Kevin McGeough | Geography
Studying Ancient Cultures Through Ancient Languages
The ancient cultures of Mesopotamia and the Near East left behind a remarkable corpus of textual records written in a variety of languages. These are incredible resources for historians, but since the writing systems had fallen out of use for thousands of years, they had to be deciphered in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In this talk, I will discuss some of the methods scholars use to understand these writings, illustrate the challenges that historians face when languages fall out of use, and how the survival of languages like Hebrew and Coptic has allowed access to Near Eastern scripts.
