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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