Ms. Kushner follows up her earlier essay on the importance of dead languages like Akkadian with an interview with the originator of the cuneiform cookie recipe, Penn Museum Keeper Katy Blanchard. Excerpt comment from Ms. Blanchard:
I suppose it simply comes down to this: We have an amazing collection here at the museum, a collection that often inspires the people it works with. I’m incredibly lucky to work with amazing objects from amazing cultures. And not everyone gets a chance to work with this material and have it be part of their everyday life. So I wanted to give other people a chance to share it. For me it wasn’t just for the language, but for the cookies, that was what made it fun. If it’s cuneiform cookies, or a brownie ziggurat, or I recently cross-stitched our famous bull-headed lyre from Ur: I want these things to be part of everyone’s everyday life.