Thursday, January 20, 2022 @ 6:00 pm-7:00 pm

Lecture

Thousands of medical texts from ancient Assyria and Babylonia have afforded modern scholars a glimpse of how illness and its symptoms were recorded and understood in the first millennium BCE. Thanks to the durable medium of clay, impressed with the iconic wedges of cuneiform script, these texts preserve some of the oldest known medical records in a standardized version of the Akkadian language, the oldest known Semitic language that descends from the same linguistic ancestor as modern Assyrian, Arabic, and Hebrew, among others. Akkadian medical language employs various strategies to convey aspects of an illness experience, and when it comes to mental distress, the heart appears in several expressions that continue to resonate today. This talk will explore such expressions as ‘heartbreak’ and a ‘low’ heart to show some of the ways people made sense of experiences like depression and anxiety in ancient Mesopotamia.

Moudhy Al-Rashid (she/her) is a Junior Research Fellow at the University of Oxford’s Wolfson College, where she specialises in the languages and history of ancient Mesopotamia. She has written for academic and popular journals on topics as diverse as mental illness in ancient Mesopotamia to Late Assyrian scholarly networks. In addition to her writing, she has also appeared on several podcasts, including the BBC Podcasts “Making History” and “You’re Dead to Me”. Through her Twitter account, she hopes to give ancient Mesopotamia as wide an audience as possible and to humanise its long history.

As part of her outreach work, she also serves as a Trustee and Council Member for the British Institute for the Study of Iraq, and serves on the management committee of the Nahrein Network, an independently-funded project in cultural heritage and sustainability in the Middle East.