Deciphering Secrets of Ancient Civilizations, Noah's Ark, and Flood Myths | Lex Fridman Podcast #487

The following is a conversation

with Irving Finkele who is a scholar of ancient languages

curator at the British Museum

for over 45 years

and is a much admired and respected

world expert on kuneaoiform

script and more generally

on ancient languages of Samrian,

Acadian and Babylonian and also on

ancient board games and

uh 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 uh fell in love with even more.

This is the Lex Freedman 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 Thinkle.

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 writing

that there's an agreed system of symbols

that A can use and B can then

play back either in their heads or literally with their voice is a bit

like a gramophone record.

So when it really began

is a terribly terribly

awkward question for us

because the truth of the matter is we have no idea when anything began

and all we can say is that the oldest

evidence we have is around 3,500 BC.

But whether that was anywhere

near the time or the stage

when this started off for

for the first time seems to me very very unlikely.

So in among these the Mesopotamians

around 3,500 they started to do this.

They made up signs which everybody understood and they could write simple pictographic messages.

Foot is a foot, a leg is a leg

and barley is barley.

And then very very gradually

they had the idea of how you could represent numerals.

And then they had the idea that the pictures could also represent signs.

And once they had the idea that you could write

sounds with pictures, that's the crucial thing

that a picture of a foot not only meant foot, but it meant the

sound of the word for foot.

Once this happened, some probably very very imaginative

and clever persons had a kind of light bulb moment when they realized

that they could develop

a whole paniply of signs

which could convey sound.

And once you had that,

you're liberated from pictographic

writing into a position where you can record language.

So language, grammar, and all the rest of it.

before long proverbs and literature and all the other things that got written down.

So it was a pretty gigantic

step whenever it was taken but we really have no idea when it was

first taken but the first evidence we have

presents a sort of clearish sort of picture.

It was simple and it got more complicated

and then it became magnificent

so that with all the signs

a fluent and well-trained

scribe could not only write down the Sumerian

language which was one of the native tongues of Iraq

and or the Babylonian

language which was one the other main language of Iraq but also any other language he heard.

So if somebody came speaking French

ahead of their time and

spoke out loud, he could record

with these signs the sound of French.

And we have examples of

funny languages in the world around in the Bronze Age which were written in

Q&A form purely by ear.

And often sometimes the scribes who recorded

by dictation or by something

wrote stuff they couldn't understand but somebody else could read and understand it.

So what you have is long before the alphabet when the alphabet was

not even a dream

um complex bewildering looking off-putting

writing system which was actually very beautiful

flexible and lasted for well over 3 millennia

probably closer to four millennia

and it took a long time for the alphabet which anybody would say was

much much more useful and much more sensible to displace it.

So, it's one of the

major stages of man's intellect

because quite soon after the writing

first took off, the signs began to proliferate

and someone said, "Hey, we haven't got a sign for this sound or we

haven't got a sign for this idea."

And so it began to

swell out and at some

extremely remarkable stage, one

probably only one person suddenly

realized that if there was no control

um they would grow exponentially

and exponentially until it was all nonsense and everybody had their own writing.

And the second thing is that no one could remember them

unless they were written down in a retrievable way.

So they invented not only writing they invented lexography

which means that early in the third millennium

they put down all the things that were made of wood

and all the things that were made of reads and all the names of

colors and of countries and all the gods and everything.

They made a systematic

attempt to make these signs

um to standardize them and to make them retrievable

and of course to teach them.

And having exercised that

rigor from the outset,

it meant that the thing became

streamlined and stayed more or less as it was all the way through for

three millennia or more

because the stamp put on it

by those early visionaries

not only who um

came up with the system and how it would work but to preserve it

and to safeguard it was fantastically effective.

So it means that there were scholars in Babylon

in the 3rd century or the second century when Alexander

was there for example.

If somebody dug up a tablet in very early writing,

they would have a pretty good idea what it meant.

They would recognize the signs even though they were so ancient and they'd see

the relationships between them.

So you have a

fantastically system where the spinal

cord was structured in a lexographic regular system.

So lexography and what the signs were

was jealously safeguarded and

protected and it lasted fantastically.

>> We should say that the name of that system that lasted for 3,000

years is Kunea form. >> Yeah.

So in the 19th century

about 1840 1850 they started to find these things on excavations

in Iraq the big Assyrian

cities and sometimes further south the 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 kuneaoiform script.

And the kuneaoiform part of it means wedge

shaped because kunea in Latin means wedge.

And when they first saw these signs

they realized that a cluster of marks

broke down into um different arrangements of triangular shapes.

And it's most clear on the Syrian

reliefs where the writing is very big

and you can easily tell that they were that shape.

On a tablet the wedge is not quite so predominant.

So that was it.

So they first called them cuniatic

or cuneaoiform and the word stuck.

And of course growing up in the British Museum and reading these things for

a living becomes a kind of

lifetime's work to make sure that everybody in the country knows what kuna

means cuz once in a while you meet somebody who never heard of the

word at all and this is appalling.

So people do survive however

but it's an important mission because

it's such an achievement by man

and so much knowledge

was encapsulated in these lumps of clay

because they used it for everyday things like letters and business documents and contracts.

This is one thing and then the kings wrote

long elaborate accounts of their

campaigns and their military activities.

And then there was proper literature, bell, le

and magic and medicine and

all other genre of literature

that we would naturally

list on a sheet of paper in alphabetic

writing what you would use writing for.

They basically did and it had the unexpected

quality that most of these clay things

lasted in the ground until now.

So, however many hundreds of thousands of tablets are in the world's museums and

collections, there must be millions of them in the ground awaiting excavation.

So, um in a way that's a comforting

thought cuz they're safe there and protected.

>> You said that the development

of kuneaform 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 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.

>> But to actually write down sound

>> is a genius invention.

Well, I think it's rather paradoxical

because the first generation

or so of tablets that we have are written in these pictographic

signs where each sign means what it looks like.

So, this is a very limited

method of recording messages

and it doesn't lend itself to recording grammar.

And then the secondary phase as we understand it from archaeology

is the perception that you could take these signs

still meaning what they look like but also what the word sounded like.

So then you have all these wonderful ice cubes

which express all the sounds of the language from which you can record words

and and grammar and everything else.

Now the thing is

the received law from

a seriology is it was that way round

that first we had pictures and secondly we had sound.

Well, I have to say

I find this very hard to believe

because if you had a group of people

in an environment where it was compellingly

necessary to make a system

that you made marks on a surface which everybody could understand and use.

Why wouldn't you start out with signs that made sounds?

Because everybody speaks the same language, right?

So you we they didn't have a b cde e fg but they could

easily work out all the

vowels and consonants without naming them as vowels and consonants but the component parts.

So they could have had signs

that started out because if you decided you had we have 26

let's say they had 50 signs

that would create the sound they could write anything without any further trouble.

So I find it very bewildering

that they started off with the least flexible

and the least adaptable

system of pictographs and then they moved on to the sound.

I don't know why they bothered with it.

And my hunch is

that the archeological evidence that we have on this score

is ultimately misleading because I think this

that probably for a very very long time before the Sumerianss,

people in the world,

the world of what we call the Middle East were in contact. They traded.

They probably even had wars

and they had messages between them.

And I think there was a longunning

system of communication between

people who didn't share

a language for whom pictures would suffice.

So if merchants come and they have three sheep to sell,

so they draw three little sheep,

you know how much it is and

what they are and so forth.

And and so I think

that what happened with the Sumerianss

with their pictographic signs

is that those signs are right at the end

of a very very very

long period of time when somebody thought

what we can do is take these stupid

inhibited no smoking signs and write language.

That is what I think happened.

That's what I think happened.

>> Is this a controversial statement? >> Highly controversial. Highly contro.

Many many athereologists would leave the

>> But I'm not scared of controversy because it's natural.

I if you think about it, it's natural

because you don't have to have an alphabet

to divide your word into sounds.

See, for example, in Sumerian,

you have a funny system of R.

You have a root

like do, which means to go,

and then you have prefixes

like e or moo or ba.

and they one's a passive, one's an active and this and this.

So when you have a sentence, you have one of the

moob bar or e prefixes.

Then you have the root and then you have things at the end.

So it's called a glutinative

by people who like to make things look more important than they are.

So you have the central thing.

You slap stuff on the beginning, slap stuff on the end, and each particle

creates a bit of meaning.

So you have a long verb which tells you he would have done it

if he could, but he couldn't kind of thing in in the form of the verb.

But the thing is, if you wanted to write down, you and I decided

to write the answer, the first thing we would do is have a sign

moo and then we'd have bar

and then we'd have e

because every 5 minutes people make those noises.

>> You see what I mean? >> Yeah, absolutely.

Do you think it's possible

we might find much much older? >> I do.

>> Kuneaform type tablets >> well or pictographic

type tablets before the kunea form when they're drawing type.

And I'll tell you why.

Because there's this marvelous site in Turkey called Gobeclete.

You know about GBC?

Well, everybody knows about the buildings and the architecture and the skull.

Everybody knows about it.

If you go all the way through the photographs,

which the archaeologists unwisely

put online, you'll find in the middle of one

color plate with lots of other things,

a round green stone like a scarab from Egypt.

That's to say it has an arched back and a flat bottom.

And on the flat bottom there are hieroglyphic

signs carved in the stone. Right?

No one said anything

about it at all.

But it's clear to me

a that this was a stamp

to ratify where the the carvings

of the signs on clay or some other ceiling material

would leave an impression.

It must be that.

So this is about 9,000 BC. >> Yeah. Yeah.

Now when I was a boy at university,

my professor said to me

that the reason you can writing evolved in Mesopotamia

because they had complex cities with ziggurats

and big buildings and

lots of people and they had to organize everything and so they invented writing

to cope with it.

Well, if they had to cope with that

in Sumer in 3000

BC, they sure as hell had to do it at Geekbecepe

because they hardly even begun to finish excavating

the sites of Geekly.

go on and on like Manchester and Newcastle United.

And really um the old rule would be you could not have architecture

like that that without

that planned and built according to principle with all the different people.

You couldn't have that without writing in southern Iraq.

So how come suddenly

7,000 years earlier they do it there?

That and that green stone

shows that they had writing.

That was an official

who sealed this, got the stuff or whatever it was or was his dad's

name or whatever it is.

Got a wiggly snake and a wiggly this.

That is pictographic writing.

Maybe even as phonetic. I don't know.

But it was writing

thousands of years before in the south.

And that's what I think it is.

You know, people came with metal from

or or precious stones from Anatolia.

They knew that in the south they had lots and lots of stuff.

They wanted to trade.

They had to communicate.

And it's basically like

having a cigarette with an X through the middle.

Everybody in the world knows what that means.

That they don't know what the word for cigarette is in this language or

cancer or filter or tobacco. It doesn't matter.

It's that's pictographic writing.

We still use it

and and it's it's above all kinds of mess.

And I think that was the prevailing

system because I honestly

believe that the people at this time were not stupid. They weren't gorillas.

They weren't less advanced than we are.

They were probably indistinguishable

from what we are.

So you have merchants

and wanderers and people who see let's go down the river and see where

we end up and

and people looking for money, looking for women, looking for everything.

I mean that's surely how it was.

But if you look at those Geckley

buildings with a skeptical

eye how it could be.

I mean the finish of it is astonishing.

The structure of it, the vision of it.

to the workforce and the tools and the organization,

you know, what do they do it with a megaphone,

your breakfast and all that kind of thing? No way. No way.

>> So that's a really controversial

>> At the time of Gobelepe,

they may have been already a writing system.

>> There was because the thing is about it

that it's it's a seal to ratify.

It's not just a squiggle on a pot and you can say, "Oh, that's

just a piece of debt."

This is a finished thing with a flat surface.

You press it down.

say you have some contract,

you have some building arrangement,

some we paying for these bricks, whatever it was and the official person had

to squash it down and it leaves the impression I mean I am a

great believer in Sherlock Holmes

>> as a teaching system for

intelligence and rationality and logic and thinking.

I read those stories a million times when I was a kid.

And the thing about about them, one of the things which impressed me most of

all was this point quoted by Holmes,

not original to him,

that it is theoretically

possible to infer the Niagara

Falls from a raindrop.

>> That's a powerful statement.

>> It's a powerful statement.

Well, that seal from Geekly

Tee is a raindrop

from which I infer writing.

And it's perfectly possible they all wrote on flat leaves.

After all, in many parts of the world, that's what happens.

So for example, in the Indis Valley,

people write the most abject

nonsense about the Indis Valley writing system.

But all we have is seals basically.

So they are also for ratification

purposes and they have the name of the owner in three or four or

maybe five signs and it's probably me son of my dad or

milkman or whatever it is. And it's obvious.

It's obvious that they had writing on a perishable material.

They can't just have had

inscribed stone seals and many parts of India

today write on palm leaf.

Why should it be any different?

So people think you know well just cuz it's now it wouldn't be then.

But actually that argument is utterly

utterly facious because the process of evolution

is stymied left right and center by inertia.

inertia is nearly as strong as evolution.

And this is something that the people who talk about progress and ideas

have no idea about.

First of all, your whole line of work you're making me realize is a

kind of like Sherlock Holmes type of process.

The deciphering of the language

archaeology of taking those pieces of evidence and trying to reconstruct

a vision of that world.

And now you're making me realize

that even all the

kuneaform tablets we have is just

a raindrop compared to the waterfall

of of thousands of years of humans.

>> We have a lot but it's nothing in comparison what existed.

But not only that,

see we don't have to decipher anymore.

We can read Acadian

or Babylonian Sumerian pretty well fluently.

That's not a problem.

So the information which you can get from these sources

especially three millennia of sources is very very substantial

very substantial but it means that a seriologists

have the um inbuilt

idea that what we have is something like all there ever was

which is absurd for example

there's a period called the earth three

period where people lived in city states

they wrote very small account tablets by the thousand

and there were two or three major cities

where this is the way they lived.

People had to bring

tithes and offerings and everything was recorded by what I always refer to and

people sympathize with as the ancestors

of the inland revenue

because everything had to be written down so that some schmuck could check it

and fill out the ledger and some other schmuck above him could okay it

so there was no funny business or no mistakes.

Now the thing is there are thousands of those tablets

written in about 2,100 to 2,000 BC.

Thousands of them about

size of a box of matches.

So people like to generalize

about the Sumerianss at this time of the world.

But they probably all came out of two

because they were dumped

when they were no longer needed

in some kind of room.

And the archaeologists in the 19th century came down on these and then all

the locals came and they bought

dug them up and they sold them all over the place and they gone

all over the world.

Thousands and thousands of them

out of probably two storage rooms

which is not a whole culture

or a whole country

or their whole history

or their belief systems.

So our view of it is

sued by the nature of the material.

And sometimes the material is

opulent and benevolent but not always.

And sometimes the people who work

with Sloo material don't even realize

how Slude it is.

I mean, you know, it's quite remarkable.

>> So you in all your time of studying

Kaoform tablets, do you sometimes

late at night get a glimpse of the waterfall?

Like can you imagine?

>> Yes, I can imagine.

I can imagine easily

because once in a while a library is discovered

in the 1850s at Nineve

which was the Assyrian

capital there was a fat king king of the world called Asha Barnipal

and he had a fantastic

library and he promoted it he impounded

tablets he had them brought in

he wanted all the prevailing knowledge and all knowledge from before under one roof

it's a kind of

like Alexandria thing so he was a trained scholar and this is what he

did and they found

In the 19th century,

they dug it up.

Leard and those people.

So, what did they find?

They found the tablets higgledy

piggledy all over the floor of a huge room and in the corridors and

everything and lots of them broken and lots of them

So, ever since then until really quite

seriologists have spent all their

people who work on these nit

joining the bits together.

And you have the story about Gilgamesh

and the goddess who falls in love with him in the garden and she

wants to seduce him and dot dot dot you can't find a bit so

you look for another bit.

You look for another bit and gradually they piece together the literature

and the assumption has always been that if you put them all together again

you'll have the whole library.

>> But it's the absolute opposite

because what happened was that the Babylonians

in the south in my opinion

they they worked handin glove with the Elummites from Iran.

They had a pinser movement and they beat Assyria. They conquered Assyria.

They ran through the capital and they set fire to everything, pinched all the

women and to all the jewelry and all the gold.

And the people say that in a fit of peak, they destroyed the library.

But they wouldn't destroy

the library because it was the giant brain from which the Assyrians

ran a world empire

and it had all the knowledge in the world. They destroyed that.

They spoke the same language.

They had the same writing system.

They'd have taken them all safely home.

cart after cart after cart.

And I think what's left there

is duplicates and broken things and things that got dropped and everything.

And that's what everyone thinks is it.

>> So this is also unc is a controversial >> You're just nontoping. It's common sense.

You're going to get

both of us can today.

>> But you see the thing you see the thing.

It's predicated on the assumption that what we have

is what there only what there was.

And this is such a fallacy.

It needs to be

attacked left, right and center.

>> So a lot of the kunea form

language is already deciphered.

>> Can you speak to the the deciphering process?

How hard is it?

Maybe take us to this place of

uh for you yourself

first learning the language,

figuring out the puzzle of it.

How does it feel

the how does it look like to to a brain that doesn't deeply understand it?

And how do you then piece stuff together?

Maybe you can go

to the the early days sort of the the Rosetta

Stone of Kao form also. >> That's important.

Well, the first thing is is that how the Kunoifor

writing system works because

the crucial point and once you see it is makes a lot of things

clear is that they wrote in

So if you take the English alphabet,

which of course they didn't,

you had the letter B,

G, D, P, H, and so forth.

They couldn't write a consonant.

They couldn't do that.

So what they did is they had a vowel

before a consonant or one after.

So you have ab and ba.

But as they had four vowels,

you had to have ab and ba,

ib and b, and b, e and be. >> Mhm.

So you had the the range of things clustered around what we call a consonant.

So they had all those for all the letters which gave them a basic system.

There was much more to it than that and it was more complicated than

that but we don't have to really go into it but basically

if you are a Babylonian

and um you want to write the word museum which of course is one

of the most important words in the English language and other languages too.

So what you would do is you would write the syllable

>> And then the sign

z and then the sign.

So you split the word up into its component syllables.

When you read it in your mind, you squash them together into museum.

That's the basic system.

They had other signs which gave you a clue

as to the meaning and

bits around the edge.

But it's basically salabic writing. >> Mhm.

So when you go to university to study kuneaoiform

what you have to learn

is all the signs

and all their values

because unfortunately they didn't just have one for each they had multiple

ones and the reason is

not that they were mad or they wanted to make life hell

but because the syllables

derived from the writing of Sumerian words.

So the Sumerian vocabulary

had a lot of words that were probably differentiated by tone.

>> So you might have bar and then a rising

a and then a lowering.

And these signs all retain the bar value

even though there were no tones.

So it means if you look at a sign list, there's a lot of signs.

You have bar number one, which is the common, then there's bar number two,

bar number three, and you have to learn them all.

And when you read, you have to learn how to do it.

So when in the modern world if you go to university

to to do a seriology

which I hope you and all of your disciples

will do as soon as possible

you actually have to cope with two languages

the Sumerian and the Babylonian.

Now the first thing is this that the Babylonian

language is a smitic

tongue which although it's extinct

is connected to or related to

Hebrew, Aramaic, Arabic, Ethiopic,

Syriak all that family of Semitic languages

which are still alive.

It's an early example

of one of those.

So that when the decipherment

came along, it was the Semitic

dictionary that they fell back on to identify

words, nouns, and roots.

The other language, which is Sumerian,

the one when you stick bits in the beginning and stick bits at the

end, is not only not Semitic.

It's not related to any other known language. >> Oh no. >> Yeah.

This is a bewitching thing.

It's a bewitching thing to me.

And this is how to understand it

because the languages that we study in the world today, linguists

study, they more or less

all fall into a language group.

So you have Indo-Uropean

with Spanish, Italian, Latin,

Hittite, and so forth.

And so that's why French, that's one group, and you have Germanic, and you have Savonic.

And most languages, even the far-flung

ones, fall into what can be seen to be maybe big and airy groups.

Their family like that.

There's not one for Sumerian.

So this means that the truth

that languages do not exist in a vacuum, but they're part of a big

family must always have been true.

So that when writing arrives about 3,00

say 300 BC to write proper

properly it means that Sumerian

was recorded just in time

but the big languages

maybe in China in Russia

in somewhere else in Asia that were related to Samrian

>> are gone >> are all gone

they're gone forever and ever and ever unless something amazing happens.

So we've got the one representative

of this bizarre family >> It isn't.

It's a very stimulating thing to imagine.

I personally believe that

neanderalars and early homo sapiens

for sure had language.

For sure they talked to one another.

It's impossible that they didn't.

The point came when they did. They did.

And in the ant,

thousand years of rule

living in Europe, they had to deal with the ice age.

They all live together.

They bring up their children.

You think they couldn't speak anything.

They have the same apparatus.

And if you have a human brain,

then it responds to stimulus.

And the more stimulus there is

for communication, I mean, the idea that you and I are out hunting rhino

and and and you say, "Lex, shut up. I'm constant."

Lex, Lex, and I suddenly think,

"Oh, I get it. You are Lex." Right?

You only have to do that once.

Then you know who I am.

So I know that I'm me and that you are you.

So people who say that they couldn't distinguish

ego and and all that, it's absolutely stupid.

If you cut your hand

with a knife, you sure as hell

You sure as hell do it hurts.

>> It hurts a lot.

You might even bleed to death, but it's not somebody else's

And it's your hand and it's your existence and your life that threatened.

You think people weren't conscious

that they were an entity?

I don't believe it.

And they probably had a way to express that with sounds.

>> Well, eventually, yes, names. I mean, names. Names are things.

And then you have a the idea that a label fixes to something.

Then the light bulb has gone on and next minute you have rhino and

you have skin and you have babies and you have because

I think you have an idea and the idea then drives the brain and

the brain has another idea.

It works like fertility.

>> So what do you think is the motivation

the primary driver of developing written language?

Is it is it goes hand inhand with uh civilization?

>> I think that the media in which it appears

is when there's a lot of people

living in an urban environment

>> and w with with rival institutions

or the king or with the government or all those sorts of things.

And that's why I think

Geeklete must have been the same thing.

I read somewhere that they're all nomads and they only came to go

you know 3 months.

I mean that cannot

be true that they were nomads

and they cannot be true

to get the stone

and someone has to

draw on the ground the plan of the building they have to work out

how thick it is going to be how high it's going to be and

I mean you know you can't just

you know like that like

>> uh all right so deciphering

the process of deciphering

>> so when I started

there were grammarss and sign lists and dictionaries

everything was marvelous it was all basically deciphered.

All you had to do is get on with learning it.

But at the beginning

when the first tablets

and bricks in Kunea form and stone inscriptions

came to light, no one could read them.

But they knew they were writing, but they didn't know how to read them.

And what happened was, like you said before

with the Rosetta Stone, it was something directly

comparable because there was

um an inscription of one of the Persian kings

halfway up a mountain

in a place called Bisutun

where this king Darius

had written an account of his successful

career in Elilumite and in Babylonian

and in old Persian

triilingual version and old Persian

although it is a obviously a archaic form of the language Persian is still

alive it was still alive in the 19th century

so they since the old Persian was written in a very simple style of

kunea form they deciphered

it they twigged it was old Persian

they read it in Persian

and they read the names Darush

in old Persian and then suddenly

somebody realized that the other two columns

about the same length

>> what do you know and the thing is it said I am das the

great King, king of the working

son of grandson of

so there's a whole paragraph

with repeated things in the Persian

which they could understand.

So what do you know they're reiterated

passages in the other two languages.

So that was the key

that that kind of

the chisel that opened up kunoiform

writing proper and the thing was they soon twigged

that the language of the Babylonian

was a smitic tongue

and this was so important.

I think the first word they discovered

was the word for river

which is naru in Aadian

and nar in Arabic and Aramaic.

And when they realized

that the word that corresponded

to the Persian had this form,

this was a gift a gift of gold

because everybody immediately sees their Arabic and Hebrew dictionaries

and started leafing through looking for words that would fit in the context.

And they basically they deciphered this inscription

in that sort of way.

And of course all the other inscriptions

came in order and there were lots and lots of difficulties which had to be resolved.

But that's the basic thing.

And without that triilingual

um I don't know what would have happened.

I mean I suppose it's conceivable

that in the very modern world

something might have happened

but as it was it was done by sheer brain power by very very

clever persons just doing it and they they cracked it.

The Elumite language is much more difficult but they

got a lot of it too.

So it was a very romantic

thing because the inscription was carved on a mountain face far above the plane

and um Henry Roinson

who was a upstanding

young British officer who claimed to decipher Cana form quite unjustifiably

climbed up there with some

miserable kid and made

squeezes of the whole thing

overlooking the plane thousands of feet up in the air and

brought those back and they were used in the decipherment.

So it's very >> Wait a minute.

more controversial statement from Muring today.

Henry Rollinsson doesn't deserve the credit for that.

>> No, I don't think he does.

He's he's he's called the father of a seriology,

but I think he's the stepfather of a seriology

because when he first got these inscriptions, he wrote a long book about it,

which was almost entirely

And there was a clergyman

in Northern Ireland called Edward Hinks

who lived in a place called Kilerlay and had five daughters and ran this

church who was um

possibly a card carrying genius

if not jolly jolly clothes.

And what happened with with him was this.

There was um an ongoing

competition well an ongoing

challenge to decipher hieroglyphic

writing which Sholon usually gets the credit for.

And Hinx was very interested in trying to decipher

hieroglyphic ahead of the French

and he ran into a sort of dead end at one stage and he

thought he'd have a look at Kunea form to see if it was

and at the same time he cracked it.

He worked out how it worked.

He realized that one sign can have more than one value

of sound and of meaning because they are multivalent signs.

I tried to shelter you from the horrible news,

but it actually it's not

it's not a walk in the park.

It takes about 5 years to to

um you probably do it in about four

>> That is a compliment.

I think you just complimented me. Uh thank you.

Thank you very much.

So what So you're saying one one sign that looks exactly the same might

have different sounds given the context. >> Yeah.

And you have to choose the right sound

and and and also

different meaning as well because for example if you if you have a sign

for hot word hot

right you you can't really have a picture sign for hot

doesn't make sense but what they did is they did a drawing of

a kind of um

complex thing with a brazer inside another sign which meant hot.

So that sign existed

but it also meant other things as well and you had to choose the

right one for the contest.

is all a context to matter.

I mean, it really is quite a matter for despair when you start ka

form because on top of everything else, they didn't leave gaps between the words. They're all connected. That's really mean. Yeah.

So when you read

um what you have to do

you start with the first sign and you think of the sign list and

you go through the

values in your mind and there's next sign

and if one is bar and the next one is ab

among other readings bar ab sounds like a syllable

structure for a word and you go on like that.

>> So there are two things about it.

One is that if you want to you can master it.

The other thing is that the number of variables was restricted. They controlled it.

So it wasn't insane.

So in other words, if you learn the corpus and you learn how the

signs are composed and you learn their different values, then you've got it down

>> and off you go.

And and um it's it's very beautiful.

I think it's it's

>> Can you in all seriousness

take me back to the time when you were learning it?

What's the process of learning it?

Well, I had very abnormal upbringing

because when I went to university

um for about three years beforehand, I'd wanted to be an Egyptologist.

>> So, I'd read the grammar

by gardener and was looking forward very much to studying ancient Egyptian.

And what happened was that I went up to the University of Birmingham

where I went to university.

And uh there was a man called Rd Clark

who was an Egyptologist.

And Ronald Clark came in on the Monday and gave us one lesson about

Egyptian sculpture or something like that.

And the next minute he

next day he died.

So, uh, the professor

called me into his room and said, "Look,

it's going to take me a while to get an Egyptologist.

They don't grow on trees."

Um, but there's another person in this department who teaches another ancient language

called Lambert, and he teaches Kunea form.

So, what I suggest is you go and do a bit of kunea form

with professor Lambert, and then when I get an Egyptologist,

you can convert back.

So, I go and knock on the door. Yes.

Um, so I went in and said, I want to learn cano form.

And, uh, Professor Lambert,

who was rather a Sherlock Holmes kind of figure, aesthetic,

bony, sarcastic, cruel, >> cruel, absolutely terrifying.

Um, and I said, um, I I wanted to learn ka form.

and he wasn't at all pleased because this was a time in Britain

when um resented having students to teach because it buttered into their research time.

It was that sort of arrangement.

Anyway, I started it off and after about

I don't know maybe one or maybe two lessons, I knew this was going

to be my life's work.

So that's what happened to

>> It was an amazing thing.

So he gave me a list of signs

to learn basic signs.

So I did and the next couple of days and then we came in

and he we started reading.

>> So given the complexity

of the signs, why did Kuneaform

last 3,000 years, the most successful writing system ever? >> Fair question.

There are several factors.

One is the famous factor of >> Mhm.

The second thing is

that people who could read and write

and were in charge of archives

and with the clarks

in the temple and the

um writers for the king and everything

commanded a very great deal of power

because most of the public

>> So they reserved to themselves

knowledge, understanding, philosophical inquiry.

I mean, no doubt it went on in pubs and things, but they

were they were in charge.

They had everything under lock and key

and they were I think the scribal schools are rather claky.

They were certainly um

clicky in the sense of Oxford and Cambridge being rivals,

that sort of thing.

They had that sort of idea

and it was in no one's interest whatsoever.

Nobody would ever concede

any interest in the idea of literacy for all.

This would be it would never be thought of and it would be anathema

and so if you got on a soap box on a Saturday afternoon and

say ah enough of this we have to teach the

>> they'd be taken away I think >> so we're getting

in these tablets the output of the intellectual

class a very small

fraction of humans so we're getting just the Oxford and the

>> we are except this

that when you went to scribal

school you had to learn

Samrian and Aadian the language languages properly and all the vocabulary and the >> Mhm.

So some boys probably had a lot of trouble

doing this and you know

they were okay but then there ain't going to be no geniuses.

And I think the situation in the school was that the teachers

farmed out the kids who would actually rather have been outside playing football

but could read and write to earning their living

doing lowlevel reading and writing.

That's to say writing

contracts, letters, everyday things for people because no one could read and write.

So you had to get a scribe if you're going to marry your daughter

off and you get all the witnesses about the presents and all this all

the thing had to be done for 4 days.

So the writer would come

and and do so

your your medium-level writers

would serve that requirement

and very talented or clever or intellectual

students would be encouraged to go into one of the literary professions

which would be so to speak,

law, working for the king, working for the church,

I mean the priesthood.

So all those things which were dependent upon archives and writing

they would find their nevo

and also um architecture

because if a big building had to be built

then somebody had to know about loadbearing

things and brick measurements

and so some of them went into that kind of work and also

probably some of them went into

running the army and they had to move stores and animals and

so they they found their neo

and some of them

were intellectually very able indeed

And they went into

um the disciplines of

on the one hand astrology

but more seriously into

and theoretical grammar because they they had treatises

about the relationship between the two languages and how they worked and different parts

of speech and and they wrote learned commentaries

as well what words meant.

So there was an intellectual

highlevel top and then there were lots of professional scribes and then the the

kids who left school as soon as possible and uh did all that like today.

I apologize to be philosophical

but Winkenstein the philosopher

said that the limits of our language is the limits of our world.

So to which degree

did the languages that were encoded in Kunea form

define human civilization would you say?

what what were the

what were the things

that were complicated to express and therefore

were not expressed often?

>> That's a really interesting question.

So um in terms of

uh richness of vocabulary

and richness of verbal

subtlety, I think Babylonian

rivals Arabic and of course English.

You know, in other words, you can say whatever you want in

>> However subtle it might be, even if people didn't understand the subtlety,

you can because the tools are fantastic.

And Arabic has lots of synonyms

and lots of devices and all the same in Babylonian.

It was a fullyfledged literary language.

The question about about whether the language put a stop to further things

as which is basically what you're asking >> is immensely complicated.

But the one thing that strikes me as

relevant is that a very huge

proportion of scholarly literature in Mesopotamia,

it takes the form of omens

because they believed that

events accidental or deliberately

stimulated had implications for what was going to happen.

>> And they took omens from things in the sky and

uh things in the street and every single thing.

If you were a

well-qualified divine, they would have this significance. Right?

Now, there are thousands

of lines of omens of all different kinds.

And in Aadian, it says,

for example, if a lizard

runs across the breakfast table,

the queen will die.

So, if you translate the Aadian

this way, the word if

verb and everything, if that, then this.

So there are thousands of

thousands of lines translated in many books about omens where if this happens that will happen.

So this is how is understood by my colleagues.

Well, this is absolutely

impossible because if you are you're the you're the chief diver

of the king and you open up a sheep to take a liver out

and examine it according to the if the queen's going to die and the

king's there, you're not going to say,

uh, the queen's going to die.

I mean, you're going to like a fucking idiot if she doesn't die.

And if she does die, you're going to be responsible.

So, all you can ever do and ever, ever have been able to do

is to say there's a sign here

that says that the queen could die,

meaning could die, not will die.

And therefore, the requisite

ritual or magic must immediately

swing into action to defer the danger.

So the point is that a equals b is never true.

It means that with a

b could be, might be,

ought to be, should be, could be true.

All those subtle things.

So that the diver who works from the king

must have been a philosopher

who looks at the king,

he looks at the king and he knows what the king wants him to say.

So he has to tell the king

what he wants to hear.

He has to tell the king if it's bad news in such a way

that he doesn't mind or he won't worry.

It's the most beautiful thing. It's so subtle.

It's it's like a

it's like a violin conc.

It can never have been a equals b for a minute.

So the medical texts say

if you do if a man has this

you do this he drinks this he'll get better. Right?

He says he'll get better.

So you ever met a doctor

who will say you do this you'll get better.

No they say all being well you'll be back on your feet

or I've seen this kind of condition many times everything should go fine.

You should get better you should be better soon

but never you will get better cuz what happens if you die where are you?

>> The lawyers will show up. >> Absolutely.

So this means that not

expressable in Aadian grammar

are these modal verbs. >> Mhm.

could, might, should, ought,

they can't be expressed grammatically.

But it is impossible.

There was such a magnificent

literary language where they

didn't have these subtleties. It's utterly impossible.

And if you translate

he will um in a literary text he might

then the whole text is different.

The whole text is different. >> Yeah. Absolutely. And they don't.

My colleagues translate that.

It says in the grammar books

like that automatically there's no self appraisal

of the folly of it.

You have said that translation is part archaeology,

part detective work, part poetry.

Can we just speak about translation

and the art of it a bit

>> I mean it's such a

such an incredible discipline

just like you said hinted at

just a subtle variation in a single word can change everything.

Well, you know, the truth about translation

is that you never really have a word in one language

which precisely equates >> You never do.

They're always a kind

the best you can do and sometimes it makes no difference and sometimes it's really quite misleading.

And so what people do when they learn Aadian

is they learn the Aadian

word and they learn the English translation. Right?

You have the paras to divide.

So whenever you have the verb parasu

is some form of divide or division

but actually it's not because divide is like the primary

root but there's maybe 10

of of what that can mean in English where the one at the bottom

and the one at the top you'd hardly know they were connected

and the Chicago dictionary which is such a magnificent

thing when you come to the museum and see me

I'll show you this Chicago it's the most

salient and important thing that came out of America in all its history

is the Chicago Assyrian

dictionary which is this long.

There's only a one rival to it for cultural importance

which is the electric guitar

of course but the two of them I think are

your countrymen's greatest achievements.

>> It's the pride of our nation.

Those two >> the very thing

>> Chicago diction can you I'm sorry to take the tangent.

What is the Chicago dictionary?

It started in the 20s

and they made a dictionary of the Babylonian

language a a to zed so to speak and it's it's as long as

this table it's magnificent

thing and this big

and there the people who worked on it were real translators

so they knew that it wasn't lexically

a means b so if you have something in a proverb

you the meaning is going to be a bit different from in a letter

and you know so

people really really understand oadian

they really But this thing about about the modal verbs is an interesting conundrum

to me because um there's no way it's reflected in the writing.

So I can only assume

that there was some kind of drawing out of the vowel in a verb

meaning could you know like you saying

might do it you know something like that.

Anyway so nowadays we it's not a decipherment that's the job. It's just reading.

And if you have lots of tablets

to work on like on a dig, it's

very exciting if they come out of the ground and no one's looked for

them before you know it's your job.

And if you're a competent deriologist,

um you should be able to sight read

more or less except

most say a letter or something like that, but most documents have some damage.

So you have to learn how to inter interpret

stuff and also some literature

is very difficult because of technical vocabulary

and they had technical vocabulary

and unusual >> So you can do all of that.

You can kind of

uh figure out the technical complexities.

You can figure out the

the noise meaning missing pieces. >> Yeah.

Sometimes you can calculate to what it ought to be,

make a reasonable suggestion

and this dictionary which I was

talking to you about is such a fantastic tool

because a lot of people worked on it for for

it was the national endowment for the humanities and it was for decades and

decades of work and most of the world's best seriologists collaborated on it.

So the quality of translation

and understanding is really extraordinary.

What are some things you've

read from that time?

Is there some jokes?

Is there some love letters?

>> There are one or two letters about

from a chap to a woman about, you know, you are very beautiful and

your lips are like radishes

and your ears are like walruses

and things, but I mean there are some things like that.

And there's a kind of street drama in Babylon

in 4th century BC, something like that,

when there must have been actors

who did this in the street.

And it's it's it's it's

Marduk and and Sarapanum's

wife and another woman.

Marduk's having an affair with this other >> oh no

>> and Sopan is jealous and the women

fight in the street and heard insults of one another and you know slot

bucket and all this kind of stuff is hilarious and

it must have been a bit like a

sort of vi opera without the music I suppose. I don't know.

But anyway, it starts off when um

Salonimum is in the room and

Marduk is in bed with this other goddess on the roof and she can hear.

You could say it was an eternal human issue. >> Yeah. Yeah.

Love, heartbreak, jealousy, all that >> between deities also.

>> Because deities are only modeled on human beings after all.

So >> yeah, deities is grandiose

way of expressing human

affairs, human behaviors, human ways. Yeah.

>> in the writing, what was their relationship to the divine

relationship with the divine?

Well, the first thing to say

is that they had a large pantheon of gods.

So, there were three gods at the top,

sometimes called Anu, Enlil and A.

There were three gods at the top and hundreds of other gods and goddesses.

And you have the situation that I think lots of small villages and towns

had their old ancient gods and eventually they all worked into a kind of

theological system like a phone book

and the lesser minor gods were amalgamated

and then they were given jobs in the households of the big gods.

So there was a sort of structure.

So you had this in the background a big sweeping theology like you have

in the world today in some parts of the world.

And um this was the main system.

And the main gods were concerned with the ruler and the fate of the country.

And another god was concerned with

illness and um the dead and what happens to the dead.

And they had other specialtities.

And they all had their own temples.

And when a baby came into the world

um probably this was universally true.

the baby was put under the

tutilage of one or other of the gods.

Sometimes you know the royal family they were the big shots but sometimes

not or the ones that were in the family or something like that.

So people had grew up with the idea that

among all of them

there were special ones for the family and they had a special one who

was supposed to look after them.

That's sort of basic idea.

But the trouble is since gods are

as you say human beings on a larger scale

they can be forgetful

or uninterested or on holiday

and there are lots of ways that you have to prompt your

make little sacrifices and

little bribes so they do their job and keep an eye on you.

So they had that kind of

um slightly practical view

of gods that they were a bit unpredictable

great when they were there but not always there. sort of idea.

And um I also believe this that a lot of people in the world

today who did not

have the disadvantage of growing up in a stifening

religion but are just

normal people get a lot more interested

when they're really ill

or when they have

a big disaster all of a sudden.

Um God or gods seem a lot more important than they do normally.

So that few people

walk about in a state of religious

awe and a good proportion of clergymen I've ever met don't do that either.

It's a kind of conception

that's not actually based on reality

that the individual's response to religious stimula

fluctuates and is varied

and is often a response to need.

It doesn't come from nothing.

I mean people don't suddenly feel

I got to thank the Lord for the rainbow

or something like that.

I think this probably true today.

I mean when you read the investigations

they make of religion today.

Christianity in this country is on the decline

because people who are supposed to be Christians say they aren't anymore. They're atheists.

So the people who say I go to church and I believe and everything

is a relatively small number of people.

So now this is the situation

which is quite remarkable

if you think about it.

The Lord knows what the consequence will be for the human race.

Whether religion will balance out, whether it will die off, who knows?

>> I think it's an ancient technology

that has proven across millennia

to give a set of tools to humans to contend as you as you

said with suffering that's a part of life.

So when mo those rare moments come

when you have to deal with deep pain,

loss, suffering, heartbreak, all those things.

>> Looking up to the sky

and asking questions and trying to figure out the answers

in your conversation with the

>> I think that's true.

But I think in Mesopotamia

it was different in terms of its potency and immediiacy

because there's no skyscrapers in Iraq.

You know, if you live in southern Iraq and you sleep on the roof

and there no lights at night,

you know, you're under the stars, you can see everything because of no smog

and everything like that.

And the idea that the gods are there watching,

it's not like a big

artifice like it is here.

It just doesn't ring true here.

You can't come to it

and really believe in it.

Whereas these people didn't have to really believe in it because it was it.

It's the obvious practical part of life. They're right there. >> Yeah.

But it's like they didn't believe in ghosts.

They took them for granted.

And they didn't believe in the gods.

They took them for granted.

This is a different mechanism

because nobody here in the world today takes those things for granted. Just the opposite.

But I think that's how it worked.

So you didn't have people wrestling

with the idea of whether the gods really exist or that whether they really care about me.

They gave them a nudge when it was necessary.

And they might offer a this, they might offer a that, but they

it was this it was the system.

It was the prevailing system.

And I think it's an important difference.

And also that thing about ghosts

is that it's clear from the inscriptions

all of them that I managed to find

that nobody ever asked

did do these things exist or not?

Or did I really see them or not?

Or did I not? They didn't. They didn't.

They just took it all for granted. >> What are ghosts?

Is it usually >> Um, well, everybody,

everybody who died in bed naturally

or peacefully, what we call their ghost,

went down to the nether world

and there they were.

So, they buried people jolly quick

um for obvious reasons

and like they do in Islam and Judaism

today, it's the same kind of idea.

and uh the spirit of the person

went down through the gates to the netherworld and stayed there.

So that's the basic situation.

And people in their houses had

actual burials under the courtyard

and they had a

thing where you pour stuff down a hole

fluid and food kind of symbolic

offerings to the to them.

>> So is that a way to

lessen the impact of mortality?

I don't know because

you know that everyone's going to die.

I think the real tragedy would be is if we're not supposed to.

That would be the tragedy.

But every single person

is going to die.

So all relationships have this finite clause in them.

So if you're very fond of somebody or you love somebody and they die,

it's kind of infantile

to whine about it ever after

because what do you think was going to happen?

Either you or them,

you know, I I always see it like that.

I don't feel grief when people die. >> It is infantile.

But I got to tell you something about human beings.

We're all kind of infantile

all the way through from,

you know, we don't stop being infantile after we're infants.

It's it's one thing to know it,

you know, theoretically and it's another thing to know it know it like this thing ends.

This ride ends >> but that's the pain.

It's the fact that the whole thing ends.

And when people fall off the edge,

>> they fall off the edge.

>> So yeah, the knowledge that it ends is the painful thing, not the actual

moment of the ending. Yeah.

Many times what makes moments really precious is that they're going to be gone.

I think that's not a trivial thing for us humans to really contend with.

I think religion, religious thought, the divine,

I think, help with that.

>> I I think the big mistake for mankind

was the creation of monotheistic

religions because they brought evil into the world

because if you believe in a monotheistic

religion, it means I'm right

and you're wrong if you don't.

So, it's already on that footing. That's >> very dogmatic.

Yeah, >> dogmatic and it's led to everything.

Inquisitions and this, you know, all this kind of stuff.

It's all as a result of it that one religion is superior and the

other should be stamped out and all that.

And in my opinion, the

monotheistic religion has generated

the most fantastic amount of non-religious feeling.

Whereas when you have all the different gods and

have different specialtities and the ones you like and the ones

everybody likes and they have their temples and their offerings.

It was very interesting to me to go

um into a temple in Kolkata

when I went to there with my wife Joanna.

We went into the temples and saw how they were and I think they

must be very much like the ones in Mesopotamia.

So there was never anything about them which affronted

people's individuality or or or

I mean there's no religious prejudice or even racial prejudice in antiquity.

All these things are modern disadvantageous matters.

If you think what's done in the name of religion,

it is absolutely staggering.

>> So let's talk go to literature

because uh we didn't really mention literature much except you did briefly mention Epic of Gilgamesh. Yeah.

>> So that was written in Kunea form.

It's one of the earliest works of literature. >> That's right.

>> Uh can you tell me about this work? >> Yeah.

Well, we know it best from this Assyrian

library set of tablets.

There are 12 of them.

It's a 12 tablet work. It's quite long.

And Gilgamesh is the hero of it.

But the literature, we know it from earlier texts

and we know that Gilgamesh lived.

He was a real person.

He was a king

in Uruk and he was one of those people

who lived after their death in the world like Alexander for example.

So there were stories about Gilgamesh

when he was alive.

There were stories about him afterwards

and they firstly they were oral literature

not written down at all and then

around the 1800s people started to write them down in Samrian or Babylonian.

So there was a corpus and eventually

they were woven into this long 12 homeriic

type thing about the adventures of Gilgamesh.

So it is certainly literature

and um it's to do with humanity

and immortality and um

man in the hands of the gods and um incorporates

lots of interesting exciting stories.

It's very Hollywood kind of thing

and you can see within it

um even in the sophisticated

nine version its roots are in oral literature

because when somebody speaks

it says Gilgamesh opened his mouth to speak and addressed his friend Enkidu

and then there's a speech and then Enkidu

opened his mouth and addressed his friend Gilgamesh.

Well, when you're reading a story, you don't need that.

And that must be because of

when there was when there was a

enacting of an oral thing

a narrator would say

and it suddenly got frozen into the text.

So it's it's very strange thing because if you're reading it is obvious that

one person speaks and the other person speaks

and and they always have this complicated

thing stuck in the text.

So it must be an echo

of presumably you have your protagonists

um enacting their timeless

matter with a with a

and the person who's writing it down says and then Gilgamesh

said you know like like in a like in a script

>> I mean what what can you say about

this the the telling of stories

in written form during that time?

Do you think that too stretched back in time? >> I do.

I think the fireside narrative matter.

You know, when we were kids, it would be twerps with a guitar

um sitting around a fire on holiday.

But that mechanism when people gather after dark when there is a fire and

talk is the sort of environment

where narrative accounts flourish

naturally among human beings.

>> Stories telling a story.

It doesn't have to be pragmatic.

It can be literary

in in a way. >> Yeah.

either a human person like Gilgamesh

or stories about the gods and

someone sees the Milky Way and they think there's a god riding a chariot

up it and then they have a story about you know and all those

sorts of things and or whatever it would be but I think

probably you have to allow for

a strong principle surfacing

in homo sapiens at a quite early age

because the paintings on cave walls

you try drawing a running antelope

in color on a wall.

I mean the quality of the workmanship

of the artistic ability is unsurpassable.

It's not just good.

So how is that an explicable

thing at this very early date?

It means that among all the population

you have imbecile and

Einstein's and somewhere along the line you have Rembrandt.

And I imagine that half the cake cave paintings in Europe were done by one person.

I mean they you got the impression every family had a genius painter. It's impossible.

Probably there was a person who went from place to place doing these paintings

because they were so

could draw straight away accurately like that.

But the they are a distillation

of creative artistic ability plus skill.

So this this is right at the

pretty early stage is it not the cave painting material.

So if you consider the human stock

which encapsulates such ideas

ever after then you have to reckon with that you have to reckon with

that very creative very creative people.

So the function of stories

to tell the young

and um about what happened and about famous battles

or when the flood came

or how people learn to

make fire or you know

how we invented the wheel all those sorts of things everybody

put puts down as but that's presumably

what absolutely happened and you have the capacity