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Dr. Moudhy Al-Rashid Profile picture
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15 Jul, 9 tweets, 4 min read
A clay tablet made by a young scribal student who was practicing the "A" sign 𒀀 over and over again at school almost 4,000 years ago in Babylonia.

Be still my heart 🥺
A Babylonian scribal student practicing the sign "DINGIR" 𒀭 which looks like a star sometime between 2000 and 1600 BCE
This Babylonian student got bored and drew a doodle on his school exercise tablet ~4,000 years ago in Iraq
This Babylonian student left his now almost 4,000-year-old fingerprints on what looks like maybe a math exercise text from ancient Iraq
Compare this work of a young Babylonian scribal student practicing signs with that of a seasoned student writing out a mock lawsuit in cuneiform 🥺🥺
A Babylonian artist in the making several millennia ago in a scribal school in what is now Iraq.

On one side of a clay tablet, there are writing exercises and on the other side, this lovely drawing of a fish and a goat (I think) 🧡
I love these so much 🧡
All of these Babylonian school tablets are from the UCLA special collections, and you can peruse them here oac.cdlib.org/findaid/ark:/1…
I somehow broke the thread so here’s the rest of it, complete with kids’ fingerprints and drawings

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More from @Moudhy

Dr. Moudhy Al-Rashid Profile picture
2 May
Many of you may have heard of Hammurabi's "Law Code", often (incorrectly) called the earliest collection of laws recorded on a 4,000-year-old diorite monument.

But why is this incorrect, what is this extremely cool artefact about, and what do we still not know about it?
The monument that records Hammurabi's Laws is not the earliest collection of legal provisions.

Three centuries earlier, during the best-documented period of history in ancient Iraq, a ruler named Ur-Nammu (or Namma) had laws written out in the Sumerian language.
"If a man presents himself as a witness but is demonstrated to be a perjurer, he shall weigh and deliver 15 shekels of silver."

Written in Sumerian, the Laws of Ur-Nammu date to around 2100 BCE, but many have not survived.
Read 13 tweets
Dr. Moudhy Al-Rashid Profile picture
2 Apr
In 235 BCE, a boy named Aristocrates was born, and someone made predictions about his life based on where the sun, moon, and planets were in the sky.

“Venus was in 4° Taurus. The place of Venus (means) he will find favour wherever he goes.”
“The moon was in 12° Aquarius. His days will be long.”

According to his horoscope, Anu-belshunu was born on December 29, 248 BCE some time in the evening, probably in Uruk. I just love that we know that about him.
Only ~30 horoscopes survive from ancient Babylonia, and they all contain similar info in a similar order.

Date and time of birth. Positions of the sun, moon, and planets in the zodiac. Eclipses that year. Solstice and equinox data. Sometimes, a prediction.
Read 10 tweets
Dr. Moudhy Al-Rashid Profile picture
26 Jan
Calculation of the area of a trapezoid by a student from ancient Babylonia.

Three of the sides are labelled with numbers, and the area is written out in the centre in the sexagesimal notation system as 5,3,20 𒐊 𒁹𒁹𒁹 𒌋𒌋 (= 5 and 1/18th, I think)
Possibly a Babylonian approximation of pi reflected in this drawing of a circle with inscribed numbers.

Read more about it here, including a computational explanation and further biblio history-of-mathematics.org/artifacts/baby…
A school tablet with calculations of the areas of squares with the teacher’s neat copy on one side (left) and a student’s slightly messier work on the other (right). Can you spot the number 9 inside the innermost square? 𒑆

Photo by Klaus Wagensonner collections.peabody.yale.edu/search/Record/…
Read 9 tweets
Dr. Moudhy Al-Rashid Profile picture
23 Jan
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 Profile picture
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 Profile picture
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

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