I’m chatting with historian, translator and author Moudhy al-Rashid in Wolfson College in Oxford, overlooking the gardens and pond. Moudhy works with the extraordinary record of cuneiform languages written on clay tablets with reed styluses. These open and period of deep history of some 3500 years between the two rivers of the Tigris and Euphrates. Most of the tablets records of daily life; some are great hymns and stories. We talk of The Epic of Gilgamesh, the oldest surviving written story, and of the Hymns of Enheduana, the priestess and first named author in human history. We also talk of the Assyrian Palace Sculptures of approx. 600 BCE that depict the lion hunt of King Ashburnipal. Says Moudhy, “What I sense is that the artists seem to have been animal activists”, for they depict suffering. Every animal is clearly personalized.

Moudhy says of the Gilgamesh epic, where he searches for immortality and finds is the survival of the collective: “We’re here to look after each other.”

What do these cuneiform tablets advise us? “How to make sense of this bizarre gift we’ve been given, which is being on this planet together.”

Moudhy’s 2025 book is “Between Two Rivers”. She is writing a new book on the richness of individual lives in antiquity.

She recommends Sophus Helle’s gorgeous book on the “Hymns of Enheduana”, and Amanda’s Podany’s “Weavers, Scribes and Kings.”

In her book, Between Two Rivers, Moudhy translates a lullaby song sung by a mother to her child:

“Little one, who dwelled in darkness,

Now you’ve come and seen the sun,

Wy the crying? Why the worries?

What has made your peace undone?”

Website: https://www.wolfson.ox.ac.uk/person/moudhy-al-rashid/

My new book will be supporting this podcast, and will be published in March 2027 by Unbreaking/5m. It’s called "Bamboo and Butterfly: Transformation and Story for Climate and Nature Recovery."