#487 – Irving Finkel: Deciphering Secrets of Ancient Civilizations & Flood Myths

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 Kineha Formscript, and more generally, ancient languages of Sumerian, Akkadian, and Babylonian. And also on ancient board games and Mesopotamian magic, medicine, literature, and culture. I should also mention that both on and off the mic Irving was a super kind and fun person to talk to, with an infectious enthusiasm for ancient history that of course I already love, but fell in love with even more. And now a quick few second mention of each sponsor. Check them out in the description or at lexregion.com/sponsors, it is in fact the best way to support this podcast. We've got Shopify for selling stuff online, Miro for brainstorming ideas with your team, Chevron for reliable energy that powers data centers, element for electrolytes, and AG1 for my daily multivitamin, choose wise and my friends. And now onto the full ad reads, I do try to make them interesting, but if you skip, please still check out the sponsors, I enjoy their stuff maybe you will too. To get in touch with me, for whatever reason, go to lexfreedman.com/contact, all right, let's go. This episode is brought to you by Shopify, the platform designed for anyone to sell anywhere with a great looking online store. So of course Shopify is great as an app, as a service, but the thing that always fascinates me is the engineering behind the scenes, and this is truly an incredible engineering team. And if you talk about this for many hours and perhaps it's good to give an example, they build a custom search engine rather than using a elastic search or any of the off-the-shelf engines that will require significant re-architecture at their scale. C++ was the core language for close to hardware optimizations, memory efficiency across hundreds of millions of items. They created rank flow, a domain-specific language combining Python-like simplicity with C++ performance, rejected hybrid Python call and C++ approaches due to deployment complexity, version skew, and operational overhead, omitting these things from their recent blog box. I highly recommend. There's so many technical blogs about the various problems they're solving. And they do this incremental phase type development deployment where they ship fast, optimize later, maintain compatibility always. And phase one was the first four weeks they built SIMScore DSL, which is a basic C++ engine to unblock data science experiments, and then in phase two, which took two to four months, they built Turbo DSL, which is a high performance engine version of that, which achieves 48% speed up. There's so much more to talk about, but incredible engineering that brings you an incredible product at the end. Sign up for a $1 per month trial period at Shopify.com/lex, and that's all or case, go to Shopify.com/lex to take your business to the next level today. This episode is also brought to you by Miro, an online collaborative platform. The very kind that the peoples and the civilizations of the Etch and World that Ervering talks about didn't have. Now, imagine that. One of the great things about the computing age is that we can work together. It's not just the productivity gains for the individuals. It's the productivity gains for teams. And no words that more true than in the process of idea development. As I talked about in the recent episode of Michael Levin, do we have ideas or do ideas have us, and ideas have a way of kind of occupying for a time or for a generation. The brains and multiples of people and those ideas are formed and shaped and modified and evolved across those brains, utilizing those brains. Or the brains do the modification, whichever it is, you want to have the bus tools for the job. This episode is also brought to you by Chevron, an energy company that delivers affordable, reliable energy to U.S. data centers. I'm attending Europe's in San Diego, which is where she's learning conference. And boys, one thing clear, aside all the fascinating technical details, the turmoil of the research world, the excitement, the wander, the mystery, beyond all that, is the reality that in order for the scaling lost the hold, the compute needs to scale. And for the compute to scale, we need energy. In the United States, the scaling of the energy infrastructure is essential, because the demand for electricity is growing at an unprecedented scale. Chevron's working hard to provide multi gigawatts of delivered power with the flexibility to scale further. Energy is not an easy problem, especially if the scaling loss holds, especially if there's benefits to the products that rely on artificial intelligence, both for the training side and the inference side. And frankly, it is the inference side that will over time consume more and more energy and require more and more compute. What a fascinating world we live in. The full stack is full of scientific and engineering challenges. And I love it. Visit chevron.com/power to learn more that's chevron.com/power. This episode is also brought to you by element, my daily zero sugar and delicious electrolyte mix. Every once in a while I'll also partake in this sparkling water, but majority of my element consumption is the OG drink mix. I can't live without it. The electrolyte sodium potassium magnesium is more essential if you're doing fasting. If you're doing carnivore, low carb diet, if you're doing anything with your body is pushed to the limit at all, you have to make sure you get the electrolytes right. My favorite flavor is watermelon salt. I had a really nice family Thanksgiving in Ohio, OHIO, boy are the football fans go hard there. It was below freezing, and I was planning to run outside long distance to prepare for the full overeating that it's Thanksgiving, but it was rough. I've gotten soft, I think, about the cold and I just did a lot of push ups and pull ups. I'm more and more realizing, as much as I am challenged by running spiritually and physically, it is a thing that if I don't do, I'm less happy, and if I do after I'm done with the run, I just have a greater clarity about the world and about myself, so I try to run every day. But anyway, get a free eight-com sample pack with any purchase, try it to drinkelement.com/lex. This episode is also brought to you by AG1, and all in one daily drinks to support better health and people's performance. Like I said, I was hanging out with family and my parents were by AGZ, which I still haven't tried, but they recommended it very highly, so I'm an AG1 guy. I guess AGZ is a nightly sleep support that helps with a restful restore to sleep. Anyway, my parents really do swear by it, so if that's the thing you're interested in, please try it out. It is melatonin-free, and doesn't just help you fall asleep, it helps with the quality of the sleep. But yeah, AG1 is in the stack of things that consume what I'm traveling to help me feel. I come at home and I've been traveling quite a lot recently, and I will be traveling a lot in the new year, and the feeling of home, the feeling of being grounded in a place that feels like home. It's really important. So, it's the little traditions, the little habits that build for myself to remind me that even when I'm far away, I can carry a little bit of the comforts of home with me. Alright, they'll give you one month supply of fish oil when you sign up at drinkag1.com/lex. This is the Lex treatment podcast to support it. Please check out our sponsors in the description, where you can also find links to contact me, ask questions, get feedback, and so on. And now, dear friends, here's Irving 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 clays there, operating material for building and also as other purposes, and eventually as a writing support, they somehow develop 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 and genders. 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 the oldest evidence we have is around 3500 BC, but whether that was anywhere near the time or the stage when this started off for the first time seems to me very, very unlikely. So, among these, the Mesopotamians, around 3500, they started to do this. They made up signs, which everybody understood, and they could write simple pictographic messages, forties 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 in clever persons had a kind of light bulb moment when they realised 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 to before long, proverbs, and literature, and all the other things that got written down. So, it was a pretty gigantic step whenever it was taken, but we really have no idea when it was first taken, but the first evidence we have presents a sort of clear-ish sort of picture, it was simple and you got more complicated, then it became magnificent, so that with all the signs, a fluent well-trained scribe could not only write down the Sumerian language, which was one of the native tongues of Iraq, or the Babylonian language, which was one, the other main language of Iraq, but also any other language he heard, so if somebody came speaking French ahead of their time and spoke out loud, he could record with these signs the sound of French, and we have examples of funny languages in the world around in the Bronze Age, which were written in Q&A form purely by ear, and often sometimes the scribes who recorded by dictation or by something, wrote stuff they couldn't understand, but somebody else could read and understand it. So, what you have is long before the alphabet, when the alphabet not even a dream, 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, or probably only one person, suddenly realized that if there was no control, 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 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 colours, and of countries, and all the gods, and everything, they made a systematic attempt to make these signs, to standardise 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 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 recognise 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 gellously safeguarded and protected, and it lasted fantastically. We should say that the name of that system, that lasted for three thousand years as Kuneha form. Yeah, so, in the 19th century, about 1840, 1850, they started to find these things on excavations in Iraq, the Begasarian cities, and sometimes further south, the Babylonian cities. They found these clay tablets, which, in the ground, lasted unimaginable lengths of time, and they were all written in what we call Kuneha form script, and the Kuneha form part of it means wedge shape, because Kuneha was seen that in means wedge. And when they first saw these signs, they realised that a cluster of marks broke down into different arrangements of triangular shapes, and it's most clear on these Syrian reliefs, where the writing is very big, and you can easily tell that they were that shape. On a tablet, the wedge is not quite so predominant. So, that was it. So, they first called them Kuneatic, or Kuneha form, and the word stuck. And of course, growing up in the British Museum and reading these things for a living, becomes a kind of lifetimes work to make sure that everybody in the country knows what Kuneha form means, because once in a while you meet somebody who never heard of the word at all, and this is appalling. So, people do survive, however, but it's an important mission, because it's such an achievement by man, and so much knowledge was encapsulated in these lengths of clay, because they used it for everyday things like letters, and business documents, and contracts. This is one thing. And then the King's wrote, "Long elaborate accounts of their campaigns and the military activities, and then there was proper literature, bell letter, and magic and medicine, and all other genres of literature that we would naturally list on a sheet of paper in alphabetical writing, what you would use writing for. They basically did, and it had the unexpected quality that most of these clay things lasted in the ground until now." So, however, many hundreds of thousands of tablets are in the world's museums and collections, there must be millions of them in the ground awaiting excavation. So, in a way, that's a comforting thought, because they're safe there and protected. You said that the development of Kuneha form 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 barley, here's the sun, here's whatever the actual object. Exactly. But to actually write down sound is a genius invention. Well, I think it's rather paradoxical, because the first generation or so of tablets that we have a written in these pictographic signs where each sign means what it looks like. So, this is a very limited method of recording messages and it doesn't lend itself to recording grammar. And then the secondary phase, as we understand it from archaeology, is the perception that you could take these signs, still meaning what they look like, but also what the words sound 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 grammar and everything else. Now, the thing is, the received law from acereology 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 come 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 they didn't have A, B, C, D, E, F, G, but they could usually work out all the vowels and consonants without naming them as vowels and consonants, but the component parts. So they could have had signs that started out because if you decided you had, we have 26, let's say they had 50 signs that would create the sound. They could write anything without any further trouble. So I find it very bewildering that they started off with the least flexible and the least adaptable system of pictographs and then they moved onto 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 settle, so they draw three little sheep, you know how much it is and what they are and so forth. And so I think that what happened with the Sumerians with their pictographic signs is that those signs are right at the end of a very, very, very long period of time when somebody thought what we can do is take these stupid inhibiting no smoking signs and write language. Yeah. That is what I think happened. That's what I think happened. Is this a controversial statement? Highly controversial. Many, many historians would leave the room. Yeah. 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 right. You have a root like "do", which means to go. And then you have prefixes like "e" or "moo" or "bar". And one's a passive, one's an active and this and this. So when you have a sentence, you have one of the "moo", "bar" 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. You slap stuff on the beginning, slap stuff on the end and each particle creates a bit of meaning. So you have a long verb, which tells you he would have done it if he could, but he couldn't kind of think in the form of the verb. But the thing is, if you want it to write down you and I decided to write down. So the first thing we would do is have a sign "moo" and then we'd have "bar" and then we'd have "e" because every five minutes people make those noises. Yeah. You see what I mean. Yeah, absolutely. Do you think it's possible we might find much, much older? I do. Cuneiform type tablets or 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 "Gabeckli Tepe." Oh yeah. You know about "Gabeckli Tepe." Yes. Well everybody knows about the buildings and the architecture and the sky. 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 colour plate with lots of other things around green stone like a scarab from Egypt. That's to say it has an arched back and a flat bottom. And on the flat bottom there are hieroglyphic signs carved in the stone. Right? No one said anything about it at all. But it's clear to me a that this was a stamp to ratify where the carvings of the signs on clay or some other ceiling material would leave an impression. It must be that. So this is about 9,000 BC. Yeah. Now when I was a boy at university at my professor said to me that the reason you can writing evolved in Mesopotamia because they had complex cities with cigarettes and big buildings and lots of people in that to organise everything and so they invented writing to cope with it. Well if they had to cope with that in summa in 3,000 BC, they sure as hell had to do it at Gebekli Tepe because they hardly even begun to finish excavating the sites at Gebekli Tepe. They go on and on like Manchester and Newcastle, United. And really the old rule would be you could not have architecture like that without the plan and built according to principle with all the different people. You couldn't have that without writing in southern Iraq. So how come suddenly in that 7,000 years earlier they do it there? And that green stone shows that they had writing. That was an official who sealed this, got the stuff or whatever it was always his dad's name or whatever it has got a weekly snake and a weekly this. That is pictographic writing. Maybe even as phonetic writer 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 precious stones from Anatolia, they knew that in the south they had lots and lots of stuff, they wanted to trade, they had to communicate. And it's basically like having a cigarette with an X through the middle. Everybody in the world knows what that means that they don't know what the word for cigarette is in this language or cancer or filter or tobacco. It doesn't matter. That's pictographic writing. We still use it. And it's above all kinds of mess and I think that was the prevailing system because I honestly believe that the people at this time were not stupid, they weren't guerrillas, they weren't less advanced than we are, they were probably indistinguishable from what we are. So you have merchants and wanderers and people who see let's go down the river and see what we end up and people were looking for money, looking for women, looking for everything. But that's surely how it was. But if you look at those gebeckly buildings with a skeptical eye, how it could be, I mean, their 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 do they do it with a megaphone, your breakfast and all that kind of thing? No way. No way. So that's a really controversial statement. It is really controversial. At the time of Gubucketepi, they may have been already a writing system. There was, because the thing is about it, that it's a seal to ratify. It's not just a squiggle on a pot and you can say, "Oh, it's just a piece of debt." This is a finished thing with a flat surface, you press it down, say you have some contract, you have some building arrangement, some, we're paying for these bricks, whatever it was, and the official person had to squash it down, and it leaves the impression. I mean, I'm a great believer in Sherlock Holmes as a teaching system for intelligence and rationality and logic and thinking. I read those stories a million times when I was a kid, and the thing about, about 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. That's a powerful statement. It's a powerful statement. Well, that seal from Gebekli Tepe is a raindrop, from which I infer writing, and it's perfectly possible they all wrote on flat leaves, cards drawn 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, well, just because it's now, it wouldn't be them, but that argument is utterly, utterly fallacious, because the process of evolution is stymied, left right in center by inertia. Inertia is nearly as strong as evolution, and this is something that the people who talk about progress and ideas have no idea about. First of all, your whole line of work you're making me realize is a kind of like Sherlock Holmes type of process, the deciphering of the language, archaeology of taking those pieces of evidence and trying to reconstruct a vision of that world. And now you're making me realize that even all the kuneiform tablets we have is just a raindrop compared to the waterfall of thousands of years of humans. We have a lot, but it's nothing in comparison to what existed. But not only that, see, we don't have to decipher anymore. We can read the Canadian or Babylonians, we're in 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 is the radiologists have the. In built idea that what we have is something like all there ever was, which is observed. For example, there's a period called the Earth 3 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 tyres and offerings and everything was recorded by what I always refer to and people sympathise with is the ancestors of the inland revenue because everything had to be written down so that some smuck could check it and fill out the legend. Some other smuck above him could okay it so there was no funny business or no mistakes. Now the thing is there are thousands of those tablets written in about 2,100 to 2,000 BC. Thousands of them about size of a box of matches. So people like to generalise 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 archaeologists in the 19th century came down on these and then all the locals came and they brought, dug them up and they sold them all over the place and they got all over the world. Thousands and thousands of them out of probably two stories 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 realise how slued it is. I mean you know it's quite remarkable. So you and all your time of studying kuneiform tablets, do you sometimes late at night get a glimpse of the waterfall like can you imagine? Yes, I can imagine. I can imagine easily because once in a while a library is discovered in the 1850s at Ninevee which was the Assyrian capital. There was a fat king, king of the world called Asha Barnipow and he had a fantastic library and he promoted it. He impounded tablets. He had them brought in Indivis. He wanted all the prevailing knowledge and all knowledge from before under one roof. He 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, lay out and those people. So what did they find? They found the tablets higledy-pigally all over the floor of a huge room in the corridors and everything and lots of them broken and lots of them burnt. So ever since then until we're really quite recently, a seriologist has spent all the people who work on these nind ofy tablets but all the time joining the bits together and you have the story about Gilgamesh and the goddess who falls in love with him in the garden and she wants to seduce him and dot dot dot you can't find a bit. So you look for another bit you look for another bit and gradually they piece together the literature and the assumption has always been that if you put them all together again you will have the whole library but it's the absolute opposite because what happened was that the Babylonians in the south, in my opinion, they worked hand in glove with the Eliamites from Iran, they had a pincer movement and they beat the serial, they conquered the serial and they ran through the capital and they set fire to everything, pinched all the women to all the jewelry and all the gold and people say that in a fit of peak they destroyed the library but they wouldn't destroy the library because it was the giant brain from which the Assyrians ran a world empire and it had all the knowledge in the world, they destroyed that, they spoke the same language, they had the same writing system, they'd have taken them all safely home. Cart after cart after cart and I think what's left there is duplicates and broken things, the things that got drops and everything and that's what everyone thinks is it. So this is also one, it's a controversial question. You just love stuff, it's starting trouble. It's common sense. You're going to get both of us cancelled today. But you see the thing, you see the thing, it's predicated on the assumption that what we have is what, that only what there was and this is such a fallacy, it needs to be attacked, left, right and center. So a lot of the Kuneha form language is already deciphered. Sure. Can you speak to the deciphering process? How hard is it? Maybe take us to this place of for you yourself first learning the language, figuring out the puzzle of it, how does it feel, how does it look like to a brain that doesn't deeply understand it and how do you then piece stuff together? Maybe you can go to the early days, sort of the Rosetta Stone of Kuneha form also. That's important. Well, the first thing is how the Kuneha form writing system works because the crucial point and once you see it makes a lot of things clear, is that they wrote ins syllables. So if you take the English alphabet, which of course they didn't, you have 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 bar. But as they had four vowels, you had to have ab and bar, eb and b, ub and bu, eb and bear. So you had the the range of things clustered around what we call a consonant. So they had all those for all the letters which gave them a basic system. There was much more to it than that and it was more complicated than that, where we don't have to really go into it. But basically if you are a Babylonian and we want to write the word museum, which of course is one of the most important words in the English language. We don't have other languages too. So what you would do is you would write the syllable 'moo' and then the sign 'Z' and then the sign 'arm'. So you split the word up into its component syllables. When you read it in your mind, you squash them together into museum. That's the basic system. They had other signs which gave you a clue as to the meaning and bits around the edge, but it's basically syllabic writing. So when you go to university to study kuneiform, what you have to learn is all the signs and all their values. Because unfortunately they didn't just have one for each. They had multiple ones. And the reason is, not that they were mad or they wanted to make life hell, but because the syllables derived from the writing of Sumerian words. So the Sumerian vocabulary had a lot of words that were probably differentiated by tone. So you might have bar and then a rising 'arm' and a lowering. And these signs all retained the bar value even though there were no tones. So it means if you look at a sign list, there's a lot of signs. You have to bar number one which is the common. Then there's bar number two, bar number three and you have to learn them all. And when you read, you have to learn how to do it. So in the modern world, if you go to university to do a curiosity, 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. 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 and the beginning of stick bits at the end, is not only not Semitic, it's not related to any other known language. Oh no. Yeah, this is a bewitching thing, it's a bewitching thing to me. And this is how to understand it because the languages that we study in the world today, linguists study, they more or less all fall into a language group. So you have Indo-European, Spanish, Italian, Latin, Hittite and so forth and so that's what French is one group and you have Germanic and you have Stavonic and most languages, even the far flung ones fall into what can be seen to be maybe big and airy groups, they're family like that. There's not one for Sumerian. So this means that the truth that languages do not exist in a vacuum but they're part of a big family must always have been true. So that when writing arrives about 3000 say 300 BC to write 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, are gone or are gone, they've gone forever and never and never and there's something amazing happens. So we've got the one representative of this bizarre family. It's amazing. It's a very stimulating thing to imagine. 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 in the end, 100,000 years of rule we. living Europe, they had to deal with the ISAs, they all lived together, they bring up their children, they couldn't speak anything, they have the same apparatus, and if you have a human brain, then it responds to stimulus. And the more stimulus it is for communication, I mean, the idea that you and I are out hunting rhino and you say, "Lex, shut up, I'm constantly "Lex", and then I suddenly think, "Oh, I get it, you are "Lex", right? You only have to do that once, then you know who I am, so I know that I'm me and that you are you. So people who say that they couldn't distinguish ego and all that, it's absolutely stupid. If you cut your hand with a knife, you're sure as hell experiencing, you're sure as hell do, it hurts, 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 threatening, people weren't conscious that they were an entity, I don't believe it. And they probably had a way to express that with sounds. Well, eventually yes, names, I mean names, names of things, and then you have a, the idea that a label fixes to something, then the light bulb was going on and next minute you have rhino and you have skin and you have babies and you have, because I think you have an idea and the idea then drives the brain and the brain has another idea, it works like fertility. So what do you think is the motivation, the primary driver of developing written language, is it, is it goes hand in hand with the situation? I think that the media in which it appears is when there's a lot of people living in an urban environment and with rival institutions or with a king or with a government or all those sorts of things, that's why I think it could be actually, Teppi must have been the same thing. I read somewhere that they're all nomads and they only came to Teppi three months, yeah, I mean that cannot be true that they were nomads and they cannot be true, to get the stone and someone has to draw on the ground, the plan of the building, they have to work out how thick it is going to be, how high it's going to be, I mean, you know, you can't, you know, like guerrillas. All right, so deciphering the process of deciphering. 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 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 Elimite and in Babylonian and in Old Persian, trilingual version. And Old Persian, although it's obviously archaic form of the language, Persian, it's still alive, it was still alive in the 19th century. So they, since the Old Persian was written in a very simple style of Cuneiform, they deciphered it, they tweaked it with Old Persian, they read it in Persian, and they read the names Darius, in Old Persian, and then suddenly somebody realized that the other two columns about the same length, what do you know? And the thing is, it said, I am Darius, the great king of the working, the son of, so there's a whole paragraph with repeated things in the person, which they could understand. So what do you know? There are reiterative passages in the other two languages. So that was the key, the kind of the chisel that opened up Cuneiform writing proper, and the thing was, they soon tweaked 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 Nauru in Akkadian and Nakhar in Arabic and Aramaic, and when they realized that the word that corresponded to the person had this form, this was a gift of goal, because everybody immediately sees their Arabic and Hebrew dictionaries and started leafing through looking for words that would fit in the context, and they basically, they 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, I don't know what would have happened. I suppose it's conceivable that in the very modern world, something might have happened, but as it was, it was done by sheer brain power, by very, very clever persons, just doing it, and they cracked it. The ilumite language is much more difficult, but they got a lot of it too. So it was a very romantic thing, because the inscription was carved on a mountain face far above the plain, and then Henry Rudinson, who was an upstanding young British officer who claimed to decipher a conveyer form 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. What a minute. More controversial statement from Murray today. Henry Robinson doesn't deserve the credit for that. No, I don't think he does. He's called the father of a seriology, but I think he's the stepfather of a seriology, because when he first got these inscriptions, he wrote a long book about it, which was almost entirely wrong. And there was a clergyman in Northern Ireland called Edward Hinks, who lived in a place called Killer Lane, had five daughters and ran this church, who was possibly a card carrying genius, if not jolly, jolly close. And what happened with him was this. There was an ongoing competition, well an ongoing challenge to decipher hieroglyphic writing, which he usually gets the credit for, and Hinks was very interested in trying to decipher hieroglyphic head 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. And at the same time, he cracked it. He worked out how he worked. He realized that one sign can have more than one value of sound and of meaning, because they are multivalent in the signs. I tried to shelter you from the horrible news, but it's actually, it's not, it's not a walk in the park. It takes about five years to to them. You probably do it in about four probably. That is a compliment. I think you just complimented me. Thank you. Thank you very much. So you're saying one sign that looks exactly the same might have different sounds given the context. Yeah, and you have to choose the right sound and also different meaning as well. Because, for example, if you have a time for hot, it would halt. But 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 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 do 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. That's not connected. That's really mean. Yeah. So when you read 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 bar and the next one is ab among other readings, bar ab sounds like a syllable structure for a word and you go on like that. So there are two things about it. One is that if you want to, you can master it. The other thing is that the number of variables was restricted. They controlled it. So it wasn't insane. So in other words, if you learn the corpus and you learn how the signs are composed and you learn their different values, then you've got it down. And off you go. And it's very beautiful. I think it's marvellous. Can you, in all seriousness, take me back to the time when you were learning it? What's the process of learning it? Well, I had very abnormal upbringing because when I went to university, for about three years beforehand, I'd wanted to be an Egyptologist. So I'd read the grammar by Gardiner and was looking forward very much to study ancient Egyptian. And what happened was that I went up to the University of Birmingham where I went to university. And there was a man called Rundle Clarke who was an Egyptologist. And Rundle Clarke came in on the Monday and gave us one lesson about Egyptian sculpture or something like that. And next minute he, next day he died. Bang. So the professor called me into his room and said, look, it's going to take me a while to get an Egyptologist. They don't grow on trees. But there's another person in this department who teaches another ancient language called Lambert and he teaches Kuneiform. So what I suggest is you go and do a bit of Kuneiform with Professor Lambert and then when I get an Egyptologist, you can convert back. That's how I. "Go and knock on the door?" "Yes!" So I went in and said, "I want to learn Kineiform." And Professor Lambert, who was rather a Sherlock Holmes kind of figure, aesthetic, bony, sarcastic, cruel, cruel, absolutely terrifying. And I said, I wanted to learn Kineiform. And he wasn't at all pleased because this was a time in Britain when Professor's resented having students to teach because he butted into their research time. It was that sort of arrangement. Anyway, I started it off and after about, I didn't know maybe one or maybe two lessons. I knew this was going to be my life's work. So that's what happened to me. It was an amazing thing. So he gave me a list of signs to learn basic signs. So I did. And the next couple of days and then we came in and we started reading. So given the complexity of the signs, why did Kineiform last 3,000 years, the most successful writing system ever? Fair question. There are several factors. One is the famous factor of inertia. The second thing is that people who could read and write and were in charge of archives. And with the clocks in the temple and the writers for the king and everything, commanded a very great deal of power because most of the public couldn't. So they reserved it themselves, knowledge, understanding, philosophical inquiry. I mean, no doubt it went on in pubs and things, but they were in charge. I had everything under lock and key. And there were, I think the scribal schools are rather clikki. They were certainly clikki in the sense of Oxford and Cambridge being rivals. That sort of thing, they had that sort of idea. And it was in no one's interest whatsoever. Nobody would ever concede any interest in the idea of literacy for all. This would be, it would never be thought of and it would be anathema. And so if you got on a soapbox on a Saturday afternoon and say, "Ah, enough of this. We have to teach the children." They'd be taken away, I think. So we're getting, in these tablets, the output of the intellectual class, a very small fraction of humans. So we're getting just the Oxford and the Cambridge. We are, except this, that when you went to scribal school, you had to learn Sumerian and Acadian, the language is properly and all the vocabulary and the grammar. So some boys probably had a lot of trouble doing this. And they were okay, but it ain't going to be no geniuses. And I think the situation in the school was that the teachers farmed out the kids who would actually rather have been outside playing football but could read and write. To earning their living, doing low-level reading and writing, that's to say writing contracts, letters, everyday things for people because no one could read and write. So you had to get a scribe, if you're going to marry your daughter off and you get all the witnesses about the presence and all this, all the thing had to be done for four days. So the writer would come and do, so your medium-level writers would serve that requirement. And very talented or clever or intellectual students would be encouraged to go into one of the literary professions which would be, so to speak, medicine, law, working for the king, working for the church, I mean the priesthood, so for all those things which were dependent upon archives and writing, they would find their nivo and also an architecture because if a big building had to be built, then somebody had to know about load-bearing things and brick measurements and so some of them went into that kind of work and also probably some of them went into running the army and they had to move stores and animals and so they found their nivo and some of them were intellectually very able indeed and they went into the disciplines of on the one hand astrology but more seriously into astronomy and theoretical grammar because they had treatises about relationship between the two languages and how they worked and different parts of speech and they wrote learned commentaries as well what words meant. So there was an intellectual high-level top and then there were lots of professional scribes and then the kids who left school as soon as possible and did all that like today. I apologize to be philosophical but Wiggenstein the philosopher said the limits of our language is the limits of our world so to which degree did the languages that were encoding kuneha form define human civilization would you say what were the what were the things that were complicated to express and therefore were not expressed often. That's really an interesting question. So in terms of 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 however subtlety it might be even if people understand the subtlety you can because the tools are fantastic and Arabic has lots of synonyms and lots of devices and all the same in Babylonian it was a fully fledged literary language. The question about about whether the language put a stop to further things as which is basically what you're asking is immensely complicated but the one thing that strikes me as relevant is that a very huge proportion of scholarly literature and espertemia it takes the form of omens because they believe that events accidental or deliberately stimulated had implications what was going to happen and they took omens from things in the sky and things in the street and every single thing if you were well qualified divine they would have this significance right now there are thousands of lines of omens of all different kinds and in occasion it says for example if a lizard runs across the breakfast table the queen will die so if you translate the occasion this way we would if verb nothing if that then this so there are thousands of thousands of lines translated in many books about omens where if this happens that will happen so this is how it's understood by my colleagues well this is absolutely impossible because if you are you're the chief diviner for the king and you open up a sheet to take a liver out and examine it according to them and if the queen's going to die the king's there you're not going to say the queen's going to die I mean you're going to like a fucking idiot if she doesn't die and if she does die you're going to be responsible so all you can ever do and ever ever have been able to do is to say there's a sign here that says that the queen could die meaning could die not will die and therefore the requisite ritual or magic must immediately swing into action to defer the danger so the point is that a equals b is never true it means that with a b could be might be ought to be should be could be true all those subtle things so that the diviner who works from the king must have been a philosopher who looks at the king he looks at the king and he knows what the king wants him to say so he has to tell the king why he wants to hear he has to tell the king if it's bad using such a way that he doesn't mind or he won't worry it's the most beautiful thing it's so subtle it's it's like a it's like a violin concerto it can never have been a equals b for a minute so the medical tech say if you do if a man has just do do do do do do do do do do this drinks is it he'll get better right he says you'll get better so you ever met a doctor who will say you do this you'll get better no they say all being well you'll be back on your feet or I've seen this kind of condition many times or everything should go fine you should get better you should be better soon but never you will get better because what happens if you die where are you the lawyers will show up absolutely so this means that not expressable in a cadian grammar are these modal verbs 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 the authorities is utterly impossible and if you translate he will in a literary text he might then the whole text is different the whole text is yeah absolutely and they don't my colleagues translate that says in the grammar books in it in it in it like that automatically there's no self appraisal of the folly of it you have said the translation is part archaeology part detective work part poetry can we just speak about translation in the art of it a bit more. Yes. I mean, it's such an incredible discipline. Just like you said, hinted at just a subtle variation and a single word can change everything. Well, you know, the truth about translation is that you never really have a word in one language, which precisely equates another. 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 a key is they learn the occasion word and they learn the English translation, right? You have to parasser is to divide. So whenever you have the verb parasser is 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 what that can mean in English, where the one at the bottom and the one at the top, you'd hardly know they were connected. And the Chicago dictionary, which is such a magnificent thing, when you come to the museum and see me, I'll show you this. It's the most salient and important thing that came out of America in all its history. It's the Chicago Syrian dictionary, which is this long. It's only a one rival to it for cultural importance, which is the electric guitar, of course. But the two of them, I think, are your countrymen's greatest achievement. It's the pride of our nation. It's the very thing. Can you, I'm sorry to take the tangent. What is the Chicago dictionary? It started in the 20s, and they made a dictionary of the Babylonian language, A to Z, so to speak. And it's as long as this table is 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, it means B, but they had, so if you have something in a proverb, the meaning is going to be different from a letter. And, you know, so people really, really understand the cadence. They really do. But this thing about the modal verbs is an interesting conundrum to me, because 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, now like you were sending you in my, do it, you know, something like that. Anyway, so nowadays we, it's not a decipherment that's the job, it's just reading. And if you have lots of tablets to work on, back on a dig, it's 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 to seriologist, you should be able to cite, read more or less except most say a letter or something like that, but most documents have some damage. So you have to learn how to interpret stuff. And also some literature is very difficult because of technical vocabulary and they had technical vocabulary and unusual words. So you can do all of that. You can kind of figure out the technical complexities. You can figure out the noise, meaning missing pieces. Yeah, sometimes you can calculate what it ought to be, make a reasonable suggestion. And this dictionary which I was talking to you about is such a fantastic tool because a lot of people worked on it for, it was the national endowment for the humanities and it was for decades and decades of work. And most of the world's best to seriologist collaborated on it. So the quality of translation and understanding is really extraordinary. What are some things you've read from that time? Is there some jokes? Is there some love letters? There are one or two letters about from a chapter woman about, you know, you are very beautiful in your lips like radishes and your ears like walrus and things, but I mean there are some things like that. And there's a kind of street drama in Babylon in four century BC, something like that, when there must have been actors who did this in the street. And it's it's it's marduk. And Salfanitumi's wife and another woman, Marduk's having an affair with this. Oh no. God is. And Salfanitumi is jealous and there's women fighting street and herd insults one another and you know slot bucket and all this kind of stuff is hilarious. And it must have been a bit like a sort of Verdi opera without the music. I suppose. I don't know. But anyway, it starts off when Salfanitumi is in the room and Marduk is in bed with this other goddess on the roof and she can hear you could say it was an eternal human issue. Yeah. Yeah. Love, heartbreak, jealousy, all that. And between deities also. Yeah. Because deities are any modeled on human beings, after all. Yeah. Deities is a grandiose way of expressing human affairs, human behaviors, human ways. Yeah. Indeed. In the writing, what was their relationship to the divine relationship with the divine? Well, the first thing to say is that they had a large pantheon of gods. So there were three gods at the top. Sometimes called Arnu Enliel and Aya. There were three gods at the top and hundreds of other gods and goddesses. And you have the situation that I think lots of small villages and towns had their old ancient gods and eventually they all worked into a kind of theological system like a phone book and the lesser minor gods were emalgamated and then they were given jobs in the household of the big gods. So there was a sort of structure. So you have this in the background of big sweeping theology like you have in the world today in some parts of the world. And 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 the dead and what happens to the dead and their other specialities. And they all had their own temples. And when a baby came into the world probably this was universally true. The baby was put under the tutelage of one or other of the gods. Sometimes you know the raw family they were the big shots but sometimes not all the ones that were in the family or something like that. So people had grew up with the idea that among all of them there were special ones for the family and they had a special one who was supposed to look after them. That's sort of basic idea. But probably since gods are, as you say, human beings on a larger scale, they can be forgetful or uninterested or on a holiday. And there are lots of ways that you have to prompt your little sacrifices and little bribes so they do their job and keep an eye on you. So they had that kind of slightly practical view of gods that they were a bit unpredictable, great when they were there but not always there, sort of idea. And I also believe this that a lot of people in the world today who did not have the disadvantage of growing up in a stiffening 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, god or gods seem a lot more important and they do normally. So few people walk about in a state of religious awe and a proportion of clergymen have ever met. Don't do that either. It's a kind of conception that's not actually based on reality. The individual's response to religious stimuli fluctuates and is varied and is often 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 it's 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 say I go to church and I believe in everything, it's a relatively small number of people say now this is the situation, which is quite remarkable if you think about it and do all knows what the consequence will be for the human race whether religion will balance out whether it will die off who knows. I think it's an ancient technology that has proven across millennia to give a set of tools to humans to contend as you said with suffering that's a part of life. So when those rare moments come when you have to deal with deep pain, loss, suffering, heartbreak, all those things, looking up to the sky and asking questions and trying to figure out the answers in your conversation or the divine. 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, there are no lights at night. You know, you're under the stars, you can see everything because of no smoke and the idea that the gods are there watching, it's not like a big after-feast like it is here, it just doesn't ring true here. You can't come to it and really believe in it whereas these people didn't have to really believe in it because it was it. It's the obvious practical part of life. They're right there. Yeah, because like they didn't believe in ghosts, they took them for granted and they didn't believe in the gods, they took them for granted. This is the different mechanism because nobody here in the world today takes those things for granted to just the opposite of it 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 get them a nudge when it was necessary And they might offer this they might offer that but they It was the it was the system it was the prevailing system and I think it's an important difference and also that thing about ghosts is That is clear from the inscriptions all of them that I managed to find that nobody ever asked themselves To these things that exist or not or did I really see them or not or did I know they didn't they didn't they just took it all for granted What are ghosts is it usually ancestors? And well everybody everybody who died in bed naturally or peacefully What we call their ghost went down to the other world And there they were so they buried people jolly quick For obvious reasons and like they do in Islam and Judaism today it's the same kind of idea And the spirit of the person Went down through the gates of the other 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 whole fluid and food that's kind of symbolic offerings to them so it's not a way to Lesson the impact of mortality. I don't know Because you know that everyone's going to die. I think the real tragedy would be is if we're not supposed to That would be the tragedy but every single person Is going to die so all relationships have this finite clause in them So if you are very fond of somebody or you love somebody and they die It's kind of infantile to Wine about it ever after because what do you think was going to happen either you or them? You know, I always see it like that. I don't feel grief when people die. It is infantile But I got to tell you something about human beings Well, I'll kind of infantile all the way through from you know, we don't stop being infantile after we're infants It's it's one thing to know it You know theoretically and it's another thing to know it know it like this thing Ends this ride ends, but that's the pain. It's the fact that the whole thing ends And when people fall off the edge They fall off the edge So yeah, the knowledge that it ends is the painful thing not the actual moment of the end Yeah, many times what makes moments really precious is that they're going to be gone I think that's not a trivial thing for us humans to Really contend with I think religion Religious thought the divine I think hope with that. I think the big mistake for mankind was the creation of monotheistic Because they wrote evil into the world because if you believe in a monotheistic religion, it means I'm right and you're wrong If you don't so it's already on that footing. It's very dogmatic. Yeah dogmatic and it's led to Everything in physicians and this you know all this kind of stuff It's always 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 have different specialities and the ones you like and the ones Everybody likes and they have their temples and their offerings It was very interesting to me to go Into a temple in Carcata 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 are fronted people's individuality or or and I mean there's no religious prejudice or even racial prejudice in antiquity All these things are modern disadvantageous matters if you think what's done in the name of religion It is absolutely staggering So let's go to literature because uh we didn't really mention literature much except you did briefly mention epic of Gilgamesh Yeah, so that was written in kineiform. It's one of the earliest works of literature. That's right Can you tell me about this work? Yeah, well, we know it best from this Assyrian library set of tablets They're 12 of them. It's a 12 tablet work. It's quite long And Gilgamesh is the hero of it But the literature we know it from earlier texts and we know that Gilgamesh lived he was a real person He was a king in uruk and he was one of those people who lived after their death in the world like Alexander for example So there were stories about Gilgamesh when he was alive. There were stories about him afterwards And they firstly they were oral literature not written down a tool and then around the 1800s People started to write the down in Samirin 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 Man in the hands of the gods and um incorporate lots of interesting exciting stories. It's very holy woody kind of thing And you can see within it, um even in the sophisticated ninivi version It's roots are in oral literature because when somebody speaks It says Gilgamesh opened his mouth to speak and addressed his friend enki-do And then there's a speech and then enki-do opened his mouth and addressed his friend Gilgamesh Well when you're reading a story you don't need that And that must be because of When there was an when there was an enacting of an oral thing a narrator would say And it's suddenly got frozen into the text so it's very strange thing because if you're reading it is obvious One person speaks in the other person speaks and and they always have this complicated thing stuck in the text So it must be an echo of presumably you have your protagonists um enacting their timeless matter with a with a And the person who's writing it down says and then Gilgamesh said you know like like in a like in a script I mean what what can you say about The the telling of stories in written form during that time do you think that too stretched back in time? I do I think the fireside narrative matter You know when we were kids it would be twirks with a guitar and 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 flourished naturally among human beings stories telling a story and doesn't have to be pragmatic It could be literary in in in a way. Yeah either a human person like Gilgamesh or Stories about the gods and someone sees the Milky Way and they think it's a god of riding a chariot up it And they have a story about you know and all those sorts of things and 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 and 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 in maceals and Einstein's and somewhere along the line you have Rembrandt's and I imagine that half the cake cave paintings in Europe were done by one person I mean they you got the impression every family had a genius painter It's impossible probably there was a person who went from place to place doing these paintings because they were so Could draw straight away accurately like that but the There are distillation of creative artistic ability plus skill. So this this is right at the pretty early stage Is it not the cave painting material? So If you consider the human stock Which encapsulates such ideas ever after Then you have to reckon with that. You have to reckon with that very creative very creative people So the function of stories to tell the young and About what happened and about famous battles were when the flood came or how people learned to make fire or you know How we invented the we all those sorts of things everybody puts puts down as be but that's presumably really what absolutely happened And you have the capacity for people to adore and to respect Among their own kind of people of astounding ability. There must to be Hunters who are ferociously quick and you know wrestle with polar bears and all that kind and all this stuff will be grist to the narrator's Thing and things got more complicated and more sophisticated. So lessons might be incorporated or lessons might come come out of them unintentionally because if you tell a story without a moral it is usually a moral if you think about it. And many of those stories are sadly lost at time or not yet found. You mention 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 arc tablet. Yeah, that was a challenge because it's totally hard to read. You've got to tell me the story, this ancient Babylonian clay tablet dating 1700 BC which contains a flood narrative that predates the biblical story of Noah by a thousand years. At least. At least. Yeah. Okay. Well, you've got to tell me the full story. So the full story is like this. Visitors used to come to the museum and 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 got 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 the 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. 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 the most effective one was they were going to send a flood to wipe them all out. 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 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 was this extraordinary because it was round the boat and everybody who knew their Bible, the arcs of a coffin shape kind of a fair and nobody thought of it being a round boat. And the fact is that round boats were usually Mesopotamia on the rivers. Coral cause has to say because for transporting things and they would never sink, they were very appropriate and so in this story it was decided he was going to be a giant coracle. Really, really big one. They would never sink and the main female animals could go in and 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 would start all over again. So it's got very many points in common with the description of the flood in Genesis and of course so did the one in Gilgamesh. So in 1872 there was a a seriologist 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 art came to rest on a mountain that the hero of this thing in Gilgamesh was called Nabish Tim 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 we knew that. So this was not only in the Epic 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 and it wasn't two stories about the same thing. It was literary dependence. It was literary depends the one was locked into the other. The text of the Hebrew Bible from whenever it was written down of course no if you know it's quite when but whenever it was it was about the same time as the one from Nineveh about the seventh century six something like 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 was this way and one goes that way but then when this tablet came in a thousand years older nobody believed the Bible was written in 1700 B.C. So the primacy of the Mesopotamian matter was established and it's important because you never get floods in Jerusalem. You just don't but in Mesopotamia they had floods the rivers sometimes it wasn't enough water sometimes it was too much sometimes it was far too much water. So the mechanism that the waters could be used as a destructive force by the powers that B is a plausible Mesopotamian mechanism and it's based in a sort of sense in my opinion and reality I think they must have been some tsunami once most people were drowned and those who survived were in boats obviously and then afterwards nobody ever forgot it and it went on and on and on. I mean they actually could have been a catastrophic event of a lot of the whole world because people were just enough to imagine yeah sweeping down to the person Gulf and you know the flat plains everything would be destroyed or the houses would be destroyed now they must be drowned and this is an incredible discovery do you think it's possible that this is the original there are flood myths in many cultures. 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 as a proof that the disastrous flood would never happen again but I think there must have been one episode of this kind maybe five thousand years before the tablet ten thousand doesn't matter because with the passage of time nothing happens in that part of the world say something will be alive grandfather to grandson before we go to sleep and remember my boy you know you only have to be careful because otherwise for all that stuff for sure bogeyman stuff you 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 route of the priesthood and everything the king and the others went overland to Babylon as refugees and they had to live there for three generations of time under nobody can there's this right so I believed that the text of the Bible was written then because if you read the Bible attentively which I can't say I do on a regular basis but if you do read it dispassionately 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 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 there washed up and everything like that so I think that what happened was 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 Jewish all these refugees from Jerusalem were meeting 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 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 going to wipe out the noisy persons when the Jewish philosophers got this narrative to recycle about the vengeful might he was in the Old Testament a very unpleasant eventual person it was because of sin it wasn't because I've rucked in playing the radio it was sin so they took one narrative and they recycled it for their own purposes the flood is a useful tool to punish people for whatever X is 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 the two weeks to build the ark so the clock goes t t t t t t t t t and about the third of the films that come out of Hollywood are the words going to be this demolished by aliens and you've got 24 hours, I think of a cure. That narrative is irresistible. That one man can save the world if he's lucky in time from disasters. So it starts off with the Pistimini and it goes on to Noah and then it goes on to Hollywood. Do you think this arc in the tablet actually was ever built? You did build a replica, one third the size. You people should check out, you tell the story of that wonderfully. What did you learn from building this replica and do you think the actual arc existed? 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 you never know what happened. But you know, it's a literary moral principle teaching narrative and not missionaries take it all around the world. That's the other thing. See, this is the mystery of it that you have flood stories everywhere and some of them are from metals and 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 and it gets recycled and gets recycled. So this is one thing. And then also there probably are spontaneous ideas because it's not so complicated. Also, amazing that independently people would have such a narrative. After all, you know, like the great river in China floods and everybody gets so that's not the whole 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 Ninuvi long before the one that I discovered came to light about the three birds being released one after the other. And that was the clincher that the two stories were locked together and lots of clergymen got very miserable about it and just know what to make of it. So that's a definitive proof that there's a literary, I think literary link. I think so. And I mean, these puzzles are then connected, but the arc you discard a thousand years. So that means that story of the flood has been told many, many times across that span to, you know, yeah, do your homework or the flood is going to come. That's right. That's right. And every time somebody built a choral call and they didn't do the waterproofing right. You know what will happen? You'll be out on the river and that will be your lot. You know, I think so. I think it was a, 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 a kind of cataclysmic cut across history, which provides 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 to the beginning, including kings before the flood. They knew about that. They have their names and their great reg new years or thousands of years, fascinating. So there's a guy named Graham Hancock who talks about the younger dry hypothesis, 10,000 BC, that there's 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? I would say negligible because I regard it as a literary matter, 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, nothing that touched America or China or Birmingham. I don't have any sympathy for that, but people have made drilled a cause. I'm not interested in all that stuff. It's my own idea. It's a literary topos of great potency, of irresistible potency, because everybody identifies with the idea of being in bed and someone knocks on the door and says, "Get up, you've got to build a boat and this is what you're going to need." You've got to get on with it sunshine or a raw sunk. What are you going to do? The most interesting thing is this atrohasis in the 1700 text. He wasn't a king and he wasn't a sailor or a boat builder. So how comes this clever god who wants to find someone to build? Wouldn't you go for a look in the yellow pages for a boat building company and say, "Listen, fella, I've 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 got to measure it and all that." It's a very interesting thing. I mean, yeah, that's a great story. You don't go to the boat builder. There you go. Taxi driver or something. So the taxi, and then that's that hero's journey. That's the stuff of great myths, yeah? It is. He's a great myth. A little detail would be really cool about the replica. What about the boat? Yeah, one third of the replica. There were three bloats who did it. And they were specialists in reconstructing medieval Arab boats because quite often they found in the mud or bits or they have information. So they were at home in it. They built it on a small lagoon in Carrella. It was just the most unbelievably wonderful thing because they used the instructions as a blueprint. They made it about a third of the size of the original. It was a pretty huge thing. But they made it because it had wooden ribs, you see. And they could get wooden ribs. They worked out by computer. The maximum size they could do it when it would work. Beyond it, it would be impossible because once they built the curved ribs and then the stuff woven all around it, it had to be covered in bitumen, which is also very heavy to make it waterproof. So they calculated the size and it worked. So they built this thing on rollers and it was pushed out into the, is just the most unbelievable. I went out there with my dear wife for the last few days and was on the maiden voyage. They had trouble with the bitumen because Indian bitumen is really not up to scratch. And they couldn't get Iraqi bitumen because it's cultural properties, carcinogenic. They wouldn't export a tanker load of Iraqi. So we had to use the Indian stuff. But the thing is this, the bitumen, which they coated it with, it was okay, but it wasn't perfect. So when it went out into the waters, there was a bit of a leak. Water had to be bailed out. So you see I said, I said, okay, it's the sunshine. I said to this producer, you ever been in a rowing boat without water in the bottom? Excuse me. Oh, you're saying that's a feature. That's the feature of the thing. Yeah. That's the feature. And that thing could have gone to ports. It was authentic. Absolutely right. We had such an adventure with that thing. They made a documentary film. In various languages. And you know what they did, you know, I was in it a bit, a bit. And they had people saying, oh, I don't think it was this. I don't think it was that. They didn't let me go back and say, what the hell are you talking about? I did it. I know I can read, you know, form can you. They didn't do it. I couldn't get my own back. I was really annoyed, really furious. So you're saying that there's some inaccurate things to do? I'm saying there's some inaccurate things. Yeah, somebody in the rock said, oh, it couldn't have been that. They probably had lots of little coricles all tied together. Did they fuck? I mean, you know, you couldn't read the stuff. I mean, it's really, really, really annoying. I mean, you should have a chance. You know, if you're going to have a fancy match, you both have to have a rapier, wouldn't you say? Yeah. And you're the, the OG. You're the person that, well, I can read it. Yeah. But the thing is this, the proportions of the material were accurate. This is the crucial thing that what had happened was, is they took the information about how you make a real collar, which is usually enough to people and a few sheep and goats. And they bumped them up so that it worked. And I know why that is, because it goes back to your question about oral literature, because there must have been times when people went to villages and told them about the flood. And when they got to the question of the boat, they'd say something like this. And Enky said, you've got to build the biggest coracle you've ever seen, like that, right? Well, I mean, if you do this in cinema and gilford, people will say, well, that's fine. But if you do it to a whole load of river people who use coracles and they make build, they're not going to take that. They're not going to say, how big was it then? Come on, how big was it? So what do they do? They go to a coracle place, and they work out the proportions of material, and then they bump it up. So that the actor who reads this for the first few times, he has in his pocket how much it is, but after a while he knows it by heart. So that none of these people get angry and you can't expect us big enough for all this, so that then you'd have all the stuff and they'd do it with this way. and you need to hold this, and you need to hold this, and you need to listen, they'd all be a hypnotized by it. That I think is it's actually regarding your question. It's on the cusp of purely oral literature, to purely literary literature. It's actually there because you can see that it was molded in the environment when people were still talking. Yeah, you got to make it authentic to really connect with people. Well, you couldn't pull it over their eyes. I mean, you know, I wish many of the films in Hollywood today would have the same level of rigor. Riga is one of the things lacking in the world. By the way, I forgot to ask, why was the flood myth focused on noisy people? Well, it can't really be noisy. I tell you what the explanation is. It's something quite different. Before the flood, the gods had not created death. So I think the noise was a reflex of the fact there were just too many animals, too many people and they had to do something about it. So it's a sort of euphemism, so to speak, because after the flood, at the end of the tablet, not my tablet, but the other ones, where it's still broken, it says there's a tantalising thing where they create barren women and who can't have children and men who can't have children and people who precesses who don't have children. They institute in society some figures who will not reproduce the species. So it's actually a rather sophisticated, mouth-usian kind of philosophical position. It's remarkable. So the noise means there's so many of them. They're actually so noisy that we can't hear ourselves think. You have to tell me about the world of ancient games. Maybe we could start with the ancient Royal Game of Ur. What is it? And how are you somehow able to crack the rules of it? Well, the Royal Game of Ur is a board of 20 squares in a rather idiosyncratic form. And it was pretty much unknown until the 1920s when Selenet Wooley was digging at a site of war. And in the graves of the Royal family, the Sumerian rulers, they found four or five boards of this pattern together with dice and pieces, which showed that it was popular among them at this time. And also that wherever they were going in the world to come, they would want to be playing it. And so that was one thing. And we had the number of pieces and some dice. So lots of people had ideas about how it might be implied. And that went on like that for a very long time. And thereafter, boards for this game turned up in most of the countries of the Middle East. Sometimes quite a lot of them. And the one from Ur dates to about 2600 BC. And from then down to the end of the first millennium, there's examples of boards from Mesopotamia itself. And from Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Turkey, Greece, Crete, all over the place. And when you put all the boards together, you realize that you're dealing with a board game, which was extremely widespread and extremely popular across space and time, across space and time. So it lasted for nearly 3000 years. And it was played all over the place. So it's one of those games which is like chess or backgammon, which you can say are world conquerors. Because the way I see that the issue is that human beings for a very long time have been, shall we say, hungry for things to do. Because all through the Bronze Age and the Iron Age, there was no television. You know, there weren't, there weren't no nothing. And kids played with pull-at-long things and adults had board games and they're kind of embedded in culture from a very early time. And this game was so widespread, you know, Tutankhamun, for example, in his tomb there were two or three boards for it with the pieces. So it arrived in the middle of the second millennium in Egypt. And even the Pharaoh played it. So you have a game which the interesting point about it is that it spread across the known world without written rules and without people necessarily knowing the same language. So a merchant would go end up in a bar, you know, come from India or I don't know where, start planting these guys playing. Have a go himself. It looks rather interesting. You go home and try and remember what it looked like and try and work out how to, you know, be transported this way than the other. And so you can see that the board has 20 squares. So you have a block of four by three and then a bridge of two and then a second three by two thing at the end. So it's difficult to describe the actual shape. But what happened was after about 2000 BC, the squares at the far end which there were two on one flank and two on the other were all put at the end of the central avenue. So you end up with 12 squares down the middle. So all the boards after the period of ore have 12 squares down the middle and then four on each side at one end. So it meant then that when you play the game you have dice to move the pieces you have pieces all the same and you obviously put them on. You all first call and you turn the call and you go up the middle and off the end and it was a race game of the kind that everybody knows from their own childhood and some squares which had resets on were are the safe squares or you had another throw and you could maybe put two on one square. We don't know you could try and block people and but anyway the crucial thing is that the widespread distribution of this idiosyncratic shape and it's a lasting thing shows it must have been a very good game if people more or less played the same thing on it everywhere. I mean it may be that there were completely different games but probably not. So this is the thing it makes you wonder what would be about it that would fit so well with a wide appetite from different persons, different types of person and the thing is that although it's a race game where you're at the mercy of dice and lucky squares and unlucky squares that the process of getting your pieces on and off the board as a winner is primarily fortuitous but it has built within it as the way I understand the game plays a measurable quota of strategy. It's a mix of probability and strategy. Yeah so most games are either just probability like snakes and ladders, snakeshoots and ladders is just a thing like that or you have a game like chess which is pure strategy and the grown-up game in the modern world where fortuity or chance and strategy have a good balance is backgammon which is a sort of grown-up version of this sort of game where nevertheless if you play according to the most rational interpretation strategy is a major factor. So what happened was that many people had ideas how it was played and the root followed and I did too and then I discovered this tablet in the British Museum which was written at a very late period in the second century BC. So 2,300 years after this object existed and it had on it the names of the pieces and what the pieces were like and various things about the throes and it was obvious that it was the rules were to do with a game which was derived from this simple early game and that working backwards from it you could reconstruct the game in accordance with its later incarnation that might be workable and it jolly well turned out to be workable because people play this all over the world now and they even play in Iraq in cafes where now no they do because after it's come come back to life it's on the internet people play they're different rules that the ones I invented are pretty much regular so if you have a good balance between chance and strategy and it's a fair game and doesn't take four days to play like modern board games so you can have a go and if you're lucky you win fast and then you have another go maybe best of three or something like that it works out rather well and what once I was in California in the in the getty and I had to give a talk about this with all the information and there's lots of things to say about it and the lady who ran the friends of the getty had a brilliant idea so what she bought in 20 or so commercial copies of this game and they had small tables with chairs and after the lecture I was supposed to say to everybody okay this is what you have to do this is how you play because you can get the rules down in like three minutes like this So I said hey first you have to do this first you you have to do that. So off you go. So there was silence. And then after a while, someone said, I hate you. I never bring you when you get when they never played it before when somebody had escaped at the last minute, cleaned up with just when they thought they were going to get. And it provokes that solitary benevolent fury and rage in the players, which all good board games do. And they were happily married couples who were at the end of the afternoon, phoning their respective lawyers to discuss the future. That's kind of the beautiful matter. You think games are, you know, are desire to play games, a mix of chance, a mix of strategies, the part of human nature. You think that's always been there. I do. I do. Yes. I think, um, I mean, you can you can say that in communities, you have rivalry, hostility, and who's the best, who's the fastest, who's the strongest and things. And if you play a board game like that, all the reality of it is sublimated into a safe terrain, where you can never, let's get angry. But it's not, it's not like that. That's one thing. But more significantly, I believe, is, is the question of what in India people call time pass, which is not quite the same as past time. Time pass is the question of what you do when it's too hot to do anything, which is true. A good part of the day and a good part of the year. And grandmother sit under trees with their grandchildren and they tell stories and they do this and they do that. And time pass is a very useful catch all phrase for the existence of board games. And in India, there are many board games. Chess, of course, is the famous one, but they're quite a lot of three in a row type games or fox against geese games and wolves against sheep and all those sorts of things, which come out of the landscape in miniature and were played for pleasure. And also, in a kind of way, it doesn't really matter who wins because you might play and it goes round and round and round and eventually somebody wins and then they have another game. So it's just sort of that kind of rather graceful valid function for not wasting time doing something which is stimulating and beneficial without it being overpowering in either way. So I think it is a human matter. Of course, we humans also sometimes mix in gambling into the whole thing. So that's the money on top of it, which I'm sure sometimes was involved here. I think so, but probably only late on because money is such, of course, that doesn't appear to quite late, but there are, we know in Mesopotamia it's rather interesting thing. There's a school tablet with three or four lines coated from one mystery thing and three or four from another mystery thing. And one of them has this, oh my astrogale, oh my astrogale, woe is me, woe is me. And that's all we have. And I think this is an example of a genre of literally called the gambler's lament because they use knuckle bones or astrogales as dice. And I'm sure there were people who bet sack of this or a room full of that and on the throw of the knuckle bones. And this extract in the school text is probably from a literary tablet in which somebody lost everything even though there weren't coins because I think you're right that it's a natural thing to fit it to a crew. And also maybe men and women played differently because there are some games which were played in harimas among girls, you know, or on a hot afternoon where nobody was going to win anything. But the rules tablet, which gives this kind of backhanded information about it, is couched in such a way that it talks about people in a bar because the movement of the pieces is calculated in terms of food and drink and women what you win. So the landscape in which the rules account for credibility is just exactly that set up. As you mentioned, you're the curator at the possibly the greatest place on earth, the British Museum. Oh yes. Can you tell me what are some of the incredible magical aspects of the British Museum? Well, the British Museum is a magical place and it's a special case because there's a lot of flurry and dispute now about what museums are and what they're for and why they exist and whether they should ever have existed and all these sorts of issues which people go on about. But the British Museum is unlike almost all museums in the world because it's to do with achievements of mankind from the beginning onwards. So it's a kind of celebration of art and more but it's not an art museum. It's to do with the struggle of the human race against all the things that beset it and how it has triumphed and how marvelous it is and the things that have happened and not turning a blind eye to all the contrasting horrible things that have happened but it's the narrative of the human race as I see it as discernible in objects. So it means that we serve two very important horizons. One is that we represent as far as we can the whole world with no injudicious attention paid to any one or other culture that they're all to us one. So there's no favoring any religious group any country group anything of the kind it's the human species we try to tell the narrative of in its own right and how it overlaps with its neighbours and how it what it's learnt from what came before all those features together is really what the concern of the museum is and of course to collect everything we have been to collect everything we can to tell those narratives and also to look after them according to a scientific principle. So all those things at once are the task of the British Museum and the second horizon it serves and is the unborn. So babies yet to be born and their children and their children and their children and it seems to me that the task of the museum is of such cultural significance and such so to speak sacred validity that it shouldn't have to put up with people capping about this or that or saying museums are sinful and wicked and should be demolished because the people who say these things don't really have any idea of actually what it really does stand for and it's a kind of lighthouse in a universe where we are surrounded by darkness ignorance stupidity uninterest disinterest skepticism ignorance and so forth about the very issues that we're interested in and it's one of the places in the world where you can talk about truth and beauty and elegance and intelligence without it being in a front to people who have none of those qualities and without it being a kind of speech that people shudder or they think you're being naive about it because those are the crucial things and also about religion that we don't favor a religion and we don't sponsor a religion we try to look them for what they are and to assess their relationships and what they offer. Perhaps less with a lesser serbity and less criticism than I would if I was the director I would try to put them down the wrong end of a microscope and look at them for what they are and what they have done and what's been done in the names of religion you probably would never get away with that but maybe one day that will be an important part because it's a major contributing factor to what's happened to the human race which is never really articulated sharply about what religion has done to us and where we might have been without it because not having religion does not mean not having law or morality or sensitivity or consideration or love or any of those things none of those things depends on religion and those are the things which are important so I think it's some people say are you say this because you work there and you know you're a curator you would say that that the British Museum is a special place it's like you do with that it is actually a special place because you cannot point to another museum in the world with the same task for example the Louvre is basically a museum of art basically a museum of art not a museum of ideas and the Met is definitely a museum of art called the Museum of Art and that's their priority design and color and shape to us to my mind is the British Museum this is one factor among many others and we are not an art museum or we're not a local museum, we're not a museum of the history of the bicycle, we're not a celebration of evil, we are, as it were, doing zythe it, the best we could do if, for example, a whole load of Martians arrived in the Great Court and burst through the front door and said to us, tell us all about this place, tell us about the world, can you do it fast because we got to leave and if you took them round and say, look at this, look at this, look at this, look at this, they get some picture which wasn't insane, the only thing they wouldn't get is a recording of Johnny Begood by Chuck Berry, but apparently one's being put into space, so this is a very comforting thing. But that's kind of what the task of the British Museum is to do that, but for the entirety of human history, it can be a store of artifacts that are the raindrops from which you can reconstruct the world. Precisely so, and it's not a valued criticism to say to us that most of the stuff is not on exhibition, which is what everybody says it, should go here, should go there because it's not on exhibition, but we're not doing it for any other reason than stockpiling for future examination. See, this is the important perspective that nobody considers, because the thing is, when you have something which is contemporary, if you're a clever journalist or a clever think you can write essays about it, you can talk about it and you can see it, but you can only see it from the perspective from which you operate, and with the passage of time, the significance of objects, what they stand for, what they meant, and what they can still mean shifts, and the further back you go, the sharper you can understand things, especially in terms of their own precedent and their own modern contemporary parallels. So, the benefit of distance, storage and contemplation is inestimable. There's so many questions I want to ask you. What was them, do you think? The people from whom these artifacts came had, that we may have, the modern day humans may have lost or lost in part or in whole. So, it's often as you've spoken about, we see the ancient peoples as lesser, dumber, more primitive, and you've spoken about how they are basically the same. I think you put them on a bus or wearing the same clothes, you wouldn't know, that's my feeling. But there is some, I'm sure there's some greater wisdom they had about certain things as we have greater wisdom on others. Thanks to Einstein, we figured out the curvature of space time, which they didn't know about. But they need quite a lot about astronomy there, quite a lot about astronomy. They stare at the stars. Yeah, and they measured them and they make calculations. When the Greeks went to Babylon, they said, "Hey man, this is really cool." And they wrote it all down and went home. Yeah, definitely, definitely. Well, I think it's a hard question to answer. But one of the things is that they were spared things which have cluttered up the essence of humanity. Because I think that the modern adherence to the electronic universe is disastrous for humans. And because it reduces the vitality of the human component, I think it's restrictive in a way that people don't realise until it's too late. Like drugs, if you take drugs now, and again, you think, "Oh, it's fine, it's fine. There's suddenly you realise you're addicted to heroin." It's a bit like that. People use the electronic world, like an addictive drug, and they can't get through without it. And I think this is a very recent thing, but I suppose it's not, I'm a luddite and say we shouldn't have rower engines and we shouldn't have kettles. But I think one of the things about the ancient world was that people never went anywhere, unless they were merchants or soldiers. They never went anywhere. Probably people born and died in a village, and then their children born and died in the village. And they never knew anything about the outside world. Maybe a very little, sometimes there'd be a message. But in principle, they had no idea about other countries, other languages, or how big they were on it. So I don't think they had wisdom in a way that you could type out following precepts will make life better, because they told lies, and they esteem the truth, and they fell in love, and they committed adultery, and they did murder, and they did all the things. I think in a way, the ancient world allowed human beings to behave more naturally than it does now. The world in which we live. I mean, if you do live in a rustic environment, or by the sea, or fishermen, or all those normal real kind of things, then it's probably all right. But most people who live crammed in the cities live a very, very artificial life, where the principles which they regard as ineluctibly crucial, are not ineluctibly crucial. One example is this ghastly thing on mobiles, where you get a short clip from a real program, I think it's utterly, utterly wicked. So you have children all over the world who cannot articulate spell or make meaning clear using the best, most literary and most beneficial languages ever been created, which is English, to save their lives. And they use a word, I'll give you an example. Right? Like I went. Like I won't. Like I went. So it's difficult to define that grammatically. Difficult like I should have gone. Where I went or I should have gone means to speak. Now, how would it be if when we see the verb to go in Sumerian, it actually meant to speak? How where would we be? Where would we be? I mean, we should probably say that even in that time, there was probably slang, right? It just wouldn't end up written. There were dialects. There were words that sailors used for sure, all those things. But they wouldn't end up in writing. Sometimes they do. We have to remember that Cambridge and Oxford speak in a certain way that's proper and formal and very smart. But there's most of the people in bars, sailors have a different way of speaking. So they would probably say like I went and have emojis. But the thing is, you have to moderate your vocabulary. Yeah, yeah. Talk to people at a certain age because they don't know what the fuck you're talking about if you use language exactly. And the thing that was just so exquisite about English is like with the barrister, you can make a case which is absolutely wonderful because it says exactly what it means. And there's no wiggle room. And the conversation should be like that with no wiggle room. It's not, it's not just a matter of spelling, but the basic vocabulary. You know something very interesting. People say they know English or they speak English. Have you ever in your life opened a full size volume of the Oxfording Distictionary? It's about that. This fact, I have a whole set. I love them. So this is it. You take a volume off the shelf and you open the book and you run your forefinger down the various columns of writing. You might have to turn several pages before you find a single word you've ever heard before because English is unimaginably rich. I grew up in a house where everybody read literature all the time. I had three sisters and then a brother. And we all read literature, went to the library, we read lots and lots and lots of books. So we all had really good vocabulary. And that's how you get vocabulary. Otherwise you don't because in conversation, do you want more tea or this sort of stuff? You don't learn new vocabulary. You have to get it from reading and listening to proper stuff. We should say the very important aspect of vocabulary, why it's important to know a lot of words and to speak clearly because those words also define the quality of your thoughts at the end of the day. That's exactly right. I must say, I think it is a pity if having produced such wonderful languages in the world that they don't, that their use is so inhibited. I think the right way to think about it is the way the British Museum thinks about it. So you're commenting on the ephemeral, on the thing that is in the moment right now is happening. The reality is only a few select things will last 100, 200 years from now about this moment in time. And so we have to sort of think with a big picture perspective and the slowness of time. Yes, in the moment there's these catastrophes, there's changing ways of speaking, the technology tearing apart the fabric of society. But when you zoom out, you will think about the grand ideas of Einstein. The battle of ideologies with communism and nazis, some of the 20th centuries, the bad, the triumphant, the rockets, these humans started launching, Rock is going to the moon, maybe to Mars. those those things and we won't be thinking about emojis and any of that and in some sense that's the the stuff you're looking at with Guneer forms is the the things that stand the test of time that are there that's true but I think I think that language properly used is a crucial human tool for communication absolutely speaking of which I have to ask some more about the Kuneha Form tablets at the British Museum when you're surrounded by so many and by the way how many Kuneha forms that is so cool what are some of the most beautiful to you maybe ones we don't know about Kuneha Forms like that make you smile yeah they lost their sense of humor in Kuneha Forms yeah I think there are there's one that I can't remember this fly or what no mosquito lands on the back of an elephant consists am I too heavy for you or something I know first and so I believe in you yeah you wouldn't you didn't have a boy yeah yeah to be there and also do you like Tom Lehrer of course okay that's good that's good I once went to America on a lecture tour and I ended up in a town where Dr. Vienna von Brown ended up running the American rocket industry it doesn't matter once the rockets are up who cares where they come down my department says wonderful brown that guy I mean I could tell where your wit comes from the fact that you know Tom Lehrer but you such a the way he plays the piano it's fantastic yeah I think my dad recorded them off the radio on a real-to-real tape recorder and I learned them all by heart they were so fantastic but I knew a Harvard professor who I say with once who's a Sumerologist and his wife said that she knew Tom Lehrer when he was in the math department and they used to have parties and he always played the piano in the corner of the room he's just amazing yeah the I mean here to real you have that you know I watch a lot of your stuff your whole way of being the wit there's something about that like biting wit it's a bit of humor bit of sadness in it it just kind of feels like it really quickly gets to the complexity what it means to be human I think so but the the paradoxical thing about Tom Lehrer he's when he's talking about the bomb and all that and devices and international trouble it's so unchanged yeah yeah and same with Dr. Strangelove it's just it's very remarkable anyway next time you'll hear when you're here you should come and see me in the museum and I'll show you some of these confounded things for yourself and show you the Chicago dictionary and give you a grammar book to learn and Irving you're a remarkable human being I'm very glad we met it's truly an honor to meet you to talk to you it's been very interesting Irving thank you so much for talking it's been a big pleasure for me next be well thanks for listening to this conversation with Irving Finkel to support this podcast please check out our sponsors in the description where you can also find links to contact me ask questions get feedback and so on and now let me leave you with some words from Ludwig Woodgenstein the limits of my language means the limits of my world thank you for listening I hope to see you next time.