Cuneiform (Radio Edit)

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. This is a radio edit of the original podcast episode. For the full-length version, please look further back in the feed. 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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• 0:34Speaker 02

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• 1:08Speaker 03

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• 1:14Greg 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 assereologist 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.

• 1:57Speaker 04

  Thank you. Thank you so much for having me.

• 1:59Greg Jenner?

  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. Count them, 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.

• 2:22Speaker 05

  Hello, thanks for having me. Yes, Moody isn't a serologist, I'm a siliologist. Comedy corner. Bring in the silly, baby.

• 2:31Greg Jenner?

  Phil, together we've tackled mighty military matters, we've done the Borgias, we've done Chinggis 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?

• 2:47Speaker 05

  I picture triangles.

• 2:49Greg Jenner?

  Yeah.

• 2:50Speaker 05

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

• 2:58Greg Jenner?

  That's fairly good knowledge straight off the bat.

• 3:00Speaker 05

  And the biggest word in my word bubbles, word clouds.

• 3:04Greg Jenner?

  Word cloud.

• 3:05Speaker 05

  The biggest word there is old. That's my header. Am I on the right ballpark?

• 3:11Greg Jenner?

  Moody, I don't want to give him too many stars early on, but I feel that was quite good.

• 3:15Speaker 04

  That's pretty spot on.

• 3:16Greg Jenner?

  Yeah. And the font for old is just like a really big font.

• 3:20Speaker 05

  Yeah, the O is a triangle, the L is a triangle, and the D is a triangle.

• 3:25Greg Jenner?

  So, what do you know?

• 3:31Greg Jenner?

  This is where I have a go at getting what you, our lovely listener, might know about today's subject. You might remember a mention of cuneiform on our Babylonians episode we talked about before with Moody and Kay Kurt. Maybe you've seen some cuneiform tablets in the British Museum or in the Ashemoleum 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 people go to hieroglyphs when they think of old scripts. 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?

• 4:14Greg Jenner?

  What is cuneiform? Am I pronouncing it right? What does its name mean?

• 4:17Speaker 04

  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. 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.

• 4:53Greg Jenner?

  Who used it?

• 4:54Speaker 04

  Lots and lots of different people used cuneiform to write lots of different languages. 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. Various empires rose and fell in this region. We had the Akkadians, 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 Akkadian.

• 5:32Greg 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?

• 5:44Speaker 05

  Oh, French.

• 5:46Greg Jenner?

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

• 5:50Speaker 05

  Okay.

• 5:51Greg Jenner?

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

• 5:54Speaker 05

  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.

• 5:59Greg 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.

• 6:06Speaker 04

  Basically, yes. Yeah, he was an officer of the British East India Company. And he was, 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.

• 6:21Greg Jenner?

  So he was invited in by the Shah of Persia?

• 6:23Speaker 04

  Bizarrely.

• 6:24Greg 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 language. Which is called Philology.

• 6:31Speaker 05

  Is it? Yeah.

• 6:32Greg Jenner?

  I feel like therefore you have an innate.

• 6:34Speaker 05

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

• 6:41Greg Jenner?

  Okay, all right.

• 6:42Speaker 05

  But I did not, I did not know that.

• 6:44Greg Jenner?

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

• 6:47Speaker 05

  Yeah, right.

• 6:47Greg Jenner?

  You think laterally.

• 6:48Speaker 05

  Yeah, sure.

• 6:49Greg Jenner?

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

• 6:51Speaker 05

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

• 6:56Greg Jenner?

  Sure.

• 6:57Speaker 05

  Right? Without that, I'm guessing you're looking for patterns.

• 7:00Greg Jenner?

  Sure.

• 7:01Speaker 05

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

• 7:12Greg Jenner?

  This is good stuff, Phil, I think.

• 7:14Speaker 04

  That's exactly right. I feel like I could actually just maybe just take, get a cup of coffee or something.

• 7:19Greg Jenner?

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

• 7:22Speaker 05

  Well, my name is Philology Wang.

• 7:23Greg Jenner?

  Exactly, Philology Wang.

• 7:24Speaker 05

  Yeah, my full name, yeah.

• 7:26Greg Jenner?

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

• 7:29Speaker 04

  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.

• 7:53Greg Jenner?

  Of.

• 7:53Speaker 04

  Of, yeah, Anam.

• 7:55Greg Jenner?

  Really?

• 7:55Speaker 04

  Yeah, that was like the first.

• 7:57Greg Jenner?

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

• 7:58Speaker 04

  It really is, yeah. I mean, it appears so many times, so it kind of helps you orient to words in relation to each other as well. So there's a pattern there. He 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.

• 8:12Greg Jenner?

  Oh, really?

• 8:13Speaker 04

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

• 8:15Greg Jenner?

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

• 8:19Speaker 04

  I'm just saying what happened.

• 8:22Speaker 05

  It's based in similar to Rosetta Stone and that is the same script in two, three different languages.

• 8:26Speaker 04

  Yeah, 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 read Old Persian from other texts that were not written in cuneiform. So they kind of knew what it might say.

• 8:44Greg Jenner?

  Okay.

• 8:44Speaker 04

  And then they kind of overlaid that.

• 8:46Greg Jenner?

  And in 1857, so 20 years after Rawlinson first went out 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 sort of intervened and said, right, okay, we're going to officially declare that cuneiform has been decoded. And this invents a new discipline of which you are a practitioner.

• 9:04Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 9:04Greg Jenner?

  Assyriology.

• 9:05Speaker 04

  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.

• 9:38Greg Jenner?

  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.

• 9:49Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 9:50Greg Jenner?

  But this, uh, this wasn't-

• 9:52Speaker 05

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

• 9:56Greg Jenner?

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

• 10:05Speaker 04

  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 collection.

• 10:32Speaker 05

  And this library is a library of tablets?

• 10:34Speaker 04

  Mm-hmm.

• 10:35Speaker 05

  Really?

• 10:35Speaker 04

  Clay tablets, yeah.

• 10:36Speaker 05

  Wow. Was it always clay, didn't they?

• 10:37Speaker 04

  It was used on other objects, but the scholarly stuff was on clay.

• 10:40Greg Jenner?

  That was the good stuff.

• 10:41Speaker 04

  Yeah, that's my favorite.

• 10:43Greg 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.

• 10:52Speaker 05

  Oh, no.

• 10:53Greg Jenner?

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

• 10:59Speaker 05

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

• 11:08Greg Jenner?

  He's spiralling, he's losing.

• 11:12Speaker 05

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

• 11:13Greg Jenner?

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

• 11:16Speaker 05

  Oh, wow. And sort of solid hardened it.

• 11:19Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 11:20Greg Jenner?

  Which you get instant preservation.

• 11:22Speaker 05

  Why didn't they do that already?

• 11:23Speaker 04

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

• 11:27Speaker 05

  Wow. So baking was kind of laminating.

• 11:29Speaker 04

  Exactly, yeah.

• 11:31Greg Jenner?

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

• 11:35Speaker 05

  It's cuneiform week here at the tent.

• 11:39Greg Jenner?

  Okay, so we know how cuneiform was deciphered, and we know how it was preserved. The library burned down, baking the knowledge. Let's now discover how cuneiform was first invented. The system is not phonetic, is that right?

• 11:50Speaker 04

  Not an alphabet. Broadly, cuneiform is a mix of signs that are characters that stand for whole words, and characters that stand for syllables, like "ba" instead of a "b" and an "a",

• 12:02Greg Jenner?

  Okay.

• 12:03Speaker 04

  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 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.

• 12:37Greg Jenner?

  We're now talking about a technology that's 5,350 years old. The obvious question is, why clay?

• 12:42Speaker 04

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

• 13:08Greg 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?

• 13:18Speaker 04

  Exactly.

• 13:18Greg Jenner?

  And then it turns into literature. Is that a fair?

• 13:20Speaker 04

  That's exactly right.

• 13:21Greg Jenner?

  Okay.

• 13:21Speaker 05

  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 because of fertility they provide 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?

• 13:43Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 13:44Speaker 05

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

• 13:52Speaker 04

  Exactly, yeah.

• 13:53Speaker 05

  So river's good.

• 13:54Greg Jenner?

  River's good, river's good.

• 13:56Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 13:57Greg Jenner?

  We've got multiple societies here. It's very generic to just say Bronze Age Mesopotamia, but like, who can read and write in a form? Is it a very highly skilled thing? Can you have basic functional literacy if you're an ordinary fisherman? Or who's got that knowledge?

• 14:12Speaker 04

  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 science to be able to carry out transactions, write letters, and that included women. Overall, it was a kind of highly skilled, that you needed to go through specialized training, and there were also different tiers that you could kind of stop at, in a way.

• 14:34Greg Jenner?

  Right.

• 14:34Speaker 04

  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.

• 14:52Greg Jenner?

  Yeah, but you said we have women scribes. The most famous one, I suppose, would be the daughter of King Sargon. He's around like sort of 4,000 years ago, but his daughter is the first woman author in history?

• 15:03Speaker 04

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

• 15:09Greg Jenner?

  First ever author.

• 15:09Speaker 05

  Wow.

• 15:09Greg Jenner?

  Wow.

• 15:10Speaker 04

  Yeah, as a woman. And then her name is El Hadwana, and she penned, penned, impressed, whatever.

• 15:15Greg Jenner?

  Pen is fine, yeah.

• 15:17Speaker 04

  These incredible hymns, temple hymns, essentially.

• 15:20Greg Jenner?

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

• 15:27Speaker 04

  Exactly.

• 15:28Greg Jenner?

  Wow.

• 15:28Speaker 05

  That's sick, yeah, really cool.

• 15:30Greg Jenner?

  Can you send messages, like, are there letters? Is there a postal system? Can you communicate with tablets and kineiform? I suppose is the question.

• 15:37Speaker 04

  Yes, yes, absolutely. Yes, they wrote letters to each other and they sent them and there were kind of mail networks.

• 15:42Greg Jenner?

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

• 15:44Speaker 05

  In the letters to each other, 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? And then, yeah, this place sucks too, actually, it's really hot.

• 16:00Speaker 05

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

• 16:05Greg Jenner?

  So you think it's just like, people just complaining?

• 16:07Speaker 05

  Must have been, yeah. Yeah, I reckon so. I reckon there's a lot to complain about back then.

• 16:12Speaker 04

  Actually, yeah.

• 16:13Greg Jenner?

  Yeah.

• 16:14Speaker 05

  There's loads.

• 16:15Greg Jenner?

  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 kineiform tablets we have is about beer.

• 16:25Speaker 04

  That's right.

• 16:26Greg Jenner?

  It's amazing. Like, nothing has changed, right?

• 16:30Greg Jenner?

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

• 16:35Speaker 04

  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 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.

• 17:15Greg Jenner?

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

• 17:18Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 17:19Greg Jenner?

  And he's a beer brewer?

• 17:20Speaker 04

  He's a beer brewer.

• 17:21Greg Jenner?

  That's great.

• 17:22Speaker 04

  So cool.

• 17:23Greg Jenner?

  Okay.

• 17:23Speaker 04

  I mean, you can get windows onto people's working lives, but you can also get windows onto what lullaby are they saying 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, it's just so moving. What?

• 17:42Speaker 05

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

• 17:48Speaker 04

  I think so. Yeah.

• 17:50Speaker 05

  Wow, that's amazing.

• 17:51Speaker 04

  I think so.

• 17:52Speaker 05

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

• 17:57Speaker 04

  Yeah, I think, you know, they were pretty good record keepers too, so it can, 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 labourers were working and the familial lines and that, and 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.

• 18:23Greg Jenner?

  Something we do have, which is really charming, I think, and quite interesting, we have a list, we have a series of letters between a wife and a merchant husband who are in different cities.

• 18:31Speaker 05

  Ah.

• 18:31Greg Jenner?

  And they're writing to each other. What do you imagine they're writing to each other, Phil?

• 18:34Speaker 05

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

• 18:42Greg Jenner?

  Yeah, how was the journey?

• 18:43Speaker 05

  Must have been something like that.

• 18:43Greg Jenner?

  Yeah.

• 18:44Speaker 05

  How's the journey? And then he's writing back how 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?

• 18:54Greg Jenner?

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

• 18:56Speaker 04

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

• 19:01Greg Jenner?

  So who are our protagonists? Is it Inaya?

• 19:03Speaker 04

  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 Kanesh. And he moved there essentially to handle trade. And then his wife, Taram Kupi, is in the heartland of Assyria, in the, 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?" And the letter ends, "Why do you keep on listening to slander and do you keep sending me angry letters?"

• 19:43Speaker 05

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

• 19:50Greg Jenner?

  Because of you, the whole city is starving.

• 19:54Greg Jenner?

  Yeah, it's that.

• 19:55Speaker 05

  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.

• 20:11Greg Jenner?

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

• 20:16Speaker 04

  So they were probably speaking Akkadian at home.

• 20:19Greg Jenner?

  Okay.

• 20:19Speaker 04

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

• 20:26Greg Jenner?

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

• 20:30Speaker 04

  Exactly.

• 20:30Greg Jenner?

  Okay. 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?

• 20:52Speaker 04

  So I think the easiest way to explain that is that in ancient Mesopotamia, supernatural things were real. 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.

• 21:22Greg Jenner?

  Sorry, King, sorry. I've got bad news.

• 21:25Speaker 04

  They did have a workaround though. So they would get, 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.

• 21:34Speaker 05

  Oh, really?

• 21:35Speaker 04

  Just to be absolutely sure.

• 21:36Greg Jenner?

  They swap in a peasant body double.

• 21:38Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 21:38Speaker 05

  Holy hell.

• 21:39Speaker 04

  I know, it was brutal.

• 21:40Greg Jenner?

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

• 21:45Speaker 05

  You have, 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.

• 21:53Greg Jenner?

  Yeah?

• 21:53Speaker 05

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

• 22:07Greg Jenner?

  Yeah.

• 22:07Speaker 04

  So 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 wrote on, 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.

• 22:30Greg Jenner?

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

• 22:38Speaker 05

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

• 22:44Greg Jenner?

  So you're watching sheep flock, like you're...

• 22:47Speaker 05

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

• 22:49Greg Jenner?

  See what they spell out.

• 22:50Speaker 05

  Yeah, exactly.

• 22:51Greg Jenner?

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

• 22:53Speaker 05

  If they spell out King Dead, you go, ah, not this again. All right, who wants two months in, in paradise?

• 23:00Greg Jenner?

  Unfortunately, though, the sheep has to die here.

• 23:03Speaker 05

  Oh, entrails.

• 23:04Greg Jenner?

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

• 23:13Speaker 04

  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?

• 23:26Speaker 05

  Yeah, they weren't crazy. The guts could tell.

• 23:29Speaker 04

  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...

• 23:50Greg Jenner?

  So do livers.

• 23:51Speaker 04

  So do livers, yeah. And the liver is even sometimes called the tablet of the gods, where the gods leave their messages. Yeah, so the writing was kind of, it permeated their entire world.

• 24:00Greg Jenner?

  You said that cuneiform is quite a stable technology. We had 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?

• 24:14Speaker 04

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

• 24:20Greg Jenner?

  Which is the year Perseus erupted. So, yeah.

• 24:23Speaker 05

  Interesting. Coincidence?

• 24:25Greg Jenner?

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

• 24:31Speaker 04

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

• 24:35Greg Jenner?

  Yeah.

• 24:35Speaker 04

  So it started in Uruk and, I mean, we don't know, but it seems to have.

• 24:39Speaker 05

  The last one was also from Uruk.

• 24:40Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 24:41Greg 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 the, how it's written, but you can still read it through that time.

• 24:50Speaker 04

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

• 24:53Greg Jenner?

  That's amazing. And so Akkadian then is followed by Aramaic, followed by Persian, followed by other languages, and off we go. So there you go, Phil. 3,500 years of technology, of script, a very impressive history. You're to impress it.

• 25:05Speaker 05

  Yeah, really good. I got it.

• 25:07Greg Jenner?

  Yeah, so you now know about cuneiform?

• 25:09Speaker 05

  Yeah, I can speak cuneiform.

• 25:11Greg Jenner?

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

• 25:13Speaker 05

  I feel like, I feel like Neo.

• 25:14Greg Jenner?

  Start again, start.

• 25:15Speaker 05

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

• 25:17Greg Jenner?

  Yeah.

• 25:19Speaker 05

  "I know cuneiform."

• 25:20Greg Jenner?

  You know cuneiform?

• 25:21Speaker 05

  "I can speak it very fluently."

• 25:22Greg Jenner?

  No!

• 25:23Speaker 05

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

• 25:25Greg Jenner?

  It's not a language, it's a script. Oh, never mind. The nuance window!

• 25:35Greg 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 cuneiform's history. Take it away, Dr. Moody.

• 25:43Speaker 04

  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

• 26:27Speaker 04

  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 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

• 27:10Speaker 04

  life from ancient Mesopotamia as we've talked 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.

• 27:35Greg Jenner?

  Beautiful. Thanks so much. 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 Borges, Chinggis Khan, The Terracotta Warriors, and the history of Kung Fu. 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. I'd just like to say a huge thank you to our guests. In history corner, we have the marvelous Dr. Moody Al Rashid from the University of Oxford. Thank you, Moody.

• 28:10Speaker 04

  Thank you for having me.

• 28:11Greg Jenner?

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

• 28:17Speaker 05

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

• 28:20Greg 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 going carve an emoji-inscribed Rosetta Stone to help future archaeologists. And it's going to involve an awful lot of rude emojis.

• 28:30Speaker 04

  Bye.

• 28:37Speaker 03

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

• 28:47Speaker 06

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

• 28:52Speaker 03

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• 29:08Speaker 02

  In Our Time is a world-class seminar every week. Why was Jeremy a lonely snail? What were lines doing in York in the third century? I'm Misha Glennie and every week I'm joined by expert guests to explore the ideas that shape our world.

• 29:24Speaker 05

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• 29:32Speaker 02

  In Our Time, listen on BBC.com or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 29:37Speaker 05

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