Holding a tablet that was written thousands of years ago
and being able to read what it says
is an amazing feeling.
If you see a cuneiform tablet for the first time
you're not likely to identify it as writing
and you certainly wouldn't know which way up it went.
It's a form of time travel -
it catapults you back in time, thousands of years
and puts you directly into the shoes of somebody
who lived so many years before us.
The earliest known form of writing is called cuneiform.
First used over 5000 years ago
it's believed to predate Egyptian hieroglyphs.
Cuneiform was used by civilisations that lived in Mesopatamia.
Several societies used cuneiform as their writing system
including the Sumerians and the Akkadians.
Pressed onto clay, cuneiform tablets are incredibly durable,
they're literally fireproof,
but for thousands of years, no one was able to translate them.
After much trial and error,
cuneiform script was finally deciphered in the Victorian era.
What they revealed was extraordinary.
Once cuneiform was deciphered
lots of unexpected things came to light
but probably none which had greater impact
than the discovery by George Smith in 1872
of the 11th tablet of the Epic of Gilgamesh
in which he encountered for the first time, the flood story.
Finding an ancient tablet with the story of Noah's Ark
written hundreds of years before the Bible
shattered the Victorian's understanding of the world.
When it arrived, it was a huge... ...bang, thing like that.
It was a very explosive matter.
And the parallel was much more than a sort of, general similarity
with a boat and water and animals.
It was in the same order
and there were many close points that compellingly showed
that this same story had been current in Mesopotamia
a millennium before the earliest date
when the Hebrew text is likely to have come into existence.
It wasn't easy being a woman in Mesopotamia
but women in wealthy families were treated fairly well.
The first known author in all of recorded history
is actually a woman.
The Akkadian priestess, Enheduanna.
The case of Enheduanna shows us
that women could reach extremely high and important positions
in Mesopotamian religion.
We learn a lot about society, about beliefs
relations between husband and wife
business transactions going wrong.
We know from cuneiform tablets that women had agency.
We have contracts where they are allowed to buy houses
and they retain control of their dowry.
They can run and manage businesses in their own right
as long as alongside their husbands.
If you've ever wondered why there's 60 seconds in a minute
or 360 degrees in a circle
it's because the Sumerians and Akkadians
used a numbering system that was sexagesimal.
Which means that they counted on a base of 60
and divisions of 60 and multiplications by 60
where we tend to use the decimal system.
Our own time measurement into 60 seconds in a minute
and 60 minutes in an hour
is a direct inheritance from Mesopotamian scholarly tradition.
It's amazing how many concepts we take for granted
in our modern society
can actually be found for the first time in ancient Mesopotamia.
The whole concept of mathematical models
the very idea that you can use data
to predict things happening in the future
and that's foundational to all modern science.
The Mesopotamians were keen letter writers
sending sealed messages with traders and travellers.
Reading these letters today,
you realise that in many ways, not much has changed.
We can see that there were specific formulae in their correspondence.
As we start an email today by "I hope all is well"
they also started with specific formulae.
But when they were angry
they forgot about this formulaic convention
and they just started the letter very matter-of-factly.
As well as writing about stock levels,
taxes and receipts on their tablets
cuneiform writers loved to gossip.
We do have letters from these women
complaining that the men are not sending enough money home.
We have a certain sense of keeping up with the Joneses
saying "next door has built an extension to their house,
when are we going to have the money to build an extension to our house?"
So these kind of things really do come through
and we see these little human concerns
these little human squabbles
desires, jealousies and so on.
By studying the past
we learn so much about ourselves and the world that we live in.
But the secrets revealed in cuneiform tablets
are only known to us today because of clay's durability.
The way that we record things is constantly evolving.
Technological progress means things become obsolete very quickly.
The messages we send every day are stored in the cloud.
How likely is it that anyone will be able to read that in 20 years
let alone a few thousand years?
There is a project in Austria
which is inscribing 1000 of the most important books of our era
onto ceramic tablets.
So humanity has really come full circle
from writing on clay at the very beginning of history
to writing on clay again
in a different way to preserve our information now.
There are many initiatives trying to prevent digital data from being lost.
Could it be that despite all the incredible technology
we have at our fingertips
ancient methods of recording information
are the best way of preserving our secrets
for generations to come.