Now Available in German: 'Thus speaks Tarām-Kūbi'

17 July 2023

The multi-award winning documentary 'Thus Speaks Tarām-Kūbi', which tells the story of a woman’s everyday life in ancient Mesopotamia based on 4000-year-old cuneiform clay tablets, is now available in German.

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 in English in 2022), tells history in a profound and captivating way, provides a broad picture of a past culture, and also shows how Assyriologists can reconstruct it. 

Among several other prizes, the documentary was awarded 'best film' at the 7th International Archaeological Film Festival in Split, Croatia, in 2022. According to the jury, the film fascinates both with its scientific (archaeological) discoveries and its artistic (cinematic) achievements. It offers a ‘detective’s story about deciphering and finding letters on clay tablets from the Bronze Age, and an innovative narrative approach’ in which the story is told in the intimate language of the author of the letters themselves.

'Thus speaks Tarām-Kūbi' has now been released in German translation, the full version is available on our website. The film 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).