Cuneiform: the world’s first writing system

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Hello, and welcome to Your Dead to Me, the Radio 4 comedy podcast that takes history seriously.

My name is Greg Jenner.

I'm a public historian, author, and broadcaster.

And today we're bouncing back to the Bronze Age with our styluses and clay tablets to learn all about the first ever writing system or script called cuneiform.

And to help us decipher the ancient story, we have two very special guests.

In History Corner, she's an honorary fellow at Wolfson College, University of Oxford.

She's an Assyriologist who researches and teaches on the history of Mesopotamia, cuneiform, and the Akkadian language.

She has a wonderful brand new book that I loved called Between Two Rivers, Ancient Mesopotamia and the Birth of History.

I highly recommend it.

And you will remember her from our episode on the ancient Babylonians.

It's Dr.

Moody Al-Rashid.

Welcome, Moody.

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 Daskmaster, Live at the Apollo.

Have a good news for you from his two Netflix comedy specials.

Too, count them.

Maybe they've read his side-splitting book, Side-Splitter, which I loved on audiobook, but you'll definitely remember him from our previous episodes of You're Dead to Me, most recently on the Terracotta Warriors and the history of Kung Fu, which sounds like a film title but isn't.

Returning for a triumphant fifth appearance, it's Phil Wang.

Welcome back again.

Hello, thanks for having me.

Yes, Moody is an Assyriologist.

I'm a siliologist.

Comedy Corner.

Bringing the silly, baby.

Phil, together we've tackled mighty military matters.

We've done the Borges, 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?

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

the biggest word in my what are those diagrams called the word bubbles, the word clouds?

Word cloud.

The biggest word there is old.

That's my

header.

How far am I

right bowlpart?

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's pretty spot on.

Yeah.

And help the font for old is just like a really big font, yeah.

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

But if you know, if you can read cuneiform, you can tell the difference.

So, what do you know?

This is where I have a go at guessing what you, our lovely listener, might know about today's subject.

And well, I think Phil has outclassed us all.

You might remember a mention of cuneiform on our Babylonians episode we talked about before with Moody and Kay 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 visualizing.

I think Phil, you did really well because you then mentioned hieroglyphs.

I think people go to hieroglyphs when they think of old scripts.

Yeah, right.

As I have.

Yeah.

But you knew triangle stuff, so that's good.

So anyway, the questions we have to answer.

What exactly was Kunoform?

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?

How did it get its name?

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 his name from the Latin cuneus.

I don't know any Latin, but I know cuneus in Latin, which means wedge.

So because

they get impressed into clay, they have this characteristic wedge or triangular shape.

And funnily enough, in Akkadian, the word for cuneiform is sataku or santaku, which means triangle.

So we're all

and funnily enough in Arabic, it's mismari, which means nail imprints.

So they kind of also went with the visual.

Like fingernail.

Like a nail.

Hammer nail.

Yeah.

Okay.

Yeah.

So.

You said it was developed over 3,000 BCE.

So it's over 5,000 years old.

That's right.

Possibly even older than that, like 5,300 years old, give or take?

Yeah.

Who used it?

Lots and lots of different people used cuneiform to write lots of different languages.

But 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.

This kind of still called Proto-Kinner from it's like really, really early stage.

They don't look like triangles yet.

They're an even simpler shape.

They're actually a more complicated shape because they look like the things that they represent.

So they look like pictures, basically.

So yeah, those are my favorite ones.

They're so pretty.

And then they're like, guys, triangles.

I've got it.

I've got it.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

We don't need to draw every brick in the pyramid.

We just need the triangle shape.

Exactly.

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.

Sumerians, Akkadians, then Babylonians, then Elamites, Hittites, Neo-Assyrians,

and then Persia.

Exactly.

Someone needs to do a song.

There needs to be like a kind of...

Like an alphabet song.

Like an alphabet song.

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

The Neo-Sumerians.

The Neo-Assyrians.

Neo-Assyrians.

Yeah, so they come after the Assyrians.

Couldn't be bothered to come up with a new name.

Everyone else came up with a new name.

They're like, we're just the Assyrians again.

Yeah, okay.

All right.

But it's not a language, Kinneiform.

Exactly.

Cuneiform is the writing system, just like we use Latin script to write stuff in English, French, German.

It's used for multiple languages with some variations.

Same with Kunaform.

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 kino form.

Can you guess the nationality of the man who deciphered this ancient Near Eastern technology?

Oh, nationality for us, please, Phil.

French.

It's a good guess.

His name was Henry Rawlinson.

Okay.

And he was from England.

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 wouldn't have been allowed to say that.

It's usually an Englishman or Frenchman, in fairness, at 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.

Yeah, he was an officer of the British East India Company, and he was originally sent to India, and then he went to Iran after that to help the Shah, I think, reorganise his army or something like that.

And he fell in love with ancient Persian monuments and cultures.

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?

And your name is Phil.

Yeah.

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

I have an innate interest in this.

Yeah, I wish I did.

No, I do have an interest in it.

I mean, I wish I had a skill in it.

Okay.

Yeah.

All right.

But I did not know that.

Okay.

How would you go about decoding an ancient script?

Because you're an engineer, right?

Yeah.

So you think laterally.

Yeah, sure.

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?

Something that just tells you what each symbol means.

Aside from that, 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 they, where particular

symbols lie, and seeing if there's a logic to them.

This is good stuff, you know.

That's exactly right.

I feel like I should just maybe just take a cup of coffee or something.

Thanks, Moody.

Yeah, we're all good here.

It's just me and Phil.

Am I going to solve this?

Well, my name is Philology Wang.

Exactly.

Philology Wang.

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.

Oh, of.

Yeah, anam.

Really?

That was like the first time.

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 was kind of played, in my view, a more minor role because a lot of work was already done by the time he got to the Behistuian 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.

He kicked a little of the line.

He showed up and said, I've got this lad, so thank you very much.

Is Behistun sort of the Rosetta equivalent that Phil mentioned?

Is that like the key discovery?

I think

it became a more kind of famous and sensationalized one, and therefore it became kind of central to all the stories about decipherment that came out of this period of history.

But a lot of work was already done by the time Behistun was decoded, so I would say it kind of helped confirm things.

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 captioned 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.

Okay.

And then they kind of overlaid that onto the cuneiform.

And this inscription at Behestun talks about a very famous king called Darius.

of Persia.

Darius the Great.

Have you heard of him?

No.

No,

he's a sort of big name in like video game.

I thought maybe you'd sort of fought him on Total War at some point.

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

And he was a big conqueror and he fought 19 battles to crush rebellions and this inscription says, I, King Darius of Persia, I guess, of, I guess, of, yeah, there was of, did some crushing and I'm going to stick it up here in Elamite and Persian and Akkadian.

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

Okay.

And Henry Rawlinson decoded it with help?

Yes.

So So he, I think, initially tried to, because it's very high up and it's not easily accessible.

So they had to use pulleys and gas.

Because it's up on like a rock face.

It's like on a cliff or something.

It's like really high up.

Exactly.

Very bright as well, because the sun sort of hits it as you're looking at it.

And Rawlinson has been credited with scaling the rocks to make the drawings, but he actually sent a few boys to do it for him.

Of course he did, yes.

You their boy.

Yes, exactly.

You climb this instead of me and make the copy, and then I will do the kind of intellectual work to decode it.

And he ended up publishing that in 1847 and he was just 37 years old.

You've already qualified that he wasn't necessarily the sole most important man in this story.

So who else should be added to the checklist?

Yeah, I mean there were a couple of others who worked on this at the same time, but I would say Edward Hinks is one of the unsung heroes of this entire story.

He was an Irish, I don't know how to say this word, clergyman.

Clergyman.

Clergyman.

This happened when I was recording my book.

I was like, I can't pronounce anything.

I know what all these words mean, and I've used them hundreds of times, but I can't actually say them out loud.

So he was an Irish clergyman.

He did something really remarkable, which is he matched up the letters, or the characters that were used in the monumental inscriptions, which he called lapidary, which is a kind of formal font, let's say, to the characters used in the clay tablet, which is a little bit messier, which he called cursive.

And that unlocked thousands and thousands more texts.

Right.

Phil, how do you think Henry Rawlinson took to Hinks's work?

Do you think he welcomed this other man coming along with new ideas?

No,

I imagine there's a lot of beef.

I imagine if it was a Kendrick Lamar Drake situation between the two.

Yeah, you think there was rap songs about each other.

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

I think you'll bang on, right?

I mean, Moody, he tries to crush his career, right?

Pretty much, yeah.

He complained when the British Museum hired Hinks for a period of time.

I can't remember how long it was.

Yeah, exactly.

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

here we are.

No, you gotta have a little healthy competition

in philology.

Yeah.

You gotta do the fucking movie.

That's the force that keeps the

discipline moving forward, you know?

You can't all just be friends.

Have you ever been tempted to crush a rival comedian's career?

I mean, you're the only Phil in comedy, right?

I mean, there could be hundreds of others, but you've.

I'm the only Phil Wang, anyway.

I buried at least three of the Phil Wang.

So Rawlinson and Hinks were squabbling and in 1857, so 20 years after Rawlinson first went out to Persia, I suppose that would have been called at the time, 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 Kinairform has been decoded.

They announced this, how, Moody?

Well, they held a competition.

We're talking about competition, yeah.

Okay.

Phil, how do you think the competition was judged?

What kind of...

Talk me through the rounds.

Oh, man.

Like a kind of spelling bee, like a kind of uniform spelling bee.

And it's like spell corn.

And Roland sends in, said to stand and go, triangle.

Triangle pointing to the top left.

Triangle pointing to the top right.

Is it something like that?

That's great.

I like that.

I like that too.

I wish they did that.

Yeah.

How did this competition work?

Is it live translation spelling bee, as Phil has suggested, which I'd love to see.

I would also love to see that.

So the society invited four people to submit sealed translations of a particular cuneiform inscription that was an Assyrian one.

So it was Horanson Hinks and two others, Henry Fox Talbot and Jules Ouper,

and they all sent in similar results.

So basic decipherment had been achieved by then, and that's when the discipline of Assyriology takes off.

I see, so they all win.

Yes, yes.

Oh, that's nice.

Yeah.

Bit of a crop-out.

And this is the Akkadian language now.

Yes.

So

the three languages were Elamite, Akkadian, and Old Persian.

All three languages have been decoded.

Oh, I see.

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

Then we think we can read this thing.

Hopefully.

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

Yes.

Assyriology.

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 it took its name from it.

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

The 7th century BCE, so the 600s.

That's amazing.

And so Nineveh, the royal library was discovered in what we now call Mosul in Iraq.

30,000 Kinefilm tablets, which is amazing.

They were brought to the British Museum, the home of Iraqi history.

But this wasn't...

But 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 Kinefilm tablets had been put in a museum, right?

Because this is what the library is.

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, such a vast collection.

And this library is a library of tablets.

Really?

Clay tablets, yeah.

Wow.

So this is from about 650 BCE.

So it's very late in the grand sweep of Mesopotamian history, but it is earlier than, like, it's earlier than Socrates.

So, you know,

when we say ancient, it's ancient, but it's really late in

Kenya form.

In Kenya form, right?

Yeah.

So it's, it's kind of, I'm doing, I'm slightly struggling to work out how to frame that, but yeah.

We've got Ashurbanipol.

I like to call him Ashabana Schompol.

I don't know why.

I always imagine in my head.

Yes, yes.

So Ashurbanipal is an interesting guy.

I mean, he has these reliefs of himself doing things like fighting lions or, you know, throwing spears.

And then he has these styluses tucked into his belt as if to make sure everyone knew, I'm not just a warrior.

I'm not just protecting my kingdom.

I'm also really smart.

I know math.

I know science.

I know how to read.

And the thing that just...

I'm going to have to say it again just to make sure people will understand, but this is a Neo-Assyrian king saying, this stuff belongs in a museum.

It's 2,500 years old.

So it's an ancient person going, this is archaeology.

or this is knowledge.

That's mad for us, right?

My brain doesn't quite compute.

And at that point, would they have been able to understand cuneiform from 2,500 years ago?

Yes, yeah.

It's quite a stable script.

I mean, the styles change, and you can sort of tell when something's really old.

Was it always clay in that they?

Yeah, I mean,

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

That was the good stuff.

Yeah, that was my favourite stuff.

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 oh no along came some baddies who sacked the city and that was fantastic news for you moody

do you know why hmm because they spread it everywhere uh ended up in different places uh

because it was cool because it was

exciting he's spiraling he's losing

um no no i don't see how it could have been good for because they set the building on fire and it baked the clay oh oh wow and sort of solid hardened it yeah which so you get why didn't they do that already they don't always they did some 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

so yeah so the next uh episode of great british bake off that's all we want to see we want to see it's cuneiform week here at the tenth and

okay so we know how cuneiform was deciphered and we know how it was preserved the library burned down baking the knowledge which is extraordinary Let's now discover how cuneiform was first invented.

Phil, you've already mentioned the alphabets.

We know it has letters in it.

Cuneiform isn't phonetic, but in the very, very, very late Old Persian, there was a tiny element of phonetic in there.

A little bit, a little bit alphabetic, a little bit...

That's right.

So just right at the end, it changed a tiny bit.

But the system is not phonetic, is that right?

Not an alphabet, that's exactly right.

There was also one earlier cuneiform alphabet from Ugarit where they were like, we are not doing this complicated thing, we're making an alphabet.

Broadly, cuneiform is a mix of signs that were characters that stand for whole words, and characters that stand for syllables, like ba instead of a B and an A.

Okay.

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.

How many characters are there in Cana Form?

You know, if you were to be a scribe and train, how many would you have to learn?

About 600 to 1,000.

I mean, you probably wouldn't have to master every single one if you were just writing letters, for example.

But if you were a scholar, scholar, you would probably need to do the upper limit of that.

Was it a cumulative script?

So they started off with some characters and every, you know, as time progressed, they just created more and more characters in cuneiform to represent new things.

Yeah, yeah.

And those characters also took on more meanings and sounds.

So each character stands for a bunch of different things.

So when you read a text, sometimes it takes a while because you're like, all right, this sign has like eight different values, and you have to make like a little table with all the different values and see which ones make sense based on context.

Yeah.

Can we see, can we show Phil some Kunaform?

Oh, let's do do it.

Yes, let's see.

We haven't smuggled anything out of a library because it's probably too valuable.

So we've got some pictures on an iPad.

Yeah, the iPad is stolen.

Just to add the

freestyle that we're missing.

Stolen from my husband.

So that.

So we have a tablet on a tablet.

We have a tablet on a tablet.

There you go.

Oh, that's lovely.

Two tablets across time.

Oh, wow, look at this.

Okay, beautiful.

So I'm looking at

a clay tablet from different angles, and it looks like a flat sourdough.

No, I mean, it's kind of lumpy in in that way it's irregular in that way it looks it's not like it's not like a perfectly square yeah tablet it looks like bread and

okay so in the top yeah so in the top left corner this is sort of made out in grids it's almost like a comic book there are squares there are it's a grid system it's sort of a grid pattern and within each grid are a collection of symbols like the top left there's two circles and then what looks like a boat a sailboat um and then below that is more dot more circles a lot of of circles.

Not so many triangles, actually.

Lost circles, and what looks like a fish.

And under that, three circles and what looks like a river.

I feel like I'm picking out a theme here.

I'm going to say this is a

tablet about a fisherman.

He's caught 60 fish,

three from the river.

This is live philology.

There's something here that looks a bit like a harp and some reeds.

So he plays music in his spare time.

He practices in the reed garden.

Is it a dating profile?

Is this hinge?

Tinder, yeah.

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

Loves long walks in the rain.

Yeah, yeah.

Wait, there's lots of circles, and

is that counting?

That's exactly right.

Yeah, the circles are numbers.

So you're so good at that.

You really are.

If you need a plan B, we need more serialists.

We have way too many tablets.

Well, yeah, I'm sort of using a lot of my knowledge of Chinese writing forms because like counting in Chinese Erasan, the one, two, three is one is a one line, two is two lines, three is three lines.

And then after that, I go, this is not sustainable.

And then it becomes more complicated characters.

But for those first three, it is just like.

Just mark.

Yeah, just marking.

But that was some very good philology, Phil.

Well done.

Oh, thanks.

I feel like you really, like, you've just brought the level of the podcast up there.

I think everyone's very impressed.

You know, we're now talking about a technology that's 5,350 years old.

The obvious question is, why clay?

Why is clay the technology?

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, oh,

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 a fair?

That's exactly right.

So is there a case to be made, you know,

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 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?

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

Exactly, yeah.

So river's good.

River's good.

River's good.

Yeah.

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We should talk about who can read this.

I'm assuming most people are not literate.

We've got multiple societies here.

I

it's very generic to just say Bronze Age Mesopotamia, but like who can read and write Cuneiform?

Is it a very highly skilled thing?

Can you have um basic functional literacy if you're an ordinary fisherman?

Or you know, who's 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.

So some went on to become scribes and administrators, and they had to just know like math for the sake of

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 periods.

So yes and no to that.

So I guess when something was written by those professionals in cuneiform,

the intention was only ever for other professionals in the same field to be able to read it, really.

You there was no expectation that other people could read a pop science book about astrology at any time.

It was only for other professionals to.

Actually, yes, and in the first millennium BCE, so in the kind of later periods of Mesopotamian sciences, there are these phrases at the end of these science texts that basically say, do not show this to the uninitiated.

Oh, really?

This is the secret knowledge of the, you know,

the god Bobar.

This is just for us, exactly.

Sick.

Yeah, isn't that fun?

Keep it from the masses.

This is just us.

You said we have women scribes.

The most famous one, I suppose, would be the daughter of King Sargon.

So Sargon the Great of Arcadi is a very famous sort of...

Sargon, there's a king.

I mean, not Darius.

Sargon sounds.

Powder, that's scary.

He's around like sort of 4,000 years ago.

But his daughter is the first woman author in history.

Yes, that's right.

She's the first named author in history.

So not just the first woman author, the first author of that name we know.

Wow.

Wow.

Yeah, as a woman.

And her name is Elchedwana, and she penned, penned, impressed, whatever.

Penn is fine, yeah.

These incredible hymns,

temple hymns, essentially.

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

That's amazing.

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

Exactly.

That's it.

Yeah, really cool.

It's very cool.

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

I mean, you could sing them if you wanted to.

We know how.

We don't know the tune, though.

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

We know the lyrics.

We know the lyrics, yes.

The tune is Sean Paul.

I should buy another Paul with Sean Paul, yeah.

That would actually be fantastic.

Okay, and so

how do you like, can you send messages?

Like, do you, are there letters?

Is there a postal system?

Can you communicate with tablets in Canair form?

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, royal mail networks, so to speak.

I mean literally royal road for the mail networks.

And they carry clay tablets.

Yeah, they carry baskets, I guess, of clay tablets on, you know, donkey or depending on the period, maybe horse.

But yeah, for to get messages from one part of, especially a growing empire, to the other, you needed to be able to communicate with your government.

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

You could do both.

Yeah.

In some periods, people wrote their own letters, meaning they learned enough to write their own letters.

But the way letters are written is they often start with like, to so-and-so, speak, thus says another so-and-so.

So there is this kind of hints that they were dictated both in the taking down of the letter, but also in the delivery of the letter as well.

And was this process system available to people outside of the Kings?

And so regular people could...

could do this as well.

Absolutely.

Yeah.

I mean, whoever needed to send a letter, not everyone would have needed to send a letter, but yeah, whoever needed to to send one, they could access this.

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

And it's the same thing, but 4,000 years ago.

So we're dictating.

So it's like, hey, Siri, but instead it's hey, scribe.

Scribe.

Okay.

Putting the Siri in a Siri.

There you go.

I didn't catch that.

I don't know what it did.

I'm sorry.

I did not hear.

Please say that again.

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

In the letters to each other.

Yeah, what kind of stuff do you think is getting jotted down?

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.

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

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

Yeah.

The arrogance though.

I'm glad there's a lot to complain about back then.

Actually, yeah.

Yeah.

The hymn to the Ankazi is one of the earliest things I've written down, and that's a song to a goddess about beer.

And I know that one of the earliest ever Kinofilm tablets we have is about beer.

That's right.

It's amazing.

I feel like nothing has changed, right?

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 someone in their basement making like a micro brew for the neighbors on a Sunday.

Yeah.

This is a guy who at one point was responsible for 135,000 liters of barley over the course of 37 months for the production of beer.

And then in another tablet, he's responsible for nine different cereals to produce eight different kinds of beer.

So this is part of an administrative machinery.

So he's a beer magnate.

He's like Mr.

Heineken.

He's in charge of all of the beer of the city.

To pay people, essentially, as part of their rations.

Yes, because beer is a currency, almost.

Sort of, yeah.

Beer was, I mean, I don't, there's an amazing book about the history of beer by a scholar named Tate Paulette.

So I hope I'm not getting this wrong, but I think it had more of the consistency of porridge.

Yes, it was thick and soupy, isn't it?

Exactly, it's a cocoa.

Exactly, but it was high calorie, so high energy, and clean-ish fluids because water wasn't always clean.

So it was a really good way to pay for it.

Particularly alcoholic, presumably?

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

So Kashim.

I'm sorry, you mentioned a few times now the word rations.

What do you mean by that in this context?

What were rations?

They were how people got paid for service in this era to the temple, usually in agricultural work.

Instead of being paid in like coins, for example, which were not a thing at the time, they got paid in basically bowls of food, whether it was barley or oil or in some cases beer.

So it was part of the payment system, so to speak.

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

Yeah.

And he's a beer brewer.

He's a beer brewer.

That's great.

So cool.

Okay.

So there we go.

So beer is the history.

The history of the world is beer, basically.

Beer and writing.

They're slightly drunk texting.

So we have hundreds of thousands of, you know, I was a medieval historian in my training, and I used to complain that we had too many documents.

But you have hundreds of thousands of kinetifilm tablets, so you haven't read them all.

Oh, no, no.

Right.

I've probably read like a hundred.

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

Yeah, it really is extraordinary.

I mean, you can get windows onto people's working lives, but you can also get windows onto what lullabies they sang to their babies, or what did they write to their far-flung husbands?

What did they observe in the night sky?

What sort of astronomical leaps did they make?

It's just so moving.

I was going to ask, are these good reads?

Are they real tablet turners?

I think so.

I think so.

What were people writing about?

I mean, there's the 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 like a forestry institution in the city of Ummah and what classes of laborers were working and the familial lines on 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, really beautiful language and poetry and storytelling.

Paul could be the first great story.

It's the earliest great literature in human history that's recorded, and we have it because of Kinear form.

Exactly.

And do we have it in complete form?

Gilgamesh?

Almost.

Almost.

We don't know how it ends.

And then Gilgamesh.

Did what?

Did what?

It's like Game of Thrones.

You still have to finish the early.

Something we do have, which is really charming, I think, and quite interesting.

We have a series of letters between a wife and a merchant husband who are in different cities.

They're writing 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 person must have been some of that.

How's that journey?

How's the journey?

Yeah, how's the journey?

It must have been someone.

Yeah.

How's the journey?

And then he's writing about how the kids, how's the barley?

I mean, it 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 Kanesh.

And he moved there essentially to handle trade.

And then his wife, Taram Kukbi, is in the heartland of Assyria, in the capital of Ashur.

And she's writing to him quite fiery letters.

And one of them reads, When you went away, you did not leave a single shekel of silver.

You picked the house house clean and took it away.

Since you left, there has been hardship and hunger in the city.

What is this extravagance that you keep writing to me about?

There is nothing for us to eat.

Do we live in luxury?

I have picked clean everything in my possession and sent it to you.

Today, I live in an empty house.

She also asks him to finally pay for the textiles that she made that he's out there selling, which takes about six months to make one of these textiles.

And the letter ends, Why do you keep on listening to slander and do you keep sending me angry letters?

Wow, so she's invoicing him as well.

On top of all that.

Yeah.

I feel like they might need couples therapy.

It's not going well, that relationship, is it?

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.

Yeah, to that point.

But it's amazing, you never think of these old forms of writing being able to convey such emotion, you know, such a nuance, or yeah, or anger even.

I've always thought of them as very

specific numbers, dates, names,

like feelings, not emotion.

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

Do we have his replies?

I'm invested now.

I see why you got into this.

New tablet, who did?

I don't know if we have his replies, but there are actually quite a few exchanges between a husband and wife in this era this was the old Assyrian period it's about 2000 to 1600 BCE where many of the wives stayed behind in Ashur made these textiles for onward sale essentially in Kanish which is about five weeks away on donkey

and not exactly the untreacherous journey I sort of feel like I empathize with them because these women are like working and they're also looking after like eight children and like making you know their

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

Meanwhile, Inaya is in Turkey having a great

blast, maybe even taking a second wife off.

I was gonna say, he's probably got a second family, hasn't he?

He's like, who's this woman writing to me?

I'm trying to play with my new kids.

So, how did scribes learn all these systems?

Do we have evidence of their training?

Yeah, and there are lots and lots of tablets that tell us about every stage of scribal education.

There's one house in Nippur, a city in what is now Iraq, that archaeologists have given the very kind of charming name of House F.

Wow.

Yeah.

Thanks, archaeology.

That's great.

Exactly.

We're very excited now to hear about House F.

And they found over 1,400 school texts, basically, from just in the first season, that tell us about the first messy wedges that scribes were impressing as little kids.

My first wedge.

Yeah, my first wedge, exactly.

It's like those, you know, wobbly kind of fingerprint-smudged.

Finger space, finger space, finger space.

Triangle stands for cat.

Triangle stands for dog.

But yeah, all the way up to quite advanced math and

Sumerian literature.

GCSEs,

fake contracts, everything.

So there were schools and kids were taught good informal schools?

Yeah, they were, yeah.

And then you also get glimpses into how frustrating it might have been to be a student because there's one tablet with a bite mark in it.

Amazing.

Yeah, of like maybe a 12-year-old.

They do look like sourdough, like I said.

So I might have just been anonymous with

the music.

Just a very hungry student.

And then some doodles as well.

There's one that maybe of a teacher sitting in a chair with like a holding a stick out.

Oh, cool.

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

I feel like clay bake, tray bake.

That's the third week in the series.

That's probably trying out one of them.

Yeah, exactly.

Just one of them.

Breaking a tooth on it.

That's been overproofed, I think, yeah.

So we've got schoolboys doodling.

We've got a doodle of

a man sitting down with a long stick, and we think it's the teacher.

Maybe, it might be.

I kind of can't imagine who else the student would have.

The stick suggests corporal punishment, doesn't it?

It might.

There are stories about schools that the students had to write down that are in Sumerian, where

it gets kind of, you know, heated at times.

But

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

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

Oh, okay.

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

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

Exactly.

Okay.

Is there a modern language that is

related to Akkadian in any way?

Yeah, there are lots actually.

So it's a Semitic language.

So it's related I mean in in Iraq today they speak I mean they speak lots of different languages, but they speak Arabic as well.

And Arabic is also a Semitic language.

So

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

Because Aramaic derives from Akkadian, and then Aramaic is the father of several languages.

I think is that sort of the chain, is it maybe?

Yeah, I mean, I don't know

to what extent Aramaic borrows from Akkadian, but it was at one point simultaneous, and people were bilingual in Aramaic and Akkadian in the United States.

That's in the late period, wasn't it?

Yeah, so the Neo-Assyrian period.

And then Persian comes in, and then you're like, oh, there's a whole other language to learn.

But they're still learning Sumerian scribes as kids.

So you're learning a dead, dead language by by that point.

It's like, so dead.

Yeah, and there are even proverbs that are like, what good is a scribe who doesn't know Sumerian?

And it's like, oh, I guess that nobody wanted to really learn this, so they had to come up with proverbs to inspire them.

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 text and the understanding of gods and monsters, ghosts,

planets and stars?

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

The gods, goddesses, demons, ghosts, they were as part of the natural world as like a rock and a tree and a river.

So they formed a kind of normal part of explanations for stuff happening in the world.

So there was a really close connection between, in particular, the divine and the sciences.

They weren't considered two separate things.

And so the people who were trained in observing the natural world were essentially observing signs being left behind by divine beings about events to come.

So, for example, a lunar eclipse was bad news because it was a sign from the gods that the king was going to die.

For example.

Sorry, king.

Sorry.

I 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 thought in a peasant body double.

Yeah.

Holy crap.

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 for 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 if I was that, you know, I'd take that.

Two months in heaven and then death.

Yeah.

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

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?

Like you're yeah, you get up on a hill and you look down and see what sort of the

spelling.

Yeah, exactly.

If they spell out S-O-S, 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, 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.

Yeah, they went crazy, didn't it?

Guts could tell.

Everything.

And they would place this tablet in front of the statue of the relevant deity, who would then presumably read the question and leave their answer, write the answer down in the entrails of the sheep, so particularly the liver.

And then they would read the liver like they would read cuneiform signs, because cuneiform signs have multiple meanings, and so do 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 the writing was kind of it permeated their entire world.

Wow.

And astronomical phenomena were also the writing, the heavenly writing, is the movement of the planets.

So you said said that Kineaform is quite a stable technology.

We have the earliest technology at 3350.

The absolute latest we go to is in the Roman era, right?

The latest kineiform is like, what, 79 CE?

That's exactly right.

The last datable Kineiform tablet, so datable, is from 79 or 80 CE.

Which is the year Vesuvius erupted.

So

coincidence.

I was going to say, maybe the volcano erupted anyone like, I feel like this is a sign.

Let's just put down the Kineiform.

Move on.

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

Yeah.

Yeah, so it started in Uruk, and I mean, we don't know, but it's not.

Oh, the last one was also from Uruk.

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, yeah, it's pretty easy to read.

It's amazing.

And so Akkadian then is followed by Aramaic, followed by Persian, followed by other languages, and off we go.

There's one more thing to mention.

Phil, as our expert philologist here yeah what do you think the cruciform monument of manish tushu was oh no

I was just I was just reading about this

you're sick of hearing aren't you the cruciform the cruciform monument of manish tushu so cruciform means is that a cross

okay monument of manatushu

hmm

hmm it's a big

it's a building and there's a tower an obelisk but it's got a cross in it a big obelisk, but it's got a cross across it.

So it's a big T.

Big T.

It's not bad, it's not bad.

Yeah, it is a big T, but it's only about this big.

Oh, it's mean T.

I feel like monument kind of overprays the size of the.

It's a miniment.

So it's about

a foot tall.

Yeah.

Okay.

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

Yeah.

So it has like 12 sides.

I don't know.

I can't do math, but it's something like that.

The reason I've asked is because it's...

A forgery.

Yeah.

Like, it sort of gets to the heart of what's quite interesting about Kinea Form.

It's that this is a deliberately new thing that's meant to look old.

Exactly.

Right.

It's an ancient fake.

Yeah.

So a bunch of priests in the sixth, I think it's the sixth century or the six hundreds BCE, I'm actually surprisingly bad at dates, but they

made this

3D cross-shaped document, populated it with old-looking signs.

That is a font not known from any other period.

So they completely made this up.

And it pretends to be from the era of Manishtushu, who was about almost 2,000 years before, who was one of Sargon the Great's descendants.

And they are basically saying, We've been, priests have been here since this time, so

please keep paying us.

It's a forgery.

It's basically saying

we've always been here.

So it's the Christian cross.

Well, it's just, yeah, it's just the round of the cross.

Oh, BC.

I probably should have said that.

All my dates are BCE.

It's sort of the era of kind of the Persian.

it's the 6th century BCE, so it's in the 500s BCE, and it's them claiming fake ancestry, saying, No, no, we've been here for like 1,800 years, and it's a brand new, it's like dipping it in, like, um, when you were a kid, you had to make like an old document, and you dipped it in tea to make it look old.

It's that, it's exactly that.

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

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

And it's describing basically the roles of these priests and how long it's been established for.

And so, they presumably did that to justify their profession, make it more authoritative and authentic.

So, there you go, Phil.

3,500 years of technology of script, a very impressive history.

You had to impress it.

Yeah, it's 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 Kunaiform.

You know Kuneiform.

I can speak it very fluently.

No.

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

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 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 freed woman 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 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 Ardea.

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.

So, what do you know now?

This is our quickfire quiz for Phil to see how much he's learned.

I should have written one notes.

I've just written Sumerian.

I have to say, that is quite, there's not many triangles on that page.

How are you feeling?

Confident?

As always happens when I'm on the show,

you tell me about the quiz at the start of the episode, and when you tell me about it at the end, I'm always surprised.

So I'm not feeling too confident just now.

We've got 10 questions.

Historically, you're very good at these quizzes.

I believe in you.

Okay, question one.

Cuneiform gets its name from the Latin word for which shape?

Triangle.

It is triangle or wedge shape.

There we go, we're off to a flyer.

Question two, where in the world was cuneiform developed and used?

Mesopotamia.

It is, absolutely.

Between the two rivers.

Question three, the rock-carved inscriptions at Behistun about Darius the Great were transcribed and translated by which English soldier, commonly known as the father of Assyriology?

Rawlinson.

It was Henry Rawlinson.

Well done.

Well remembered.

Question four.

What are the earliest surviving cuneiform tablets about?

Our earliest named person in history, possibly.

Oh, oh, oh,

a brewer.

Bromme.

That's it.

Beer, absolutely.

135,000 litres of beer.

I'm doing my best.

It's a lot of beer.

Good night.

Question five.

Why was cuneiform needed during ancient sheep liver divination rituals?

Oh,

it was used to elicit messages from the gods.

That's right.

With a yes-no question which had to be written down.

Yes.

Well done.

And the liver was also the tablet of the gods, wasn't it?

That was a lovely night.

Question six, what doodles have been found on a schoolboy's cuneiform tablet?

A drawing of probably his teacher with a cane.

That's right, yeah.

And also tooth marks as well.

Question seven, can you name one of the languages written in cuneiform?

Akkadian.

Very good.

We could have Sumerian, Old Persian, Elamite, Hittite, Hurrian.

You went with Akkadian, which is, I think, is a good one.

Question eight, what is the cruciform monument of Manashtushu?

Your favourite?

It is a lie.

It is an ancient lie.

It is some priests cooked up to look important.

Yeah, to say we've been here much longer than we pretend to be absolutely right.

Question 9, the The Royal Library of Nineveh was created by King Usher.

It was my King Usher Binapal Sean Paul to house 30,000 clay tablets.

What happened to it?

It was burned.

It was burned down.

And everything was taken to the British Museum.

And question 10, when was the last known cuneiform inscription created?

79 or 80?

CE.

Amazing!

10 out of 10, Phil Wang.

You are a philologist.

Triangle out of triangle, correct.

That's fantastic.

Well done.

Oh, well done moody for teaching him because thank you that was that was we really that's some technical stuff we've covered there but just so interesting it really was yeah and yeah it's always amazing because we do think of these ancient peoples like you say as being

more

about more robotic in a way that they were just about survival that their writing was just about practical things but

but there's so much sort of life and drama that we would recognize today yeah it's it's soap proper stuff isn't it it's a husband and wife arguing it's a mum trying to get her kids back, it's a boss saying,

Where's my order?

It's not end time.

It's really

proper human life.

Yeah, it really is.

It's so, I love it.

It's so beautiful.

I love Cuneiform.

Well, thank you so much for sharing that with us today.

And thank you also, Phil, for your knowledge and wisdom and comedy.

Oh, thanks for having me.

It's been fascinating.

It's been great.

And listener, if after today's episode, you want more Mesopotamia with Moody, check out our episode on the ancient Babylonians.

And to hear more from Philly Philly Wang Wang, listen to his episodes on the Borgias, Chinggis Khan, the Terracotta Warriors, and the history of Kung Fu.

We've given you quite a weird curriculum so far, haven't we?

Yeah, it's a varied curriculum.

It feels like we're training you for some sort of purpose, but I don't know what

an enormous battle.

Yes, exactly.

And remember, if you've enjoyed the podcast, please share the show with your friends, subscribe if 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 have 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 has 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!

This episode of You're Dead to Me was researched by Hannah Cusworth and Matt Ryan.

It was written by Emmy Rose Price Goodfellow, Emin Nagoos, and me.

The audio producer was Steve Hankey, and our production coordinator was Ben Hollins.

It was produced by Emmy Rose Price Goodfellow me and senior producer Emmin Nagoos, and our executive editor was James Cook.

You're Dead to Me is a BBC Studios audio production for BBC Radio 4.

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