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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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 1.
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There's an Oxyrhynchus papyrus fragment from Egypt that has, I'm going to get this slightly wrong because it's been a while since I looked at it, but on one side it has the Saros cycle, which is developed in Mesopotamia, written out in Greek, and on the other side it's sort of spelled out in Akkadian. So there's a direct kind of
Like a translation of somebody sharing this knowledge in two different languages. And there are a host of other kind of threads like that that show how it goes from Babylonia into Greece and then beyond. And the zodiac in use today is the same zodiac that comes from Babylonia. The 60-minute hour comes from the units of measurement that they use today.
for time, as well as the degrees system that they use. So the legacy of Babylonian science is very much a part of how we still do science, even if their goals or maybe what they were doing with it was slightly different. It was obviously powerful enough of an organizational system to survive into other cultures and beyond, even if cuneiform dies out.
I mean, the last datable tablet is from 79 to 80 CE, and it's an astronomical almanac of predictions and records for a particular year.
I would love to make a sort of overarching point, which is that, you know, people back then were interested in trying to make sense of the world just as we are today.
And they did it in really systematic ways, according to sets of rules that they followed that maybe don't make that much sense to us or that maybe never wrote those rules down, but we can extrapolate them from the thousands and thousands and thousands of tablets that they've left behind. There's something really meaningful and moving about the fact that people were just as intelligent.
They had just as innovative moments. leaps as we might have today thousands of years ago and they are looking at the same sky i mean not the same sky i see here at oxford with eight stars but you know the incredible you know endless universe that they were trying to make sense of and i think that's really beautiful
Between Two Rivers, Ancient Mesopotamia and the Birth of History.
Thank you so much for having me.
That's pretty spot on. Yeah.
Yeah, so cuneiform or cuneiform are both completely fine. So it was a writing system developed just before 3000 BCE in what is now southern Iraq. And it was a script, not a language. Found mostly on clay tablets, but also on some extremely large monumental inscriptions made out of stone and some other objects as well. And it gets its name from the Latin cuneus.
I don't know any Latin, but I know cuneus in Latin, which means wedge. So because they get impressed into clay, they have this characteristic wedge or triangular shape. And funnily enough, in Akkadian, the word for cuneiform is sataku or santaku, which means triangle. Oh, wow.
And funnily enough, in Arabic, it's mismari, which means nail imprint. So they kind of also went with the visuals. Like fingernail. Like a nail. Hammer and nail. Yeah. Okay.
That's right.
Yeah.
Lots and lots of different people used cuneiform to write lots of different languages. But it's the writing system that is used in the region that we call ancient Mesopotamia between the Tigris and around the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, and what is now Iraq and Syria and some of the neighboring countries as well.
The oldest tablets come specifically from Uruk in southern Iraq, and those date to about 3350 BCE. This kind of still called proto-cuneiform is like really, really early stage. They don't look like triangles yet.
They're actually a more complicated shape because they look like the things that they represent. So they look like pictures, basically. Yeah, those are my favorite ones. They're so pretty.
Exactly. Various empires rose and fell in this region. We had the Akkadians, Babylonians, Assyrians before them, the Sumerians. And then the neighboring Elamites, Hittites, and eventually the Persians. And they all used some variation of cuneiform for their many languages. The main two languages, however, in ancient Mesopotamia were Sumerian and Akkadian.
Mm-hmm. Exactly.
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