UC Berkeley

The human activity of making things has a long intellectual history, well predating the Industrial Revolution or even the term “technology” itself. This dissertation examines cuneiform sources written between the second and first millennium BCE in order to determine how technology interacted with and shaped scribal knowledge. With no clear boundary—between genuine and artificial, between the natural and human-made, between theory and practice, episteme and techne, knowing-that and knowing-how—with no term to distinguish between scribe and craftsman, cuneiform texts challenge how we think about both technology and knowledge. The case studies presented herein derive from cuneiform tablets written between the late second and mid first millennia BCE in what is today Iraq. These ancient clay tablets preserve technical recipes, explanatory lists of materials, and rituals bearing the hallmarks of scholarship. For the intellectual historian, they exemplify a discerning interest in the construction and proliferation of technical knowledge at an early stage of Middle Eastern textual history.

The work argues that notions of technology constitute an essential element of cuneiform scribal knowledge. Ignoring the technological component of cuneiform scholarship renders an incomplete portrait of nēmequ—the Akkadian term we translate as “knowledge,” or “wisdom.” Neo-Assyrian glassmaking recipes can function as literary or ritual texts focused on purity, Middle Assyrian perfume recipes can be read as cultural windows into the roles of female experts during the rise of the Assyrian territorial state, and even a solitary tablet containing wool dyeing recipes can expand our knowledge of the cultural role of garments in first millennium Babylonia. Technical recipes, in sum, constitute textual sources that inform and interact with the construction of knowledge at the local level. This work offers close, contextualized readings of Akkadian technical recipes, and utilizes frameworks derived from the history and philosophy of science and technology, in order to generate new methods for investigating the relationship between technology and cuneiform scribal knowledge.