Ancient Mesopotamia and the Birth of History, with Moudhy Al-Rashid
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Welcome to Intelligence Squared, where great minds meet. I'm producer Mia Serenti. On today's episode, Dr. Muni Al-Rashid sheds light on the history of ancient Mesopotamia.

Mesopotamia, the land between the Tigris and the Euphrates River, gave rise to writing, literature, astronomy and law, shaping human history in ways that still resonate today. Drawing on her new book, Between Two Rivers, Al-Rashid brings to life the stories of ordinary people from thousands of years ago. Working mothers, enslaved individuals seeking freedom, and even a princess who may have founded the first museum.

In conversation with archaeologist and author Rebecca Ragsykes, Al Rashid discusses the earliest written records, from economic tallies to personal letters, and explores how Mesopotamians grappled with the timeless human concerns: love, illness, ambition, and the quest for knowledge. Why does Mesopotamia often remain in the shadow of Egypt and Greece? And what can we learn from this ancient civilization today?

Let's join our host, Rebecca Ragsykes, now with more. Welcome to Intelligence Squared. I'm Dr Rebecca Ragsykes and our guest today is Dr Moody Al-Rashid. Moody is an honorary fellow at the University of Oxford's Walson College, where she specialises in the languages and history of ancient Mesopotamia.

Moody's really well known for communicating to many different audiences. She's written academic publications, she writes for popular magazines, journals, including History Today.

and her work focuses on topics as varied as mental illness in ancient Mesopotamia through to late Assyrian scholarly networks. And in addition to her writing, she's also appeared on several podcasts, including recently BBC's Making History and You're Dead to Me. So today we are discussing Moody's new book, which I have here, which is exceptionally beautiful. Look at this.

called Between Two Rivers and it's a wonderful illuminating history of ancient Mesopotamia. So welcome to Intelligence Squared Moody. Thank you so much. Thank you. Well, I absolutely loved reading this book. I was very fortunate to have an advanced copy and not only is it very beautiful, but it is fabulously informative and just a lovely, lovely read as well.

So I have a lot of different questions for you, which I hope are going to sort of help people really understand what you've done with this brilliant work of scholarship. So maybe not everybody is familiar with ancient Mesopotamia. So could you maybe sort of help people picture this ancient place when and where it is by explaining a little bit about the title of the book?

Sure. Yeah. So between two rivers is referring to the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, the rivers that run through what is now Iraq and Syria and a little bit further north as well. And these two rivers and the surrounding environment had really fertile soil that the rivers sort of indirectly created along with some other geological processes.

And that soil sort of made it possible for really successful agriculture and a host of innovations around 3000, a little bit before 3000 BCE. And this region between the two rivers is often given the name Mesopotamia, which comes from the Greek also meaning between the rivers. And in Arabic, the name for the region is Bilad Mabain and Nahrain, which also means between the two rivers.

So the rivers are really quite central to people's understandings of this region. And ancient Mesopotamia refers to a place, not to a civilization. And it was home to many civilizations and cultures in antiquity that sort of thrived alongside these life-giving bodies of water and the rich environment that they created.

So it has its own sort of deep history actually as a period of study in itself. It covers a lot of different time and quite a large region. And as you just say, you have actually a cultural progression through time in that context as well. But alongside that, and I think this comes through really nicely in your book, is that there's a very long history of scholarship here.

around Mesopotamia and the ancient Near East and things like this. And one of the things that I really found funny reading it was your sort of little story about how George Smith, upon first reading a tablet with the Epic of Gilgamesh and being able to read this, he was so excited he ran naked through the British Museum. So,

Can you tell us a little bit about how your own studies on this very big topic began and where your interests came from?

I love the George Smith story because it's sort of kind of how we all feel inside but maybe don't all thankfully take all our clothes off on museums. When we realize what incredible what incredible sources come from the region. So, my, my own rediscovery let's say of the topic came in my 20s also at the British Museum I first encountered it in.

I don't know why I remember this, but in the sixth grade in an American school in Saudi Arabia, which was a school I went to for elementary school with Mrs. Al-Sado, and we did a kind of week on ancient Mesopotamia, including cuneiform. But it really reentered my life in my 20s when I did like a random week-long summer class on the book in the ancient world because I was and continue to be super, super cool.

And the first day was given by one of the curators at the British Museum, Dr. Irving Finkel. And he introduced us to this just sort of incredible world of cuneiform tablets and the sorts of things that they tell us about everyday life, as well as, you know, milestones in human history. And I just fell in love pretty much instantly and changed the entire course of my academic career to fit around this stuff instead of

going to what was supposed to be law school, which I don't think I would have necessarily got into anyway. So that's, it's okay. Maybe you don't run around naked with the joy of law school either. I don't know.

So you fell in love with the subject and the potential of it. And was there anything personal? Because I also really loved a little sort of story you talk about where you ended up chanting Sumerian in a sort of attempt to try to find sort of the cadence of that language as well.

Yeah, I mean, what really drew me to the topic was the languages. I'm a language nerd. I really, really love, I love Semitic languages in particular. I think that the way they're organized around, you know, radicals is so beautiful and elegant. So that was the kind of primary, you know, force behind my utter love of the cuneiform tablets. It's really kind of

hard to convey that though. But once you really, once you start to read what they say, you fall in love even harder. And one of the things I was asked to do, actually during the pandemic, because I remember doing it in sort of a closet in my house, just the quietest room, trying to record part of a Sumerian version of a Gilgamesh story. And it was just,

really to recite these things out loud is very different from just reading them. You really get a sense for how they might have been read aloud to others or how they might have been performed or heard or just sort of otherwise consumed by people in the ancient world and what it would have felt like to listen to the musicality of the languages. I really do love the languages. I can't sort of get enough of them.

I think that sort of element of the many different layers in what studying an ancient society that has texts and not only texts but literary texts as well comes through really beautifully.

In general, I think popular perceptions of some ancient cultures with texts is maybe that it's mostly about the powerful rulers and the wars they had and things like this. But your book is really, really interested in everything beyond that. Yeah, there's talks about kings and things, but you go further in. It's...

It's completely full of detail about everyday lives, emotional, intimate, bodily details, even flatulence. So could you explain a little bit about why you think it's important to tell those stories? And also, how does somebody end up being able to translate fart?

That's a great question. So, I mean, I wanted to focus on those stories because, quite frankly, I think they're more interesting and way more relatable than the more kind of cookie cutter sources about kings and queens that tend to very self-consciously try to fit into a particular ideology or a way of presenting oneself that's not

so unlike propaganda today. We can't really get to the heart of a person. There are sources about royalty like letters that give a bit more humanity and give a bit more of a picture of the people behind these roles. But really what I thought was more interesting and that could tell us more about the history and how people understood their history and how they understood each other and related to each other and their environment is the everyday sources like letters and

Even lullabies that people sang to their crying babies, warning them to be quiet so they don't wake the benevolent house god who sort of has the body of a bison and the head of a human. But also school tablets with stories about kids getting nervous before exams and admonishing them for keeping their eye on the door, which sort of...

waiting for the end of the exam to come. And then letters, which are some of my favorite sources between people, between someone who's waiting for payment on something, someone whose letter has not been or letters have not been answered. That's sort of like per my last email, but the Cuneiform version. And

letters between wives and husbands in which women are sort of saying, come home and help me. I'm trying to do too much here and I can't do it all by myself. So there's a real humanity to those sources. And that's what I really wanted to bring out in my book. This episode is brought to you by Progressive Insurance.

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As an archaeologist, obviously I work on prehistory when technically we don't have writing of course, and so all of our information comes from material culture and many different ways that we have to try to pick out information from that. But when you have writing, as soon as you get text sources,

it's, it is transformative in our ability to understand intricacies of life, but also those, those personal things. You literally get people's voices. So sort of,

for us understanding the past today, but also writing as something that evolves in ancient times was also transformative to those cultures. There's many different inventions through time, cultural and technological inventions, but writing is really one of those key echelon moments. And in fact, your book is subtitled "The Birth of History". So, I think that's a really

It would be really lovely to hear about how you explore the origins of writing and how that kind of develops in this period. And what did people want to record with these scratches and little marks?

Yeah. So when I first came to the field, I was sure that I would focus on early writing because it is so interesting how we can track the development of writing in the archaeological record from the idea of having some sort of mnemonic device to help people keep track of stuff to a fully fledged writing system that can be retrieved by anyone trying to use it. And it's just, it's utterly fascinating. But

If we rewind to around 3350 BCE, and keeping in mind the fertile soil and agricultural successes in the region at the time, in a city called Uruk in particular, people...

needed to find a way, they needed a sort of technological innovation to keep track of transactions and agricultural products that were being funneled through the temple. And initially this took the form of an already existing technology, which was tokens, which was really tiny, sometimes so adorable people mistook them for toys, objects that are just shaped like things, like a jug for oil or a little

a specific kind of shape for an animal. And they kept these together to count commodities. But then it became apparent at some point to someone or to a group of people that it made more sense to shift the medium for these from lots of little individual objects to a single tablet on which similar images could be impressed to keep track of the same commodities and transactions in relation to them.

So writing really developed in a kind of unromantic, very unsexy way as a need to just keep track of stuff because people just had too much stuff to keep track of. But interestingly, at the same time that it was recorded, it was sort of developed for that reason,

People decided that they needed a way to teach this new technology to others. So dictionaries are also some of the first texts that we have. They're more like word lists or lists of words that were used within the administration and within agriculture and related fields.

But they also include some sort of impossible objects that suggest that even at the earliest, at the birth of writing, at the earliest time of the use of this technology, people were still doing something kind of useless with it. So just for the sake of it, for the sake of thinking about something, thinking about reality and trying to organize knowledge in an interesting way.

So that's really interesting then. So this is something that I'm really fascinated by, is the question not just of what did writing and text bring to practicalities,

Do you have any thoughts about whether writing, sort of the record keeping admin side of it, but also the literary side, whether that then starts to affect and change society and people's experiences as well?

I think that's an interesting question. I think one thing that writing does in this early period and a few centuries after when it starts to really take hold is that it makes it easier to keep track of every last detail. I mean, that's why it was developed in the first place, including what people were doing or what they were supposed to be doing within a kind of administrative or labor context.

So work becomes easier to quantify and people's time also then becomes easier to quantify. And labor, in fact, by the kind of middle of the third millennium BC, so several hundred years after the development of writing, comes to be measured in units of time based on how much work someone could complete in a day. So I think writing really makes that kind of transition possible.

I mean, it could have also developed without writing, but this idea of a workday is a bit of a conceptual breakthrough that I think was easier to get to when you could write all this stuff down and make records of it. And even also in the kind of early periods, the word for labor that

the the same cuneiform sign that signified labor is a sign for arm which then also comes to signify wage and sometimes even rent so labor is very clearly a function of time it's a very early kind of way of saying time time is money i think um yeah in ancient mesopotamia so i do think it's an is a really interesting way to think about it and and and work also i mean it kind of comes in

surprising places. So for example, in a creation epic from around 1600 BCE, known as Atrahasis, the gods sort of rely on humanity as a workforce to feed them and dig canals and just keep things running. And the

at some point they decide everyone is just a bit too loud and they send the flood to wipe humanity out, which doesn't succeed for a variety of reasons. But then once there's no one there to help them with anything, they realize, oh my goodness, we have lost our workforce. So what do we do now? And they have to create humanity anew. And so there's even, you know, even in foundational myths, the idea of work and labor is still is there, which I think is, you know, incredibly interesting.

There's always someone there to take notes of how much work you have or haven't been doing. Exactly. I think something sort of staying with the theme of writing and who's doing it and why, something that I think might perhaps surprise people from your book is

sort of the level of literacy in general and also the fact that women seem to be quite involved with writing. So, you know, you've mentioned already writing schools and students practising their cuneiform.

A lot of that seems to be with boys, but it's not only boys, is it? There are girls involved in that. And also, you know, you have elite women who are writing to each other, but then you also have these middle class merchants who are sending letters. So, you know, could you talk us a little bit about how women are integrated into this world of writing?

Yeah, I'm going to start by sharing one of my favorite facts from ancient Mesopotamia, which is that the first named author in history is actually a woman. And her name is Enheduanna. And she was a princess, the daughter of King Sargon the Great, as well as a high priestess to the moon god Anur, which is one of the kind of a more important kind of political role to help the king consolidate power in the south, the southern parts of Mesopotamia.

But back to your question, I think that levels of literacy vary from one period to another, as well as based on sort of a particular person's needs. And I think the example of merchants in ancient Assyria, so we're talking about around 1900 or 2000 BCE until about 1600 BCE,

They had to learn a kind of basic repertoire of signs in order to send letters back and forth to keep up with their trade networks. The context for this was that women in the heartland of Assyria, in the city of Ashura typically, were weaving these large textiles that would take months and months to make. So this wasn't just a sort of hobby, this was a full-time job.

And they would send the textiles to further north to what is now Turkey, a city called Kanish, where their husbands or brothers or some other kind of business partners, which were often family members, would sell the textiles and send the kind of returns back home in the form of things like tin, for example. So those women, among others, had to learn how to write to their business partners, to their husbands, to their brothers, and say things like,

why haven't you sold the textile for market price? Why did you sell it for less? Also, can you please send the tin back because the tax man is knocking on the door. So for very practical, you know, everyday reasons, they needed to learn how to write. And I just, I think that that's such a wonderful kind of insight into how literacy varies and includes men and women in the ancient world. Yeah, absolutely. And sort of,

this is what's always so exciting about cultures where you have archaeology and you have the text, but it's also the frustrating thing because some of the questions we might like to know, for example, how many girls did go to these writing schools? We just can't really access that information. And is literacy something that you maybe as a woman learn later in your life or is that common if you're at a certain economic level in society? It's all very...

very intriguing and frustrating. But do you have any favourite particular texts that you find maybe especially revealing or affecting? I know some of your particular research has been around sort of the medical elements of culture.

I think that's it really, is that my favorite texts are the medical texts. I know it sounds really dry, but the medical texts are full of descriptions that are extremely relatable.

And what I find so moving about the medical texts is that they're describing a familiar body. I mean, our bodies have not changed evolutionarily or otherwise since 2000 or 1000 BCE when these texts are to get written down. And they're describing really familiar problems. My PhD thesis was on mental symptoms in a particular series of diagnostic texts.

And the way that they describe mental distress is very familiar. They describe crying out. They describe feeling it in your chest when you're really anxious. They describe sleeplessness, nightmares, not being able to concentrate, not making a lot of sense when you're talking. So I find those descriptions really, they feel modern to me. And it feels like any one of us could have written

that set of symptoms or the sets of symptoms that you find in a lot of these incredibly insightful medical texts. Yeah, that you might we might use slightly different sort of framings of words or symbolic descriptors. But actually, we're all feeling the same kinds of emotions and physical symptoms that people have had for, you know, thousands and thousands of years. Yeah.

It reminds me a little bit of one of the instances that you write about where there is, I think it's a slave woman who's suffering a very late miscarriage, something really quite serious, and she's asking for help. So you have these from her owner, I think. So you have these intersections where you have

health, you have women and their ability to sort of communicate with people. So there's there seems to be so many really sort of deep connections between all these different elements that interest you. And I really love how you weave that all the way through the book, these these sort of focuses on everyday people, things that are familiar to us now, but also the things that are unusual and strange. And one of the things

as well is sort of this idea of the home gods and the monsters and the presences that are there or not and what people have to do to ask for help from these beings as well. Maybe you could talk a bit about that. Yeah, so the supernatural was very much real in ancient Mesopotamia. The way we write about it or talk about it is to call it supernatural, but it was very much natural for them.

ghosts or demons, witchcraft, those were part of the natural world just like a rock or in our understanding of, for example, illness, a bacteria was. And they sort of weave this kind of web of causality for misfortune in people's lives. And a lot of

a lot of how they deal with that is there are kind of two levels of cause there there's the kind of immediate cause which is like let's say a snake bites you and you have all these problems as a result of that like you've been poisoned for example um or or a scorpion bite even kind of more serious but there's what but why did the scorpion or the snake bite you you know you must have made someone angry you must have done you committed some sort of taboo or um

some other transgression that would invite this misfortune on you. And I think what's so interesting is that they had a really kind of set way of understanding different types of misfortune. So for example, going back to the woman Dabitum from the letter that you mentioned, who suffered a very late pregnancy loss and is writing to her Lord, is how she calls him in the letter.

there was a particular demon responsible for that specific kind of loss and her name was Lamashtu, a terrifying demoness who was responsible for some of the most devastating losses that of the youngest in society in ancient Mesopotamia. And that really is how they organize, partly how they organize their world around what they saw as these kind of natural parts of the world that helped explain

some of the most horrible things that could happen, but also some of the most terrifying things and try to get some control over it through various rituals that you could direct toward whoever it was that was or whatever it was that was causing your issues.

The attempts to kind of manage life through deities or supernatural elements and sort of either gift things to them or assuage them is one way that people do this in your book. But you also have some absolutely extraordinary sort of cases where you talk about people trying

to take control over elements of their lives in the everyday. And, you know, one of the most fabulous cases, quite amazing that you talk about, is another woman, La Tubashini, if I pronounced that right, who is...

Well, I'll let you tell her story because it's amazing. Yeah, so she was an enslaved woman and there are several documents spanning 30 years that tell us about how she came to be enslaved, which was this sort of slavery by marriage arrangement, partly or possibly to access the children of that union because the children would have had the same status as her. In other words, they would have also entered the world enslaved.

And she has six children, at least, that we know of in the records. And at some point after her kind of time as a slave, she is manumitted, so she's freed.

And her first official act is to take on one of the most powerful families in Babylonia to fight for the freedom of her other children who were owned by that family. And I think there's something so incredibly moving that she used, as you said, she sought to try to take control over some aspect of her life through legal means, through sort of an everyday means that was available, which was a lawsuit claiming that her children should have the same status that she had now that she was freed.

Unfortunately, she didn't succeed, except for only for one child out of the six. But I think her story is really a story about courage and about what people, just as we would today fight for our own children or for people that we love. People back then did the same and there's no reason to think they were any different from us. And I really hope to convey that in my book. I know, absolutely. I think that's...

That's one of the elements that is so sort of powerful in this as a book because it has a lot of information, it grounds us in the period, the time, sort of the structures of power, but also then you have these little moments that completely leap out and it is like...

a presence from that time is here with an emotional traumatic situation that we may never have experienced ourselves, but we can absolutely imagine ourselves in that because it's something to do with children and that you would absolutely do anything to try to get your children back from a situation like that. And that's, I think, really what sort of ties together so many of the themes is this idea about

history and the presencing of people and what does the creation of history in this period mean then, but what does it mean for us in our ability to sort of access those lives? But there is like a third theme there as well, which is that this idea about what is history and who does it. And you have examples of people

including women in the book, who take an interest in their own past. And especially, I'd love for you to tell us about the wonderful Enigaldi Nanna, whose sort of museum, in inverted commas, is what actually provides the structure for your book, this collection of objects she had, what they were. And that's the way that you order your book in terms of exploring this broader society. So could you tell us a bit about that?

Sure. So we talked about Enheduanna earlier, who was a princess and high priestess to the moon god. And just like Enheduanna was in around 2300 BCE, Enigaldinanna in the 500s BCE, so almost 2000 years later, was also a princess, daughter of the last Babylonian king, Nabonidus, and high priestess to the moon god at Ur.

So even though we don't know much about her, we know much about the role that she did as well as her dynasty. And one of the things that her dynasty, which we call the Neo-Babylonian dynasty or the New Babylonian dynasty, was really interested in was the past.

Maybe this was because they sort of rose out of the ashes of the humongous, immense Assyrian Empire, and it was really hard to kind of find legitimacy in the wake of that first and largest kind of empire the world had ever seen.

So they sought to do that through connecting with the distant past. And that was one way people in Mesopotamia in general could find authenticity, credibility, legitimacy to their roles, whatever those roles may be, be priests or kings or something else, was to connect with this kind of distant past.

And part of that entailed kind of renovating old stuff and making it look like it used to look. And when they did that, just on a practical level, they found also old stuff. And so when Nabonidus renovated the kind of ziggurat or temple complex at Ur so that his daughter, Enigaldinanna, could move there and take on this role,

he found, and he writes about this in his royal inscriptions, or somebody writes about them in his royal inscriptions, inscriptions of long dead kings, as well as of priestesses who had once taken on this role, such as Ananadu from around 1800 BCE.

And what's interesting about Enigaldinana's palace is that when excavators uncovered it in the 1920s, they found a lot of these older objects on the kind of archaeological level belonging to her period. They found stuff from 1100 BCE, from 1800 BCE, from 2000 BCE. It was essentially a collection of antiquities.

And it's possible that Enigaldinana herself was interested in those objects. It's possible that they were just kind of collected as part of the renovation works and then maybe displayed in the palace or maybe just kept because they were seen as important because they were old, just like we do today. When we find something old, we sort of there's something really special about it that we want to make sure that it doesn't kind of fall apart. We do what we can to keep.

to keep it. And it's through those objects that I try to tell this story of the history of ancient Mesopotamia, but also the way people might have understood the history, the past memory, and what, you know, what came before them, including the stuff that they couldn't access, because it hadn't been written down, the prehistory, so to speak.

Yeah, and you're so right. There's so many echoes that we can see today, or even just in recent history. You've got 2000 odd years between Enigaldi Nana and Heruana, the objects that seem to be an accumulation of objects in that space that those people are encountering. And that's about the same time period between us now and Rome.

And then you think sort of about how Rome is drawn on today still culturally as some kind of thing to emulate or you gain sort of authority through architecture or, for example, in Italy, there's very clear history there with sort of the 1930s interest in what was under the streets of Rome. So there are these many different echoes.

That's really one of the aspects that perhaps is going to resonate with people today, the way that history for people in the five, six hundreds BCE

They already had a 2000 year plus history that they were drawing on and trying to understand and quantify. And it's this stretching through time of human stories and things, which is exactly what text and writing actually allows us to achieve.

Maybe we can finish this lovely conversation with whether you sort of have any ideas about what you would like readers to take from your book, Between Two Rivers, and sort of thoughts or ideas or surprises maybe that you hope that they might take.

I think it's really just that we have a lot in common with the people who lived a long time ago, whether it's their interest in their distant past or their deep love and care for their kids or their worries about work, whatever it may be. We have so much in common with them, just as we have so much in common with each other, no matter how far away they feel or how different they feel. And again, just as we feel far away and different from many people today. I think that's the kind of

I hope is the main message of my book is that there's a real humanity in these sources, something that we really share. And I think that's really beautiful. And I hope that people take that away from the book. Yeah, absolutely. And I've been speaking to Moody Al-Rashid, the author of Between Two Rivers, which is available now online or at any bookshop near you. I've been Rebecca Rag Sykes, and you have been listening to Intelligence Squared. Thank you very much for joining us.

Thanks for listening to Intelligence Squared. This episode was produced by myself, Mia Cirenti, and it was edited by Bea Duncan. You've been listening to Intelligence Squared. Thanks for joining us.

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