Now that summer is coming to a close for me, it's time to jump more fully into my dissertation work, a project I'm calling "Secrecy, Protection, and the Foundations of Knowledge in Ancient Mesopotamia." Strap in for another thread no one asked for on literal ancient secrets.
Sometimes tucked into scholarly cuneiform tablets we get "secrecy statements" in the form of warnings to keep the information for the mūdû, the one who knows, and away from lā mūdû, the one who does not know. So far, a pattern among these tablets has been elusive.
Adding to the mystery are a series of tablets communicating information entirely through the use of numbers. The numbers are sometimes replacements for single words and sometimes replacements for entire phrases. At least as far as we think...
Building on the work of Gadd, Hunger, and @pearcele, I will take a closer look at tablets like this one that record omens with the first half of each sentence written in numbers. Rather than try to crack the code, I want to know what happens to knowledge concealed in this way. 
But how does information communicated via numbers intersect with other oddities of cryptography in Mesopotamia? One of the most famous examples is the symbolic way Esarhaddon represented his name on the top of this black inscribed stone.
Remember those acrostic poems you wrote in elementary school? Cuneiform scribes did those too! Take a look at this example from a prayer where the scribe uses the first and last signs of each line to tell us who he was.
And to bring the ends of this circle together, scribes also used numbers as ways to represent their names in the spaces at the end of tablets. Take this example, TCL 06, 51 cdli.ucla.edu/search/archiva…
So what do these numbers mean? Sometimes the scribes from later periods do their best to tell us, or at least give us a hint. In a commentary edited by @pearcele, we see a scribe quoting number omen texts and providing an explanation ccp.yale.edu/P461117
In conjunction with written forms of secrecy, I will also be questioning the significance of the possible connection between secret writing and public writing that has been concealed. Particularly, foundation deposits will be the focus of this part of the dissertation.
What about secrecy helps us understand how knowledge is constructed? How is knowledge construction like a physical building? These are just some of the questions I hope to answer. Knowledge has a source and knowledge has its keepers. So, what happens to it when we keep it away?
Some have argued that these secrets are the result of scribal play. But let's take a page out of @cjcrisostomo's book, Translation as Scholarship. Scribal play is normative and happens in texts all over Mesopotamia. So, it's time to dig deeper into secrecy, playful or not.
