Welcome to Decoding Ancient Texts. In this opening module, I want to introduce you to the amazing texts of the cultures of ancient Mesopotamia — Sumer, Babylonia, Akkadia, and Assyria.

We begin with the story of how the cuneiform tablets were uncovered and deciphered in the nineteenth century. For centuries, these tablets with their strange wedge-shaped marks were thought to be decoration. Then, with the discovery of the Behistun Inscription and Henry Rawlinson’s work to translate it, a whole world opened. Suddenly we could read the words of people who lived thousands of years ago.

We follow Austen Henry Layard, who unearthed the great library at Nineveh, and Hormuzd Rassam and William Loftus, who recovered thousands more fragments. We meet Henry Rawlinson, who first understood what had been found, and George Smith, whose book The Chaldean Account of Genesis revealed that the stories of creation, the flood, and early kingship had long been written on Babylonian tablets.

From there, we trace the work of Leonard William King, W. G. Lambert, Andrew George, and Timothy Stephany — translators and Assyriologists who refined our understanding of these texts, line by line and word by word. We also meet Nathaniel Schmidt, a scholar whose recognition of the same connections once cost him his university post, showing how powerful and unsettling these discoveries were.

Together we explore what happens when the ancient records are read on their own terms, without the filters of later theology or mythology. We look at how translation shapes meaning, from Babylonian tablets to Greek scriptures, and how comparing translations reveals the questions beneath the words themselves.

As we move toward the Enuma Elish and the Epic of Gilgamesh, we begin to recognize themes and patterns that echo across cultures and ages, stories that preserve memory, record experience, and speak to the origins of the human story.

Health and peace to you – Paul

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