Dr. Moudhy Al-Rashid
speaker
840 appearances
4 recordings
2 series
first heard Mar 2025
last heard 12 Jun
Dr. Moudhy Al-Rashid’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Absolutely. There is a lot of change. And in particular, in the first millennium BCE, so from 900 BCE to about 100 CE, there's a lot of innovation that happens in how people approach the world and how they write about it as well.
Not trying to be as complete, for example, as they were in the previous millennium and trying to kind of use different ways of understanding the world to connect different elements of it. So it's really interesting innovation.
I would say written astronomy begins in ancient Mesopotamia. For all we know, people were doing really advanced mathematical astronomy before writing. But from what we know from the sources, I would say the earliest texts in astronomy come from ancient Mesopotamia. And some of the observations they make about the planets, the moon, lunar cycles, eclipse cycles, happen really, really early.
There's a text from the dawn of writing from around 3000 BCE in which someone is recording transactions related to a festival for the goddess Inanna. The goddess Inanna was the goddess of fertility and later Ishtar, fertility and war. And she's associated with the planet Venus. And so they refer to the planets often by the name of the deity that's associated with it.
And there's a reference in this text that to the morning and evening Inanna, and that's an indication that they were making so many observations of the planet Venus that they knew that when it was visible in the morning, it was Venus, and that when it was visible in the evening, it was also Venus, and that these weren't two different stars being observed.
They really had this observational program in place from very early on, even if it doesn't really get fleshed out properly until about 1800 BCE onward, and then really, really drilled down in the first millennium BCE.
Yes. So this text comes from Uruk, I believe. I hope I'm not misremembering. So we're talking about what is now southern Iraq, or if you're referring to how the region is referred to in antiquity, southern Mesopotamia, which basically refers to the land between the rivers, the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. So it is a place that was home to many civilizations and cultures in antiquity.
And for this text, it would have been most likely the Sumerian speakers who were writing this down. But then later astronomy, we started to move into other civilizations like the Assyrians and Babylonians, Assyrians in the north and Babylonians in the south, barring some periods in which the Assyrians just took over everything.
Yeah, that's a great question. And thankfully, the answer is yes, because it's so many thousands of years of history and so many sort of changes of the guard, so to speak, that it really is hard to keep track of all the political upheaval. But in terms of scholarship, one thing that all of these cultures and civilizations shared was the use of the cuneiform writing system.
In English, it gets its name from cuneus, which means wedge in Latin. you have these clay tablets in which people have impressed signs with a reed stylus that have these really characteristic wedge or triangular shape to them because of how they get impressed with the reed stylus. And so that is shared across 3,000 years of history. So over half of human written history is in cuneiform in a sense.
And out of that writing system, because there are so many unique features to it, there is a really specific way of doing scholarship that that develops. And that seems to be shared across from the 2nd millennium BCE onwards. So from the dawn of the Babylonians and Assyrians, that seems to start to be shared across those two major players in the region until the end of cuneiform's use.
One possible way to understand it is that because cuneiform was such an old writing system, it develops, of course, across time. It was initially developed to write the Sumerian language, which is not related to any known language. And then scribes and scholars expanded what signs stood for to make it possible to use the writing system to write the completely unrelated Akkadian language.
So as a result of this expansion and this extension of the writing system to write totally different languages, Each cuneiform sign takes on more than one meaning. So as a really basic example, the cuneiform sign for house is just a word. It's a sign that stands for a whole word. Not only does it stand for the word house, but it also stands for syllables that sound like the word for house.
So in Sumerian, that's ae. In Akkadian, that's bit, and so then it sounds like bet and pit and pet. So it takes on all these other values. And it's slightly technical and boring, but the reason I'm giving this backdrop is to say that in a way, the world starts to look like a cuneiform tablet. So scholarship interprets natural phenomena as signs, almost as cuneiform signs, with multiple meanings.
And so the kind of aim of scholarship becomes the interpretation of the world as signs. And I think it's really informed by the writing system itself. And that's where omens come in. And they wrote thousands and thousands of these omens down. And an omen is basically a statement in the cuneiform sources that is something like, if observation, then prediction. So if observation
A lunar eclipse takes place in the east, then the king will die, or something along those lines. So the observation is about something going on in the sky.
And they had these omens for all sorts of things, like stuff that happened on Earth, a fox being present in a city, somebody having a birthmark, I have a birthmark on my left cheek, what that might mean about a person's life or the success of the observer. But in terms of celestial omens, they were typically concerned with broader political trends.
So you have an observation paired with a prediction, and that observation is understood to be a sign from the gods, not a cause. The eclipse is not causing anything to happen. It's the gods saying, listen, we're sending this eclipse to warn you that the king is going to die. So if you want to do anything about that, here's a set of rituals that's available to you to prevent that from happening.
And this whole kind of scholarly culture builds up around these assumptions about what the world means and what messages it's sending. LSG
In a way, yes. We have these lists of omens from the earlier periods. So again, when I say earlier period, now we're talking about around 1800, 1900 BCE. Lists of omens, some of which are impossible things. So an eclipse being green, for example. And the reason for that is that the scholars writing these things down were not just interested in what was, in actual facts, in observable things.
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