Ancient Knowledge Networks: A Social Geography of Cuneiform Scholarship in First-Millennium Assyria and Babylonia

by Eleanor Robson

Ancient Knowledge
Networks is a book about how knowledge travels, in minds and bodies as well
as in writings. It explores the forms knowledge takes and the meanings it
accrues, and how these meanings are shaped by the peoples who use it.

Addressing the relationships between political power, family
ties, religious commitments and literate scholarship in the ancient Middle East
of the first millennium BC, Eleanor Robson focuses on two regions where
cuneiform script was the predominant writing medium: Assyria in the north of
modern-day Syria and Iraq, and Babylonia to the south of modern-day Baghdad. She
investigates how networks of knowledge enabled cuneiform intellectual culture
to endure and adapt over the course of five world empires until its eventual
demise in the mid-first century BC. In doing so, she also studies Assyriological
and historical method, both now and over the past two centuries, asking how the
field has shaped and been shaped by the academic concerns and fashions of the
day. Above all, Ancient Knowledge
Networks is an experiment in writing about ‘Mesopotamian science’, as it
has often been known, using geographical and social approaches to bring new
insights into the intellectual history of the world’s first empires.

Genres: History, Nonfiction

517 pages, Kindle Edition

Published November 14, 2019

About the author

Eleanor Robson is a Reader in History and Philosophy of Science at the Department of History and Philosophy of Science, Cambridge University, vice-chair of the British School of Archaeology in Iraq and a Quondam Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford.
Robson is the author or co-author of several books on Mesopotamian culture and the history of mathematics. In 2003, she won the Lester R. Ford Award of the Mathematical Association of America for her work on Plimpton 322, a clay tablet of Babylonian mathematics; contrary to previous theories according to which this tablet represented a table of Pythagorean triples, Robson showed that it could have been a collection of school exercises in solving quadratic equations. She has also been widely quoted for her criticism of the U.S. Government's failure to prevent looting at the National Museum of Iraq during the Iraq War in 2003.

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