Cuneiform Insights into the Dawn of the Anthropocene
What third-millennium BCE texts about fisheries reveal about human impact on the marshes of southern Iraq.
- Role: Researcher Co-Investigator, with Christie Carr and Jacob L. Dahl (University of Oxford)
- Funding: John Fell Fund, £52,000, 2024–2025
The project asks what cuneiform texts can tell us about human impact on the environment of southern Iraq in the third millennium BCE, taking fisheries as the test case. Administrative, legal and epistolary texts from Girsu, Umma and Iri-Sagrig are read against archaeological and palaeoenvironmental evidence for a wetland that was devastated again in the 1990s.
What the texts show
- Ration lists record fish redistributed on a large scale to workers and messengers, with marked fluctuations from year to year and periods of scarcity.
- Letters complain that fish cannot be had, pointing to over-fishing, seasonal shortfall or climate rather than to a steady supply.
- A small number of texts describe fish ponds and managed breeding, the earliest evidence of attempts at sustainability in the region.
- Shifts in river courses, coastline and irrigation during the period reshaped where settlements sat and which resources they could draw on.
Outputs
- Workshop Writing the Dawn of the Anthropocene, Rencontre Assyriologique Internationale 70, Prague, July 2025 (with Christie Carr and Rune Rattenborg).
- Carr, Pagé-Perron and Dahl, Human-Environment Interactions at the Dawn of the Anthropocene: A Case Study of Third-Millennium Fisheries in South-Western Asia (in preparation).