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”

Excited (and nervous) to give a Zoom lecture today to a 5th-grade class about astronomy in ancient Mesopotamia and its legacy! It’s impossible to talk about any aspect of scholarship in ancient Mesopotamia, like astronomy, without first defining Mesopotamia and introducing the writing system used there for around 3,000 years, cuneiform.

So let’s start.

Welcome, new Tweeps! I know you came for the dogs, which I am totally here for, but I hope you stay for the cuneiform because the world it reveals is full of humanity and wonder (and sometimes also dogs). This is a 4,000-year-old mud brick from the ziggurat in the ancient city of Ur in Iraq, stamped with a cuneiform inscription that mentions king Ur-Nammu.

The brick also immortalises the paw prints of a very good doggo who walked over it before it dried.

Have you already taught yourself to churn butter and perfected homemade sourdough? Maybe it’s time to move on to 4,000-year-old recipes from Babylonia.

Short thread of stews recorded on a cuneiform tablet from ancient Iraq to go with all that bread. A recipe from c1750 BCE for a vegetarian stew called pašrūtum, made from spring leeks, leeks, coriander, and garlic. Ground-up dried sourdough (bappiru) is added at the end to thicken the stew and deepen the flavour.

The original recipe calls for sheep’s fat, but any fat will do

An old photo of the ziggurat at Ur in southern Iraq during the course of excavations there in the 1920s.

It was constructed during the reign of Ur-Nammu ~2100 BCE and restored by a handful of subsequent kings. The people ascending the steps give an idea of its immense scale The walls of the ziggurat at Ur in the 1920s. Made of (millions of) air dried and baked mud bricks, the temple complex was dedicated to the moon god whose name is Nanna in Sumerian, Sîn in Akkadian.

The tiny-looking person at the foot of the wall highlights its height

The Iraq Museum is one I hope to get to visit someday, but until then, I am grateful that @Mehiyar sends me incredible photos that momentarily make me feel like I’m there.

A short thread. Reconstructed from surviving parts, like inlays made of mother-of-pearl and lapis lazuli, the Golden Lyre is named for its bull head made of gold and was found in the Royal Cemetery at Ur in southern Iraq (c2600 BCE).

Photo by @Mehiyar

Brief and, for most people, completely useless thread on how to type in cuneiform.

First, you can download a Unicode cuneiform font here hethport.uni-wuerzburg.de/cuneifont/ If you know some values of cuneiform signs, you can use Cuneify to type in cuneiform in various script styles.

Cuneify requires some knowledge of the sign repertoire. Typing “kalbu” (dog) will generate an error, but typing “kal-bu” will generate cuneiform cuneifyplus.arch.cam.ac.uk

Before even the Epic of Gilgamesh, a story written in the Akkadian language, is the Sumerian myth known today as “Bilgames and Huwawa”.

Gilgamesh is called by his name in Sumerian, Bilgames, and in the story, he proposes a journey to the fabled mountains where cedars grow

https://twitter.com/robgmacfarlane/status/1185435470022545408

In the Sumerian story of Bilgames/Gilgamesh and Huwawa, the hero—anxious about mortality—wants to journey to the Cedar Mountain to establish his fame.

“People are lost, that fills me with dismay...corpses in the water make the river almost overflow...This will happen to me too”

Teaching a class on wisdom literature in ancient Mesopotamia this term, which has meant perusing proverbs for students to translate.

Proverbs were also copied down and translated by Babylonian students as part of scribal education. They may reflect popular sayings (or not). Anyway, here is a selection of Sumerian proverbs about dogs that are lovely and, perhaps, a little bit relatable.

“The dog understands: ‘Take it!’ It does not understand: ‘Put it down!’”