Cuneiform is supposedly one of the most complex scripts of antiquity, and yet it endured for over 3000 years in its heartland of southern Iraq. At its most widespread, in the later second millennium BC, communities across the Middle East–from western Iran to Cyprus, via Egypt and Anatolia–wrote to each other, and for themselves, in cuneiform script. In these lectures, I suggest that cuneiform was not as hard to learn as we moderns have thought. If that is so, how can we use these historical insights, and new technologies, to improve our own teaching methods, in universities and beyond?
In the first lecture, I ask, who could read, write and calculate in cuneiform in the early second millennium BC? Over the past 25 years historians have challenged old assumptions that it was a purely male, professional business. However, some certainties have remained: that it was a primarily urban phenomenon, that schooling took place at home, and that the marshland communities of southern Iraq were essentially non-literate for several hundred years from the late 18th century BC. However, new excavations at Tell Khaiber in southern Iraq have produced unprecedented, archaeologically contextualised evidence for non-professional, rural cuneiform literacy in this supposed “dark age.” This encourages us to re-evaluate the sociology of writing across the cuneiform world.