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willismonroe Profile picture
willismonroe
@willismonroe
Assyriologist, History of Science/Religion, Postdoc at UBC.
Dec 15, 2020 • 7 tweets • 3 min read
The art of burying the bad news is as ancient as cuneiform writing...

A Neo-Babylonian letter features a son regaling his father with platitudes and wishes for good health, but turns out he's buttering him up for a big ask... The letter opens with very traditional greetings and wishes for good health. The son, named Marduk-nadin-ahhe, offers a favor to his father, named Nabu-ah-iddin.
Oct 24, 2020 • 7 tweets • 4 min read
Just a quick update, thanks to a reference provided by @ElizabethKnott4, a recent article by Sebastiano Soldi in the Metropolitan Museum Journal volume 52 provides a bit more contextual evidence for these objects: doi-org.ezproxy.library.ubc.ca/10.1086/696544 Soldi rightly connects these "clay hands" with the long tradition of clay decorative elements in architecture stretching all the way back to the Late Uruk period (late 4th mil BCE). The walls of the E-anna temple were covered in small decorative pegs inserted into the brickwork.
Oct 23, 2020 • 9 tweets • 3 min read
Hands of Ishtar, a rather interesting and enigmatic Assyrian object are making the rounds on Twitter today. I wanted to show a couple cool examples of these objects from different places in Mesopotamia to illustrate one aspect of imperial architecture.

To begin, these objects are often called "Hands of Ishtar" named because they clearly are modeled on clay hands often with clearly delineated fingers sometimes even with fingernails (and example from the British Museum): britishmuseum.org/collection/obj…
Aug 28, 2020 • 14 tweets • 5 min read
Why is the 13th zodiac sign a perennial mystery? I thought it'd be fun to do a thread on the history of the zodiac and how we actually know where these invisible divisions of the sky start and end... (Image of VAT 7851 with the moon and the zodiac sign Taurus) This was prompted by an article in Vice back in July (vice.com/en_in/article/…) which links to an older post by NASA (spaceplace.nasa.gov/starfinder2/en/) which is good but I have minor quibbles with... In any case neither answers the question of how we know where the signs are in the sky...
Jun 20, 2020 • 9 tweets • 3 min read
It's the longest day of the year, also known as the summer solstice. People have been measuring the length of the day for thousands of years in order to identify when solstices and equinoxes occur, not surprisingly some of our best evidence comes from Mesopotamia... This thread concerns an Old-Babylonian tablet from the British Museum (BM 17175+17284) dated to sometime in the first half of the 2nd millennium BCE, over three and a half thousand years ago!
Oct 18, 2019 • 9 tweets • 3 min read
How did messengers travel safely between ancient empires? A few tablets from the Amarna archives (14th c. BCE) provide evidence for early letters which functioned as passports, ensuring safe travel for the bearer of the message as they traveled across long distances. The tablet above is BM 29841 or El-Amarna number 30. It's a document written by the king of Mitanni to anyone encountering the holder on their way to Egypt. The tablet is now held in the British Museum: britishmuseum.org/research/colle…
Sep 23, 2019 • 19 tweets • 6 min read
As @moudhy noted (in an amazing thread) it's the autumnal equinox. In this thread I want to show how ancient Mesopotamian scholars determined this and prove that you too can read ancient cuneiform astronomical texts... The first things to note is that cuneiform numbers are *easy*. It's a sexegesimal (base-60) system with "one" and "ten" markers. There's no place value markers so you just have to infer that from context (but it's usually apparent).
Jan 21, 2019 • 16 tweets • 3 min read
Beautiful lunar eclipse tonight in Vancouver, a rare clear night let me spy it out of our apartment window. What follows bellow is a short thread on how a Mesopotamian astrologer might interpret this eclipse...

Photo credit u/RPG_Vancouver on r/Vancouver reddit.com/r/vancouver/co… Before we get into the actual omens, the short take away... bad news for the East, and just bad news in general... but that's part and parcel for eclipse omens. Hence why the ancient Mesopotamians had handy rituals to dispel the evil of an eclipse.