Johns Hopkins Assyriologist Jacob Lauinger has the rare privilege of translating a once-in-a-lifetime archaeological find: a small, 3,500-year-old cuneiform tablet unearthed in February 2023 after a series of earthquakes in Turkey.
Earlier this fall, students in the First Year Seminar titled Reading Ancient Middle Eastern Literature benefited from their instructor's proximity to history when Lauinger, an associate professor of Assyriology and director of graduate studies in the Department of Near Eastern Studies at Johns Hopkins University, and Meg Swaney, assistant curator for exhibition and teaching, led the class in a lesson on how to make replicas of the ancient tablets in the Johns Hopkins Archaeological Museum.
"Students typically begin the project trying to use the stylus on the clay tablet like it was a pen on paper. By the end of the project, though, they've realized that they need to use a completely different set of motions—pressing, impressing, and lifting the corner of the stylus instead of dragging it across the surface—in order to make the cuneiform signs," Lauinger say. "Even apart from asking them to choose unfamiliar cuneiform signs in place of the more familiar letters of the alphabet, this hands-on project communicates to students more effectively than I could ever do in a lecture how something as seemingly straightforward as writing their own name is actually a culturally determined and embodied practice."
Watch the class in action in this video:
Video credit: Roy Henry / Johns Hopkins University
