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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Yeah, and there are lots and lots of tablets that tell us about every stage of scribal education. There's one house in Nippur, a city in what is now Iraq, that archaeologists have given the very kind of charming name of House F. Wow. Thanks, archaeology. That's great. Exactly. We're very excited now to hear about how stuff.
And they found over 1,400 school texts, basically, from just in the first season that tell us about, you know, the first messy wedges that scribes were impressing as little kids. My first wedge. Yeah, my first wedge, exactly. It's like those, you know, wobbly kind of fingerprint smudged tablets. Finger space, finger space, finger space.
Yeah.
But, yeah, all the way up to, you know, quite advanced math and Sumerian literature. Doing the GCSEs. Yeah, GCSEs, fake contracts, everything.
They were, yeah. And then you also get glimpses into, like, how frustrating it might have been to be a student because there's one tablet with a bite mark in it. Amazing. Yeah, like maybe a 12-year-old.
And then some doodles as well. There's one that's maybe of a teacher sitting in a chair holding a stick out.
Maybe, it might be. I kind of can't imagine who else the student would have... The stick suggests corporal punishment, doesn't it? There are stories about schools that the students had to write down that are in Sumerian where it gets kind of heated at times.
So they were probably speaking Akkadian at home because by the time House F exists, Sumerian is a dead language.
But they were learning Sumerian at school because it was important to learn this ancient, authentic old language, just like Latin was. Yeah, OK.
Exactly.
Yeah, there are lots actually. So it's a Semitic language. So it's related. I mean, in Iraq today, they speak, I mean, they speak lots of different languages, but they speak Arabic as well. And Arabic is also a Semitic language. So there's a lot of vocab overlap and some grammar overlap.
Yeah, I mean, I don't know, like, to what extent Aramaic borrows from Akkadian, but it was at one point simultaneous and people were bilingual in Aramaic and Akkadian. That was in the late period, wasn't it?
Yeah, exactly.
Yeah. And there are even proverbs that are like, what good is a scribe who doesn't know Sumerian? And it's like, well, I guess that nobody wanted to really learn this. So they had to come up with proverbs to inspire them.
So I think the easiest way to explain that is that in ancient Mesopotamia, supernatural things were real. The gods, goddesses, demons, ghosts, they were as part of the natural world as like a rock and a tree and a river. So they formed a kind of normal part of explanations for stuff happening in the world. So there was a really close connection between, in particular, the divine and the sciences.
I've got bad news. They did have a workaround, though. So they would get a substitute to be in the king's place for a couple of months. And then that person would live like a king and then be killed. Oh, really? Just to be absolutely sure. They'd swap in a peasant body double. Yeah, exactly. I know, it was brutal.
You can imagine why it was so important for the observers, for the diviners and the scholars to get the signs right, because there was a lot that rode on these signs. Things that are happening in the natural world.
And there were entire textbooks that were filled with omens to tell people how to interpret an eclipse or the position of Jupiter in a particular constellation or what the color of Mars in the sky might have been.
So you had to, well, among, there were a couple of different ways, but one way was to write your yes or no question. It had to be a yes or no question. It couldn't just be like, what's going to happen tomorrow? It has to be, will I recover from, you know, this journey or whatever. Yeah, they went crazy.
Everything. And they would place this tablet in front of the statue of the relevant deity, who would then presumably read the question and leave their answer, write the answer down in the entrails of the sheep, so particularly the liver. And then they would read the liver like they would read cuneiform signs, because cuneiform signs have multiple meanings, and so do…
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