dc.description.abstract
The thesis examines how William Henry Fox Talbot (1800-1877), a Victorian gentleman of science,
thought and worked in respect to his assyriological studies. After delving into diverse other fields, in the
mid 1850s Talbot started to work on ancient cuneiform texts, which had only been tentatively deciphered
several years before. This field of research kept him enthralled for the rest of his life and during the next
25 years, he produced 120 notebooks with assyriological content. One of the central questions of the
thesis is: in which way did Talbot use his notebooks as thought instruments in his research? In order to
answer that question, around 15 notebooks from the earliest years of his cuneiform research between
1853 and 1857 were selected for an analysis. After the introductory chapter, the second chapter gives an
overview over the current state of research. It shows that Talbot’s contributions to cuneiform research
have quickly marginalized in the history of Assyriology and that he was retrospectively reduced to the role
of an initiator of the parallel translation of 1857, an event that has been subsequently called the “birth of
Assyriology”.
The third chapter takes a close look at Talbot’s biographical background and the historical context of
Victorian reception of Assyria in order to show which aspects shaped Talbot’s interest in the cultures and
languages of the Ancient Near East and thus contributed to his commencement of cuneiform studies. It
shows that several factors came together: Talbot had been interested in ancient languages and in general
linguistic structures from his early youth. When the findings of excavations led by Austen Henry Layard
(1817-1894) arrived in England in the 1840s, they triggered an “Assyriana” frenzy, which chimed in with
Tabot’s love for languages and his antiquarian interests as well as with his passion for solving riddles.
The fourth chapter examines Talbot’s object of study, ancient cuneiform. First, it traces the history of the
reception of this writing system’s appearance in the the West from the 17th to the 19th century. One result
is that cuneiform stimulated very different interpretations than Egyptian Hieroglyphs did. In the second
part, the decipherment of cuneiform writing by Henry Rawlinson (1810-1895) and Edward Hincks (1792-
1866) is illustrated.
In the fifth chapter, the methods for analyzing the notebooks are explained In particular the research on
the phenonmenon of “notational iconicity”, which had been developed further in recent years and
provides an important theoretical background for the dissertation. The underlying premise is that writing
systems and the process of writing have inherent potentials that go beyond the graphic fixation of spoken
language. Thus, the empirical study of the notebooks aims to analyse in which way note-taking can serve
as an instrument of thinking in scientific processes and how it enhances epistemic processes. These
processes only become possible in the triangle between hand, eye and mind.
Finally, in the sixth chapter various phenomena from the notebooks are being analysed. In order to
illustrate Talbot’s working methods, the metaphor of a thought laboratory is being introduced, consisting
of several rooms or spaces. In the “organisational space”, Talbot structures his work and creates internal
and external points of reference, thus facilitating the later use of the books. In the “exploratory space”, he
conducts paper experiments on the notebooks’ pages and makes use of different techniques that enable
him to intellectually process the alien system of cuneiform writing. Lastly, he uses the “reflection space” in
a second step for checking his own results, verifying or falsifying them and commenting on them.
Talbot’s notebooks show how crucial the work on paper is for the understanding of complex relations and
that the usage of writing cannot be reduced to graphically fixing spoken language. Indeed, it proves to be a
much more complex cultural technique that does not only display thinking, but rather shapes it.
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