Ever since 2018, a new public outreach/digital humanities project is available online: “Digital Hammurabi”. The project has been entirely conceived and shaped – and is actively conducted – by husband and wife Assyriology team, Megan Lewis and Joshua Bowen, whose aim is “to provide reliable, accurate information about the Ancient Near East … in an entertaining and engaging fashion”.
Their activities are indeed manifold, including interviews to academics, videos on Mesopotamian-related issues, one Youtube channel dedicated to kids and a crowd-funded research grant for PhD students. We are very grateful to Megan and Joshua for this interview, which casts light on their unique project and provides us with many information – and useful links – on “Digital Hammurabi”.
Please, tell us about yourselves!
[Megan] We are Joshua Bowen and Megan Lewis, two Assyriologists who live in southern Maryland! We met while we were both PhD students at the Johns Hopkins University, and married in 2016. We have 3, soon to be 4, children, a dog, and more books than any sane person can reasonably read.
How did the project “Digital Hammurabi” come to light? When did you have the first idea, and how did you choose its format?
[Megan] We started the Digital Hammurabi YouTube channel in April 2018. The idea was first suggested by someone on another YouTube channel – Josh was doing an interview, and an audience member said that they’d love to learn more about Assyriology and asked if he had a channel of his own. Josh had graduated with his PhD and was unable to pursue a career in the field for family reasons, and making videos about Mesopotamia seemed like a good way to retain a connection – and use his education!
[Josh] We’d both also noticed a difficulty for non-specialists in accessing reliable information about Mesopotamia; so much of what is publicly available is either out of date, or unreliable (and often involves aliens). We thought that a YouTube channel would be a perfect vehicle to help fill this gap. YouTube is easily-accessible to anyone with internet access, and required very little in the way of equipment or software when we started out.
Could you please describe to us some of the activities you are involved in? Do you collaborate with other institutions dedicated to the study of the Ancient Near East? If so, how?
[Megan] The majority of our activities are based around the YouTube channel – my favourite is interviewing academics about their research. We try and do the interviews live because it gives our audience an opportunity to actually engage with the research being presented, and to ask their own questions. I think this kind of interaction really helps engage the general public in what can be fairly esoteric material, and it helps to build relationships and trust in a society that is (unfortunately) often sceptical of experts. We’ve also started releasing these interviews as a Digital Hammurabi podcast, for people who are interested in the subject matter but maybe don’t use YouTube.
We’re also lucky that other scholars see the value in what we’re trying to do. For example, Sara Mohr and E.L. Meszaros, both Ph.D. students at Brown University, write and produce our feature “Assyriology Today”, a monthly video that collects relevant news stories and public scholarship into an easily-accessible format, so that non-specialists can stay abreast of developments in the field that they may otherwise be unaware of.
[Josh] We make a lot of pre-recorded videos, too. Our most popular video is the first in my “Learn to Read Sumerian” series – it’s had over 67,257 views since it was uploaded, which I think really speaks against the belief that what we do is too difficult or obscure to be of interest to non-specialists.
[Megan] We are also very open to collaboration with other institutions, and it’s something we’d love to expand on as the channel grows. In October 2019 I was lucky enough to be able to go to Providence and livestream both the “At the Margins” conference, and the Egyptology and Assyriology graduate conference. Ultimately I’d love to be able to do something like livestream one of the major conferences, but we’d need a lot of equipment and several more pairs of hands!
I was also invited to give a talk at Brown University on public scholarship…though that’s had to be postponed until things are safer. I’ve been a guest lecturer at Virginia Theological Seminary, and both Josh and I have appeared as guests on various other podcasts and YouTube channels.
Are there perhaps any fun facts about your project that you would like to share with us?
[Megan] Our son, Oliver (now 2) said his first word live on YouTube! Josh was doing a live Hebrew class, and Oliver asked to be picked up and said “hi” to everyone. It was particularly special for me because I wasn’t actually home, and under any other circumstance would have missed it, but because it was caught on YouTube I got to share in the excitement!
What are your main expectations for “Digital Hammurabi”? Is there anything in particular that you wish to achieve?
Megan Lewis
[Megan] Digital Hammurabi started out very much as a hobby, and has quickly morphed into something much larger than that. It’s essentially my part-time job now, and its success has absolutely blown us both away – we’ve got just over 14k subscribers on YouTube, and we’re still steadily gaining viewers. As the channel expands and we generate more revenue, I’d like to be able to offer honorariums for our guest speakers, and bring some other specialists – maybe an archaeologist, and an art historian – on board to help round out our videos. I’d also like to be able to grow our kids channel to be as big, but as we don’t upload there more than once a month it’s going to take a bit more time.
In your website, you also list your recent publications and research interests. Can you tell us something about them?
[Megan] While I don’t think anyone would consider what we do to be “academic”, the amount of research and work that goes into making videos is quite substantial – and a lot of that research never actually makes it into the videos. Rather than let our work languish on the hard drive of our computer, we decided that we’d try and self-publish some popular-level books. There’s not an awful lot of popular reading material available that isn’t either woefully out of date, or of…questionable veracity.
[Josh] Right. So far we’ve released two publications – a companion to my Sumerian grammar video series, which is aimed at people with little to no experience of learning ancient languages, and tries to walk the student through the basics of Sumerian grammar (and cuneiform!) in an engaging, accessible manner. The second book is essentially a sourcebook for slavery in the Old Testament.
[Megan] Self-publication seems to be working pretty well for us, so far. The first book was a huge learning curve, but they’ve both been well-received. In fact, the Sumerian Grammar especially has had consistent sales since we published it in December 2019. I was expected interest to tail off a month or two after the launch, but we’ve sold an average of 77 copies a month since its launch. I think this really illustrates the interest there is in the general public for accessible Assyriological material, and I’d like to be able to meet that interest and solicit manuscripts of popular-level historical works from other authors, too.
What do you think could be improved in the way in which Assyriology presents itself to the large public, outside the specificities of our discipline? How do you think Assyriologists could reach a wider audience?
[Megan] It’s difficult, because public outreach isn’t generally something that’s supported by universities in practical terms. I’ve heard of senior professors advising junior faculty to stop making things like podcasts in favour of working on academic publications because they know that non-academic work – however important it is – simply isn’t given enough weight when it comes to tenure and hiring committees. It’s very unfortunate, because I think Assyriology could benefit greatly from wider public support and awareness, and the best way to get that is through podcasts and YouTube, and popular level publications.
Joshua Bowen
Even social media platforms like Twitter can be successfully utilised – you can see academics like Dr. Moudhy al-Rashid putting a lot of thought and effort into educational Twitter content, and her level of success (she has 19.4k followers as of May 2020) really speaks to the interest that people have in what we do. The problem is that creating this kind of content is incredibly time-consuming, and if it’s discounted during job searches, then it’s difficult to justify sitting down and researching a Twitter thread when you “should” be working on revisions to an article. This isn’t just a short falling of Assyriology, it’s something that academia as a whole struggles with…but I think that we, as a field, are starting at something of a disadvantage. The general public know something about the Classical world, they’re familiar with Ancient Egypt…Assyriology, not so much.
You upload online materials which aim to describe the Ancient Near East to children aged 10 and over: how do you prepare them, and what would you like to transmit to kids?
[Megan] Yes! We run a separate YouTube channel called “AniMesopotamia”. The videos are short – usually under 5 minutes – and are intended to introduce kids to basic information about Mesopotamia. Where it is, why it matters, and how people lived all those years ago. They’re intended to be teaching tools for social studies classes, but the format is simple enough that they can be understood by children without the aid of a teacher.
Which feedback did you have so far, and what are your main projects for the future? Are you planning any new activity, to be added to the many ones that you already pursue?
[Megan] We’ve had overwhelmingly positive feedback, it’s been amazing. Not just from our viewers either, but friends and colleagues in the field have been very complimentary about what we’re doing.
For the coming year, we’ve had a paper accepted for ASOR (“Two Birds with One Stone: Public Outreach and Crowd-Funded Research”) about our experiences running H.A.P.S., our scholarship grant, and Josh is working on a popular-level book that draws from his dissertation, looking at cult and scribal education. I’ve got a couple of book ideas, but I think they’ll take a little while to complete – I want to write a book on sex in Mesopotamia, and a Mesopotamian mythology for children.
We’re also in the preliminary stages of setting up an online conference. We’ve been talking about it for the past year, and I think we’ve managed to iron out the technical details. Hopefully we can put out a call for papers soon, and hold it in early 2021.
Can you tell our readers something about the H.A.P.S. Grant? To whom is it directed, where and how can someone find information about it, how did you get involved into it?
[Megan] H.A.P.S. is something we’re especially proud of. It’s essentially a crowd-funded research grant for PhD students to help sustain them over the summer months, when stipends often disappear. We started it in summer 2018, and after a very successful year of fundraising we were able to fund three students at $2,000 each in summer 2019. We’re set to do the same this summer, and I’m hoping to expand to be able to offer four grants in summer 2021. I’ve just finished applying for non-profit status from the U.S. government, which I’m hoping will open up some additional fundraising avenues.
Really the only requirement is that applicants are current Ph.D. students at an accredited university, studying some aspect of the Ancient Near East – including Archaeology, Art History, the Hebrew Bible, Egyptology, and Assyriology. We just finished the interview process for this year, but we’ll be accepting applications for summer 2021 starting in February – definitely take a look at www.hapsfund.com for more information, and keep an eye on Twitter and Agade so you don’t miss the opening of applications!
[Josh] The application process is a little unusual. We interview all applicants live on the Digital Hammurabi YouTube channel, primarily so that our audience get the opportunity to ask their own questions. Following that, everyone who has donated to H.A.P.S. gets the opportunity to vote for the research they would most like to see funded, with the top three students receiving the grants. It may sound a little gimmicky, but part of the point of H.A.P.S. is to involve non-specialists in academia. By giving our audience access to researchers, and giving them the opportunity to have a personal stake in the research that is being carried out, we’re trying to bridge the gap between expert and lay-person that I spoke about earlier.
[Megan] All of the interviews can be viewed on the Digital Hammurabi YouTube channel, and the candidates really do an amazing job at articulating their research to non-specialists, and showing how passionate they are about their work. I feel incredibly privileged to be able to talk to these students about what they do, and help them share why they love their field.
If you could change one thing about the field of Assyriology, what would it be?
[Megan] For a field devoted to the study of an ancient cultures, I think we do ourselves a disservice by not engaging with how those cultures speak to the modern people who own that history. This is probably not the case everywhere, but in my experience Assyriology is taught as a discipline isolated from the cultures and communities that currently occupy the geographical space that we’re concerned with. For me, one of the most important things about ancient history is how it informs and influences what it means to be human in the 21st century. If we lock ourselves away from the modern world and ignore the fact that the history of Mesopotamia is a deeply important part of a living culture, then I think we lose something valuable.
You can follow “Digital Hammurabi” at the following links:
Twitter – @digi_hammurabi (Megan) and @DJHammurabi1 (Josh)
Email – digitalhammurabi@gmail.com
Website –www.digitalhammurabi.com and www.hapsfund.com
YouTube – www.youtube.com/digitalhammurabi
Podcasts – https://digitalhammurabi.buzzsprout.com
and https://hebane.buzzsprout.com/