Cuneiform Literature, Medicine, and Mental Health: Interview with Dr. Moudhy Al-Rashid

Audible subscribers can listen to all episodes of tides of history add-free right now. Join Audible today by downloading the Audible app. Hi everybody, from Wondery, welcome to another episode of tides of history. Thanks for hanging out with me today. So one of the really consistent things that happens is you throw yourself into a new subject is that you realize just how much you don't know, how many vast topics are out there that are totally new and mind-blowing. That's how I felt over the past couple of months as we've started to dig into the cultures of the ancient Middle East. It's a whole new world of cities, art, politics, and literature about which I previously knew almost nothing. At the heart of this world was a writing system. Cuneiform. Cuneiform was incredibly durable, long-lasting, and influential, but for those of us brought up in educational traditions focused on Europe, it's probably not something we know too much about. Maybe we read the epic of Gilgamesh if that, or learn a few names of kings, like Sargon or Hamarabi, or maybe if you're getting real wild with it, Ashurbanapal. That's a shame, because Cuneiform literature is much more than Gilgamesh or the deeds of kings. It's an incredible window onto a segment of the past and space and time that we're just not exposed to nearly enough. Luckily, we've got a great guest here today who can help us understand the Cuneiform world. She's a post-doctoral researcher at Wolfson College at the University of Oxford, where she earned her PhD in Oriental Studies, she's an Assyriologist, and an expert in Cuneiform literature, especially Cuneiform medical and scientific texts, and a perpetually fascinating person to follow on Twitter. We couldn't ask for a better guide to Cuneiform culture. Dr. Moody Allrichy, thank you so much for joining me. Thank you so much for having me, and letting me talk about my favorite subject in the world, Cuneiform. So, let's start with the basics here. What defines Cuneiform as a writing system? Like, when we're talking about a literate Cuneiform culture, where is that in time and space? So, I think one way to talk about Cuneiform is to talk about its relationship to the landscape. So, as you said, Cuneiform is a writing system, and it was in use in a region that we call Mesopotamian English, which actually comes from the Greek between the rivers, referring to the Tigris and Euphrates. It basically covers what is now Iraq and Syria, although the use of Cuneiform did sort of spill out into neighboring regions and countries due to various socio-political factors in different periods. Now, the landscape in southern Iraq at the time of the development of Cuneiform near the end of the fourth millennium BCE was like a rich alluvial plane, which is just a fancy way of seeing an area with deposits of clay, silk, sand, things that make the land very fertile, but sort of primary among this is the clay. So along these rivers, you have these rich deposits of clay, and you also have reed beds. These features of the landscape help explain the medium of the writing system that developed in this area, which uses clay that is impressed or traced in the early phases with a reed stylus. It gets its name in English from the Latin Cuneus, which means wedge. I don't actually know Latin, and then just kind of regurgitating what I've been told about it, but I do know that in Arabic it's called the Kitabat and mismadiya, which I think comes from the word mismadiya, which means nail. So interestingly, in both English and Arabic, the word for this writing system has something to do with the way it looks, and it is very distinctive visually. It's a very interesting writing system. There are about a thousand signs or characters, whatever sort of word you want to use for that. Some of these are logograms, which means they represent whole words. Some are syllabograms, which means they represent syllables, so the word syllable would be written as instead of s-y-l-l-a-b-l-e. It would be written something like sil-la-bil, with three signs that stand for those three sounds. And some of these signs are what we call determinatives, which is a kind of sign that precedes or follows a word to tell you how to read it. So the divine determinative, which precedes the name of a goddess or god, looks like a star. And that signals, okay, the thing that's going to follow is the name of a goddess. Another interesting feature of Kineiform is that it's multi-valent, which is a way of saying that each sign has multiple values. This makes it very confusing, but it also sort of opens up this whole world of a scholarship that you find in Kineiform texts that relies on these multiple levels of meaning. So going past the question of how it's bounded in time and space. So Mesopotamia, again, we're talking about a region, not a civilization. And as you said, the common denominator of the various civilizations that rose and fell in this region was that they used Kineiform for about 3,000 years. So the earliest sort of proto-Kineiform comes from around 3,300 BCE. And the very last Kineiform texts that's dateable is from 79 CE. And both interestingly come from Orook. So the earliest deriding develops in Orook and the last dateable Kineiform tablet, which is an astronomical almanac, is also from Orook. And this kind of writing technology is what connected the inhabitants with a shared way of making sense of the world, of organizing and managing the world. And this is what we call Kineiform culture. And it survives in the form of hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of thousands of texts that allow us to reconstruct a lot of the history. Three thousand years of usage of a writing system is an incredibly long period of time. That's longer than the latin alphabet has been in use in the present day, hundreds of thousands of texts. I mean, that's a huge number of things from a very wide range in time. So if it has logograms, syllabograms, has determinatives, the earliest Kineiform texts were written in the Sumerian language, is that correct? So yes and no, which I can elaborate on. Okay, so the earliest texts are written in, are yes and no written in Sumerian. But what other languages was Kineiform used for? So I'll start with the yes and no bit because that's a very interesting question. It goes back to how Kineiform developed as a writing system. So writing and agriculture were very much intertwined. And in fact, actually, there's a goddess of writing, Nidaba or Nisaba, who's also the goddess of grain because of how closely related the two were. To paint a very oversimplified picture of what happened, essentially what you have is this fertile soil in southern Iraq and a lot of irrigation technologies were developed to sort of tame the landscape in a way that allowed for the rise of surplus agriculture. In other words, there was enough food to feed everybody. In fact, there was so much that they needed a way of recording information about what was going on agriculturally. And this gave rise to the use of initially namanic devices to keep track of that kind of information. So the earliest namanic devices may have taken the form of tokens, but eventually the medium for curing this information becomes clay tablets. However, the earliest, earliest ones of these may be independent of language. So there's not a one-to-one relationship between the stuff on the tablets and any kind of like linguistic information. They were just drawings of things and numerical notations to help people keep track of information. But let's say if you saw one of the tablets and I saw one of them, we could have read them differently, even if we could retrieve the same information from them. So basically they're recording information, but there's no underlying like linguistic value to them. So if you see a sign for grain, you know that's grain. You don't need to know the word for grain in any particular language to know that's what it is. Exactly. Yes, exactly. And again, this is a very broad brush that I'm painting this rather complex development with. And that is Sumerian. That is recording the Sumerian language. And we have hints of Sumerian in signs that give grammatical information, essentially. And again, all of these come from a city called Uruk and nearby Jandat Nasser. Those are really earliest, earliest texts come from. But as you said, can you form, as a writing system, was used to record quite a few different languages. So initially Sumerian, and then it was adapted to record a completely unrelated language, which was Akkadian. Sumerian is what we call a language isolate in the field, and that it's not related to any known language that we can discern so far. Whereas Akkadian is, it's part of the Semitic language family, and it's the earliest known Semitic language. So even though the languages were very different, the writing system was still used to write both. And it was, in fact, adapted then to write quite a few other languages in use in the ancient and the least, notably Hittite, which is actually an Indo-European language, as well as Ugeritic, another Semitic language. But Keneer form was actually adapted into an alphabet, a Keneer form alphabet to write Ugeritic, interestingly, Eboly and a few others in the ancient Middle East. And it was used to write all kinds of texts. So even though it initially is developed to record stuff going on administratively in a kind of agricultural setting, it ends up being used to write everything from diplomatic correspondence to, you know, lullabies and receipts for doing laundry. Fascinating. So we have this really, really flexible writing system that suited to this kind of cosmopolitan, multicultural, multilingual world, because there's a assumption in the present day that you have kind of the boundaries of a polity, and within that polity people speak a language, and that's the language that people are taught. But that's not a very good match for most of human history, and especially not for the ancient world, where you have lots and lots of speech communities that overlap, you have lots of multilingualism, you have lots of kind of fluid boundaries. between places, the boundaries of an archaeological culture, and a polity, and a speech community don't necessarily line up in any specific way, Q&A form seems to be really well suited to serve as a written medium in that kind of environment. Yeah, absolutely. And that's actually really, I think, a really important point. And you even have that kind of diversity in ancient Mesopotamia throughout the various periods. One thing that is limiting about Q&A form, though, is that it was recorded on clay which survived. I mean, it's literally just a very durable substance, but there were probably, you know, other types of sources that didn't. We know for sure there were writing boards, for example, that were used in quite restricted settings, but still those may have recorded another, you know, possibly Aramaic, for example. And focusing on Q&A form text does narrow things a little bit, but there are so many still tells us quite a lot about the region and its history. A major question about Q&A form culture and about written text as a whole is that they never tell us about society as a whole. They're never representative of everybody, because not everybody in the ancient world can write. So who were the people who were writing Q&A form texts? And you mentioned a whole variety of purposes, but what kind of things were they using them for? Yeah, so I mean, it's a very big question. And a very important point that you make about sort of the limitations of what we based on who's writing them and what their context of that was. And there are so many things that will never know your entire segments of society. We can only know so much about because those people either didn't have access to this technology or to those trained in it or because those who did have access were writing about them in a certain way. So at its most basic Q&A form and Q&A form writing was available to those trained as scribes. This is like the most kind of general way to answer this question, but they were trained to do different things. So there was kind of a basic scribal curriculum that isn't, you know, uniform throughout ancient Mesopotamia, but there were sort of shared elements that prepared someone to learn Q&A form. And then you sort of specialized kind of like how education works today in some settings. So some people went on to do sort of legal and administrative type of texts, everything from sort of contracts to receipts to letters. Others specialized in scholarly disciplines like medicine or astronomy or lamentations or incantations, that sort of thing. And their job was to sort of copy and edit those types of texts that belong within their discipline. But this is then further complicated by the question of authorship. Some of them will, in the scholarly curriculum, will be signed by someone. There will be a caliphon or like a signature section at the end of the tablet, but that person didn't necessarily compose the text. They're just kind of copying an earlier version of it that somebody else composed. So this then gives rise to additional questions about who wrote Q&A form, because we know who literally copied the text, but we don't know who composed the originals. So getting a bit more granular, literacy varied than from periods a period. I think a really good example is the old Assyrian period, which is around 2000 BCE to 1600 BCE. And during that period, the Assyrian Empire had a vast trade network that reached well into sort of what is now Turkey. This necessitated in some cases, the breakup of households, where, for example, a husband might be based in Kanish in up in Turkey, kind of trading an important trade post. And a wife would remain in Ashur, the capital of the Assyrian Heartland, to run the household and business interests there, to safeguard goods and archives, etc. Those people weren't trained as scribes, but they needed to learn a kind of basic repertoire of science to keep in touch with each other and update each other and make requests and fulfill requests. Interestingly, this included women. So, for example, there's a woman called Lamassi, who writes quite a few letters to her husband about challenges with getting wool, or not being paid for certain things. And some of them get quite heated. Another woman writes, called Shimon Tsuen, writes a letter where she describes waiting for a payment for textiles that she sent to someone that she was then going to use that payment to pay off a debt. So this tells us a little bit about the kind of landscape of business and who could be involved in it, as well as who was writing texts. There are also some wonderful letters from the Old Assyrian period about smuggling and tax evasion, which is another sort of reminder. The more things change, the more they stay the same. Exactly, exactly. So that's really interesting. So you have a class of professional scribes. That's their job. Your job is to serve as the person who's writing this stuff down, but then there's also a kind of a broader literate culture that goes along with that. It's really interesting that I mean, like throughout time and space, writing isn't always treated the same as a skill or a technology, right? So in medieval Europe, there's a great text from the abbot of a monastery where he's talking about training the monks to do various things. And he's like, we take the really dull boys and we make them scribes because it's basically just like manual labor that you're just kind of copying texts. But in other times and places, the ability to write something can be quite high status. At other points, it's just kind of like just kind of a job, just kind of a thing that people do. So where on that kind of spectrum from high status activity down to, we take the dull boys and we make them scribes, would scribal culture be in Cuneiform culture? I mean, if you're talking about sort of the scholarly element of scribal culture, it would definitely be the higher sort of end of that spectrum. It was a kind of quite a narrow group of people that was carrying this out. It did include some women. I mean, mostly by large men. But for example, there are a handful of disciplines amongst them medical professionals and there are a few references to women physicians or women exorcists and other type of medical professional. But by and large, they were men and by and large, they carried out their scholarship in certain periods for the sake of helping the kings sort of run the empire. So a really good example of this is the neo-Syrian period where you have the library of Ashurbanipal that is quite, you know, becoming more and more famous, I hope, at least I like to think. And so even though it's sort of a modern construct, and it's not as simple as just a single library that belonged to King, it has its own sort of historiography, the types of texts the King Ashurbanipal was concerned with and the types of scholars he surrounded himself with that sort of went with those, the production of those texts, helped him run the empire. And this included things like diviners or seers, however you want to translate that term because they helped with decision making. It was a legitimate discipline of scholarship that helped people make decisions. You know, there were also physicians to help with health issues, astronomers and astrologers to help read the signs in the sky and also then help King Ashurbanipal make decisions. So it's a fairly elite kind of group. At the same time, you read these letters from scholars to kings and you do have a very human element in a lot of them. So, for example, some of them will write, and I can't remember his name, but there's one that's just like, will I ever get a day off? And then there are others that are like, no one is paying me. You know, I'm dying of anxiety here. You know, I literally says I'm dying of a broken heart because sort of being neglected on the payroll or people being expelled from the court. So there is a very human element all this despite the kind of narrow segment of society involved. I can't stop thinking as you're talking about this, the kinds of scholars that the King surround themselves with. I can't stop thinking of like scholars at a think tank, where they're just diviners trying to understand the world and give a little bit of insight and always worried about where the next paychecks coming from. Like, if that's not kind of a constant in the life of a scholar, I don't know what is. Like, is the check actually going to, is it going to come? Or are we going to get paid this? Fairly helpful. Show blood in here. Football is finally back and prize picks is going crazy with the deals to start the season, giving out promos every day in September. On prize picks, you can make all the picks you want all in the same app. And now prize picks is available nationwide. So what are you waiting for? Lock in for kickoff because everyone and everything is on prize picks. What you want? Download the app today and use co-wondery to get $150 instantly in lineups if you win your first $5 lineup, prize picks, run your game. With the Venture X business card from Capital One, you earn unlimited double miles on every purchase. Plus big purchasing power means you can spend more and earn more. The Capital One Venture X business card. What's in your wallet? Terms apply to capital one dot com for details. So I want to come back to you talked about business and I love economic history. I'm really fascinated by this. So that gives us some pretty direct insights into how people were trading and doing business in that particular period that you've got widespread trade networks. You've got a variety of people within a household who are kind of doing various functions with regard to economic activities. And writing is the medium that allows you to conduct business over space. I mean, that's not that common a thing in the grand scheme of the pre-modern world to have a kind of a written literate business culture is not something we should take for granted. Yeah, absolutely. And what I love about those, especially for the oldest hearing period, what I love about those texts is that they're, again, they're very human like that you can see these families that are sort of separated by these vast distances that are just trying, they're doing their best. They're like complaining to each other about like, why haven't I heard from you about this particular question of ask you like three times? Or you know, they're just saying giving instructions to each other about how to run things. You get sort of intimate details about how people did things, both practically but also within kind of domestic spheres. And it's just, yeah, it's an amazing window that we have as people today onto people back then that just again reminds us, as you said, the more things change, the more they stay the same. So, okay, I want to come back to the the issue of what languages we're being written. We talked about Sumerian. You mentioned Acadian. That's what a lot of your work is focused on. So what's Acadian? What other languages is it related to? - Absolutely, well, Acadian. So Acadian is, as I mentioned, it's a Semitic language. It's the earliest known written Semitic language, but it's an East Semitic language. So the fast, fast, fast majority of Semitic languages that we know of are West Semitic languages and Acadian is an East Semitic language. It's a very formal linguistic label, but it's an important distinction. But there is a lot of overlap with modern Semitic languages. So I speak Arabic and there's a lot of vocabulary that's sort of shared between the two. Whether they have a common sort of great, great, great grant ancestor in the form of a proto Semitic language or they've been loaned or otherwise made their way. But things like beat is bait and Arabic, which means house and ahu is brother. It's the same in Arabic. Shamshu is son. So there's a lot of, you know, perhaps speakers or a Semitic language is that tune into your podcast might recognize those as well. And I don't know modernist hearing, but I understand there's a ton of shared vocabulary with Acadian as well as the survival of some very ancient names. So an example I recently encountered is Nabu, who was the God of writing. So we talked about Nidaba or Nisab as the goddess of writing Nabu as the God of writing, who's very important actually in the Neo-Acerian period. I believe becomes the name Nebo. So there's the survival of a lot of, you know, not just the culture, but a lot of features of the language into today's Semitic languages. But back to the ancient world, there are broadly two main dialects of Acadian. This is a kind of traditional view that is open to revision. And those are, we know as Babylonian and Assyrian, confusingly also the names of the civilizations and the time periods, okay? But there's also this kind of third literary dialect that is an invention of scholars that has some of these Assyrian and Babylonian dialectical features in it, but that it was basically just used for scholarly and in particular literary texts. And we call it today a standard Babylonian. So there are a couple of very important dialects that are very well attested in the surviving Kenia form texts. So I specialize in the first millennium BCE. So all the texts I look at or teach are in Acadian. And specific, much of the scientific corpus is written in Acadian, not tons of sort of medical texts in Sumerian, I actually really know of a handful and similarly with astronomical texts. So Acadian is sort of the language of science if we're happy to use that label, which I'm very happy to use that label. Okay, you mentioned your particular interest are in kind of this medical and scientific literature. Those texts are from the first millennium BCE. What was their audience and what kinds of texts are we talking about? Like when we talk about kind of a medical and a scientific corpus, what did they consider a medical and scientific stuff like what were they interested and what are they into? - Yeah, so they're actually quite well-defined medical texts and astronomical texts, which I'm gonna just treat as the two disciplines of science for now, otherwise gets a little bit too big of a topic. And if we look at medicine first, they would have been used, copied, relied upon by medical professionals in particular therapeutic texts. So texts that give instructions for how to treat an illness to whoever could afford or access to that kind of treatment. And in fact, some of the texts show quite a lot of revision and experimentation. There's even this label indicating the verb is letaku to test. And so a lot of remedies are in the first millennium BC are labeled as tested. This has been tested. It is known to work that sort of thing. So we know a lot of these things were actually used in practice. And in terms of sort of the audience, so I guess in that sense you could say for the medical texts, the audience really is just the medical professionals that are using them. And for the purpose of healing non-medical professionals. In terms of the astronomical texts, it's a little bit different 'cause the audience can include people like royalty, for example. So we have tons of astrological reports that have survived from the neocerion period in which astronomers or astrologers, whatever you wanna call them, I think Dr. Willis Monroe's, I feel like I quote him and everything I do. His solution is to just call it astronomology. So I combine the two together 'cause they really are inseparable for this period. And they make their reports to the King. So it really depends on the type of texts that you're talking about, the purpose of it. And again, what it's gonna be used for, who's gonna rely on it and to what end? - Okay, so that's really, really fascinating. So you have a body of medical professionals who have a body of written knowledge that circulates between them about remedies for common ailments. They have a common vocabulary, a common sense for what these ailments are, how to treat them. That's absolutely fascinating. I had no idea that there was that kind of a medical culture. - Yeah, and just to kind of even go into a bit more detail, there are different kinds of medical professionals and I'll give the accepted translation. So the ASU is the physician and the Ashipu is the exorcist. It's a really problematic translation because it makes it sound like they're not doing medicine when they actually are because the quote unquote supernatural causes were built into the natural world. So something like a demon who is an agent of a particular type of disease is real as a snake that bites you. So both of these types of agents of disease are worthy of treatment by these different kinds of medical professionals. There's a lot of overlap. So for example, there are sometimes exorcists who will copy tablets that are meant for an ASU for a physician and they will use those types of remedies and vice versa. So and they must have also been quite a bit of competition between the two types of medical professionals. So it can get quite specific actually depending on the type of medical professional that you're looking at. And the reason for these two is that, I mean, there are many ways to conceptualize illness in different societies. And an ancient Mesopotamia in general, again, speaking very generally, there were a few different levels of causation for a disease that then mirror these professions. So there's the natural cause, like for example, let's say a snake bite. And there's a supernatural layer to, you know, almost every type of ailment. And the exorcist is focused on that, whereas the ASU sort of focused on the natural cause. And then behind all of this, there is the, well, what did I do wrong? Like what taboo did I commit that invited this misfortune on me? So the text types and the professional types kind of mirror this view of disease and illness more generally, which I think is really quite interesting. And we can learn so much from them. - I mean, that's absolutely fascinating. And I think there is a tendency in the present day to treat medical knowledge as if it's kind of a direct reflection of the natural world and of the natural causes for a thing, which is not actually how people engage with disease. It's not actually how we understand disease, even among medical professionals. Like you've got your diagnostic manuals, but those things are constantly shifting. Our understanding of the causes of disease are constantly shifting. I mean, like I've been doing physical therapy for long enough to know that there are treatments that come in and out of fashion based on new developments and discoveries in what was established 10 years ago is now frowned upon. And so like you can have medical cultures that understand the same disease in dramatically different ways that may not necessarily be any more or less appropriate. - Yeah, exactly. And I think that's what's so interesting about the history of medicine. You have this shared kind of subject, which is the human body, which hasn't changed that much between now and 4,000 years ago or 3,000 years ago and today, but you have a totally different way of conceptualizing it, its relationship to the world and how to kind of address problems that arise and how to frame them as well. Because hearing a voice might not be a bad thing in every society, might not be a symptom, might actually be quite a gift. A lot of my research looks at mental symptoms and mental illness. And I think that in particular is very interesting way into how people understood the world, understood their place in the world, understood what was considered normal, what disrupted your relationship with the community or with yourself or with others. And I think the history of medicine is a really interesting window onto that. - By the early 2000s, college admissions in America were more competitive than ever for students and their parents, it was an ordeal to be endured. 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(phone buzzing) I want to come back to issues of mental illness in just a second. Before that, there's a really fascinating discussion that happened in the historiography of Medieval Europe about 25 or 30 years ago that had to do with fasting. And there was an article that came out where I was like, okay, well, this behavior that female saints engage in regularly that was kind of extreme fasting, well, they were just anorexic. But anorexia is not something it means the same thing in every context. And for these particular people in this particular context, it was very much a sign of sanctity. It was not an eating disorder. It was about their relationship to the divine and what they were willing to do to enhance their connection to the divine. So you can have exactly the same set of symptoms or behaviors that are just understood in dramatically different ways depending on the context. - Yeah, exactly. It's a very interesting example. I didn't know that. But precisely and that's why I think the history of medicine is just so interesting. - I want to come back to mental distress and depression because again, this is a thing where even in the present day we can see understandings of mental illness and depression dramatically changing from year to year. How did the authors of the texts that you're working with and presumably people around them? How did they understand mental distress and depression? - Yeah, so I mean, I think one of the difficulties of doing any kind of like history of psychology, psychiatry, mental illness, mental symptoms is exactly as you said, even today the definition of various illnesses are constantly in flux and being regrouped and symptoms are being organized in certain ways. And so it's impossible to project that back onto the ancient world. So I think the first thing I did and when I started my research was dispense with that altogether. And look instead, even if I'm not identifying illnesses, what symptoms did they identify that they may have organized into different types of illnesses or into illnesses in a way that's different from the way we organize them into illnesses. And certainly they have descriptions of depression and dejected states. These are often linked to other descriptions of mental states such as fear, anxiety. There's a term that translates almost exactly to breaking of the heart. So heartbreak can be a kind of a sensation in the stomach perhaps that's associated with anxiety or in the chest. But either way, I think it reflects the type of anxiety. But alongside the sort of spectrum of moods and terminology for mental states, you also have physiological symptoms that are often grouped with these mental symptoms. So things that may sound familiar to anyone who's suffered from, for example, depression. So I had pretty bad depression when I was at university and I used to take medication for it. And one of the things I suffered from a lot was my stomach hurt all the time. I had a sort of a nervous stomach. And I never had an appetite. So you do have descriptions of loss of appetite, of someone bringing the wording is it, your heart's desire is brought to you as in the food that you really like. And they just sort of, oh god, I don't want that. Difficulty sleeping, problems with libido. It can get quite graphic actually in some of these therapeutic texts that describe mental symptoms and illness. So the way they group these things together, there is seem to favor, including physiological, sometimes called somatic symptoms, together with mental or psychological descriptions. So depression lowercase D is a topic that comes up quite a lot in the medical texts I look at. And the way it's organized, I think, is really interesting. I sometimes wonder if it was group physical symptoms because they didn't have the sort of dualism that we have inherited from early modern philosophy. And B, because it's easier to treat difficulty sleeping or loss of appetite, maybe, then something that you can't quite see like sadness. That's just a totally speculative comment that I'm making. But what I think is important is that they treated these experiences as valid medical concerns. There was no sort of stigmatization of them. A person could go to an ASU or an Ashipu with these experiences and say, I need medical treatment for it. It's not a modern invention. And I think that's really an important takeaway for me anyway from these texts, the suffer the same things back then that we do today. Yeah, I mean, that's so, so, so interesting. I'm really fascinated by the grouping of the physical and the mental symptoms together because we know your mind has such a powerful effect on your body that this dualism is an inherently flawed kind of thing, an inherently flawed perspective to take, that having physical symptoms that go along with depression is incredibly common. I mean, that's not at all an uncommon thing. So it's fascinating to me that they had figured that out. Something that could have been forgotten in the interim, I guess, is what I'm saying. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, at the end of the day, you know, the brain is also part of this whole picture and then that's a physical thing. I totally agree. I was talking to a neurologist about this a couple of years ago. And, you know, we were talking about this kind of move back toward the physicality of the mental in a way. And I think that's a really, yeah, this really interesting kind of point to draw out of these texts. So do you get any sense for how they conceptualized emotion? 'Cause we know again that emotion is a thing that's going to be fairly culturally specific in the way that it's understood and categorized and kind of the boundaries on its expression. Do we get any sense for that from these medical texts as well? Like is there a sense for what's too much emotion or what is an inappropriate emotion to feel that's kind of medicalized? Well, I think in a way you could answer by seeing anything that made it into the medical texts is probably already either chronic or extreme or something about it is not matching up to what would be considered in that context like a normal in quotation mark response to things happening around you. Or it could be that these are, you know, normal responses to distress or misfortune but that there was an available way to treat it. So I think there are two ways to think about that angle. But I think there's also a lot of clues about emotion and the history of emotions in non medical texts. So for example, this expression heartbreak appears also in a kind of verbal construction in the old Babylonians, so old Babylonians, the period 2000 BCE to 1600 BCE in the old Babylonian version of the flood epic where the kind of Noah figure whose name is Etra Chassis realizes sort of on the eve of the flood that he's going to have to leave behind, you know, everyone. And I think the line reads something like his heart breaks and he vomits gall. So we have descriptions of emotion in all kinds of contexts, both extreme, normal, and you know, the epic of Gilgamesh is another excellent example. You know, his response to the death of Enkidu is, you know, it's very moving and is, you know, anyone who's lost someone can see themselves in this and has just sheer, you know, loss and distress. So there are hints at that in all kinds of texts. And I think, you know, the medical texts are for sure, you know, for, to me, a very interesting window onto that. But there are just so many, you know, even letters. There's so many, so many sources that can also supplement that picture. - Yeah, I'm really struck in the way that you discussed this by the intersection between the universal experience of being human in a body and the culturally specific manifestations of how we understand that. Like that's, I mean, that's just really striking to me. - Yeah, and I mean, to me, that's what the history of science is in general. And that's why I love doing the history of science. It's a history of how people made sense of stuff. And the way they make sense of things fits with a particular context or a particular way of understanding the world. And I mean, I thought it was a bit circular. But I mean, what I find so interesting is that this constant endeavor to make sense and make the world, which is chaos, something ordered and something manageable or intelligible, is this, you know, it's for quite a human drive. And I think the history of that is really, it can, it's just so interesting. - So what drew you to the study of Cuneiform in general? - The short answer is Irving Finkel. As one does, I took a summer class for fun on the book in the ancient world, perfectly normal thing to do when you're in your mid-20s. And the first day was taught by Dr. Irving Finkel of the British Museum. And he is, he was so animated about it. And I mean, his window onto Cuneiform really sparked my interest to the point where instead of applying to law schools that summer, I applied to Oxford to do Cuneiform studies 'cause it was the only place still taking applications. (laughing) And miraculously got in. So it was a really, you know, gut feeling that I just went with. Yeah, it was at completely random. It changed the course of my life that one literally one and a half days in that summer of, you know, whatever it was, 2008. So that's what got me into Cuneiform. I just fell in love. I fell in love with the ancient language. I fell in love with just the sheer quantity of sources and how much they can tell us, how much they tell us about people back then, and how much we have in common with them really. I mean, when you know, you know, as they say. Exactly. I mean, so this is, I don't think I had any idea that the corpus of Cuneiform literature was as large as it is. I mean, hundreds of thousands of texts. I don't know what I thought, but I definitely don't think I thought it was that many. Yeah, I mean, it's so many. And then, well, there are a couple of really interesting projects and important projects in the field to digitize those tablets. And I mean, it's just such an epic undertaking because there are hundreds of thousands of these texts. And they're everything from like administered receipts to royal inscriptions, hymns, prayers, astronomical tablets, an approximation of pie, proverb, records of litigation, you know, how far Jupiter went across the sky using complex geometry. I mean, it's just such an incredible, an incredible corpus that has survived from ancient Mesopotamia. One of the things that has been intensely frustrating to me over the course of my career as a historian is just that like the effort that people will put in to studying the same text over and over and over again, because that's the text that speaks to a particular area or that's the one historian who survives from early medieval England or from Frankeia or what have you. And so you get these incredibly long detailed studies of this. It's just like there are so many other texts in other places. There's other bodies of evidence that you could be studying. Like instead of trying to squeeze that one source for everything you can, Why not look at some of the dozens of other bodies of evidence that have not been examined in anything like that level of detail? Why not look at the corpus of Kenyra form texts try to dig into that or I did a lot of work on letters or Receipts receipts tell you a great deal about the world, you know That kind of stuff. I mean I I you know the more people who can do Kenyra form the more of these we can read So I hope people will be more interested in this part of the world and these Sources and well, you know help bring them to light really and revive them Well, you have sold me on Kenyra form dr. Moody. I'll receive where can people find you? Where can they follow your work? The best place is Twitter and just my first name MOU DHY is my handle So please do join. I share a lot of stuff about Kenyra form and some of it very random Random random is good random is our lives a random, you know very true Thank you so much for your time today is an absolute pleasure chatting with you about this you too. Thank you so much And thank you for such interesting questions Thanks so much for joining me today Be sure and hit me up if you'd like to chat about anything we've talked about on tides or something you'd like to see You can find me on Twitter at Patrick underscore Wyman or on Facebook at Patrick Wyman MMA or on Instagram at Wyman underscore Patrick I write on other topics at Patrick Wyman dot substach dot com if you haven't already Don't forget to subscribe to tides of history on Apple podcasts Amazon music the Wandery app or wherever you're listening right now Join Wandery plus in the Wandery app to listen early and add free if you've been enjoying the show I'd really appreciate it if you left a five-star rating into review Tides of history is written and narrated by me Patrick Wyman the sound engineer is Sergio Enrique's Tides of history is produced by Morgan Jeffie from Wandery the executive producers are Jenny lower Beckman and Marshall Louis Thanks again for listening until next time from Wandery. 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