Hosted by Lydia Wilson
Featuring Selena Wisnom
Produced by Finbar Anderson
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We all know that a minute is made up of 60 seconds, and that there are 60 minutes in an hour. What we tend to forget is where that concept came from.
“That’s a Mesopotamian counting system,” historian Selena Wisnom, author of “The Library of Ancient Wisdom: Mesopotamia and the Making of History,” tells New Lines’ Lydia Wilson on The Lede. “There are actually a lot of things which are quite foundational to our culture that come from there,” she says — not least, the story of Noah’s Ark.
“There are a lot of things that are foundational to our culture that come from [Mesopotamia].”
While the culture of ancient Mesopotamia might be just as foundational to our own as, for instance, that of ancient Egypt, Wisnom thinks the former has been disregarded over the centuries, because “we’re often very visual beings and it’s impossible to fail to be impressed by what we see from Egypt just because of the style of their art.” Mesopotamian writings, while hugely important, are “maybe not so exciting to look at because they wrote on clay tablets.”
Writing on clay, while not being as visually attractive as hieroglyphs on papyrus, nonetheless makes for hard-wearing records that are a treasure trove to the small number of experts, Wisnom among them, who can read the cuneiform script.
These Mesopotamian cultures, Wisnom says, are wonderful sources for periods of history we know little about. “The Mesopotamians have a really profound respect for tradition,” she says. “Why are they preserving history so assiduously? I think for them ancientness is equated with authority. The older something is, the more likely it is to be true.”
Studying the ancient Mesopotamians can leave a historian struck by how they seem at once very foreign, and also hugely relatable, says Wisnom. “There’s lots that does strike us as fundamentally weird about Babylonian culture,” she says. “On the other hand, when we try to get into their mindset and think about why they are doing this and how they are doing it and what kind of logic they are using, I think it makes a lot more sense than we might think.”