Cuneiform: the world’s first writing system

Greg Jenner is joined in ancient Mesopotamia by Dr Moudhy Al-Rashid and comedian Phil Wang to learn about the history of cuneiform, the oldest writing system in the world. In the 19th Century, European scholars began to translate inscriptions found on ruins and clay tablets from ancient Mesopotamia - an area of the world between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers that encompasses modern Iraq, as well as parts of Syria, Iran, Turkey and Kuwait. The script they deciphered became known as cuneiform, and this distinctive wedge-shaped writing system is perhaps the oldest in the world. The earliest cuneiform tablet is in fact over 5,000 years old. These clay tablets reveal much about the daily life of people in this part of the ancient world, recording everything from the amounts of beer sold by brewers and the best way to ask the gods for advice, to squabbles between husbands and wives and even the lullabies used to get babies to sleep. The first recorded epic poem, The Epic of Gilgamesh, is also preserved thanks to cuneiform. This episode traces the history of cuneiform, exploring how this script worked, who used it and what they used it for, what it tells us about the inhabitants of ancient Mesopotamia, and how it was finally deciphered. If you’re a fan of historical puzzles, amazing archaeological finds and the intimate details of everyday life in the ancient world, you’ll love our episode on cuneiform. If you want more from Dr Moudhy Al-Rashid, check out our episode on Ancient Babylon. And for more ancient history with Phil Wang, listen to our episodes on the history of Kung Fu and the Terracotta Warriors. You’re Dead To Me is the comedy podcast that takes history seriously. Every episode, Greg Jenner brings together the best names in history and comedy to learn and laugh about the past. Hosted by: Greg Jenner Research by: Hannah Cusworth and Matt Ryan Written by: Emmie Rose Price-Goodfellow, Emma Nagouse, and Greg Jenner Produced by: Emmie Rose Price-Goodfellow and Greg Jenner Audio Producer: Steve Hankey Production Coordinator: Ben Hollands Senior Producer: Emma Nagouse Executive Editor: James Cook

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Greg Jenner?

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• 1:13Greg Jenner?

  Hello and welcome to You're Dead to Me, the Radio 4 comedy podcast that takes history seriously. My name is Greg Jenner. I'm a public historian, author and broadcaster. And today, we're bouncing back to the Bronze Age with our styluses and clay tablets to learn all about the first ever writing system, or script, called cuneiform. And to help us decipher the ancient story, we have two very special guests. In history corner, she's an honorary fellow at Wolfson College, University of Oxford. She's an Assyriologist who researches and teaches on the history of Mesopotamia, cuneiform, and the Akkadian language. She has a wonderful, brand new book that I loved, called Between Two Rivers: Ancient Mesopotamia and the Birth of History. I highly recommend it. And you will remember her from our episode on the ancient Babylonians. It's Dr Moody Al Rashid. Welcome, Moody.

• 1:57Greg Jenner?

  Thank you. Thank you so much for having me. Delighted to have you back. And in comedy corner, he's a fantastic comedian, actor and author. You'll know him from Dust Master, Live at the Apollo. Having news for you from his two Netflix comedy specials, Two. Count them. Maybe you've read his side-splitting book Side Splitter, which I loved on audiobook, but you'll definitely remember him from our previous episodes of You're Dead to Me. Most recently, on the Terracotta Warriors and the history of Kung Fu, which sounds like a film title, but isn't, returning for a triumphant fifth appearance. It's Phil Wang, welcome back again.

• 2:26Speaker 04

  Hello, thanks for having me. Yes, Moody isn't a serologist, I'm a siliologist.

• 2:30Greg Jenner?

  Ayyyy.

• 2:31Speaker 04

  Comedy corner. Bring in the silly, baby.

• 2:35Greg Jenner?

  Phil, together we've tackled mighty military matters. We've done the Borgia's, we've done Genghis Khan, we've done the Terracotta Warriors and Kung Fu. Today, we're going quite nerdy. What does the word cuneiform mean to you? Spiritually, emotionally?

• 2:52Speaker 04

  I picture triangles.

• 2:53Greg Jenner?

  Yeah?

• 2:54Speaker 04

  Sort of carved triangles, a lot of grain, barley, the sort of the recording of barley.

• 3:02Greg Jenner?

  That's fairly good knowledge, straight off the bat.

• 3:04Speaker 04

  The biggest word in my, what was the word, it's called the word bubbles, the word clouds.

• 3:09Greg Jenner?

  Word cloud.

• 3:09Speaker 04

  The biggest word there is old. That's my, that's my header. How far am I on the right ballpark?

• 3:16Greg Jenner?

  I mean, Moody, I don't want to give him too many sort of starts early on, but I feel that was quite good. That's pretty spot on. Yeah. And how bad, the font for old is just like a really big font, yeah?

• 3:25Speaker 04

  Yeah, the O is a triangle, the L is a triangle, and the D is a triangle. But if you know, if you can read cuneiform, you can tell the difference.

• 3:33Greg Jenner?

  So, what do you know?

• 3:40Greg Jenner?

  This is where I have a go at getting what you, our lovely listener, might know about today's subject. And, well, I think Phil has outclassed us all. You might remember a mention of cuneiform on our Babylonians episode we talked about before with Moody and Kay Kurde. Maybe you've seen some cuneiform tablets in the British Museum or in the Ashmolean Museum. In the States, I think Paris has some. More likely, you've seen something resembling cuneiform, well, probably as a prop in a video game or in a movie. But to be honest, I don't think cuneiform is something that most people are visualising. I think, Phil, you did really well, because you then mentioned hieroglyphs. I think people go to hieroglyphs when they think of old scripts.

• 4:14Speaker 04

  Yeah, right, as I have.

• 4:15Greg Jenner?

  Yeah.

• 4:16Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 4:16Greg Jenner?

  But you knew triangle stuff, so that's kind of cool.

• 4:18Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 4:19Greg Jenner?

  So anyway, the questions we have to answer. What exactly was cuneiform? What do all these clay tablets actually tell us? What do they say? And who first figured out how to decipher it? Let's find out. Right, Dr Moody. Can we start with some quick, basic definitions, because I'm feeling very basic. What is cuneiform? Am I pronouncing it right?

• 4:38Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 4:38Greg Jenner?

  How did it get its name? What does its name mean?

• 4:41Speaker 05

  Yeah, so cuneiform or cuneiform are both completely fine. So it was a writing system developed just before 3000 BCE in what is now southern Iraq, and it was a script, not a language, found mostly on clay tablets, but also on some extremely large monumental inscriptions made out of stone and some other objects as well. And it gets its name from the Latin cuneus. I don't know any Latin, but I know cuneus in Latin, which means wedge. So because they get impressed into clay, they have this characteristic wedge or triangular shape. And funnily enough, in Akkadian, the word for cuneiform is sataku or santaku, which means triangle. So we're all...

• 5:20Greg Jenner?

  Oh, wow.

• 5:20Speaker 05

  Yeah. And funnily enough, in Arabic, it's mismari, which means nail imprint. So they kind of also went with the visuals.

• 5:26Greg Jenner?

  Like fingernail?

• 5:27Speaker 05

  Like a nail...

• 5:28Greg Jenner?

  Hammer and nail?

• 5:29Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 5:29Greg Jenner?

  Okay.

• 5:30Speaker 05

  Yeah, so...

• 5:31Greg Jenner?

  You said it was developed over 3000 BCE, so it's over 5000 years old?

• 5:35Speaker 05

  That's right.

• 5:36Greg Jenner?

  Possibly even older than that, like 5300 years old, give or take?

• 5:39Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 5:40Greg Jenner?

  Who used it?

• 5:41Speaker 05

  Lots and lots of different people used cuneiform to write lots of different languages. But it's the writing system that was used in the region that we call ancient Mesopotamia, between the Tigris and around the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, and what is now Iraq and Syria and some of the neighboring countries as well. The oldest tablets come specifically from Uruk in southern Iraq, and those date to about 3350 BCE. This kind of still called proto-cuneiform is like really, really early stage. They don't look like triangles yet.

• 6:09Speaker 04

  They're even simpler shape?

• 6:11Speaker 05

  They're actually a more complicated shape, because they look like the things that they represent. So they look like pictures, basically. Yeah, those are my favorite ones. They're so pretty.

• 6:19Greg Jenner?

  And then they're like, guys, triangles. I've got it. I've tried all the triangles.

• 6:22Speaker 04

  Yeah, we don't need to draw every brick in the pyramid. We just need the triangle shape.

• 6:27Speaker 05

  Exactly. Various empires rose and fell in this region. We had the Acadians, Babylonians, Assyrians before them, the Sumerians, and then the neighboring Elamites, Hittites, and eventually the Persians. And they all used some variation of cuneiform for their many languages. The main two languages, however, in ancient Mesopotamia were Sumerian and Acadian.

• 6:46Greg Jenner?

  Sumerians, Acadians, then Babylonians, then Elamites, Hittites, Neo-Assyrians, and then Persia.

• 6:53Speaker 05

  Uh huh, exactly.

• 6:54Greg Jenner?

  Someone needs to do a song. There needs to be like a kind of-

• 6:56Speaker 05

  Like an alphabet song.

• 6:57Greg Jenner?

  Like an alphabet song. Like, if only Sesame Street could just do this for us, that'd be great.

• 7:02Speaker 04

  The Neo-Sumerians.

• 7:03Greg Jenner?

  The Neo-Assyrians.

• 7:05Speaker 04

  Neo-Assyrians.

• 7:06Greg Jenner?

  So they come after the Assyrians.

• 7:07Speaker 04

  Couldn't be bothered to come up with a new name. Everyone else who came up with a new name, they're like, "We're just Assyrians again."

• 7:12Greg Jenner?

  Yeah, okay, all right. But it's not a language, cuneiform?

• 7:15Speaker 05

  Exactly. Cuneiform is the writing system, just like we use Latin script to write stuff in English, French, German. It's used for multiple languages with some variations. Same with cuneiform.

• 7:23Greg Jenner?

  Phil, we're gonna, we're gonna mix things up here. We're gonna go to modern history now. We're gonna start with only a couple hundred years ago, when they deciphered cuneiform. Can you guess the nationality of the man who deciphered this ancient Near Eastern technology?

• 7:36Speaker 04

  Oh.

• 7:37Greg Jenner?

  Nationality for us, please, Phil.

• 7:39Speaker 04

  French.

• 7:40Greg Jenner?

  It's a good guess. His name was Henry Rawlinson.

• 7:43Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 7:44Greg Jenner?

  And he was from England, as all the best people are.

• 7:47Speaker 04

  That's what I wanted to say. That's what I actually wanted to say, but I thought I wouldn't have been allowed to say that.

• 7:52Greg Jenner?

  It's usually an Englishman or Frenchman, in fairness, in this period in history. Moody, what was an Englishman doing in Iran? Was he doing a classic bit of empire? "Hello, I've just come to do a bit of empire."

• 7:59Speaker 05

  Basically, yes. Yeah, he was an officer of the British East India Company. And he was originally sent to India, and then he went to Iran after that to help the Shah, I think, reorganize his army or something like that. And he fell in love with ancient Persian monuments and cultures.

• 8:14Greg Jenner?

  So he was invited in by the Shah of Persia?

• 8:16Speaker 05

  Bizarrely.

• 8:16Greg Jenner?

  A rare thing. Normally it's a sort of invasion thing, so that's quite nice. They actually said, "Welcome, please." Phil, the study of languages is called Philology.

• 8:24Speaker 04

  Is it?

• 8:25Greg Jenner?

  And your name is Phil?

• 8:26Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 8:26Greg Jenner?

  I feel like therefore you have an innate skill in this.

• 8:29Speaker 04

  An innate interest in this, yeah. I wish I did. No, I do have an interest in it. I want me to say I wish I had a skill in it.

• 8:35Greg Jenner?

  Okay, all right.

• 8:36Speaker 04

  But I did not know that.

• 8:38Greg Jenner?

  Okay, how would you go about decoding an ancient script? Because you're an engineer, right?

• 8:41Speaker 04

  Yeah, right.

• 8:41Greg Jenner?

  You think laterally.

• 8:42Speaker 04

  Yeah, sure.

• 8:43Greg Jenner?

  And you're Henry Rawlinson. How do you start decoding that?

• 8:45Speaker 04

  Well, ideally you have some sort of key. You find some sort of key à la Rosetta Stone.

• 8:51Greg Jenner?

  Sure.

• 8:51Speaker 04

  Right? Something that just tells you what each symbol means. Aside from that, without that, I'm guessing you're looking for patterns?

• 8:57Greg Jenner?

  Sure.

• 8:58Speaker 04

  You're looking for structures, you're looking for sentences, and then looking for what repeats, where they, where particular symbols lie, and seeing if there's a logic to them.

• 9:13Greg Jenner?

  This is good stuff, Phil, I think.

• 9:15Speaker 05

  That's exactly right. I feel like I should just maybe just get a cup of coffee or something.

• 9:19Greg Jenner?

  Thanks, Moody. Yeah, we're good here. It's just me and Phil. We're gonna solve this.

• 9:22Speaker 04

  Well, my name is Philology Wang.

• 9:24Greg Jenner?

  Exactly, Philology Wang.

• 9:25Speaker 04

  Yeah, my full name, yeah.

• 9:28Greg Jenner?

  Moody, it sounds like Rawlinson used the Phil Wang technique.

• 9:30Speaker 05

  He actually exactly did that. Yeah, he and a bunch of other philologists basically looked for patterns in these trilingual inscriptions that were in various places in Iran, namely Persepolis, but also some big ones on Mount Alvan, and then the big kind of Rosetta Stone of Assyriology, which is the Bihistun inscription. They first found royal names, and then from there they found the word for "of", kind of unexciting but very important.

• 9:55Greg Jenner?

  "Of"?

• 9:55Speaker 05

  "Of", yeah, "anam".

• 9:57Greg Jenner?

  Really?

• 9:57Speaker 05

  Yeah, that was like the first.

• 9:58Greg Jenner?

  That's a really crucial word, isn't it?

• 10:00Speaker 05

  It really is, yeah. I mean, it appears so many times, so it kind of helps you orient towards in relation to each other as well. So there's a pattern there. He was kind of played, in my view, a more minor role because a lot of work was already done by the time he got to the Bihistun inscription by other philologists.

• 10:14Greg Jenner?

  Oh, really?

• 10:15Speaker 05

  A lot of copies were made, a lot of words were decoded.

• 10:18Greg Jenner?

  Are you besmirching an Englishman's name, Moody? How dare you?

• 10:22Speaker 05

  I'm just saying what happened.

• 10:25Speaker 04

  He kicked it off the line.

• 10:27Greg Jenner?

  He showed up and said, I've got this, lads. Thank you very much. Is Bihistun sort of the Rosetta equivalent that Phil mentioned? Is that like the key discovery?

• 10:35Speaker 05

  I think it's the, it was, it became a more kind of famous and sensationalized one. And therefore it became kind of central to all the stories about decipherment that came out of this period of history. But a lot of work was already done by the time Bihistun was decoded. So I would say it kind of helped confirm things.

• 10:51Speaker 04

  And is Bihistun similar to Rosetta Stone in that it's the same script in two, three different languages?

• 10:56Speaker 05

  Yeah, it's a tri, it's a trilingual inscription, but all using cuneiform. So it's three cuneiform inscriptions in these like, almost like caption boxes, but they're different languages recorded. One of the languages was known, Old Persian. People knew how to, to read Old Persian from other texts that were not written in cuneiform. So they kind of knew what it might say.

• 11:15Greg Jenner?

  Okay.

• 11:15Speaker 05

  And then they, they kind of overlaid that onto the cuneiform.

• 11:18Greg Jenner?

  And this inscription of Bihistun talks about a very famous king called Darius of Persia? Darius the Great? Have you heard of him?

• 11:24Speaker 04

  No.

• 11:25Greg Jenner?

  No, he's, he's a sort of big name in like video game. I thought maybe you'd sort of fought him on Total War on some point.

• 11:32Greg Jenner?

  He's a couple hundred years before Alexander the Great.

• 11:34Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 11:34Greg Jenner?

  And he was a big conqueror and he fought 19 battles to crush rebellions. And this inscription says, "I, King Darius, of Persia."

• 11:42Speaker 05

  I guess.

• 11:43Greg Jenner?

  Of, I guess.

• 11:43Speaker 05

  Of, yeah, there's a "of."

• 11:45Greg Jenner?

  Did some crushing. And I'm going to stick it up here in Elamite and Persian and Akkadian.

• 11:49Speaker 05

  And Akkadian, yeah. He wants to cover all the bases, I guess. Make sure everyone could, could see what he did.

• 11:54Greg Jenner?

  Okay. And Henry Rollinson decoded it with help?

• 11:57Speaker 05

  Yes. So he, I think initially tried to, because it's very high up and it's not, you know, easily accessible. So they had to use pulleys and.

• 12:06Greg Jenner?

  Because it's up on like a rock, it's like on a cliff or something. It's like really high up.

• 12:09Speaker 05

  Exactly. And very bright as well, because the sun sort of hits it as, you know, you're looking at it. And Rollinson has been credited with scaling the rocks to make the drawings, but he actually sent a few boys to do it for him.

• 12:20Greg Jenner?

  Of course he did. Yes.

• 12:22Speaker 05

  And yeah.

• 12:23Greg Jenner?

  You there, boy?

• 12:23Speaker 05

  Yes, exactly. You climb this instead of me and make the copy. And then I will do the kind of intellectual work to decode it. And he ended up publishing that in 1847, and he was just 37 years old.

• 12:34Greg Jenner?

  You've already qualified that he wasn't necessarily the sole most important man in this story. So who else should be added to the checklist?

• 12:43Speaker 05

  Yeah, I mean, there were a couple of others who worked on this at the same time. But I would say Edward Hinks is one of the unsung heroes of this entire story. He was an Irish, I don't know how to say this word, clergyman?

• 12:54Greg Jenner?

  Clergymen.

• 12:55Speaker 05

  Clergymen.

• 12:56Greg Jenner?

  Yeah.

• 12:56Speaker 05

  This happened when I was recording my book, because like, I can't pronounce anything. I know what all these words mean, and I've used them hundreds of times, but I can't actually say them aloud. So he was an Irish clergyman. He did something really remarkable, which is he matched up the letters, or the, sorry, the characters that were used in the monumental inscriptions, which he called lapidary, which is a kind of formal font, let's say, to the characters used in the clay tablet, which is a little bit messier, which he called cursive. And that unlocked thousands and thousands more texts.

• 13:26Greg Jenner?

  Right. Phil, how do you think Henry Rawlinson took to Hinks's work? Do you think he welcomed this other man coming along with new ideas?

• 13:34Speaker 04

  No, I imagine, I imagine there's a lot of beef. I imagine it was a Kendrick Lamar Drake situation between the two.

• 13:41Greg Jenner?

  Yeah, you think they're writing rap songs about each other?

• 13:43Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, cuneiform songs about each other, yeah.

• 13:46Greg Jenner?

  I think you're bang on, right? I mean, Muder, he tries to like crush his career, right?

• 13:50Speaker 05

  Pretty much, yeah. He complained. He complained when the British Museum hired Hinks for a period of time. I can't remember how long it was.

• 13:58Greg Jenner?

  Like a year or something, wasn't it?

• 13:59Speaker 05

  Yeah, exactly. He complained then, and he tried to suppress Hinks's work, which is not exactly in the spirit of sort of scholarly cooperation, but here we are.

• 14:07Speaker 04

  No, you've got to have a little healthy competition, I think, in philology.

• 14:10Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 14:12Speaker 04

  That's the force that keeps the, the, the discipline moving forward, you know? They can't, can't all just be friends.

• 14:18Greg Jenner?

  Have you ever been tempted to crush your rival comedian's career? I mean, you're the only Phil in comedy, right? I mean, there might be, there could be hundreds of others, but you've.

• 14:23Speaker 04

  I'm the only Phil Wang, anyway. I've buried at least three Phil Wang.

• 14:30Greg Jenner?

  So Rollinson and Hinks was, was squabbling and in 1857, so 20 years after Rollinson first went out to, to Persia, I suppose that's what it would have been called at the time. The Royal Asiatic Society, I don't know what they are, but they, they, they sort of intervened and said, right, okay, we're gonna, we're gonna officially declare that cuneiform has been decoded. They announced this how, Moody?

• 14:51Speaker 05

  Well, they held a competition. We're talking about competition, yeah.

• 14:54Greg Jenner?

  Okay. Phil, how do you think the competition was, was judged? What kind of, talk me through the rounds.

• 15:00Speaker 04

  Oh, man, like a kind of spelling bee, like a cuneiform spelling bee. And he's like, spell corn. And Rollinson and Hinks had to stand there and go, triangle, triangle pointing to the top left, triangle pointing to the top right. Is it something like that?

• 15:18Greg Jenner?

  I, that's great. I like that.

• 15:20Speaker 05

  I like that too. I wish they did that.

• 15:22Greg Jenner?

  Yeah. How did this competition work? Is it live translation spelling bees, Phil has suggested, which I'd love to see.

• 15:26Speaker 05

  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 Rollinson, Hinks and two others, Henry Fox Talbot and Jules O'Perre, and they all sent in similar results. So basic decipherment had been, had been achieved by then, and that's when the discipline of Assyriology takes off.

• 15:47Greg Jenner?

  I see, so they all win?

• 15:49Speaker 05

  Yes, yes.

• 15:50Speaker 04

  Oh, that's nice.

• 15:51Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 15:52Speaker 04

  Bit of a cop out.

• 15:53Greg Jenner?

  And this is the Akkadian language now?

• 15:55Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 15:56Greg Jenner?

  So, so the, the three languages were Elamite, Akkadian and Old Persian. All three languages have been decoded.

• 16:01Speaker 04

  Oh, I see. So the test was if these three people can decipher this independent of one another, then right.

• 16:09Speaker 05

  Then we think we can read this thing.

• 16:11Greg Jenner?

  Cool. And this invents a new discipline of which you are a practitioner?

• 16:15Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 16:16Greg Jenner?

  Assyriology.

• 16:17Speaker 05

  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 I took its name from it.

• 16:50Greg Jenner?

  But Assyriology is named after the fact that there's this incredible library, which dates to when roughly?

• 16:56Speaker 05

  The 7th century BCE, so the 600s.

• 16:58Greg Jenner?

  Okay, amazing. And so Nineveh, the Royal Library was discovered in what we now call Mosul in Iraq. 30,000 cuneiform tablets, which is amazing. They were brought to the British Museum, the home of Iraqi history.

• 17:12Greg Jenner?

  But this, this wasn't-

• 17:13Speaker 04

  If it's not in the BM, did it even happen? That's always been my motto.

• 17:17Greg Jenner?

  But this wasn't the first time the massive collection of ancient cuneiform tablets had been put in a museum, right? Because this is what the library is like. This was already a collection of knowledge by someone saying, this stuff's old.

• 17:28Speaker 05

  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 are tested, the types of works are tested are just so incredible. You have astronomy, medicine, literature, omens. It's just such a vast, such a vast collection.

• 17:55Speaker 04

  And this library is a library of tablets?

• 17:58Speaker 05

  Mm-hmm.

• 17:58Speaker 04

  Really?

• 17:58Speaker 05

  Clay tablets, yeah.

• 17:59Speaker 04

  Wow.

• 18:00Greg Jenner?

  So this is from about 650 BCE. So it's very late in the grand sweep of Mesopotamian history. But it is earlier than, like, it's earlier than Socrates. So, you know, it's, when we say ancient, it's ancient, but it's really late in-

• 18:15Speaker 05

  In cuneiform.

• 18:16Greg Jenner?

  In cuneiform, right? Yeah, so it's kind of, I'm doing, I'm slightly struggling to work out how to frame that. But yeah, we've got Ashurbanipal. I like to call him Ashurbanashonpal. I don't know why, I always imagine it in my head.

• 18:26Speaker 05

  Yes, yes. So Ashurbanipal was an interesting guy. I mean, he, 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, 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.

• 18:45Greg Jenner?

  And the thing that just, I'm, I'll have to say again, just to make sure people understand, but this is a Neo Assyrian king saying, this stuff belongs in a museum. It's 2,500 years old. So it's, it's an ancient person going, this is archaeology. Or this is knowledge. That's mad for us, right? My brain doesn't quite compute.

• 19:05Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 19:05Speaker 04

  And at that point, were they been able to understand cuneiform from 2500 years ago?

• 19:10Speaker 05

  Yes, yeah, it's quite a stable script. I mean, the styles change and you can sort of tell when something's like really old.

• 19:17Speaker 04

  Was it always clay, that they?

• 19:18Speaker 05

  Yeah, I mean, it was used on other objects, but the scholarly stuff was on clay.

• 19:22Greg Jenner?

  That was the good stuff.

• 19:23Speaker 05

  Yeah, that's my favorite stuff.

• 19:25Greg Jenner?

  So the Library of Nineveh was this incredible compilation of all the knowledge, two and a half thousand years' worth, put into one place. And then in the year 612 BCE, it was destroyed.

• 19:34Speaker 04

  Oh, no.

• 19:35Greg Jenner?

  Along came some baddies who sacked the city, and that was fantastic news for you, Moody.

• 19:40Speaker 05

  Mm hmm.

• 19:40Greg Jenner?

  Do you know why?

• 19:42Speaker 04

  Hmm, because they spread it everywhere, ended up in different places, because it was cool, because it was exciting.

• 19:50Greg Jenner?

  He's spiraling, he's losing.

• 19:53Speaker 04

  No, no, I don't see how it could have been good for Moody.

• 19:55Greg Jenner?

  Because they set the building on fire and it baked the clay.

• 19:59Speaker 04

  Oh, wow. And sort of solid hardened it.

• 20:02Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 20:02Greg Jenner?

  Which you get infinite preservation.

• 20:04Speaker 04

  Why didn't they do that already?

• 20:05Speaker 05

  They don't always, they did some bake some tablets that were really important, but for the most part, they just let them dry.

• 20:09Speaker 04

  Wow, so baking was kind of laminating for them.

• 20:12Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 20:13Greg Jenner?

  So, yeah, so the next episode of Great British Bake Off, that's all we want to see.

• 20:17Speaker 04

  It's cuneiform week here at the tent.

• 20:21Greg Jenner?

  Okay, so we know how cuneiform was deciphered and we know how it was preserved, the library burned down, baking the knowledge, which is extraordinary. Let's now discover how cuneiform was first invented. Phil, you've already mentioned the alphabets. We know it has letters in it. Cuneiform isn't phonetic, but in the very, very, very late Old Persian, there was a tiny element of phonetic in there, a little bit, a little bit alphabetic, a little bit.

• 20:44Speaker 05

  That's right.

• 20:45Greg Jenner?

  So just right at the end, it changed a tiny bit, but the system is not phonetic, is that right?

• 20:49Speaker 05

  Not an alphabet, that's exactly right. There was also one earlier cuneiform alphabet in 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 that were characters that stand for whole words and characters that stand for syllables like bah instead of a B and an A.

• 21:09Greg Jenner?

  Okay.

• 21:09Speaker 05

  Or, you know, bat, like, you know, 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 when 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. And that enabled the writing system to take on completely unrelated languages to the ones that those initial words were in.

• 21:44Greg Jenner?

  How many characters are there in cuneiform? You know, if you were to be a scribe and train, how many would you have to learn?

• 21:51Speaker 05

  About 600 to 1,000. I mean, you probably wouldn't have to master every single one if you were just like writing letters, for example. But if you were a scholar, you would probably need to do the upper limit of that.

• 22:02Speaker 04

  Was it a cumulative script? So they started off with some characters and every, you know, as time progressed, they just created more and more characters in cuneiform to represent new things?

• 22:10Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah. And then, 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,

• 22:19Greg Jenner?

  Yeah.

• 22:19Speaker 05

  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.

• 22:26Greg Jenner?

  Yeah. Can we see, can we show Phil some cuneiform?

• 22:28Speaker 05

  Yeah, let's do it.

• 22:29Greg Jenner?

  Yes. We haven't smuggled anything out of a library because it's probably too valuable. So we've got, we've got some pictures on an iPad.

• 22:35Speaker 04

  But the iPad is stolen, just add the freestyle.

• 22:37Speaker 05

  It actually is stolen from my husband.

• 22:40Greg Jenner?

  Oh, great. So we have a tablet on a tablet.

• 22:42Speaker 05

  We have a tablet on a tablet.

• 22:43Speaker 04

  Oh, that's lovely, two tablets across time. Oh, wow, look at this. Okay, beautiful. So I'm looking at, it's a clay tablet from different angles and it looks like a flat sourdough loaf.

• 22:57Greg Jenner?

  Nice.

• 22:58Speaker 04

  It's kind of lumpy in that way. It looks, it's not like, it's not like a perfectly square tablet. It looks like bread. And, oh, okay, so in the top, yeah, so in the top left corner, this is so made on grid. It's almost like a comic book. There are squares, there are, it's a grid, it's sort of a grid pattern. And within each grid are a collection of symbols. Like the top left is two circles and then one looks like a boat, a sailboat. And then below that is more dot, more circles, lots of circles, lots of many triangles, actually, lots of circles and one looks like a fish. And under that, three circles and one looks like a river. I feel like I'm picking out a theme here. I'm going to say this is a tablet about a fisherman.

• 23:43Speaker 04

  He's caught, he's caught 60 fish.

• 23:48Speaker 04

  Three from the river.

• 23:49Greg Jenner?

  This is live philology.

• 23:51Speaker 04

  There's something here that looks a bit like a harp and some reeds. So he plays music in his spare time. He practices in the reed garden.

• 24:01Greg Jenner?

  Is it a dating profile? Is this Hinge?

• 24:03Speaker 05

  Tinder, yeah.

• 24:04Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's something here about how he doesn't like pineapple on pizza.

• 24:09Greg Jenner?

  Loves long walks in the rain. Yeah, yeah.

• 24:13Speaker 04

  But there's lots of circles and is that, is that counting?

• 24:16Speaker 05

  That's exactly right. Yeah, the circles are numbers.

• 24:18Speaker 04

  Phil, you are so good at this.

• 24:20Speaker 05

  You really are. If you need a plan B, we need more serologists. We have way too many tablets.

• 24:25Speaker 04

  Well, yeah, I'm sort of using a lot of my knowledge of Chinese writing forms. Cause like in counting in Chinese, you know, Irasan, the one, two, three is the, one is a one line, two is two lines, three is three lines. And then after that, I go, this is not sustainable. And then it becomes more complicated characters. But for those first three, it is just like, just mark, yeah, just marking.

• 24:45Greg Jenner?

  Well, that was some very good philology, Phil. Well done.

• 24:47Speaker 04

  Oh, thanks, thanks.

• 24:48Greg Jenner?

  I feel like you really like, you've just brought the level of the podcast up there. I think everyone's very impressed.

• 24:52Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 24:53Greg Jenner?

  You know, we're now talking about a technology that's 5,350 years old. The obvious question is why clay? Why, you know, the, why is clay the technology?

• 25:02Speaker 05

  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 and 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, oh, let's just try, let's just try this.

• 25:29Greg Jenner?

  More people, more stuff means you need to write things down. So the invention of writing is an accounting system. It's like a software for keeping track of your receipts.

• 25:39Speaker 05

  Exactly.

• 25:39Greg Jenner?

  And then it turns into literature. Is that fair?

• 25:41Speaker 05

  That's exactly right.

• 25:42Greg Jenner?

  Okay.

• 25:42Speaker 04

  So is there a case to be made, you know, it's, we often sort of credit rivers, and especially in Mesopotamia's case, the two rivers, as being crucial to the success of these civilizations for, because of fertility they provided in the soil. But is there a case to be said that beyond that, they also provided the clay to write things down and for the society to progress in that domain as well?

• 26:05Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 26:06Speaker 04

  So it wasn't just sort of agriculture that the rivers allowed to happen, but for record keeping as well.

• 26:14Speaker 05

  Exactly, yeah.

• 26:15Speaker 04

  So river, river's good.

• 26:16Greg Jenner?

  River's good, river's good.

• 26:18Speaker 04

  Yeah.

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• 27:52Greg Jenner?

  We should talk about who can read this. I'm assuming most people are not literate. We've got multiple societies here. It's very generic to just say Bronze Age Mesopotamia, but like, who can read and write kind of form? Is it a very highly skilled thing? Can you have basic functional literacy if you're an ordinary fisherman? Or, you know, who's got that knowledge?

• 28:12Speaker 05

  So, kind of both. And it depends on, 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 signs 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.

• 28:35Greg Jenner?

  Right.

• 28:35Speaker 05

  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 periods. So, yes and no to that.

• 28:53Speaker 04

  Yeah. So I guess when something is written by those professionals in kind of form, the intention was only ever for other professionals in the same field to be able to read it, really. There's no expectation that other people could read a pop science book about astrology. It's only for other professionals to...

• 29:10Speaker 05

  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."

• 29:21Greg Jenner?

  Oh, really?

• 29:22Speaker 05

  This is the secret knowledge of the, you know, you know, the god, blah, blah, blah. This is just for us. Exactly. So.

• 29:28Speaker 04

  Sick.

• 29:28Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 29:29Greg Jenner?

  Keep it from the masses. This is just us. You said we have women scribes. The most famous one, I suppose, would be the daughter of King Sargon. So Sargon the Great of Alcardi's very famous sort of.

• 29:39Speaker 04

  Sargon, there's a king's name. Not Darius. Sargon sounds bad. That's scary.

• 29:44Greg Jenner?

  He's around like 4,000 years ago. But his daughter is the first woman author in history?

• 29:50Speaker 05

  Yes, that's right. She's a first named author in history. So not just the first woman author, the first author whose name we know.

• 29:55Greg Jenner?

  Wow.

• 29:56Speaker 05

  Yeah, as a woman. And her name is Elkhedwana. And she penned, penned, impressed, whatever.

• 30:02Greg Jenner?

  Pen is fine, yeah.

• 30:03Speaker 05

  These incredible hymns, temple hymns, essentially.

• 30:07Greg Jenner?

  Right.

• 30:07Speaker 05

  The texts that are attributed to her authorship come from a slightly later period. So it's not exactly straightforward, but I think, still think that's the coolest thing ever.

• 30:15Greg Jenner?

  That's amazing. The earliest named author in history is a princess writing 4,300 years ago.

• 30:21Speaker 05

  Exactly.

• 30:22Speaker 04

  Sick. Yeah, really cool.

• 30:23Speaker 05

  Very cool.

• 30:25Speaker 04

  And the hymns, so are we able to sing these hymns now?

• 30:29Speaker 05

  I mean, you could sing them if you wanted to. We know how.

• 30:31Speaker 04

  I guess we don't have a tune though.

• 30:32Speaker 05

  Yeah, you can make one up, I guess. But.

• 30:35Speaker 04

  We know the lyrics.

• 30:36Speaker 05

  We know the lyrics, yes.

• 30:37Greg Jenner?

  The tune is Sean Paul. It's Asher Bynum Paul's Sean Paul, yeah.

• 30:41Speaker 05

  That would actually be fantastic.

• 30:44Greg Jenner?

  Okay. And so how do you, like, can you send messages? Like, are there letters? Is there a postal system? Can you communicate with tablets and cuneiform, I suppose is the question?

• 30:55Speaker 05

  Yes, yes, absolutely. Yes, they wrote letters to each other and they sent them. And there were kind of mail networks, royal mail networks, so to speak. I mean, literally royal road for the mail networks.

• 31:06Speaker 04

  And they'd carry clay tablets.

• 31:07Speaker 05

  Yeah, they'd carry baskets, I guess, of clay tablets on, you know, donkey or depending on the period, maybe horse. But yeah, for to get messages from one part of especially a growing empire to the other, you needed to be able to communicate with your, you know, governors.

• 31:20Greg Jenner?

  And do you write your own? Or do you go to the local scribe and dictate it?

• 31:24Speaker 05

  You could do both.

• 31:24Greg Jenner?

  Oh, you can.

• 31:25Speaker 05

  Yeah, in some periods, people wrote their own letters. I mean, they learned enough to write their own letters. But the, the way letters are written is they're, they often start with like, to so and so speak. Thus says another so and so. So it's, there is this kind of hints that they were dictated, both in the taking down of the letter, but also in the delivery of the letter as well.

• 31:45Speaker 04

  And was this supposed to be some available to people outside of the kings and so, so regular people could, could do this as well?

• 31:51Speaker 05

  Mm hmm. 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.

• 31:58Greg Jenner?

  So in the 19th century, when you get the invention of telegraphy and you'd go to the telegraphy office and you dictate your thing and someone would put into Morse code and then someone else would translate it for them. And it's the same thing in, but four thousand years ago.

• 32:09Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 32:10Greg Jenner?

  So, so we're dictating, so it's like, hey Siri, but instead it's hey scribe. Scribe, uh, so, okay, putting the Siri in Assyria. There you go.

• 32:20Speaker 04

  I didn't catch that. I don't know what to do.

• 32:23Greg Jenner?

  I did not hear. Please say that again.

• 32:28Greg Jenner?

  What kind of things do you think people were dictating in their tablets, Phil?

• 32:31Speaker 04

  In the letters to each other?

• 32:33Greg Jenner?

  Yeah. What kind of stuff do you think is getting jotted down?

• 32:35Speaker 04

  Probably like, this place sucks. It's really hot. It's really hot. We've got a river. That's pretty good, I guess, but what's it like over there? Then, and then, yeah, this place sucks too, actually. It's really hot.

• 32:50Speaker 04

  We go to this stupid scribe every time I want to send a letter to someone.

• 32:55Greg Jenner?

  So you think it's just like when people are complaining?

• 32:57Speaker 04

  Must have been, yeah.

• 32:58Greg Jenner?

  Yeah.

• 32:58Speaker 04

  The arrogance though. I wonder if there's a lot to complain about back then.

• 33:01Speaker 05

  Actually, yeah.

• 33:03Greg Jenner?

  Yeah. The hymn to Mancasi is one of the earliest things ever written down, and that's a song to a goddess about beer. And I know that one of the earliest ever, you know, from tablets we have is about beer.

• 33:15Speaker 05

  That's right.

• 33:16Greg Jenner?

  It's amazing. Nothing has changed.

• 33:20Greg Jenner?

  Can you tell us about this ancient, is it one tablet, is it fragments? What have we got? The beer tablet.

• 33:25Speaker 05

  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 microbrew for the neighbors on a Sunday. Yeah. This is a guy who at one point was responsible for 135,000 liters 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.

• 34:05Greg Jenner?

  So he's a beer magnate? He's like, he's like, Mr. Heineken. He's in charge of all of the beer of the city.

• 34:13Speaker 05

  To pay people essentially as part of the rations.

• 34:15Greg Jenner?

  Yes, because beer is a currency, almost.

• 34:18Speaker 05

  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.

• 34:28Greg Jenner?

  Yes, thick and soupy, isn't it?

• 34:30Speaker 05

  Exactly. It's a poke a straw.

• 34:31Greg Jenner?

  Yeah.

• 34:32Speaker 05

  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.

• 34:40Speaker 04

  Particularly alcoholic, presumably?

• 34:41Speaker 05

  Probably not too alcoholic and probably not very tasty, I'm guessing.

• 34:47Greg Jenner?

  So Kushim.

• 34:48Speaker 04

  I'm sorry, you mentioned a few times now the word rations. What do you mean by that in this context? What were rations?

• 34:53Speaker 05

  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.

• 35:15Greg Jenner?

  So Kushim might be one of the first named people in history?

• 35:18Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 35:20Greg Jenner?

  And he's a beer brewer.

• 35:20Speaker 05

  He's a beer brewer.

• 35:21Greg Jenner?

  That's great.

• 35:23Speaker 05

  So cool.

• 35:23Greg Jenner?

  Okay. So there we go. So beer is the history, the history of the world is beer, basically. Beer and writing, a slightly drunk texting.

• 35:34Greg Jenner?

  So we have hundreds of thousands of, you know, I was a medieval historian by training and I used to complain that we had too many documents, but you have hundreds of thousands of cuneiform tablets. So you haven't read them all?

• 35:46Speaker 05

  Oh, no, no. I've probably read like a hundred.

• 35:48Greg Jenner?

  That's extraordinary, because that gives us such a window into daily life.

• 35:52Speaker 05

  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.

• 36:12Speaker 04

  Yeah, I was gonna ask, are these good reads? Are they real tablet turners?

• 36:18Speaker 05

  I think so, yeah.

• 36:20Speaker 04

  Wow, that's amazing.

• 36:21Speaker 05

  I think so.

• 36:22Speaker 04

  What were people writing about? I mean, these are letters presumably, and also, all of it, literature and records as well.

• 36:28Speaker 05

  Yeah, and they were pretty good record keepers too, so it can be borderline sort of dry, where you're reading about like 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.

• 36:56Greg Jenner?

  Arguably the first great story, the earliest great literature in human history that's recorded, and we have it because of cuneiform.

• 37:03Speaker 05

  Exactly.

• 37:03Speaker 04

  And do we have it in complete form, the Gilgamesh?

• 37:06Speaker 05

  Almost, almost.

• 37:09Greg Jenner?

  We don't know how it ends.

• 37:12Greg Jenner?

  And then Gilgamesh did what?

• 37:14Speaker 04

  It's like Game of Thrones, he's still not finished it.

• 37:18Greg Jenner?

  Something we do have, which is really charming, I think, and quite interesting, we have a series of letters between a wife and a merchant husband who are in different cities, and they're writing to each other. What do you imagine they're writing to each other, Phil?

• 37:29Speaker 04

  Things like, how are you? Good trip? You get in all right? That must have been something, how was the journey?

• 37:38Greg Jenner?

  Yeah, how was the journey?

• 37:38Speaker 04

  Must have been something like that. How's the journey? And then he's writing back, how are the kids? How's the barley? I mean, he must have been there for a while, if there was time for them to have a clay tablet exchange, right?

• 37:49Greg Jenner?

  I feel like there's more drama in these tablets, Moody.

• 37:51Speaker 05

  Oh, yes. Oh, yes. They did write about barley too, but they also shouted at each other a little bit.

• 37:56Greg Jenner?

  So who are our protagonists? Is it Anaya?

• 37:59Speaker 05

  Inaya, he's the husband and he's living in Anatolia, which is what is now Turkey, where there is a major trading hub, like an international trading hub called Kanesh. And he moved there essentially to handle trade. And then his wife, Taram Kupi, 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, "When you went away, you did not leave a single shekel of silver. You picked the house clean and took it away. Since you left, there has been hardship and hunger in the city. What is this extravagance that you keep writing to me about? There is nothing for us to eat. Do we live in luxury? I have picked clean everything in my possession and sent it to you. Today, I live in an empty house."

• 38:41Speaker 05

  She also asks him to finally pay for the textiles that she made that he's out there selling, which takes about six months to make one of these textiles. And the letter ends, "Why do you keep on listening to slander and do you keep sending me angry letters?"

• 38:53Speaker 04

  Wow. So she's invoicing him as well.

• 38:56Speaker 05

  I know.

• 38:57Speaker 04

  On top of all that.

• 38:58Greg Jenner?

  Yeah. I feel like they might need couples therapy. It's not going well, that relationship, is it?

• 39:03Speaker 04

  God, she's making it sound like it's his fault the entire city is falling apart. I feel like it's a little dramatic.

• 39:09Greg Jenner?

  Because of you, the whole city is starving. Yeah.

• 39:13Speaker 04

  But it's amazing, you never think of these old forms of writing being able to convey such emotion, you know, such nuance, or yeah, or anger even. I've always thought of them as very, very specific numbers, dates, names. Not like feelings, not emotion.

• 39:31Greg Jenner?

  Well, as I said, a Kinephile was developed as an accountancy system early on, but it becomes just a way to communicate everything and anything that people want to say to each other, which means literature, letters, language, astronomy, petty complaints, legal trials, presumably.

• 39:47Speaker 04

  Do we have his replies? I'm invested now. I see why you got into this.

• 39:51Greg Jenner?

  New tablet, who dis?

• 39:52Speaker 05

  Yes. 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, so about 2000 to 1600 BCE, where many of the wives stayed behind in Ashur, made these textiles for onward sail essentially, in Canesh, which was about five weeks away on donkey, 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 and like making, you know.

• 40:25Speaker 04

  And they're not getting the money, yeah, the money back.

• 40:26Speaker 05

  Yeah, so, and they're doing a lot of work, so kind of.

• 40:29Greg Jenner?

  Meanwhile, Inayr is in Turkey, having a great time.

• 40:31Speaker 05

  Yeah, having a blast, maybe even taking a second wife.

• 40:33Greg Jenner?

  I was gonna say, he's probably got a second family, hasn't he? He's like, who's this woman writing to me? I'm trying to play with my new kids. So how did scribes learn all these systems? Do we have evidence of their training?

• 40:42Speaker 05

  Yeah, and there are lots and lots of tablets that tell us about every stage of scribal education. There's one house in Nipur, a city in what is now Iraq, that archaeologists have given the very kind of charming name of House F.

• 40:56Greg Jenner?

  Wow.

• 40:58Speaker 05

  And, yeah.

• 41:00Greg Jenner?

  Thanks archaeology, that's great.

• 41:02Speaker 05

  Exactly, we're very excited now to hear about House F. And they found over 1,400 school texts basically from, and just in the first season, that tell us about, you know, the first messy wedges that scribes were impressing as little kids.

• 41:16Greg Jenner?

  My first wedged.

• 41:17Speaker 05

  Yeah, my first wedged, exactly. It's like those, you know, bobbly kind of fingerprint smudged tablets.

• 41:22Greg Jenner?

  Fingertape, fingertape, fingertape.

• 41:23Speaker 04

  Yeah. Yeah, triangle stands for cat.

• 41:26Greg Jenner?

  Yeah.

• 41:27Speaker 04

  Triangle stands for dog.

• 41:28Speaker 05

  But yeah, all the way up to, you know, quite advanced math and Sumerian literature.

• 41:37Greg Jenner?

  Doing GCSEs.

• 41:38Speaker 05

  Yeah, using fake contracts, so everything.

• 41:40Speaker 04

  So there were schools and kids were taught, couldn't they form at school?

• 41:43Speaker 05

  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.

• 41:49Greg Jenner?

  Amazing.

• 41:50Speaker 05

  Yeah, like maybe a 12-year-old.

• 41:52Speaker 04

  They do look like sourdough, like I said, so that might have just been an honest mistake.

• 41:56Greg Jenner?

  Just a very hungry student.

• 41:58Speaker 05

  Yes. And then some doodles as well. There's one that maybe of a teacher, sitting in a chair with like, holding a stick out.

• 42:04Speaker 04

  Cool.

• 42:04Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 42:04Greg Jenner?

  I feel like the teeth marks justifies my earlier Great British Bake Off joke.

• 42:08Speaker 04

  Oh, yes.

• 42:09Greg Jenner?

  I feel like clay bake, tray bake. That's the, that's the third week in the series.

• 42:12Speaker 04

  That's Prue Leith trying out one of the...

• 42:14Greg Jenner?

  Yeah, exactly. Just, you know, breaking a tooth on it. That's, that's been overproofed, I think, yeah. So we've got schoolboys doodling, we've got a doodle of, um, somewhat like of a man sitting down with a long stick and we think it's the teacher.

• 42:26Speaker 05

  Maybe, it might be. I kind of can't imagine who else the student would have...

• 42:30Greg Jenner?

  The stick suggests corporal punishment, doesn't it?

• 42:32Speaker 05

  It might. There, there are stories about schools that the students had to write down that are in Sumerian where they, they, it gets kind of, you know,

• 42:41Greg Jenner?

  Yeah.

• 42:41Speaker 05

  heated at times, but...

• 42:44Greg Jenner?

  What language do they speak and what language are they writing in if they're scribe, if they're training to be scribes?

• 42:49Speaker 05

  So they were probably speaking Akkadian at home because by the time House F exists, Sumerian is a dead language.

• 42:56Greg Jenner?

  Okay.

• 42:56Speaker 05

  But they were learning Sumerian at school because it was important to learn this ancient, authentic, old language, just like Latin was...

• 43:03Greg Jenner?

  Yeah. Okay. So it's like a Victorian schoolboy learning Latin so he could go and become a lawyer.

• 43:07Speaker 05

  Exactly.

• 43:08Greg Jenner?

  Okay.

• 43:08Speaker 04

  Is, is there a modern language that is related to Akkadian in any way?

• 43:13Speaker 05

  Yeah, there are lots actually. So it's a Semitic language. So it's related, I mean, in, 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

• 43:25Speaker 04

  Right.

• 43:25Speaker 05

  There's a lot of vocab overlap and some grammar overlap.

• 43:28Greg Jenner?

  Because Aramaic derives from Akkadian and then Aramaic is the father of several languages. I think is, is that sort of the chain, is it maybe?

• 43:36Speaker 05

  Yeah. I mean, I don't know, like, to what extent Aramaic borrows from Akkadian.

• 43:41Greg Jenner?

  Okay.

• 43:41Speaker 05

  But it, it was at one point simultaneous and people were bilingual in Aramaic and Akkadian.

• 43:46Greg Jenner?

  That's in the late period, wasn't it? Yeah. So the Neo Assyrian period. And then Persian comes in and then you're like, oh, there's a whole other language to learn. But they're still learning Sumerian as scribes as kids.

• 43:55Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 43:55Greg Jenner?

  So you're still, you're learning a dead, dead language by that point. It's like so dead.

• 43:58Speaker 05

  Yeah. And there are even proverbs that are like, what good is a scribe who doesn't know Sumerian? And it's like, oh, I guess that nobody wanted to really learn this. So they had to come up with proverbs to inspire them.

• 44:08Greg Jenner?

  The scribes are sort of, they're also being used in religion, right? So religion is also important. And we talked about some of this when we did our Babylonians episode with Kay, but I think we just probably reiterate for Phil's benefit. What, what does cuneiform teach us about sacred texts and the understanding of gods and monsters, ghosts, planets and stars?

• 44:29Speaker 05

  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. They weren't considered two separate things. And so the people who were trained in observing the natural world were essentially observing signs being left behind by divine beings about events to come. So for example, a lunar eclipse was bad news because it was a sign from the gods that the king was going to die. For example.

• 45:12Speaker 05

  Sorry, King, sorry. 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.

• 45:28Speaker 04

  Holy, hey.

• 45:29Speaker 05

  I know, it was brutal.

• 45:30Greg Jenner?

  Would you take that? Would you have two months living as a king if you know you're going to die at the end?

• 45:34Speaker 04

  You have to think about the average quality of life at the time and how much of an upgrade that would have been, even for just for two months. I would have considered it.

• 45:43Greg Jenner?

  Yeah?

• 45:43Speaker 04

  Yeah, for sure. Yeah, depending what age I was. If I was 40, I was already knocking on death's door, to be honest. So if I was, you know, I'd take that. Two months in heaven and then death.

• 45:56Greg Jenner?

  Yeah.

• 45:57Speaker 04

  Yeah, I'll take that.

• 45:58Speaker 05

  You can imagine why it was so important for the, you know, the observers, for the diviners and the scholars to get the signs right? Because there was a lot that rode on these 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.

• 46:20Greg Jenner?

  And there's also divination. So telling the future by using sheep, Phil. How would you go about telling the future with sheep?

• 46:27Speaker 04

  Is it sort of like a tea leaves reading kind of thing? Like the pattern they fall into tells a story?

• 46:34Greg Jenner?

  So you're watching sheep flock?

• 46:36Speaker 04

  Yeah, you get up on a hill and you look down and see what sort of...

• 46:39Greg Jenner?

  See what they spell out?

• 46:40Speaker 04

  Yeah, exactly.

• 46:41Greg Jenner?

  If they spell out SOS, it's like, uh-oh.

• 46:43Speaker 04

  If they spell out "king dead", you go, "Oh, not this again. All right, who wants two months in paradise?"

• 46:50Greg Jenner?

  Unfortunately, though, the sheep has to die here.

• 46:52Speaker 05

  Yeah. Oh, entrails.

• 46:54Greg Jenner?

  Yeah. It's the liver, isn't it? They're looking at the liver. But what I find really interesting is that writing is still very important in this process. Can you tell us why?

• 47:03Speaker 05

  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?

• 47:11Greg Jenner?

  Okay.

• 47:12Speaker 05

  It has to be, will I recover from, you know, this journey or whatever? Yeah, they went crazy, didn't they? Guts could tell. 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...

• 47:40Greg Jenner?

  So do livers.

• 47:40Speaker 05

  So do livers, 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.

• 47:49Greg Jenner?

  Wow.

• 47:50Speaker 05

  And in astronomical phenomena, we're also, the writing, the heavenly writing, is the movement of the planets.

• 47:56Greg Jenner?

  So you said that cuneiform is quite a stable technology. We have the earliest technology at 3,350. The absolute latest we go to is in the Roman era, right? The latest cuneiform is like, what, 79 CE?

• 48:11Speaker 05

  That's exactly right. The last dateable cuneiform tablet, so dateable, is from 79 or 80 CE.

• 48:17Greg Jenner?

  Which is the year Vesuvius erupted. So, yeah.

• 48:20Speaker 05

  Coincidence?

• 48:21Greg Jenner?

  I was going to say, maybe the volcano erupted or anyone like, I feel like this is a sign. Let's just put down the cuneiform.

• 48:27Speaker 05

  Move on. And what I love is it's also from Uruk.

• 48:31Greg Jenner?

  Yeah.

• 48:32Speaker 05

  Yeah, so it started in Uruk and, I mean, we don't know, but it seems to have... The last one was also from Uruk. Yeah.

• 48:37Greg Jenner?

  Okay, so that's amazing. So it's a stable technology. It changes a little bit over the time in terms of the font, in terms of how it's written, but you can still read it through that time?

• 48:46Speaker 05

  Yeah, it's pretty, yeah, it's pretty easy to read.

• 48:49Greg Jenner?

  That's amazing. And so Akkadian then is followed by Aramaic, followed by Persian, followed by other languages, and off we go. There's one more thing to mention. Phil, as our expert philologist here, what do you think the cruciform monument of Manish Teshu was?

• 49:01Speaker 05

  Oh, no.

• 49:04Speaker 04

  I was just, I was just reading about this.

• 49:07Greg Jenner?

  You're sick of hearing, aren't you?

• 49:08Speaker 04

  The cruciform.

• 49:09Greg Jenner?

  The cruciform monument of Manish Tushu.

• 49:11Speaker 04

  So cruciform means, is that a cross?

• 49:14Greg Jenner?

  Mm hmm.

• 49:14Speaker 04

  Okay, monument of Manatushu?

• 49:16Greg Jenner?

  Mm hmm.

• 49:16Speaker 04

  Hmm. Hmm. It's a big, uh, it's a building and there's, there's a tower, an obelisk, but it's got a cross in it. A big obelisk, but it's got a cross across it. So it's a big T. Big T.

• 49:30Greg Jenner?

  It's not bad, yes.

• 49:31Speaker 05

  It's not bad, yeah, it is a big T, but it's only about this big, about a foot.

• 49:34Greg Jenner?

  Oh, it's a mini T.

• 49:34Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 49:34Speaker 04

  I feel like monument kinda overplays the size of it.

• 49:37Greg Jenner?

  It's a monument.

• 49:39Speaker 04

  So it's about a foot, about a foot tall?

• 49:41Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 49:41Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 49:42Speaker 05

  And it's like a 3D cross, basically.

• 49:44Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 49:44Speaker 05

  So it has like 12 sides, I don't know, I can't do math, but it's something like that.

• 49:47Greg Jenner?

  Yeah. The reason I've asked is because it's a forgery?

• 49:52Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 49:52Greg Jenner?

  Like it, it sort of gets to the heart of what's quite interesting about gineiform, it's that this is a deliberately new thing that's meant to look old.

• 49:59Speaker 05

  Exactly.

• 50:00Speaker 04

  Right.

• 50:01Speaker 05

  It's an ancient fake.

• 50:02Greg Jenner?

  Yeah.

• 50:03Speaker 05

  So a bunch of priests in the sixth, I think it's the sixth century or the 600s BCE, I'm actually surprised about its dates, but they, um, 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 Manish Tushu, who was about almost 2,000 years before, um, 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, uh, please keep paying us.

• 50:40Greg Jenner?

  Forgery, it's basically saying, we've always been here.

• 50:43Speaker 04

  So it's a Christian cross?

• 50:45Speaker 05

  Well, it's, it's just, yeah, it's, it's just the random shape.

• 50:48Speaker 04

  600 BCE, oh, BCE, that's what I was saying, okay.

• 50:51Speaker 05

  I probably should have said that, all my dates are BCE.

• 50:55Greg Jenner?

  It's like, it's sort of the era of kind of the Persian, it's the sixth century BCE, so it's in the 500s BCE, and it's, it's them claiming. Fake ancestry saying, no, no, we've been here for like 1,800 years. And it's a brand new, it's like dipping in like, um, when you were a kid and you had to make like an old document and you dipped it in tea to make it look old. It's that.

• 51:12Speaker 05

  Exactly that.

• 51:13Speaker 04

  And so you said it's cross-shaped documents, so there's writing all over it.

• 51:16Speaker 05

  There's writing all over the sides of it, yeah, on every edge. 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.

• 51:31Greg Jenner?

  So there you go, Phil. 3,500 years of technology, of script, a very impressive history, because you had to impress it.

• 51:37Speaker 04

  Yeah, really good. I got it.

• 51:39Greg Jenner?

  Yeah, so you now know about kineiform?

• 51:42Speaker 04

  Yeah, I can speak kineiform.

• 51:44Greg Jenner?

  No, no, you can't speak it. It's not a language.

• 51:45Speaker 04

  I feel like Neo.

• 51:46Greg Jenner?

  Start again, start.

• 51:48Speaker 04

  I'm like Neo when he says, I know Kung Fu.

• 51:50Greg Jenner?

  Yeah.

• 51:51Speaker 04

  I know kineiform.

• 51:52Greg Jenner?

  You know kineiform.

• 51:53Speaker 04

  I can speak it very fluently.

• 51:54Greg Jenner?

  No.

• 51:56Speaker 04

  I don't know why you have such a problem with me saying it.

• 51:57Greg Jenner?

  It's not a language, it's a script. Oh, never mind.

• 52:01Speaker 07

  The nuance window!

• 52:07Greg Jenner?

  This is where Phil and I sit quietly in the classroom and we carve our clay tablets for two minutes while Dr. Moody tells us something we need to know about kineiform's history. Take it away, Dr. Moody.

• 52:16Speaker 05

  In 592 BCE, a young woman, or maybe even still a girl, named La Tubashini was sold into slavery by marriage by her adoptive mother, Chamaya. 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, La Tubashini 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 of 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

• 53:00Speaker 05

  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 is lost to 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 Ardya. 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

• 53:45Speaker 05

  about: receipts, lullabies, literature, letters, liver omens, astronomical leaps, and also the lives of women like Latubashini 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.

• 54:08Greg Jenner?

  Beautiful, thanks so much.

• 54:10Speaker 05

  Thanks.

• 54:11Greg Jenner?

  So what do you know now? This is our quickfire quiz for Phil to see how much he's learned.

• 54:21Speaker 04

  I should have written more notes. I've just written Sumerian.

• 54:25Greg Jenner?

  I have to say, that is quite, there's not many triangles on that page. How are you feeling? Confident?

• 54:31Speaker 04

  As always happens when I'm on this show, you tell me about the quiz at the start of the episode, and when you tell me about it at the end, I'm always surprised. So I'm not feeling too confident just now.

• 54:41Greg Jenner?

  All right, we've got 10 questions. Historically, you're very good at these quizzes, I believe in you. Okay, question one: cuneiform gets its name from the Latin word for which shape?

• 54:51Speaker 04

  Triangle!

• 54:52Greg Jenner?

  It is! Triangle or wedge shape? There we go, we're off to a flyer. Question two: where in the world was cuneiform developed and used?

• 54:58Speaker 04

  Mesopotamia.

• 54:59Greg Jenner?

  Yes, absolutely, between the two rivers. Question three: the rock carved inscriptions at Behistun about Darius the Great were transcribed and translated by which English soldier, commonly known as the father of Assyriology?

• 55:11Speaker 04

  Rawlinson.

• 55:12Greg Jenner?

  It was Henry Rawlinson, well done, well remembered. Question four: what are the earliest surviving cuneiform tablets about? Our earliest named person in history, possibly?

• 55:22Speaker 04

  Oh, a brewer, a beer maker.

• 55:24Greg Jenner?

  Yeah, that's it, beer, absolutely, 135,000 litres of beer. I'm doing my best, it's a lot of beer.

• 55:31Speaker 04

  Good night.

• 55:31Greg Jenner?

  Question five, why was cuneiform needed during ancient sheep liver divination rituals?

• 55:36Speaker 04

  Oh, it was used to elicit messages from the gods.

• 55:41Greg Jenner?

  That's right, with a yes/no question which had to be written down.

• 55:44Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 55:45Greg Jenner?

  Well done. And the liver was also the tablet of the gods, wasn't it? That was a lovely line. Question six, what doodles have been found on a schoolboy's cuneiform tablet?

• 55:53Speaker 04

  A drawing of probably his teacher with a cane.

• 55:57Greg Jenner?

  That's right, yeah. And also teeth marks as well.

• 55:59Speaker 04

  I know.

• 56:00Greg Jenner?

  The child was hungry. Question seven, can you name one of the languages written in cuneiform?

• 56:05Speaker 04

  Akkadian.

• 56:05Greg Jenner?

  Very good. We could have Sumerian, Old Persian, Alamoite, Hittite, Hurian. You went with Akkadian, which is, I think is a good one. Question eight, what is the cruciform monument of Manish Tashu? Your favourite.

• 56:15Speaker 04

  It is a lie. It is an ancient lie that some priests cooked up to look important.

• 56:22Greg Jenner?

  Yeah, to say we've been here much longer than, yeah, we claim to be, absolutely right. Question nine, the Royal Library of Nineveh was created by King Usher, by King Ushabana Pal Shumpaul to house 30,000 clay tablets. What happened to it?

• 56:35Speaker 04

  It was burned.

• 56:36Greg Jenner?

  It was.

• 56:37Speaker 04

  Burned down.

• 56:37Greg Jenner?

  And everything was taken to the British Museum. And question 10, when was the last known cuneiform inscription created?

• 56:44Speaker 04

  Seventy-nine or eighty CE.

• 56:47Greg Jenner?

  Amazing, 10 out of 10 Phil Wang. You are a Philologist.

• 56:51Speaker 04

  Triangle out of triangle, correct.

• 56:54Greg Jenner?

  That's fantastic, well done. Oh, well done Moody for teaching him because, you know, that was, we really, there's some technical stuff we've covered there, but just so interesting.

• 57:03Speaker 04

  It really was, yeah. And, yeah, it's always amazing, because we do think about these ancient peoples, like you say, as being more about, more robotic in a way, that they were just about survival, that their writing was just about practical things, but there's so much sort of...

• 57:19Greg Jenner?

  Life and drama that we would recognise today. Yeah, it's so proper stuff, isn't it? It's a husband and wife arguing, it's a mum trying to get her kids back, it's, you know, a boss saying, where's my order? It's not on time. It's really, it's proper human life.

• 57:33Speaker 05

  Yeah, it really is. It's so, I love it. It's so beautiful. I love junior form.

• 57:37Greg Jenner?

  Well, thank you so much for sharing that with us today. And thank you also, Phil, for your knowledge and wisdom and comedy. Oh, thanks for having me. It's been fascinating. Yes, we're great. And listener, after today's episode, you want more Mesopotamia with Moody? Check out our episode on the ancient Babylonians. And to hear more from Philly Philly Wang Wang, listen to his episodes on the Borgias, Chinggis Khan, the Terracotta Warriors and the history of Kung Fu. We've given you quite a weird curriculum so far. Yeah, it's a varied curriculum. I feel like we're training you for some sort of purpose, but I don't know what yet. An enormous battle. Yes, exactly. And remember, if you've enjoyed the podcast, please share the show with your friends, subscribe to Your Dead to Me on BBC Sounds, where you will hear the show a month before it arrives on other platforms. So there we go, there's a bonus for you. And switch on your Sounds notifications too, so you never miss an episode.

• 58:22Greg Jenner?

  I'd just like to say a huge thank you to our guests in history corner. We had the marvellous Dr Moody Al Rashid from the University of Oxford. Thank you, Moody.

• 58:29Speaker 05

  Thank you for having me.

• 58:30Greg Jenner?

  It's been a pleasure. And in comedy corner, as ever, we have the fantastic Phil O'Leary Wang. Thank you, Phil.

• 58:35Speaker 04

  Thank you for using my full name. It's been a pleasure.

• 58:38Greg Jenner?

  And to you lovely listener, join me next time as we decode another message from the past. But for now, I'm off to go and carve an emoji inscribed Rosetta Stone to help future archaeologists. And it's going to involve an awful lot of rude emojis. Bye.

• 58:52Greg Jenner?

  This episode of Your Dead to Me was researched by Hannah Cusworth and Matt Ryan. It was written by Emmyrose Pricegood Fellow, Emma Nagus and me. The audio producer was Steve Hanke and our production coordinator was Ben Hollands. It was produced by Emmyrose Pricegood Fellow, me and senior producer Emma Nagus. And our executive editor was James Cook. Your Dead to Me is a BBC Studios audio production for BBC Radio 4.

• 59:17Speaker 03

  I'm Nicola Coughlin and for BBC Radio 4, this is History's Youngest Heroes. Rebellion, risk and the radical power of youth.

• 59:27Greg Jenner?

  She thought, right, I'll just do it. She thought about others rather than herself.

• 59:32Speaker 03

  Twelve stories of extraordinary young people from across history. There's a real sense of urgency in them, that resistance has to be mounted, it has to be mounted now. Subscribe to History's Youngest Heroes on BBC Sounds.

• 59:49Speaker 08

  It's the film that convinced Americans the Second World War was worth fighting.

• 59:54Speaker 09

  A reason to be in Hollywood, that is really quite a terrifying situation.

• 59:58Speaker 08

  And its production is an extraordinary story in itself. Ronald Reagan had been named as the potential lead. Join me, Misha Glennie, and three expert guests for a special live edition of In Our Time, where we discuss Casablanca. Listen on BBC.com or wherever you get your podcasts.