Thread by @Eleanor_Robson

Yes! Look what was waiting when I got to work today!

Thank you SO much to @UCLpress for the effortless editorial process & beautiful end result 💐

Grab an #openaccess copy or order your print edition in the link below while I tell you why I think my book matters (THREAD)

https://twitter.com/uclpress/status/1194933219491303424

Headline news: in antiquity, just as now, knowledge was both social & political: it didn’t just exist but shaped, and was shaped by, the people who created, used, rejected & adapted it in large & small ways. Facts, methods & theories have histories & geographies just like we do

These histories and geographies are particularly visible in cuneiform culture of the ancient Middle East (to c.50 BC) because many clay cuneiform tablets are excavated archaeological artefacts,* so we have 1000s of autograph manuscripts which we can locate & date very precisely

*Unfortunately, many other cuneiform tablets were either dug up by antiquarians in the 19th century, before archaeological recording methods existed or were considered important; or were deliberately & illegally looted in more recent times. Problematic in SO many ways....

Huge questions of ethics & legality apart, unprovenanced cuneiform tablets are almost worthless for the type of research I’ve done for the past 20 years, as TABLETS ARE PORTABLE so dates & locations written on them only inform us about production, not use or abandonment

So it’s REALLY ODD, at least to me, that no-one before has taken full advantage of tablets’ rich archaeological context, in combination with the material and textual evidence of the objects themselves, to do much micro-history with them, never mind macro-geographies.

To be fair, it’s taken me 14 1/2 years, including a four-year @ahrcpress-funded research project at @CambridgeHPS and many, many collaborators. It’s been a stupidly large project and in retrospect I was a bit mad to do it. But so glad I did!

Oracc.org/cams/gkab

So, back to the book. In Chapter 1 I say a bit about how I think history - and - philosophy of science approaches are useful for cuneiform studies (and why I try to avoid the word Mesopotamia... don’t @ me, just read). There’s a more coherent overview of the book’s argument too

Chapter 2 asks WHY hasn’t anyone done this before? Two answers: 1. King Ashurbanipal’s famous “library” in 7th cent BC Nineveh, discovered in the 1840s and therefore still dominates — but turns out to be a) really weird and b) not a library

2. A famous, mid-20th-century concept in cuneiform studies: “the stream of tradition”, which suggested knowledge flowed effortlessly & unchangingly down the centuries and across the cuneiform world. Ironically this has become residues as fact, not a theory

[oh how I hate auto-correct! Reified, not residues]

Anyway, you can read why I think these concepts should be trashed — or, better, archived in their historical moment — and I set out some ideas from history of books & sociology & geography of science that have helped me rethink

Short version: Bruno Latour, David Livingstone, Robert Darnton all help us think about networks of people, artefacts, writings — & deities, I add — move around & interact to create & recreate knowledge to address particular needs & interests

[I’m going to pause here as my train-commute home is ending and this is getting rather longer than planned. Back later!]

So, where was I? Ah yes, Chapter 3 is where the fun starts. To keep things simple, I focus on five erudite literate professions of cuneiform culture: the asû & āšipu (types of healer), the bārû & ṭupšar Enūma Anu Ellil (types of diviner) and kalû (lamenter) in the 1st mill BC

I'm also interested in the scholars' human & divine patrons: royal families and their entourages; temples and their priestly communities; private clientele. Chs 3–4 cover Assyria, c.880–610 BC; chs 5–6 look at Babylonia, c.650–50 BC, tracking change over time & local variation

Ch 3 charts the increasing importance of cuneiform scholarship to Assyrian imperial ideology & practice, along with worship of Nabu, god of wisdom, over 2 centuries, followed by its sudden collapse in the reign of Ashurbanipal. We'll come back to this...

I'm a bit obsessed by Nabu's temples in Assyrian imperial centres: their scale, layout & decor tell us as much about the changing relationship between king, god & scholarship as any textual evidence. Here's a classic reconstruction of my favourite, from Nimrud, south of Mosul

Ch 4 stays in Assyria, looking at abundant micro-geographical evidence for *where* different types of royal scholars practiced, how they moved about the empire, &—most importantly—how members of the same professions were systematically excluded from imperial knowledge production

This abundance of imperial documentation comes from a 30-year period, c.670–640 BC, a generation before the final rout of the Assyrian empire in the 610s BC. This is no coincidence.

Perhaps you saw this👇today. Systems collapse is multi-causal & complex

theguardian.com/science/2019/n…

Whatever the reasons for institutional failure, in the cuneiform world, failing institutions typically left behind a generation or so's worth of records: Miguel Civil showed this 40 years ago for the Third Dynasty of Ur in the 21st cent BC & now we can see other examples

While scholars & others in 'ordinary' Assyrian cities continued to write in cuneiform right until the invaders came in the late 7th cent, we can precisely track the abandonment of cuneiform for imperial purposes in the 640s, along with a retreat from provincial governance

This takes place immediately after Ashurbanipal's devastating civil war with his brother Shamash-shumu-ukin, ruler of Babylon, in 652-648 BC. It must have bankrupted both & brought in no revenue, unlike previous conquests of new territories

Why does this matter to our story? Because it means that Ashurbanipal's "library", accrued to monopolise access to scholarly knowledge, was abandoned long before Nineveh was sacked in 612. The very fact that its tablets are available to us mean that they were LOST to antiquity.

I estimate *very roughly* that about 1/2 of written scholarly knowledge of the 7th cent BC was buried in Nineveh. We know cuneiform scholarship died out in the Assyrian empire; I argue that Ashurbanipal's imperial collecting/looting almost did for Babylonian scholarship too

Stealing a term from evolutionary biology, I say that the end of Ashurbanipal's patronage of cuneiform scholarship was a "survival bottleneck event". That is, it almost died out, but managed to recover, though only in Babylonia, c.650–520 BC. That takes us nicely to Chapters 5-6

Deep breath... Down south to Babylonia, southern Iraq, where the evidence set is different—an important historical fact in itself—so we can't tell an exactly parallel story. But I try. So Ch 5 again charts the long relationship between king, Nabu & scholarship. It's not the same!

Simply put, for Babylonian kings, Nabu is NEVER god of wisdom; he's the divine crown prince, son of dynastic god Marduk. And Babylonian scholars do not universally embrace Nabu as in Assyria. But kings love scholars & vice versa—or they do until king Cyrus comes to town in 539 BC

When Cyrus conquers Babylon, he needs the support of the local elite, i.e., the families that run the big temples & supply them & the court with scholars. So he over-promises and within 20 years it's all gone horribly wrong. Babylonians feel SO betrayed. They rebel & rebel again

As Caroline Waerzeggers showed 15 years ago, by 484 BC the Persians had had enough of revolting Babylonians and systematically removed the troublemakers (we don't know how exactly but it can't have been pretty). Some temple communities collapsed completely; loyalists were fine

The Persians couldn't allow Marduk's temple in Babylon to fail completely — they needed its tax income — so they disempowered it instead.

So that's the end of royal patronage of cuneiform scholarship; temples & scholars depend increasingly to local worshippers, private clientele

Somehow this reinvention works, at least in some places, and cuneiform scholarship, related to temples in complex ways, hangs on until the mid-1st century BC. But asû-healers and bārû-diviners don't make the cut. Their writings survive as heritage but the professions disappear

I also focus on how scholars in 4th-3rd cent Uruk react to the loss of royal patronage. On the face of it they thrive on local support—their new Resh temple dwarfs Marduk's temple in Babylon—but boy, are they furious! Yet they hope that one day they'll get the king they deserve

Chapter 6 digs into the micro-geographies of this grand narrative: where did different scholarly professions operate in Babylonia, before & after this second survival bottleneck of 520-484 BC? Which cities? In and/or out of temples? For how long? How far did knowledge travel?

It's no news to specialists that the last surviving cuneiform-literate communities were in Babylon & Uruk. But does this reflect historical reality or the happenstance of archaeological discovery? I think, by tracing shrinking communication networks, that I can show it's real

Finally, Chap 7 (no coincidence! cuneiform scholars loved the 7 as the smallest co-prime integer to 60—but that's a story from an earlier book) draws out some implications for historical practice. I won't bore you with that here but talk about what writing this book has led me to

1. The cuneiform-editorial work needed in the first phases of this project led me, @yennits & others to create @opencuneiform, back in 2010. It's grown like Topsy since!

I've made a little corpus of all the cuneiform texts featured in the book at

oracc.org/cams/akno

@yennits @opencuneiform 2. Thinking hard about social & political geographies of knowledge production in antiquity led me to think about them in modern times too. So in 2013-2015 another @ahrcpress project focused on the Assyrian city of Kalhu/Nimrud in antiquity & modernity: oracc.org/nimrud

@yennits @opencuneiform @ahrcpress 3. And that more or less led to what I'm mostly doing now: directing @NahreinNetwork, which seeks to redress the geographical balance of knowledge production about the Iraqi past, bringing Iraq itself back in.

Relatedly, @uclrcsoftdev is making @opencuneiform Arabic-friendly

@yennits @opencuneiform @ahrcpress @NahreinNetwork @uclrcsoftdev 4. I'm also (slowly) finishing editorial work on 150 cuneiform tablets excavated in 2013-17 from @eanasir's Tell Khaiber project in southern Iraq. A different millennium, a very different socio-political & intellectual context, a tweet-storm for another day...

@yennits @opencuneiform @ahrcpress @NahreinNetwork @uclrcsoftdev @EaNasir 5. Finally, I've promised @HoZ_Books that I'll write a short book called The library: from Ashurbanipal to Alexandria and beyond. I've also promised that it will take considerably less than 14 1/2 years from proposal to delivery! Watch this space... /END