#487 – Irving Finkel: Deciphering Secrets of Ancient Civilizations & Flood Myths
Episode publishedPodcast: Lex Fridman PodcastLex Fridman Podcast
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The following is a conversation with Irving Finkel, who is a scholar of ancient languages, curator at the British Museum for over forty five years, and is a much admired and respected world expert on cuneiform script, and more generally, on ancient languages of Sumerian, Akkadian, and Babylonian, and also on ancient board games and Mesopotamian magic, medicine, literature, and culture. I should also mention that both on and off the mic, Irving was a super kind and fun person to talk to with an infectious enthusiasm for ancient history that, of course, I already love, but fell in love with even
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This is the Lex treatment podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description, where you can also find links to contact me, ask questions, get feedback, and so on. And now, dear friends, here's Irving Finkel. Where and when did writing originate in human civilization? Let's go back a few thousand years.
The first attempts at writing that we could call writing go back to the middle of the fourth millennium, say, around 3500 BC, something like that. There were people in The Middle East, individuals who lived between the Euphrates and Tigris Rivers, who had clay as their operating material for building and all sorts of other purposes. And eventually, as a writing support, they somehow developed the idea of the basis of writing, which means that you can make a sign which people agree on on a surface that another person, when they see it, they know what sound it engenders. That is the essence of w
We should say that the name of that system that lasted for three thousand years is cuneiform.
Yeah. So in the nineteenth century, about 1840, 1850, they started to find these things on excavations in Iraq, the big Assyrian cities, and sometimes further south, Babylonian cities. They found these clay tablets, which in the ground lasted unimaginable lengths of time. And they were all written in what we call cuneiform script. And the cuneiform part of it means wedge shaped because cuneos in Latin means wedge. And when they first saw these signs, they realized that a cluster of marks broke down into different arrangements of triangular shapes. And it's most clear on the Syrian reliefs wher
be millions of them in the ground awaiting excavation. So in a way, that's a comforting thought because they're safe there and protected. You said that the development of cuneiform of these tablets of written language is one of the greatest, probably the greatest invention in human history. How hard do you think it was to come up with this? And we should make clear that that very specific element of encoding sound on the tablet, that's the genius invention. Drawing a picture makes sense. Okay. Here's, you know, barley. Here's the sun. Here's whatever. The actual object.
Exactly.
But to actually write down sound is a genius invention.
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