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
So it delivers, yeah. And the liver is even sometimes called the tablet of the gods, where the gods leave their messages. Yeah, so writing was kind of, it permeated their entire world. Wow. And astronomical phenomena were also the writing, the heavenly writing, is the movement of the planets.
That's exactly right. The last datable cuneiform tablet, so datable, is from 79 or 80 CE.
Oh, interesting.
Move on. And what I love is it's also from Uruk. Yeah. So it started in Uruk, and I mean, we don't know. Oh, the last one was also from Uruk.
It's not bad, yeah. It is a big T, but it's only about this big.
Yeah, and it's like a 3D cross, basically. So it has like 12 sides, I don't know, I can't do math, but it's something like that.
Exactly. Right. It's an ancient fake. Yeah. So a bunch of priests in the sixth, I think it's the sixth century or the 600s BCE. I'm actually surprisingly bad at dates, but they made this 3D cross shaped document, populated it with old looking signs. That is a font not known from any other period. So they completely made this up.
And it pretends to be from the era of Manishtushu, who was about almost 2000 years before, who was one of Sargon the Great's descendants. And they are basically saying we've been priests have been here since this time. So please keep paying us.
Well, it's just, yeah, it's just the random sheep.
Yeah.
I probably should have said that. All my dates are in B.C.
And it's describing basically the roles of these priests and how long it's been established for. And so they presumably did that to justify their profession, make it more authoritative and authentic.
In 592 BCE, a young woman, or maybe even still a girl, named Laa Tubashini was sold into slavery by marriage by her adoptive mother, Hamaya. This marriage was financed by a third party, presumably to secure access to the children who would be born of the forced union and who would have had the same legal status as their mother.
It's a harrowing story, but remarkably, around 560 BCE, Laa to Bashini was emancipated from her slave status, and her first official act as a freedwoman was to fight for the freedom of her children. On 29 October 560 BCE, the Babylonian courts heard her lawsuit against members of the incredibly powerful and wealthy family who had financed the arrangement in the first place.
She argued before a minister and the king's judges that, like her, her children should also be freed. Five clay tablets that span three decades tell her story. And even if the nature of the legal sources lack the color of a literary work, they tell us a lot about her courage.
They tell us that she survived her decades-long ordeal as an enslaved woman forced into marriage, at least six pregnancies and births without the benefit of anesthesia or antibiotics, and far more that has lost its time. And they tell us that she survived all this a fighter, willing to take on a powerful family and argue before the king's judges for the freedom of her children.
In the end, she only succeeded in freeing one son, a boy named Ardia. Among many things, what moves me about her story is just what we can learn from cuneiform. This writing system preserves so much of life from ancient Mesopotamia as we've talked about. Receipts, lullabies, literature, letters, liver omens, astronomical leaps, and also the lives of women like La Tubashini and her six children.
Her story is a reminder that people in the ancient past were no less human, no less loving or brave and no more immune to pain than we are. And neither is any person today who seems too different to have anything in common with. They were not the other and neither are any of us from each other.
Thanks.
Thank you for having me.
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