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
You could do both. In some periods, people wrote their own letters. They learned enough to write their own letters. But the way letters are written is they often start with, like, to so-and-so, speak, thus says another so-and-so. So there is this kind of hint that they were dictated both in the taking down of the letter, but also in the delivery of the letter as well.
Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, whoever needed to send a letter, not everyone would have needed to send a letter, but yeah, whoever needed to send one, they could access this.
So there are a whole bunch of tablets that tell us stuff about beer from the earliest, earliest periods of writing. But what I think is really interesting is that one of the earliest names, at least we think it's a name and we think we're pronouncing it correctly when we say the name is Kushim. is a beer brewer.
And this is not like, you know, someone in their basement making like a micro-brew for the neighbours on a Sunday. This is a guy who at one point was responsible for 135,000 litres of barley over the course of 37 months for the production of beer. And then in another tablet, he's responsible for nine different cereals to produce eight different kinds of beer.
So this is part of an administrative machinery.
To pay people, essentially, as part of their rations.
Sort of, yeah. Beer was, I mean, I don't, there's an amazing book about the history of beer by a scholar named Tate Paulette. So I hope I'm not getting this wrong, but I think it had more of the consistency of porridge. Yes, it's thick and soupy, isn't it? Exactly, it's a poker straw.
Exactly. But it was high calorie, so high energy and cleanish fluids because water wasn't always clean. So it was a really good way to pay people. And not particularly alcoholic, presumably? Probably not too alcoholic and probably not very tasty, I'm guessing.
They were how people got paid for service in this era to the temple, usually in agricultural work. Instead of being paid in like coins, for example, which were not a thing at the time, they got paid in basically bowls of food, whether it was barley or oil or in some cases beer. So it was part of the payment system, so to speak.
Oh, no, no. I've probably read like a hundred.
Yeah, it really is extraordinary. I mean, you can get windows onto people's working lives, but you can also get windows onto what lullabies they sang to their babies or what did they write to their far-flung husbands? What did they observe in the night sky? What sort of astronomical leaps did they make? It's just so moving.
Wow, that's amazing. I think so.
Yeah, and they were pretty good record keepers too, so it can be borderline sort of dry where you're reading about... a forestry institution in the city of Ummah and what classes of laborers were working and the familial lines and then you're just name after name after name. But you're still getting these people's names from thousands of years ago, which is pretty cool.
But it can also be like some of the most beautiful literature that, you know, I feel like I've ever read, like the Epic of Gilgamesh. Really beautiful language and poetry and storytelling.
Oh, yes. Oh, yes. They did write about barley too, but they also shouted at each other a little bit.
Inaya, he's the husband and he's living in Anatolia, which is what is now Turkey, where there's a major trading hub, like an international trading hub called Kanish. And he moved there essentially to handle trade. And then his wife, Taram Kugbi, is in the heartland of Assyria in the capital of Ashur. And she's writing to him quite fiery letters. And one of them reads... Right. Right.
And the letter ends, why do you keep on listening to slander and do you keep sending me angry letters?
I don't know if we have his replies, but there are actually quite a few exchanges between a husband and wife in this era. This was the old Assyrian period. It's about 2000 to 1600 BCE, where many of the wives stayed behind in Ashur, made these textiles for onward sale, essentially, in Kanish, which was about five weeks away on donkey. Wow. And not exactly an untreacherous journey.
I sort of feel like I empathize with them because these women are, like, working, and they're also looking after, like, eight children. Yeah.
Yeah, having a blast, maybe even taking a second wife.
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