The Ancients - The Scholars of Assyria

Episode Date: January 27, 2022

Tens of thousands of clay tablets containing texts written in the ancient Cuneiform script of the Assyrian Empire have been discovered, giving us invaluable insights into the inner workings of the Mesopotamian kingdom on the eve of its collapse in the 1st millennium BC.In this fascinating episode, Tristan chats with Professor Eleanor Robson of UCL to help shed light on the incredible history of scholarship in the ancient Near East.Order Tristan’s book today: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Perdiccas-Years-323-Alexanders-Successors/dp/1526775115/ref=zg_bsnr_271237_68/260-7675295-7826601?pd_rd_i=1526775115&psc=1If you'd like to learn more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad free podcasts and audiobooks at History Hithttps://access.historyhit.com/?utm_source=audio&utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=Podcast+Campaign&utm_id=PodcastTo download, go to Android or Apple store:https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.historyhit&hl=en_GB&gl=UShttps://apps.apple.com/gb/app/history-hit/id1303668247If you’re enjoying this podcast and looking for more fascinating The Ancients content then subscribe to our Ancients newsletter. Follow the link here:https://www.historyhit.com/sign-up-to-history-hit/?utm_source=timelinenewsletter&utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=Timeline+Podcast+CampaignMusic:Over the Dunes - Jon Sumner

Hi, I'm Tristan Hughes, and if you would like the Ancient ad-free, get early access and bonus episodes, sign up to History Hit. With a History Hit subscription, you can also watch hundreds of hours of original documentaries, including my recent documentary all about Petra and the Nabataeans, and enjoy a new release every week. Sign up now by visiting historyhit.com slash subscribe. It's the ancients on History Hit. I'm Tristan Hughes, your host. And in today's podcast, we'll forget Alexander the Great, forget all things Roman, because we're going further back in ancient history. We go into the Near East and we're talking all about the Assyrian Empire, all about the Assyrians. We're talking about cuneiform, the particular focus on Assyrian scholarship that has been preserved through

surviving cuneiform tablets. We're going to be looking at the association between court scholars and particular Assyrian kings, the rise of court scholarship shall we say, in the early first millennium BC. We're going to be talking about various kings, various figures such as Sargon II and the famous or infamous Ashurbanipal as well as the god Nabu and how he became so closely associated with scholarship in ancient Assyria. Now join me to talk through all of this and so much more. It's about time we focused on ancient Assyria, so trust me, this isn't going to be the last of our ancient Assyrian episodes. Join me to talk all about this.

We've got an esteemed Assyriologist on the show, and that is Professor Eleanor Robson. Eleanor is the Head of the Department of History and Professor of Ancient Middle Eastern History at UCL. It was wonderful to meet Eleanor in person for this great chat. So without further ado, to talk all about cuneiform and Assyrian scholarship, here's Eleanor. Eleanor, thank you so much for taking the time to come on the podcast today. It's a real pleasure to be with you. Thank you for inviting me. You're very welcome. And I love your office. It's absolutely beautiful. So many books everywhere. It's so brilliant. I know it's a simple question, but it's a good place to start.

What is cuneiform? Oh, cuneiform or cuneiform, doesn't matter how we pronounce it really. It's just a script like the alphabet or like hieroglyphics or like Chinese script, it's a means of writing multiple different languages, just as the alphabet, the Western alphabet today is used to write anything from English, French, Basque, all sorts of unrelated languages. So it was developed in southern Iraq, we think, over 5,000 years ago and was used for over 3,000 years across the Middle East to write a variety of different languages, including direct or indirect ancestors of modern-day Hebrew and Arabic, languages that we collectively call Akkadian, that includes Babylonian in the south of Iraq and Assyrian in the north, but also other languages that were not related to Babylonian, such as Sumerian

in southern Iraq, Hittite in ancient Turkey, Hurrian in Syria, etc. And it even reached as far as Egypt at some point. Unlike the alphabet, however, cuneiform from the outside looks very complex. It looks as complicated as hieroglyphics or Chinese. But that, I think, is because we're looking at it from the outside and trying to look at all the different ways it was used for writing in different contexts, for different languages, over a 3,000-year period. And if we focus down on what any one particular group was using in this whole superset of cuneiform scripts at any one time, we see that it's actually much more manageable. It's still not an alphabet. It's a complex mixture of syllables and word signs,

but it's not nearly as scary as it first looks. And I'm guessing that with cuneiform, the huge time period with which it's used and the various different cultures that used it, let's say cuneiform of Neo-Assyrian times, would it look quite different to that being used in, let's say, Babylonian times at the time of the Macedonian conquest or something, half a millennium later? Yes, absolutely it would. So there are various things that change. So cuneiform, I should have said earlier, is marking the surface, usually clay, with wedge-shaped marks to make signs. So

that's literally what it means. But just as, say, modern day handwriting styles change, and you can look at an old document and just by looking at it, guess, oh, this is Victorian or this is medieval. A trained uniformist can do the same. And then when you start reading, you realise that spelling conventions change as well. And they also depend on context, and that the format of documents is also very genre dependent and time dependent. So again, when you're looking at pulling a random manuscript from a modern day library, you can tell before you start to read roughly what you're looking at. Is this a legal document? Is this a novel? Is this printed? Is

this handwritten, etc. So again again all of that is encompassed in the changing the the evolution of cuneiform and its dispersal across the middle east over 3 000 years and you mentioned like written documents novels so in terms of administration mythology and all of that within cuneiform it seems that there are these various subcultures shall we say oh yeah absolutely so cuneiform was probably invented in order to do bookkeeping, where to keep control of assets, debts, et cetera, of big institutions over 5,000 years ago. And for at least the first half of its history was used almost exclusively for that. So the late Assyriologist Bob England estimated a few years ago that 97% of our evidence

is numerical administrative etc. But it's a vast amount of evidence because all the stuff that survives was written on clay or other durable materials. So we have just huge amounts of material to work with. I mean, probably a quarter of a million documents in the British Museum alone, and never mind all the other museums scattered around the place. Iraq, Turkey, Syria have big holdings, lots of European and North American museums, and East Asian too. So there's just a vast amount to work with. And then from that legal document, so people showing that they have ownership rights or owe people, and then gradually evolving into letters, sending information and orders first, and then more kind of emotional and content. Intellectual content develops quite late. When I say late, I'm talking about the last third

of the third millennium BC, so that's probably very early for most people, but it's all relative. And so the intellectual traditions where people are writing down knowledge that was very complex or very lengthy is really quite a small part. And in the early days, certainly, and probably for most of the tradition, very closely related to religious culture and also to political power. closely related to religious culture and also to political power. And is this where we start seeing this royal link to intellectual cuneiform? Straight away, you mentioned the religious side, but political power too.

Are we thinking royalty at this time as well? The first evidence, the really good evidence we have of kings wanting scholars in their court to advise them, as opposed to, say, military generals or provincial officials, people who weren't in control of other people or vast amounts of money. The most direct evidence we've got is the 18th century BC, of course. Indirectly, we can probably infer that for another three centuries or so before that. And so what sorts of intellectual enterprises are we talking about within this scholarly cuneiform culture? The kings, they're most interested in finding people that can help them make decisions without having their own vested political or military interests. So they're interested in divination. Now that to us

sounds very unscholarly, very mumbo-jumbo and deeply unscientific. But if you imagine yourself that you are the ruler of a large kingdom, you have military advisors who are in control of large armies. You have perhaps provincial governors who also have their own vested interests. You live in a world which is governed by the gods. As far as you're concerned, the gods make all the decisions about what happens and you need to keep in the gods favour in order to make sure that nobody is conspiring against you to murder you, the next neighbouring king isn't plotting to overthrow you, etc. And so who do you find to give you objective advice? It's people like you who are elite and male, be connected to you but aren't you know

don't have the power to overthrow you because they don't have resources at their disposal and yet you're a ruler and so you don't want to be seen to be weak so you're consulting the gods and divination is a means to do that so the early evidence we have is a very strange to us concept of examining the entrails of sacrificial animals for signs from the gods in a very deliberate and public ceremony in which the question that the gods are being consulted on is public within the court so that everybody knows the king is asking, should I appoint so-and-so to my inner cabinet? Will they be loyal? So they know the king is thinking about these things. And then the diviner sacrifices an animal, systematically examines the entrails, and that observation process gets recorded by a scribe standing next to him. And the gods send messages through the entrails, which are collectively positive or negative. And that is not the end of it that's a set of starting points for the king to then to go into private conversation with the diviner and have a conversation about the loyalty or otherwise of this potential appointee and so

when the decision is made it seemed to be the god's decision because they have sent the messages but in fact there's a lot of sort of social work going on, co-opting the whole court into this big decision-making event, knowing that it's happening and knowing that the gods are looking out, so don't even think about being disloyal, but allowing the king some privacy to make a choice with a trusted advisor who doesn't have an army or land at his disposal, so no means to rebel against.

So the diviners are kept quite separate from the rest of the court, but they're often, yeah, male and elite and related to the king in those early days. Okay. It's interesting how, as you say, they kind of spill into this area of advisors, as it were, of all places as advisors for the royal figure. And they also do other things as well. But that idea of the royal advisor who sees the future hasn't entirely gone away. A listener of a certain age might remember our former Prime Minister Tony Blair's wife, Cherie, had an astrologer. President Mitterrand was also known to have one, and President Reagan. And it may well be that the current generation

also turns out these things come out usually after the end of office no idea the pressures of power are such that and the paranoia around that often involves the consulting at one remove it's really not that strange not that distant in time this is still quite a modern phenomenon you join the ancients podcast it's about ancient assyria. You stayed to hear about Tony Blair's, you know, the astrology links to Tony Blair's work. That's amazing. I didn't even know that at all. I see it in the modern day. Eleanor, if we're focusing, because I know you've done a lot of work on the near Assyrian period and scholarly cuneiform at that time at the court. But first of all, as a bit of background to that, the origins of Assyrian court scholarship, as it were, going back to this period, which is called the Middle Assyrian period.

What is this and when is this? So, yes, we were talking just now about the late third, early second millennium BC. So we're going to jump forward five, six hundred years or so now to just over three thousand years ago. So about 13th to 11th centuries BC. So this is a point of big change in the Middle East where communication technologies, transport technologies allow large-scale empires to cohere for much longer courses. I've been domesticated, so people can travel big distances and move armies and such.

So there are new powers on the stage, and particularly in what's now northern Iraq, Assyria, who, as with many newcomers to a political stage, perhaps have a slight inferiority complex to longer established ones. And so bringing in different types of advisor from the south, from Babylonia, to help them consolidate their reign and get the gods on side is really important. So we start to see this in Assyria just as Assyria starts to get large. So as it's gaining more territory through military might, that also brings the conquest, brings more wealth because they're essentially pillaging the conquered areas and starting to move people around as well. The more

wealth they gain, the more suspicious they are of how effectively they can keep it, and there's worries as much about inside threats as external ones. So yeah, we see then this big, I wouldn't say big migration, but that's not the right word. I think significant, but small numbers of scholars moving, gravitating towards the Syrian court to advise them. So not just divination, but it also starts to become issues around calendars, but also keeping the gods on side of the Assyrian king, so praying in the right sorts of ways, but then also providing this one-to-one advice for kings as well. So we start to see kings naming their chief scholarly advisors, their senior scholars,

who will give all sorts of advice. So we can kind of tell now that people are traveling to these courts to be at this place where they know that their knowledge or whatever is going to be used by the person in power, as it were. Yeah, so patronage relationships are something that we find across pre-modern courts, not just in the Middle East. So we can see it even earlier when the first Assyrian kings of that style of governing are in correspondence with Egyptians. There's a lot of movement of doctors, for instance. So all sorts of people gravitate to centres of power and wealth and want to sell themselves and tell how busy and important and valuable they are. So scholarly relationships from this point onwards worked on a form of patronage. So people weren't employed with a steady income, etc.,

but would offer advice and knowledge and would be given gifts in return. So it was always the relationship was only ever as good as the latest transaction. And yet long-term trust relationships developed, was only ever as good as the latest transaction. And yet long-term trust relationships developed, so we can see then sort of dynasties of scholars establishing themselves alongside the royal dynasties. And we see letters in which scholars will say, well, as my father said to your father, and we can see that these kind of dynasties then run in parallel. Okay. So these family lines, as it were, are sort of emerging. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. That's so interesting. And do you start seeing those in the records? Like, do you dynasties then run in parallel okay so these family lines as it were yeah absolutely and and

do you start seeing those in the records like do you start seeing particular names and family names as far back as let's say the start of the first millennium or the end of the second millennium bc yes from the end of the second millennium bc in assyria we can start to see these perhaps for four generations or so and what's also really interesting is that we can see them rethinking their origin so in the early days they're quite proud of their origin there's one family I'm thinking of in particular who's quite proud of their origins in a northern Babylonian city called Deir and then within three three generations they've kind of conveniently forgotten that and there's as if they've been in Syria all along they've completely naturalized and integrated. And the prestige of having a family

that was from an old Babylonian city was not so important anymore, because it was all about a nationalist Assyrian identity by that point, that the Assyrian power had grown strong enough not to actually want to really think about external knowledge. As we get to the start of the first millennium BC in the Neo-Assyrian Empire, do we see, especially let's say between the 9th and 8th centuries, do we see this evolution, let's say in cuneiform court scholarship during this time? Yes, absolutely. There's a lot of change and it depends very much on individual rulers and what their relationships with scholars are. But yeah, in the 8th century, right at

the end of the 8th century BC, King Sargon, we now call him Sharukin, who was himself a usurper, had an advisor who correctly predicted the outcome of what turned out to be a really major battle up in what's now essentially Armenia, Theratu, the kingdom to the north of Assyria. And the vast wealth captured on those raids were such that really enabled a whole new city to be built. And the scholars who had predicted this victory and had summoned the gods to make it happen were really rewarded by establishing them absolutely at the centre of power. And we see this in a very straightforward geographical, micro-geographical way. So the Assyrian court had rural cities that it moved between in northern Iraq. So Nineveh is the most famous now, but in the earlier periods it was Ashur,

which is to the south of modern-day Mosul, Nimrud, which is just a little bit further north, closer to Mosul, and yes, and then Nineveh, which is in Mosul itself. The court scholars worshipped a god called Nabu, the god of writing and wisdom. And in the early days, it was very much their thing. It was something that the first Assyrian scholars had brought with them from Babylon, and the Assyrian royal family had nothing to do with. And when the royal citadel at Nimrud was built, the temple for the scholars was several hundred meters away, quite away from the palace. When Sargon got all his lovely new booty from Eratu and set up yet another royal city in a place he called Dor Sharukhane, Fort Sargon, and that is known by the modern name Khosabad. He built the temple for

Naboo right next to the palace with a little bridge linking. So he really starts to bring Naboo into royal ideology absolutely centrally. And we can see this happening in about the 10th year of his reign. And then over the next few generations, as his successors, his descendants have differing relationships with scholarship and particularly with the sorts of scholarship associated with the god Naboo. It comes and goes, but that's really the point at which it becomes fundamental. And it's so interesting in regards to the evidence that you have for that, the remains of temples. So you have these temples now at this time being dedicated to a god and associated almost completely and forgive

me if i'm wrong in that like but with scholarship it's right at the heart of the royal regime yes absolutely um so the god naboo had been worshipped in different forms for a millennium by this point but that's the point at which he becomes central so previously there had been ashur the sort of the god who is the embodiment of the state, who always remains important. Ninurta, the warrior god, had been the other really important one. He gets, poor love, gets rather pushed aside in favour of Naboo. So there's this shift then in ideology that it's not all just about brute force, but there's a kind of an intellectual element to governing large empires and that it's

really important to have. We have to conceptualize the gods as actors in all of this too. The temples are places where big political and military decisions get made and the gods are conceived as being fundamental to that as well. They carry an awful lot of weight. And as gods rise and fall, then all the people surrounded by them do too. These places now, we have these scholars' base, and you said this link with the gods as well. But let's say for academic pursuits like mathematics or astronomy, astrology, would these places be where these figures were practicing that as well? They absolutely were, yes. So the kings are interested in divination, and we talked about divination by sacrifice. But by the first millennium,

they were also interested in divination from the skies. And that involves a lot of observation and prediction. So there's a lot of mathematics and stuff going on there. And the scholars have their own intellectual pursuits too. So for instance at Nimrud, the temple of the god Nabu, it's one of my favourite places in the world, it's such a beautiful place. The god, you imagine the god as this sort of huge anthropomorphic statue seated on the throne, male god, and then his other half, Tashmetu, is in the shrine next door, literally they have parallel shrines. Their doors open out and Naboo looks out across the courtyard onto the library and so all of the cuneiform tablets that constituted the scholars' library were stored

opposite. So there's this direct visual relationship. That's the inner sanctum that only the scholars go. There's an outer courtyard that has a little mini version of the throne rooms for Naboo and Tashmetu and a throne room so that when the king comes, the statues of the gods are taken out and moved there. So the king can then have his little retinue, etc., and consult the gods with the scholars there. And so that's, again, it's privacy. It's outside the palace. out of the palace into this space that's protected by the scholars and can commune with the scholars and the gods in privacy and have his conversations without being earwigged by visiting dignitaries, by members of the family, etc. The fact that we know so much about this particular temple, it sounds like one of the great archaeological discoveries for Assyriologists and the like,

for learning all about this stuff. It sounds incredible. It's one of my favourite places. I mean, one of the joys of Assyriology is that over the past hundred or more years, long-term excavations with documents in situ has provided us with vast wealth of knowledge in the way that classicists probably find quite hard to conceptualise. knowledge in the way that classicists probably find quite hard to conceptualise. But yeah, we work with autograph artefacts found in, well, not necessarily in situ in situ, because what we've got are deposition contexts, where tablets were abandoned. And they're durable, so they last unless people have deliberately destroyed them. But what we do know, and what shouldn't surprise us, is that the documents themselves tell us they moved around a lot that these are not medieval libraries with great big books on chains these are portable

objects that could be as small as a mobile phone or as large as a laptop computer but usually in between those things so and we have letters saying to the king oh i'm sorry i can't give you that advice at the moment i left my tablets at. I need to pop home and consult. That variety is insane. And talking about that vast amount of knowledge and this idea of travelling across the empire. How can toilet training cows help save the planet should we start renting our clothes and why on earth is beds from the happy mondays now keeping bees i'm jimmy doherty tv presenter farmer and conservationist and these are just a few of the questions we'll be answering on my new podcast on jimmy's farm from history hit join me on the farm to hear from the likes of the

founder of the eden project, Sir Tim Smith. It is only people who don't know what they're doing that can do marvellous things in some areas because received wisdom will sometimes, you'll talk yourself out of it if you've got lots of people who've done it before. Professor Dieter Helm on how to stop climate change. There may be all sorts of products like avocados and everything will have palm oil in it, etc. And these have not just long distances involved in it,

but they're not actually producing what could be produced on the land and the frame that it's set. And my old friend, Jamie Oliver. I think I was stupid enough, naive enough, and unspoiled enough about the world that we live in. Listen to On Jimmy's Farm now wherever you get your podcasts. If we then move on to this particular time period where there seems to be a lot of interest in a lot of focus on which is the early 7th century why is there such a focus on this particular time period for this because we have amazing depth of evidence nunavut which is essentially modern day mosul

and nimrud which is very close to it just south south of it, were the first two Assyrian cities to be explored by Europeans in the early 19th century. So the French first and then the British, who were just digging stuff up to take to the Louvre and the British Museum. To cut a long story short, it's more complicated than that. This is a time at which the idea of science is coalescing in Europe and the shift from natural philosophy, which was essentially theological, trying to understand how the divinely created world worked, not unlike our Babylonians and Assyrians, to a kind of more rational understanding of the world. And evidence mattered. And big imperial centres like London and Paris

were supposed to be centres of knowledge production and so everything had to come there and we can think about Darwin, young Darwin setting off on the Beagle to collect specimens for natural history and therefore antiquarians were also collecting stuff to be brought to London to be classified and organised. This is long before the idea of archaeology, where you study everything in context and you document everything as you go. Archaeology is really about assemblages and context. This is a world of things that were thought to speak for themselves, and in a world of the Ottoman Empire before the modern-day nation-states and the idea that states had the rights to their own antiquities. So there was just a lot of movement and stuff.

And so a young British explorer called Austin Henry Layard lucked out on a vast collection of cuneiform tablets that he found, or his team, in fact his foreman, his Iraqi, what we would now call Iraqi, but Ottoman, local Ottoman foreman, Dawud Tome, found. And luckily for him, these cuneiform tablets had all been burnt in antiquity and fired when the Medes and Babylonians had sacked Nineveh and destroyed it in 612 BC. Nobody could read the script yet, but they were beautiful and they were indestructible because they were essentially terracotta. And so they were all shipped to London, tens of thousands of them, over the course of several decades in various batches. And it was the beginnings of

decipherment of not cuneiform in general, but Assyrian cuneiform. Cuneiform in general had started to be worked on a few decades before. So there was this amazing collection of what turned out to be everything from so-called royal correspondence to the scholarly correspondence with the king to collections of more theoretical works about how all the scholarship worked. It took, well, the decipherment is still not finished. There's a big project at the British Museum at the moment to finish it off. But yeah, it was the foundation stone really of Assyriology in Northern Europe. So how did this foundation stone, how did it lead to this whole idea, this notion of the name Ashurbanipal's Library? I know you've done a lot of work on this, so feel free to go into the detail. So this is controversial, so there will be colleagues who disagree with me on this. I come from this from a history of science training, which is very much my background. So it's very

noticeable that we don't really have a word for library in Assyrian or Babylonian. There is a word gergenaku, which occurs three or four times that might mean library, or it might not. And the early excavators talked really about finding an archive and because they were not yet archaeologists they're not really recording context so we can't it's really quite difficult to reconstruct exactly where they found this stuff though we know in general terms because of diary entries nevertheless when the tablets got back here and people started to work on them they started started to arrive in about 1839, 1840. So there's a whole generation of people just working on these.

This is at the same time that the central part of the British Museum is, well, the British Museum is starting to be opened. This is really some of the newest stuff that arrives there. And they're starting to build the big round reading room in the centre of the British Museum that becomes the British Library. And so they're literally surrounded by thinking about how collections form and how buildings form. And there are inscriptions on the bottom of some of the tablets, what we call colophons, basically book plates describing what the tablets are for. And it's clear that some of them at least are for the king's own use, King Ashurbanipal's use.

And so we can see a shift then in the way that Victorian scholars are writing about this collection from being just a collection or an archive to in the late 60s, early 70s of the 19th century, suddenly starting people starting to talk about Ashurbanipal's library. And so, for instance, the big reference work, the standard history of the ancient Middle East at this point is by a classicist called Rawlinson, and it goes through several editions. And George Rawlinson, who wrote the great book called Five Great Monarchies of the Ancient World, is the brother of Henry Rawlinson, who's doing After the Decipherment. And so we can see between one edition to the next,

suddenly Ashurbanipal's library starts to appear in this reference work that hasn't before. And at the same time, the British Museum scholars themselves are starting to use this. So this phrase appears several decades after the first discovery of the collection. So it's really an intellectual conceptualisation of all of these tablets, which more recent archaeologists, and particularly a former curator at the British Museum, Julian Reid, has shown, were found actually in many different places, four or five, possibly even six different places, across the palace and temples of Nineveh. And what do you think this therefore tells us about the actual scholarly layout of somewhere

like Nineveh at the time of Ashurbanipal and other cities in the Assyrian Empire at that time? It's difficult. So we know there was a temple of Naboo because we have tablets with colophons on them describing that, tablets being deposited in the collection there, and the very meagre remains of the foundations, which were unfortunately really badly excavated in the early 20th century by the British Museum. And then we have various parts of the library in which the tablets were found, often en masse. However, what we don't know is whether they were found undisturbed or whether they were the result of invading armies coming through and searching for stuff. Because again, we've got good parallels from other periods where this happens too the armies come in and they're looking for evidence to use against the the conquered and they're just looking to loot stuff as well so one at least one tablet escapes from ashurbanipal's library and ends up in southern Iraq 500 years later,

with the kind of book plate on it saying it belongs to Ashurbanipal's library. So we don't really know because this stuff was found before archaeology was conceptualised exactly what its deposition was, which makes it very frustrating. But we can be sure that, yes, certainly Ashurbanipal was really interested in scholarship and he did have a private collection. But to what extent all of the tablets from Nineveh can be counted as the collection? And to what extent it was a library in any meaningful sense are two other big, difficult philosophical questions. I mean, as you say, so we do have the evidence that Ashurbanipal himself, he was big into scholarly pursuits during his reign, was he? Yeah, everyone is quite tempted to think of Ashurbanipal as a really effective leader of Assyria.

I have a rather different view. We know that he wasn't destined to become king. So just as modern royal families, there are heirs who are trained up. In Britain, we talk about the Prince of Wales, or more generally, the Crown Prince. For Assyria, it wasn't a matter of straightforward male primogeniture, because kings had many wives to ensure that they would produce an heir. So there were often many competitors to the throne, and they would just pick their favoured one, and they might fall out of favour and be replaced. favoured one and they might fall out of favour and be replaced. But Ashurbanipal was not the firstborn son of the firstborn son and he'd been trained up for actually to be probably a priest

of Naboo and some of the colophons that we have that name Ashurbanipal actually talk about him as a prince and in the context of the worship of Naboo. So there's a series of happenstance, the context of the worship of Naboo. So there's a series of happenstance, grisly accidents, murders, etc. And his father changing his mind about whose succession it should be. So Ashurbanipal, to cut a long story short, ends up on the throne of Assyria without the normal training to be a crown prince. And it particularly has no military training. It's in charge of this vast empire that stretches from essentially the top of the Gulf, some sort of into Egypt, right up into Turkey, Mediterranean coast, etc. No military training. What does he do? What has he got at his disposal? He's got all of his scholarly training and his worship.

We can see this. He doesn't go and battle. If you look at his sculptural reliefs, he isn't needing an army in the way that his grandfather, Sennacherib, did. You look at his inscriptions as well. He's staying at home and praying for the good outcome of the army. And when there's a particular military victory and the head of the enemy forces are captured,

the head of the enemy forces is captured. The head of the enemy forces is transported back to Nineveh and the famous garden relief in which Ashurbanipal is having a nice picnic in the garden with his wife. And there's Tayum and the captured king hanging on the tree. So scholarship, scholarship, scholarship all the way from him because that's the only thing he's got. And essentially it doesn't work very well. And the empire starts to collapse around him. So there's this huge amount of scholarly production in which he's collecting, he's getting his invading armies to find all the scholarly tablets they can and bring them back and recopy them. So we have in the British Museum, tablets in Babylonian script that were found in

Nineveh. And then there are documents also talking about the recopying process, poor captured scholars in fetters, in chains, being forced to copy out either from memory or from stuff. So he's going through this whole process of reappropriating knowledge for himself for managing this empire because he's really not got a very good grip on it too. So there's this whole process of erasure of the traditions of transmission normally scholarships will scholars will write at the bottom of their tablets well you know this tablet's been in my family or i've borrowed it and i've made a copy from you know another member of the community etc so we get these big trains of

transmission ashurbanipal no this is the tablet of ashurbanipal king of the world right and then so we presumably think that the other tablets from other places were probably meant for disposal once they'd been recopied and standardized. This all collapses, I think, because it's not revenue generating. I mean, the whole of the empire depends on just conquering Bhuti. It's a really sort of centripetal. You grab resources from the outside, from the peripheries, and you you bring it in and there's this conspicuous consumption in the middle but ashurbanipal is at war with his brother in who is governing babylonia and there's this really destructive civil war essentially that again is a huge drain on resources and doesn't bring

anything in so everything starts to collapse pretty fast and we can trace over a decade the stopping of the production of writing in the court and we can also see at the same time there's a shift in governance so Assyrians didn't count years they named them after or the king chose an eponym so a year would be named after a particularly favoured official. And in the early days of the empire, there was a kind of rota about which people in which jobs got to do, but had a year named after them in a roughly a decade-long cycle. It then became a more kind of way of showing favour. By the end of Ashurbanipal's reign, he's choosing the chief courtyard sweeper and the chief cook he's no longer choosing great

imperial officials of the major provinces the senior military officials i mean he's real kind of down to kind of this little sort of i was thinking of him as kind of miss havisham kind of set up in this collapsing palace with just his faithful retainers around him in the last three decades or so it's amazing how it goes from heyday to decline, doesn't it? In that period from where you can kind of interpret from the records that survive, isn't it? I mean, there are all sorts of other reasons for the collapse. There was a major environmental problem. So there were famines and, you know, harvest failures, etc.

But this is somebody who was just really ill-prepared to rule. Eleanor, one of the really things which was interesting there was that you mentioned, obviously, there's quite a lot of Babylonian links during this time of this cuneiform. And one of the jobs that you mentioned that these scholars are doing, it's not just advising, it's copying cuneiform that's already been written elsewhere and remaking it, repurposing it. So it's in Ashurbanipal's image, shall we say, something like that? Yes, absolutely.

So we've been focusing a lot on royal scholarship, there are also people non-royal people that need and want advice whether through illnesses or wanting to know about their future etc and making their own personal plans so there are scholars attached to temples not particularly the temple of naboo or not only the temple of naboo, in Babylonia and South Iraq for all the periods we've been talking about. People who would have, yeah, for some parts of their lives be doing that, but also would have a life outside the temple working with private clients. I mean, we think of priests as having a vacation and that's all they do is look after their flocks. But for Babylonian priesthood, it was a very part-time privilege and duty

that went with being a particular male, members of particularly elite families. And the more, the brighter, the more scholarly would do that and there'd be other members of the family who would just be, you know, running the family business, et cetera, and trading or whatever it was. And then others might be going into local politics. So well-connected families doing this whole variety of different things. Again, one can think about Victorian parallels of, you know, eldest son inheriting, another son going into the army, another son going into the priesthood, that kind of thing going around.

So there's all of this happening in Babylonia and other temples in Assyria, all the periods we've been talking about. But Babylon is where it starts and it's where the Assyrians think of as the cultural... They have a kind of inferiority complex about Babylonia. It's culturally more sophisticated than Assyria. Though Assyria has its own cultural production too, but there's always this sense that Babylon's doing it better and that Babylon is where the real knowledge happens. So they're keen to get that knowledge. They're keen to get, always keen to get scholars and always keen to get knowledge from Babylonia. And I guess that also highlights one of the other themes that we talked about already,

and once again to stress, throughout this period, this idea of travel across the Assyrian empire, beyond the borders of Assyria, of these intellectuals accompanying the king to these places or wherever. Itinerant scholars, should we say. Yeah, so there are itinerant scholars who are moving to power to look for patronage. The king would take scholars with him on military campaign when scholars did go, or the army would take a scholar on campaign as well. Whether you're in your running era, Pilates era, or yoga era, dive into Peloton workouts that work with you. From meditating at your kid's game to mastering a strength program,

they've got everything you need to keep knocking down your goals. No pressure to be who you're not, just workouts and classes to strengthen who you are. So no matter your era, make it your best with Peloton. Find your push. Find your power. Peloton. Visit Peloton at onepeloton.ca. And then there were also, yes, sort of major centres of learning of temples and the scholars would go on their own anyway, because the scholars have patronage relationships with the king, not with him all the time. And again, our correspondence shows us that some of these really important people could be away from the king for quite a long period of time, looking after other people, looking after their own affairs. They're not sort of stuck to him with glue. And different

types of scholars have different sorts of arrangements with the king. So some, you might only see the king perhaps a couple of times a year, it would come for big occasions and be in correspondence with him all the other times. The ones that were much more physically close to him are the ones we perhaps ironically know least about because they were more rarely in written correspondence and didn't need to necessarily ask permission to have an audience with the king because they were intimates and they could just chat, talk to each other. So it's the scholars that were a bit more physically and socially distanced the king we know most about and do we know last question we're going to ask i mean do we know particular names i mean from the ancient greek and roman world we hear of like these

astronomers or these scholars who have a particular name but is it similar with ancient assyria do we know particular names of people who were these scholars yes we absolutely do because a we've got their correspondence and b we've got these book plates these colophons at the ends of the tablets that give us all of their genealogies and who they're copying from and who they're learning from so when I was talking about earlier about dynasties of scholars then yeah this is this is the evidence that we've got so we don't know all of them but we know the most important and yes it's sort of we're talking in the orders of dozens at any one time rather than hundreds but these are the real elite i mean so you mentioned as we wrap

up now as ashurbanipal's reign goes on that you seem to see this decline so what do we know about kunair from scholarship as we get to the end of the Assyrian Empire? I guess how it endures from then on. So it's all collapsing in the palace, but it's continuing in the temples outside. So we can see in Ashur itself and in Nimrud and in more provincial places, even like Khosrowena, continuing right until the invaders get there. And we can track the invaders moving westward in the late 7th century BC. People flee and they resettle and people from Ashur resettled in this Babylonian city called Uruk and scholarship re-evolves and reshapes itself. I mean that's a

conversation for another day given that our time's running out but there's a whole other than battle for survival after the Persian conquest in 539 and the decades after that, because the Persians are just really not that interested in traditional scholarship. And yet it endures and sort of gradually peters out over the next half millennium or so till the middle of the first century BC is where our last evidence is.

So much still to cover, as you say, that'll be a chat for another day. But I think from all we've chatted so far today and it doesn't really stress like the importance of canary form scholarship of canary from research going forwards for looking at this time period and not just you know the most prominent figures but what's happening around administration and so much more during those many centuries oh yeah i mean you know we could have had another whole other conversation about the project I'm working on at the moment, which is about literacy in an agricultural warehouse in the Babylonian countryside. There's a whole other end of the social spectrum. There's just such a vast amount of evidence and it's so richly contextualized because of our archaeological

methodologies. And yeah, it's really important for understanding how people thought and worked, really, in the first half of history, and therefore the ramifications that has for later periods, both in the Middle East and beyond. Very exciting indeed. And Eleanor, last but certainly not least, you've written a book all about scholarly cuneiform

during the Assyrian period and more, which is called? It's called Ancient Knowledge Networks. Brilliant. Well, it just goes to me to say this has been awesome. Great to meet you in person, and thank you so much for taking the time to come on the podcast. Well, thank you very much for having me. It's been a pleasure. Well, there you go. Assyrian scholarship with Professor Eleanor Robson. It was about time that we dedicated an episode to ancient Assyria, and you can rest assured that we'll be doing more episodes in the future about more ancient Mesopotamian civilizations, Assyria, and so

much more. Now, to wrap it all up, if you'd like even more Ancients content in the meantime, well, you can subscribe to our Ancients even more ancients content in the meantime where you can subscribe to our ancients weekly newsletter via the link in the description below i'll also mention here my book which is coming out in the next couple of days at the end of january 2022 it's exciting times slightly daunting slightly scary times but very exciting If you'd like to know what followed Alexander the Great's death and the chaos that immediately ensued in this ancient Macedonian Game of Thrones, then why not buy the book today and have a read for yourself? There are some really extraordinary stories in there and I hope you'll enjoy it. I'll put a link to the book in the

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