Why an ancient Mesopotamian tablet is key to our future learning | Tiffany Jenkins | TEDxSquareMile

In our ephemeral, digital world where everything is mediated through a computer screen and summoned by the click of a mouse, ancient objects in dusty old museums are essential to future of learning. In the late eighteenth century, a clay fragment from a piece of the world’s oldest literature overturned orthodoxies and advanced knowledge of the past. It’s an important lesson: evidence from the past will help us to rethink what we know which is never complete. Ancient history and the tangible artifact - something real, not virtual - will take us out of the cloud and bring us back down to earth. Tiffany Jenkins is an author, academic, and ex-columnist for the Scotsman. She wrote the critically acclaimed Keeping Their Marbles: How The Treasures Of The Past Ended Up In Museums And Why They Should Stay There, published in 2016. She is the writer and presenter of the 2016 BBC Radio 4 series, A Narrative History Of Secrecy. She has been a visiting fellow at the London School of Economics, and was previously t