Name: The ancient secrets revealed by deciphered tablets | BBC Ideas
Uploaded: 2021-11-29T17:41:32.000Z
Duration: 6 min 13 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Basic passive voice

Holding a tablet that was written thousands of years ago

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 catapults you back in time, thousands of years

and puts you directly into the shoes of somebody

The earliest known form of writing is called cuneiform.

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,

but for thousands of years, no one was able to translate them.

cuneiform script was finally deciphered in the Victorian era.

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.

And the parallel was much more than a sort of, general similarity

and there were many close points that compellingly showed

that this same story had been current in Mesopotamia

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

that women could reach extremely high and important positions

We learn a lot about society, about beliefs

We know from cuneiform tablets that women had agency.

We have contracts where they are allowed to buy houses

They can run and manage businesses in their own right

If you've ever wondered why there's 60 seconds in a minute

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

Our own time measurement into 60 seconds in a minute

is a direct inheritance from Mesopotamian scholarly tradition.

It's amazing how many concepts we take for granted

can actually be found for the first time in ancient Mesopotamia.

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.

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.

they forgot about this formulaic convention

and they just started the letter very matter-of-factly.

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

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.

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The ancient secrets revealed by deciphered tablets | BBC Ideas

literally

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extraordinary

extremely