Assyriology personal statement example

Why do you want to study this course or subject?

My interest in Assyriology began with a display case rather than a book. On a wet Tuesday in Year 11 our class was taken to a city museum, and while most people drifted towards the Egyptian galleries I stopped at a small clay tablet about the size of my palm, catalogued as a record of grain. What struck me was how ordinary it was: someone had pressed a stylus into damp clay to keep track of a delivery, and three or four thousand years later I was reading the label. I wanted to know how those signs worked, who wrote them, and why a bureaucratic note survives when so much else does not.

Since then I have read more widely, including Karen Radner's short introduction to ancient Assyria and Irving Finkel and Jonathan Taylor's book on cuneiform, which gave me a clearer sense of how the script developed from accounting marks into a system flexible enough to carry Sumerian and Akkadian, letters, omens, laws and literature. I was surprised that scribes trained by copying sign lists and proverbs, and that so much of what we know comes from school exercises. That practical, technical side appeals to me: philology as careful, patient work with damaged objects rather than sweeping stories.

I am applying for Assyriology because I want the languages properly, not in translation. I enjoy the slow puzzle of grammar, and I would like to work eventually in museum or archive cataloguing, where linguistic training and handling skills matter. Studying a field with a small number of specialists and an enormous body of unpublished material seems to me a good reason to join it rather than a discouragement.

How have your qualifications and studies helped you to prepare?

My A levels are History, Latin and Geography, and each has contributed something I expect to use. Latin has been the most directly relevant: two years of steady declension practice, unseen translation and set text work on Virgil have taught me to sit with a sentence I cannot immediately understand and work outwards from the verb. Learning to accept that a first reading is often wrong has been useful preparation for languages with a far less familiar structure, and I have found that I genuinely like the mechanics of case and tense.

In History I study early modern Britain and a unit on the Crusades, where source reliability is central. Writing about chronicles with obvious agendas made me think harder about royal inscriptions from Assyria, which I understand were often composed to present campaigns in a particular light rather than as neutral reporting. Geography has given me something different again: my coursework on river sediment in a local catchment involved fieldwork, sampling and honest discussion of where my data were weak, which is closer to archaeological method than I expected.

Outside the syllabus I taught myself the basic cuneiform sign values used for Akkadian syllables using free online sign lists, and I have made slow progress reading transliterated lines with a glossary. It is careful rather than fast work, and I know I am at the very start. I also attended a free online lecture series on Mesopotamian cities. My school does not offer anything like this subject, so most of my preparation has been self-directed, fitted around timetabled lessons and revision.

What else have you done to prepare outside of education, and why are these experiences useful?

For a Year 12 humanities project I designed and built a small exhibition on the invention of writing, displayed for a fortnight in the school library. I made clay tablets with a cut reed stylus so that younger pupils could try impressing signs themselves, wrote six explanatory panels, and produced a simple handout comparing an administrative tablet with a later literary one. The practical part taught me a lot: wet clay behaves very differently from paper, and my first attempts were unreadable smudges. Around ninety Year 7 and 8 pupils took part, and my head of department asked me to run the activity again during an open evening, which I did. Explaining the same idea to different audiences without either patronising them or losing accuracy was the hardest part, and the most useful.

I belong to a local history and archaeology society, most of whose members are considerably older than me. I have spent Saturday mornings washing and sorting pottery from a Roman site, mainly coarse greyware, and learning to record finds correctly under supervision. It is repetitive and cold, and I have grown to like it. The society also introduced me to volunteers who catalogue local records, which is what first made me think about archive work as a career.

On Saturdays and through the holidays I work at a garden centre, mostly on tills and the customer desk, handling refunds, plant queries and the occasional complaint. I have learned to keep a queue moving while giving someone a proper answer, to stay steady when a customer is annoyed, and to manage my own time when I am tired. Balancing eighteen hours a fortnight with A levels has made me organised out of necessity, and I now plan revision weekly rather than hoping for free evenings.

I read for pleasure as well, currently working through translated Mesopotamian literature, and I play in a badminton club league, which I keep up because it gets me away from a desk.

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