Satria Amilius Quaijtaal posing in the MPIWG hallway
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Satria Amilius Quaijtaal

Predoctoral Fellow (Sep 2022-Feb 2026)

Science before Nature: An Epistemology of Perspectives in the Commentaries of Cuneiform Scholarly Traditions

Satria Quaijtaal’s project investigates commentaries belonging to scholarly traditions from first millennium BCE Mesopotamia. The commentaries are written in the Sumero-Akkadian cuneiform script and explore the semantic landscape of literary and divinatory texts through analogical hermeneutics. Satria is interested in the principles of epistemic practices before the conception of natural philosophy and in the ontological ideas that informed them.

Cuneiform commentaries are the product of Babylonian and Assyrian scholars reflecting on older knowledge traditions and the cuneiform script as resources of knowledge. Satria seeks to uncover the commentators’ epistemic objects by analyzing the methods, questions, reasoning, and terminology that they used to engage with culturally significant literary narratives, lexical works, medical compendia, and divinatory lists of observations and predictions.

The goal of the project is to develop a deeper understanding of how the cuneiform system and hermeneutic analysis provided ancient scholars with an ontological framework and epistemic tools for investigating the experienced world through the observation and interpretation of phenomena, language, and writing.

Satria Quaijtaal holds a BA and MA in ancient Near Eastern languages and civilizations, completed at Freie Universität Berlin in 2017 and 2022. He wrote his MA thesis on “The Old Babylonian Syllabary of Akkadian Texts from Elam.”

Find Satria's full profile on the Website of the International Max Planck Research School – "Knowledge and its Resources" (IMPRS-KIR).

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