Assyriology (MA)
Student experiences
Elysa:
I’m currently doing the one-year Master’s in Assyriology at Leiden University, as part of Classics and Ancient Civilizations. For my thesis I’m working on an archive of nine clay tablets from the Böhl collection that are still unpublished, so it really feels like an open field.
My work involves copying the tablets, transliterating them by reading the signs, and then translating them. As I started working on them, it took some time to get used to reading the tablets, especially because the signs are not always clearly visible and I sometimes have to play around with the lighting. But the more tablets I read, the easier it became to recognise the signs and get a better sense of what the tablets are about.
Holding something that was written around 2,500 years ago is a very special feeling.
The first time I held a clay tablet, it felt kind of unreal. You are holding something that was written around 2,500 years ago, and that is a very special feeling. One thing I found especially nice was that one of the tablets contained the name of a woman. You do not encounter that very often, and I thought that was really interesting. It is a good reminder that this was not only a world of men, but of women too. Moments like that make the work feel very rewarding, because small details can suddenly give you a different perspective on the people behind these texts.
For the future, publishing these tablets feels like a very nice start. It gives me a preview of what it is like to work independently, start publishing material, and slowly find out what the story is.