Lex Fridman PodcastDr. Irving Finkel on Lex Fridman: Why Writing Predates Sumer
How a Gobekli Tepe seal (~9000 BC) points to writing before Sumer; Finkel argues Nineveh tablets are leftover duplicates, not the lost cuneiform library.
At a glance
WHAT IT’S REALLY ABOUT
Irving Finkel Reveals Deep Origins Of Writing, Floods, And Play
- Lex Fridman and Assyriologist Irving Finkel explore the origins, structure, and decipherment of cuneiform, arguing that writing—and even lexicography—emerged far earlier and more systematically than the archaeological record alone suggests.
- Finkel makes a controversial case that proto-writing likely existed millennia before Sumer, possibly even at sites like Göbekli Tepe, and that our surviving tablets are only a tiny, skewed fraction of a much larger intellectual tradition.
- They examine how Mesopotamian flood myths predate and shape the biblical Noah story, including Finkel’s work on the Ark tablet and his reconstruction of a giant coracle, framing the flood as a powerful literary device rooted in real catastrophe.
- The conversation also covers the philosophy of translation, ancient board games like the Royal Game of Ur, attitudes toward gods, ghosts, and death, and the role of the British Museum as a long-term custodian of humanity’s material memory.
IDEAS WORTH REMEMBERING
5 ideasWriting likely predates our earliest tablets by millennia.
While the oldest known true writing is around 3500 BC in Mesopotamia, Finkel argues that pictorial and perhaps phonetic systems must have evolved much earlier through long-distance trade and practical communication needs.
Cuneiform was a highly flexible, syllabic system backed by early lexicography.
Mesopotamian scholars not only created a syllable-based script that could record multiple languages, they also standardized and cataloged signs into extensive word lists, allowing cuneiform to remain stable and readable for over 3,000 years.
Our surviving tablets are a distorted sample of ancient reality.
Finkel stresses that caches like the Ur III accounts or Ashurbanipal’s library likely represent a couple of storerooms, not whole cultures; vast quantities of texts were lost, moved, or written on perishable materials, so our picture is partial and biased.
Mesopotamian flood stories structurally underpin the biblical Noah narrative.
The Atrahasis and Gilgamesh flood accounts—centuries older than Genesis—include key shared motifs such as divine decision, ark-building with detailed specifications, a world-destroying deluge, and the three successive release of birds, indicating literary borrowing, not independent invention.
Ancient stories and games were sophisticated tools for thought and social life.
Epic literature like Gilgamesh wrestled with mortality and divine power, while board games such as the Royal Game of Ur blended chance and strategy, serving as “time pass,” social competition, and a culturally transmissible form of structured thinking.
WORDS WORTH SAVING
5 quotesIt is theoretically possible to infer the Niagara Falls from a raindrop.
— Irving Finkel
What we have is something like all there ever was, which is absurd.
— Irving Finkel
The primacy of the Mesopotamian matter was established… you never get floods in Jerusalem.
— Irving Finkel
The British Museum is a lighthouse in a universe where we are surrounded by darkness, ignorance, stupidity, uninterest, disinterest, skepticism, ignorance.
— Irving Finkel
The limits of my language means the limits of my world.
— Ludwig Wittgenstein (quoted by Lex Fridman at the end)
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