We are very excited to announce that our keynote talk will be delivered by Dr Moudhy Al-Rashid (Wolfson College, University of Oxford)! The talk is entitled, 'Heaven to Earth to Clay: Writing and Reality in Ancient Mesopotamia’.
Here is the abstract:
In this keynote talk, I will explore how people make sense of the world today and how people in ancient Mesopotamia made sense of the world around them using unique knowledge production techniques. In particular, we will explore omen texts and astronomical texts as a way into how scribes and scholars wrote about the world and generated information about the world in an effort to organise it systematically. A large part of this effort relied on features of the cuneiform writing system, like its polysemy and its graphical elements. In many ways, the script itself influenced how the world was understood; natural phenomena became signs to interpret like the wedge-shaped signs on clay, and certain metaphors suggest just how important cuneiform was to the enterprise of ancient science and scholarship. While I will not say anything groundbreaking or new (because I have just finished a book and come off of maternity leave), I hope to offer a high-level overview of some of the themes between heaven and earth in ancient Mesopotamia, look for some connections between present and past, and end with some possible avenues for future research.
You can still register for OPCA 2024 by following this link and filling in the form: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLScAQ8jklGsLC9IksEc8MQETrQm-tJFXXSStRK2bHwIEn_8Emg/viewform?vc=0&c=0&w=1&flr=0&fbclid=IwAR0hDrCcjkAM606yX_SxrYZNL1JULnG9HXkbeqqjI1gixdJPbhzAhNoNeXg_aem_AWr0yUY1WbkkzlUFUrmZkmK7Hsg8t9nQplw1l9GggiMwvR6voU-VQUSxUUT_G2UXP2asrMqb-z9UkmlGy0bhr787.
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