Prisons in Ancient Mesopotamia with Nicholas Reid

Psychiatry & Psychotherapy Podcast

David J Puder

Science, Health & Fitness, Medicine

4.8 • 1.3K Ratings

🗓️ 10 March 2023

⏱️ 54 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In today’s episode of the podcast, we speak with Professor Nicholas Reid, author of, Prisons in Ancient Mesopotamia. After introducing us to how Mesopotamians viewed and treated mental health, Reid talks to us about the earliest historical records on imprisonment in the history of the world.

In his book, Reid discusses the evolution of the modern prison system as it relates to ancient Mesopotamia. Together we discuss the commonalities that can be seen between the ancient and modern systems and the benefits that come from learning about past cultures’ successes and weaknesses.

It may seem safely assumable to believe that because we are thousands of years removed from some ancient societies and their often barbaric methods of treating humanity, that we have automatically advanced into a superior, more humane society.

But with our reliance on solitary confinement and a loss of meaning, our system is missing what could be a more healing and transformative journey.

Link to blog here.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome back to the podcast. Today is kind of a unique episode. I wanted to dive into
0:18.7	the history of psychiatry, the history of mental health, and I thought I would go back
0:25.9	really far. And so I have today an expert, Dr. Nicholas Reid. He is an ancient text expert.
0:33.7	He has a recent book he's written called Prisons and Ancient Mesopotamia. And yeah, he studies
0:44.4	a seriology. And so do you want to define a seriology and talk about a little bit about like how this
0:49.8	is even studied? Yeah, yeah. David, thanks for having me on for this podcast. A seriology is
0:56.9	actually a misnomer that the field was named incorrectly when people were began to discover
1:02.6	these clay tablets with scratches on them or wedges on them. They began to think, oh, it's all
1:07.9	must be a serian. So they call it a study of a seria. We now know that certainly some of that
1:13.0	came from a seria, but we have Babylonian, Sumerian text. And so when you think of the field of a
1:18.8	seriology, it's the study of the language and cultures of the ancient east. My specialization
1:24.4	is particularly with southern Iraq and modern day terms. Okay. And so how does one study this,
1:33.2	like what are the what are the ancient texts look like or what are you utilizing to study it?
1:37.8	Most of them are clay tablets that have been sun dried. They did use fuel for some of them
1:45.2	and bake them. But that was typically more important tablets. The more every day tablets were
1:52.3	dried in the sun. And they used to read stylists to impress wedges into the clay tablets. And
1:59.9	these clay tablets go back to 3,200 BC. So these are very, very old. And we have hundreds of thousands
2:06.9	of them that are extant today. Part of the reason why we have this so much information is because
2:11.9	if you bury a clay tablet in the desert, when you dig there, you find a clay tablet in the desert.
2:17.6	If you burn someone's city, you bake their records. Whereas Papyrus and other materials that are
2:24.3	were used for writing, they're not as durable. You have to have almost perfect
2:29.6	conditions to have significant fines for antiquity. So like the Dead Sea Scrolls, which many of
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