Assyriologists study the peoples, empires and languages of ancient Mesopotamia through cuneiform texts. Cuneiform is the earliest known writing system. Studying it inherently raises questions about historiographical knowledge. Who wrote what, when, and why? What knowledge can we draw by studying cuneiform tablets, and what is left unknowable?
Assyriologist, Professor Saana Svärd explains that in ancient Mesopotamia literacy was not as common as it is in today’s world. Cuneiform texts often dealt with business transactions, administration and supporting royal power, but other texts such as personal letters of the elite have also been found. What was presumably left unrecorded is, for example, lifeways of ordinary people.
How exactly did ancient Mesopotamians build their intricate irrigation systems? That’s common knowledge and know-how, not something to write down on a clay tablet, ancient scribes might have thought – and that leaves researchers thousands of years later piecing together that information from other sources than textual evidence.
Professor Svärd directs the Finnish Centre of Excellence in Ancient Near Eastern Empires (ANEE) and leads the team focusing on digital humanities approaches on cuneiform texts. Utilizing digital methods has proven fruitful. They build on the widely accepted assumption in linguistics that the meaning of a word can only be understood in context, i.e. through the words that occur with and around it. ANEE has used thousands of transcribed cuneiform texts as data and produced lexical networks, where links of co-occurring words become visible. Researchers have then been able to describe e.g. the conventions of conveying emotions in royal inscriptions: the king is often angry, mad or furious with the armies or peoples he overcame in battle, and the gods are pleased and gratified with the king.
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