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 meaning missing pieces.
>> Yeah. Sometimes you can calculate to
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 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 seriologists
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 chap to a woman about, you know, you
are very beautiful and your lips are
like radishes and your ears are like
walruses and things, but I mean there
are some things like that. And there's a
kind of street drama in Babylon in 4th
century BC, something like that, when
there must have been actors who did this
in the street. And it's it's it's it's
Marduk and and Sarapanum's wife and
another woman. Marduk's having an affair
with this other
>> oh no
>> goddess
>> and Sopan is jealous and the women fight
in the street and heard insults of 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 vi
opera without the music I suppose. I
don't know. But anyway, it
[clears throat] starts off when um
Salonimum 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
>> between deities also.
>> Yeah.
>> Because deities are only modeled on
human beings after all. So
>> yeah, deities is 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 Anu, Enlil and A. 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 amalgamated
and then they were given jobs in the
households of the big gods. So there was
a sort of structure.
So you had this in the background a big
sweeping theology like you have in the
world today in some parts of the world.
And um this was the main system. And the
main gods were concerned with the ruler
and the fate of the country. And another
god was concerned with
illness and um the dead and what happens
to the dead. And they had other
specialtities. And they all had their
own temples. And when a baby came into
the world
um probably this was universally true.
the baby was put under the tutilage of
one or other of the gods. Sometimes you
know the royal family they were the big
shots but sometimes not or the ones that
were in the family or something like
that. So people had grew up with the
idea that among all of them there were
special ones for the family and they had
a special one who was supposed to look
after them. [clears throat]
That's sort of basic idea. But the
trouble is since gods are as you say
human beings on a larger scale they can
be forgetful or uninterested or on
holiday and there are lots of ways that
you have to prompt your make little
sacrifices and little bribes so they do
their job and keep an eye on you. So
they had that kind of um slightly
practical view of gods that they were a
bit unpredictable great when they were
there but not always there. sort of
idea. And um I also believe this that a
lot of people in the world today who did
not have the disadvantage of growing up
in a stifening religion but are just
normal people get a lot more interested
when they're really ill or when they
have a big disaster all of a sudden. Um
God or gods seem a lot more important
than they do normally.
So that few people walk about in a state
of religious awe and a good proportion
of clergymen I've ever met don't do that
either. It's a kind of conception that's
not actually based on reality that
[snorts] the individual's response to
religious stimula fluctuates and is
[clears throat] varied and is often a
response to need. It doesn't come from
nothing. I mean people don't suddenly
feel I got to thank the Lord for the
rainbow or something like that. I
[snorts] think this probably true today.
I mean when you read the investigations
they make of religion today.
Christianity in this country is on the
decline because people who are supposed
to be Christians say they aren't
anymore. They're atheists. So the people
who say I go to church and I believe and
everything is a relatively small number
of people. So now this is the situation
which is quite remarkable if you think
about it. The Lord 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 as you said with
suffering that's a part of life. So when
mo those rare moments come when you have
to deal with deep pain, loss, suffering,
heartbreak, all those things.
>> Yeah.
>> Looking up to the sky and asking
questions and trying to figure out the
answers in your conversation with the
divine.
>> I think that's true. But I think in
Mesopotamia it was different in terms of
its potency and immediiacy because
there's no skyscrapers in Iraq. You
know, if you live in southern Iraq and
you sleep on the roof and there no
lights at night, you know, you're under
the stars, you can see everything
because of no smog and everything like
that. And the idea that the gods are
there watching, it's not [snorts] like a
big artifice like it is here. It just
doesn't ring true here. You can't come
to it and really believe in it. Whereas
these people didn't have to really
believe in it because it was it. It's
the obvious practical part of life.
They're right there.
>> Yeah. But it's like they didn't believe
in ghosts. They took them for granted.
And they didn't believe in the gods.
They took them [clears throat] for
granted. This is a different mechanism
because nobody here in the world today
takes those things for granted. Just the
opposite. But I think that's how it
worked. So you didn't have people
wrestling with the idea of whether the
gods really exist or that whether they
really care about me. They gave them a
nudge when it was necessary.
And they might offer a this, they might
offer a that, but they it was this 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 it's clear from the
inscriptions all of them that I managed
to find that nobody ever asked
themselves,
did do these things exist or not? Or did
I really see them or not? Or did I not?
They didn't. They didn't. They just took
it all for granted.
>> What are ghosts? Is it usually
ancestors?
>> Um, well, everybody, everybody who died
in bed naturally or peacefully, what we
call their ghost, went down to the
nether world
and there they were. So, they buried
people jolly quick um for obvious
reasons and like they do in Islam and
Judaism today, it's the same kind of
idea. and uh the spirit of the person
went down through the gates to the
netherworld and stayed there.
So that's the basic situation. And
people in their houses had actual
burials under the courtyard and they had
a thing where you pour stuff down a hole
fluid and food kind of symbolic
offerings to the to them.
>> So is that a way to lessen 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're very fond of somebody or you love
somebody and they die, it's kind of
infantile to whine about it ever after
because what do you think was going to
happen? Either you or them, you know, I
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. We're all
kind of infantile all the way through
from, you know, we don't stop being
infantile after we're infants. It's it's
one thing to know it,
you know, theoretically and it's another
thing to know it know it like this thing
ends. This ride ends
>> but that's the pain. It's the fact that
the whole thing ends. And when people
fall off the edge, [snorts]
>> they fall off the edge.
>> So yeah, the knowledge that it ends is
the painful thing, not the actual moment
of the ending. 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,
help with that.
>> I I think the big mistake for mankind
was the creation of monotheistic
religions because they brought 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. That's
>> very dogmatic. Yeah,
>> dogmatic and it's led to everything.
Inquisitions and this, you know, all
this kind of stuff. It's all as a result
of it that one religion is superior and
the other should be stamped out and all
that. And in my opinion, the
monotheistic [clears throat] religion
has generated the most fantastic amount
of non-religious feeling. Whereas when
you have all the different gods and have
different specialtities 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 um into a temple in Kolkata when I
went to there with my wife Joanna. We
went into the temples and saw how they
were and I think they must be very much
like the ones in Mesopotamia. So there
was never anything about them which
affronted people's individuality
or or or I mean there's no religious
prejudice or even racial prejudice in
antiquity. All these things are modern
disadvantageous matters. If you think
what's done in the name of religion, it
is absolutely staggering.
>> So let's talk 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 Kunea form. It's
one of the earliest works of literature.
>> That's right.
>> Uh can you tell me about this work?
>> Yeah. Well, we know it best from this
Assyrian library set of tablets. There
are 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 at all and then around
the 1800s people started to write them
down in Samrian or Babylonian. So there
was a corpus and eventually they were
woven into this long 12 homeriic type
thing about the adventures of Gilgamesh.
So it is certainly literature and um
it's to do with humanity and immortality
and um man in the hands of the gods and
um incorporates lots of interesting
exciting stories. It's very Hollywood
kind of thing and you can see within it
um even in the sophisticated nine
version its roots are in oral literature
because when somebody speaks it says
Gilgamesh opened his mouth to speak and
addressed his friend Enkidu and then
there's a speech and then Enkidu opened
his mouth and addressed his friend
Gilgamesh. Well, when you're reading a
story, you don't need that.
And that must be because of when there
was when there was a enacting of an oral
thing a narrator would say and it
suddenly got frozen into the text. So
it's it's very strange thing because if
you're reading it is obvious that one
person speaks and the other person
speaks and and they always have this
complicated thing stuck in the text. So
it must be an echo of presumably you
have your protagonists
um enacting their timeless 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 this
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 twerps with a guitar um sitting
around a fire on holiday. But that
mechanism when people gather after dark
when there is a fire and talk is the
sort of environment where
narrative accounts flourish naturally
among human beings.
>> Stories telling a story. It doesn't have
to be pragmatic. It can be literary 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 there's a god riding a chariot up
it and then they have a story about you
know and all those sorts of things and
or whatever it would be but I think
probably you have to allow for a strong
creative
principle surfacing in homo sapiens at a
quite early age because the paintings on
cave walls you try drawing a running
antelope in color on a wall. I mean the
quality of the workmanship of the
artistic ability is
unsurpassable. It's not just good. So
how is that an explicable thing at this
very early date? It means
that among all the population you have
imbecile and Einstein's and somewhere
along the line you have Rembrandt. 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 they are a
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 um about
what happened and about famous battles
or when the flood came or how people
learn to make fire or you know how we
invented the wheel all those sorts of
things everybody put puts down as but
that's presumably what absolutely
happened and you have the capacity for
people to adore and to respect among
their own kind people of astounding
ability. There must have been hunters
who were ferociously quick and you know
wrestle with polar bears and all that
kind of and [snorts] all this stuff
would be gristed the narrator thing and
things got more [clears throat]
complicated and more sophisticated. So
lessons might be incorporated or lessons
might come out of them unintentionally
because if you tell a story without a
moral, it is usually a moral if you if
you think about it
>> and many of those stories are sadly lost
to time or not yet found.
>> You mentioned floods and speaking of
stories that have been lost and found.
You're well known for a lot of things.
One of them is decoding the so-called
ark tablet. Yeah, that was a challenge
because it's really hard to read.
>> You got to tell me the story. This uh
ancient Babylonian clay tablet dating
1700 BC which contains a flood narrative
that predates the biblical story of Noah
by a thousand years
>> at least.
>> At least.
>> Yeah.
>> Okay. Well, you got to tell me the full
story.
>> So, the full story is like this.
Visitors used to come to the museum um
to ask questions of the experts who
worked there and one would be on duty
periodically and sometimes people would
bring objects, sometimes they'd ask
questions and somebody once came in with
a whole load of objects including this
tablet which to cut a long story short I
identified pretty much straight away as
being part of the flood story. It was a
tablet about 8 in by 3. 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 write
them out and create something quieter
that worked harder. So this was the
basic mechanism and they had different
ways of doing it. And then the most
effective one was they were going to
send a flood to wipe them all out. And
one of the gods, the number three in the
triumvirate thought this was a
deplorable idea. So he took it upon
himself to warn this person called
Atraasis who lived in Mesopotamia to
build a boat to rescue life when the
waters came. And in it he told him the
shape of it and the materials he would
need and how much he would need of the
materials um so he could do it safely.
And in the 60 lines of the tablet all
this stuff was there. It was like a
blueprint to build this boat. And the it
was is extraordinary because it was
round the boat. Um and everybody who
knew their Bible the arcs sort of coffin
shape kind of affair and nobody thought
of it being a round boat. And um
the fact is that round boats um weren't
used in Mesopotamia on on the rivers
corals that's to say because for
transporting things and um they would
never sink. They were very
appropriate and and so in this story it
was decided it was going to be a giant
coral a really really big one that would
never sing and the male and female
animals could go in and the Adraasi's
wife and his three sons and so forth
could go in and everything would be
there and it would float on the water
>> and when it came down they said we'll
start all over again. So it it's it's
got very many points in common with the
the description of the flood in Genesis.
And of course so did the one in
Gilgamesh. So in 1872
there was a um [clears throat] an 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 ark came
to rest on a mountain that the hero of
this thing in Gilgamesh who was called
Napishim released a bird three times to
see whether the trees had come up and
the first one came back and the second
one and the third one didn't. So he knew
that. So this was not only in the epig
of Gilgamesh but it was also in the book
of Genesis. So what it meant was that it
[clears throat] wasn't you couldn't have
two stories. It wasn't two stories about
the same thing. It was literary
dependence. It was literary dependence.
One was locked into the other. The text
of the Hebrew Bible from whenever it was
written down. Of course, nobody knows
quite when, but whenever it was, it was
about the same time as the one from Nin,
about the 7th century, 6th, something
like that, that the that the time
interval between the Gilgamesh version
from Nineveh and the Hebrew Bible is not
like a big expanse of time. So, there
was an argument that one goes this way
and one goes that way. But when this
tablet came in a thousand years old,
nobody believes the Bible was written in
1700 BC.
So the primacy of the Mesopotamian
matter was established. And it's
important because you never get floods
in Jerusalem.
You just don't. But in Mesopotamia, they
had floods. The rivers, sometimes there
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 be is a plausible
Mesopotamian mechanism and it's based in
a sort of sense in my opinion in reality
I think there must have been some
tsunami once most people were drowned
and those who survive were in boats
obviously and then afterwards nobody
ever forgot it and it went on and on. I
mean uh there actually could have been a
catastrophic event of a large
>> not the whole world cuz people
>> but just enough to imagine
>> yeah sweeping down to the Persian Gulf
and you know the flat plains everything
would be destroyed all the houses will
be destroyed and animals will 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 5,000
years before the tablet, 10,000. It
doesn't matter because with the passage
of time nothing happens in that part of
the world. So something will be alive
grandfather to grandson before you go to
sleep and remember my boy you know you
only have to be careful because
otherwise and all that stuff for sure
bogey man stuff it never quite died out
in their conscious minds.
So I think that when the Judeans from
Jerusalem after the destruction of the
temple and the by the Babylonians and
the route of the priesthood and
everything, the king and the others went
over land to Babylon as refugees and
they had to live there for three
generations of time under
Nebuchadnezzar's reign. So I believe
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,
um you have the mechanism that the early
books of the Bible explain to the reader
how it is that these people are in such
a mess because they're supposed to be
the chosen people doing all that. Look
at they haven't got a temple. They
haven't got a country. they're all
washed up and everything like that. So I
think
that what happened was was it's a
complex thing but the Judeans from
Jerusalem they spoke Hebrew but they
also spoke Aramaic right the two
languages their 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 all these
refugees from Jerusalem were milling
around in Babylonia they would have
intermarried and disappeared within no
time at all. And the authorities who
were there prevented this by drawing up
a kind of charter of their history,
explaining things from the beginning of
time up until now, how it happened and
what happened and it was all
intentional.
So that is in my opinion the driving
force behind the Hebrew texts. 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 about the vengeful
almighty, he was in the Old Testament
very unpleasant and vengeful person. It
was because of sin. It wasn't because of
racket and 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 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 or two weeks to build the
ark. So the clock goes tick tick tick
tick tick. And about a third of the
films that come out of Hollywood are the
world's going to be demolished by aliens
and you've got 24 hours to think of a
cure. Tick tick tick tick tick tick
tick. is that that narrative is
irresistible that one man can save the
world if he's lucky in time from
disaster. So it starts off with Pishim
and it goes on to um 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.
>> Yeah.
>> And you uh people should check out you
tell the story of that wonderfully. Now,
what did you learn from building this
replica? And do you think the actual ark
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 never know what happened, but
you know, it's a literary
moral principle teaching narrative. And
look, missionaries take it all around
the world. That's the other thing. See,
there this is this is the mystery of it
that you have flood stories everywhere.
And some of them are from medalsome
missionaries who have all these innocent
little kids sitting on benches and and
I'm going to tell you a story like that.
So it moves into this consciousness and
it gets recycled and it gets recycled.
So this is one thing and then also there
probably are spontaneous ideas because
it's not so complicated or so amazing
that independently people would have
such a narrative after all you know like
the the great river in China floods and
everybody gets so that it's not at all
surprising but what was so shocking for
George Smith who was such a clever
person is to read for the first time on
this tablet from Ninovi long before the
one that I discovered came to light
about the three birds being released one
after the other and that that was the
clincher that the two stories were
locked together and lots of clergymen
got very miserable about it and didn't
know what to make of it. So that's
that's a definitive proof that there's a
literary
>> literary I think literary link I think
so
>> and I mean these puzzles that are then
connected but the the ark you discover
[sighs and gasps] 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 That's right.
>> To all the [laughter]
>> That's right. And every time somebody
built a coracore and they didn't do the
waterproofing, right?
>> Yeah.
>> You know what will happen? It'll be out
on the river and that will be your lot.
You know, I I think so. I think it was a
I there there's a certain amount of
evidence that in Mesopotamian society,
people talk about the time before the
flood and after the flood. And it's like
when I was a boy, people used to talk
about before the war, we used to
and now we we do this that it's a kind
of cataclysmic cut across history which
provides a a ruler. So things are either
before it or after it because there's a
king list for example where they wrote
down the names of all the kings all the
way back to the beginning including
kings before the flood. They knew about
that. They have their names and their
great regal years or thousands of years.
Fascinating.
>> So there's a guy named Graham Hancock
who talks about the younger Jesus
hypothesis 10,000 BC that there was an
asteroid that hit Earth and melted the
ice sheets and that created a flood in
North America. So that means an actual
cataclysmic global event that then as
all the different civilizations sprung
up, they all carried that knowledge,
that memory. That's his idea. What
probability would you assign to that?
>> 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.
So I I I don't have any sympathy with
that. But people have made drilled a
cause and in I don't know all over. I
I'm not interested in all that stuff. is
to my mind. 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 says get up. You got to
build a boat and this is what you're
going to need and you got to get on with
it sunshine or we're all sunk. I mean
what are you going to do? The most
interesting thing is this Atraases 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,
fellas, I got to deal with." No, he had
to tell him, "This is the blueprint.
This is the shape. You need all this.
You need all that. You 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 great boat
boat builder. You go
>> the
>> taxi driver or something to
>> the taxi and then that's that that uh
hero's journey that that's the stuff of
great myths. Yeah,
>> it is. It is a great myth.
>> A little detail would be really cool
about the the the replica like uh what
did you of the boat? Yeah. One
>> something else. [laughter]
There were there were three BS who did
it.
>> Yep. And they were specialists in
reconstructing medieval Arab boats
because quite often they found in the
mud or bits or they have information and
they rec so they were at home in it and
we built it on a small lagoon in in
Kerala. 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. A pretty huge
thing but they made it they because it
had wooden ribs. You see?
>> Mhm.
>> And they could get wood ribs. They
worked out by computer the maximum
maximum size they could do it when it
would [clears throat] 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 bitammen, 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 it was just the
most unbeliev I went out there with my
dear wife for the last few days and was
on the maiden voyage and they had
trouble with the bumen because Indian
bammen is really not up to scratch and
they couldn't get Iraqi bitin because
it's cultural property it's carcinogenic
they wouldn't export a tank a load of
Iraqi so we had to use Indian stuff but
the thing is this the bitamin which they
coated it with was okay but it wasn't
perfect so when went out into the
waters. There was a bit of a leak. Water
had to be bailed out. So I was ah you
see
I said okay listen 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 that's a feature
not
>> that's the feature of the thing. Yeah
[laughter]
that's the feature. That thing could
have gone to ports.
>> So it's authentic.
>> Absolutely right. We had such an
adventure with that thing. They made a
documentary film. Yeah, in various
languages. And [snorts] 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." You know, they didn't let
me go back and say, "What the hell are
you talking about? I did it. I know what
I'm talking I can rec." They didn't they
didn't do it. I I couldn't get my own
back. I was really annoyed, really
furious.
>> So, you're you're saying that there's
some inaccurate things, too.
>> I am saying there's some inaccurate
things. Yeah. Somebody in Iraq said,
"Oh, it couldn't have been that. They
probably had lots of little coracles all
tied together, did they? Fuck. I mean,
you know, he couldn't read the stuff. I
mean, it's really, really, really
annoying. I mean, [snorts] you should
have a chance, shouldn't you? You know,
if you're going to have a fencing match,
you both have to have a rap here,
wouldn't you say?
>> Yeah. And you're the the OG. You're the
person that coded it.
>> Yeah. But the thing is this, the
proportions of the material were
accurate. M
>> this is the crucial thing [snorts] that
um [clears throat]
what had happened was is they took the
information about how you make a real
coral which is usually enough two 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
Enki said you got to build the biggest
coracal you've ever seen like that right
well I mean if you do this in cinema in
Guilford people will say well that's
fine but if you do it to a whole load of
river people who use coracals and 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,
[snorts] what do they do? They go to a
coral 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
then he'd have all the stuff and he'd do
it with this way and you need all this
and need all this and they'd all be
hypnotized by it. That I think is is
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 uh many of the films in Hollywood
today would have the same level of
rigor.
>> Rigor 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 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
tantalizing thing where they create
baron women and who can't have children
and men who can't have children and
people who priestesses who don't have
children and they institute in society
some figures who will not reproduce the
species. So it's actually a rather
sophisticated
Malthusian kind of philosophical
position. It's remarkable. So that the
noise means there's so many of them, not
they're actually so noisy that we can't
hear ourselves think.
>> You have to tell me about the
the world of ancient games. Maybe we can
start with the ancient royal game of
what is it and uh how were you somehow
able to crack the rules of it? Well, the
Royal Game of U um is a board of 20
squares in a rather idiosyncratic form
and it was pretty much unknown until the
1920s when Selenid Woolly was digging at
the site of or
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 uh lots of people had ideas
about how it might have been played 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 and the one from Ur dates to
about 2,600 BC
and from then down to the end of the
first millennium there's examples of
boards from Mespert
itself and from Egypt,
Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Turkey, Greece,
um, Cree
all over the place. And when you put all
the boards together,
you realize that you're dealing with a
board game which was um, extremely
widespread and extremely popular
>> across space and time.
>> Across space and time. So it lasted for
nearly 3,000 years and it was played all
over the place. So it's one of those
games which is like
chess or back gammon which you can say
are world conquerors because the way I
see that the issue is that human beings
um 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 pullalong
things and adults um had board games and
they're kind of embedded in culture from
a very early time. And this game was so
widespread, you know, Tuton Camun, 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
um across the gnome world um without
written rules and without people
necessarily knowing the same language.
Um, so a merchant would go
end up in a bar, you know, come from
India or I don't know where and start pl
seeing these guys playing have a go
himself and 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 and
the other. And so you can see that that
the board has 20 squares. So you have a
block of 4x3 and then a bridge of two
and then a second 3x two thing at the
end. So it it's difficult to describe
the actual shape. But what happened was
after about 2,000 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 your first
corner and you turn the corner 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 rosettes on were 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 its lasting thing shows it must have
been a very good game. Um if if people
more or less played the same thing on it
everywhere. I mean it may be that they
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 is the way I
understand the game plays a a measurable
quot of strategy. It's a mix of
probability and strategy.
>> Yeah. So most games are either just um
probability like snakes and ladders.
Snake shoots and ladders is just thing
like that. Or you have a game like chess
which is pure strategy.
And the grown-up game in the modern
world where fortuitity or chance and
strategy have a good balance is back
gammon which is a sort of grownup
version of this sort of game where
nevertheless if you play according to
the most rational interpretation it
strategy is a a major factor. So what
happened was that many people had ideas
how it was played and the route 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
2nd 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
throws. 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 um they
even play in Iraq in cafes. way. Now,
now
>> they do because after it's come come
back to life, it's on the internet,
people play, they're different rules,
but the ones that 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 once I was in um [snorts] uh
in in California in in in 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 the the
lady who ran the friends of the Getty
had a brilliant idea. So 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 cuz you
can get the rules down in like 3 minutes
like this. So I said okay first you have
to do this first you have to do that. So
off you go. So there was silence and
then after a while someone said I hate
you. I'm never playing with you again.
when they never played it before,
>> when somebody had escaped at the last
minute, cleaned up 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 kind of thing, beautiful
matter. You think games are,
you know, our desire to play games, a
mix of chance, a mix of strategy is a
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 um 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. Yes.
>> Where you can nevertheless 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.
>> Mhm.
>> Which is not quite the same as pastime.
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 grandmothers
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
catchall phrase for the existence of
board games and in India there are many
board games um chess of course is the
famous one but they're quite 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
play for pleasure and also
uh in a kind of way it doesn't really
matter who wins because you might play
goes round and round and round
eventually somebody wins and then they
have another game. So it's a sort of
that kind of rather graceful valid
function for not wasting time doing
something which is stimulating and
beneficial without it being um
overpowering in either way. So I think
it is a human matter. Of course uh we
humans also sometimes mix in gambling
into the whole thing to add some money
on top of it which I'm sure sometimes
was involved here. I think I think so
but probably only late on because money
as such
>> of course doesn't appear till quite late
but there there are uh
we know in Mesopotamia it's rather
interesting thing there's a school
tablet with three or four lines quoted
from one literary thing and three or
four from another literary thing and one
[snorts] of them it has this
uh oh my Astro Al. Oh my Astragal. Woe
is me. Woe is me.
And that's all we have. And I think this
[clears throat]
is an example of a genre of literature
called the gamblers's lament
because they use knucklebones or
astrogals as dice. And I'm sure there
were people who bet sack of this or a
room full of that and uh on the throw of
the knucklebones. And this extract in
the school text is probably from a
literary tablet in which somebody
lost everything
even though they weren't coins because I
think you're right that it's a natural
it's a natural thing to for it to acrue
and also maybe men and women play
differently because there are some games
which were played um in karims among
girls you know 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
accounts for credibility are for is just
exactly that setup.
As you mentioned, you're
the creator at the uh 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 um it's a special
case um 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 the 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 discernable 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 neighbors and how it what it's
learned from what came before. All those
features together is really what the
concern of the museum is. [snorts] And
of course to to collect everything we we
or has been to collect everything we can
to tell those narratives and also to
look after them um [clears throat]
according to scientific principle. So
all those things at once are the task of
the British Museum. And the second
horizon it serves um is the unborn.
So ba 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 carping about this or
that or saying the 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 an affront 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 less assertity 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 contributive 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 um people say
ah you say this because you work there
and you you know you're a curator. You
would say that that the British Museum
is a special place has nothing to do
with that. It is actually a special
place because you cannot point to
another museum in the world
[clears throat] 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. It's
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 and
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, as I see it, the best
we could do. If, for example, a whole
load of Martians arrived in the great
court and um burst through the front
door and said to us, um, "Tell us all
about this place. Tell us about the
world. Can you do it fast cuz we got to
leave." And if you took them round and
said, "Look at this. Look at this. Look
at this. Look at this." They'd get some
picture which wasn't insane. The
[snorts] only thing they wouldn't get is
a recording of Johnny be good by Chuck
Bry, but apparently one's being put into
space.
>> So this is a very comforting thing.
>> But that's kind of what the task for the
British Museum is to do that but for the
entirety of human history.
>> Yeah. [clears throat]
>> Store of artifacts that
>> that are the raindrops from which you
can reconstruct the world.
>> Precisely. So, and it's not a valid
criticism to say to us that most of the
stuff is not on exhibition, which is
what everybody says. It should go here,
it 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 thinker 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 par
contemporary parallels. So the the dis
the benefit of distance storage and
contemplation is inestimable.
There's so many questions I want to ask
you. What what wisdom 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 the it's often as you've
spoken about we see the ancient peoples
as uh lesser, dumber,
um more primitive and you've spoken
about how they are basically the same.
>> I think you put them on a bus all
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
as we have greater wisdom about others.
Thanks to Einstein, we figured out the
curvature of spaceime
>> which they didn't know about. But
>> they knew quite a lot about astronomy
though. Quite a lot about astronomy.
>> They stared at the stars.
>> Yeah. And they measured them and they
they they made calculations. And when
the Greeks went to Babylon, they think,
"Hey, man, this is really cool." And
they
>> [laughter]
>> wrote it all down and went home. Yeah,
definitely. Definitely. Well, I think
it's it's it's a hard question to
answer. Um 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
realize until it's too late. Like drugs,
if you take drugs now and again, you
think, "Oh, it's fine. It's fine." Then
suddenly you realize you're addicted to
heroin. It's a bit like that. People use
the electronic world like an 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 lite and say we shouldn't have
railway engines and we shouldn't have
kettles, but I think one one of the
things about the the ancient world was
that people never went anywhere unless
they were merchants or in 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 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 or so I don't think they
had wisdom in in 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
I think in a way the ancient world
allowed human beings to be to behave
more naturally than it does now.
The world in which we live. I mean if
you do live in in a rustic environment
or or or by the sea or or or you're a
fisherman or you I mean 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. They're not
in you know one example is this ghastly
thing on mobiles where you get a short
clip from a real program.
>> Yeah.
>> 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 language has ever been
created which is English to save their
lives. And they use a word I'll give you
an example.
>> Yeah.
>> Right. Like I went
>> like I went
>> like I went. Yeah.
>> 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 in that time there was probably
slang, right? It just wouldn't end up
written
>> in the 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 and
[laughter]
>> but the thing is you have to moderate
your vocabulary
>> to talk to people of a certain age
because they don't know what the fuck
you're talking about if you use language
exactly. And the thing which is so
exquisite about English is like with a
barristister you can make a case which
is absolutely wonderful because it says
exactly what it means and there's no
wrigle room and that 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 Oxford
English Dictionary? It's about that like
this fat. 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 and then a brother and we
all read literature. Went to the library
every week, 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? All
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 uh speak
clearly because those words also define
the quality of your thoughts.
>> Sure.
>> At the end of the day,
>> that's exactly right. I must say I I 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 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 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
um with the 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 Nazism of the 20th centuries, the
bad, the triumphant,
the rockets, these humans started
launching rockets going to the moon,
maybe to Mars, those those things. And
we won't be thinking about emojis and
any of that. And and in some sense
that's the the stuff you're looking at
with with kunea 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. Yes. Speaking of which, I
have to ask some more about the kaiform
tablets at the British Museum. When
you're surrounded by so many and by the
way, how many uh ka forms?
>> About 130,000.
>> That is so cool.
>> Jeez, it's pretty cool.
>> What are some of the most beautiful to
you? Maybe ones we don't know about ka
forms like they make you smile.
>> Well, there not many jokes. You asked
about jokes.
>> Yeah, they lost their sense of humor in
Canaan form.
>> Yeah, I think there are. There's one
that what I can remember was [laughter]
the
um a fly or what mosquito lands on the
back of an elephant and says am I too
heavy for you or something like that
joke.
>> Yeah.
>> You wouldn't mute it in the pub or
anything like that.
>> Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You had to be there.
>> And also do you like Tom Lara?
>> 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 Fon Brown
>> um ended up running the American rocket
>> Mhm.
>> industry.
>> It doesn't matter
>> once the rockets are up who cares where
they come down. That's not my department
says Wner Brown. that guy. I mean, I I
could tell where your wit comes from.
The fact that you know Tom Lair,
>> but he's such a The way he plays the
piano is fantastic.
>> Yeah.
>> I think my dad recorded them off the
radio on a realtore tape recorder and I
learned them all by heart. They were so
fantastic. But I I knew a Harvard
professor who I stayed with once who was
a sumerologist and his wife said that
she knew Tom Ner 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 he had a real you have
that you know I've watched 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 of what it means to be human.
>> I think so. But the the the paradoxical
thing about Tom Larry is when he's
talking about um
the bomb and and all that and devices
and
international trouble. It's so
unchanged.
>> Yeah. Yeah.
>> And and same with Doctor Strange Love.
It's just it's very remarkable. Anyway,
next time you're here, 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 um
show you the Chicago dictionary and give
you a grammar book to learn. And
>> Irving, you're a remarkable human being.
>> Well, I'm very glad we met.
>> It's truly an honor to meet you.
>> Me, too. It's been very interesting.
>> Irving, thank you so much for talking.
>> It's been a big pleasure for me, Lex. Be
well.
>> Thanks for listening to this
conversation with Irving Finkele. To
support this podcast, please check out
our sponsors in the description where
you can also find links to contact me,
ask questions, give feedback, and so on.
And now, let me leave you with some
words from Ludwick Woodenstein.
The limits of my language means the
limits of my world.
Thank you for listening. I hope to see
you next time.