Documentary about Assyrian correspondence'Thus speaks Tarām-Kūbi' at the 7th International Archaeology Film Festival

7 September 2022

Photo: CNRS

The multi-award-winning documentary about the letters of women from ancient Mesopotamia will be featured at this year's edition of the Archaeology Film Festival in Split from 10-12 November.

How did people live in ancient Mesopotamia? A lot of what we know about this question is based on the study of 4,000-year-old clay tablets and the private and commercial letters they contain. These letters provide unique insights into the living conditions and social circumstances of ancient Mesopotamians like Tarām-Kūbi, who is the 'main character' of the documentary 'Thus speaks Tarām-Kūbi - Assyrian Correspondence'. This film, which was released in French in 2020 and has recently come out in English, tells history in a profound and captivating way, provides a broad picture of a past culture, and also shows how Assyriologists can reconstruct it. 

The multi-award-winning documentary has now been selected for the competition programme of the 7th International Archaeology Film Festival, which will be held from 10-12 November 2022 in Split, Croatia. The selected films will compete for one of the three jury awards, and for the Audience Award.

'Thus speaks Tarām-Kūbi' was produced by Vanessa Tubiana-Brun (direction) and Cécile Michel (scientific direction), who is the Principal Investigator of the projects 'Archives and Literacy in Second Millennium Assyrian Manuscript Culture' and 'Reading Closed Cuneiform Tablets Using High-Resolution Computed Tomography' (the latter together with the physicist Christian Schroer and the computer scientist Stephan Olbrich). The full version of the film is available on the website of CNRS Images.