Cuneiform Worlds: Writing and the Making of Knowledge in Ancient Mesopotamia
Satria Quaijtaal’s project investigates cuneiform commentary practices in first-millennium BCE Mesopotamia and the ways in which Babylonian and Assyrian scholars used writing and inherited textual traditions to investigate, interpret, and order their world. His dissertation, Cuneiform Worlds: Onto-Epistemic Operations in Cuneiform Commentary Practices, examines these practices as evidence for the conceptual and epistemic operations through which cuneiform scholars produced and organized knowledge.
Cuneiform commentaries document scholars engaging closely with authoritative works on divination, medicine, literature, ritual, and lexical scholarship. Rather than treating these texts primarily as exercises in textual interpretation, the project examines commentary as a scholarly practice through which relationships between words, signs, texts, observable events, and divine agency could be identified and made meaningful. Particular attention is paid to the operations by which commentators established such relationships and to the forms of reasoning that made them possible.
The project argues that the cuneiform writing system and the written scholarly tradition together provided an “onto-epistemic framework”: they supplied both resources for producing knowledge and conceptual structures through which the world could be understood. Cuneiform signs were not merely representations of language. Their graphic, phonetic, and semantic properties enabled scholars to establish meaningful correspondences across different domains of knowledge and experience. Commentary practices therefore offer evidence for how scholars reasoned about the relationship between texts and the world they described and interpreted.
By situating these practices historically, the project also examines how scholarly reasoning changed during the first millennium BCE. It traces developments from the Neo-Assyrian scholarly environment of the seventh century BCE through the Achaemenid period to the Late Babylonian and Hellenistic scholarly communities of Babylonia. In doing so, it investigates changing relationships between textual interpretation, divinatory and astral knowledge, scholarly authority, and conceptions of an ordered world.
More broadly, the project contributes to the history of knowledge by asking how systems of writing and inherited textual traditions can function simultaneously as repositories of knowledge and as instruments for generating new knowledge. Rather than evaluating Mesopotamian scholarship through categories derived from later natural philosophy or modern science, it seeks to reconstruct the intellectual operations through which cuneiform scholars themselves made their world intelligible.
Satria Quaijtaal holds a BA in Ancient Studies and an MA in Geschichte und Kulturen Altvorderasiens – Altorientalistik from Freie Universität Berlin, completed in 2017 and 2022 respectively. His MA thesis, The Old Babylonian Syllabary of Akkadian Texts from Elam, investigated the writing practices of Old Babylonian Akkadian texts from southwestern Iran.
Find Satria's profile on the Website of the International Max Planck Research School – "Knowledge and Its Resources" (IMPRS-KIR).