Dr. Moudhy Al-Rashid on Understanding Ancient Mesopotamia

INTRODUCTION

Dr. Moudhy Al-Rashid is the author of "Between Two Rivers: Ancient Mesopotamia and the Birth of History" and an historian based at Wolfson College, University of Oxford, who specializes in the history of science in ancient Mesopotamia. She received a B.A. in Philosophy from Columbia University’s Columbia College, and went on to complete an MPhil in Cuneiform Studies and a DPhil in Oriental Studies at the University of Oxford (Wolfson College).

Influenced by her home country of Saudi Arabia, Dr. Al-Rashid was exposed to early rock art in Shuwaymis and ancient stone tools. She was inspired to learn more about history after experiencing a summer course in London on books in the ancient world, specifically cuneiform tablets.

---

MITCHELL: Moudhy thanks so much for joining us today. I want to get right into it and ask you to tell us a little bit about your background and how you came to study ancient Mesopotamia.

MOUDHY: Yeah. Thank you for having me. So I'm currently an honorary fellow at, Wolfson College in Oxford, it's not an academic position, but I've been here for almost 20 years. It's been my academic home for 20 years.

Originally, I'm from Saudi Arabia, which is where I grew up. And I think in some ways that really shaped my love of the region's history and of languages in particular, because I grew up in a trilingual household, and Saudi Arabia itself has an incredibly long history, including stone tools from early hominids around dried up lake beds that 50 to 400,000 years ago would have been lush green lakes.

There's incredible rock art that shows us what animals were around those times, including cows, which, of course, would not survive in the desert now. Telling us just how green it used to be, and actually, one of my favorite fun facts, the funniness is perhaps debatable, but I think it's cool. Is that the earliest depiction of dogs on leashes comes from, the region where I'm from in Saudi Arabia, from a rock art site called Shuwaymis, which I just think is amazing. It's a hunting scene with dogs on on leashes. And when we went out into the desert, we used to actually find what we thought were shark teeth, but we're actually early stone tools that were shaped like sharp shark's teeth. So, history was sort of all around me. But my path from finding shark teeth, that were not shark teeth in the desert, to becoming of, you know, a full-time historian was actually pretty winding.

I was supposed to go to law school due to various family pressures, which I'm sure is a familiar story to many people. And I did the equivalent of a pre-law track. I did philosophy, but then I experienced a pretty big, plot twist when I did a summer course in London on books in the ancient world. The first day was on Cuneiform tablets, and I just completely fell in love. It was like leaving the fiancé that my parents had chosen for the, you know, person I fell in love with. And, you know, to there, you know, now, in retrospect, quite disproportional dismay. But I think it was it was the right thing for me because after coming into contact with Cuneiform through this course, I immediately applied to a grad program. And I never looked back. So in a roundabout and accidental and maybe even romantic and impulsive way, I ended up as a scholar of ancient Mesopotamia.

MITCHELL: That's amazing. Well, we're glad you're here, so yeah, thank you. Let's get right into it and talk about the beginnings of Ancient Mesopotamia. Can you give us an overview and kind of set the stage for us of what that scene would have looked like at the time?

MOUDHY: Yeah. So, Mesopotamia, the kind of clue is really in the name. It's the name of the region between and around two, major rivers, the Tigris and Euphrates, which run through what is now Iraq, Syria and neighboring countries, including Turkey, which is actually where the river system begins. And these two rivers and the surrounding environment had really, really fertile soil, lush reed beds, that, together with various innovations, led to really successful farming around 3400 BCE and that inspired other developments like the development of writing, and the birth of cities.

And that's just one way, really, to connect the dots between like agriculture, innovation and writing in the region's really early history. So in Arabic we say Bayn an-Nahrayn, which just means between two rivers and Mesopotamia itself is the Greek word meaning between the rivers. So really the rivers are pretty integral to our understanding of the place’s history. The main point is that Mesopotamia refers to a place, not a region, with this really quite specific kind of ecology, that makes all of these incredible innovations possible eventually.

One of the things I, one of this sort of elements of that, that I really love is that the, the silt left behind by the riverbeds, it becomes the clay that is the medium for their writing system. And a lot of their accounts of creation center on clay. So, humanity is made out of clay, for example. So, the, the kind of environment really shapes the technology as well as how people understand their own place in the world and, and their mythologies. But as a place, it was home to many civilizations and cultures. So, for example, the Sumerians and the really early periods around 3000 BCE, and then later the Assyrians and Babylonians, who may sound familiar, to more people around 2000 BCE onwards, and then the Persians, eventually the Macedonian Greeks, Alexander the Great and others, and these civilizations, particularly the early ones, developed some of the world's firsts.

Like the first writing, primarily the first written sciences, written literature, written histories, maybe even the earliest war memorial, and a common denominator Nader shared by all of them was the cuneiform writing system, which was this writing system in clay. And it gets its name from the wedge shape of the characters. I'm probably saying it wrong, but the word for wedge in Latin is cuneus.

That's I always joke that that's the only Latin word I know. And that’s basically a function of how when you impress, into clay with a reed stylus, you get these tiny triangles. And that Cuneiform writing system was used for about 3000 years. So that's about half of our written history as human beings. Maybe more than that actually is in cuneiform, which is just such an incredible time span. And there are hundreds of thousands of clay tablets that tell us about everything from how much beer costs in a particular period to, you know, how, a wife is writing to her husband and complaining that she's got too much to do. I mean, really the whole, you know, earliest diplomatic correspondence is just such incredible insights into, into people's lives, but in their own words. So, it's a really interesting region with so many sources that can tell us about it.

MITCHELL: Interesting. Yeah, so it seems that the stage was set ecologically very, kind of, a lot of vitality, watery, very different from what we see today and then from that the, yeah, origins of you know early villages in humanity start to kind of emerge. Maybe can you talk about some of these early small villages such as Eridu on the, you know, the edge of the river and what that may have looked like?

MOUDHY: Yeah. So it's interesting because in the really early period. So, I mean, there were settlements before this, but in the fourth millennium BCE. So, in the 3000 BCE and the early bit of that, chunk of 1000 years, there aren't that many settlements, at least as far as far as I know, that have been excavated. In the region. And it is really marshy and wet and difficult to kind of manage this watery landscape.

But there are some climate changes that happened and innovations that allow people to kind of control and manage water a bit better in the latter half of that, 1000-year period. And I think that is where you start to see, like a boom in settlements, like the early cities, including Eridu, for example, which was a religious center for most of Mesopotamia, long, long history, close to the city of Ur, which was also really important, kind of stronghold in the south and then Uruk, a little bit further south, which is traditionally thought to be the earliest, city in the world. But I think it's, there is a there is a lot more archeology that's been done since the early discoveries that crowned Uruk with this title. And I think now the thought is that there were actually a lot of cities that emerged around the same time, including further north.

But, but yeah, there was quite a conversion of things that do happen at Uruk that is, is quite special that it would be. Yeah. That, that make it an interesting way to frame that history.

MITCHELL: So, you mentioned kind of control of the resources, so, the irrigation and you think that through people or groups starting and attempting to control the irrigation and gain control of those systems. You know they were then in control of the food sources in a way and that starts to develop a stratification in society and power dynamic in society which evolves and develops into social classes in a city.

MOUDHY: Yeah, absolutely. So I think, what's so interesting is that, the development of all this tech basically to manage water, including, as you said, the, irrigation technologies, but also things like canals that redirected water and that became almost like roads or highways, you know, make it making it easier to get around and transport things that kind of drained the landscape just enough and enabled them to have a little bit more control over, pretty unpredictable water supply.

It's sort of torrential rain or like really dry heat. There's no kind of in between. So, so exactly as you said, that ability to kind of manage the landscape a little bit better led to really successful agriculture. And that in turn meant that A. People were being attracted from other places to settle in cities. This is just one kind of way to account for it. But also people could do other things. They weren't all wrapped up in food production because it was a lot more efficient and a lot more successful. And it's thought that that's one of the kind of ways of laying the groundwork for social stratification. Ultimately, that culminates in the kind of figure of a single figure of authority and charge, which we don't really see in the very early periods.

As far as I know, like in the earliest period of writing, around 3333 50 BCE, there seems to be no kind of references in the administrative texts to a like a lord or a king or anything like that. Even though some of the lists of words that they had may have had some kind of terminology for leadership, but in the slightly kind of a couple hundred years later than you do, start to see this figure of like someone in charge, who has more land than other people, for example, which is a pretty solid expression of, sort of social stratification and, inequality ultimately as well.

MITCHELL: Sure. Possibly earlier it was more egalitarian, people working together to yeah create a stable food source, so others were freed up to build. It seems like, that’s what a lot of the efforts were dedicated towards.

MOUDHY: Possibly.  Yeah. Yeah, I think that's right. And I think that's another interesting point that you raised that because they, they have even from really early periods, this incredible, monumental architecture, these enormous structures that are being built, including, for example, the temple through which all agricultural products were funneled, for, redistribution to a wider population.

So, focusing on Uruk again, this was called the Ayanna precinct. And the kind of center of the Ayanna precinct was the temple to the goddess Inanna, who is the goddess of love and fertility, but also eventually warfare. One of actually probably the most powerful goddess in the pantheon across all Mesopotamian, cultures. So, what's interesting is that I don't think, I may be wrong, but I don't think there are records of them building those very early monumental architecture.

But there must have been a pretty solid administrative machine to manage all the materials needed to build things, and all the people needed to build those structures, which we do see in later periods when, when they build major temples or city walls or palaces, it's like a huge, group effort to do that. And it involves a lot of management. So it's interesting that in the very early periods that sort of missing from our understanding of the textual record, which is admittedly limited because we can't fully read them. But, but yeah, it's, it's an interesting, interplay of different factors.

MITCHELL: Yeah, and I think of buildings of that time, and I know and familiar with what it takes to build a large building in our contemporary society. And it’s so much administration, logistics, you know it’s a lot. And I’m super impressed and kind of fascinated that they had this type  of infrastructure and systemization to some degree implemented in their society at that early stage in history.

MOUDHY: Yeah. I mean, and even if you just think about it from the perspective of sheer volume, because they, they used mud bricks, which are they mixed mud and straw together in a really specific way. And then they put them in these molds, probably made in, like, a basket, made out of a basket or something. And then they would, you know, take them out of the molds and dry them in the sun or sometimes bake them if they were particularly important. And, millions of these bricks had to be made to make some of these structures. So, for example, the wall around Uruk, which comes from a slightly later period to, the, you know, kind of the birth of the city is about nine kilometers long and really wide, I think it's like ten feet wide. And archeologists estimate that 300 million bricks would have been needed to build this wall.

So you can just sort of I mean, I can't even I can barely kind of, you know, build something out of Duplo, let alone like, imagine. It's like having to build such an incredible structure. And, you know, it's amazing what people were doing so, so early.

MITCHELL: Yeah, I think you know we see the remnants or the remains of the physical objects, of you know these buildings or mud bricks and things left and were thinking “Oh wow this is what is most noteworthy piece of history remaining”. But in a way, maybe one of the equally most impressive innovations at that time, was the ability to manage that amount of people, to get them to do that, and we obviously don’t  see that, we see the product of that so were fascinated with the architecture or the building, but um that innovation to manage that group of people is equally, if not more impressive, in my mind. 

MOUDHY: Yeah, I, I totally agree, and I think yeah, I mean we get sort of glimpses of it in the later texts and some of them are actually quite, entertaining to read. So, because bricks were produced in such numbers, you know, basically anyone could get roped into making bricks, including someone who was like a trained astronomer, for example, in the first millennium BCE. You see references to this in letters back and forth to Assyrian, governors and kings, trying to desperately manage the building of, of things and the making of bricks.

And there's this lovely series of letters about a shepherd. I forget his name, but essentially, he was trying to get away from the task of providing straw to make bricks. And he had eventually done, you know, he eventually stolen something I can't remember. And he was hiding in a temple. And the person who was going after him was like, we don't actually care that you stole this thing. Just please help us make these bricks like we just need these bricks to be made. And you are the straw person, you know? So it's just so you can see this sort of desperation sometimes and getting people to do this work. And just the sheer numbers involved, and the calculations involved, they even create a, you know, a word for, a number. I think it's like 3000 bricks or something like that in, around 2000 BCE.

They create a whole word for this unit of bricks because they just can't count them individually anymore. So, it's yeah, it is there. There's some interesting glimpses into, you know, the actual logistics of it in the later periods, as well as some kind of humorous moments that make you like that are very relatable. You know, when you're trying to get a project done and you're just like, listen, I just need you to do the thing. They were also in those shoes thousands of years ago.

MITCHELL: I love that though. That we have these glimpses into the ordinary everyday life of regular people from that time. I’m assuming this is a kind of Cuneiform tablet that we’re reading about this?

MOUDHY: Exactly. Yeah. So, all the sources, all the letters written back and forth, all the administrative records, receipts for material. They would all have been in clay. And we're so lucky they use clay because they survived. And, you know, the library set on fire. It's actually really helpful to later archeologists because it bakes the clay and preserves it. So, you know, these records are I mean, they're often broken or fragmentary, but we get enough glimpses to be able to piece something together.

MITCHELL: Yeah that’s amazing. You touched on the precinct a little bit, and I want to maybe paint eh picture of what kind of let’s say Uruk would have looked like to the listener or the viewer so they can start to visualizing, maybe to the best degree possible what the precinct may have looked like and what the city would have possibly looked like, if someone were to walk through the gates and see this thing. I mean what would that have looked like?

MOUDHY: Yeah. I mean, the way I imagine it is that, and you can sort of still see it in the landscape today with how ruins rise up, in, in the landscape, I sort of imagine it as that precinct, that temple being the most kind of visually striking bit of the city with buildings around it. So, I can imagine it being not just the administrative center, which sounds really boring, but is actually very important, not just the religious center, but the real beating heart of the city where kind of everyone was drawn to and everything happened.

But in its shadows is, you know, there are also, you know, many buildings that can tell us a lot about what life might have been like. I mean, something as simple as how wide a road is can tell us, or how many donkeys might have fit. Would they have been crossing each other, or is this a one-way thing?

Is it just for people, houses being built really close to each other throughout most periods of Mesopotamian history can tell us a little bit about people trying to create shade and cool things down a little bit, you know, kind of early climate solution, to, to living somewhere with such kind of oscillations and temperature, such extremes.

So, I think entering Uruk, the way I imagine it is, you would have made your way through various smaller streets that connect, you know, connected various parts of the city, surrounded by residential buildings or crafts related buildings, sort of workshops. And it would have probably been really quite loud. It might have not smelled amazing, because I'm not sure what the drainage would have been like or what they did with their animal and how they kept their animals, throughout, you know, sort of quite easy to imagine, the kind of chaos of it all.

But then this giant temple rising, that would have been quite impactful. And maybe even as part of the ideology or the economic safety net that drew people into that area, that turned Uruk from a settlement to what we might consider a city, like a more densely populated settlement, where there is infrastructure to meet the demands of that dense population. There is kind of everything you need is in that city. You don't have to go anywhere else to get it. So, I think, yeah, I love to imagine what it might have been like.

But the other interesting thing about Uruk is that it was continuously inhabited for thousands of years. So, you sort of have these squished layers of different versions of the city for each of these main periods of occupation or habitation. And, even in the later periods, you get these monumental temples that were built under the sluices, for example, in the one hundreds BC, BCE and the, sorry, the Parthians. So, they were continuing to build on what came before them and sort of squishing the layers beneath with every, with every new era. And you have these layer cakes of archeology where you get the different versions of the city. So someone entering Uruk in 3400 BCE or 3000 BCE would have a very different site to someone doing it in 500 BCE.

MITCHELL: Yeah that’s interesting that you bring that up, I remember reading about the many layers of stratification of the tells, I think that’s what they’re called, yeah?

MOUDHY: Yeah. Absolutely.

MITCHELL: And that they were quite rapid it seems like. They were many on top of each other. Do we know why they went through this kind of cycle of build, rebuild, build rebuild?

MOUDHY: Yeah. I mean, if you think about it, once you find a place that works, whether it's, you know, the climate is right, the, it's by a river. So it's kind of regularly fed by water or it's on a particularly lucrative trade route. You don't abandon it, you just rebuild stuff and with each layer of rebuilding, the broken bits of the previous generation just get kind of either moved around a little bit or, not fully removed, moved, and people stuff get sort of trapped in those layers and then you rebuild on that. You don't sort of start from scratch. It doesn't make a lot of sense to do that. It helps with foundations to just use what's already there and maybe build slightly above it.

So you end up with, you know, people's lives, just most, you know, moments in people's lives or things that they, they owned a little an amulet or a broken piece of pottery, crushed into these layers that can tell us a lot about what life might have been like or, you know, something as simple as how a pot looks can tell us a lot about how it was produced. Was there an industry behind that? Is it not very. You know, are artistic looking? Is it more practical? Is it, you know, was it mass produced? So, something as simple of that as that can tell us a lot about economy or what, you know, what people were eating from. And then you get the residue in the pot, you know, that tells us what they were using it to store.

So something really simple that gets trapped in those layers can be a window onto so much of people's lives. And we're kind of lucky that they rebuilt in this way, because it did seal a lot of things in to the layer cake. So to speak, of every archeological site.

MITCHELL: That’s amazing, so most of the city would’ve been built by mudbrick in these layers, the temples. Was there 1 temple or two temples, that were built with kind of limestone cladding and finished with plaster, or I think those had a bit of a different construction?

MOUDHY: That's a good question, I guess. Probably right. I don't know enough about the specifics of what the exteriors would have been, would have looked like, but they did use they did use feet like artistic features, even in the really early periods that don't have a kind of, engineering purpose, so to speak. So, they were trying to decorate, in a way, these buildings from these monumental buildings, not necessarily like a private home. And really specific ways that have lasted again, that have lasted, which is just incredible.

MITCHELL: So the buildings weren’t purely functional,they were beginning to show some sort of expression of ornemation, and some artistry in the buildings?

MOUDHY: Yeah, I would say that. And, and the, you know, the bricks that were used. So in the very early periods they used these, I think we call them Plano convex bricks, which is basically looks like a bread loaf. It's like flat on one side and round on another, which like, from an engineering perspective, it's very confusing to see how there's any advantage to this shape of brick. And they were laid in a sort of herringbone pattern. And so there might have been kind of even, even in something like a building block of a brick, a purpose to the shape that they ended up deciding to use for a particular building.

MITCHELL: Nice, so let’s talk about the belief systems of these early people. What were their belief systems and how did that kind of possibly constribute to ther feeling or their desire to build, their cities?

MOUDHY: Yeah. I mean, this is such a great question, and, sort of without realizing it, I dedicate a chapter to this in my book. The editor was very skeptical when I said I wanted to do a chapter on bricks. She was, like, already asleep before I finish the sentence. You know, but bricks can tell us exactly this. They can tell us about what you just said, what people thought were important, what belief systems informed, what they thought were important. And I think as a really basic example, if we think about what we've already talked about with just how many bricks were needed to build something like a temple, so for example, in, in Ur which was, the site, the city of the moon God.

His name in Sumerian was Nanna and Akkadian was Sin. Those are are the two main languages that cuneiform was used to write in Mesopotamia for the kind of periods that we're talking about. If we think about that city, the ziggurat complex dedicated to the moon god used an estimated 7 million bricks alone. So, you don't do that if you don't care.

Like you don't go through all that effort. If you don't really, really care about building this particular structure for the moon god or for whichever for the goddess of fertility and war, for whichever deity, you have in mind for that building. And I think what's also interesting, if we look at the language itself. The word for temple in Sumerian is É, it's just the letter e, and in Akkadian it's bīt ilim, which means house. And these temples were literally thought of as the house of that deity on earth, and it would house their statue. And the statue wasn't just a statue; it wasn't just a representation. There's like quite a kind of philosophical way of understanding that the statue was the god or goddess themself, who also could exist in other places at the same time.

So the temple was a really, really important structure and a reflection of just how much they cared about their deities and that they wanted to build these beautiful houses for them. And you also in ancient Mesopotamia, never abandoned a temple. Like you can abandon a palace. That's fine, but you never abandoned a temple in a place that's still, lived in by other people. You just renovate it, you rebuild it. You, try to make it look like it did in ancient times, but you don't think, “Oh, that site is an absolute mess. Let's start over somewhere else.” Because in a sense, you would be abandoning the home of your deities. So I think in a lot of ways architecture reflects those belief systems, but they can also reflect political changes.

So, for example, in another city called Kish, which is near Babylon, which is quite a famous, ancient city that I think is where also Alexander the Great died much later than the periods that we're talking about. But, in that, city, you start to see a structure that's comparable to the temple and kind of size and fanciness, so to speak, and the sheer amount of effort that would have gone into building it.

But these places were abandoned quite quickly. They were they seem to have been abandoned quickly. And you get in later periods they're you get used to cemeteries, for example, and they are palaces. They represent a totally non-religious extension of power. And not that power was entirely separate from religious understandings. But the building itself shows that there is another authority rising in this era, and that is the person of the king, and that it can really tell us a lot about the development from early leaders of cities or maybe more egalitarian systems that we don't we don't have a full window onto to the development specifically of a king and kingship that gets passed down through bloodlines and where genealogy gets important, and there's a whole ethos and ideology built around it. And I think it's really interesting that architecture can tell us about the earliest stages of that, almost more than texts can.

MITCHELL: Yeah sure. I often say that Architecture is a story book, just as a text is a story book. Um you know in many other parts of the world people were illiterate, you know they could not read. So, they used symbols, they used engravings, carvings, and that was the story that they interpreted. Whether those were founding myths, stories about their religious beliefs and those were written in stone. And the architecture serves as a story book, it being very large and imposing too, kind of reinforces this idea that “this is very important story, and you need to adhere to this” and yeah that’s incredible to understand that connection. I know that you did your PHD in Mental Health in the ancient Mesopotamia world, is that correct?

MOUDHY: Mhm, That's right.

MITCHELL: Can you tell us a little bit about the connection between that subject and their built environment?

MOUDHY: Yeah, I think - that's a really a great question because my first thoughts went to today and how our built environment affects our mental health today. But we'll maybe talk about that a little bit later. And I don't know exactly how to answer it in terms of the connection between, sort of architecture and mental health, but one way, maybe into that would be that when you start to have cities and you start to have these densely populated areas and the need for infrastructure and services to meet the demands of that population, one of those things is medicine, right? You can't you have to have some kind of structured medical culture to deal with something that everybody has to deal with at some point in their life.

And one element of medicine that was quite widely recognized in the textual record in ancient Mesopotamia was, illness that had a strong emotional or even cognitive component. So to give a bit of background, there are thousands of medical texts from ancient Mesopotamia, again, all written in clay in cuneiform. And they range from lists of ingredients for really specific elements, like, let's say, it's a text about headaches and what, you know, herbs or stones even you need to use to, to deal with that symptom. To really elaborate diagnostic texts that describe symptoms and then offer an illness label and then a prognosis like, he will get better, or she will die, that sort of thing.

And then around all that, there are other sources that you can use to reconstruct aspects of medicine, like even a letter. Something as simple as a letter can tell us that. There's a wonderful letter from the Old Babylonian period, which is around 1900 or 2000 to 1600 BCE. And it's a letter to, a king, I think his name, I think it’s King Zimri-Lim. And it's from a medical professional saying, listen, this we tried this cure for your illness, and it worked. So-and-so tried it and this person tried it, and it worked. So, you should do it, your fever will go away if you take this concoction or whatever medication it was.

So even something as ostensibly boring as a letter can tell us that they did some experimentation and that they, you know, created medical cures alongside other strategies for dealing with illness, like addressing a kind of, more remote cause, like, deity is angry with you, or some demon has decided to just ruin your life for one reason or another.

So, there was a really organized medical culture, and a big part of that was, mental health. And they have descriptions of what I take to be close to our experiences of anxiety with a lowercase a, not trying to equate, one with the other. And there's an interesting term that you see in medical texts, which in Akkadian is “ḫīp libbi”, which translates literally to something like breaking of the heart.

And it's often, used alongside symptoms like being fearful or losing your appetite or, not being able to sleep. Which may sound familiar, to people certainly quite familiar to me. I have to give a talk later this week, and I joke that I've been having anxiety dreams about it since last week. So I think we've all sort of been there. But what I love about this term is that I think it captures a kind of physical element as well, which is that we sometimes feel our anxiety and our fear in our torso, in our chest, that feeling, that crushing sensation or that fluttery sensation, depending on where on the kind of, nervousness spectrum, that feeling might be.

And they, they also addressed a host of other, mental symptoms, again with a lowercase d, depression or depressed status. They describe the heart as being low, and they have a, a bunch of terminology for describing someone just feeling sad, but sad enough that it required medical attention. So this is like a valid experience that requires medical attention. And then again, things like sleeplessness or forgetting, you know, just not being able to pay attention and forgetting what you're saying, as well as cognitive problems that, you know, mirrored and problems with speech, sudden changes in speech, for example, that would be probably closer to a stroke, but can also maybe reflect, other conditions that could have an emotional or mental component.

So there's a really rich medical corpus and a, you know, an interesting part of that is how they dealt with mental health. And I don't think, I don't know that they would have come up with all that without being together and needing that no medical system to be written down in some way and formalized with medical professionals and, texts that you can turn to, not the average person, but a medical professional could turn to and say, okay, you have this. Let's take it, let's do this treatment for it.

MITCHELL: Yeah, sure sure. So do we know if they had mahbe small buildings dedicated to you know, service, serving people and helping them through these ailments?

MOUDHY: Yeah, absolutely. There were, healing temples. So, it's not it's not 100% clear what happened in those temples. Like what kind of level of healing or medical attention, a person might have received there, but there were there was there were several, actually, goddesses of healing, the most kind of famous and, later primary one. Her name is Gula, and interestingly, she's associated with dogs. Sorry this is a bit of a tangent because I'm obsessed with dogs. And there's a temple to, her at Asean, or to the Healing Goddess, which, she may have had a different name at the time. It's from around 1000 BCE, and it was called the temple was called.

So remember, “É” means temple in Sumerian " ur-giz " means dog. And “ra” is just a grammatical thing. So it's called the é-ur-giz-ra. So, the dog temple or even the dog house, if you want to be more literal about it. And there are figurines of dogs that are found there, and there are, you know, figurines of the goddess with her dog, her attribute animal. She's often depicted with a dog at her feet. And there were burials of dogs are about 30, just over 30 Dog burials are found excavated beneath the ramp leading up to the temple. That may have formed part of some sort of ritual ceremony associated with the healing goddess herself. And there, you know, it's a totally, diverse population of dogs.

Some were puppies, whose head suffered injuries, some were older dogs. So it wasn't like they just went got, a certain demographic of dogs and, killed them. We think that they didn't actually might have been part of some, ritual associated with healing. So, yeah. So, with the temple, such temples would have been centers for, someone coming with various aches and pains. There are figurines also of people gripping their neck or their stomach, found in these temples. So we know that they might. They might have. They must have gone to these, centers for help. We just don't know exactly what sort of healing they received there.

MITCHELL: Yeah, it’s incredible to think that at these times, they had these large buildings dedicated to that. And they were sensitive and aware of these ailments within people. You know think of our modern, maybe lets say hospitals today. And drive around big cities and these are massive buildings, large buildings, dedicated to helping people with their health. And to think at that time, given all the kind of maybe this idea of survival and their need to just survive and live. They were able to dedicate the resources to build comparative buildings, to some degree, to help people get through these natural, human emotions and hardships. It makes me look at this ancient culture with another kind of level of appreciation and say “wow that’s incredible, that they were able to dedicate the resources to do that”

MOUDHY: Yeah, absolutely. And that they did have such a sophisticated way of dealing with medical problems because, you know, illness is terrifying, especially, you know, back then when there were no things like antibiotics or, you know, even a painkiller would have been really helpful, I'm sure, in certain contexts. So. Yeah. And, and, you know, mortality was really high for younger people, for more vulnerable members of the population as well.

So, I can also imagine being around people who were sick or a child or a baby who was sick must have been absolutely terrifying. So, to know there was somewhere you could go, however, you know, effective the treatment might be is not really for us to know or decide, but that they had somewhere that they could go, that there were medical professionals they could turn to. I think it's really, it's amazing and really speaks too. Yeah, really speaks to what they thought was important enough to kind of formalize this.

MITCHELL: I want to go back to this idea of kind of belief systems that may have been at the foundation of civilization’s will to build, desire to create cities. I’d like to ask, in our contemporary cities, if you can, what do you think are the kind of stories and belief systems that underly our contemporary cities?

MOUDHY: Cities are built in so many different ways. And I've lived in very different cities. I grew up in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, which is humongous. I lived in New York, which is humongous in a totally different way and, really organized as well, in a way that my where I grew up was not. And now I live in a very walkable city where we mostly walk everywhere, where we take the bus. And it's just quite easy to get around. And I would say there I think there are parallels with Mesopotamia that I find moving or informative. Like how prominent buildings can serve, you know, public functions, even something boring, like administrative things, like where do you go to get a driver's license or get your passport renewed or, you know, other, other boring things that we all need unfortunately.

There are roads of varying widths, you know, an archeologist 4000 years from now, might look and say, okay, this is a road for, like eight cars or this is definitely a train track. You know, they would be able to, you know, infer elements of the kind of connectivity of different parts of cities from something as simple as how wide or how long a road is something we take for granted or barely even notice, half the time that we're using it. There's, you know, sanitation solutions, waste management, that they had also in ancient Mesopotamia. So, I think, I think the ultimate belief system is that we need to be able to live together, safely amongst each other and access basic needs.

But I think there are also lots of ways that cities don't serve us. Not all cities, but again, some cities and actually maybe even make us unwell. So, noise pollution, for example, I think there's been quite a lot of research done on how it can, lead to or is correlated with premature death. I think it's over 10,000 in Europe, for example, every year. And then air pollution doesn't really need any exposition. Not enough nature can exacerbate all those problems, not enough green spaces or walkability issues. So, yeah. And I think actually there might be a lot of research on how walkable cities are good for mental health. You probably know way more about this than I do, but I just remember seeing a post about that at some point.

So, I think as a response to this, my brain goes to “how can our cities better serve or better reflect belief systems that center our well-being in a different way?” Or instead of maybe something like convenience, which, you know, or the economic system, let's say, makes convenience necessary. You know, we can't we don't always have time to prepare a meal from scratch, let alone grow the ingredients for that meal from scratch. Which in some cases can be like quite a radical act or a form of protest, sometimes against a food system or food prices or even laws in a specific place that prohibit it.

So, I don't know, there, I love the question because it makes me think about the relationship between us, our needs, our beliefs, our places, and what cities do and don't make available to us and how they do or don't serve us, I think. Yeah. I mean, it really made me think about those things. I'd never really thought about it before.

MITCHELL: Yeah, looking back at ancient cities, ancient Mesopotamia, and saying, “this is the seed that all the cities were germinated from” and what things did they do well that helped human flourish, what things did they not do well. And kind of looking at cities through the course of time is something that I am really interested in doing and seeing which cities served people, which ones did not. They’re all very different, but I think once you pick out those things, or nuances that you think serve people or don’t serve people, you can see the underlying story underneath that and say “ok what was the  decision to put in this mass transit rail, what was that based upon, what value was that based upon, what belief system was that based upon. And then hopefully, if we take an inventory of cities throughout history and we’re able to kind of regather ourselves at one point and say, “OK now how do we design better cities for the future?" That’s kind of what the hope is. So, thank you so much for giving me the insight into the ancient Mesopotamian cities and painting the picture for us, because it definitely brought it to life in my mind. So, thank you so much.

MOUDHY: My pleasure. And I think what's also interesting about those early cities is they're very much like an experiment. It's just it had never happened before. And many ways the result is us today. So, in some roundabout way, you know, at work, it seemed to really work to live together and, you know, in close proximity like that.

MITCHELL: Certainly, and it’s an interesting topic, is the city. Just as we made the city or created the city. The city also rewired us to some degree. Yeah, I think it’s this mutual thing.

MOUDHY: Yeah, absolutely. Definitely. Yeah. Exactly.

MITCHELL: Moudhy, thank you so much for taking the time to and spending the, I guess your afternoon with us. I’m looking forward to your book, “Between Two Rivers”, coming out in the states. And if you can give our listeners and viewers a way to reach out to you and contact you, if they have any questions that would be great.

MOUDHY: Yeah. Of course. I'm very findable on Blue Sky. I'm just Moudhy, on blue sky and, drmoudhy one word on Instagram. And my email address is very easy to find if you just search my name. And then Wolfson College, where I, where I work, it's moudhy.al-rashid@wolfson.ox.ac.uk. It's very clunky to say out loud, but much easier to Google. And please do reach out. Any questions, anything you're particularly interested in, I'm always happy to answer questions.

MITCHELL: Amazing. Thank you so much.

MOUDHY: My pleasure. Thank you so much for having me.

---

Connect with Dr. Al-Rashid |

• BlueSky

• Instagram

• Wolfson College Oxford

• Between Two Rivers: Ancient Mesopotamia and the Birth of History

Connect with Host Mitchell Rocheleau |

• Instagram

• Spotify