Dr. Irving Finkel on Lex Fridman: Why Writing Predates Sumer

1. 0:00 – 0:58

   Introduction

   1. LFLex Fridman0:00

      The following is a conversation with Irving Finkel, 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 cuneiform script, and more generally, on ancient languages of Sumerian, Akkadian, and Babylonian. And also, on ancient board games and, uh, 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, 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 Fridman Podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description, or you can also find links to contact me, ask questions, get feedback and so on. And now, dear friends, here's Irving Finkel.

2. 0:58 – 7:04

   Origins of human language

   1. LFLex Fridman0:58

      Where and when did writing originate in human civilization? Let's go back a few thousand years.

   2. IFIrving Finkel1:05

      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 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 and 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, uh, for the first time seems to me very, very unlikely. So in, among these, the 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. 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 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 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, 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 of 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 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, um, complex, bewildering looking, off-putting writing system which was actually very beautiful and 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 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 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 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 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.

3. 7:04 – 14:17

   Cuneiform

   1. IFIrving Finkel7:04

   2. LFLex Fridman7:04

      We should say that the name of that system that lasted for 3,000 years is cuneiform.

   3. IFIrving Finkel7:10

      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 Babylonia cities. They found these clay tablets which, in the ground, uh, 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, um, 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 cuniatic 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, 'cause once in a while you meet somebody who never heard of the word at all, and this is appalling.

   4. LFLex Fridman8:22

      (laughs)

   5. IFIrving Finkel8:22

      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, belles-lettres, 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, 'cause they're safe there and protected.

   6. LFLex Fridman9:26

      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-

   7. IFIrving Finkel10:00

      Exactly.

   8. LFLex Fridman10:00

      ... but to actually write down sound is a genius invention.

   9. IFIrving Finkel10:05

      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 lore from Assyriology is that 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, w- 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 archaeological 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-

   10. LFLex Fridman12:37

       Yeah.

   11. IFIrving Finkel12:37

       ... what- what they are and so forth.

   12. LFLex Fridman12:38

       (laughs)

   13. IFIrving Finkel12:38

       And- 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-"

   14. LFLex Fridman12:56

       (laughs)

   15. IFIrving Finkel12:56

       "... inhibited no smoking signs and write language."

   16. LFLex Fridman13:00

       Yeah.

   17. IFIrving Finkel13:00

       That is what I think happened. That's what I think happened.

   18. LFLex Fridman13:04

       Is this a controversial statement?

   19. IFIrving Finkel13:05

       Highly controversial.

   20. LFLex Fridman13:07

       Hmm.

   21. IFIrving Finkel13:07

       Highly controver- many p- many a theologists would leave the room.

   22. LFLex Fridman13:11

       Yeah.

   23. IFIrving Finkel13:12

       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 write. You have a root, like "du," which means to go, and then you have prefixes, like "E" or "mu" 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 "mu," "ba," or "E" prefixes, then you have the root, and then you have things at the end. So it's called agglutinative by people who like to make things look more important than they are. So you have the central thing and 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- in the form of the verb.

   24. LFLex Fridman14:02

       Yeah.

   25. IFIrving Finkel14:02

       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.

   26. LFLex Fridman14:14

       (laughs) Yeah.

   27. IFIrving Finkel14:15

       You see what I mean?

   28. LFLex Fridman14:16

       Yeah, absolutely.

4. 14:17 – 25:29

   Controversial theory about Göbekli Tepe

   1. LFLex Fridman14:17

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

   2. IFIrving Finkel14:23

      I do.

   3. LFLex Fridman14:24

      ... cuneiform-type tablets.

   4. IFIrving Finkel14:26

      Or- or pictographic-type tablets, before the cuneiform when they're drawing type, and I'll tell you why, because there's this marvelous site in Turkey called Gobekli Tepe.

   5. LFLex Fridman14:36

      Oh yeah?

   6. IFIrving Finkel14:36

      Do you know about Gobekli Tepe?

   7. LFLex Fridman14:37

      Yes, of course.

   8. IFIrving Finkel14:37

      Well, everybody knows about the buildings and the architecture and the sculpture. 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 a arched back and a flat bottom, and on the flat bottom there are hieroglyphic signs carved in the stone, right? No one's said anything about it at all, but it's clear to me, A, that this was a stamp to ratify where the im- the carvings of the signs on clay or some other sealing material would leave an impression. It must be that. So this is about 9,000 BC.

   9. LFLex Fridman15:26

      Yeah.

   10. IFIrving Finkel15:26

       Now, when I was a boy at university, uh, my professor said to me that the reason y- what you can- w- 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 3,000 BC, they sure as hell had to do it at Gobekli Tepe because they've hardly even begun to finish excavating the sites of-

   11. LFLex Fridman15:54

       Mm-hmm.

   12. IFIrving Finkel15:54

       ... Gobekli Tepe. They go on and on like Manchester and Newcastle United.

   13. LFLex Fridman15:58

       (laughs)

   14. IFIrving Finkel15:59

       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 n- uh, 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, uh, "We've got the stuff," or whatever it was. Obviously his dad's name or whatever it is, it's got a wiggly snake and a wiggly this. That is pictographic writing. Maybe even as phonetic writing, 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 though they- 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- it's above all kinds of mess and I think that was the pervading 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 that sc- "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, and- but that's surely how it was. But if you look at those Gobekli 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, so the workforce and the tools and the organization. You know, what did they do it with? A megaphone? "Your breakfast!" And all that kind of stuff.

   15. LFLex Fridman17:55

       (laughs)

   16. IFIrving Finkel17:55

       No way. No way.

   17. LFLex Fridman17:57

       So that's a really controversial statement-

   18. IFIrving Finkel17:59

       It is really controversial.

   19. LFLex Fridman18:00

       ... that at the time of Gobekli Tepe there may have been already a writing system.

   20. IFIrving Finkel18:04

       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 da-" This is a finished thing with a flat surface. You press it down so you have some contract, you have some building arrangement, some, uh, we're paying for these bricks, whatever it was, and the off- official person had to squash it down and it leaves the impression. I mean, I am a great believer in Sherlock Holmes...

   21. LFLex Fridman18:30

       Mm-hmm.

   22. IFIrving Finkel18:30

       ...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 the, one of the things which impresses 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.

   23. LFLex Fridman18:52

       That's a powerful statement. Yeah?

   24. IFIrving Finkel18:54

       It's a powerful statement. Well, that seal from Gobekliche 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 happened, so for example, in the Indus Valley, people write the most abject nonsense about the Indus 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, "Oh, well, just 'cause it's now, it wouldn't be then." But actually, that argument is utterly, utterly fallacious, 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, that people who talk about progress and ideas have no idea about.

   25. LFLex Fridman20:07

       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, archeology, 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 cuneiform tablets we have is just a raindrop compared to the waterfall of, of thousands of years of humans.

   26. IFIrving Finkel20:39

       Yes. We have a lot, but it's nothing in comparison with what existed. But not only that, see, we don't have to decipher anymore. You, w- we can read Akkadian 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 Assyriologists 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 Ur III 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 is the ancestors of the Inland Revenue, 'cause 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's no funny business or no mistakes. Now, the thing is, there are thousands of those tablets written in about 2100 to 2000 BC. Thousands of them, about the size of a box of matches. So people like to generalize about the Sumerians at this time of the world, but they probably all came out of two rooms, because they were dumped when they were no longer needed in some kind of room and the archeologists in the 19th century came down on these and then all the locals came and they bought, uh, dug them up and they sold them all over the place and they'd 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 slued by the nature of the material, and sometimes the material is opulent and benevolent, but not always, and sometimes the people who work with slued material don't even realize how slued it is. I mean, you know, it's quite remarkable.

   27. LFLex Fridman22:50

       So you in all your time of studying cuneiform tablets, do you sometimes late at night get a glimpse of the waterfall? Like, can you imagine?

   28. IFIrving Finkel23:01

       Yes. I can imagine. I can imagine easily because once in a while a library is discovered. In the 1850s at Nineveh, which was the Assyrian capital, there was a fat king, king of the world called Ashurbanipal, and he had a fantastic library and he promoted it. He impounded tablets. He had them brought to Nineveh. He wanted all the prevailing knowledge and all on it, knowledge from before under one roof. It was a kind of like Alexandria thing. So he was a trained scholar, and this is what he did, and they found it in the 19th century. They dug it up, Layard 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.

   29. LFLex Fridman23:43

       Mm-hmm.

   30. IFIrving Finkel23:43

       And lots of them broken and lots of them burned. So, ever since then until really quite recently, Assyriologists who spent all their, a lot, uh, people who work on these Nineveh tablets, but all the time joining the bits together and you have the, uh, 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.
5. 25:29 – 30:48

   How to write and speak Cuneiform

   1. IFIrving Finkel25:29

   2. LFLex Fridman25:29

      So, a lot of the cuneiform language is already deciphered.

   3. IFIrving Finkel25:34

      Sure.

   4. LFLex Fridman25:35

      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 cuneiform also.

   5. IFIrving Finkel26:01

      That's important. Well, the first thing is, is that how the cuneiform writing system works, because th- the crucial point, and once you see it, is makes a lot of things clear, is that they wrote in syllables. 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 bi, ub and bu, eb and be.

   6. LFLex Fridman26:42

      Mm-hmm.

   7. IFIrving Finkel26:43

      So you had the, the range of things-

   8. LFLex Fridman26:45

      Mm-hmm.

   9. IFIrving Finkel26:45

      ...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 mu-

   10. LFLex Fridman27:09

       Yeah.

   11. IFIrving Finkel27:09

       ...and then the sign Z and then the sign M. 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 there are bits around this, but it's basically syllabic writing.

   12. LFLex Fridman27:30

       Mm-hmm.

   13. IFIrving Finkel27:31

       So, when you go to university to study cuneiform, 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 derive from the writing of Sumerian words.

   14. LFLex Fridman27:58

       Mm-hmm.

   15. IFIrving Finkel27:59

       So the Sumerian vocabulary had a lot of words that were probably differentiated by tone.

   16. LFLex Fridman28:06

       Mm-hmm.

   17. IFIrving Finkel28:07

       So you might have ba and then a rising A and then a lowering, and these signs all retained the ba value even though there were no tones. So it means if you look at the sign list, there's a lot of signs. You have ba number one which is the common, then there's ba number two, ba 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 assyriology, 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 Semitic tongue, which although it's extinct, is connected to or related to Hebrew, Aramaic, Arabic, Ethiopic, Syriac, 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.

   18. LFLex Fridman29:25

       Oh, no.

   19. IFIrving Finkel29:26

       Yeah.

   20. LFLex Fridman29:26

       (laughs)

   21. IFIrving Finkel29:26

       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-European with Spanish, Italian, Latin, Hittite, and so forth and so that's what, French is one group, and you have Germanic, and you have Slavonic. And, 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 are part of a big family must always have been true. So that when writing arrives about 3,000, 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 Sumerian-

   22. LFLex Fridman30:33

       Are gone?

   23. IFIrving Finkel30:34

       ... 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. So that-

   24. LFLex Fridman30:44

       Amazing.

   25. IFIrving Finkel30:44

       It is am- it's a very stimulating thing to imagine.

6. 30:48 – 32:31

   Primitive human language

   1. IFIrving Finkel30:48

      I personally believe that Neanderthals 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 the Neanderthals 100,000 years rul- uh, i- l- live in Europe, they had to deal with the Ice Age, they all lived together, they bring up their children. You think they couldn't speak anything? They had 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-

   2. LFLex Fridman31:23

      Mm-hmm.

   3. IFIrving Finkel31:23

      ... and, and, and you say, "Legs," mmm, well, shut up, I'm concentrating. "Legs, legs." And then I suddenly think, "Oh, I get it. You are legs." 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, and all that, it's absolutely stupid. If you cut your hand with a knife, you sure as hell experience it. You sure as hell do. It hurts.

   4. LFLex Fridman31:53

      Mm-hmm.

   5. IFIrving Finkel31:54

      It hurts a lot. You might even bleed to death. But it's not somebody else's hand, and it's your hand and it's your existence and your life that's threatened. You think people weren't conscious that they were an entity? I don't believe it.

   6. LFLex Fridman32:06

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

   7. IFIrving Finkel32:10

      Well, eventually, yes. Names. I mean-

   8. LFLex Fridman32:13

      Names.

   9. IFIrving Finkel32:14

      ... names of things, and then you have a... The idea that, uh, uh, 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.

7. 32:31 – 33:25

   Development of writing systems

   1. IFIrving Finkel32:31

   2. LFLex Fridman32:31

      So what do you think is the motivation, the primary driver of developing written language? Is it... Is it goes hand-in-hand with, uh, civilization?

   3. IFIrving Finkel32:40

      I think that the media in which it appears is when there's a lot of people living in an urban environment.

   4. LFLex Fridman32:47

      Yeah.

   5. IFIrving Finkel32:47

      And wi- wi- with rival institutions or the king or the government or all those sorts of-

   6. LFLex Fridman32:53

      Yeah.

   7. IFIrving Finkel32:54

      ... uh, things. And that's why I think, uh, uh, uh, Gobeklitepe must have been the same thing. I read somewhere that they're all nomads and they only came to Gobeklitepe, you know, f- three months a year. I mean, that cannot be true that they were nomads and they... It 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 gonna be, how high it's gonna be. And how... I mean, you know, you can't just (grunting) you know, like that-

   8. LFLex Fridman33:23

      (laughs)

   9. IFIrving Finkel33:23

      ... like gorillas.

8. 33:25 – 45:57

   Decipherment of Cuneiform

   1. LFLex Fridman33:25

      Uh, all right, so deciphering, the process of deciphering.

   2. IFIrving Finkel33:28

      So when I started there were grammars and sign lists and dictionaries. Everything was marvelous. It was all basically deciphered, all you had to do was get on with learning it. But at the beginning when the first tablets and bricks in cuneiform 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 Elamite and in Babylonian and in Old Persian, trilingual version. And Old Persian although it was a, obviously a archaic form of the language, Persian is still alive, it was still alive in the 19th century. So they, uh... Since the Old Persian was written in a very simple style of cuneiform they deciphered it, they twigged it was Old Persian, they read it in Persian and they read the names Dariawsh in Old Persian. And then suddenly somebody realized that the other two columns about the same length.

   3. LFLex Fridman34:43

      Brilliant.

   4. IFIrving Finkel34:44

      What do you know? And the thing is, it said, "I am Darius the great king, king of the world, king of the... Son of diddly, diddly, diddly, diddly... Uh, grandson of diddly, diddly, diddly." 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, the, the kind of the chisel that opened up cuneiform writing proper. And the thing was they soon twigged that the language of the Babylonian was a Semitic tongue, and this was so important. I think the first word they discovered was the word for river which is Naru in Akkadian and Nahr 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 seized their Arabic and Hebrew dictionaries and started leafing through looking for words that would fit in the context. And they basically... They decipher 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 trilingual, 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 brainpower by very, very clever persons just doing it and they, they cracked it. The Elamite language was 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 plain and...Um, Henry Rawlinson, who was a upstanding young British officer who claimed to decipher cuneiform quite unjustifiably, climbed up there with some miserable kid, and made squeezes of the whole thing overlooking the plain, thousands of feet up in the air, and brought those back, and they were used in the decipherment. So, it's very romantic.

   5. LFLex Fridman36:46

      Wait a minute. (laughs) More controversial statement from

   6. today: Henry Rawlinson doesn't deserve the credit for that?

   7. IFIrving Finkel36:52

      No, I don't think he does. He's, he's, he's called the Father of Assyriology, but I think he's the stepfather of Assyriology, because when he first got these inscriptions, he wrote a long book about it, which was almost entirely wrong.

   8. LFLex Fridman37:04

      Mm-hmm.

   9. IFIrving Finkel37:05

      And there was a clergyman in Northern Ireland called Edward Hincks, who lived in a place called Killyleagh and had five daughters and ran this church, who was, um, possibly a card-carrying genius. If not, jolly, jolly close. And what happened with, with him was this: there was, um, an ongoing competition, or an ongoing challenge to decipher hieroglyphic writing, which Champollion usually gets the credit for, and Hincks 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 cuneiform to see if it was helpful.

   10. LFLex Fridman37:45

       Hmm.

   11. IFIrving Finkel37:46

       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, 'cause they are multivalent, the signs. I tried to shelter you from the horrible news, but it actually, i- i- it's not, it's not a walk in the park. It takes about five years to, to, um... You could probably do it in about four, probably.

   12. LFLex Fridman38:11

       That is a compliment. I think you just complimented me. Uh, thank you. Thank you very much. (laughs) so, what? So you're saying one, one sign that looks exactly the same might have different sounds, given the context?

   13. IFIrving Finkel38:25

       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," the word "hot," right, 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 brazier 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 context. Is all the context to matter? I mean, it really is quite a matter for despair when you start cuneiform, because on top of everything else, they didn't leave gaps between the words-

   14. LFLex Fridman39:04

       Mm-hmm.

   15. IFIrving Finkel39:04

       And that's what-

   16. LFLex Fridman39:04

       They're all connected.

   17. IFIrving Finkel39:05

       That's really mean.

   18. LFLex Fridman39:06

       Yeah.

   19. IFIrving Finkel39:07

       Yeah. So when you read, um, what you have to do, you start with the first sign and you think of the sign this, and you go through the values in your mind, and there's next sign. And if one is "ba" and the next one is "ab," among other readings, "ba-ab" sounds like a syllable structure for a word, and you go on like that.

   20. LFLex Fridman39:26

       Mm-hmm.

   21. IFIrving Finkel39:26

       So, there are two things about it. One is that if you want to, you can master it, and the other thing is that the number of variables was restricted. They controlled it, so it wasn't insane.

   22. LFLex Fridman39:37

       Mm-hmm.

   23. IFIrving Finkel39:37

       So, in other words, if you learn the

   24. LFLex Fridman39:39

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

   25. Mm-hmm.

   26. IFIrving Finkel39:44

       ... and off you go. And, and, um, it's, it's very beautiful, I think. It's, it's, it's marvelous.

   27. LFLex Fridman39:51

       Can you, in all seriousness, take me back to the time when you were learning it?

   28. IFIrving Finkel39:55

       Yeah.

   29. LFLex Fridman39:55

       What's the process of learning it?

   30. IFIrving Finkel39:57

       Well, I had a very abnormal upbringing, because when I went to university, um, for about three years beforehand I'd wanted to be an Egyptologist.
9. 45:57 – 50:56

   Limits of language

   1. IFIrving Finkel45:57

   2. LFLex Fridman45:57

      I apologize to be philosophical but Wittgenstein, the philosopher, said, uh, "The limits of our language is the limits of our world." So to which degree did the languages that were encoded in cuneiform 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?

   3. IFIrving Finkel46:21

      That's a really an 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 English-

   4. LFLex Fridman46:41

      Mm-hmm.

   5. IFIrving Finkel46:41

      ... however subtle it might be, even if people, they don't understand the subtlety. You can because the tools are fantastic and Arabic has lots of synonyms and lots of devices and ............................ Same in Babylonian. It was a fully fledged literary language. The question about a- about whether the language put a stop to further things, as, which is basically what you're asking-

   6. LFLex Fridman47:04

      Mm-hmm.

   7. IFIrving Finkel47:05

      ... 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.

   8. LFLex Fridman47:29

      Mm-hmm.

   9. IFIrving Finkel47:29

      And they took omens from things in the sky and, uh, things in the street and, uh, e- every single thing. If you were a well-qualified diviner would have this significance. Right? Now, there are thousands of lines of omens of all different kinds and in Akkadian it says, for example, "If a lizard runs across the breakfast table, the queen will die." So if you translate the Akkadian this way, the word if, verb and everything, "If that, then this." So there are thousands of, thousands of lines translated into many books about omens where if this happens that will happen. So this is how it's understood by my colleagues. But this is absolutely impossible because if you are the... you're the, you're the chief diviner for the king and you open up a sheep to take a liver out and, uh, examine it according to the... and if the queen's gonna die and the king's there, you're not gonna say-... uh, "The queen's gonna die." I mean, you're gonna look like a fucking idiot if she doesn't die.

   10. LFLex Fridman48:35

       (laughs) Yeah.

   11. IFIrving Finkel48:36

       And if she does die, you're gonna 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 it- that with A, B could be, might be, ought to be, should be, could be true. All those subtle things. So that the diviner who works for 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.

   12. LFLex Fridman49:36

       Mm-hmm.

   13. IFIrving Finkel49:36

       It's- it's like a- a- a- a- it's like a violin concerto. It can never have been A equals B for a minute. So the medical texts say, "If you do... If a man has this, diddly-diddly-diddly-do, you do this, your drinks is... He'll get better." Right? It says, "He'll get better." So you ever met a doctor who will say, "You do this, you'll get better"? No.

   14. LFLex Fridman49:57

       (laughs)

   15. IFIrving Finkel49:57

       They say, "All being well, you'll be back on your feet." Or, "I've seen this kind of condition many times, oh, everything should go fine. You should get better, you should be better soon," duh-luh-luh-luh-luh. But never, "You will get better," because what happens if you die?

   16. LFLex Fridman50:09

       (laughs)

   17. IFIrving Finkel50:09

       Where are you?

   18. LFLex Fridman50:10

       The lawyers will show up.

   19. IFIrving Finkel50:12

       Absolutely.

   20. LFLex Fridman50:12

       (laughs)

   21. IFIrving Finkel50:13

       So this means that not expressible in Akkadian grammar are these modal verbs.

   22. LFLex Fridman50:20

       Mm-hmm.

   23. IFIrving Finkel50:21

       Could, might, should, ought. They can't be expressed grammatically. But it is impossible that it 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.

   24. LFLex Fridman50:44

       Mm-hmm.

   25. IFIrving Finkel50:44

       The whole text is different.

   26. LFLex Fridman50:45

       Yeah, absolutely.

   27. IFIrving Finkel50:46

       So it's... And- and they don't... My colleagues translate like it says in the grammar books, neh-nuh-neht, neh-nuh-neht. Like that, automatically. There's no self-appraisal of the folly of it.

10. 50:56 – 56:06

    Art of translation

    1. LFLex Fridman50:57

       You have said that translation is part archeology, part detective work, part poetry. Can we just speak about translation and the art of it a bit more?

    2. IFIrving Finkel51:05

       Yes.

    3. LFLex Fridman51:06

       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.

    4. IFIrving Finkel51:16

       Well, you know, the truth about translation is that you never really have a word in one language which precisely equates another.

    5. LFLex Fridman51:26

       Yeah.

    6. IFIrving Finkel51:26

       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 Akkadian is they learn the Akkadian word and they learn the English translation. Right? You know, the parasu is "to divide." So whenever you have the verb parasu, it's some form of divide or division. But actually, it's not, because divide is like the primary root. But there's maybe 10 nuances of- 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...

    7. LFLex Fridman52:07

       Mm-hmm.

    8. IFIrving Finkel52:07

       ... I'll show you this Chica- 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, uh, one rival to it for cultural importance, which is the electric guitar, of course. But the two of them, I think are your countryman's greatest achievements.

    9. LFLex Fridman52:28

       (laughs) It's the pride of our nation.

    10. IFIrving Finkel52:31

        I think so.

    11. LFLex Fridman52:31

        Those two things. (laughs)

    12. IFIrving Finkel52:32

        The very thing.

    13. LFLex Fridman52:33

        Chicago Dic- c- can you... I'm sorry to take the tension. What is the Chicago Dictionary?

    14. IFIrving Finkel52:37

        It started in the '20s, and they made a dictionary of the Babylonian language.

    15. LFLex Fridman52:42

        Ah.

    16. IFIrving Finkel52:42

        A, A to Z, so to speak. And it's- it's as long as this table, it's a 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, but they had... So if you have something in a proverb, you- th- the meaning is gonna be a little bit different from in a letter, and you know. So, people really, really understand Akkadian, they really do. 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 were saying, you know, "He might do it," you know, something like that. Anyway, so nowadays, we- w- it's not the decipherment that- that's the job, it's just reading. And if you have lots of tablets to work on, like on a dig, it's, uh, very exciting if they come out of the ground and no one's looked at them before, you know, it's your job. And if you're a competent assyriologist, um, you should be able to sight-read more or less. Except, m- most... Say a letter or something like that, but most documents have- 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, um, they had technical vocabulary and unusual words.

    17. LFLex Fridman54:03

        So you can do all of that. You can kind of, uh, figure out the technical complexities.

    18. IFIrving Finkel54:09

        Sure.

    19. LFLex Fridman54:09

        You can figure out the- the noise, meaning missing pieces.

    20. IFIrving Finkel54:14

        Yeah. Sometimes you can c- calculate to what it ought to be-

    21. LFLex Fridman54:17

        Yeah.

    22. IFIrving Finkel54:18

        ... make a reasonable suggestion. And, uh, 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, uh, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and it was for decades and decades of work. And most of the world's best assyriologists collaborated on it, so the quality of translation and understanding is really extraordinary.

    23. LFLex Fridman54:41

        What are some things you've read from that time? Is there some jokes? Is there some love letters?

    24. IFIrving Finkel54:48

        There are one or two letters about, um... Uh, 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 that 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 Sarpanitum, his wife, and another woman. Marduk's having an affair with this other-

    25. LFLex Fridman55:21

        Oh, no.

    26. IFIrving Finkel55:21

        ... goddess.

    27. LFLex Fridman55:22

        Mm-hmm.

    28. IFIrving Finkel55:23

        And Sarpanitum is jealous and these women fight in the street and hurl insults at one another and, you know, "Slop bucket," and all this kind of stuff. It's hilarious and it must have been a bit like a, sort of Verdi opera without the music, I suppose. I don't know. But anyway, it starts off when, um, Sarpanitum 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.

    29. LFLex Fridman55:50

        Yeah. Yeah, love, heartbreak, jealousy, all of that.

    30. IFIrving Finkel55:53

        Uh, between deities also.
11. 56:06 – 1:01:31

    Gods

    1. IFIrving Finkel56:06

    2. LFLex Fridman56:06

       In the writing, what was their relationship to the divine?

    3. IFIrving Finkel56:10

       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 Ea. 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 were 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 have 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, and the dead and what happens to the dead, and they had other specialties, 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 tutelage of one or other of the gods. Sometimes, you know, the royal family, they were the big shots, but sometimes n- 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, th- there were special ones for the family and they had a special one who was supposed to look after them. That's the 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 un- uninterested or on holiday, and there are lots of ways that you have to prompt your... Uh, 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 stifling 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 f- 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 th- the individual's response to religious stimuli 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've 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, and people who say, "I go to church and I believe in everything," it is a relatively small number of people saying now this is the situation, which is quite remarkable if you think about it. Lord knows what the consequence will be for the human race, whether religion will balance out, whether it will die off. Uh, who knows?

    4. LFLex Fridman59:45

       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, 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-

    5. IFIrving Finkel1:00:08

       Yeah.

    6. LFLex Fridman1:00:08

       ... looking up to the sky and asking questions and trying to figure out the answers, in your conversation with the divine-

    7. IFIrving Finkel1:00:15

       I think that's true, but I think in Mesopotamia it was different in terms of its potency and immediacy, because there's no skyscrapers in Iraq. You know, if you live in southern Iraq and you sleep on the roof and there are no lights at night, you know, you're under the stars, you can see everything because of... You know, 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.

    8. LFLex Fridman1:00:53

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

    9. IFIrving Finkel1:00:57

       Yeah. 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. It's just a different mechanism, 'cause nobody here i- 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 this, they might offer that, but they w- i- it was th- it was the system, it was the prevailing system, and I think

12. 1:01:31 – 1:11:19

    Ghosts

    1. IFIrving Finkel1:01:31

       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 themselves, "D- d- do these things exist or not? Did I really see them or not? Or did I not?" They didn't, they didn't. They just took it all for granted.

    2. LFLex Fridman1:01:50

       What are ghosts? Is it usually ancestors?

    3. IFIrving Finkel1:01:54

       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 I- Islam and Judaism today, it's the same kind of idea, and, uh, the spirit of the person went down through the gates of the nether world 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, w- fluid and food, it's kind of symbolic offerings to th- uh, to them.

    4. LFLex Fridman1:02:39

       So isn't that a way to lessen the impact of mortality?

    5. IFIrving Finkel1:02:44

       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 gonna happen? Either you or them? You know, uh, I- I always see it like that. I don't feel grief when people die.

    6. LFLex Fridman1:03:24

       It is infantile, but I gotta 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.

    7. IFIrving Finkel1:03:45

       But that's the pain. It's the fact that- that the whole thing ends.

    8. LFLex Fridman1:03:49

       Yeah.

    9. IFIrving Finkel1:03:49

       And when people fall off the edge, they fall off the edge.

    10. LFLex Fridman1:03:54

        So yeah, the knowledge that it ends is the painful thing, not the actual moment of the ending. Yeah.

    11. IFIrving Finkel1:03:58

        Yeah.

    12. LFLex Fridman1:03:59

        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, and I think religion, religious thought, the divine, I think help with that.

    13. IFIrving Finkel1:04:13

        I- I think the- the big mistake from mankind was the creation of monotheistic religions, because they brought evil into the world, because if you believe in a monotheistic religion, that means I'm right and you're wrong if you don't, so th- th- it's already on that footing.

    14. LFLex Fridman1:04:31

        It's very dogmatic, yeah.

    15. IFIrving Finkel1:04:32

        Dogmatic and it's led to everything, there's inquisitions and there's this, you know, all this kind of stuff. It's all a result of it that one religion is superior and the others should be stamped out and all that, and in my opinion, monotheistic religion has generated the most fantastic amount of non-religious feeling, whereas when you have all the different gods and they have different specialities and the ones you like and the ones that everybody likes and they have their temples and their offerings... It was very interesting to me to go, um, into a- 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.

    16. LFLex Fridman1:05:33

        So let's talk- go to literature, 'cause, uh, we didn't really mention literature much, except you did briefly mention Epic of Gilgamesh.

    17. IFIrving Finkel1:05:40

        Yeah.

    18. LFLex Fridman1:05:41

        So that was written in cuneiform. It's one of the earliest works of literature.

    19. IFIrving Finkel1:05:45

        That's right.

    20. LFLex Fridman1:05:45

        Uh, can you tell me about this work?

    21. IFIrving Finkel1:05:47

        Yeah. Well, w- we know it best from this Syrian library set of tablets, there are 12 of them, it's a 12 tablet work, so 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 Sumerian or Babylonian. So there was a corpus and eventually they were woven into this long 12 Homeric 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 and exciting stories. It's a very Hollywoody kind of thing.... and you can see within it, um, even in the sophisticated Nineveh version, uh, 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 a... When there was an, 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 a very strange thing, because if you're reading it, it's 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 battle with a, with a... And, and the person who's w- writing it down says, "And then Gilgamesh said..." You know, like, like in a pr- like in a script.

    22. LFLex Fridman1:07:55

        I mean, what, what can you say about the, the telling of stories in written form during that time? Do you think that too stretched back in time?

    23. IFIrving Finkel1:08:06

        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.

    24. LFLex Fridman1:08:30

        Stories, telling of stories. It doesn't have to be pragmatic, it can be-

    25. IFIrving Finkel1:08:33

        No.

    26. LFLex Fridman1:08:33

        ... literary in, in a way.

    27. IFIrving Finkel1:08:35

        Yeah. Either a human person like Gilgamesh, or stories about the gods and someone sees the Milky Way and they think, "It's a god riding a chariot up it," then they have a story about, you know, and all those sorts of things. You know? Or whatever it would be. But I think probably you have to allow for a strong creative 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 imbeciles and Einsteins, and somewhere along the line you have Rembrandts. And I imagine that half the cake- cave paintings in Europe were done by one person. I mean, they, they... You get 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, the, the... They are a distillation of creative, uh, 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 story is to tell the young and, um, about what happened and about famous battles or when the flood came or how people learned to, uh, make fire or, you know, how we invented the wheel. All those sorts of things everybody puts, puts down as be-... But that's presumably what absolutely happened. And you have the capacity for people to adore and to respect among their own kind people of astounding ability. There must have been hunters who were ferociously quick and, you know, wrestle with polar bears and all that kind of... And a- all, all this stuff would be grist to the narrator's thing. And as things got more complicated and more sophisticated, so lessons might be incorporated or lessons might come out of them unintentionally. Because if you tell a story without a moral, there is usually a moral if you, if you think about it.

    28. LFLex Fridman1:11:13

        And many of those stories are sadly lost to time or not yet found.

    29. IFIrving Finkel1:11:18

        Hmm.

13. 1:11:19 – 1:21:26

    Ancient flood stories

    1. IFIrving Finkel1:11:19

    2. LFLex Fridman1:11:19

       You mentioned floods, and speaking of stories that have been lost and found, you're well known for a lot of things. One of them is decoding the so-called Ark tablet.

    3. IFIrving Finkel1:11:29

       Yeah, that was a challenge because it's jolly hard to read.

    4. LFLex Fridman1:11:32

       You gotta tell me the story. This, uh, ancient Babylonian clay tablet dating 1700 BC which contains a flood narrative that predates the Biblical story of Noah by a thousand years.

    5. IFIrving Finkel1:11:45

       At least.

    6. LFLex Fridman1:11:46

       At least.

    7. IFIrving Finkel1:11:47

       Yeah.

    8. LFLex Fridman1:11:47

       Okay. Well, you gotta tell me the full story.

    9. IFIrving Finkel1:11:50

       So the full story is like this. Visitors used to come to the museum, um, to ask questions of the experts who worked there and one would be on duty periodically, and sometimes people would bring objects, sometimes they'd ask questions. And somebody once came in with a whole load of objects, including this tablet, which to cut a long story short, I identified pretty much straight away as being part of the flood story. It was a tablet about eight inches by three. Not the whole flood story, which is a complex narrative which ended up in the Gilgamesh narrative much, much later, but this one was an early narrative in which the point was taken up where the gods in heaven had decided that the population of Mesopotamia needed to be wiped out because they were so noisy.

    10. LFLex Fridman1:12:39

        Mm-hmm.

    11. IFIrving Finkel1:12:40

        This was the expression. And the gods couldn't sleep after lunch sort of thing, so they decided they would wipe them out and create something quieter that worked harder. So this was the basic mechanism, and they had different ways of doing it and then the, the most effective one was they were going to send a flood to wipe them all out, and one of the gods, the number three in the triumvirate, thought this was a deplorable idea so he took it upon himself to warn this person called Atrahasis who lived in Mesopotamia. ...to build a boat to rescue life when the waters came. And in it, he told him the shape of it and the materials he would need and how much he would need of the materials, um, so he could do it safely. And in the 60 lines of the tablet, all this stuff was there. It was like a blueprint to build this boat. And it, it was just extraordinary because it was round, the boat. Um, and everybody who knew their Bible, uh, the ark's a coffin shape kind of affair and nobody thought of it being a round boat. And, um, the, the fact is that round boats, um, were used in Mesopotamia on, on the rivers, c- coracles that's to say, 'cause for transporting things and they would never sink, they were very appropriate and, and so in this story it was decided it was gonna be a giant coracle. A really, really big one that would never sink and the g- the... m- male and female animals could go in and the, Atrahasis' wife and his three sons and so forth could go in and everything would be there and it would float on the water and when it came down they said, "We'll start all over again." So it, it's, it's got very many points in common with th- the book, the description of the flood in Genesis and of course so did the one in Gilgamesh. So in 1872 there was a, um, a, a, a assyriologist in the British Museum called George Smith and he was a very, very talented reader and in 1872 he discovered that one of the tablets from the Nineveh library we were talking about before had on it a passage which ran in parallel with Gilgamesh about the waters coming and the boat and everybody floating and even to the point that when the rain stopped and the ark came to rest on a mountain that the hero of this thing in Gilgamesh, who was called Utnapishtim released a bird three times to see whether the trees had come up and the first one came back and the second one and the third one didn't so he knew that... So this was not only in the Epic of G- Gilgamesh but it was also in the book of Genesis. So what it meant was that it wasn't... you couldn't have two stories, it wasn't two stories about the same thing, it was literary dependence. It was literary dependence, so one was locked into the other. The text of the Hebrew Bible from whenever it was written down, of course nobody knows quite when, but whenever it was, it was about the same time as the one from Nineveh, about the 7th Century, 6th Cent- something like that, that, that, that the time interval between the Gilgamesh version from Nineveh and the Hebrew Bible is not like a big expanse of time. So there was an argument that one goes this way and one goes that way but then when this tablet came in a thousand years older nobody believes the Bible was written in 1700 BC. So the primacy of the Mesopotamian matter was established and it's important because you never get floods in Jerusalem. (laughs) You just don't. But in Mesopotamia they had floods, the rivers sometimes there wasn't enough water, sometimes there was too much, sometimes there was far too much water. So the mechanism that, that the waters could be used as a destructive force by the powers that be is a plausible Mesopotamian mechanism and it's based in a sort of sense, in my opinion, in reality I think there must have been some tsunami once most people were drowned and those who survive were in boats obviously and then afterwards nobody ever forgot it f- and it went on and on and on.

    12. LFLex Fridman1:17:01

        So you mean, uh, there actually could have been a catastrophic event of a large scale?

    13. IFIrving Finkel1:17:05

        Yes, not the whole world 'cause people would-

    14. LFLex Fridman1:17:07

        But just enough to imagine?

    15. IFIrving Finkel1:17:08

        Yeah. Sweeping down to the Persian Gulf and, you know, the flat plains, everything would be destroyed, all the houses would be destroyed and there'll also be drowned and...

    16. LFLex Fridman1:17:16

        This is an incredible discovery. And do you think it's possible that this is the original? There are flood myths in many cultures.

    17. IFIrving Finkel1:17:24

        I believe this, the Mesopotamians had a deep-seated horror of dependency on water when they couldn't control it. They were fearful of it. And they had a rainbow in Babylonia, like in the Bible a- as a proof that the disastrous flood would never happen again. But I think there must have been one episode of this kind, maybe 5,000 years before the tablet, 10,000 it doesn't matter because with the passage of time nothing happens in that part of the world so something will be alive, grandfather to grandson, before you go to sleep, "And remember my boy, you know, you only have to be careful because otherwise..." and all that stuff. For sure, bogeyman stuff. It never quite died out in their conscious minds. So I think that when the Judeans from Jerusalem, after the destruction of the temple and the, by the Babylonians and the rout of the priesthood and everything, the king and the others went over land to Babylon as refugees and they had to live there for three generations of time under Nebuchadnezzar's r- reign. So I believe that the text of the Bible was written then because if you r- read the Bible attentively which I can't say I do on a regular basis but if you do read it dispassionately, um, you have the mechanism that the early books of the Bible explain to the reader how it is that these people are in such a mess because (laughs) they're supposed to be the chosen people doing all that. Look at, they haven't got a temple, they haven't got a country, they're washed up and everything like that. So I think that what happened was w- it's, it's a complex thing but the Judeans from Jerusalem, they spoke Hebrew but they also spoke Aramaic.... right? The two languages, they're sister languages. And the Babylonians spoke Babylonian, and they also spoke Aramaic. And they all wore the same kind of clothes, and they all had brown skin. And when the Je- all these refugees from Jerusalem were milling around in Babylonia, they would have intermarried and disappeared within no time at all. And the authorities who were there prevented this by drawing up a kind of charter of their history, explaining things from the beginning of time up until now, how it happened and what happened. And it was all intentional. So that is, in my opinion, the driving force behind the Hebrew text. And the thing about it is, that they didn't have, in Jewish philosophical tradition, stuff about creation and the beginning of the world. Uh, and they took Babylonian ideas, which they learned when they were there, and they recycled them. So, whereas the Babylonians decided that the gods were gonna wipe out the noisy persons, when the Jewish philosophers got this narrative to recycle about, about the vengeful almighty, who was, in the Old Testament, a very unpleasant and vengeful person. It was because of sin. It wasn't because of rockin' and playing the radio, it was sin. So they took one narrative, and they recycled it for their own purposes.

    18. LFLex Fridman1:20:43

        The flood is a useful tool to, to punish people for whatever X is?

    19. IFIrving Finkel1:20:49

        That's exactly right. And something else is this. Something else is this, right? You have five days to build the ark, or whatever it is. Two weeks to build the ark. So the clock goes tick, tick, tick, tick, tick. And about a third of the films that come out of Hollywood are the world's gonna be demolished by aliens, and you've got 24 hours to think of a cure. Tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick. So it's the... That narrative is irresistible. That one man can save the world, if he's lucky, in time, from disaster. So it starts off with Ut-napishtim and then it goes on to, um, Noah, and then it goes on to Hollywood.

14. 1:21:26 – 1:32:49

    Noah's Ark

    1. IFIrving Finkel1:21:27

    2. LFLex Fridman1:21:27

       Do you think this ark, in the tablet, actually was ever built? You did build a replica one-third the size.

    3. IFIrving Finkel1:21:35

       Yeah.

    4. LFLex Fridman1:21:36

       And you, uh... People should check out, you tell the story of that wonderfully. Uh, what did you learn from building this replica? And do you think the actual ark existed?

    5. IFIrving Finkel1:21:46

       No, I don't think so. I think it's a literary construction out of the reality that people who did survive were on boats. I mean, they had boats, for sure. And you might wake up in the Persian Gulf and never know what happened, but, you know, it, it's a literary moral principle teaching narrative. And look, missionaries take it all round the world. That's the other thing. See there... This is, this is the mystery of it, that you have flood stories everywhere, and some of them are from meddlesome missionaries who have all these innocent little kids sitting on benches and, "I'm going to tell you a story," like that. So it moves into this consciousness, then it gets recycled, and it gets recycled. So this is one thing. And then also, there probably are spontaneous ideas, because it's not so complicated or so amazing that independently people would have such a narrative. After all, you know, like the, the Great River in China floods and everybody gets... So that, that's not at all surprising. But what was so shocking for George Smith, who was such a clever person, is to read for the first time on this tablet from Ninevah, long before the one that I discovered came to light, about the three birds being released one after the other. And that, that was the clincher that the two stories were locked together. And lots of clergymen got very miserable about it and, uh, didn't know what to make of it.

    6. LFLex Fridman1:23:10

       So that's, that's the definitive proof that those are literary...

    7. IFIrving Finkel1:23:14

       A liter- literary, I think, literary link. I think so.

    8. LFLex Fridman1:23:18

       And, I mean, these puzzles that are then connected, but, uh, the ark, you discov- 1,000 years... So that means that story of the flood has been told many, many times across that span to, you know-

    9. IFIrving Finkel1:23:37

       Yeah.

    10. LFLex Fridman1:23:37

        ... do your homework or the flood is gonna come.

    11. IFIrving Finkel1:23:40

        That's right.

    12. LFLex Fridman1:23:40

        Do all (laughs)

    13. IFIrving Finkel1:23:42

        That's right. And every time somebody built a caracole and they didn't do the waterproofing right-

    14. LFLex Fridman1:23:49

        Yeah.

    15. IFIrving Finkel1:23:49

        ... you know what will happen? You'll be out on the river and that will be your lot, you know. I, I think so. I think it was a... I, I... There, there's a certain amount of evidence that in Mesopotamian society, people talk about the time before the flood and after the flood. And it's like when I was a boy, people used to talk about, "Before the war, we used to..." And now, we, we do this. It's, it's a kind of cataclysmic c- cut across history which provides a, a, a ruler, so things are either before it or after it. Because there's a king list, for example, where they wrote down the names of all the kings all the way back at the beginning, including kings before the flood. They knew about that. They had their names and their great regnal years or thousands of years. Fascinating.

    16. LFLex Fridman1:24:42

        So there's a guy named Graham Hancock who talks about the Younger Dryas Hypothesis, 10,000 BC, that there was an asteroid that hit Earth and melted the ice sheets, and that created a flood in North America. So that means an actual cataclysmic global event, that then as all the different civilizations sprung up, they all carried that knowledge, that memory. That's his idea. What probability would you assign to that?

    17. IFIrving Finkel1:25:13

        I would say negligible because I regard it as a literary matter-

    18. LFLex Fridman1:25:17

        Mm-hmm.

    19. IFIrving Finkel1:25:18

        ... which is not predicated on the existence of flood in people's minds. But I do believe that the story in Mesopotamia...... owes its inception to a disastrous flood. But nothing global-

    20. LFLex Fridman1:25:30

        Yeah.

    21. IFIrving Finkel1:25:30

        ... nothing that touched America or China or Birmingham. So I-I-I don't have any sympathy with that. But people have made, drilled a cause and then the, and, and then the... I don't know, all over. I'm not interested in all that stuff. It's, to my mind-

    22. LFLex Fridman1:25:42

        It's a literary device.

    23. IFIrving Finkel1:25:43

        ... it's a literary top-off of great potency, of irresistibly potency. 'Cause everybody identifies with the idea of being in bed and someone knocks on the door and says, "Get up, you've gotta build a boat and this is what you're gonna need and you've gotta get on with it, sunshine, or we're all sunk." I mean, what are you gonna do? The most interesting thing is this Atra-Hasis in the 1700 text. He wasn't a king and he wasn't a sailor or a boat builder.

    24. LFLex Fridman1:26:12

        Mm-hmm.

    25. IFIrving Finkel1:26:12

        So how comes this clever god who wants to find someone to buil-... Wouldn't you go for a look in the Yellow Pages for a, a boat building company and say, "Listen, fella, I got a deal." No. He had to tell him. "This is the blueprint, this is the shape. You need all this, you need all that, you've gotta measure it and all that." It's a very interesting thing.

    26. LFLex Fridman1:26:30

        I mean, yeah, that's a great story. You don't go to the great boat, boat builder. You go... (laughs)

    27. IFIrving Finkel1:26:35

        The taxi driver or something like that.

    28. LFLex Fridman1:26:36

        To the taxi, and then that's that, that, uh, hero's journey that m- that's the stuff of great myths. Yeah.

    29. IFIrving Finkel1:26:43

        It is, it is a great myth.

    30. LFLex Fridman1:26:45

        A little detail would be really cool about the, the, the replica. Like, uh-

Episode duration: 2:05:12