In ancient Assyria, scholars wrote questions in clay about events to come for divine eyes.

The god Shamash would leave his reply in the entrails of an animal to be read by a trained seer.

There are 300+ of these.

Only 2 ask Shamash to overlook that they were written by a woman “The rumour of an insurrection that was reported to Ashurbanipal…is it decreed and confirmed? Will it happen? Is it true? Will they catch me? Will I die? Will they capture me in the course of it?”

Maybe a woman close to king Ashurbanipal posed the questions to the god Shamash?

The Epic of Gilgamesh tells the story of king Gilgamesh’s quest for eternal life. Tucked within his epic story is another tale told by the oldest man in the world, Uta-napishti.

It’s a story of the Flood and its survivors.

The description of the storm itself is really something Even a cataclysmic flood begins with a calm-before-the-storm.

"The deathly hush of Adad passed across the sky. All that was bright turned to darkness. He trampled the land like an ox...."

The first moments of the flood described in the Gilgamesh Epic feature the storm god, Adad

Some really old stuff to start the week. Ancient bricks may seem boring, but there is more to them than mud and straw.

A short thread with a plot twist at the end about these building blocks of life in ancient Mesopotamia from my book, Between Two River. Bricks in ancient Mesopotamia were sometimes stamped with cuneiform signs using an ancient precursor to a printing press.

A mould with a cuneiform inscription on it, including the name of the king behind construction work, was pressed into wet mud bricks to save time and effort

Some jokes and humour on clay tablets from ancient Mesopotamia to brighten your day.

It's hard to know what would have made people laugh so long ago, but literature, folktales, and proverbs are full of examples of what we find pretty funny. This story where a Babylonian jester makes up fake, gross menus to parody an elaborate feast.

Ingredients include dog poop, donkey butts, and the very specific egg of a goose from a chicken coop on a sand bed.

If it looks like there are two different fonts on this clay tablet from ancient Babylon, that’s because there are.

In December 603 BCE, a young scribe named Balāṭa made a faithful copy of a far more ancient inscription of Sîn-Kashid who had ruled Uruk over 1,000 years earlier. The top part of this tablet is an inscription in the Sumerian language, dead for centuries by the time Balāṭa the junior scribe made this copy of it.

The signs are larger and reflect an older “font”. Was he copying from an original that was over 1,000 years old to him?

How to make glass in ancient Assyria. First, you grind your ingredients separately, which can include certain stones, roasted carnelian-coloured seashells, “white plant”, and salicornia ashes. Then “You mix them together” and place them in a cold kiln with four openings “You burn a good, smokeless fire. You remove the (glass) as soon as it (begins to) turn white. You cool it off and grind it down.” Several stages in the production of glass, as described in a broken clay tablet from the Library of Ashurbanipal.

I am often moved by how cuneiform tablets give glimpses into the lives of everyday people.

One of my favourites is of a physician name Rabâ-sha-Marduk who lived in the 1200s BCE. This medical therapy for headaches ("seizing of the temple") is signed by him A receipt for "high quality dates...for his sacrifice" names a healer or physician named Rabâ-sha-Marduk.

The tablet is tiny and covered in fingerprints. It feels like a rushed, messy record of a transaction, but one that leaves behind a name of someone we know did medicine

In this ancient Assyrian letter, astronomers complain they can’t do their jobs or teach astronomy “because of the ilku-duty”, a type of taxation in the form of labour.

“we cannot keep the watch of the king, and the pupils do not learn the scribal craft” cdli.mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de/artifacts/3342…
Astronomers in ancient Assyria were sometimes exempt from performing the “ilku”, or tax in the form of labour, and that wasn’t always a good thing.

Those excused from state-mandated labour to carry on their scholarship in service of the king sometimes faced violence.

In the ruins of the ancient Babylonian city of Isin lie the 3,000-year-old remains of a temple to the healing goddess Gula.

She was the patron goddess of physicians who wielded a scalpel and a bandage, and her companion was a trusted, pointy-eared dog. Beneath a long ramp or platform in the healing goddess’ temple precinct in ancient Isin, 33 dogs were laid to rest.

Their remains show no evidence of ritual sacrifice, but some did have severe injuries that healed during their lifetimes. Many were puppies.

Today, I’d like to introduce you to a woman named Lā-tubāšinni (pronounced La-tubashinni) who fought for her children in Babylon in October of 560 BCE Although details of her early life are murky, she may have been adopted only to eventually be sold by her adoptive mother, Hammaya, into marriage.

This marriage-by-purchase might be how she ended up a slave.

Source: Cornelia Wunsch 1998 academia.edu/734422/_1997_9…

did the Sumerians invent the wheel?

i have no idea, but here’s a thread on the history of the wheel in ancient Mesopotamia because the possible answers are unsurprisingly really interesting there are a few places to look for early evidence of the wheel (or anything really), like…

1. archaeological evidence, or an actual wheel
2. written evidence, or textual references to a wheel
3. art, or depictions of the wheel

all three are attested for ancient Mesopotamia

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

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.

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.

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…

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…

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

“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.

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

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!"

“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”