Rewriting the End of Cuneiform Culture

Introduction

In the prevailing view, cuneiform script survived until the first century CE because it was the only way to write the most enduring Mesopotamian science, astronomy. This view, however, is skewed by the nature of the data: while astronomical texts are easy to date, the vast majority of non-astronomical tablets cannot be dated and are overlooked in histories of the period. Yet, the vitality of cuneiform in its terminal phase suggests that a wealth of late literary and scholarly tablets awaits the development of new dating methods.

Project Aim

The aim of the Rewriting the End of Cuneiform Culture (RECC) project is to explain why cuneiform survived long after the great Mesopotamian centers had lost their prominence and become provinces within vast empires. The hypothesis posits that the survival and flourishing of cuneiform is a reaction to these changes, an attempt to defend the native tradition against cosmopolitan cultures. With their labored writings, Babylonian scholars endeavored to show that their legacy still had the power to speak to their own world.

Research Objectives

The project has three Research Objectives:

1. To grasp the extent of the textual production of the late period and the network of scribal families responsible for it.
2. To chart the development of cuneiform script by means of a pioneering Machine Learning-powered tool (CuneiDate) that enables, for the first time, the inferred dating of undated tablets.
3. To rewrite the end of cuneiform civilization by explaining the reasons for the continued use of cuneiform.

Impact of the Method

This pathbreaking method promises to revolutionize cuneiform studies and other disciplines that study manuscript cultures by providing historical context to thousands of unmoored documents. The recovery of these contexts will disclose how the Babylonians coped with the loss of significance of their millennia-old traditions and offer insights for contemporary cultures experiencing cultural anxiety as they interact with more dominant cultures in a globalized world.