STS Speaker Series. The Languages of Babylonian Astronomical Science

Babylonian astronomers were renowned throughout the ancient world both for their observations and predictions. By the middle-to-late first millennium BCE, when these astronomers wrote down their descriptions of celestial phenomena in the form of omina, reports, or diaries, they did so in the standard language of scholarship of the time — Babylonian, or what we often call Akkadian. Or did they? Compared to other scholarly texts, astronomical texts actually show a predilection for terminology and alternative written expressions that make these texts look more like a different language, Sumerian, a language that had fallen out of vernacular use more than 1, 000 years earlier. By employing this technical, almost specialized, linguistic form, these astronomers demonstrated a level of expertise that set them apart from other domains of scholarship and presented them as purveyors of scientific truth beyond terrestrial concerns.

Bio: My research focuses on the languages and intellectual and social histories of the cuneiform cultures the ancient Middle East. Which means that the themes of my scholarship cover a wide range of topics including sociolinguistics; education; multilingualism; translation; language contact/change; scribal practices; lexicography; scholarship; and the histories of science, technology, and medicine. I choose to study and teach the ancient Middle East (roughly ancient Iraq and Syria) because of the vast amounts of contextualized data available mostly on hundreds of thousands of clay tablets of various kinds over three thousand years. There is no shortage of research possibilities.

My book Translation as Scholarship: Language, Writing, and Bilingual Education in Ancient Babylonia and previous research investigated the varieties of cuneiform scribal practices, with special focus on the nature of translation as scholarly knowledge and the intersection and influence of various scribal corpora upon each other (for example, the use of lexical texts in literature or commentaries).