Autumn 2019
Current and former members of Cambridge Assyriology at the Rencontre in Paris, July 2019
Welcome
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New Research, New Insights
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International Collaboration
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Outreach in the UK
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Innovation in Cambridge
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New play, New book
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to our Newsletter! The goal of this newsletter is simple - to inform, interest and involve our increasingly wide circle of colleagues, supporters and friends - present, past and future. It has been a busy and fulfilling year, and there is so much that we haven’t been able to include here; this is after all a newsletter, not a comprehensive record of the year! Nevertheless, we hope you will find its contents as exciting and inspiring as I do. Reflecting on the academic year that has just passed, of course it all starts and ends with our people. So, sadly, let us begin with the warmest farewell and heartfelt thanks to Selena Wisnom. Selena has been with us for two years, and in such a short time has built the strongest of academic and teaching reputations, and the firmest of friendships. It was our great good fortune to have her here, and we wish her every success for the future. Thank you. Selena, for everything! Then, a warm welcome, to Leandro Ranieri, who joins us in October 2019 as a visiting scholar from Brazil. And finally, our warmest congratulations to Dr Christoph Schmidhuber, as we should now call him, who successfully defended his outstanding PhD thesis just a few months ago; more on that later in the newsletter. One of our aims with this newsletter is to draw attention to the highlights of the year, starting with the launch (November 2018) of the ‘Poor Man of Nippur’ film, which the Arts and Humanities Research Council has shortlisted for ‘Best research film of the year’. But there have been so many highlights - where to begin? In addition to Christoph, we have further 7 PhD students with their theses in progress; our people have participated in excavations in Lagash and Abu Salabikh; we have hosted an important archaeological conference here in Cambridge; our people have participated in many international conferences abroad; we have continued to run an active and successful schools outreach programme, including the highly regarded 6th form conference for Assyriology and Egyptology; we have introduced a number of innovations to our teaching tools and methods here at home; and Selena has written and produced a new play about Ashurbanipal, which was performed to great acclaim in London. If I were asked to characterise these highlights together, all of which are covered in this newsletter, then I would have to talk about collaboration and teamwork. It all starts and ends with our people, and their dedication to this fascinating field of knowledge. And what of the future? Plans are afoot for an exchange programme with Shanghai International Studies University, and for online learning tools in collaboration with Cambridge University Press. We hope to have news about these in a year’s time!
Warm regards to all,
Dr Martin Worthington
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Ancient Childhood: Perspectives from Iraq and Syria in the Early Second Millennium BC
Dr Christoph Schmidhuber Completed PhD Thesis
Have you ever wondered what growing up must have been like 4000 years ago? I surveyed around 30,000 cuneiform sources to introduce children into our reconstruction of Old Babylonian society, addressing topics such as the ancient family, “child labour”, gender formation, and others that shed light on the lived experience of children. I am currently preparing my thesis for publication, and in the meantime I am settling in at my new workplace – the Collège de France in Paris – where I have started a postdoctoral project on Mesopotamian slavery, funded by the Leverhulme Trust.
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Humour in Akkadian Literature: A Contextual Analysis
Figurines from Neolithic sites – what do they do? Monique Arntz In-progress PhD Thesis
Alex Barker In-progress PhD Thesis
Humour in the Mesopotamian world is an intriguing yet ultimately ambiguous topic. From where exactly did the Mesopotamian audience derive their humour? How accessible would textual humour have been? Should an advanced legal parody really be considered in the same breath as a slapstick or other physical comedy? These questions shall be discussed in a new exploration of humour in the Mesopotamian world. Rather than adopting broad thematic chapters attempting to find examples that fit into preconceived categories, this study instead intends to base its examination on close reading of a group of sample ‘humorous’ compositions. Its approach shall be to break them down individually to see how humour may function in each case, before bringing the findings together for a wider comparative and theoretical discussion.
In the Near Eastern Neolithic period (ca. 10,000-5,500 BC), figurines are often our primary source of visual representation. Figurines are a ubiquitous find on many Neolithic sites. Traditionally, they have been researched through visual approaches focusing on their iconography and symbolic meaning. The main drawback of these interpretative frameworks is that they fail to analyse figurines as artefacts. Instead, figurines are treated primarily, or even exclusively, as images or texts. My research takes an artefact approach and posits that in order to better understand figurines we need to analyse figurines as a process; from production, use, to discard, and to analyse choices made within this process. Working with figurines from two Neolithic sites, Tell Sabi Abyad and Çatalhöyük (Turkey), I aim to compare the differences and similarities in figurine processes at both sites and how the different social settings at the two sites might be related to these observed differences and similarities.
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The theological role of the use of ‘Bēl’ as an alternate name of Marduk George Heath-Whyte In-progress PhD Thesis
From the late second millennium BC onward, the god Marduk, the king of the Babylonian pantheon, was also referred to as Bēl. This common Akkadian noun, normally translated as “Lord”, seems not just to have been a title of this god, but to have become a name of him. But how did Marduk acquire this new name, and why was he called Bēl in some contexts, but Marduk in others? The names of gods were fundamentally important to Mesopotamian religion, and it is the aim of my research to understand the theological role of this alternate name of Marduk in the first and late-second millennium BC.
Regionality of ceramic production during the Middle Islamic period (1100-1500 CE) in Northern Iraq Kyra Kaercher In-progress PhD Thesis I’m not primarily an Assyriologist, but I take an active interest in this earlier period in Iraq, which is why I have also joined in organising the Ancient Near East Seminar Series. My research focuses on the regionality of ceramic production during the Middle Islamic period (1100-1500 CE) in Northern Iraq. This research combines the typologies and chronologies already created for Islamic ceramics from Western and Central Asia with scientific methods to analyse the production of the ceramics. This is then used to look at local, regional, and international production of the ceramics. I am also interested in looking at the changes in ceramic production through time in the Northern Zagros, as well as looking at local vs. global economies in terms of supply and demand during the Islamic period. Lastly, I am also interested in Cultural Heritage and the preservation and prevention of destruction of places in times of conflict.
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Memories for Life Dr Christina Tsouparopoulou Principal Investigator This project explores how private individuals chose to memorialise themselves and others through the act of dedicating inscribed objects to the gods in the Ancient Near East. Found in temples and other contexts, such objects embody a series of choices such as material, object shape, language, and content that convey information about the social person who commissioned it. Through a holistic analysis of these objects, which treats its material properties and inscriptions as inextricable for understanding greater meaning, we gain insights into material sourcing and manufacture, artisanal practice and creativity, religious belief, and the greater social networks of ancient urbanites.Thus far, the team has researched and recorded 550 objects dating from the Early Dynastic I Period to the Old Babylonian Period (c. 2900-1600 BCE). In June 2019, the "Memories for Life” project received generous funding from the Riksbankens Jubileumsfond (the Swedish Foundation for Humanities and Social Sciences) to host an international workshop in Uppsala: “Crafting memories and identities in Antiquity: Inscribed dedicatory and commemorative objects” that took place 13-14 September 2019. This workshop brought together leading scholars working across regional and diachronic spectrums in antiquity in order to develop theoretical models and methodologies for analysing and interpreting inscribed objects across time and space. Speakers included scholars in Classics, Ancient Near Eastern Studies, Egyptology, Biblical Studies and Comparative religion, drawing upon ideas generated in fields such as anthropology, material religion, and communication studies. Christina leads a project team which also includes Dr Nancy Highcock and Silvia Ferreri.
Producing the Standard Inscription of Ashurnasipal II Dr Caleb Howard PostDoc Research
In the ninth century BCE, the Assyrian king Ashurnasirpal II (reigned 883-859 BCE) created a new capital at the city of Kalḫu (modern Nimrud). There, he built the Northwest Palace and associated temples and filled them with inscriptions proclaiming the greatness of his kingship, his conquests, and his building projects. Among these is a composition that we call the Standard Inscription, because it was inscribed hundreds of times into the faces of the stone wall-panels that lined the inner walls of the Northwest Palace. Over the past several years, I’ve been traveling to various museum collections and collating and photographing the copies of this composition in the hopes of reconstructing the process of producing these copies. I synthesized these data in my dissertation, which I’m revising (and expanding!) into a monograph. I hope to describe the process of producing the copies of the Standard Inscription in as much detail as possible, and thereby increase our understanding of a fascinating aspect of Mesopotamian culture: how scribes and stonemasons did things with texts. Page 8
The Spirited Horse: Human-equid relations in the Bronze Age Near East Dr Laerke Recht PostDoc Research I am currently working on a project called The Spirited Horse: Human-equid relations in the Bronze Age Near East. It explores the ways in which humans and various equids (donkeys, horses, onagers, hybrids) interacted, and especially what impact equids had on human lives. Among the major aspects are equids as an important factor in both the development of trade (long and short distance), and in transformations in warfare with the use of wheeled vehicles. As my MSCA fellowship is coming to an end, I am now starting to put together all the data for a monograph.
Excavations at Kınık Höyük-Niğde
Socio-cultural history of bronze age non-elites
Dr Nancy Highcock PostDoc Research
Dr Christina Tsouparopoulou Senior Research Associate This project aims to explore the sociocultural history of non-elites at the transition from the Middle to the Late Bronze Age in the Near East, Eastern Mediterranean and S. Caucasus. The emphasis is placed on mapping the flows of images, artefacts and ideas. Combining Digital Humanities and archaeometry in tandem with innovative archaeological and art historical theories, the project studies the production, consumption, and appropriation and/or rejection of ‘commonplace’ cylinder seals, a widely-used class of object in mid-second millennium BCE, seemingly produced enmasse on ‘low-cost’ materials, which spread over a wide area from the Eastern Mediterranean to Central Western Asia. The project is funded through Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellowship.
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In addition to close involvement in the ‘Memories for Life' project, I was field director in the summer of 2019 of the Turkish / Italian / American excavations at the site of Kınık Höyük-Niğde in southern Cappadocia, Turkey. In addition to overseeing fieldwork across the multiperiod urban site, I continued directing the excavation of the western lower town, where in 2018 the team and I uncovered evidence for an occupation dating as far back as the early-mid 3rd millennium BCE. These important results indicate that there was a settlement, at least in this part of the site, for nearly 3000 years, the only known and investigated lower town settlement of such longevity in this sub-region of Turkey. I presented these results at the 4th Kültepe International Meeting (KIM) held at the site of Kültepe, Turkey in August 2019.
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Rencontre Assyriologique Internationale Paris 2019 Every summer, the world’s Assyriologists descend upon a city for the subject’s major international conference, the Rencontre Assyriologique Internationale. This year the Rencontre was held in Paris, at the Collège de France. Cambridge is proud to have put in a strong showing, with papers given by Selena Wisnom, Martin Worthington, Christina Tsouparopoulou, and Nicholas Postgate (who also displayed a poster), and a good number of students in attendance. This is especially important as the Rencontre is a unique way to experience how the subject is researched and thought about in other institutions and academic traditions (not to mention networking). We are especially proud that this year two brave Undergraduates joined the fray - let’s hear from them directly:
Our First Rencontre Ishbel Russell and Ashleigh Taylor This summer the two of us, both first year Assyriologists, travelled to Paris to attend the 65th Rencontre Assyriologique Internationale. This was our first Rencontre and was an incredibly exciting opportunity to meet and listen to talks by a huge variety of academics so early on in our Assyriological journeys. We attended lots of talks over the 5 days, on subjects as diverse as medicine, mathematics, and metaphor! The talk which most intrigued Ishbel was ‘Tablets as Narrative Units’ by Sophus Helle, which challenged the comparison of tablets within an epic to chapters in a book, suggesting that each tablet in fact functions as a distinct narrative unit which contributes a part of the overall story, more like comics within a series. Ash was most excited by the development of digital approaches to Assyriology, especially with regards to interpreting cuneiform signs from tablets. Programs are being developed which can "read" a tablet, when photographed in certain lighting, and produce a sketch of the signs. This would likely significantly speed up future research. As well as these talks, the Rencontre also gave us lots of opportunities to meet and talk with people whose talks we had enjoyed. The Young Assyriologist Party on the Tuesday at the Collège de France was a wonderful opportunity to meet PhD students and early career academics from all over the world, providing us with an insight into what an Assyriological career really looks like. Overall, we both had a wonderful time at the Rencontre this summer, learning about lots of new and interesting concepts which may even influence our own future research!
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‘Fierce lions, angry mice and fat-tailed sheep’ Cambridge 2019 Dr Laerke Recht On the 22-23 March 2019, the conference ‘Fierce lions, angry mice and fat-tailed sheep: Animal encounters in the ancient Near East’ took place at the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research in Cambridge (organised by Laerke Recht and Augusta McMahon). The main sponsor of the conference was the BISI, the McDonald Institute and Marie Skłodowska-Curie. A total of 33 presentations were given, with speakers joining us from 15 different countries and four different continents. The theme of this conference was the relationships between humans and the environment, with particular focus on interactions with other animals. It was important to us that a range of perspectives would be represented, with researchers focusing on faunal remains, ancient texts, material culture and/or theoretical approaches. In fact, the papers presented offered an even greater variety of material and approaches than expected, with wonderful insights and discussions of many different species of animals. The full programme with paper titles and speakers can be found on the conference website: https://aneanimalencounters.wordpress.com/programme/ An edited volume of the proceedings is now under preparation.
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Munich Partnership Cambridge University and the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität in Munich have inaugurated a series of strategic partnerships, and Cambridge Assyriology have had the good fortune to form one together with Professor Karen Radner and her team. The venture, funded by the two Universities, resulted in a team of five scholars from Munich coming to Cambridge in February, and interacting with our students and researchers in a week of seminars; in three Cambridge scholars (Caleb Howard, Selena Wisnom and Martin Worthington) spending time in Munich; and in two of our Undergraduates doing summer internships in Munich, where they worked on the huge digitisation projects underway there. Let us hear from them directly:
Our Munich Internship Josh Meynell and Naomi Weir For one month during the summer vacation we were lucky enough to do an internship at the Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich. Working particularly under the tutelage of Jamie Novotny and Nathan Morello, we were able to familiarise ourselves with the processes involved in the ORACC digital humanities project. We were instructed in the basic skills of text lemmatisation and introduced to the various computer programs which are necessary to build the ORACC website. We honed our skills by translating and lemmatising several texts, some of which we had read before, and some not. This was a fantastic way to improve out language skills over the vacation, as well as exploring cuneiform scripts which we had not yet encountered. We also spent some time working on a new ORACC project based on Babylonian architecture (which is as yet unpublished!). Our contribution to this involved helping with the setting up of the database as well as writing up some preliminary articles. This was a brilliant opportunity to thoroughly read through perhaps even a hundred or so royal inscriptions in order to compile the data for our articles. We were also lucky enough to spend a couple of mornings working with Enrique JimĂŠnez on the eBabylon project, in which he and his team are transliterating thousands of cuneiform fragments in order to create a functional database of texts, and to eventually find joins between fragments. This was a unique opportunity to experience something on the front line of current Assyriological research. We are hugely grateful to the many scholars in Munich who took a large amount of their time to teach us, welcome us, and support us throughout our visit. Experiencing life in academia first hand was both enlightening and exciting, and it was a joy to meet and get to know much of the MOCCI team. Particular thanks must go to Jamie Novotny who gave up many hours to share his wisdom. All in all, it was a hugely enriching trip, and we left Munich very excited to press on with the final year of our undergraduate degrees!
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Heidelberger Forschungslabor Dr Christoph Schmidhuber This summer saw the first installment of the Heidelberger Forschungslabor Alter Orient, a six-week workshop on editing unpublished cuneiform tablets aimed at graduate students and early-career researchers. Cambridge Assyriology was represented by Christoph Schmidhuber. This year, the participants read, copied, and translated school tablets from Assur in a mixture of individual and group work, with a publication scheduled for next year. Applications are due in December and successful applicants will enjoy free accommodation and a contribution to their travel costs: https://www.ori.uni-heidelberg.de/assyriologie/forschungslabor/
Research Visit to Vienna October 2018 – September 2019 Peerapat Ouysook The idea of going on a research visit to the University of Vienna came up from the fact that their Orientalistik department is the community of academics who conduct research specifically about Babylonia in the 1st Millennium BC, a scholarly interest which is directly connected to my PhD research about the inscriptions of Nebuchadnezzar II. This research community is led by Professor Michael Jursa, a specialist in Neo-Babylonian economics. Much like other universities in the German-speaking world, the Viennese academics and students work in group projects of diverse focus, both on the archaeological material and the textual aspect of the written evidence. They also maintain a strong academic network with the communities in France, Germany, Italy, as well as in Israel. My visit was funded by the OeAD (Österreischischer Austauschdienst), For those interested, please visit their website for more information at: https://oead.at/en/ Page 13
4th Annual Sixth Formers Conference on Studying Mesopotamia and Egypt Dr Nancy Highcock On March 2nd 2019, Cambridge Archaeology hosted the 4th Annual Sixth Formers Conference on Studying Mesopotamia and Egypt at University at the Royal Asiatic Society and British Museum. Organized by Dr Nancy Highcock, in collaboration with Dr Martin Worthington, the event comprised a full day of scholarly talks, a careers panel, tour of the Egyptian and Mesopotamian galleries, and student-led treasure hunt. Scholars from nine different UK universities (Birmingham, Cambridge, Cardiff, Liverpool, Oxford, Reading, SOAS, UCL, UWTSD) shared their research and extolled the value of studying Mesopotamia and Egypt with prospective university students and their parents from across the country. Topics included science in cuneiform texts, Mesopotamian extispicy and Brexit, Sumerian housewives and Persian queens, Egyptian poetry and myth, and all the ins and outs of studying ancient Near Eastern archaeology, history, and languages at the university level. There were 60 attendees, a great time was had by all and we look forward to the event in 2020, which will be held jointly in London and Durham! Travel bursaries are available for students attending state schools. For further information: http://tinyurl.com/EgMesConf
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Sumer and Mesopotamia in Primary Schools Dr Marie-F. Besnier A passion for a topic often starts when we are children. Telling children about Mesopotamia and Sumer is one of the aims of Esagil Games: the project a “Day in Sumer” (https://esagil.co.uk/teachers-corner/), started in September 2018. For a “Day in Sumer”, I go to the schools myself to offer four one-hour sessions: writing, agriculture and irrigation, everyday life, and cities. For each of them, I use authentic sources made accessible to children through a range of various interactive activities, so that pupils get acquainted with diverse primary sources and learn how to interpret them.
Children discover ancient pottery sherds Children decipher cuneiform writing and learn the basics of the Sumerian language with Gudea.
Mesopotamia at the Open Knowledge Summer School The Summer School, held on August 27th, 2019 in CRASSH, Cambridge, covered a wide range of topics from antiquity to the present day, with the theme: ‘The Science and Politics of Food in Human History’. Mesopotamia was the topic of the first morning session: graduate students from diverse fields and courses of studies discovered ancient Mesopotamian agriculture and environmental issues during a one morning session with a lecture followed by a workshop.
For more information: https://esagil.co.uk/ or email marie@esagil.co.uk Page 15
‘Academic quality’ replica tablets used for teaching Akkadian, thanks to British Museum expert craftsman The teaching of Akkadian at Cambridge has been significantly enhanced by the acquisition of near-perfect academic quality replicas of a number of the most important clay tablets and prisms which are in the possession of the British Museum. Thanks to the close relationship between Cambridge and the British Museum, the museum’s own expert craftsman, Michael Neilson, who normally creates exhibits for other leading museums around the world, has agreed to create for us ‘perfect copies’ of Sennacherib’s ‘Taylor Prism’, a manuscript of Hammurapi’s laws from Ashurbanipal’s library, and Ištar’s Descent. The project was funded by the University’s Teaching and Learning Innovation Fund This means that students now work with the ‘original’ cuneiform texts, as well as with the traditional transcripts, which introduces rapidly the important connection between language, objects and culture in ancient Mesopotamia.
Michael Neilson in his studio at the British Museum, with two Taylor Prisms on his desk. One is almost 3,000 years old, the other almost 3 weeks old! Could you tell which is which? Clue: Michael is right-handed . . .
Michael Neilson writes:
Mould making and casting are probably the earliest methods of multi-production. Devised and utilised by crafts men and women of ancient times, the fundamental principles have changed little over thousands of years. The British Museum has a long and distinguished association with cast making. This is because casts made from within the collection, other institutions and archaeological sites were used by historians, academics and artists for the study of classical art & design, architecture, numismatics, gemmology and of course cuneiform script. Today, because such activities have been greatly reduced, I have the sole responsibility as the museum’s replication specialist; it is my job, and my delight, to combine artistry and tradition with the use of modern materials and conservation practices, to produce virtually indistinguishable copies of objects from within the British Museum collection for display in other collections around the world. It has been a great pleasure to work with the Department of Assyriology at Cambridge, and producing replicas specifically for teaching purposes is particularly rewarding. I was also delighted to host a visit of young Cambridge Assyriologists in my studio here at the British Museum, and to share in their enthusiasm. I hope that the replicas I have produced will help to inspire students of Assyriology for many years to come.
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New Videos – Assyriology and Mesopotamia at Cambridge The launch of The Poor Man of Nippur was a huge opportunity to engage the public and interest people in Assyriology. To capitalise on the unique moment of the launch, Selena Wisnom and Martin Worthington applied to the University’s Arts and Humanities Impact Fund, which graciously agreed to sponsor a series of videos. These have now been released, featuring materials about the film and the story, but also about wider issues in the subject. Assyriology as a University Subject has garnered almost 2000 views, while Augusta McMahon’s newly launched tour de force on Mesopotamian Goats is bound to become a favourite. All videos can be found at: https://tinyurl.com/MesopotamianFilms
Replica of the Shalmaneser Obelisk moved to the Haddon library!
The original Black Obelisk, a carved celebration of the reign and campaigns of Shalmaneser III, king of Assyria (reigned 848-824 BC), is in the British Museum. It was taken from Nimrud (now in northern Iraq) by the archaeologist Austen Henry Layard, who found it in the course of his excavations there in 1846. Its bas-relief sculptures are thought to include the earliest surviving representation of a Biblical figure. Jehu, king of Israel, prudently recognised Shalmaneser’s conquests and sent him tribute in around 841 BC, and the paying of the tribute is believed to be one of the obelisk’s twenty scenes. Five subdued kings are represented in the obelisk’s five levels, one to a level.
Aidan Baker Librarian
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‘Ashurbanipal: the last great king of Assyria’ A new play by Dr Selena Wisnom, premiered February 2019 I am standing in the crypt of St Pancras’ church, which has been transformed into the throne room of Ashurbanipal, the last great king of Assyria. It is a freezing night in 648 BC and the atmosphere is electric: the king is discussing a tense political situation with his advisors, and announces that he will ask the gods for advice by sacrificing a ram. Huddled around the walls, the audience watch as a group of actors carry in a man on their shoulders, stripped to the waist, twitching and terrified in animal incomprehension. As we the audience pin down the limbs of the sacrificial ram, the diviners begin reciting the ritual prayers and with a ray of light the priest standing next to me plunges in the knife. The ram’s limbs go limp and we stand back while the entrails are taken out and their meaning deciphered. The course of history is determined here. This was my first glimpse of how the play would be staged at the dress rehearsal, experiencing it as the audience would for the first time. Ashurbanipal: the last great king of Assyria, is a play that I wrote based on historical sources, telling the story of Ashurbanipal’s disastrous war against his brother, the king of Babylon. The play dramatizes an event that was pivotal in Mesopotamian history, showing it through the lens of a deep-rooted family conflict. The plot pieces together the fragmentary cuneiform sources into a narrative, using dramatic license to bridge the gaps. The script is suffused with quotations from ancient texts so as to recreate the culture’s ways of thinking and figures of speech, with characters sometimes even speaking in their own words taken from letters and inscriptions. As I had explained to the director Justin Murray, I wrote the play with the aim of immersing the audience in the world of ancient Assyria so that they would learn about the period directly through the story without needing to know any of the background, since all the necessary information would be conveyed through the plot. Little did I know just how immersive this production of Ashurbanipal would become . . . I would like to thank the University of Cambridge Arts and Humanities Impact Fund, The London Centre for the Ancient Near East, and the Institute for Classical studies for supporting this project.
Ashurbanipal takes counsel . . . in the crypt of St Pancras, Euston.
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‘Ea’s Duplicity in the Gilgamesh Flood Story’ Review of a new book by Dr Martin Worthington The Mesopotamian story of the Flood, as told in Tablet XI of the epic of Gilgamesh, has caught Martin's attention for the subtle but clear duplicity of the god Ea. Having been told by Ea that he must build a boat to save his family from the forthcoming deluge, Uta-Napishti (the Mesopotamian flood hero) responds by asking Ea what he should tell the people of his city who, having helped him build his boat, will presumably be left behind to drown! A good question. Ea’s answer is the subject of Martin's new book:
‘At dawn there will be cakes, in the evening he will rain down upon you a shower of wheat.’
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‘By means of incantations, by means of wind demon(esse)s, he will rain down upon you a rain of wheat-like intensity.’
‘At dawn, darkness; in (this) pre-nocturnal twilight OR he will rain down upon you that which kills the wheat (like a deadly Reaper).’
Martin analyses each of the words used by Ea - their use, context and possible meanings across a swathe of Akkadian literature - to present an academic and highly convincing case for three equally plausible and valid meanings of Ea's words; ranging from re-assuring (you will have a great harvest!) to catastrophic (you will be swept away and die!). Martin draws three main conclusions: First, that Ea is intentionally duplicitous in his choice of words. While Ea misleads, however, he doesn't strictly lie; since with the benefit of hindsight his words could have been taken as the truth. If you are a Mesopotamian deity, duplicity is clearly OK. Second: that since the same form of words is used twice more in the epic (to describe what actually happened), an oral narrator could have used his voice to emphasise a different meaning each time, and in that way to spell out the trick of Ea's duplicity. And third: that once one explores the implications of this level of subtlety, it emerges that the Gilgameš Flood story as a whole is an incredibly well-crafted narrative, full of tricks and significant omissions. Much as some have sought to dismember it into different sources, one can make a strong case for a single ‘(very) intelligent hand’. This short review cannot of course do proper justice to the intellectual rigour, academic depth and surefooted insight that Martin has brought to this subject. His work will stand the test of time, and will surely become the basis of other so far unforeseen conclusions based on his rigorous and comprehensive analysis. Mark K Chetwood Page 19
For more information about Assyriology and Mesopotamian Archaeology at Cambridge: https://www.arch.cam.ac.uk/about-us/mesopotamia
Newsletter assembled by Mark K Chetwood, October 2019
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