Cuneiform (Radio Edit)
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BBC Sounds. Music, radio, podcasts. Hello and welcome to Yardentomy, 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 we're going to be talking about the history of 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. 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 Dastmaster, Live at the Apollo. Have a look at his for you from his two Netflix comedy specials, two, 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. Hello, thanks for having me. Yes, Moody isn't a seriologist, I'm a sillyologist. Hey! Comedy corner. Bring in the silly, baby. Phil, together we've tackled mighty military matters. We've done the Borgias, 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. I picture triangles. Yeah. So carved triangles, a lot of grain, barley, the sort of the recording of barley. That's fairly good knowledge straight off the bat. And the biggest word in my word bubbles, the word cloud. The biggest word there is old. That's my header.

Am I on the right ballpark? I mean, Moody, I don't want to give him too many sort of stars early on, but I feel that was quite good. That was pretty spot on. Yeah. And the font for old is just like a really big font. Yeah, the O is a triangle, the L is a triangle, and the D is a triangle. So, what do you know? ♪

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

Who used it? Lots and lots of different people used cuneiform to write lots of different languages. It's the writing system that is 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 Canadian form for their many languages. The main two languages, however, in ancient Mesopotamia were Sumerian and Akkadian. Phil, we're going to mix things up here. We're going to go to modern history now.

We're going to start with only a couple of hundred years ago when they deciphered cuneiform. Can you guess the nationality of the man who deciphered this ancient Near Eastern technology? Oh, French. French.

It's a good guess. His name was Henry Rawlinson. Okay. And he was from England. Yes. As all the best people are. That's what I wanted to say. That's what I actually wanted to say, but I thought I wasn't allowed to say that. 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.

Basically, yes. 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 culture. So he was invited in by the Shah of Persia. Bizarrely. 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. Is it? Yeah. I feel like therefore you have an innate skill in this. 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. Okay. Yeah. All right. But I do not know that. Okay. How would you go about decoding an ancient script? Because you're an engineer, right? Yeah, right. So you think laterally. Yeah, sure. And you're Henry Rawlinson. How do you start decoding that?

Well, ideally you have some sort of key. You find some sort of key a la Rosetta Stone. Sure. Right? Without that, I'm guessing you're looking for patterns. Sure. 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. This is good stuff, Phil, I think. That's exactly right. I feel like I should just maybe just get a cup of coffee or something. Thanks, Moody. Yeah, we're good here. It's just me and Phil. We're going to stroll this. Well, my name is Philology Wang. Exactly. Philology Wang. Yeah, my full name.

Moody, it sounds like Rawlinson used the Phil Wang technique. 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 Alvand, and then the big kind of Rosetta Stone of Assyriology, which is the Behistun inscription.

They first found royal names and then from there they found the word for of, kind of unexciting but very important. Of? Of, yeah, Annam. Really? Yeah, that was like the first... That's a really crucial word, isn't it? It really is, yeah. I mean, it appears so many times so it kind of helps you orient 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 Behistun inscription by other philologists. Oh, really? A lot of copies were made, a lot of words were decoded. Are you besmirching an Englishman's name, Moody? How dare you? I'm just saying what happened. Is Behistun similar to Rosetta Stone in that it's the same script in three different languages? Yeah, it's a trilingual inscription, but all using cuneiform. So it's three cuneiform inscriptions in these 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. And then they kind of overlaid that. 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. Yeah.

the Royal Asiatic Society, I don't know what they are, but 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. Yes. Assyriology. Assyriology. The way

I try to explain it 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 3,000

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 it took its name from it. 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. Yes.

If it's not in the BM, did it even happen? That's always been my motto. But this wasn't the first time the massive collection of ancient cuneiform tablets had been put in a museum, right? Because this was already a collection of knowledge by someone saying...

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

And this library is a library of tablets? Mm-hmm. Really? Clay tablets, yeah. Wow. Was it always clay, that thing? It was used on other objects, but the scholarly stuff was on clay. That was the good stuff. Yeah, that's my favourite stuff. So the Library of Nineveh was this incredible compilation of all the knowledge, 2,500 years' worth, put into one place, and then in the year 612 BCE, it was destroyed. Oh, no. Along came some baddies who sacked the city, and that was fantastic news for you, Moody. Mm-hmm. Do you know why?

because they spread it everywhere. Ended up in different places. Because it was cool. Because it was exciting. He's spiralling. He's losing it. I don't see how it could have been good. Because they set the building on fire and it baked the clay. Oh, wow. And sort of hardened it. Yeah. Why didn't they do that already? They

They don't always... They did bake some tablets that were really important, but for the most part, they just let them dry. Wow. So baking was kind of like laminating. Exactly. So, yeah. So the next episode of Great British Bake Off, that's what we want to see. It's cuneiform week here at the tent. OK. 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? Not in alphabet. Broadly, cuneiform is a mix of signs or characters that stand for whole words and characters that stand for syllables, like ba instead of a B and an A. Or bat, like 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. We're now talking about a technology that's 5,350 years old. The obvious question is why clay? 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, 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 this. 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. Exactly. And then it turns into literature. Is that fair? That's exactly right. 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 the fertility they provide in the soil. But is there a case, if you said, that beyond that, they also provided the clay to write things down and for the society to progress in that domain as well? So it wasn't just sort of agriculture that the rivers allowed.

allowed to happen but for record keeping as well. Exactly, yeah. So river's good. River's good. River's good. Yeah. We've got multiple societies here. It's very generic to just say Bronze Age Mesopotamia but like who can read and write in air form? Is it a very highly skilled thing? Can you have basic functional literacy if you're an ordinary...

fishermen or who's got that knowledge? 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. Right. 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 medical professionals or astronomers doing much more highly specialized math, especially in the later period. So yes and no. You said we have women scribes. The most famous one, I suppose, would be the daughter of King Sargon. He's around like 4,000 years ago. But his daughter is the first woman author in history? Yes.

Yes, that's right. She's the first named author in history. So not just the first woman author, the first author. The first ever author. Wow. Yeah, as a woman. And her name is Elhadwana. And she penned, impressed, whatever. Pen is fine, yeah. These incredible hymns, temple hymns, essentially. Right. That's amazing. The earliest named author in history is the Princess...

Writing 4,300 years ago? Exactly. Wow. That's really cool. Can you send messages? Are there letters? Is there a postal system? Can you communicate with tablets and cuneiform, I suppose is the question? Yes, yes, absolutely. Yes, they wrote letters to each other and they sent them and there were kind of mail networks. What kind of stuff do you think is getting jotted down? In the letters to each other, probably like, this place sucks. LAUGHTER

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? This place sucks too, actually. It's really hot. I have to go to this stupid scribe every time I want to send a letter to someone. So you think it's just like people just complaining? It must have been, yeah. The arrogance though. I don't think there was a lot to complain about back then. Actually, yeah.

Yeah. Loads. The Hymn to Nankazi is one of the earliest things ever written down, and that's a song to a goddess about beer. Mm-hmm. And I know that one of the earliest ever kineoform tablets we have is about beer. Mm-hmm. That's right. It's amazing. I feel like nothing has changed, right? No, it hasn't.

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

And this is not like, you know, someone in their basement making like a micro-brew for the neighbours on a Sunday. This is a guy who at one point was responsible for 135,000 litres of barley over the course of 37 months for the production of beer. And then in another tablet, he's responsible for nine different cereals to produce eight different kinds of beer. So this is part of an administrative machinery. So Kashim might be one of the first named people in history. Yeah.

I need a beer brewer. He's a beer brewer. That's great. Oh, wow. That's so cool. Okay. I mean, you can get windows onto people's working lives, but you can also get windows onto what lullaby is 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. I was going to ask, are these good reads? Are they real tablet turners? I think so, yeah. Wow, that's amazing. I think so. What were people writing about? I mean, these are letters, presumably, and also, all of it, literature and records as well. Yeah, and they were pretty good record keepers too, so it can be borderline sort of dry where you're reading about...

a forestry institution in the city of Ummah and what classes of labourers 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. Something we do have, which is really...

I think it's 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? Things like, how are you? Good trip? You get in all right? That must have been something. How's the journey? Must have been something like that. How's the journey? And then he's writing back, how are the kids? How's the barley? Yeah.

I mean, he must have been there for a while if there was time for them to have a clay tablet exchange, right? I feel like there's more drama in these tablets, Moody. Oh, yes. Oh, yes. They did write about barley, too, but they also shouted at each other a little bit. So who are our protagonists? Is it Inaya? Inaya, he's the husband, and he's living in Anatolia, which is what is now Turkey, where there's a major trading hub, like an international trading hub called Kanish. And he moved there, essentially, to handle trade.

And then his wife, Taram Kugbi, is in the heartland of Assyria in the capital of Ashur. And she's writing to him quite fiery letters. And one of them reads...

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

But it's amazing, you never think of these old forms of writing being able to convey such emotion, such nuance, or anger even. I've always thought of them as very...

very specific numbers, dates, names. Yeah. Not like feelings, not emotion. What language do they speak and what language are they writing in if they're training to be scribes? So they were probably speaking Akkadian at home. Oh, okay. But they were learning Sumerian at school because it was important to learn this ancient language.

authentic old language, just like Latin was. Yeah, okay, so it's like a Victorian schoolboy learning Latin so that he'd go and become a lawyer. Exactly. 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 does cuneiform teach us about sacred texts and the understanding of gods and monsters, ghosts, planets and stars? Hmm.

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. Sorry, King. Sorry. Okay.

I've got bad news. They did have a workaround, though. So they would get a substitute to be in the king's place for a couple of months. And then that person would live like a king and then be killed. Oh, really? Just to be absolutely sure. They'd swap in a peasant body double. Yeah, exactly.

I know, it was brutal. Would you take that? Would you mean two months living as a king if you know you're going to die at the end? You have to think about the average quality of life at the time and how much of an upgrade that would have been even just for two months. I would have considered it. Yeah? 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 I'd take that. Two months in heaven and then death? Yeah, I'll take that. You can imagine why it was so important for the observers, for the diviners and the scholars to get the signs right because there was a lot that rode on these signs.

things that are happening in the natural world. And there were entire textbooks that were filled with omens to tell people how to interpret an eclipse or the position of Jupiter in a particular constellation or what the color of Mars in the sky might have been. And there's also divination. So telling the future by using sheep, Phil. How would you go about telling the future with sheep?

Is it sort of like a tea leaves reading kind of thing? Like the pattern they fall into tells a story? So you're watching sheep flock? Yeah, you get up on a hill and you look down and see what sort of... See what they spell out. Yeah, exactly. If they spell out SOS, it's like, uh-oh. Uh-oh. If they spell out King Dead, you go, oh, not this again. All right, who wants two months in paradise? No, unfortunately, no, the sheep has to die here. Oh, entrails. 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? So you had to, well, 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 this journey or whatever? Yeah, they went crazy. They didn't think guts could tell. Everything. Yeah.

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... So do livers. 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. You said that kinetic form 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? That's exactly right. The last datable cuneiform tablet, so datable, is from 79 or 80 CE. Which is the year Vesuvius erupted. Oh, interesting. Coincidence. I was going to say, maybe the volcano erupted or anything. I feel like this is a sign. Let's just put down the cuneiform. Move on. And what I love is it's also from Uruk.

Yeah. So it started in Uruk, and I mean, we don't know. Oh, the last one was also from Uruk. 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. Yeah, it's pretty easy to read. 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 had to impress it. Yeah, really good. I got it. Yeah, so you now know about cuneiform. Yeah, I can speak cuneiform. No, no, you can't speak it. It's not a language. I feel like Neo. Start again.

I'm like Neo when he says I know Kung Fu. Yeah. I know Cuneiform. You know Cuneiform. I can speak it very fluently. No! I don't know why you have such a problem with me saying it. It's not a language. It's a script. Oh, never mind. The nuance window!

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. In 592 BCE, a young woman, or maybe even still a girl, named Laa Tubashini was sold into slavery by marriage by her adoptive mother, Khammaya. This marriage was financed by a third party, presumably to secure access to the children who would be born of the forced union and who would have had the same legal status as their mother.

It's a harrowing story, but remarkably, around 560 BCE, Laa to Bashini was emancipated from her slave status, and her first official act as a freedwoman was to fight for the freedom of her children. On 29 October 560 BCE, the Babylonian courts heard her lawsuit against members of the incredibly powerful and wealthy family who had financed the arrangement in the first place. She argued before a minister and the king's judges that, like her, her children should also be freed.

Five clay tablets that span three decades tell her story. And even if the nature of the legal sources lack the color of a literary work, they tell us a lot about her courage. They tell us that she survived her decades-long ordeal as an enslaved woman forced into marriage, at least six pregnancies and births without the benefit of anesthesia or antibiotics, and far more that has lost its time. And they tell us that she survived all this a fighter, willing to take on a powerful family and argue before the king's judges for the freedom of her children.

In the end, she only succeeded in freeing one son, a boy named Ardia. Among many things, what moves me about her story is just what we can learn from cuneiform. This writing system preserves so much of life from ancient Mesopotamia as we've talked about. Receipts, lullabies, literature, letters, liver omens, astronomical leaps, and also the lives of women like La Tubashini and her six children.

Her story is a reminder that people in the ancient past were no less human, no less loving or brave, and no more immune to pain than we are. And neither is any person today who seems too different to have anything in common with. They were not the other, and neither are any of us from each other.

Beautiful. Thank you so much. Thanks. And listen, after today's episode, you want more Mesopotamia with Moody, check out our episode on the ancient Babylonians. And to hear more from Filly Filly Wang Wang, listen to his episodes on the Borgias, 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 You're 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 had the marvellous Dr Moody Al-Rashid from the University of Oxford. Thank you, Moody. Thank you for having me. It's been a pleasure. And in Comedy Corner, as ever, we have the fantastic Philology Wang. Thank you, Phil. Thank you for using my full name. It's been a pleasure. 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!

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