0:13 JT
Hello and welcome to the Thin End of the Wedge, the podcast where experts from around the world share new and interesting stories about life in the ancient Middle East. My name is Jon. Each episode, I talk to friends and colleagues and get them to explain their work in a way we can all understand.
0:32 JT
This episode is a special episode recorded at the international assyriological conference held in Helsinki this July. There was a workshop celebrating local research called “Helsinki research from State Archives of Assyria to Ancient Near Eastern Empires”. You can hear Saana Svärd talking about the Ancient Near Eastern Empires project in Episode 39. The State Archives of Assyria project is by now a very long running project, actually a pioneering digital resource and one of the enduring monuments of the field. It is the brainchild of Professor Simo Parpola.
1:14 JT
At the Rencontre, Professor Parpola kindly agreed to talk about his personal journey and that of the State Archives of Assyria project. This was a rare opportunity to hear a remarkable story. We recorded it so that it could be shared more widely, because this is something that is well worth hearing. We hope you enjoy it. So get yourself a cup of tea, make yourself comfortable, and let’s meet today’s guest.
1:51 JT
Well, good morning. So as Saana said, Simo is the man who needs no introduction. It’s impossible to mention to an assyriologist the word Helsinki without triggering thought of the Assyrians. And vice versa, you can’t think of the Assyrians without thinking also of Helsinki. And likewise, you can’t think of the Assyrians without thinking of the name Parpola. And Simo has very graciously agreed to give us the next half an hour to explain a little bit about his experiences and how he came to be in this remarkable situation.
2:19 JT
So thank you, Simo. We have to start with the obvious question, you know, how did you get here? I ask many of our colleagues, you know, how did you become an assyriologist? Nobody has ever yet said, “When I was little, the thought came into my head, well, when I grow up, I want to be an assyriologist.” How did you fall into this field? Why aren’t you a classicist or an Egyptologist, or something like that?
2:41 SP
Why did I become an assyriologist? Okay, it’s a long story, but I put it short. I initially wanted to become an astronaut. {AUDIENCE LAUGHS} Then I fell in love with the Amerindian cultures–Mayas and the Aztecs. After a few years of very childish studies, in 1959 I realised that I can’t make my life as a student of Amerindian cultures, because those things are not taught in Finland. I should have gone into {UNCLEAR} to start my studies. And since it was very insecure if I would make my living with it, I decided to then start assyriology there, which was taught in Finland.
3:41 JT
Thank you. I don’t think I’ve ever heard anybody think of assyriology as a secure field. {AUDIENCE LAUGHS} I wonder, when you came home and you were sitting around the dinner table, and you explained your idea to your mother, say, you know “What I’m going to do is I’m going to study assyriology.” What did your family think about that?
4:01 SP
Well, very heavy resistance. {AUDIENCE LAUGHS} My mother, who knew how stubborn I was, asked for help from my uncle, who was a Dutch chiruc … chirurgie … kirurgi …
4:21 JT
surgeon
4:22 SP
surgeon, yes, yes. And he thought, tried to talk me over, but didn’t succeed. So after all their effort, my parents had to resist, and … and resign.
4:38 JT
We’re very grateful for your resistance. Could you say something about why you chose Assyria? You’ve had a long career in Assyrian studies. Was there ever a moment when you thought, “I might dabble in the Babylonians”? How did you come to choose Assyrians? Why did you stick with it?
4:52 SP
Well, I came to the university as a student who was determined, but open-minded. And I had decided to do assyriology, because my … my uncle, Finnish uncle, was professor. And therefore my first lecture at the university in 1961 was Neo-Assyrian, taught by Jussi Aro. He was the docent of assyriology at the university. It was about Neo-Assyrian letters, the so-called Harper letters. And I must say that while I was very ignorant when I entered first class, I soon became acquainted with the cuneiform script. We started from the very first lecture. We started with 20 Harper letters. In about two months, I could read good. So I decided I … this is probably my field. And I want to become an assyriologist.
6:05 SP
At the same time, however, I had learned that doing Neo-Assyrian was something that was not common among assyriologists. The Neo-Assyrian studies had became background … er, back-field of assyriology, because of the finds in Mari. And then naturally sumerology, and Old Babylonian studies were always popular, and so on. And I realised that even though the texts that we were reading, the royal correspondence of Assyria, were extremely important cause, and not only for assyriology, but also for other disciplines, the state in which the discipline was, was not so good. There was only, actually, an only person in the world who could be thought an expert in Neo-Assyrian–Professor Karlheinz Deller, officially a biblicalist in Rome. There were no dictionary of Assyrian, no real text books, and both of the studies of the Assyrian language were very antiquated. They dated from, mostly from the time before World War One. And they were out of date. In that case I decided to do my best to study(?) {UNCLEAR} there to become a good assyriologist, and Neo-Assyrian student.
7:49 JT
I wonder if we could ask you in a little bit more depth about that. You talk there about the lack of a dictionary and the old-fashioned editions. So looking back at the State Archives project now, it’s an incredible resource. I can’t think of another part of the field as well served as Assyrian studies, with the main archives, the supplementary text series, the contextual books around it. Incredibly ambitious project. Looking at it the other way, before you started it, you had this goal of editing all of the archives, which is what, 6000 texts, something like that?
8:25 SP
Something like that, but more.
8:27 JT
Something like that, but more, yes. {AUDIENCE LAUGHS}
8:28 JT
I mean 6000 of anything is a lot. And they’re not the shortest texts. They’re not the easiest texts when you don’t have much to work with. Could you say something about the practicalities? Also, you know, nowadays we sit at home in our pyjamas, we can flick some photographs of tablets. That certainly wasn’t the case in the 1980s. What did it take to envision that? How did you practically do it?
8:56 SP
From the beginning, I had quite simple student objectives. That is to say, to get {UNCLEAR}, to get recognition, things like that. But there was a decisive event in my life that changed everything. And I tried to start to think bigger. Jussi Aro had given me a study topic for my bachelor’s degree. It was nine Neo-Assyrian texts from Ashur, mostly unedited letters, which I must tell even today, are very difficult texts. I wrote a study paper about the basis of that {UNCLEAR}.
9:54 SP
Obviously, Aro was convinced that I had some potential. So he contacted Karlheinz Deller, who had been commissioned by the Chicago Assyrian Dictionary to copy, transliterate all the unedited Neo-Assyrian letters in the British Museum. Well, I had just received my BA degree, when Deller wrote to me and welcomed me to meet him in Rome. And I went there in 19 … in the September of September 1963, and had a long talk with him at the Vatican city. He was daunted by this task that he received to fulfil. And he really needed, … so he really needed a good assistant in order to do … go through with it. It was estimated that there would be about 1500 Neo-Assyrian letters at the British Museum that had … nobody had clearly looked at. Only for a couple of years for his description about Neo-Assyrian, unpublished tablets of the British Museum.
11:20 SP
In any case, we made a preliminary plan as to how to do. And it involved two visits to the British Museum–long, many months long, visits in 1964 and ’66. And then a stay at the Biblical Institute in Rome, in 1965, in order to hammer out our strategy. So this really was a major event. And for me as a young scholar. And we succeeded in transliterating all the texts in 1964. And copying enough texts for a CT volume, which, for some reasons, I don’t want to go into, was not published, actually as projected, but was integrated later into another CT volume, which I produced.
12:24 SP
Yes, we worked together quite, quite nicely during these months that we spent together. Altogether, more than a year. And we shared the same hotel room in London, and we corresponded very regularly. And especially the stay in Rome at the Biblical Institute was very nice. I had prepared for it by transliterating all the texts that we had transliterated the previous year in so-called punch cards. And this is not the real punch cards that were used for feeding … entering cuneiform texts into the computer, but these were all an older type of punch cards, which were operated with needles. And it’s a coded test, where these holes have a symbolic … a certain coded system.
13:33 SP
And for instance, when I transliterated all these 1500 texts on these cards in 1964, I had in mind the study of various subsequent parts: history, religion, administration, justice, etc. But particularly one primary code, namely, joins. Because the fragments that we were working for, were very small. And you must make joins. So you could see that they had very sharp breaks. And they were smashed into fragments when the Medes took Nineveh. And so there was a great potential for joins. But you cannot trace them in the … by comparing, just comparing the fragments. Because there were so many of the fragments. And we had … didn’t have that time at the Museum we should have, being constantly, as you, checking joins out. There was so much. So I made a code for potential joins with reference to the size of breaks that were there, etc., very accurate descriptions. And then I used my needle, you know, to have those cards that were punched drop down. And we in being in Rome, when I was in Rome, we were able to find over 40 joins in that way, that were checked out in the Museum. And later on, continuing this same system, I found over two … 200 … 200 joins during the following years.
15:25 SP
So naturally, we made all other types of things together, also the plan, etc. And ended up planning a series of publications entitled Neo-Assyrian Letters, which would contain re-editions of all previously published letters, and all these new texts that we had identified. A series with … authored by Deller and myself, where all the texts would have been collated, and been fully indexed. I had actually already indexed with the help of the computer, some 400 letters, dealing with Assyrian scholars, which was topic of my future dissertation. And with the help of the indices that I produced with my friend, Timo Poston(?) Niemi, who was in the computer business, I was able to compile details for the productive indices that enabled me to identify the authors of letters with no indication of sender at the beginning. So the text had broken away. And I was able to with certainty to identify most of the missing authors, because of an analysis of their orthography. They had all of them had distinctive orthography, with certainty identified with the help of these disks. And that was why, at that time, I decided to do, you know, everything in the future with the help of the computer. So I had done the {UNCLEAR} book.
17:17 JT
Well, thank you. That’s a remarkable story. I must leave some time for some questions from the audience, but I have a couple of questions. I’d like to look backwards and then forwards. So the backwards question is, looking back over your long career, what is the one thing that you are most proud of?
17:39 SP
I’m most proud … what I am most proud of, I’m so glad I have stayed well and have not been ill. I’m so wonderfully grateful that I have met people who are open minded and ready to work for a higher goal. That I found, you know, people who understood me, and saw that I might have some potential and gave me jobs. The list is very long. I cannot put it briefly. But I’m trying to tell that, you know, if you … there are people here, young people who are just beginning their careers–don’t ever stop having dreams, and don’t ever shrink back realising those dreams. You need the ability to keep doing what you see you are created to do. And remember, it’s a marathon. You can’t set, you know, thoughts and achievements … don’t achieve without working hard.
19:04 JT
Hmm, very good advice. So looking forward, then, we all have in our minds an idea of what Assyria was like, and that inevitably colours our interpretations and our translations. One of the defining characteristics of the State Archive series is that the translations are not literal and stilted and wooden. They’re very lively. They’re engaging as texts themselves. And that inevitably comes from the depth of experience, with your reconstruction of how it was. But there must be moments when you’re sitting at your desk, and you’re frustrated, because there’s something missing. And with all the new excavations at Nineveh, you know, finding tablets, is there a tablet that you wish they’d find? You know, to answer a question that’s been bothering you for years. What do you want them to find?
19:55 SP
I don’t know. {AUDIENCE LAUGHS}
19:57 SP
I’m sorry to say this, but there was one tablet which everybody wanted to find, which I was happy to be on an excavation where it was found–the Ziyaret Tepe excavations, you know, where they found the last letter written by an Assyrian commander before an imminent Babylonian attack. And this was really what I’d always wanted to find. But of course I … you never … surprises never end. So anything can be found.
20:40 JT
Thank you very much. So we have a few minutes left, so I’d like to open it to the audience. There are many in the crowd who have spent time working with Simo. Many others who have benefited from his work. Would anybody like to take this remarkable opportunity?
20:54 Jari Schrader
Hi, yes. I’m just curious. Are you happy to see that so many other assyriologists have started to use computers. I know in Munich Enrique Jiménez has started the electronic Babylonian Library project. So are you happy to see that others have …
21:10 SP
Of course, I’m very happy.
21:12 Jari Schrader
Yes, yeah, of course, you are an Assyrian man, and he’s a Babylonian guy. So is there a rivalry between you?
21:17 SP
No.
21:18 Jari Schrader
No, between the old guys. Between people and not between the scholars. And just as a joke. But, yeah, so it’s like, are you happy to see that?
21:26 SP
I’m very happy.
21:27 Jari Schrader
Yeah.
21:28 SP
In every way.
21:28 audience member
Thank you very much for this, Simo, and also very good advice. I was wondering if you could say a little bit about what the greatest challenges were, especially at the beginning of the project, in getting a suitable grant, and funders and supporters.
21:28 SP
I’m not sure if you already asked for jobs. In any case, I … I have made for many grant applications for myself, even after I was already an established scholar. But sometimes it is impossible to get support, because of the mode of thinking of those people who are in the position of providing grants and stipends. For instance, I made an application for Academy funding in 1974, from Finnish Academy, in order to set up a sort of pre-SAA project. But they told me that, I mean, off the record, that it was impossible to get support for this type of humanistic project from the present government, which was social democrat. And there was also some Soviet … Soviet influence at that time. You cannot get this. But when I applied then for the SAA project a decade later, then the wind had changed direction, and I was already told off the record then that you have a good chance to start the project. And the same goes, I think also for students, when they make up applications, you should have mentors, good mentors, who can recommend you for a stipend and so on. And what else? You must have made a pretty good career yourself, so that you are credible yourself.
23:32 Martin Worthington
Hello, Professor Parpola. Like everybody here, I’m a great admirer of all your work. And I’d like to ask about how two sides of you co-exist. On the one hand, we have the extraordinary philological exactitude and the very mainstream work that SAA has done becoming a backbone of the field. And on the other hand, you’re also well known for astonishingly bold and daring, and very creative projects, like your monotheism and the etymology of Sumerian. Could you tell us how these two sides of you co-exist?
24:07 SP
I don’t know. {AUDIENCE LAUGHS} But I’ve always realised that life is short. And so I’ve tried to work hard in order to realise some dreams … ideas that I had. And maybe that’s an explanation that … you know. Of course, it always encourages you when you succeed in doing something. And for instance, I have made things outside assyriology. Like, for instance, I I have some sort of need inside my heart to help the Finns who are now under Soviet … Finno-Ugaric people who are under the Soviet … Russian rule. And so I devoted seven years of my life in order to participate in the effort of revitalising these languages, which are in the danger of disappearing. So I don’t know.
25:18 JT
Thank you very much. I’m afraid we’ve run out of time, but I’m sure you will have other opportunities. But before we leave, we have to thank you again, Simo, very much for the last half hour and also for your contributions to the field. Thank you very much indeed. {AUDIENCE APPLAUDS}
25:53 Saana Svärd
Thank you. That was amazing. Thank you so much. And let me conclude this session by expressing my personal thanks also to Simo for everything that he has done. From myself, and of course, everybody else in Helsinki.
26:11 JT
I’d also like to thank our patrons: Enrique Jiménez, Jana Matuszak, Nancy Highcock, Jay C, Rune Rattenborg, Woodthrush, Elisa Rossberger, Mark Weeden, Jordi Mon Companys, Thomas Bolin, Joan Porter MacIver, John MacGinnis, Andrew George, Yelena Rakic, Zach Rubin, Sabina Franke, Shai Gordin, Aaron Macks, Maarja Seire, Jaafar Jotheri, Morgan Hite, Chikako Watanabe, Mark McElwaine, Jonathan Blanchard Smith, Kliment Ohr, Christina Tsouparopoulou, TT, Melanie Gross, Claire Weir, Marc Veldman, Bruno Biermann, Faimon Roberts, Jason Moser, Pavla Rosenstein, Müge Durusu-Tanrıöver, Tate Paulette, Willis Monroe, Toby Wickenden, Emmert Clevenstine, Barbara Porter, Cheryl Morgan, Kevin Roy Jackson, Susannah Paulus, Eric Whitacre, Jakob Flygare, Jon Ganuza, Bonnie Nilhamn-Kuosmanen, Ben, Michael Gitlin, as well as those who prefer to remain anonymous.
27:30 JT
I really appreciate your support. It makes a big difference. Every penny received has contributed towards translations. Thanks of course to the lovely people who have worked on the translations on a voluntary basis or for well below the market rate. For Arabic, thanks in particular to Zainab Mizyidawi, as well as Lina Meerchyad and May Al-Aseel. For Turkish, thank you to Pinar Durgun and Nesrin Akan. TEW is still young, but I want to reach a sustainable level, where translators are given proper compensation for their hard work.
28:09 JT
And thank you for listening to Thin End of the Wedge. If you enjoy what we do, and you would like to help make these podcasts available in Middle Eastern languages, please consider joining our Patreon family. You can find us at patreon.com/wedgepod. You can also support us in other ways: simply subscribe to the podcast; leave us a five star review on Apple Music or your favourite podcatcher; recommend us to your friends; follow us on Twitter: @wedge_pod. If you want the latest podcast news, you can sign up for our newsletter. You can find all the links in the show notes and on our website at wedgepod.org. Thanks, and I hope you’ll join us next time.