Thin End of the Wedge
Thin End of the Wedge
75. Moudhy Al-Rashid: Engaging interest in Mesopotamia
Moudhy talks about the different kinds of outreach work she has done. How does she excite interest in material that is very unfamiliar for most people? What works well? She discusses the different audiences and formats, the various approaches and possibilities.
2:18 why Mesopotamia?
4:45 attracting interest
8:11 overcoming the unfamiliar
11:19 reliable history versus pseudo-history
13:10 radio and podcasts
17:06 scale and detail
19:47 different audiences
22:03 images
23:52 what didn't work
25:55 favourite fact
27:17 new book
33:30 what's next?
On the Spot: Moudhy Al-Rashid Feb 2019
The Stylus is Mightier than the Sword Feb 2020
You're Dead to Me--Cuneiform: the world’s first writing system
You're Dead to Me--The Ancient Babylonians
Writing and rewriting history Feb 2025
The Rest is History RIHC: Mesopotamian Mythology, Cyrus the Great, and The First Museum
Music by Ruba Hillawi
Website: http://wedgepod.org
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCSM7ZlAAgOXv4fbTDRyrWgw
Email: wedgepod@gmail.com
Patreon: http://Patreon.com/WedgePod
Hello, and welcome to the Thin End of the Wedge, the podcast where experts from around the world share new and interesting stories about life in the ancient Middle East. My name is Jon. Each episode, I talk to friends and colleagues and get them to explain their work in a way we can all understand. Those of us who work in the field of assyriology share a passion for these ancient cultures these days, however, many people outside the field. Know very little about it, but there is an appetite. A major challenge we face is how to bridge that gap. How do we engage non specialists? What are they interested in, and how do we translate our research into a form they can digest and enjoy? Our guest is someone who's been very active and successful in outreach work alongside her teaching and research. She's built a social media profile, being interviewed for popular history programs on the radio, appeared on major podcasts, and has a new book, which is causing a real buzz and riding high in the charts. I ask her how she does it, what works and what doesn't. So get yourself a cup of tea, make yourself comfortable, and let's meet today's guests. Hello and welcome to Thin End of the Wedge. Thank you for joining us.
Moudhy Al-Rashid:Hi, Jon, thank you so much for having me.
Jon Taylor:Could you tell us, please: who are you, and what do you do?
Moudhy Al-Rashid:My name is Moudhy Al-Rashid, and I'm an assyriologist at Oxford. I just finished my last official academic post doc at Wolfson, where I was researching and teaching topics in the history and languages of ancient Mesopotamia. I taught Akkadian primarily, like Gilgamesh, Descent of Ishtar, Hammurabi, but also specialised classes on medical texts. But I recently sort of transitioned to non-academic position of Honorary Fellow, because I've just finished my first book called Between Two Rivers: ancient Mesopotamia and the Birth of History.
Jon Taylor:What we want to discuss today is your work generally, in terms of outreach, engaging people, trying to share your passion for Mesopotamia. So I guess the first question has
to be the challenging one:why do you think people should be interested in Mesopotamia?
Moudhy Al-Rashid:I think it's a great question. And I think the most basic answer to me, if I'm answering it from a personal perspective, is that I think it's really, really interesting. The breadth and also the depth of the sources is sometimes just like utterly breathtaking. They offer intimate moments in people's lives, but also major milestones. If we had to pluck a few, the earliest writing. And every stage in this conceptual and technological breakthrough is preserved in the archaeological record, which is really incredible. The earliest war memorials, possibly like the white monument in Syria from the third millennium BCE. Some of the earliest attempts to write down their own history, like the Umma-Lagash border conflict, the Sumerian King List. Even if they do blend myth and memory together, they do it in such a specific way that I think it does speak to their attempts to make sense of their past and present it. The Amarna Letters, the earliest diplomatic correspondence in the 1300s BCE. Scientific breakthroughs like the development of the zodiac and mathematical astronomy. And after the mid-first millennium BCE, one of my favourites is the earliest approximation of Pi. I mean, there are just so many milestones. The list is almost endless. But I think there are also some really intensely human moments in the sources that are preserved in cuneiform tablets. Like one of my favourites is a little boy named Sueyya writing around 1900 BCE to his dad, who's far away in Anatolia. And he's writing from the Assyrian heartland, telling him what he's learning at school, and having this sort of impeccable handwriting that's better than any of the other tablets that we have from that era. Lullabies people sang to their babies. And even in literature, some like Gilgamesh's grief at the death of Enkidu is just, I mean, some of these moments are really relatable and beautiful and human. That's what I think really draws me, and I hope others to ancient Mesopotamia.
Jon Taylor:Yeah. I mean, that's certainly what comes across in your book and your other outreach efforts. It's very much about personal connections and actual people, rather than these big, sweeping vistas. You have experience in two realms, essentially, don't you? So you have the university experience, where you're trying to attract young students coming in. They can pick Greece and Rome or Egypt and pyramids and mummies and things. Or you could look at mud for a living. So that requires a certain skill, doesn't it, to attract that interest, to pry people away and to focus them on Mesopotamia. But you also have the popular side of it with social media, radio, podcast, things like that. What are the big differences between attracting interest from those two different groups?
Moudhy Al-Rashid:I think with students, to some degree, whatever it is that they've come to Oxford to study, they're already invested, right? They're already interested in the ancient world in some aspect of it. So it's not too hard to sell to get them interested in cuneiform. And some of them come deciding that that's what they want to do. They want to learn Akkadian. They want to learn Sumerian. You're already kind of working with people who have had that moment of their minds being blown by these sources, and have decided to dedicate, you know, years of their lives to it. The other difference is that they're familiar with the jargon, but also the terminology that we use in citations, which is very, very confusing, so there's less to explain as you go. Even if you're still teaching, you're teaching on a different depth of level, whereas engaging the public is more challenging because most of them have never even heard of ancient Mesopotamia. So you're really building the discourse up from scratch. And have to respect that kind of vacuum, in a way, because people are interested but they don't know where to start, so you have to help them find a place to start. And that can be challenging, because you can't even use shortcuts, like "Old Babylonian period". No one has any idea what that is, sometimes even"cuneiform", or the fact that it's written in clay. You have to really start with the basics. And it really becomes ... or, you know, I felt like it became my job to be incredibly clear, avoiding all the jargon that actually makes this stuff 1000 times easier to talk about, because there's a kind of base level of knowledge avoiding all that and explaining as you go. But it also, I've learned, means compromises in some contexts. Like, if you're doing a thread on Bluesky, for example, you can't give all the context that you'd like on what Old Babylonian period means. You can't even really say Old Babylonian period because that doesn't signify a specific time to people. You could try something like 4000 years ago for shorthand. Another what I've found that I've had to just drop completely from the vernacular is "script stage". And I just say "font" now, because it's sort of, it's just like a font, you know? Why not? So I didn't want to lose an audience trying to explain a label that only means something to a select few users. I think it made more sense to find alternatives. And that kind of challenge in the vocabulary, really, and the background knowledge is one that's fun to tackle, and it makes you think about, okay, well, how can I talk about this in a way that's... that's clear and interesting, a balancing act, I think, between clarity and accuracy that I sometimes get wrong. You know, it's not it's not always perfect, but it's a challenge that I really enjoyed, because I love writing and I love trying to find ways to be as clear as possible.
Jon Taylor:It's a very similar challenge actually, to museum display.
Moudhy Al-Rashid:I can imagine, yeah, to condense all this information into a tiny little placard, how do you even begin?
Jon Taylor:Yeah. I mean, one of the things we all struggle with is the lack of familiarity these days that people have with this part of the world, this part of history. So inevitably, you have to throw at them lots of new and strange sounding names of people, of places, of concepts. You start saying things like"me" and try and explain what that is. And when you throw so much unfamiliar material at people, quite often, it's very difficult to take that on, to try and make sense of it. It's a very high burden. How do you get around that? How do you make people comfortable, to bring them in to talk about the things that you want to talk about, we need to talk about?
Moudhy Al-Rashid:Such another... such a great question. I think one of the reasons everything sounds so unfamiliar is because, as you said, it's not part of people's everyday discourse or everyday elements of ancient world that they're exposed to, like figures from ancient Greece and Rome. So I feel like repetition, just sharing as much stuff out there, you know, that's on assyriology and writing as much as possible, until Assyria is understood to be a single word. Or, you know, Mesopotamia is a place, not a language, that sort of thing. So I think repetition really, but also taking the time each time to explain. Which ,I understand, is probably not always possible with an exhibition label, for example, because there's such a tight space. Whereas on social media, for example, or in a podcast, you can take a few extra sentences or posts to explain something. You know, it's tempting to say, like "omen text", for example, but that doesn't really mean a lot to most people. So I've learned to use familiar analogues. It's another useful tool is to just try to find a modern analogue to something like "textbook of observations and predictions that we call omens". So my PhD thesis was on the diagnostic textbook. The Sa-gig. And I used to when I talked about it online, call it a"series", but that's ... means something else to most people. So now I just call it a"textbook", because that's sort of, in a way, that's what it was. It was just made out of clay instead of paper, but it really is a kind of reference manual for people doing stuff in medicine and or an interpretation of signs related to the human body. So using familiar language can help to replace some of the stuff that we take for granted."Extispicy"is another great one{LAUGHS} or protases and apodoses. You know, the words like you just kind of have to let go. In a way, the names are a little harder, because we have so many sentence names, right, that even I still struggle to remember half of them because they're just so long. But I think getting people used to seeing those or explaining names in ancient Mesopotamia were often sentences. You don't need to say how they were structured or anything about the grammar or language. It can be enough for people to appreciate, "Okay, that's why this name has like 100 dashes in it, because it's not just one word". So yeah, explanation and repetition, I found, are really useful tools, as well as relying on modern analogues. I know I've just used that word 1000 times, but it really is a useful tool.
Jon Taylor:Yeah, definitely. So when you decide you're going to share something, you're trying to excite a bit of interest in people, what balance do you strike then between challenging the misconceptions that are out there? To the extent that people have some knowledge about this part of the world, a little bit more often than is ideal, it's about, you know, ancient aliens and spaceships and levitation, DNA, and things that are, you know, pseudo-science and quite damaging in a way. Do you set out to debunk that, or do you just put out the reliable info? What's the best way to approach this?
Moudhy Al-Rashid:You know, I haven't tried to confront it directly yet. I'm not as brave as people like Flint Dibble, who's an academic at Cardiff, who really takes it on and is actively trying to combat disinformation and bizarre ancient aliens theories. I haven't really had the courage to take that on yet. My strategy is more just like put as much accurate stuff out there and make sure it is accurate, which can be very time consuming as well, but is extremely important. So yeah, I think my strategy so far has just been to be the latter of what you said, to just put as much stuff out there as I can in the hopes that some more accurate stuff will take hold and stay away from the toxic kind of debates. But there is a lot out there that's bizarre, let's say.
Jon Taylor:Yeah, I guess then it's partly a logistical matter of time, but also mental load and stress. And I guess the reward, you know how much you'd have to put into it, and how much really you're going to be able to change minds that seem to be made up already.
Moudhy Al-Rashid:Exactly. Someone said to me, don't worry about arguing with someone with a fixed mindset. You should be interacting with those who are sort of already open to learning something new. I think that makes a lot of sense.
Jon Taylor:Yeah. Okay, so you've been on the BBC in a number of formats. I mean, you've been on the big history podcasts. You've been on radio shows. I wonder if you could say a little bit about that side of things. How does it work? Do they invite you to talk about something in particular? Do you get to choose? What's the process for this kind of thing?
Moudhy Al-Rashid:Yeah, well, I mean, it was a slow part process to kind of get on anyone's radar to begin with. I have to be very upfront about that. When I first joined Twitter, I had absolutely no idea what I was doing. And previously, had just used social media for personal stuff, like pictures of my dog and my meals, typical stuff that I really wish I had time to do now but{LAUGHS} And then eventually, I started doing something called Mesopotamia Monday. We did the hashtag where I share something interesting, that I thought was interesting about Mesopotamia every Monday. And then it occurred to me, why on earth was I limiting myself to just Monday? So I just started sharing whatever I came across or thought people might find interesting. If I was browsing the Yale Babylonian collection website, looking for a mathematical text, for example, for a teaching presentation, and I came across a cool plaque I would share about that. Or if there was a beautiful line of text from something I was teaching, I would share that. Or some other element of my research that I thought might resonate. So it started off as just sharing things that I was already encountering, and then I set out to create threads from scratch on topics that either people asked about or that I thought people would be interested in based on what things people were already interested in. And that took a lot of work, I have to say, making a Twitter thread or now a Bluesky thread. I'm really paranoid about getting stuff wrong, because I don't want to, you know, be part of the disinformation machine inadvertently. So it involves a lot of checking, double checking, condensing information to fit word limits, making sure there's no jargon, making sure it's clear. So sometimes a thread like that would take me many hours, sometimes like two or three hours to do. But what I learned was that there was a huge appetite for knowledge on social media, despite the kind of epistemic slide that we're seeing and disinformation by those in power and the deliberately disorganised discourse by people like Trump that has somehow become normalised. There are also lots of people who just want to learn something new. So, you know, people are just curious. And it reflected back, in a way, my own curiosity about the field when I first came across it and the podcasts came with those, in a way. They came as those started to get more reach. People who had podcasts would reach out, typically, either via social media or on my Oxford address, which is ... or my Wolfson address, which is publicly available. And then you sort of take it from there. Sometimes they ask you to do a podcast on a specific topic, or sometimes they'll ask if you want to do something on something you don't know very much about, in which case it's better to offer an alternative person for that. But you also end up on things where people expect you to know 3400 years of history, which is just not expected of any other historical discipline in the world, I think, except maybe I don't know. Do geologists count? They deal with deep time. But some of the first ones I did were The Rest is History, which is I didn't realise at the time would become integral to the book I ended up writing about the earliest historical texts from ancient Mesopotamia. You're Dead To Me--the first one I did was on the Babylonians, and the second one, which was so much fun, was on cuneiform, which I was so glad to get to do that one, because it's so foundational to people understanding this stuff. But I've done, you know, some of the other early ones I did were, you know, on topics that I was more familiar with, like medicine and everyone has been incredibly kind and genuinely interested, which is so lovely. It's a really great community of people interested in history and related subjects who sort of run these podcasts and who go on them, and who listen to them. It's, I'm so grateful that I've been able to get to do so many of them.
Jon Taylor:Okay, one of my questions about this is the question of scale. On the one hand, our sources tend to be very specific. On such and such a day, this person got two litres of oil or something like that. And then you have to somehow work out from that to what life was like for somebody like that at that time. Then on a podcast, you'll get tremendous difference in scale. So we'll be asked to talk about, you know,"the Assyrians" or"Mesopotamia", whereas somebody else will be asked to talk about the life of Caesar. Or you get six episodes charting each stage in Caesar's life. There's a tremendous disparity in scale. What's the level at which we should pitch things?
Moudhy Al-Rashid:Yeah, I think that's another great question, because you're right, there's just so much, and it's such a big topic with so few of us compared to the material working on it. The scale really often feels just overwhelming, especially when you have to sit and try to explain it. And I think storytelling, I've learned is a really powerful tool in trying to condense such a huge swath of history into something a little bit more manageable. I think the example you gave a second ago of someone getting a couple of litres of oil as a kind of "okay.,how do we get from there to the economic history of a particular period?" I think that's a really great way to do that is because you can find an actual person, an actual thing that they went through, and kind of weave out of that, something about an era. But I think if someone wants to do outreach, you kind of get to talk about whatever you want, as long as there's some context. So you could take on "what is Mesopotamia?", if you wanted to. There is space for that, because it's not part of people's everyday life and popular culture yet, I hope yet. But there's also space for talking about someone like, I don't know Taram-kubi from the Old Assyrian period, and her letters back and forth to her husband, which I think was actually the topic of a documentary. So I think there's space for both. But storytelling can be a really powerful tool, and telling people's lies as if they were a story is also ... it's a way to get to the heart of what the sources are telling us without having to be too dry about it, if you know what I mean. So yeah, I think everything's a great question, though, because there is so much, and how do you balance the two, and how do you make them clear? Because there is, but I do think there's space for both. There's space for the sweeping histories, and there's space for six episodes on Ashurbanipal, let's say,{LAUGHS}
Jon Taylor:{LAUGHS} I look forward to that.
Moudhy Al-Rashid:Yeah, that would be an interesting one.
Jon Taylor:Absolutely. Alright, so with the different forms of media, then, do they require different things, different approaches? Are you trying to target different audiences?
Moudhy Al-Rashid:So yeah, I mean social media, there are different ... I ... I kind of shy away from Instagram, because I don't like doing videos, and I just can't bring myself to the put the time in at the moment that would require that. So I like the text based social media, like Buesky. It's definitely an easier way to do outreach, because you have time to think about what you want to say. You have time to pick a topic that you think people might be interested in. Let's say dogs. You have time to narrow it down and make it interesting and find images and describe the images, and you just have time and you can check stuff that's like a theme that's emerging. I'm like really paranoid about checking things. Whereas face-to-face is really important and a great opportunity, but it can be really nerve wracking. It And you definitely reach different audiences. So social involves a lot of prep, sometimes travel, sometimes media is restricted to your base, whether that's like 150 you're in a room with people you met five seconds earlier. And people or 2000 or 20,000. Those are the people primarily that I'm autistic, so I already struggle with that when I'm not are going to be seeing what you're writing, and maybe the being recorded. But then if you add the dimension of the people within their circles. Whereas with radio and podcasts, possibility that however many thousands of people might be listening to this at some point. You know, it's a struggle for me the subject you know, the history of ancient Mesopotamia can reach far more people. So it's definitely worthwhile. It not to just completely break down, but it's a great can be a lot of fun. And so far, in my experience, everyone has opportunity, and I think I'm okay with doing stuff that's been really lovely. This isn't like you're going on to debate scary and that's hard, I think{LAUGHS} Roller-coasters are the merits of whatever new tariff Trump is putting in. It's also scary and hard and they're super fun, so ... {LAUGHS} not like a hostile scenario. It's just people who want to learn about things, and I think that's really lovely.
Jon Taylor:Could I ask about images? Obviously, with social media, images play quite an important role, quite a useful hook to draw people in. But with radio, obviously you don't have that, and you don't seem to have any images in your book. I wonder what role you place on images and how important they are to engaging people. If you don't have access to them, how do you deal with trying to explain unfamiliar objects?
Moudhy Al-Rashid:Yeah, I mean, I think images can be a really important tool, because the stuff is so unfamiliar. Even something as simple as a cuneiform tablet, most people have never seen one before. So being able to present one, or to show people what cuneiform looks like, can be very interesting for them. And it is possible to describe it in a way that can bring it to life for someone who might not be able to see the images, or, for whatever reason, access or download them. So I think images can be very useful, and they're also ... in my book, because my book is structured around objects, I wanted to include images. But, you know, frankly, by the end of the process, it was ... we were running out of time and getting to deadlines, and I thought, well, maybe it might make more sense to just create a website or something to compliment it, because we would be difficult to have colour images anyway. But I think you can really bring an object to life with a photo
Jon Taylor: I have to ask:you know, life isn't always a straight line, is it? And people are unpredictable sometimes. So of it. And so many of these things are catalogued and is there something that you've tried to do, some way you've digitised and available for anyone who can to access them tried to engage people--a story, an object you thought they might for free. And I think that's really wonderful, and I think like, but it just hasn't worked for some reason? that's ... at the moment I'm trying to make sure to include links on social media whenever I include an image, because I want people to be able to go to these incredible databases and see all the work people put into layering all the data and making it available, because they are a really useful tool. They can be. As can be the storytelling around them and trying to make bring them to life as well with words.
Moudhy Al-Rashid:So I've learned that Akkadian grammar does not land. {LAUGHS} Yeah, shockingly, shockingly, because I get really pumped about Akkadian grammar. Like, I think it's the coolest thing in the world, but when you try to kind of explain that or put that forward, I think you tend to lose your audience. So that's one thing. I think the languages themselves, although people are curious, they don't really have time for the nitty gritty. It's like, I'm personally obsessed with the ocean. I love the deep ocean. I love whales, but I don't have time to, like, get a degree in marine biology or get into the real nitty gritty of it. So I'm really grateful to academics like Jon Copley, who have written very accessible books on this. And I think that's sort of the same with the languages and grammar. You have to pick the kind of things that you think will resonate about them and maybe not go into the hapax in Ludlul or the D-stem of something, something or other. It's, yeah, that's ... I've found it hard to get people excited about that. But the other thing that I find odd is that if I post something that's just a piece of art from ancient Mesopotamia, it tends to get less engagement than a text, which I find very surprising. Yeah, maybe I just don't know how to write about ancient art in an exciting enough way, because I am a philologist at heart. But I think people get a lot more they tend to be really interested in the people's lives and the stories about people's lives and individuals from ancient Mesopotamia, which you don't necessarily get from the art, no matter how intricate and beautiful and representative of a particular era or event it might be. I think it doesn't, so far in my experience and ... and/or the way that I present it, have this ... it doesn't resonate as much as the texts, which I think is really interesting.
Jon Taylor:Yeah, that is quite interesting. I wonder why that is. Do you have a favourite fact about Mesopotamia?
Moudhy Al-Rashid:I absolutely love this question. It's like, when someone's like, "what's your favorite movie?" And you're like, "Have I ever watched a movie before? I can't remember a single movie that I've watched in the last 20 years." I think one of my favourite facts is that the distance in time between us and the last wedge, so that tablet from Uruk, from 79 to 80 CE, which is an astronomical Almanac. The distance and time between us and that tablet is smaller than the distance and time between that tablet and the earliest proto-cuneiform. So I think why I love that fact is that the people of the Late Babylonian and later periods who were still using cuneiform, and even a little earlier than that, the stuff that we think is ancient was even ancient to them. I mean, their sense of time must have been really something, and maybe what came before that. So I think that's probably something I really love about ancient Mesopotamia ... is just that within an era that we consider to be ancient, that's 3400 years, those people also had things that were incredibly ancient to them. More ancient, in fact, than some of their stuff is to us.
Jon Taylor:Yeah, that is a pretty cool fact. I can't let you go without talking about your new book. It's got a beautiful cover. I noticed you ... you avoided brown as a colour. Interesting choice. It's got rave reviews. You're riding high in the charts. Could you tell us why you wrote it? What the idea of the book is? How did this book come about?
Moudhy Al-Rashid:Yeah. I mean, I would have loved for it to be a cuneiform tablet on the cover, but I think that the cover they ended up going with is so stunning by Holly Ovenden. It's just so beautiful with the rivers being evoked. I wrote this book because what I really learned from online engagement is that I've loved learning from the people that I follow and that interact with me. And I really love getting to share what I have learned from our field, which is such an interesting ... it's a fascinating field. And I wrote it really because I wanted to share something that I really love. I joke that I wanted to scream about it from the rooftops, but that's like, dangerous, probably illegal, ill-advised, maybe, for other reasons. So a book seemed like a much more reasonable option for sharing it as a bit more widely, if possible, with more people who might be interested in the topic. And yes, I wrote it during, I mean, there's no like great time, I guess, to write a book, because it's really hard to write a book. But I wrote it when I was pregnant and I had a tiny toddler. I mean, she was barely a toddler at the time, so it was... it was a bizarre time to take such a project on, but I think it helped me write a very different book to what I would have written if I was writing it at any other time in my life. It made me a lot more empathetic, I think, to the sources. And I think it's one of the things that made me focus so much on individual people.
So Between Two Rivers:Ancient Mesopotamia and the Birth of History tells a history of Mesopotamia. And it does it through objects found in an ancient museum in the city of Ur dated to about 550 BCE. This museum, which ... I'm doing the quotation signs with my hands... {LAUGHS} in quotes, because it's not completely clear what it actually is, and I do go into that, but it contained objects from much earlier eras. Like a weapon and the statue of a king named shulgi, who lived just before 2000 BCE, so around 1500 years before this museum might have been put together. And this museum was in the palace of a princess named En-nigaldi-Nanna, which I think is another interesting historical element of the whole puzzle that I go into as well in the book. And each of these objects offers a way into some aspect of life in ancient Mesopotamia. The weapon was a macehead, and it tells us about violence, this war and how people made sense of that. The excavators found a school tablet made by a child that can tell us a bit about how people learned to read and write. An ornate title deed that we call a kudurru can tell us a bit about social inequality. An inscription of a king can tell us a little bit about the conversations between humans and deities and how that gives rise to the birth of science. The statue of King Shulgi that I mentioned has an inscription that tells us a bit about what it means to be an ideal king. And among all these objects, there was one that excavators called the key to helping them explain why so many older things were found in a layer of excavation that was from, you know, 550 BCE, and it was what they called an exhibition label. It was basically an object describing another object and saying that it was there for display. Or that's how the words were translated. So it's a really interesting collection, and it gives us a sense of how people understood history, as well as a way into these different aspects of life. But I think the objects aren't really the stars of the show. They're just really the springboards into the real star, which is cuneiform. And cuneiform sources tell us about the lives of people in ancient Mesopotamia in their own words, which I think is so beautiful, as well as people's attempts to make records of their own past. So the museum objects offer us a window, basically, onto the world that really we have to thank cuneiform for allowing us to resurrect and onto how history might have been understood. I wanted to spotlight the stories of individuals, and, you know, use those stories to help us weave a broader narrative of what the different eras were about in ancient Mesopotamia, and what we can learn about them and each other, and maybe that we're not so different from the people who made these texts and whose lives are recorded in them.
Jon Taylor:It does it in a very nice way. It's quite an interesting structure. It's not chronological. You have your museum, the objects in it, and you head off in one direction, and that triggers another thought. Then you come back to it. It's a very different way of structuring a book to most of the material that's out there. Was that a plan? Or did that just happen organically? That just how it came out when you wrote what you wanted to write?
Moudhy Al-Rashid:Yeah. I mean, I think that sort of hit the nail on the head. I wrote what I wanted to write. I didn't want to write a chronological history, because it was just too overwhelming a thought to even try to cover that much ground. And I didn't want to try to be exhaustive. I wanted to be exhausted enough that people would know about the major periods of history and some of the major players, but also fill it in with the stuff that I thought people would find really interesting based on my engagement online, but also based on what I think is interesting and what I've, you know, had the privilege of getting to research and learn about. So it's more of a thematic history, I would say, than a chronological one. I do try to follow a bit of a thread at the beginning of each chapter, but yeah, I think it's less about that very kind of accidental thread that ended up happening, and more about the themes of education, warfare, science. And then in the last chapter, I talk about women, which I think has been a favourite so far, of many of the readers, so definitely my favourite one to write. I wrote it first and then I rewrote it last.
Jon Taylor:Yeah. Well, congratulations. It's a lovely book.
Moudhy Al-Rashid:Thank you.
Jon Taylor:What's next? Having done that, are you just taking a breath, or do you already have plans for a sequel or something completely different?
Moudhy Al-Rashid:Yeah. I mean, I would, I would love to go on like a holiday somewhere, somewhere far away from the many illnesses that we have been catching this winter. But in all seriousness, I hope to write another book, if all goes well. I would love to write another book that can bring another aspect of life in ancient Mesopotamia to a wider audience. And to write about it in a way that I hope will appeal to many people and make this material clear, interesting and meaningful, because it is such it's just such incredible stuff that the cuneiform preserves. It deserves as wide an audience as possible.
Jon Taylor:Absolutely. I couldn't put it better myself. Thank you so much for your time.
Moudhy Al-Rashid:Thank you. Thank you for having me.
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