You're Dead to Me - Cuneiform: the world’s first writing system

Episode Date: March 21, 2025

Greg Jenner is joined in ancient Mesopotamia by Dr Moudhy Al-Rashid and comedian Phil Wang to learn about the history of cuneiform, the oldest writing system in the world.In the 19th Century, European scholars began to translate inscriptions found on ruins and clay tablets from ancient Mesopotamia - an area of the world between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers that encompasses modern Iraq, as well as parts of Syria, Iran, Turkey and Kuwait. The script they deciphered became known as cuneiform, and this distinctive wedge-shaped writing system is perhaps the oldest in the world. The earliest cuneiform tablet is in fact over 5,000 years old.These clay tablets reveal much about the daily life of people in this part of the ancient world, recording everything from the amounts of beer sold by brewers and the best way to ask the gods for advice, to squabbles between husbands and wives and even the lullabies used to get babies to sleep. The first recorded epic poem, The Epic of Gilgamesh, is also preserved thanks to cuneiform. This episode traces the history of cuneiform, exploring how this script worked, who used it and what they used it for, what it tells us about the inhabitants of ancient Mesopotamia, and how it was finally deciphered.If you’re a fan of historical puzzles, amazing archaeological finds and the intimate details of everyday life in the ancient world, you’ll love our episode on cuneiform.If you want more from Dr Moudhy Al-Rashid, check out our episode on Ancient Babylon. And for more ancient history with Phil Wang, listen to our episodes on the history of Kung Fu and the Terracotta Warriors. You’re Dead To Me is the comedy podcast that takes history seriously. Every episode, Greg Jenner brings together the best names in history and comedy to learn and laugh about the past. Hosted by: Greg Jenner Research by: Hannah Cusworth and Matt Ryan Written by: Emmie Rose Price-Goodfellow, Emma Nagouse, and Greg Jenner Produced by: Emmie Rose Price-Goodfellow and Greg Jenner Audio Producer: Steve Hankey Production Coordinator: Ben Hollands Senior Producer: Emma Nagouse Executive Editor: James Cook

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. work undercover and if she's got, she's going to be shot. Join me for more stories of unsung heroes, acts of resistance, deception and courage from World War II. Subscribe to History's Secret Heroes wherever you get your podcasts. BBC Sounds, music, radio, podcasts. Hello and welcome to Your Dent 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 Dustmaster live at the Apollo. Have a good news for you from his two Netflix comedy specials too count them maybe you'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 isn't a seriologist I'm a silly ology bring Hey, bring in the silly baby. Phil, together we've tackled mighty military matters. We've done the Borgias, we've done Genghis Khan, we've done the terracotta warriors and Kung Fu. Today we're going quite nerdy. What does the word cuneiform mean to you spiritually, Spiritually, emotionally. I picture triangles. Yeah. So carved triangles, a lot of grain. Bali, the sort of the recording of Bali.

That's fairly good knowledge. And the biggest word in my one of the outcomes called the word bubbles, the word clouds. Well, cloud, the biggest word there is old. That's my that's my header. How am I right? B on the right ballpark? I mean, Moody, I don't want to give him too many sort of stars early on, but I feel that was quite good. That's pretty spot on.

Yeah. And the font for old is just like a really big font. Yeah, the O is a triangle, the L is a triangle, and the D is a triangle. But if you know, if you can read Gunniform, you can tell the difference. So, what do you know, if you can read Guineform, you can tell the difference. So what do you know? This is where I have a go at getting what you, our lovely listener, might know about today's subject. And 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 K. 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 scripts yeah right yeah yeah but you

knew triangle stuff so that's kind of false yeah so anyway the questions we have to answer what exactly was cuneiform what do all these clay tablets actually tell us what do they say and who first figured out how to decipher it let's find out right dr. moody can we start with some quick basic definitions because I'm feeling very basic what is c 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. Andnily enough in Akkadian the word for cuneiform is sattaku or santaku which means triangle. Oh wow. And funnily enough in Arabic it's mismari which means nail imprint so they kind of also

went with the visuals. Like fingernail or hammer and nail? Yeah. Okay. You said it was developed over 3000 BCE so it's over 5000 years old. That's right. Possibly even older than that, like 5300 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-cuneiform, it's like really, really early stage. They don't look like triangles yet.

And... 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. Yeah, those are my favorite ones. They're so pretty. And then they're like, guys, triangles. I've got it. I'm trying to solve it. Triangles. 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. So, Sumerians, Akkadians, then Babylonians, then Elamites, Hittites, Neo-Assyrians, and then Persia. Exactly. Someone needs to do a song like an alphabet song like if only Sesame Street could just do this for us

that'd be great the neo-Assyrians the neo-Assyrians neo-Assyrians so they come after the Assyrians can be bothered to come up with a new name like we're just the Syrians again yeah okay all right but it's not a language Gniform exactly you came from is the writing system just like we use Latin came up with a new name, they're like, uh, we're just the Syrians again. Yeah. Okay. All right. But it's not a language. Kineform. Exactly. Kineform 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, same with Kineform. Phil, we're going to, we're going to mix things up here.

We're going to go to modern history now. We're going to start with, uh, only a couple of hundred years ago when they deciphered Kineform. 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. Yes. As all the best people are. That's what I wanted to say. That's what I actually wanted to say but I thought I wasn't allowed to say that. It's usually an Englishman or Frenchman in fairness in this period in history. Moody, what was an Englishman doing in Iran? Was he doing a classic bit of empire? Hello, I've just come to do a bit of empire.

Basically, yes. 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, reorganize 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. An innate interest in this. Yeah. I wish I did. No, I do have an interest in it. I want me to say I wish I had a skill in it. Okay. Yeah. All right. But I didn't know. I did not know that. Okay. How would you go about decoding an ancient script? Because you're an engineer, right?

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. You're looking for structures, you're looking for sentences, and then looking for what repeats where particular symbols lie and seeing if there's a logic to them. This is good stuff, Phil, I think. That's exactly right.

I feel like I should just maybe just take a cup of coffee or something. Thanks, Moody. Yeah, we're good here. It's just me and Phil. We're going to solve this. Well, my name is Philology Wang. Exactly, Philology Wang.

Yeah, 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 Alvan and then the big kind of Rosetta stone of Assyriology, which is the Behistun inscription. They first found royal names and then from there they found the word for of, kind of unexciting but very important of yeah

I'm really First that's a really crucial word. Yeah, it really is Yeah, I mean 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 bahisun inscription by other philologists. Oh really? A lot of copies were made, a lot of kind of words were decoded. Are you besmirching an Englishman's name, Moody? How dare you? I'm just saying what happened. He kicked it off the line. He showed up and said I've got this

lads, 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 two or three different languages?

Yeah, it's a trilingual inscription, but all using cuneiform. So it's three cuneiform inscriptions in these like almost like caption boxes, but they're different languages recorded. One of the languages was known, Old Persian. People knew how to read Old Persian from other texts that were not written in cuneiform. So they kind of knew what it might say. And then they kind of overlaid that onto the cuneiform. And this inscription of Behistun 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. Okay. And He was a

big conqueror and he fought 19 battles to crush rebellions and this inscription says I, King Darius of Persia, 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 he, I think, initially tried to, because it's very high up and it's not, you know, easily accessible, so they had to use pulleys and... Because it's up on like a rock, it's like on a cliff or something, it's like really high up. Exactly. And very bright as well, because the sun sort of hits it as, you know, 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 there, 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? Stan Mijer Clurgyman. Danielle Pletka Clurgyman. Stan Mijer Yeah. Danielle Pletka 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, sorry, 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' 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 it was a Kendrick Lamar Drake situation between the two. Yeah, you think they were in rap songs about each other?

Yeah, yeah, cuneiform songs about each other, yeah. I think you're bang on, right? I mean, Mooda, 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. A year or something. 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. That's the force that keeps the discipline moving forward. You know, I can't, I can't all just be friends.

Have you ever been tempted to crush a rival comedian's career? I mean, you're the only film and comedy, right? I mean, there might be there could be hundreds of others, but you've. I'm the only film wang anyway. I've buried at least three film wangs. So Rawlinson and Hinks was squabbling. And in 1857, so 20 years after Rawlinson first went out to Persia, I suppose that's what it would have been called at the time, 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 Kineform has been decoded. They announced this how, Moody? 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 taught me through the rounds? Oh man, like a kind of spelling bee, like a kind of spelling bee. And he's like, spell corn. Rollins and Hink said to stand there and go, triangle, triangle pointing to the top left, triangle pointing to the top right. Is it something like that?

I think 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 Horace and Hynx and two others, Henry Fox Talbot and Jules Aubert, 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 cop-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. Then we can read this thing. 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 seventh century BC so the 600s amazing and said Nineveh the Royal Library was discovered in what we now Call Mosul in Iraq 30,000 Kina from tablets, which is amazing. They were brought to the British Museum the home of Iraqi history But this this was not in the BM, did it even happen? That's always been my motto.

But this wasn't the first time the massive collection of ancient cuneiform tablets had been put in a museum, right? Because this is what the library is like. 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? Play tablets. 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, it's when we say ancient, it's ancient, but it's really late in... In cuneiform. In cuneiform, right. Yeah, so it's kind of, I'm doing, I'm slightly struggling to work out how to frame that,

but yeah, we've got Ashurbanipal. I like to call him Ashurbanashampal. I don't know why, I always imagine it in my head. Yes, yes. So Ashurbanipal was 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 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, 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 again just to make sure people 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, were they 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 like really old. Was it always clay? Yeah, I mean it was used on other objects but the scholarly stuff was on clay. That was the good stuff. Yeah, that's my favourite stuff. So the library of Nineveh was this incredible compilation of all the knowledge two and a half thousand years worth put into one place and 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. Ended up in different places. Uh, cause it was cool. Cause it was exciting. He's spiraling. He's losing. No, no, I don't see how it could have been good. Because they set the building on fire and it baked the clay. Oh wow, and sort of hardened it. Yeah. Which you get in this presentation. 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 left them dry.

Wow, so baking was kind of laminating for them. Exactly, yeah. So yeah, so the next episode of Great British Bake Off, that's what we want to see. It's Cuneiform Week here at the tent 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. It's not alphabetical. 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. 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 or, you know, bat, like B-A-T, as one sound. That tells us a lot, actually, about the history of how this script develops, because initially it was just signs that stood for words, and this was in the earliest iterations. And scribes used quite innovative methods to make each sign stand for more things, more sounds, that were related to its original meaning or to the original sounds that those words had and that enabled the writing system to take on completely unrelated languages to the ones that those initial words were in.

How many characters are there in Kineform? You know, if you were to be a scribe and train, how many would you have to learn? About 600 to a thousand. I mean, you probably wouldn't have to master every single one if you were just like writing letters, for example, if you were a scholar, you would probably need to do the upper limit of that. Was it a cumulative script? So they set up with some characters and every, you know, as time progressed, they just created more and more characters and Cuneiform to represent new things. Yeah, yeah. And then 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 show Phil some Kineform? Yeah, let's do it. Yes. We haven't smuggled anything out of a library because it's probably too valuable. So we've got some pictures on an iPad. The iPad is stolen just add the freestyle that we're missing. It's stolen from my husband.

So we have a tablet on a tablet. We have a tablet on a tablet. Oh, that's lovely. Two tablets across time. Oh, wow. Look at this. Okay, beautiful. So I'm looking at it's a clay tablet from different angles and it looks like a flat sourdough loaf.

I mean, it's kind of lumpy in that way. It's irregular in that way. It's not like a perfectly square tablet. It looks like bread. And, okay, so in the top left corner, it's made out in grid. It's almost like a comic book. There are squares. It's a grid. 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 sailboat.

And then below that is more circles. More circles. Not so many triangles, actually. More circles. And one looks like a fish. And under that, three circles. And one looks like a river. I feel that three circles and one looks like a river. 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. Yep, yep. Wait, there's lots of circles and is that counting? That's exactly right. Yeah, the rain. Yeah. Yeah. Wait, there's lost circles and is that to is that counting? That's exactly right. Yeah. The circles are numbers. You're so good at this.

You really are. If you need a plan B, we need more serologists. 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 in your year sound of one, two,, 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 marking. 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. Yeah, that's awesome. You know, we're now talking about a technology that's 5,350 years old. The obvious question is why clay? Why, you know, 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, and 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 fair? That's exactly right. Okay. Is there a case to be made, you know, it's we often sort of credit rivers and especially in Mesopotamia's case, the two rivers as being crucial to the success of these civilizations for because of fertility they provided in the soil but as I case we 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 it's a record keeping as well. Exactly, yeah. So, river's good. River's good. River's good. Yeah. I'm Helena Bonham Carter, and for BBC Radio 4,

I'm back with a brand new series of history's secret heroes. And he tells her that she will be sent to France as a secret agent, she will be sent to France as a secret agent She will work undercover and if she is caught she's going to be shot Join me for more stories of unsung heroes acts of resistance deception and courage from World War two Subscribe to history's secret heroes wherever you get your podcasts wherever you get your podcasts. 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 basic functional literacy if you're an ordinary fisherman or you know, who, who's got that knowledge? So kind of both. And 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 you know calculations and field calculations and then others went beyond that to become you know 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. There's no expectation that other people could read a pop science book about astrology. It was only for other professionals. 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. This is the secret knowledge of the, you know,

the gods, blah blah blah. This is just for us. This is just for us, exactly. Wow, that's sick. 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's a very famous sort of Sargon. There's a king. Not Darius. Sargon sounds bad. 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 a first named author in history. So not just the first woman author, the first author of this name we know. Wow. Yeah, as a woman. And her name is El Khedwana, and she penned, penned, impressed, whatever. Yeah, penned 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 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. Classic, yeah, really cool. And the hymns, are we able to sing these hymns now? I mean, you could sing them if you wanted to.

I guess we don't know the tune though. Yeah, you can make them if you wanted to. We know how we can. We know the tune though. Yeah you can make one up I guess. We know the lyrics. We know the lyrics, yes. The tune is Sean Paul. It's Ashurbanipal Sean Paul. That would actually be fantastic. Okay and so how do you like can you send messages? Are they letters? Is there a postal system?

Can you communicate with tablets in cuneiform, I suppose is the question. Yes, yes, absolutely. Yes, they wrote letters to each other and they sent them and there were kind of mail networks, 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 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 you know, 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 I mean they learned enough to write their own letters But the the way letters are written is there they 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. Was this supposed to be available to people outside of the kings and so regular people 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 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 into morse code and then someone else would translate it for them and it's the same thing in but 4 000 years ago. Yeah yeah. So so So dictating it's like hey Siri instead of hey scribe. Hey scribe. Putting the Siri in a Siri. I didn't catch that. 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 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. Like the restaurant reviews. 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? Then, this place sucks too actually, it's really hot. I have to go to this stupid scribe every time I want to send a letter to someone.

See, you think it's just like people just complaining. It must have been, yeah. Yeah, I reckon so. I think there's a lot to complain about back then. Actually, yeah. It must have been loads. The Hymn to Nankazi 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 Kinoform tablets we have is about beer. That's right. It's amazing. Nothing has

changed. Can you tell us about this this 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 Kushim, 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's thick and soupy, isn't it?

Exactly. It's a poca straw. Yeah. Exactly. But it was high calorie, so high energy and cleanish fluids because water wasn't always clean. So it was a really good way to pay people. Particularly alcoholic, presumably? Probably not too alcoholic and probably not very tasty, I'm guessing. Right. 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 area 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 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. a slightly drunk texting. So we have hundreds of thousands of, you know, I was a medieval historian by training and I used to complain that we had too many documents, but you have hundreds of thousands of Kinoform 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 you can get windows onto people's working lives

But you can also get windows on to what lullaby is they saying to their babies or what did they write to their far-flung husbands? What did they observe in the night sky? What sort of astronomical leaps did they make? It's just, it's, it's just so moving what I was gonna ask are these good reads? Are they real tablet turners? I think so. That's amazing. 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, I mean, you know, they were pretty good record keepers too. So it can, it can be borderline sort of dry where you're reading about like a forestry institution in the city of Ooma and what classes of laborers were working and the familial lines on that. 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, storytelling. Which is arguably the first great story. It's the earliest great literature in human history that was recorded. And we have it because of Keneafol. Exactly. And do you 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, he's still not finished.

He's like, I'm waiting. Something we do have which is really charming and quite interesting, we have a series of letters between a wife and a merchant husband who are in different cities. And they're writing to each other. What do you imagine they're writing to each other, Phil? Things like, how are you? Good trip? You get in alright? That must have been something like that. How's the journey? How's the journey? Yeah, how's the journey? Must have been something like that. Yeah. How's the journey? And then he's writing about how the kids, how's the barley? I mean, he must have been there for a while if there was time for them to have a clay tablet exchange, right? I feel like there's more drama in these tablets, Moody. Oh, yes. Oh, yes.

They did write about barley too, but they also shouted at each other a little bit. So who are our protagonists? Is it Inaya? Inaya, he's the husband and he's living in Anatolia, which is what is now Turkey, where there is a major trading hub, like an international trading hub called Kanish. And he moved there essentially to handle trade. And then his wife, Taram Kuppi, 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 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 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 it's about like it's a little dramatic. Because of you, the whole city is starving. It's amazing, you never think of these old forms of writing being able to convey such emotion, you know, such nuance or anger even. I've always thought of them as very specific numbers, dates, names. They're not like feelings, not emotion. Well, as I said a Kineer film was developed as an accountancy system in 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 dis? 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, so about 2000 to 1600 BCE, where many of the wives stayed behind in Asher, made these textiles for onward sale, essentially, in Kanishk, which was about five weeks away on donkey and not exactly an untreaturous 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 they're not getting

the money back. Yeah so and they're doing a lot of work so kind of. Meanwhile Inayar is in Turkey having a great time. Yeah, having a blast. Maybe even taking a second wife. I was going to 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. 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 wedges exactly it's like those you know wobbly kind of fingerprints smudged on finger space finger space finger space yeah triangle stands for cat yeah triangle

stands for dog but yeah all the way up to, you know, quite advanced math and, um, Sumerian literature, GCSES, fake contracts, everything. So there were schools and kids were taught, couldn't they film at school? Yeah, they were. Yeah. And then you also get glimpses into like how frustrating it might've been to be a student because there's one tablet with a bite mark in it. Like maybe a 12 year old.

They do look like sourdough. Like. Yeah, like maybe a 12 year old. They do look like sourdough, like I said. So, I might just be in an honest mistake. Just a very hungry student. And then some doodles as well. There's one that's 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.

Oh yes. I feel like clay bake, tray bake. That's the third week in the series. That's Pruleth trying out one of the... Yeah, exactly. Just breaking a tooth on it. That's been overproofed, I think. 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 they, it gets kind of, you know, heated at times. What language do they speak and what language are they writing in if they're training to be scribes? So they were probably speaking Akkadian at home, because by the time House F exists, Sumerian is a dead language. 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 he could go and become 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 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 like to what extent Aramaic borrows from Akkadian okay but it was at one point simultaneous and people were bilingual in Aramaic and Akkadian. 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 But they're still learning Sumerian scribes. Yes, you're learning a dead dead language by that point. It's like so dead Yeah, and they're 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've got bad news. news because it was a sign from the gods that the king was going to die. For example. Sorry, sorry. I've got bad news. They did have a workaround though, so they would get a substitute to be in the king's place for a couple of months and then that person would live like a king and then be killed.

Oh really? Just to be absolutely sure. They'd swap in a peasant body double. Yeah. I know, it was brutal. Would you take that? Would you mean two months living as a king if you know you're gonna die at the end? Yes

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. 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 it was that, you know, I'd take that. Two months in heaven and then death. Yeah. So you can imagine why it was so important for the, you know, 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 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 see what they spell out yeah exactly if they spell out s.o.s. it's like oh oh this spell out king dead you go oh not this again all right who wants two months in paradise no, the sheep has to die here. Oh, entrails. Yeah

Isn't it the end they're looking at the liver? But what's what I find really interesting is the 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 has to be a yes or no question It couldn't just be like what's gonna happen tomorrow. Okay. It has to be a yes or no question. It couldn't just be like, what's going to happen tomorrow? It has to be, well, I recover from, you know, this journey or whatever. Yeah, they went crazy. 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... So do livers. So do livers, yeah. And the livers, even sometimes called the tablet of the gods, where the gods leave their messages. Yeah, so writing was kind of, it permeated their entire world. In astronomical phenomena we're also the heavenly writing is the movement of the planets. You said that cuneiform 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 cuneiform is like what 79 CE? That's exactly right. The last dat latest cuneiform is like what 79 CE that's exactly right the last datable cuneiform tablet so datable is from 79 or 80 CE which is the year for Suvius erupted so yes which so so incident I was gonna say maybe the volcano after anyone like that I feel like this is a sign let's just put down the cuneiform move on and what I love is it's also from Uruk. Yeah. So it started in Uruk and I mean we don't know. Oh the last one was also from Uruk. Okay so that's amazing. So it's a stable technology.

It changes a little bit over the time in terms of the font, in terms of how it's written but you can still read it through that time. Yeah it's pretty easy to read. That's amazing. And so Akkadian then is followed by Aramaic, followed by Persian, followed by other languages, and off we go. There's one more thing to mention. Phil, as our expert philologist here, what do you think the cruciform monument of Manushtushu

was? Oh no. I was just reading about this. You're sick of hearing, aren't you? The cruciform? The cruciform monument of Manushtushu. So cruciform means, is that a cross? Okay monument of mana to shoe

It's a big Uh, 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. That's not bad. Yeah, it is a big T, but it's only about this big. Oh, it's mini T. Yeah, I feel like monument kind of overplays the size of it. It's a monument. So it's about a foot tall.

Yeah. OK. 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. Yeah. 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 cuneiform. 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 century, I think it's the sixth century or the six hundreds BC, 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 Manushtushu, 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 a Christian cross. Well, it's just, yeah, it's just the random shape. 600 BC. Yeah. Oh, BC. That's what I was going to say. Okay. I probably should have said that. All shape. Or 600 BC. Yeah. Oh, BC. That's what I was going to say.

I probably should have said that. All my dates are in BC. It's like the era of the Persian, it's the 6th century BC, so it's in the 500s BC, and it's them claiming fake ancestry, saying, no, no, we've been here for like 1800 years. And it's a brand new, it's like dipping it in like, when you were a kid and you had to make an old document and you dipped it in tea to make it look old. It's that. Exactly that. And so you said it's cross-shaped documents, 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. Ah. You had to impress it. Yeah, really good. I got it. Yeah, so you now know about cuneiform.

Yeah, I can speak cuneiform. No, no, you can't speak it. It's not a language. I feel like Neo. Start again. Start. I'm like Neo when he says, I know kung fu. Yeah.

I know cuneiform. You know cuneiform. I can speak I know Kung Fu. Yeah. I know Kinaeiform. You know Kinaeiform? I can speak it very fluently. No! I don't know why you have such 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 Laatubashini was sold into slavery by marriage by her adoptive mother, Chamaia. This marriage was financed by a third party, presumably to secure access to the children, who would be born of the forced union and who would have had the same legal status as their mother. It's a harrowing story, but remarkably, around 560 BCE, Laa Thubashini was emancipated from her slave status, and her first official act as a freedwoman was to fight for the freedom of her children.

On 29 October of 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 Ardya. 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 Latubashini 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. Thanks so much. So what do you know now? This is our quickfire quiz for Phil to see how much he's learned. I should have written more notes. I've just written Sumerian. I have to say that is quite, there's not many triangles on that page. How you feeling? Confident? As always happens when I'm on this 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. All right, we've got 10 questions. Historically, you're very good at these quizzes. I believe in you. OK, 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. 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. Yes, 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 a seriology? Rawlinson.

It was Henry Rawlinson. Well done, well remembered. Question four. What are the earliest surviving cuneiform tablets about? Our earliest name person in history possibly. Oh, oh, oh, a brewer, a beer maker. Yeah, that's it, beer, absolutely. 135,000 liters of beer. I'm doing my best. It's a lot of beer. Big 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 has 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 teeth marks as well.

The child was hungry. Question seven, can you name one of the languages written in cuneiform? Akkadian. Very good. We could have Sumerian, old Persian, Alawite, Hittite, Hurrian. But you went with Akkadian, which I think is a good one.

Question eight, what is the cruciform monument of Manushtushu? Your favorite. 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, yeah,

we claim to be absolutely right. Question nine, the Royal Library of Nineveh was created by King Ashurbanipal, 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! Well done Moody for teaching him because that was really 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 about these ancient people 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 there's so much sort of life and drama that we would recognize today. Yeah, it's so proper stuff, isn't it?

It's a husband and wife arguing, it's a mom trying to get her kids back, it's a boss saying, where's my order? It's not end time. It's really, it's proper human life. Yeah, it really is. I love it. It's you know a boss saying where's my with my order. It's not in time. It's really it's 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 your knowledge and wisdom and comedy Oh, thanks for having me. It's been fascinating. It's been great and listen up 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 Yeah, it's a varied curriculum. I feel like we're training you for some sort of purpose. I don't know what enormous battle yes exactly and Remember if you've enjoyed the podcast Please share the show with your friends subscribe to your dead to on BBC Sounds, where you will hear the show a month before it arrives on other platforms. So there we go. There's a bonus for you. And switch on your

sounds notifications too, so you never miss an episode. I'd just like to say a huge thank you to our guests in History Corner. We had the marvelous Dr. Moody Al Rashid from the University of Oxford. Thank you, Moody. Thank you for having me. It's been a pleasure and in Comedy Corner. As ever, we have the fantastic Philology Wang. Thank you, Phil. Thank you for using my full name. It's been a pleasure. And to you lovely listener, join me next time

as we decode another message from the past. But for now, I'm off to go and carve an emoji, inscribe Rosetta Stone to help future archeologists, and it's gonna 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 M. Euro's Price Goodfellow, Emma Naguse and me. The audio producer was Steve Hankey and our production coordinator was Ben Hollands. It was produced by Emma Euro's Price Goodfellow, me and senior producer Emma Naguse and our

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