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

The first attempts at writing that we could call writing go back to the middle of the fourth millennium, say around 3500 BC, something like that. There were people in the Middle East, individuals who lived between the Euphrates and Tigris Rivers, who had clay as their operating material for building and all sorts of other purposes, and eventually as a writing support, they somehow developed the idea of the basis of writing, which means that you can make a sign, which people agree on, on a surface that another person, when they see it, they know what sound it engenders. That is the essence of writing, that there's an agreed system of symbols that A can use and B can then play back, either in their heads or literally with their 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.