PSW 2476 Ancient Lives Preserved in Cuneiform | Amanda Podany

Lecture Starts at 14:51
www.pswscience.org
April 28, 2023
PSW #2476
Ancient Lives Preserved in Cuneiform: Impressions of Mesopotamian Society Over 3,500 Years Ago
Amanda Podany
Professor Emeritus of History, Cal Poly Pomona
Perhaps the oldest urban civilization on Earth is also, remarkably, the ancient culture for which we have the most documentation. For about 3,000 years, starting in 3200 BCE, the scribes of ancient Mesopotamia (modern Iraq), and of its immediate neighbors in what are now Syria, Turkey, and Iran, produced millions of texts. At least 500,000 of these have been found and they represent an extraordinary resource for historians today. These documents reveal details about daily life, legal practices, and professions that can rarely even be glimpsed in other ancient cultures.
The reason for the texts’ survival is that the writing medium in and around Mesopotamia was usually clay, formed into tablets that were dried in the sun or baked after they had been inscribed. Texts are found almost everywhere that excavations take place in these parts of the Middle East - in ancient temples and palaces, private houses, and even streets. In contrast, scribes in neighboring cultures, such as Egypt, Canaan, Israel, Greece, and Rome, generally wrote on organic materials, such as papyrus and leather, and the vast majority of their documents have long since decomposed.
The cuneiform script inscribed on the clay tablets was both phonetic (with some signs used to represent syllables) and logographic (with other signs used to represent whole words), and it was adapted to record many spoken languages. A few texts, such as royal inscriptions, were written with an eye to the future, but the vast majority comprise practical documents such as administrative records, school exercises, letters, contracts, lists, court cases, and so on.
This talk will demonstrate some of the rich and varied ways that cuneiform tablets have been used to reconstruct the world in which they were written, and the possibilities they present for future study. The texts provide historians with data about individuals-male and female, rich and poor, young and old, many of whom were far from the halls of power. Their lives and experiences can be examined through the lens of microhistory, as windows into their eras. Cuneiform documents also reflect the legal system, one of the world’s earliest, and its remarkable attention to fairness for all. And the clay tablets can be examined as physical artifacts that changed over time and provide evidence for the chronology of events thousands of years ago.
As a case study, the history of the ancient kingdom of Hana, in the Middle Euphrates region of Syria, will be examined through all these approaches. Its chronology, beginning in the 18th century BCE, has been elucidated through a study of these documents, its legal practices (reflected in contracts) prove to have been remarkable, and the people who lived there come alive through a study of the families and the neighborhoods in which they lived.
Amanda H. Podany is Professor Emeritus of History at Cal Poly Pomona, where she has been on the faculty since 1990.
Amanda’s research focuses on Syria in the second millennium BCE, with attention to chronology, scribal practice, international relations, and kingship. She has helped pioneer the use of microhistory to study cuneiform archives, exploring and contextualizing the lives of ancient individuals. Much of Amanda’s scholarly work has centered on the land of Hana, located in the Middle Euphrates region of Syria.
Amanda is an author on numerous scholarly articles. She has authored four books and is co-author of another. And she is the author and presenter of a 24-part series of lectures on ancient Mesopotamia for Wondrium/Great Courses. She has a particular interest in making recent findings in her field accessible to a wider audience and has presented numerous public lectures at museums and universities (among other institutions) including the Getty Museum and the Morgan Library.
In her first book, The Land of Hana: Kings, Chronology, and Scribal Tradition (2002), she made the case for a revision of the conventional dating of the Hana kingdom, proving that the kingdom flourished after the 16th century BCE, rather than before. Her revised chronology has been adopted by other scholars and has contributed to other studies of chronological debates concerning the second millennium BCE. Her most recent book, Weavers, Scribes, and Kings: A New History of the Ancient Near East (2022) recounts more than 3,000 years of history through the eyes of people of all walks of life, using a microhistorical approach.
Amanda earned a BA in Anthropology at UCLA, an MA in Archaeology of Western Asia at the Institute of Archaeology, University of London, and a PhD in History of the Ancient Near East at UCLA.
www.pswscience.org

[@kimkesson1454]

She really knows her stuff! And she loves it. This lecture could be incredibly boring but she makes it interesting!

[@jamesraymond1158]

Fascinating. I could feel her excitement as their lives came into sharper focus. How wonderful to be able to read (and write) these documents.

[@Amadeu.Macedo]

Amanda H. Podamy is my favorite scholar! Brava!

[@vynyx4684]

She is such an amazing lecturer and her passion for this is so contagious, I've just finished "Ancient Mesopotamia: Life in the Cradle of Civilization" by her and was so excited to find this here!!

[@Janizzary]

Her level of detective work and deduction is outstanding.

[@stuartwilliams4016]

Absolutely fascinating…I am so glad I happened on this site

[@miatatommy2000]

Thank you 😊!