19/07/2026
نشرات بلاد الرافدين!
في مشروعها "نشرات بلاد الرافدين"، تطرح الباحثة الفرنسية وعالمة الآشوريات سيسيل ميشيل (Cécile Michel) سؤالاً جوهرياً مفاده:
إذا كان عليك ضمان حفظ معلومة حيوية وتريد نقلها عبر الزمن؛ ما هي الطريقة الأمثل للقيام بذلك؟
المقاربة البديهية اليوم هي حفظ كل شي على الأنترنت أو على قرص صلب كما جرت العادة، غير أن الاعتماد على تكنولوجيا حديثة غير مضمونة البقاء يهدد الأجيال القادمة بـما تدعوه الباحثة "زهايمر عالمي" نتيجة الفقدان الحتمي للبيانات. وهنا تتجلى مفارقة التوثيق؛ فرغم أن سكان بلاد الرافدين شاركونا الوعي ذاته بأهمية الأرشفة للمستقبل، إلا أنهم تفوقوا في اختيار الوسيط المادي لحفظ تراثهم.
تثبت الشواهد الأركيولوجية أن "الطين" هو المادة الأكثر استدامة وموثوقية عبر التاريخ؛ فبينما تواجه الوسائط الرقمية والورقية خطر الزوال، صمدت الألواح المسمارية لتقدم لنا اليوم تفاصيل دقيقة عن مجتمعات ضاربة في القدم. علمياً، يظهر التدوين الرافدي القديم أكثر ديمومة من توثيقنا الرقمي الحديث؛ فإذا أردت لمعلومة أن تخلد، فالنحت على الطين هو الخيار الأضمن.
🔬 تُناقش الباحثة هذا المحور في أحدث آليات تنظيم الأرشيفات الرسمية والخاصة في بلاد الرافدين وسياقاتها التاريخية.
In her ‘Mesopotamian Bulletins’, the Assyriologist Cécile Michel blogs about a rich and manifold past culture that still has a lot to tell us today. We regularly translate selected entries of this blog into English. Three new episodes are now available.
Suppose you have a certain piece of information that you ought to make sure will be remembered – not just by yourself, but also by your descendants, and their descendants, over millennia. How do you store this information? The most obvious approach today is to create a file on your computer and additionally save this file on one or more additional hard drives. However, this makes the availability of the information dependent on the availability of a certain kind of technology whose longevity nobody can guarantee today. In fact, many people expect the digital archives we create today are very ephemeral. Most of the information that is merely preserved digitally might be lost forever in the distant future. Initiatives like Memory of Mankind are already warning that future generations will be suffer from ‘global Alzheimer’ because they will find much less written evidence of their ancestors than previous generations.
In fact, the longest-lasting medium that mankind has ever found for passing on knowledge is still clay. No other writing support has proven to be so durable over the millennia. Even the oldest documents on paper, parchment, or palm leaves (not even to mention digital media) do not come close to the lifespan of the cuneiform tablets that were produced in ancient Mesopotamia and which still provide us with detailed insights into the lives of people and their societies back then. In other words, if you want to preserve information for posterity, the best thing you can do is still to carve your message in clay.
In her ‘Mesopotamian Bulletins’, the Assyriologist Cécile Michel regularly writes about ancient clay documents and what they tell us about the lives of people back then. Studying these documents often reveals that the actions and intentions of these people are much more familiar to us when we might initially think. One of these intentions was to archive knowledge such that it will be accessible in the future. Today, we learn a lot about these ancient cultures not just by looking at individual clay tablets, but also by assessing the contexts in which they were kept. In one of the new episodes of her blog, Cécile Michel deals with the archives that the ancient Mesopotamians built and how they were organised, and she explains why we are in a very different situation with regard to official and private archives, respectively.
#تاريخ #ثقافة #أنثروبولوجيا
In her ‘Mesopotamian Bulletins’, the Assyriologist Cécile Michel blogs about a rich and manifold past culture that still has a lot to tell us today. We regularly translate selected entries of this blog into English. Three new episodes are now available.
