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.
Appearances
Well, they held a competition. We're talking about competition, yeah.
I like that too. I wish they did that. Yeah.
I would also love to see that. So the society invited four people to submit sealed translations of a particular cuneiform inscription that was an Assyrian one. So it was Horace and Hinks and two others, Henry Fox Talbot and Jules Aupert. And they all sent in similar results. So basic decipherment had been achieved by then. And that's when the discipline of Assyriology takes off. I see.
So they all win. Yes. Yes, yes.
Yeah. Bit of a cop-out.
Yes.
Then we think we can read this thing.
Yes. Assyriology. Assyriology. The way I try to explain it is in the same way that Egyptology studies ancient Egypt, Assyriology studies ancient Assyria and the other civilizations that existed in Mesopotamia.
But they've kind of focused on Assyria because around the time of the beginning of this discipline, an incredible royal library was uncovered from Nineveh, which was the royal library of the last great Neo-Assyrian king, Ashurbanipal. And there were about 30,000 tablets that were unearthed from that. So I think that really, you know, that was the kind of game changer for the field.
And that's why it took its name from it.
Yes. King Ashurbanipal wanted to create this royal library, and he sent scholars to different parts of the empire to copy the most well-known and important texts, including some very old ones, like the Epic of Gilgamesh, and brought them under one roof, so to speak. It gets its name as a royal library because the types of disciplines attested, the types of works attested are just so incredible.
You have astronomy, medicine, literature, omens. It's just such a vast, such a vast collection.
Play tablets, yeah.
In cuneiform. In cuneiform, right. Yeah.
Yes, yes. So Ashurbanipal is an interesting guy. I mean, he has these reliefs of himself doing things like fighting lions or, you know, throwing spears. And then he has these styluses tucked into his belt as if to make sure everyone knew, not just a warrior. I'm not just protecting my kingdom. I'm also really smart. I know math. I know science. I know how to read.
Yes, yeah. It's quite a stable script. I mean, the styles change and you can sort of tell when something's really old.
Yeah.
They did bake some tablets that were really important, but for the most part they just let them dry.
Not an alphabet. That's exactly right. There was also one earlier cuneiform alphabet from Ugarit, where they were like, we are not doing this complicated thing. We're making an alphabet. Broadly, cuneiform is a mix of signs or characters that stand for whole words and characters that stand for syllables like ba instead of a B and an A or bat like B-A-T as one sound.
That tells us a lot actually about the history of how this script develops, because initially it was just signs that stood for words. And this was in the earliest iterations. And scribes used quite innovative methods to make each sign stand for more things, more sounds that were related to its original meaning or to the original sounds that those words had.
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