Kind: captions
Language: en
The following is a conversation with
Irving Finkele 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
kuneaoiform script and more generally on
ancient languages of Samrian, Acadian
and Babylonian and also on ancient board
games and uh 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 uh fell in
love with even more. This is the Lex
Freedman 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 Thinkle.
Where and when did writing originate in
human civilization? Let's go back a few
thousand years.
>> The first attempts at writing that we
could call writing go back to the middle
of the fourth millennium say around 3500
BC something like that. There were
people in the Middle East, individuals
who lived between the Euphrates and
Tigris rivers who had clay as their
operating material for building and all
sorts of other purposes. And eventually
as a writing support, they somehow
developed the idea of the basis of
writing which means that you can make a
sign which people agree on on a surface
that another person when they see it,
they know what sound it engenders. That
is the essence of writing that there's
an agreed system of symbols that A can
use and B can then play back either in
their heads or literally with their
voice is a bit like a gramophone record.
So when it really began is a terribly
terribly awkward question for us because
the truth of the matter is we have no
idea when anything began and all we can
say is that the oldest evidence we have
is around 3,500 BC. But whether that was
anywhere near the time or the stage when
this started off for for the first time
seems to me very very unlikely.
So in among these the Mesopotamians
around 3,500 they started to do this.
They made up signs which everybody
understood and they could write simple
pictographic messages. Foot is a foot, a
leg is a leg and barley is barley. And
then very very gradually they had the
idea of how you could represent
numerals. And then they had the idea
that the pictures could also represent
signs. And once they had the idea that
you could write sounds with pictures,
that's the crucial thing that a picture
of a foot not only meant foot, but it
meant the sound of the word for foot.
Once this happened,
some probably very very imaginative and
clever persons had a kind of light bulb
moment when they realized that they
could develop a whole paniply 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. before long proverbs and literature
and all the other things that got
written down. So it was a pretty
gigantic step whenever it was taken but
we really have no idea when it was first
taken but the first evidence we have
presents a sort of clearish sort of
picture. It was simple and it got more
complicated and then it became
magnificent so that with all the signs a
fluent and well-trained scribe could not
only write down the Sumerian language
which was one of the native tongues of
Iraq and or the Babylonian language
which was one 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 was not even
a dream um complex bewildering looking
off-putting writing system which was
actually very beautiful flexible and
lasted for well over 3 millennia
probably closer to four millennia and it
took a long time for the alphabet which
anybody would say was much much more
useful and much more sensible to
displace it. So, it's one of the major
stages of man's intellect because quite
soon after the writing first took off,
the signs began to proliferate and
someone said, "Hey, we haven't got a
sign for this sound or we haven't got a
sign for this idea." And so it began to
swell out and at some extremely
remarkable stage, one probably only one
person suddenly realized that if there
was no control [snorts] um they would
grow exponentially and exponentially
until it was all nonsense and everybody
had their own writing. And the second
thing is that no one could remember them
unless they were written down in a
retrievable way. So they invented not
only writing they invented lexography
which means that early in the third
millennium they put down all the things
that were made of wood and all the
things that were made of reads and all
the names of colors and of countries and
all the gods and everything. They made a
systematic attempt to make these signs
um to standardize them and to make them
retrievable and of course to teach them.
And having exercised that rigor from the
outset, it meant that the thing became
streamlined and stayed more or less as
it was all the way through for three
millennia or more because the stamp put
on it by those early visionaries not
only who um came up with the system and
how it would work but to preserve it and
to safeguard it was fantastically
effective. So it means that there were
scholars in Babylon in the 3rd century
or the second century when Alexander was
there for example. If somebody dug up a
tablet in very early writing, they
[snorts] would have a pretty good idea
what it meant. They would recognize the
signs even though they were so ancient
and they'd see the relationships between
them. So you have a fantastically
strong
system where the spinal cord was
structured in a lexographic regular
system. So lexography and what the signs
were was jealously safeguarded and
protected and it lasted fantastically.
>> We should say that the name of that
system that lasted for 3,000 years is
Kunea form.
>> Yeah. So in the 19th century about 1840
1850 they started to find these things
on excavations in Iraq the big Assyrian
cities and sometimes further south the
Babylonian cities. They found these clay
tablets which in the ground lasted
unimaginable lengths of time and they
were all written in what we call
kuneaoiform script. And the kuneaoiform
part of it means wedge shaped because
kunea in Latin means wedge. And when
they first saw these signs they realized
that a cluster of marks broke down into
um different arrangements of triangular
shapes. And it's most clear on the
Syrian reliefs where the writing is very
big and you can easily tell that they
were that shape. On a tablet the wedge
[clears throat] is not quite so
predominant. So that was it. So they
first called them cuniatic or
cuneaoiform and the word stuck. And of
course growing up in the British Museum
and reading these things for a living
becomes a kind of
lifetime's work to make sure that
everybody in the country knows what kuna
means cuz once in a while you meet
somebody who never heard of the word at
all and this is appalling. [snorts] So
people do survive however but it's an
important mission because it's such an
achievement by man and so much knowledge
was encapsulated in these lumps of clay
because they used it for everyday things
like letters and business documents and
contracts. This is one thing and then
the kings wrote
long elaborate accounts of their
campaigns and their military activities.
And then there was proper literature,
bell, le and magic and medicine and
all other genre of literature that we
would naturally list on a sheet of paper
in alphabetic writing what you would use
writing for. They basically did and it
had the unexpected quality that most of
these clay things lasted in the ground
until now. So, however many hundreds of
thousands of tablets are in the world's
museums and collections, there must be
millions of them in the ground awaiting
excavation. So, um in a way that's a
comforting thought cuz they're safe
there and protected.
>> You said that the development of
kuneaform of these tablets of written
language is one of the greatest probably
the greatest invention in human history.
How hard do you think it was to come up
with this? And we should make clear that
that very specific element of encoding
sound
on the tablet. That's the genius
invention. Drawing a picture makes
sense. Okay. Here's, you know, barley,
here's the sun, here's whatever the
actual object.
>> Exactly.
>> But to actually write down sound
>> is a genius invention. Well, I think
it's rather paradoxical
because the first generation or so of
tablets that we have are written in
these pictographic signs where each sign
means what it looks like. So, this is a
very limited method of recording
messages and it doesn't lend itself to
recording grammar. And then the
secondary phase as we understand it from
archaeology is the perception that you
could take these signs still meaning
what they look like but also what the
word sounded like. So then you have all
these wonderful ice cubes which express
all the sounds of the language from
which you can record words and and
grammar and everything else. Now the
thing is the received law from a
seriology is it was that way round that
first we had pictures and secondly we
had sound. Well, I have to say I find
this very hard to believe because if you
had a group of people in an environment
where it was compellingly necessary to
make a system that you made marks on a
surface which everybody could understand
and use. Why wouldn't you start out with
signs that made sounds? Because
everybody speaks the same language,
right? So you we they didn't have a b
cde e fg but they could easily 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 on to the sound. I don't know
why they bothered with it. And my hunch
is that the archeological evidence that
we have on this score is ultimately
misleading because I think this that
probably for a very very long time
before the Sumerianss, 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 longunning system of
communication between people who didn't
share a language
for whom pictures would suffice. So if
merchants come and they have three sheep
to sell, so they draw three little
sheep, you know how much it is and what
they are and so forth. And and so I
think that what happened with the
Sumerianss with their pictographic signs
is that those signs are right at the end
of a very very very long period of time
when somebody thought what we can do is
take these stupid inhibited [laughter]
no smoking signs and write language.
That is what I think happened. That's
what I think happened.
>> Is this a controversial statement?
>> Highly controversial. Highly contro.
Many many athereologists would leave the
room.
>> Yeah.
>> But I'm not scared of controversy
because it's natural. I 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 R. You have a
root like do, which means to go, and
then you have prefixes like e or moo or
ba. and they one's a passive, one's an
active and this and this. So when you
have a sentence, you have one of the
moob bar or e prefixes. Then you have
the root and then you have things at the
end. So it's called a glutinative 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 thing in in the form
of the verb. But the thing is, if you
wanted to write down, you and I decided
to write the answer, 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 5 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.
>> Kuneaform type tablets
>> well or pictographic type tablets before
the kunea form when they're drawing
type. And I'll tell you why. Because
there's this marvelous site in Turkey
called Gobeclete. You know about GBC?
Well, everybody knows about the
buildings and the architecture and the
skull. Everybody knows about it. If you
go all the way through the photographs,
which the archaeologists unwisely put
online, you'll find in the middle of one
color plate with lots of other things, a
round green stone like a scarab from
Egypt. That's to say it has an arched
back and a flat bottom. And on the flat
bottom there are hieroglyphic signs
carved in the 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 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. Yeah. Now when I was a boy at
university, my professor said to me that
the reason you can writing evolved in
Mesopotamia because they had complex
cities with ziggurats and big buildings
and lots of people and they had to
organize everything and so they invented
writing to cope with it. Well, if they
had to cope with that in Sumer in 3000
BC, they sure as hell had to do it at
Geekbecepe because they hardly even
begun to finish excavating the sites of
Geekly. go on and on like Manchester and
Newcastle [laughter] United. And really
um the old rule would be you could not
have architecture like that that without
that planned and built according to
principle with all the different people.
You couldn't have that without writing
in southern Iraq. So how come suddenly
7,000 years earlier they do it there?
That and that green stone shows that
they had writing. That was an official
who sealed this, got the stuff or
whatever it was or was his dad's name or
whatever it is. Got a wiggly snake and a
wiggly this. That is pictographic
writing. Maybe even as phonetic. I don't
know. But it was writing thousands of
years before in the south. And that's
what I think it is. You know, people
came with metal from or or precious
stones from Anatolia. They knew that in
the south they had lots and lots of
stuff. They wanted to trade. They had to
communicate. And it's basically like
having a cigarette with an X through the
middle. Everybody in the world knows
what that means. That they don't know
what the word for cigarette is in this
language or cancer or filter or tobacco.
It doesn't matter. It's that's
pictographic writing. We still use it
and and it's it's 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 gorillas.
They weren't less advanced than we are.
They were probably indistinguishable
from what we are. So you have merchants
and wanderers and people who see let's
go down the river and see where we end
up and and people looking for money,
looking for women, looking for
everything. I mean that's surely how it
was. But if you look at those Geckley
buildings with a skeptical eye how it
could be. I mean the finish of it is
astonishing. The structure of it, the
vision of it. to 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.
>> At the time of Gobelepe, they may have
been already a writing system.
>> There was because the thing is about it
that it's it's a seal to ratify. It's
not just a squiggle on a pot and you can
say, "Oh, that's just a piece of 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 paying for these
bricks, whatever it was and the official
person had to squash it down and it
leaves the impression I mean I am 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 them, one of the things which
impressed 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 Geekly Tee is a raindrop from
which I infer writing. And it's
perfectly possible they all wrote on
flat leaves. After all, in many parts of
the world, that's what happens. So for
example, in the Indis Valley, people
write the most abject nonsense about the
Indis 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 cuz it's
now it wouldn't be then. But actually
that argument is utterly utterly facious
because the process of evolution is
stymied left right and center by
inertia. inertia is nearly as strong as
evolution. And this is something that
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 kuneaform tablets we
have is just a raindrop
compared to the waterfall of of
thousands of years of humans.
>> We have a lot but it's nothing in
comparison what existed. But not only
that, see we don't have to decipher
anymore. We can read Acadian or
Babylonian Sumerian pretty well
fluently. That's not a problem. So the
information which you can get from these
sources especially three millennia of
sources is very very substantial
very substantial but it means that a
seriologists have the um inbuilt
[clears throat] idea that what we have
is something like all there ever was
which is absurd for example there's a
period called the earth three period
where people lived in city states they
wrote very small account tablets by the
thousand and there were two or three
major cities where this is the way they
lived. People had to bring tithes and
offerings and everything was recorded by
what I always refer to and people
sympathize with as the ancestors of the
inland revenue because everything had to
be written down so that some schmuck
could check it and fill out the ledger
and some other schmuck above him could
okay it so there 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 generalize about the
Sumerianss 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 bought dug them
up and they sold them all over the place
and they gone all over the world.
Thousands and thousands of them out of
probably two storage rooms which is not
a whole culture or a whole country or
their whole history or their belief
systems. So our view of it is sued by
the nature of the material. And
sometimes the material is opulent and
benevolent but not always. And sometimes
the people who work with Sloo material
don't even realize how Slude it is. I
mean, you know, it's quite remarkable.
>> So you in all your time of studying
Kaoform 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 Nineve which
was the Assyrian capital there was a fat
king king of the world called Asha
Barnipal and he had a fantastic library
and he promoted it he impounded tablets
he had them brought in he wanted all the
prevailing knowledge and all knowledge
from before under one roof it's a kind
of like Alexandria thing so he was a
trained scholar and this is what he did
and they found In the 19th century, they
dug it up. Leard and those people. So,
what did they find? They found the
tablets higgledy piggledy all over the
floor of a huge room and in the
corridors and everything [clears throat]
and lots of them broken and lots of them
burnt.
So, ever since then until really quite
recently,
seriologists have spent all their people
who work on these nit 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'll have the whole library.
>> Mhm.
>> But it's the absolute opposite because
what happened was that the Babylonians
in the south in my opinion
they they worked handin glove with the
Elummites from Iran. They had a pinser
movement and they beat Assyria. They
conquered Assyria. They ran through the
capital and they set fire to everything,
pinched all the women and to all the
jewelry and all the gold. And the 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
and things that got dropped and
everything. And that's what everyone
thinks is it.
>> So this is also unc is a controversial
project.
>> You're just nontoping.
It's common sense. You're going to get
both of us can today.
>> But you see the thing [laughter] you see
the thing. It's predicated on the
assumption that what we have is what
there only what there was. And this is
such a fallacy. It needs to be attacked
left, right and center.
>> So a lot of the kunea form language is
already deciphered.
>> Sure.
>> Can you speak to the the deciphering
process? How hard is it? Maybe take us
to this place of uh for you yourself
first learning the language, figuring
out the puzzle of it. How does it feel
the how does it look like to to a brain
that doesn't deeply understand it? And
how do you then piece stuff together?
Maybe you can go to the the early days
sort of the the Rosetta Stone of Kao
form also.
>> That's important. Well, the first thing
is is that how the Kunoifor writing
system works because the crucial point
and once you see it is makes a lot of
things clear is that they wrote in
syllables.
So if you take the English alphabet,
which of course they didn't, you had the
letter B, G, D, P, H, and so forth. They
couldn't write a consonant. They
couldn't do that. So what they did is
they had a vowel before a consonant or
one after. So you have ab and ba. But as
they had four vowels, you had to have ab
and ba, ib and b, and b, e and be.
>> Mhm. 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 but we don't have to really go into
it but basically if you are a Babylonian
and um you want to write the word museum
which of course is one of the most
important words in the English language
and other languages too. So what you
would do is you would write the syllable
moo.
>> Yeah.
>> And then the sign z and then the sign.
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 salabic writing.
>> Mhm. So when you go to university to
study kuneaoiform
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
a and then a lowering. And these signs
all retain 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 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 when in the
modern world if you go to university to
to do a seriology which I hope you and
all of your disciples will do as soon as
possible you actually have to cope with
two languages the Sumerian and the
Babylonian. Now the first thing is this
that the Babylonian language is a smitic
tongue which although it's extinct
is connected to or related to Hebrew,
Aramaic, Arabic, Ethiopic, Syriak all
that family of Semitic languages which
are still alive. It's an early example
of one of those. So that when the
decipherment came along, it was the
Semitic dictionary that they fell back
on to identify words, nouns, and roots.
The other language, which is Sumerian,
the one when you stick bits in the
beginning and stick bits at the end, is
not only not Semitic. It's not related
to any other known language.
>> 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-Uropean with Spanish, Italian,
Latin, Hittite, [snorts]
and so forth. And so that's why French,
that's one group, and you have Germanic,
and you have Savonic. And most
languages, even the far-flung ones, fall
into what can be seen to be maybe big
and airy groups. [clears throat] Their
family like that. There's not one for
Sumerian. So this means that the truth
that languages do not exist in a vacuum,
but they're part of a big family must
always have been true. So that when
writing arrives about 3,00 say 300 BC
to write proper properly it means that
Sumerian was recorded just in time but
the big languages maybe in China in
Russia in somewhere else in Asia that
were related to Samrian
>> are gone
>> are all gone they're gone forever and
ever and ever unless something amazing
happens. So we've got the one
representative of this bizarre family
that
>> amazing.
>> It isn't. It's a very stimulating thing
to imagine. I personally believe that
neanderalars 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 ant, thousand
years of rule living in Europe, they had
to deal with the ice age. They all live
together. They bring up their children.
You think 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 there is
for communication, I mean, the idea that
you and I are out hunting rhino and and
and you say, "Lex,
shut up. I'm constant." Lex, Lex, and 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 and all that, it's
absolutely stupid. If you cut your hand
with a knife, you sure as hell
experiencing.
You 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 threatened.
You think 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 are things. And then you
have a the idea that a label fixes to
something. Then the light bulb has gone
on and next minute you have rhino and
you have skin and you have babies and
you have because I think you have an
idea and the idea then drives the brain
and the brain has another idea. It works
like fertility.
>> So what do you think is the motivation
the primary driver of developing written
language? Is it is it goes hand inhand
with uh civilization?
>> I think that the media in which it
appears is when there's a lot of people
living in an urban environment
>> and w with with rival institutions or
the king or with the government or all
those sorts of things. And that's why I
think Geeklete must have been the same
thing. I read somewhere that they're all
nomads and they only came to go you know
3 months. 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 and I mean you know you can't just
you know [laughter] like that like
gorillas
>> uh all right so deciphering the process
of deciphering
>> so when I started there were grammarss
and sign lists and dictionaries
everything was marvelous it was all
basically deciphered. All you had to do
is get on with learning it. But at the
beginning when the first tablets and
bricks in Kunea form and stone
inscriptions came to light, no one could
read them. But they knew they were
writing, but they didn't know how to
read them. And what happened was, like
you said before with the Rosetta Stone,
it was something directly comparable
because there was um an inscription of
one of the Persian kings halfway up a
mountain in a place called Bisutun
where this king Darius had written an
account of his successful career in
Elilumite and in Babylonian and in old
Persian triilingual version and old
Persian although it is a obviously a
archaic form of the language Persian is
still alive it was still alive in the
19th century so they since the old
Persian was written in a very simple
style of kunea form they deciphered it
they twigged it was old Persian they
read it in Persian and they read the
names Darush in old Persian and then
suddenly somebody realized that the
other two columns about the same length
>> brilliant
>> what do you know and the thing is it
said I am das the great King, king of
the working son of
grandson of so there's a whole paragraph
with repeated things in the Persian
which they could understand. So what do
you know they're reiterated passages in
the other two languages. So that was the
key [snorts] that that kind of the
chisel that opened up kunoiform writing
proper and the thing was they soon
twigged that the language of the
Babylonian was a smitic tongue and this
was so important. I think the first word
they discovered was the word for river
which is naru in Aadian and nar in
Arabic and Aramaic. And when they
realized that the word that corresponded
to the Persian had this form, this was a
gift a gift of gold because everybody
immediately sees their Arabic and Hebrew
dictionaries and started leafing through
looking for words that would fit in the
context. And they basically they
deciphered 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 triilingual
um I don't know what would have
happened. I mean I suppose it's
conceivable that in the very modern
world something might have happened but
as it was it was done by sheer brain
power by very very clever persons just
doing it and they they cracked it. The
Elumite 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 plane and um Henry
Roinson who was a upstanding young
British officer who claimed to decipher
Cana form quite unjustifiably climbed up
there with some miserable kid and made
squeezes of the whole thing overlooking
the plane thousands of feet up in the
air and brought those back and they were
used in the decipherment. So it's very
romantic.
>> Wait a minute. more controversial
statement from Muring today. Henry
Rollinsson doesn't deserve the credit
for that.
>> No, I don't think he does. He's he's
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 Kilerlay and
had five daughters and ran this church
who was um possibly a card carrying
genius if not jolly jolly clothes. And
what happened with with him was this.
There was um an ongoing competition well
an ongoing challenge to decipher
hieroglyphic writing which Sholon
usually gets the credit for. And
[clears throat] Hinx was very interested
in trying to decipher hieroglyphic ahead
of the French
and he ran into a sort of dead end at
one stage and he thought he'd have a
look at Kunea form to see if it was
helpful
and at the same time he cracked it. He
worked out how it worked. He realized
that one sign can have more than one
value of sound and of meaning because
they are multivalent signs. I tried to
shelter you from the horrible news, but
it actually it's not it's not a walk in
the park. It takes about 5 years to to
um you probably do it in about four
probably.
>> That is a compliment. I think you just
complimented me. Uh thank you. Thank you
very much. [laughter]
So what So you're saying one one sign
that looks exactly the same might have
different sounds given the context.
>> Yeah. And you have to choose the right
sound and and and also different meaning
as well because for example if you if
you have a sign for hot word hot right
you you can't really have a picture sign
for hot
doesn't make sense but [clears throat]
what they did is they did a drawing of a
kind of um complex thing with a brazer
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 contest. is
all a context to matter. I mean, it
really is quite a matter for despair
when you start ka form because on top of
everything else, they didn't leave gaps
between the words. They're all
connected. That's really mean. Yeah. So
when you read um what you have to do you
start with the first sign and you think
of the sign list 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 and um it's it's
very beautiful. I think it's it's
marvelous.
>> 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 um [snorts]
for about three years beforehand, I'd
wanted to be an Egyptologist.
>> So, I'd read the grammar by gardener and
was looking forward very much to
studying ancient Egyptian. And what
happened was that I went up to the
University of Birmingham where I went to
university. And uh there was a man
called Rd Clark who was an Egyptologist.
And Ronald Clark came in on the Monday
and gave us one lesson about Egyptian
sculpture or something like that. And
the next minute he next day he died.
Bang.
So, uh, 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." Um, but there's
another person in this department who
teaches another ancient language called
Lambert, and he teaches Kunea form. So,
what I suggest is you go and do a bit of
kunea form with professor Lambert, and
then when I get an Egyptologist, you can
convert back.
So, I go and knock on the door. Yes. Um,
so I went in and said, I want to learn
cano form. And, uh, Professor Lambert,
[clears throat] who was rather a
Sherlock Holmes kind of figure,
aesthetic, bony, sarcastic, cruel,
[snorts]
>> cruel,
>> cruel, absolutely terrifying. Um, and I
said, um, I I wanted to learn ka form.
and he wasn't at all pleased because
this was a time in Britain when um
professors
resented having students to teach
because it buttered into their research
time. It was that sort of arrangement.
Anyway, I started it off and after about
I don'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 he we started reading.
>> So given the complexity of the signs,
why did Kuneaform last 3,000 years, the
most successful writing system ever?
>> Fair question. There are several
factors. One is the famous factor of
inertia.
>> Mhm. The second thing is that people who
could read and write and were in charge
of archives and with the clarks in the
temple and the um writers
[clears throat] for the king and
everything commanded a very great deal
of power because most of the public
couldn't.
>> So they reserved to themselves
knowledge, [snorts] understanding,
philosophical inquiry. I mean, no doubt
it went on in pubs and things, but they
were they were in charge. They had
everything under lock and key and they
were I think the scribal schools are
rather claky. They were certainly um
clicky 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
soap box 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 Samrian
and Aadian the language languages
properly and all the vocabulary and the
grammar.
>> Mhm. So some boys probably had a lot of
trouble doing this and you know they
were okay but then there 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
lowlevel 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 presents and all
this all the thing had to be done for 4
days. So the writer would come and and
do so your 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,
law, working for the king, working for
the church, I mean [clears throat] the
priesthood. So all those things which
were dependent upon archives and writing
they would find their nevo and also um
architecture because if a big building
had to be built then somebody had to
know about loadbearing 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 they found their neo and
some of them were intellectually very
able indeed And they went into
um the disciplines of on the one hand
astrology but more seriously into
astronomy
and theoretical grammar because they
they had treatises about the
relationship between the two languages
and how they worked and different parts
of speech and and they wrote learned
commentaries as well what words meant.
So there was an intellectual
highlevel top and then there were lots
of professional scribes and then the the
kids who left school as soon as possible
and uh did all that like today. I
apologize to be philosophical but
Winkenstein the philosopher said that
the limits of our language is the limits
of our world. So to which degree did the
languages that were encoded in Kunea
form define human civilization would you
say? what what were the what were the
things that were complicated to express
and therefore were not expressed often?
>> That's a really interesting question. So
um in terms of uh richness of vocabulary
and richness of verbal subtlety,
I think Babylonian rivals Arabic and of
course English. You know, in other
words, you can say whatever you want in
English.
>> However subtle it might be, even if
people didn't 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 fullyfledged
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 in Mesopotamia, it takes the
form of omens because they believed that
events accidental [clears throat] or
deliberately stimulated had implications
for what was going to happen. [snorts]
>> And they took omens from things in the
sky and uh things in the street and
every single thing. If you were a
[clears throat]
well-qualified divine, they would have
this significance. Right?
Now, there are thousands of lines of
omens of all different kinds. And in
Aadian, it says, for example, if a
lizard runs across the breakfast table,
the queen will die. So, if you translate
the Aadian this way, the word if verb
and everything, 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 is understood by
my colleagues.
Well, this is absolutely impossible
because if you are you're the you're the
chief diver of the king and you open up
a sheep to take a liver out and examine
it according to the if the queen's going
to die and the king's there, you're not
going to say, uh, the queen's going to
die. I mean, you're going to like a
fucking idiot if she doesn't [laughter]
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 diver 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 what he wants to hear. He has
to tell the king if it's bad news in
such a way that he doesn't mind or he
won't worry. It's the most beautiful
thing. It's so subtle. It's it's like a
it's like a violin conc. It can never
have been a equals b for a minute. So
the medical texts say if you do if a man
has this you do this he drinks this
he'll get better. Right? He says he'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 everything
should go fine. You should get better
you should be better soon but never you
will get better cuz what happens if you
die where are you?
>> The lawyers will show up.
>> Absolutely. So this means that not
expressable in Aadian grammar are these
modal verbs.
>> Mhm. could, might, should, ought, they
can't be expressed grammatically. But it
is impossible. There was such a
magnificent literary language where they
didn't have these subtleties. It's
utterly impossible. And if you translate
he will um in a literary text he might
then the whole text is different. The
whole text is different.
>> Yeah. Absolutely. And they don't. My
colleagues translate that. It says in
the grammar books
like that automatically there's no self
appraisal of the folly of it.
You have said that translation is part
archaeology, part detective work, part
poetry. Can we just speak about
translation and the art of it a bit
more?
>> Yes.
>> I mean it's such a such an incredible
discipline just like you said hinted at
just a subtle variation in a single word
can change everything. 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 Aadian is
they learn the Aadian word and they
learn the English translation. Right?
You have the paras to divide. So
whenever you have the verb parasu 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 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 Chicago it's the most
salient and important thing that came
out of America in all its history is the
Chicago Assyrian dictionary which is
this long. There's only 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 achievements. [laughter]
>> It's the pride of our nation. Those two
things
>> the very thing
>> Chicago diction 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 a to zed so to speak and it's
it's as long as this table it's
magnificent thing and this big and there
the people who worked on it were real
translators so they knew that it wasn't
lexically a means b so if you have
something in a proverb
you the meaning is going to be a bit
different from in a letter and you know
so people really really understand
oadian they really But this thing about
about the modal verbs is an interesting
conundrum to me because um there's no
way it's reflected in the writing. So I
can only assume that there was some kind
of drawing out of the vowel in a verb
meaning could you know like you saying
might 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 like on a dig, it's very
exciting if they come out of the ground
and no one's looked for them before you
know it's your job. And if you're a
competent deriologist,
um you should be able to sight 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 inter 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 uh figure out the technical
complexities. You can figure out the the
noise