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.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 1.
Appearances
And that enabled the writing system to take on completely unrelated languages to the ones that those initial words were in.
About 600 to 1,000. I mean, you probably wouldn't have to master every single one if you were just writing letters, for example. But if you were a scholar, you would probably need to do the upper limit of that.
Yeah, yeah. Right, right. And those characters also took on more meanings and sounds. So each character stands for a bunch of different things. So when you read a text, sometimes it takes a while because you're like, all right, this sign has like eight different values and you have to make like a little table with all the different values and see which ones make sense based on context.
Yeah, let's do it. Yes.
It actually is stolen from my husband.
We have a tablet on a tablet.
Tinder, yeah.
Yeah, the circles are numbers. Phil, you are so good at this. You really are. If you need a plan B, we need more seriologists. We have way too many tablets.
Well, there was a lot of it. I mean, the silty kind of riverbed where the two rivers meet near the Arabian Gulf, it was quite a rich, fertile soil. For the fertility of the soil, coupled with some agricultural tech advances, made it possible for them to have so much agricultural produce and products to keep track of, which necessitated a writing system.
And since it was everywhere, they thought, let's just try this.
So kind of both. And the answer to that depends on the period you're talking about and also the place. So in some periods, professionals, for example, learned a basic kind of repertoire of science to be able to carry out transactions, write letters, and that included women. Overall, it was a kind of highly skilled that you needed to go through specialized training.
And there were also different tiers that you could kind of stop at in a way.
So some went on to become scribes and administrators and they had to just know like math for the sake of, you know, calculations and field calculations. And then others went beyond that to become, you know, medical professionals or astronomers doing much more highly specialized math, especially in the later period. So yes and no to that. Yeah.
Actually, yes. And in the first millennium BCE, so in the kind of later periods of Mesopotamian sciences, there are these phrases at the end of these science texts that basically say, do not show this to the uninitiated. Oh, really? This is the secret knowledge of the, you know, the gods. This is just for us. This is just for us. Exactly.
Yeah, isn't that cool?
Yes, that's right. She's the first named author in history. So not just the first woman author, the first author of this name we know. Wow. Yeah, as a woman. And her name is Elhadwana. And she penned, penned, impressed, whatever. Yeah. The pen is fine, yeah. These incredible hymns, temple hymns, essentially.
The texts that are attributed to her authorship come from a slightly later period, so it's not exactly straightforward, but I still think that's the coolest thing ever. That's amazing.
I mean, you could sing them if you wanted to. I guess we don't know the tune, though. Yeah, you can make one up, I guess. We know the lyrics. We know the lyrics, yes.
Yes. Yes, absolutely. Yes, they wrote letters to each other and they sent them and they were kind of,
mail networks royal mail networks or speak i mean literally royal road yeah for the mail networks um and they carry clay tablets yeah they carry baskets i guess of clay tablets on you know donkey or depending on the period maybe horse but yeah for to get uh messages from one part of especially a growing empire to the other you needed to be able to communicate with your you know governors and do you write your own or do you go to the local scribe and dictate it
Showing 761–780 of 840 · page 39 of 42
← Previous
Next →