Thin End of the Wedge
Thin End of the Wedge
82. IAA prize winners 2025
International Association for Assyriology awards prizes to early career scholars annually. The for 2025 awards went to:
Best PhD dissertation in the field of Assyriology and Mesopotamian Archaeology: Adeline Reynaud, for “Les diagrammes mathématiques paléo-babyloniens : catalogue, propriétés matérielles, rôles dans les raisonnements”
Best article in Assyriology and Mesopotamian Archaeology:
Laureate: Jon Beltz, for “Everyday Magic? Four Sumerian zi…pa₃ Incantations on Amulets,” in Journal of Cuneiform Studies 77: 97-121.
Runner-up: Andrew Pottorf, for “un-il₂ (“Menials”) as a Serflike Social Stratum during the Ur III Period,” Journal of Ancient Near Eastern History 12/1: 83-113.
Jon and Andrew join us to talk about their prize-winning research.
2:00 What is a zipa incantation?
2:54 amulets and tablets
3:55 practical magic
5:27 main argument
6:29 structures
8:13 place in research
9:10 what's next
11:42 status groups in Ur III
15:52 state of research
20:52 the "people"
22:30 how to become UN.IL2
26:59 social security?
28:50 place in research
30:43 what's next
Music by Ruba Hillawi
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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.
Ellie Bennett:And my name is Ellie. Each episode, we talk to friends and colleagues and get them to explain their work in a way we can all understand.
Jon Taylor:This episode, we meet the winners of the latest round of prizes awarded by the International Association for Assyriology. Two early career scholars discuss their winning research, bringing us into the worlds of early second millennium magic, and social status in Ur III society.
Ellie Bennett:So get yourself a cup of tea. Make yourself comfortable, and let's meet today's guest.
Jon Taylor:Hello and welcome to Thin End of the Wedge. Thank you for joining us.
Jon Beltz:Thanks for having me.
Jon Taylor:Could you tell us please: who are you, and what do you do?
Jon Beltz:My name is Jon Beltz. I'm a philologist and Assyriologist, and I'm currently doing a teaching fellowship at the University of Tuebingen in Germany.
Jon Taylor:Okay, thank you. So we're talking today because you won a prize last year, didn't you? So, could you tell us
please:what did you win, and what did you win the prize for?
Jon Beltz:Yeah, so I won the 2025 prize for the best article of an early career scholar from the International Association for Assyriology. And I won it for my article entitled"Everyday magic. Four Sumerian zipa incantations on amulets", which was in the Journal of Cuneiform Studies.
Jon Taylor:Wonderful. First off, congratulations!
Jon Beltz:Thank you.
Jon Taylor:We're going to talk a little bit today about the article and what you contributed. Maybe we can start with, what is a zipa incantation?
Jon Beltz:Yeah, that's a great question, and one that I kind of ripped my hair out in writing the article itself. They're kind of ill-defined a little bit. They're a Sumerian incantation that is characterised by the usage of the Sumerian verb zipa, which means "to swear on the life of". And it's commonly used for oaths. And so these incantations adapt the language of oaths for the purpose of exorcism, which sounds a little bit weird, but there's actually a lot of ... a lot of cross-cultural parallels for that. And they were edited a long time ago ... over half a century ago. But again, not much work, analysis-wise, or even definition-wise, has been done on them.
Jon Taylor:So you mentioned that we have some on amulets, but presumably there's also tablets. Could you give us an idea of how we find these things? How do they turn up?
Jon Beltz:Yeah. So again, they are mostly known ... the earlier ones ... known from tablets. And there's a couple of serialised compositions from the first millennium that we find that Erich Ebeling originally published. And most of those manuscripts are in the British Museum. And then Borger added on to one of those texts. And again, they're very much like the sort of first millennium serialised compositions that that we expect to find, with things like Udughul or Maqlu or things like that. I've been working on ones that are on amulets and a kind of a different shape of amulet. You know, Assyriologists are used to amulets being those kind of flat things with a little lug on top that's pierced sideways. But the ones I was working on are, they're sort of like a ... if you took a cylinder shape and flattened it. And then it's like a cylinder, it's pierced through the centre.
Jon Taylor:Alright then. So what is the current state of research? And I guess in particular, what is the status of these incantations, because amulets suggest very much a practical magic. But with tablets, sometimes you wonder, maybe that's a more literary thing. What do we think about them? What are they really?
Jon Beltz:Yeah, this has been a big question in the study of Mesopotamian magic and a lot of branches of ancient magic in general. You know, because a spell or an incantation is something that is spoken. And so if we find it in writing, it's outside of its natural habitat, in a sense. And so in assyriology, especially for the early period, you know, the Early Dynastic through Old Babylonian period, there was an article in the early 90s by Michalowski, arguing ... or not arguing, but sort of cautioning... that we need to be careful in saying that, "Well, you know, these might not actually be texts that people were using to do rituals and things like that", you know, because they show up in school contexts and things like that. And they might be scholastic or literary, and again, as you say, you know, because they're on tablets, so the question of how they're used is uncertain. But there's been more recent work that points out cases where within this early tradition, especially in the Old Babylonian and Old Assyrian corpora, that there might actually be some practical use of some of these things that are on clay tablets.
Jon Taylor:Well, can we turn now, then, to your specific contribution? What was the argument of your article? How have you moved the discussion forward specifically?
Jon Beltz:Yeah, so I did a couple things in my article and kind of went through several drafts to figure out what things to do and what order to put them in. You know, I encountered, first of all, the problem of, how do you define a zipa incantation? And as, sort of, at the core of my article, I published and edited this group of amuletic incantations that are all ... from their similarities, they're not the same incantation, but they're clearly related to each other. I dated them to the late third, maybe early second millennium, and I looked at the similar structure that they had, and compared this structure to other known Sumerian incantations, primarily from the Old Babylonian period, and found a number of similarities in structures with other known incantations that are on clay tablets, either single incantation tablets, or in larger compendia, like the Old Babylonian version of Udughul and things like that. So I was able to use that then to argue... because of those similarities ... to argue that there is some kind of relationship between the Sumerian incantations that we find on clay tablets and the ones that we find on these amulets. So there is at least some relationship between the text that we find on clay tablets and actual magical practice.
Jon Taylor:Very nice. Can you say something about the key structures, the key features, and what the significance of them is? You know, how does the magic work, perhaps?
Jon Beltz:Yeah, so, like I said, the zipa incantations are sort of structured around this oath, which goes, "By the life of such and such a god, or sometimes multiple gods, until you leave this person alone, may you not eat, may you not drink, may you not stretch out your hand to the table of the gods". And so it kind of forces this oath on the demon, or the evil force that it will, you know, not be able to take any sustenance until it leaves or starves them out of a person, I guess, if you want to be really literal about it. The main structural elements, there's a few of them that I looked at. But the core of the oath is this long list of possible demons. So like, should you be an Udug-demon. Should you be a Lilu demon. Should you be a ghost. You know, different things like that. And then we get the adjuration by the gods, you know, "Be adjured by this god and this god and this god and this god, that until you leave this person alone", etc.
Jon Taylor:Okay, what's the broader context of this for you? I mean, is this part of your dissertation, or was this just a side project? Something you found you thought was interesting, and you developed as secondary research?
Jon Beltz:Yeah, this started as, like a side project for me. My dissertation was actually on the deity/demon Namtar. So I was working in the Yale Babylonian collection during my PhD, and I was kind of stumbled on one of these amulets. And just for fun, I tried to read it, and things would have snowballed from there. And I found the other ones and looked at those and stuff. And, yeah, it just developed from there. But in terms of broader context, I guess something I see, as you know, it affects, kind of how we... how we talk about Mesopotamian magic and magical texts and the role that writing plays within practical magic and everyday life in Mesopotamia.
Jon Taylor:What's next for you, then? Are you going to do more work on incantations, or is your focus turned elsewhere now?
Jon Beltz:Yeah, so as I said, it's been a while since, over half a century since anyone's really seriously worked on the... the first millennium zipa compositions. So I'm currently working on an updated edition of those. You know, going to museums and looking at manuscripts and, you know, doing all ... all that fun stuff. Good, fundamental assyriology.
Jon Taylor:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Jon Beltz:So I've got that, and then a few other side projects are sort of spinning out of it. I mean, looking, continuing to look a little bit more at the issue of, again, tablets versus amulets, and there's a distinction in a lot of other branches of ancient magic. Where they distinguish between formularies, which are things like spell books, recipes, scripts and activated texts, which are amulets, curse texts, inscribed blessings and curses, things like that. And I'm trying to see if there's a way that we can look at the ways that maybe that distinction is something that we can adapt and use in our own context as assyriologist.
Jon Taylor:Yeah, that sounds very promising. I look forward to that. Is that going to be a book, do you think, or one or two articles?
Jon Beltz:That's probably more the article level, I think.
Jon Taylor:Well, super well. Thank you very much. Congratulations again, and I look forward to seeing how your work develops.
Jon Beltz:Yeah. Thank you very much.
Jon Taylor:Hello and welcome to Thin End of the Wedge. Thank you for joining us.
Andrew Pottorf:Well, hello, Jon. Thank you so much for inviting me. I'm very much looking forward to this.
Jon Taylor:Could you tell us please: who are you, and what do you do?
Andrew Pottorf:My name is Andrew Pottorf. I am a teaching associate in assyriology at the University of Cambridge. And I specialise in the Ur III period, which is the last 100 years or so of the third millennium in southern Mesopotamia, particularly work on socio-economic texts.
Jon Taylor:Okay, so you won a prize last year. Could you tell
us:what prize did you win, and what did you win it for?
Andrew Pottorf:Yeah. Well, I'm grateful to say that I won the runner-up for best article of an early career scholar. And it was given by the International Association for Assyriology for an article that I published, which is titled "UN.IL2" ... parenthetically, I say "menials as a serf-like social stratum during the Ur III period".
Jon Taylor:Okay, well, first off, congratulations.
Andrew Pottorf:Thank you.
Jon Taylor:So let's dig into that a little bit. I guess we start with some background. Could you tell us about social status groups in the Ur III period, please? What kind of options are there?
Andrew Pottorf:Yeah, that's a great question. So I approach the concept of social status from a Weberian perspective. I would say that Weberian perspectives are far-ranging, both old and new. So mine may not be the same as everyone else's, of course. But I would say that Weber focuses on understanding social differentiation primarily in
three ways:by class, by status, and by party. The last one is the most irrelevant to this discussion. It has to do with political parties. So the first you have to do with class and status. For Weber, classes are theoretical groupings that scholars can devise that divide the society according to various economic conditions, criteria having to do with their material wealth and market power and so on. As for statuses, this is something that Weber talks about that has to do with the native understanding of the society. That is, how these people saw themselves, how they differentiated themselves. And for Weber, had particularly to do with the idea of honour or prestige. That is perhaps a universal concept. I would argue it's sometimes ambiguous or debatable what exactly that means. So I focus more on the idea of rights and privileges, which, again, has to be unpacked. But basically what Weber is talking about, and he uses a German word "Stand", which can be translated as"status". He also pluralised"Staende". So this basic concept is status, or status groups. It is, unfortunately, a difficult term that has to be thought about, in my opinion, quite carefully. So first of all, when I say class and I'm talking about theoretical groupings. When I'm talking about statuses, I'm talking about natively organised groupings. And this term "Stand" can be translated in a variety of ways. So one way is "status group", which is, I would say, a vague and open-ended concept that can be applied in a whole range of ideas. For example, occupations can be a status group for Weber. He even can push the idea of status groups into a very concrete form, such as caste. And I would also say that that's one way of looking at it. Not the way that I choose to look at it. And will not say is appropriate for this time. So the term that I use is "order", which is a term that has been used before and possible to describe concrete groupings of people based on various legal, social, economic conditions. So I would say that when I'm talking about orders, I'm talking about people who are differentiated, again, based off legal, social, economic conditions. And for my work in the Ur III period, I would say there are possibly four orders. It's not entirely clear, because the data are heavily skewed towards certain regions and certain parts of those regions, but I would say there are clear distinctions between individuals that are called in Sumerian dumugir, which means literally"native child" or "native son". And I would argue that these people can be referred to as citizens. Then there are people who are called enslaved or slaves, and I would say that that's a different order. There are also people that I've written about in this article called UNIL. That's the UN sign, and the IL-two sign, which is unfortunately, a very difficult term to unpack. And then the fourth order is possibly mushkenu. We see mushkenu in a variety of contexts. However, those contexts are much more limited than we find all the other orders. But I do believe that they are distinct from citizens, UNIL, and enslaved people. All four of these categories, I think, are non-overlapping. You cannot be both a citizen and an UNIL, or both an UNIL and a mushkenu. They are discrete categories that people natively defined or described in order to separate people based off various legal, social, economic possibilities.
Jon Taylor:Okay, so your article focuses on this group, the UNIL. You've glossed them as "menials".
Andrew Pottorf:Yeah.
Jon Taylor:Could you maybe bring us up to date? What's the
Andrew Pottorf:Yeah. current state of research? How have people interpreted this group before now? Yeah, it's a great question, and it's one that I have worked through for a while. But I still feel like there's more to be done. And maybe we may never fully unpack what this term means. So this term consists of two signs. The first sign is UN, which can also be read as UG-three, with perhaps a nasal-G, UNG, if you will. That sign can mean"people". The sign can also be read as "kalam", which can refer to land or like native land, for example. The second sign, IL-two, means "to carry". And it also has a variety of readings. It can be read as GA-six, or with a nasal-G, pronounced nga-six, which means "to carry". And there's various nuances there, "to lift" or "to carry". So if you combine these terms together, literally, you get"people to carry" or "people carrier". In the earliest publications that I have looked at, this term was often translated as"carrier" or "porter", to suggest that these were people who carried. I don't particularly agree with that. I believe that we find the occurrence both in the Ur III period, but especially before that, for example, in the Early Dynastic, we find the term IL-two, describing carriers. There's a whole group of people who are just called IL-two,"carrier". So I would argue that UNIL does not mean "carrier" or"porter", if those are synonyms. It was suggested by Marcel Sigrist that perhaps this term literally means "people carrier", but he didn't think that that term made much sense. And I would agree it does not literally mean someone who carries people. But he dismissed that idea, though he played around with it. There's also the idea that maybe the IL-two sign is read as "dusu", having to do with a basket that is iconic for public service. So these are the people of the public service. That is a tempting idea. I've not thought it through fully, but I do not ultimately end with that idea. So one translation that I use is a common translation now, which is "menial". That comes from several factors. One of which is the Akkadian. So the Akkadian equivalent, if you will, which we find it in later texts and in lexical text, for example, is"kinattum", which refers to someone who has a menial occupation within a household. But I wouldn't say that that's a literal meaning of this term. And also, while I use the word menial to give people an understanding of this term, I find that it can be problematic. I would say that not all UNIL perform menial labour. And there are people who perform menial labour who are not UNIL. So while I find it to be a useful translation, I'm not entirely satisfied with it. There is one translation that I am proposing that I believe has picked up some support, but I do not believe it will necessarily be accepted by everyone. Nor do I insist upon it with all of my belief. But I would say that I actually go back to what Marcel Sigrist said about this term, meaning literally "people carrier". But not someone who... the terms mean "people" and"carrier", the two signs ... so I would say, rather than literally carrying people, it has to do with metaphorically or figuratively carrying people. And I borrow this idea from Piotr Steinkeller with how he talks about a different pair of terms. So we have in the Ur III period the terms abba il-two, which can be abbreviated as ab il-two, and then ama il-two. So ab or abba means "father" and ama means "mother". And Piotr makes a very compelling case that these were individuals who did not literally carry their fathers and mothers, but supported them in their later years, in their ailing, perhaps final years. So I argue that perhaps by analogy, these were individuals who supported the people as a whole. And they did that by their year round work, public service, they perform for people. The last piece of information I would use, the last piece of evidence would be that this term is used as an epithet for the goddess Ninlil, which I find to be really interesting and maybe perhaps even puzzling. It has been proposed that when it refers to Ninlil, that it refers to her as someone who supports the people. Now we can maybe argue that this usage of this term for her has nothing to do with how it is used in Ur III period. I accept that, but it is still a compelling opportunity to see a connection here. So ultimately, we can call this term perhaps menial, knowing that it's maybe an imperfect, imprecise translation. I don't call them "people supporters" regularly, but I do acknowledge that that's maybe what this term means. Again, the development of that idea is ongoing.
Jon Taylor:Okay, so UN here is"people", as in "we, the people"? Is that what that is?
Andrew Pottorf:Yeah, perhaps, perhaps. Again, I could rethink this in the coming years. I do believe that we should treat the term UNIL separately than the term IL. So in the Early Dynastic period, we see many references to individuals called IL, and I believe that those are actual carriers. And in the Ur III period, we see a lot of people who carry. There's ... if I may continue with this argument ... the words abba-il and ama-il are both abbreviated in various texts by the signs AB and AMA. So you'll see in a text, you'll have someone's name, and right before their name, it'll say AB for "father supporter", or before the name, it'll say AMA for "mother supporter". And then for hundreds of UNIL the same thing is done. Right before their name, there's just the UN sign. So they abbreviate UNIL, abba-il and ama-il all the same way. And we find many occupations where people are carrying something. I can't name them all, but for example, we have"ga IL-two", which means "milk carrier", and we have "U-two IL-two" which some people have argued is perhaps similar to UNIL too, but I think it's just"plant carrier" or "grass carrier". So in all those other instances, the sign preceding IL-two is the object of the verb. We call this as grammarians, a "dubsar formation". Dubsar means"scribe", literally "tablet writer", where "dub" as "tablet" is the understood object of the verb "to write". So I'm arguing that UN is the object of the verb IL-two "to carry".
Jon Taylor:We have some idea about how you can become enslaved. Do we know how you can become an UNIL?
Andrew Pottorf:It's a great question, and it's one that I've wrestled with for several years. And I'm afraid to say that the answers are not entirely clear. One thing I can say is certain. It really appears that whether you were enslaved, an UNIL, or a citizen, or even a mushkenu, that when you were born, whatever order your parents had--particularly, in my opinion, your mother, although there is perhaps contravening evidence ... your mother or your father--whatever order that person has, as someone who is born to them would also carry that order. I think, as a natural dependency that they have. So for sure, I believe that UNIL were hereditary. So the children of UNIL became themselves UNIL. And this is something I believe is the case when I look at hundreds of attestations of UNIL where every member of the family is an UNIL. And this is particularly apparent with male UNIL. Unfortunately, in the Ur III period, male UNIL are often easy to identify, but female UNIL are not. It is clear that there are female UNIL, and that's clear for several reasons, but they are rarely identified as UNIL. There's only a handful of identifications of them as UNIL, which provide enough evidence the way that they exist, and we can extrapolate from that, I believe, but mostly male UNIL. So all that is to say we see clear evidence of hereditary origins. Beyond that, I would say that it looks like UNIL emerged from a pre-existing order, or a grouping of people who had a large amount of dependency upon governing households or administrative households, like a king or a governor or a temple. In the Early Dynastic period, for example, we see at the E.MI or E.MUNUS institution or organisation--this is in Girsu in the Early Dynastic period--we see that there are individuals who were all male, and they were given land in return for their work, and they only had to perform work for certain months in the year. I would say that those were citizens. And then we see a bunch of people, often called IL-two, these carriers, and they had to perform work year round, just like UNIL did. And they also received less compensation, often like UNIL. So I think it's my opinion, and that of several others, that the UNIL actually emerged from the IL-two. So I would argue that in the Early Dynastic period, the IL-two were an occupational clustering, if you will, group of occupations with shared features. Perhaps they were a status group in the sense of that Weber argues that occupations can become a status group if they have many commonalities that differentiate them on the basis of privileges and so on. So I'd argue that perhaps this group of IL-two carriers formed later UNIL. I think the first reference where we see UNIL referring to individuals like this, is in the Sargonic period. So it appears to emerge there. And possibly before then. But every attestation of UNIL in the only Dynastic Period, to me, appears possibly a name. And it is a name in that time. I believe it's also a name in the Ur III period. We have to differentiate when it's a name versus a type of identification. Another origin beyond this idea of occupational groups is perhaps as a punishment. So there is perhaps a text where an individual had an UNIL under his control, and that UNIL escaped. And so it seems as if this individual was punished by becoming himself an UNIL. There's maybe a handful of references also in the Old Babylonian period where someone as a punishment has to do work as if they were an UNIL or similar position. Those are all debatable, though, in my opinion, so I'm afraid to say that that's not very clear. In general, these people were impoverished, perhaps struggling to support their own households, and so they had, for one reason or another, a greater dependency, a greater servitude to these types of administrative households, those households run by governors, kings and temples, for example.
Jon Taylor:Do you think these could be a group who are supported by the people. Are they carried by the wider populace? A kind of social security? Is that a possibility?
Andrew Pottorf:This perhaps goes both ways. I would say that the way the term is grammatically structured, if the term is read as UN IL-two, and we cannot be entirely sure of how to read these signs. But if it's structured the way it is, it looks as if the sign UN is understood to be the object rather than the subject. And I would say that the term appears to mean "people carrier", not"people who are carried", if you will. I think it's not structured that way.
Jon Taylor:Yeah.
Andrew Pottorf:But nevertheless, I would say that you could argue it goes both ways, in the sense that UNIL perform a lot of public service, or service that ... and I use the word "public", that's a complicated term. They perform a lot of service for, shall we say, administrative households. That is, the household of the king, of a governor, or of a temple. These are all households that are large. They're not households in the ordinary sense, but, organisations that have a large amount of resources and personnel, so these individuals who perform work for them. But what I'm trying to say is these organisations or households also provide support for these people. So there's sort of a back and forth in terms of benefits. What I mean by benefits is that these individuals received regular compensation for their work and some time off from this compelled work, which may have been better than if they were privately enslaved or not regularly employed. However, I would argue that these individuals were heavily controlled and compelled to work year round, with limited time off and often minimal compensation. So I would consider this a worse situation than most citizens experienced, though better than slavery.
Jon Taylor:How does this fit within your wider work? Was it part of your dissertation?
Andrew Pottorf:Yes, absolutely. So my dissertation was focused on social stratification, the idea that Ur III society had large groupings that were differentiated as if they were--not literally, but, you know, but to a degree--strata, layers. I wouldn't say that this is an ironclad, completely literal concept of layers, but there is, my opinion, a type of layering. So the layers would be citizens, and I'm going to mention them first, because I would say they had the most rights and privileges, the most social power and economic power and so on. And then it's a bit ambiguous, but perhaps then mushkenu, but they are far less attested and much more ambiguous. And then UNIL, who are clearly attested, and they certainly had less social power, economic power and rights and so on than citizens and perhaps also mushkenu. And then at the very bottom, the lowest layer were slaves. So I would say my dissertation focused on all of these layers. Mushkenu were the least dealt with in my dissertation. Due to both the evidence and the focus I brought to it. But yes, the UNIL were a key part of my dissertation. And one thing I really appreciate about my work on the UNIL is that I believe we can look at the UNIL as a way of comparing them to both enslaved people and to citizens, and see how they differ from both of these other categories. They offer a sort of mirror, if you will, to show what commonalities and differences are possible. So I find there's a lot of value in that. I have a lot of you know sympathy for looking at these people and what they had been through. But in terms of doing academic work, I find that is useful to see how they can be compared with citizens and enslaved people.
Jon Taylor:Okay. And what's next for you? Are you going to look further at social groups, or have you moved on to another topic now?
Andrew Pottorf:Well, I'm probably going to do more of what I'm working on right now. So the Ur III period is so vast in its data, which for me, means unending work, if time permits. So I currently have several publications that are in various stages of development. I am focusing particularly on developing my dissertation as a book to be published, so that is coming along quite well. And I am also recently starting to publish what I call online repositories. These are mostly Excel sheets and related files that I'm putting on to Zenodo--Z, E, N, O, D, O--which is a website that stores these files for everyone to see. And these are files that store 1000s of data points, quantitative and qualitative data points having to do with my work. There is so much more that I want to work on that is yet to come. I have many publications that are in various stages of development, and particularly my book. But all that is to say, I'm going to continue working on these social groups for the time being. There are other ideas that come to mind. As much as possible, I try to synergise and connect my ideas as much as possible. I sometimes deal with the preceding periods, the Sargonic and Early Dynastic periods, but overall, the Ur III period and socio-economic history is quite an engaging subject for me.
Jon Taylor:Okay. Well, thank you very much.
Andrew Pottorf:Thank you.
Jon Taylor:Congratulations again on your prize, and I look forward to following your work.
Andrew Pottorf:Great. Thank you so much.
Jon Taylor:I would also like to offer congratulations to Adeline Reynaud, who won the IAA prize for best dissertation for her work on diagrams in Old Babylonian mathematical texts.
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Jon Taylor:For Arabic, thanks in particular to Zainab Mizyidawi, as well as Lina Meerchyad, May Al-Aseel, and Wasim Khatabe. For Turkish, thank you to Pinar Durgun and Nesrin Akan.
Ellie Bennett:And thank you for listening to Thin End of the Wedge. If you enjoy what we do, and you would like to help make these podcasts available in Middle Eastern languages, please consider joining our Patreon family. You can find us at patreon.com/wedgepod.
Jon Taylor:You can also support us in other ways: simply subscribe to the podcast; leave us a five star review on Apple Music or your favourite podcatcher; recommend us to your friends. If you want the latest podcast news, you can sign up for our newsletter. You can find all the links in the show notes and on our website at wedgepod.org. Thanks, and I hope you’ll join us next time.