Pattern Spotting, Quantification and Magic in the languages of Ancient Iraq

Institutskolloquium

  • Datum: 04.09.2020
  • Uhrzeit: 10:30 - 12:00
  • Vortragender: Prof. Martin Worthington
  • Martin, an Assyriologist, is Associate Professor of Near and Middle Eastern Studies at Trinity College, Dublin. He was previously Lecturer, then Senior Lecturer, at the University of Cambridge. His publications have been awarded two international prizes, by the American Oriental Society and the Royal Asiatic Society. His most recent book (Ea's Duplicity in the Gilgamesh Flood Story; Routledge, 2019) is a mix of philology and literary criticism which argues that a crucial message from a god in the story of the Babylonian Noah was so worded as to simultaneously voice two different messages which sounded the same (and thereby mislead the hearers). In 2018 he directed the world's first Babylonian-language film, The Poor Man of Nippur (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pxYoFlnJLoE&t=879s), which was shortlisted by the Arts and Humanities Research Council for the 2019 'Research in Film' award. Martin's principal research interests are in Babylonian, Assyrian and Sumerian grammar and literature. His current book project is called 'Sargon's Riddle'.
  • Ort: Zoom Meeting Room 1
  • Gastgeber: Dmitry Moseev
  • Kontakt: dmitry.moseev@ipp.mpg.de
Pattern Spotting, Quantification and Magic in the languages of Ancient Iraq
Cuneiform tablets from Ancient Mesopotamia number in the hundreds of thousands. They offer astonishingly detailed pictures of the lives and doings of the societies which invented writing and urbanisation, pioneered astronomy, and gave us 360 degrees in a circle. Everything we know about them has had to be worked out – a huge endeavour of the last 150 years, which is still ongoing. This talk, which assumes no prior knowledge, will show something of the methods we use in grappling with Babylonian and Assyrian – from working out the grammar, to navigating problems of meaning and textual logic, to reconstructing pronunciation. It is designed for those who are curious about ancient languages, and would like to have an idea of what goes on 'behind the scenes'.
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