and being able to read what it says

is an amazing feeling.

If you see a cuneiform tablet for the first time

you're not likely to identify it as writing

and you certainly wouldn't know which way up it went.

It's a form of time travel -

it catapults you back in time, thousands of years

and puts you directly into the shoes of somebody

who lived so many years before us.

The earliest known form of writing is called cuneiform.

First used over 5000 years ago

it's believed to predate Egyptian hieroglyphs.

Cuneiform was used by civilisations that lived in Mesopatamia.

Several societies used cuneiform as their writing system

including the Sumerians and the Akkadians.

Pressed onto clay, cuneiform tablets are incredibly durable,

they're literally fireproof,

but for thousands of years, no one was able to translate them.

After much trial and error,

cuneiform script was finally deciphered in the Victorian era.

What they revealed was extraordinary.

Once cuneiform was deciphered

lots of unexpected things came to light

but probably none which had greater impact

than the discovery by George Smith in 1872

of the 11th tablet of the Epic of Gilgamesh

in which he encountered for the first time, the flood story.

Finding an ancient tablet with the story of Noah's Ark

written hundreds of years before the Bible

shattered the Victorian's understanding of the world.

When it arrived, it was a huge... ...bang, thing like that.

It was a very explosive matter.

And the parallel was much more than a sort of, general similarity

with a boat and water and animals.

It was in the same order

and there were many close points that compellingly showed

that this same story had been current in Mesopotamia

a millennium before the earliest date

when the Hebrew text is likely to have come into existence.

It wasn't easy being a woman in Mesopotamia

but women in wealthy families were treated fairly well.

The first known author in all of recorded history

is actually a woman.

The Akkadian priestess, Enheduanna.

The case of Enheduanna shows us

that women could reach extremely high and important positions

in Mesopotamian religion.

We learn a lot about society, about beliefs

relations between husband and wife

business transactions going wrong.

We know from cuneiform tablets that women had agency.

We have contracts where they are allowed to buy houses

and they retain control of their dowry.

They can run and manage businesses in their own right

as long as alongside their husbands.

If you've ever wondered why there's 60 seconds in a minute

or 360 degrees in a circle

it's because the Sumerians and Akkadians

used a numbering system that was sexagesimal.

Which means that they counted on a base of 60

and divisions of 60 and multiplications by 60

where we tend to use the decimal system.

Our own time measurement into 60 seconds in a minute

and 60 minutes in an hour

is a direct inheritance from Mesopotamian scholarly tradition.

It's amazing how many concepts we take for granted

in our modern society

can actually be found for the first time in ancient Mesopotamia.

The whole concept of mathematical models

the very idea that you can use data

to predict things happening in the future

and that's foundational to all modern science.

The Mesopotamians were keen letter writers

sending sealed messages with traders and travellers.

Reading these letters today,

you realise that in many ways, not much has changed.

We can see that there were specific formulae in their correspondence.

As we start an email today by "I hope all is well"

they also started with specific formulae.

But when they were angry

they forgot about this formulaic convention

and they just started the letter very matter-of-factly.

As well as writing about stock levels,

taxes and receipts on their tablets

cuneiform writers loved to gossip.

We do have letters from these women

complaining that the men are not sending enough money home.

We have a certain sense of keeping up with the Joneses

saying "next door has built an extension to their house,

when are we going to have the money to build an extension to our house?"

So these kind of things really do come through

and we see these little human concerns

these little human squabbles

desires, jealousies and so on.

By studying the past

we learn so much about ourselves and the world that we live in.

But the secrets revealed in cuneiform tablets

are only known to us today because of clay's durability.

The way that we record things is constantly evolving.

Technological progress means things become obsolete very quickly.

The messages we send every day are stored in the cloud.

How likely is it that anyone will be able to read that in 20 years

let alone a few thousand years?

There is a project in Austria

which is inscribing 1000 of the most important books of our era

onto ceramic tablets.

So humanity has really come full circle

from writing on clay at the very beginning of history

to writing on clay again

in a different way to preserve our information now.

There are many initiatives trying to prevent digital data from being lost.

Could it be that despite all the incredible technology

we have at our fingertips

ancient methods of recording information

are the best way of preserving our secrets

for generations to come.