Dan Snow's History Hit - Assyria and the Birth of Writing

Episode Date: July 6, 2021

It is often the case that it is assumed that it was in ancient Greece and the eastern Mediterranean that was host to the foundation of European politics, culture, economics and engineering. But in fact, the development of sophisticated civilisations, writing cultures, complex technologies and sciences occurred over millennia in the fertile crescent in the ancient civilisations of Assyria, Sumer, Babylon and the Akkadian Empire. These are the crucible of our world today to champion this often-underappreciated part of human history Moudhy Al-Rashid an Assyriologist from Oxford University. She takes Dan through the history of this vitally important region, how and why writing developed, and why she thinks this part of history has often been neglected. 

Hi there everyone, welcome to Dan Snow's History Hit. I'm as guilty as everyone else here, but I talk about ancient Greek history a lot. I talk about the Eastern Mediterranean, get very excited about it in the ancient world. Like it's the kind of foundation of European politics, culture, economics, everything, engineering. But you know it's not, because the development of sophisticated civilisations, cultures, writing, of religion, of all sorts of technologies that were going to be adapted and built on by the ancient Greeks actually occurred over millennia previous to the rise of the ancient Greek world in the ancient Near East, the Fertile Crescent, the land between the two rivers, Assyria, Babylon, the Sumerians,

land between the two rivers. Assyria, Babylon, the Sumerians, the Akkadian Empire. These are the crucible, really, the crucible of our world today. And thankfully, they've got a cheerleader. They've got a spokesperson, a very, very talented one, who is Moudi al-Rashid. She is at Oxford University, and she is utterly brilliant, has been entrancing people on social media, podcasts, various TV shows about this world that we've forgotten to remember. Why have we forgotten to remember it? Well, she's got some interesting answers there as well. It was such a treat to talk to Mudi Al Rashid about Assyriology. Assyriology. After you've listened to it, you might want to go and check out historyhit.tv. We've got lots going on there at the moment. We're releasing some big TV shows on historyhit.tv. It's like a history channel some big tv shows on history.tv it's like a history channel but without aliens on it so it's pretty good you go there you go to history.tv

for a small subscription you get all these podcasts without the ads on the beginning then you get hundreds of hours of history documentaries straightforward history documentaries you're gonna absolutely love it you can go in there and check out our recent release buddhica queen of the icini tribe uprising against rome or you can go on there and check out our recent release buddhica queen of the icini tribe uprising against rome or you can go and look at the great heathen army documentary i made with dr kat jarman in which she took me across england on the trail of the great heathen army the great viking invasion of the late 9th century that's rapidly becoming our most watched program ever on history tv which i would not have predicted but'm very, very glad and pleased to see it.

In the meantime, everyone, please enjoy this podcast with Moody Al-Rashid. Moody, thank you very much for coming on the podcast. Thank you so much for having me. Do you get frustrated when you're in Britain and everyone just wazzes on about Greece and Rome the entire time? Do you feel we're just missing a giant part of the story of the ancient Near East? Yes, if I'm being perfectly honest, I do get quite frustrated. Not because there's anything wrong with studying ancient Greece and Rome. They're fascinating.

Absolutely not. But because there is this whole world that came before it and that in many ways informed what has been inherited from ancient Greece in particular, that seems to be, as far as I know, missing from the curriculum. And that is just so interesting. So that is a bit frustrating to see it missing. I feel the same sometimes with Egyptology. It's given a separate name.

It's like hived off. And it's studied as almost sort of fetishized by kids and primary schools. But we don't ever link Egypt, its technology, its ideas to what's going on to the northeast or elsewhere in the Mediterranean basin. I find it's very balkanized, this part of our history. Yeah, absolutely. And I think for a lot of reasons, Egyptology has made its way into popular culture, much more so than the rather unfortunately named Assyriology, for a lot of reasons that we can talk about if that's interesting.

But I think that as a result of that, not as many people as you'd like have even heard of cuneiform or ancient Mesopotamia. So hopefully we can redress that as scholars and historians and try to bring it to a wider audience so people can learn more about this interesting history. Let's start addressing it right here and right well not start because you've made a whole career very successfully doing just that but let me start doing that right here where do you like to start where is your starting point for this subject? My starting point is always my favorite part of it so it's quite subjective which

is cuneiform. But I think it's also one of the most important aspects of studying the history of the ancient Middle East and in particular, ancient Mesopotamia, because it is a writing system that is the common denominator of the many civilizations that rose and fell in the area that we call ancient Mesopotamia. So the land between two rivers, the Tigris and the Euphrates rivers. So even totally sort of unrelated cultures like the Sumerians in the fourth millennium BCE and the late Babylonian culture of the middle of the first millennium BC, what they share

across those millennia is cuneiform and the many types of scholarship and the literary works that have survived in this wonderful, fascinating writing system. Is it helpful to think of it as the first recognizable writing system? I think so. I think as far as I know, unless things have changed drastically in the last few months, it is the earliest known writing system. This relies on its early stages having begun in the late 4th millennium BC, so around 3300-3350 BCE, we start to see in the archaeological record these little tablets that have numerical notations, so these sort of circles that are pressed in with one side of a reed stylus, and alongside those images of the things being represented. So a jug of beer or milk, a bushel, I think that's a

word of barley, something I had to look up recently, the things that are being counted in the administration. So that I think is what locates it as the earliest known writing system. But at this point, we don't know what language it's being used to record. There are no features of the stuff being written down that give us a hint of the grammar or the exact words being reflected. They're more like mnemonic devices. It's only a few hundred years later that it's possible to see Sumerian in this writing system as it develops. And you mentioned the two rivers. People might not remember the fertile crescent, that expression from my childhood.

Why do you get advanced societies we don't get civilizations yet do we but why do we get complex organized societies in this piece of the world at this time so i think if we begin the story with the birth of writing which is really where my specialism starts then we can suggest that the fertility of the soil and the success of agriculture led to this need to record stuff, to record things that were being funneled through what was at the time a kind of temple economy. And this is what gives rise to writing. And this kind of surplus agriculture also attracts people to live closer together. So we start to get cities. And this is a vastly oversimplified picture.

This is when we could do like 10 podcasts just on this like 100 year period. Don't tempt me. Don't tempt me. And actually, you know, writing and grain. So writing and grain are very interlinked, not just from our practical perspective, but there's even a goddess, a Sumerian goddess, Nisabar Nidaba, who's the goddess of grain and writing. So the two really go hand in hand in this early period when you start to see writing as a technology being developed and everything that is wrapped up in that, really.

And I'm being stupid here, but that's because once you have grain, you have surplus, you have the ability to store it, you need some way to keep track of it, write it down, find out where it all is. That's exactly right. So surplus agriculture is the kind of technical term that is really hard to kind of explain. It basically means exactly what you said. There's a lot of stuff being grown very successfully. So not everybody needs to be farming for a start. So you can have people doing other things other than being involved in agriculture.

And you need a way to keep track of everything that's going on agriculturally. And this is where writing comes in, not as some romantic device to record our thoughts and the oral literature that's being potentially recited, but literally just to keep track of stuff, exactly as you described it. I always think with this area between two services, it kind of suffers because the geography is kind of a double-edged sword. On the one hand, you get this extraordinary exchange of goods and ideas and people from across Eurasia and North Africa. That must have been an amazing place because it's kind of easy to get to, right? But on the other hand, does that then mean that it attracts invaders as well? I just can't keep track of the different polities that kind of come and go over these

centuries, whereas Egypt has a geographical integrity that proves quite hostile for invaders, for example. Yeah, that's an interesting way to look at it. And you do have actually in the written sources at certain periods in various empires' histories, this kind of trope of the outsider or the foreign invaders. So for some periods, it's the Gutians. For others, it's just people that come from the mountains, possibly referring to the Zagros Mountains to the east. It's a region that did see the rise and fall of, as you said, different empires and cultures and civilizations. And I think what makes that so interesting is the fact that their way of recording information and the types of information they recorded doesn't change.

I mean, I don't want to make it sound like a monolith. There's obviously variation within that. But there is this kind of thread that links the narrative from the early Sumerian culture to the much later light Babylonian culture. There's a very lively and exciting debate about settlement within the isles here, Britain Island, around Saxons arriving, around the Vikings as well. Is this kind of elite replacement? Is this ethnic cleansing, total genetic replacement of populations? What's your sense of what's going on in this space over these millennia?

So it's really hard to speak to the question of ethnicity and ethnic groups replacing or pushing out other ones, because what we have left as evidence doesn't give us that kind of information. You can sort of maybe say, oh, well, this person has an Amorite name, which is the tribe that rose with Hammurabi in the early second millennium BCE. But you meet British people called Layla, and that's an Arabic name. It doesn't mean that person is necessarily of Arab descent, if that makes sense. So it's notoriously difficult to identify these kinds of categories that are pretty easy to construct today. So I think that's a very difficult question to answer.

But if you think of it maybe as a sort of dynasties coming in without necessarily trying to change the makeup of the population, but just ruling the existing population without trying to push anyone out or destroy anything, I think that's perhaps another way to frame it that seems to be borne out in the textual record a bit better. I mean, there are, of course, wars and sackings of particular cities and things like that. But I don't know that we can say one way or another that there's anything like ethnic cleansing for these periods. It's a really difficult question to answer. Yeah, I can imagine evidence is pretty scarce. What about Sumerian? You mentioned earlier that

Sumerian is a language that we know? Yes, for the most part. There's a joke in the field that there are as many versions of Sumerian as there are Sumerologists, which is a person who studies Sumerian. So it's still kind of in the works, the decipherment of Sumerian, but it's pretty well understood. It's well understood enough that we can, for example, read the literary texts and the administrative texts more or less and know what's going on, how many sheep are being counted and whether this is a myth about creation and who are the different characters in it. You can really get a sense of what's being said. It's well understood enough for that. But it's interesting because Sumerian being the first language that cuneiform was used to record, as far as we can tell from the evidence, is what's called an agglutinative language. And it's not related to Akkadian, which is an East Semitic language, the earliest known Semitic language,

sort of related to Arabic today, for example, Assyrian Hebrew. So what's interesting is that this writing system is adaptable enough to cope with completely different languages. And then later it gets used to write Hittite, which is an Indo-European language. So I think that's one of the things that's interesting about cuneiform. But yes, Sumerian, we know it well enough. It's a really interesting language to get to study, especially if you're interested in decipherment. It's a cool field to be in if that's the kind of thing that you're interested in. It's a very cool field, particularly cool because I'm fascinated by some of the names. Like, is it King Sargon of Akkad? I mean, you can't actually believe that

that's a thing that exists. Yeah. So Sargon, so in Akkadian, his name is Sharukin, which is probably a throne name that he just took because Sharru means king. But either way, it's an extremely cool name. And he was a very interesting figure. And did he exist? Is he the first like a tested ruler in this space? There are earlier rulers. It's hard to say, oh, this was a king or this was a governor. It's really hard to map our kind of modern political language onto Sumerian language. So, for example, there was a man called Gudea who ruled a city called Lagash in the late third millennium BCE. And his title is Ensi.

And people translate it all sorts of ways. Governor is a favorite, but it could mean something else because he rules multiple cities in the area. So governor is not quite right. Mayor, maybe. I mean, who knows? So it's difficult to say. But what's interesting about Sargon is he was the king of what is thought to be the first kind of empire. It expanded quite a lot. It wasn't just confined to Akkad, which we haven't located yet. It expanded to rule a variety of city-states in the area, but even quite far north and south. So that's what's interesting, I think, about Sargon's empire, which wasn't very long-lived, but nevertheless very interesting.

You're listening to Dan Snow's History. We're talking about the ancient Near East, Assyria, Babylon, and more. More after this. Okay Tristan, you've got 50 seconds. Go. Right, so Dan's given me a few seconds to sell the Ancients podcast. What is the Ancients, I hear you say? Well, it's like Dan's show, except just ancient history. We've got the groundbreaking new archaeological discoveries. This seems to be the oldest known dated depiction of the animal world as far as we can tell

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Spread the word. Land a Viking longship on island shores. scramble over the dunes of ancient egypt and avoid the poisoner's cup in renaissance florence each week on echoes of history we uncover the epic stories that inspire assassin's creed we're stepping into feudal japan in our special series Chasing Shadows, where samurai warlords and shinobi spies teach us the tactics and skills needed not only to survive, but to conquer. Whether you're preparing for Assassin's Creed Shadows or fascinated by history and great stories, listen to Echoes of History, a Ubisoft podcast brought to you by History Hits. There are new episodes every week. It's a couple of hundred years after the Great Pyramid.

So just to give people a sense, if they're familiar with Egyptian history, it's not a million miles out from the Old Kingdom in Egypt. These empires then, we become a bit more familiar after this. After a couple of hundred years, you get Ur, and then you get Hammurabi a couple of hundred years after that, and people may be more familiar with these names. Are these empires expanding and contracting in a very similar kind of space? Sort of. So the third dynasty of Ur, which does come about 200 years after Sargon, Sort of. So the Third Dynasty of Ur, which does come about 200 years after Sargon, it only lasts 100 years, but it does expand during its short lifetime. We're not 100% sure why it collapsed as quickly as it did. Interestingly, I think it's the most densely documented period in ancient Mesopotamia's history. There's tens of thousands of administrative texts from that 100-year period.

tens of thousands of administrative texts from that 100-year period. But then if you fast forward a bit to Hammurabi, which is a great example, he inherits not a huge empire. He sort of rises the ranks and he expands the empire quite significantly, reaching as far north and even further as Mari, which is in present-day Syria, all the way down to southern Mesopotamia, where Babylon, Ur, and Uruk are more ancient cities. So yeah, I mean, you do see this kind of expansion and contraction, also very much so in the first millennium BCE under the Assyrians, which we can get to later if we have time. But yes, absolutely, things change quite quickly. And under these first imperial structures that you mentioned, I mean, you get writing about law, religion, literature, politics. Is there a body of writing effectively that we should be more familiar with

in the West? I mean, what have us novices got to learn and what worlds can we enter into? Oh my gosh, so many. That's an excellent question. And I wish we had like an extra couple of hours to answer it. But I know a lot of people love literature in many ways, raises universals and things that we deal with today. I think that's one of the reasons the epic of Gilgamesh, even if someone doesn't know very much about cuneiform culture, they've probably heard about Gilgamesh and his epic in which he's coping with extreme grief and trying to find the answer to mortality and immortality. So I think literature is one window into what we share really with people in ancient Mesopotamia. But also, I mean, I'm a scholar of ancient science, so I try to push the sort of scientific and scholarly corpus because then I think in a really similar way, they show the things that

people were concerned with back then in terms of making sense of the world around them, making sense of things like illness, which can be quite terrifying. They were doing, again, the same sorts of exercises that we do today, although we have much more advanced technology and we have inherited a lot more knowledge than was available back then. So I think that there are so many ways to answer that question, depending on what you're interested in. There's something for everyone. There's literature, there's science, there's also economic history. There are lullabies, there are receipts for doing laundry, all kinds of very interesting texts

that you can look at. Why have these been overlooked? Like, why do we think of Democritus in the Miletian Renaissance or the Athenian Enlightenment? Why do we think that's where Western civilization begins? Like, what's going on

there? I think part of the problem is that the early history of this field of Assyriology and of the archaeology of ancient Iraq and Syria is very much tied up in kind of imperialism and colonialism. The people carrying out the archaeology largely were British diplomats, for example, or British archaeologists. And there was this kind of way of thinking about the Middle East that really informed their perspective. On another angle, there was also a huge interest in the field from the perspective of biblical studies, which can be interesting, but then pigeonholes it as well. So I think the early history of this field set the stage for it to sort of be ignored or to be written about in a way that led it to be ignored. So for example,

the texts that I have the privilege of getting to research include all kinds of scientific observations, whether it's sort of calculating the distance traveled by Jupiter, for example, using a forerunner to calculus or really detailed medical descriptions and therapies. These were considered craft and unscientific by early historians of science. And I just don't understand how that's even possible. I mean, they're literally examples of the exact sciences from the late first millennium BCE. So I think a lot of it has to do with that kind of early colonial lens through which the field was studied, which people are doing a good job, I think, now of trying to deconstruct that, decolonize it.

It must make that incredibly exciting for you, though, because you get to play this really exciting role. I feel like it's a deep privilege to get to study and teach about these texts and share that knowledge, but it's also a privilege to get to help change the narrative, to do justice and to restore this material to what I think should be its rightful place in history books. And that includes in broader curricula outside of the Middle East, because I know in the Middle East, we learned all about this stuff. This wasn't a question, really, but it's sort of outside the Middle East where it's missing. That makes sense. I mean, I can't generalize from my own experience, but I think in general,

people do know about Mesopotamia. I mean, in terms of observing celestial objects, it's funny, I get a lot of people in this podcast going, you know, science. I mean, everyone thinks science begins in the 17th century. Actually, it begins in my period, which is like 500 years earlier. Now I've got the ultimate, the Ur historian of science, who literally says it begins in Ur. I'm very pleased about this. Because observing celestial movements, I mean, this is going on right through your period.

Yeah, absolutely. And my specialism is the first millennium BCE, but there are forerunners to all the texts that you find from the first millennium BCE much earlier. And there are even hints at observation of planetary motions and regularly occurring phenomena like planetary motions and eclipses from earlier than that. So for example, there is an administrative text from like 2900 BCE or something like that, that talks about the morning and evening Inanna, suggesting that the person who wrote this was aware that this was one and the same

astronomical object. You know, obviously they didn't understand what planets were because we didn't understand what those were until telescopes were created. But in the first millennium BC, you see all kinds of observational texts and eventually calculation texts in the field of astronomy that are invaluable to the study of astronomy in this period, but also to dating everything else that happens, because we can date stuff based on when an eclipse was observed, for example, as well as to understanding how people tried to make sense of the world around them 4,000 years ago, 3,000 years ago. And the other thing is, in terms of transmission of this knowledge to later civilizations, Assyrian, Persian, Greek,

was there a kind of radical discontinuity like arguably there was in Britain when the Romans left or when the Mongols attacked Baghdad? Or can we imagine this information flowing relatively freely from one of these civilizations that you described to the next? I think it's more the latter. I mean, if you imagine the last half of the first millennium BCE, so 500 BCE sort of onward, in ancient Mesopotamia, and particularly in ancient Babylonia, so southern Iraq, you start with the Persians in the 6th century BCE, they arrive, and then the Greeks arrive, there's a Hellenistic period. So it's not hard to imagine that there were people who spoke to each other or who learned from each other and that that knowledge was able to travel from outside of

what we call ancient Mesopotamia. There are direct pieces of evidence for transmission. So for example, there is a papyrus from Oxyrhynchus, I think I'm saying that right because I feel like that's one of those words I've never actually said out loud until this moment that lists the elements of the Saros cycle, which was a cycle for calculating lunar eclipses in Akkadian and in Greek. There are also references to the Babylonian astronomers in Greek texts, and there are even specific astronomers. So they talk about the Chaldean and Urukian astronomers, but they also talk about specific ones like someone called Kidinu, whose death was recorded. So there are some sort of clear examples of contact, let's say. There's even sort of cuneiform tablets with Greek letters on them and them being spelled

out in cuneiform. So there's a lot of contact at this time. And it's not hard to imagine that elements of Babylonian astronomy make their way into Greek astronomy. And there are even, again, direct examples of that through, for example, the zodiac, which is still in use today, is inherited from ancient Babylonia. Really? Yeah, yeah. It developed again in the middle of the first millennium BCE. It's very interesting, actually. So the calendar in ancient Mesopotamia divided

the year into 12 equal months of 30 days, with an extra month added every so often to bring it in line with the solar calendar. So that's why it's called the lunisolar calendar. And the zodiac is in a way the kind of spatial projection of that way of organizing time onto the sky. So you have the ecliptic, so the portion of the sky that the zodiacal constellations are observed in, divided into 12 equal sections of 30 degrees. So it allows information to be organized differently. It makes it easier to make astronomical observations and calculations. And the names of those, they survive into Greek. So for example, Capricorn is the goatfish in Akkadian, Gemini is the twins, Mashu in Akkadian. So this way of organizing information and even

elements of the naming persist up to this day. In the last few minutes, let's just rattle through some of these different kind of imperial entities that people might have heard of. We've mentioned the Assyrians a few times, but what's the kind of timeframe of the Assyrians? The Assyrians and Babylonians sort of appear and sort of disappear around the same time. Around 2000 BC, in the north, you have Assyria, and in the south, you have Babylonia. And that persists all the way up to the sort of mid-first millennium BCE, with Babylonia going a little bit beyond that. But ancient Assyria is best known, I think, in popular culture, or as popular as one can get really with this field, in the first millennium

BC with the Neo-Assyrian period, the new Assyrian period under Ashurbanipal, where it becomes the largest empire in the world to that point in time. So it included Egypt, parts of Cyprus, parts of Turkey, Iran, obviously Iraq, Syria. It was an enormous, enormous empire and took a lot of doing to run properly. And we have excellent examples of letters and other texts that tell us how this was actually done and the scale, the sheer scale of trying to make it happen and keep it together. Fascinating period of history. And then it's sort of eventually replaced, I guess, by the Persian Empire, which fills a similar space. Yes. Ancient Assyria falls in the 7th century BCE. The Babylonians continue for not much longer, and then the Persians show up. It's not sort of a whole-scale replacement

of Babylonian culture and people or anything like that. It's just a replacement of the people in charge, really. And as you say, you can see these cultural threads that continue through these regimes that come and go. Yes, absolutely. I mean, you see certain types of written material persist all the way until the last periods of cuneiform culture, but you also see new things being created probably in response to political needs and pressures and to the kind of shrinking scholarly profession and it being sort of narrower and narrower in the last half of the first millennium BC where, for example, the zodiac creates new ways of organizing information that replaces old ways of understanding it. That's just one example. There are so many examples. So

there are common threads, but there's also innovation at the same time. Very interesting to study both aspects of it. Well, thanks so much for coming on the podcast. And what an amazing thought that kids in years to come, thanks to scholarship of yours and your colleagues, may rediscover this entire millennia of our history in which formed the kind of foundation of much of our common humanity. I hope so. I hope so. Well, good luck with it all. Are you allowed to tell everyone what the name of your book is? The current working title is The Princess and the Key because it's about a museum run by a princess named Enigaldinana and a key found in her museum that unlocked the mystery of the

objects that she was collecting. So that's where the title comes from. And I hope when I write it, everyone gets a chance to read it. Oh, I'm sure you will. Thanks so much for coming on the podcast. Thank you so much for having me. It was a pleasure. I feel we have the history on our shoulders. All this tradition of ours,

our school history, our songs, this part of the history of our country, all were gone and finished. Thank you for making it to the end of this episode of Dan Snow's History. I really appreciate listening to this podcast. I love doing these podcasts. It's a highlight of my career. It's the best thing I've ever done. And your support, your listening is obviously crucial for that project. If you did feel like doing me a favour, if you go to wherever

you get your podcasts and give it a review, give it a rating, obviously a good one, ideally, then that would be fantastic and feel free to share it. We obviously depend on listeners, depend on more and more people finding out about it, depend on good reviews to keep the listeners coming in. Really appreciate it. Thank you. you