Tweet

@Oracctivity

More from @Moudhy

Dr. Moudhy Al-Rashid

@Moudhy

23 Jan

@gregjenner

Thank you so much to the incredible @gregjenner and his team for having me on "You're Dead to Me" and to @kaekurd for being so hilarious and bringing Gilgamesh the restaurant into my life!

Here’s a thread of some of the stuff referenced in the podcast for those interested

First of all, what even is cuneiform?

It’s a writing system from the ancient Middle East, used to write several languages like Sumerian and Akkadian. Cuneiform signs can stand for whole words or syllables. Here’s a little primer of its evolution sites.utexas.edu/dsb/tokens/the…

What kinds of texts was cuneiform used to write?

Initially, accounting records and lists.

Eventually, literature, astronomy, medicine, maps, architectural plans, omens, letters, contracts, law collections, and more.

Read 23 tweets

Dr. Moudhy Al-Rashid

@Moudhy

30 Nov 20

Good morning! Ancient Babylonians sometimes paid other people to do their laundry for them.

"The dirty clothes that Shaddinnu has given (me) for cleaning, I will clean the dirty clothes by the 10th day of the month Arahsamna and return them to Shaddinnu"

A handful of clay tablets from Uruk, Babylon, and Borsippa in the middle of the first millennium BCE record contracts for doing laundry.

"Ina-teshi-etir, the washerman...will clean and whiten the whites of the house of Nabû-shumu-ukin", for which he gets paid 1 shekel per year

Akkadian word of the day is zikûtu "laundry" because why not

Read 8 tweets

Dr. Moudhy Al-Rashid

@Moudhy

17 Nov 20

“Will there be a vaccine in 2020?” is a question I wish I could have asked an ancient Babylonian or Assyrian seer in March to assuage anxiety, manage expectations, or make decisions.

Thread on using the organs of sheep to answer specifically worded questions a long time ago

Nature was a clay tablet to the diviner in ancient Mesopotamia. The gods inscribed signs in astronomical phenomena, animal behaviour, plant life, oil, smoke, human physiology, dreams, and animal exta to be read by diviners.

The liver was sometimes called the tablet of the gods.

There is a fancy word in English for liver divination that took me ~3 years to learn to spell: extispicy.

In ancient Mesopotamia, this was the job of the bārû, "seer" or "diviner". A person trained for a Very Long Time to learn to read signs inscribed on the entrails of sheep

Read 21 tweets

Dr. Moudhy Al-Rashid

@Moudhy

26 Jul 20

As we begin to bid farewell to NEOWISE, I want to take a moment to remember the comets that found their way into cuneiform tablets thousands of years ago, and the people who may have felt the same sense of wonder some of us did when looking at the night sky this July.

The Akkadian word for comet is ṣallammû, or ṣallummû. It appears in cuneiform texts from ancient Babylonia that record centuries of observed astronomical phenomena.

AFAIK, these "Astronomical Diaries" are the longest-running dataset for such phenomena from the ancient world

“the comet which previously had been seen in the east in the path of Anu in the area of Pleiades and Taurus, to the west…and passed along in the path of Ea”

The comet known as Halley’s Comet is described in a Babylonian Astronomical Diary from 164 BCE oracc.iaas.upenn.edu/adsd/adart3/X3…

Read 11 tweets

Dr. Moudhy Al-Rashid

@Moudhy

17 Jun 20

What survives of the past is things, so it's easy to forget the people behind them whose lives, loves, worries, and wants might not have been so different from ours.

Thread of letters from ancient Mesopotamia as a random reminder of our shared humanity

Work anxiety is nothing new.

In the 7th century BCE, a physician named Nabu-tabni-usur found himself an outcast in the king's court and lamented to his royal patron, "If the king knows a fault committed by me, let the king not keep me alive...I am dying of a broken heart!"

An exorcist named Urad-Gula in the court of king Esarhaddon was "dying of a broken heart" after falling out of favour.

The head exorcist, who was Urad-Gula's father, wrote to the king to ask that the "shattered" scholar be reinstated. A 3,000-year-old diplomatic, fatherly moment

Read 15 tweets

Dr. Moudhy Al-Rashid

@Moudhy

8 Jun 20

“To turn a man into a woman and a woman into a man are yours, Inana,” reads a 4,000-year-old temple hymn to Inana, the Sumerian goddess of love and war.

Non-binary gender identities are not new. Brief thread in response to that one Karen etcsl.orinst.ox.ac.uk/section4/tr407…

Ishtar, the later Mesopotamian goddess of love and war, had gender fluid characterstics. Ashurbanipal’s hymn to Ishtar of Nineveh compares her to the god Ashur.

“Like Ashur she wears a beard and is clothed with brilliance...The crown on her head gleams like the stars”

Gender fluid identity appears throughout Mesopotamian history, like that of the assinnu, a word sometimes written as a combination of the cuneiform signs for “man” and “woman”.

They served as cultic personnel to Ishtar and even as prophets, like one named Šēlebum in Mari

Read 7 tweets

Share this page!

Dr. Moudhy Al-Rashid

Try unrolling a thread yourself!

More from @Moudhy

Dr. Moudhy Al-Rashid

Dr. Moudhy Al-Rashid

Dr. Moudhy Al-Rashid

Dr. Moudhy Al-Rashid

Dr. Moudhy Al-Rashid

Dr. Moudhy Al-Rashid

Did Thread Reader help you today?

Like this author's thread?