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

- The following is a conversation with Irving Finkel, who is a scholar of ancient languages.

He's a curator at the British Museum for over 45 years, and is a much admired and respected world expert.

He's an expert on cuneiform script and more generally, on ancient languages like Sumerian, Akkadian, and Babylonian.

He's also an expert on ancient board games, Mesopotamia 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.

He has an infectious enthusiasm for ancient history that of course I already love, but fell in love with even more.

This is the Lex Fridman Podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description.

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.

They had clay as their operating material for building and all sorts of other purposes.

Eventually, as a writing support, they somehow developed the idea of the basis of writing, which means that you can make a sign.

People agree on it, 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 voices, 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.

All we can say is that the oldest evidence we have is around 3500 BC, but whether that was anywhere near the time or the stage when this started off

for the first time seems to me very, very unlikely. So, among these Mesopotamians around 3500, they started to do this.

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

Foot is a foot, leg is a leg, and barley is barley. Then very, very gradually, they had the idea of how you could represent numerals.

They also had the idea that the pictures could also represent sounds, 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 panoply 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,

and 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 clear-ish picture. It was simple and it got more complicated, then it became magnificent.

So that with all the signs, a fluent, well-trained scribe could not only write down the Sumerian language,

which was one of the native tongues of Iraq, or the Babylonian language, which was the other main language of Iraq, but also any other language he heard.

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 cuneiform 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, a complex,

bewildering-looking, off-putting writing system, which was actually very beautiful, very

flexible, and lasted for well over three 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 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,

they would grow 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 lexicography,

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

reeds and all the names of colors and of countries and all the gods and everything. They made a

systematic attempt to standardize these signs 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 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 third 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 strong system where the spinal cord

was structured in a lexicographic, regular system.

So, lexicography 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 cuneiform.

- 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 cuneiform script. And

the cuneiform part of it means wedge-shaped,

because cuneus 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 Assyrian

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 cuneatic

or cuneiform, 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 cuneiform means.

Because 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 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, history, and magic and medicine and

all other genres 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, in a way that's a comforting thought, 'cause 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.

- 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 archeology, is the perception that you

could take these signs, still meaning what they look like but also

what the words 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

Assyriology 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... they didn't have A, B, C, D, E, F, G, but they could easily work

out all the vowels and consonants without naming them as

vowels and consonants, but they're 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 Sumerians, 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 long running 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 so I think that what happened with the Sumerians, 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. Many Assyriologists would leave the room.

But I'm not scared of controversy because it's natural. I mean, 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 writing, you have a root, like du, which means to go. And then you

have prefixes, like E or Mu or

Ba, and one's a passive, one's an active, and this and this. So when you have a

sentence, you have one of the Mu, Ba, or E prefixes,

then you have the root, and then you have things at the end. So it is called

agglutinative 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've done it if he could, but he couldn't," kind of thing, in the form of the

verb. But the thing is, if you wanted to write down, you and I decided to write down, so the first

thing we would do is have a sign Mu, and then we'd have Ba,

and then we'd have E, because every five minutes people made those noises.

You see what I mean?

- Yeah, absolutely. Do you think it's possible we might find much, much older--

- I do

- ... cuneiform type tablets?

- Or, or pictographic type tablets, before the cuneiform and

it's drawing type, and I'll tell you why.

Because there's this marvelous site in Turkey called Gobekli Tepe.

- Oh yeah?

- Do you know about Gobekli Tepe?

- Yes, of course.

- Well, everybody knows about the buildings and the

architecture and the... everybody knows about it. If you go

all the way through the photographs, which the archaeologists unwisely

put online, you will 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