Transcript for Irving Finkel: Deciphering Secrets of Ancient Civilizations & Flood Myths

This is a transcript of Lex Fridman Podcast #487 with Irving Finkel. The timestamps in the transcript are clickable links that take you directly to that point in the main video. Please note that the transcript is human generated, and may have errors. Here are some useful links:

Go back to this episode’s main page
Watch the full YouTube version of the podcast

Here are the loose “chapters” in the conversation. Click link to jump approximately to that part in the transcript:

0:00 – Introduction
0:58 – Origins of human language
7:04 – Cuneiform
14:17 – Controversial theory about Göbekli Tepe
25:29 – How to write and speak Cuneiform
30:48 – Primitive human language
32:31 – Development of writing systems
33:25 – Decipherment of Cuneiform
45:57 – Limits of language
50:56 – Art of translation
56:06 – Gods
1:01:31 – Ghosts
1:11:19 – Ancient flood stories
1:21:26 – Noah’s Ark
1:32:49 – The Royal Game of Ur
1:45:48 – British Museum
1:53:13 – Evolution of human civilization

Introduction

Lex Fridman (00:00:00) The following is a conversation with Irving Finkel, a scholar of ancient languages, curator at the British Museum for over 45 years, and a much-admired and respected world expert on cuneiform script. More generally, he’s an expert on ancient languages of Sumerian, Akkadian, and Babylonian, as well as ancient board games and Mesopotamia magic, medicine, literature, and culture. I should also mention that both on and off the mic, Irving was a super kind and fun person to talk to, with an infectious enthusiasm for ancient history that, of course, I already love but fell in love with even more. This is the Lex Fridman Podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description, or you can also find links to contact me, ask questions, get feedback, and so on.

Origins of human language

Lex Fridman (00:00:53) And now, dear friends, here’s Irving Finkel. Where and when did writing originate in human civilization? Let’s go back a few thousand years.

Irving Finkel (00:01:05) The first attempts at writing that we could call writing go back to the middle of the fourth millennium, say around 3500 BC, something like that. There were people in the Middle East, individuals who lived between the Euphrates and Tigris Rivers, who had clay as their operating material for building and all sorts of other purposes, and eventually as a writing support. They somehow developed the idea of the basis of writing, which means that you can make a sign, which people agree on, on a surface that another person, when they see it, they know what sound it engenders. That is the essence of writing: that there’s an agreed system of symbols that A can use and B can then play back, either in their heads or literally with their voices, a bit like a gramophone record.

Irving Finkel (00:01:54) So when it really began is a terribly, terribly awkward question for us, because the truth of the matter is, we have no idea when anything began. And all we can say is that the oldest evidence we have is around 3500 BC, but whether that was anywhere near the time or the stage when this started off for the first time seems to me very, very unlikely. So, among these Mesopotamians around 3500, they started to do this. They made up signs which everybody understood and they could write simple pictographic messages. Foot is a foot, leg is a leg, and barley is barley.

Irving Finkel (00:02:36) 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 lightbulb moment when they realized that they could develop a whole panoply of signs which could convey sound. And once you had that, you’re liberated from pictographic writing into a position where you can record language. So, language, grammar, and all the rest of it, and before long, proverbs and literature and all the other things that got written down.

Irving Finkel (00:03:29) So it was a pretty gigantic step whenever it was taken, but we really have no idea when it was first taken. But the first evidence we have presents a sort of clear-ish picture. It was simple and it got more complicated, then it became magnificent, so that with all the signs a fluent, well-trained scribe could not only write down the Sumerian language, which was one of the native tongues of Iraq, or the Babylonian language, which was 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.

Irving Finkel (00:04:10) And we have examples of funny languages around the world in the Bronze Age, which were written in cuneiform purely by ear. And often, sometimes the scribes who recorded by dictation or by something, wrote stuff they couldn’t understand, but somebody else could read and understand it. So, what you have is long before the alphabet, when the alphabet was not even a dream, a complex, bewildering-looking, off-putting writing system, which was actually very beautiful, very flexible, and lasted for well over three millennia, probably closer to four millennia. And it took a long time for the alphabet, which anybody would say was much, much more useful and much more sensible, to displace it.

Irving Finkel (00:04:52) 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, 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.

Irving Finkel (00:05:34) So they invented not only writing, they invented lexicography, which means that early in the third millennium, they put down all the things that were made of wood, and all the things that were made of reeds, and all the names of colors and of countries and all the gods and everything. They made a systematic attempt to make these signs 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 came up with the system and how it would work, but to preserve it and to safeguard it, was fantastically effective.

Irving Finkel (00:06:26) So, it means that there were scholars in Babylon in the third century or the second century, when Alexander was there, for example. If somebody dug up a tablet in very early writing, they would have a pretty good idea what it meant. They would recognize the signs even though they were so ancient, and they’d see the relationships between them. So, you have a fantastically strong system where the spinal cord was structured in a lexicographic, regular system. So, lexicography and what the signs were was jealously safeguarded and protected, and it lasted fantastically.

Cuneiform

Lex Fridman (00:07:04) We should say that the name of that system that lasted for 3,000 years is cuneiform.

Irving Finkel (00:07:10) Yeah. So in the 19th century, about 1840, 1850, they started to find these things on excavations in Iraq, the big Assyrian cities and sometimes further south, the 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 cuneiform script. And the cuneiform part of it means wedge-shaped, because “cuneus” in Latin means wedge. And when they first saw these signs, they realized that a cluster of marks broke down into different arrangements of triangular shapes. And it’s most clear on the Assyrian reliefs where the writing is very big and you can easily tell that they were that shape. On a tablet, the wedge is not quite so predominant. So, that was it.

Irving Finkel (00:08:02) So, they first called them cuneatic or cuneiform, and the word stuck. And of course, growing up in the British Museum and reading these things for a living becomes a kind of lifetime’s work to make sure that everybody in the country knows what cuneiform means. Because once in a while you meet somebody who never heard of the word at all, and this is appalling. So, people do survive, however. But it’s an important mission because 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.

Irving Finkel (00:08:46) And then there was proper literature and magic and medicine and all other genres 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 in a way that’s a comforting thought, because they’re safe there and protected.

Lex Fridman (00:09:26) You said that the development of cuneiform, of these tablets, of written language is one of the greatest, probably the greatest invention in human history. How hard do you think it was to come up with this? And we should make clear that that very specific element of encoding sound on the tablet, that’s the genius invention. Drawing a picture makes sense. Okay, here’s, you know, barley. Here’s the sun. Here’s whatever, the actual object.

Irving Finkel (00:10:00) Exactly.

Lex Fridman (00:10:00) But to actually write down sound is a genius invention.

Irving Finkel (00:10:05) Well, I think it’s rather paradoxical, because the first generation or so of tablets that we have are written in these pictographic signs where each sign means what it looks like. So, this is a very limited method of recording messages, and it doesn’t lend itself to recording grammar. And then the secondary phase, as we understand it from archaeology, is the perception that you could take these signs, still meaning what they look like but also what the words sounded like. So, then you have all these wonderful ice cubes which express all the sounds of the language from which you can record words and grammar and everything else. Now, the thing is, the received law from Assyriology is it was that way around, that first we had pictures and secondly we had sound.

Irving Finkel (00:10:55) 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, they didn’t have A, B, C, D, E, F, G, but they could easily work out all the vowels and consonants without naming them as vowels and consonants, but they’re component parts. So, they could have had signs that started out… Because if you decided you had… We have 26, let’s say they had 50 signs that would create the sound, they could write anything without any further trouble.

Irving Finkel (00:11:44) So, I find it very bewildering that they started off with the least flexible and the least adaptable system of pictographs and then they moved on to the sound. I don’t know why they bothered with it. And my hunch is that the archaeological evidence that we have on this score is ultimately misleading, because I think this: that probably for a very, very long time before the Sumerians, people in the world, the world of what we call the Middle East, were in contact. They traded, they probably even had wars, and they had messages between them. And I think there was a long running system of communication between people who didn’t share a language for whom pictures would suffice. So, if merchants come and they have three sheep to sell, so they draw three little sheep.

Irving Finkel (00:12:35) You know how much it is and what they are and so forth. And so I think that what happened with the Sumerians, with their pictographic signs, is that those signs are right at the end of a very, very, very long period of time, when somebody thought, “What we can do is take these stupid inhibited no smoking signs and write language.” That is what I think happened. That’s what I think happened.

Lex Fridman (00:13:04) Is this a controversial statement?

Irving Finkel (00:13:05) Highly controversial. Many Assyriologists would leave the room.

Irving Finkel (00:13:12) But I’m not scared of controversy because it’s natural. I mean, if you think about it, it’s natural because you don’t have to have an alphabet to divide your word into sounds, see? For example, in Sumerian, you have a funny system, right? You have a root, like “du,” which means “to go.” And then you have prefixes, like E or Mu or Ba, and one’s a passive, one’s an active, and this and this. So when you have a sentence, you have one of the Mu, Ba, or E prefixes, then you have the root, and then you have things at the end. So it is called agglutinative by people who like to make things look more important than they are. So you have the central thing, you slap stuff on the beginning, slap stuff on the end, and each particle creates a bit of meaning.

Irving Finkel (00:13:56) So you have a long verb which tells you, “He would’ve done it if he could, but he couldn’t,” kind of thing, in the form of the verb. But the thing is, if you wanted to write it down, you and I decided to write it down, so the first thing we would do is have a sign Mu, and then we’d have Ba, and then we’d have E, because every five minutes people made those noises. You see what I mean?

Controversial theory about Göbekli Tepe

Lex Fridman (00:14:16) Yeah, absolutely. Do you think it’s possible we might find much, much older…

Irving Finkel (00:14:23) I do

Lex Fridman (00:14:24) …cuneiform-type tablets?

Irving Finkel (00:14:26) Or pictographic-type tablets, before the cuneiform and its drawing type, and I’ll tell you why. Because there’s this marvelous site in Turkey called Gobekli Tepe.

Lex Fridman (00:14:36) Oh yeah?

Irving Finkel (00:14:36) Do you know about Gobekli Tepe?

Lex Fridman (00:14:37) Yes, of course.

Irving Finkel (00:14:37) Well, everybody knows about the buildings and the architecture. Everybody knows about it. If you go all the way through the photographs, which the archeologists unwisely put online, you will find in the middle of one color plate with lots of other things, a round green stone like a scarab from Egypt. That’s to say, it has an arched back and a flat bottom. And on the flat bottom, there are hieroglyphic signs carved in the stone. No one said anything about it at all, but it’s clear to me, A, that this was a stamp to ratify, where the carvings of the signs on clay or some other sealing material would leave an impression. It must be that. So this is about 9000 BC.

Irving Finkel (00:15:26) Now when I was a boy at university, my professor said to me that the reason writing evolved in Mesopotamia is 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 Gobekli Tepe, because they’ve hardly even begun to finish excavating the sites of…

Irving Finkel (00:15:54) …Gobekli Tepe. They go on and on like Manchester and Newcastle United. And really, the old rule would be you could not have architecture like that, 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 then 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 it 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 writing, I don’t know, but it was writing thousands of years before in the south. And that’s what I think it is.

Irving Finkel (00:16:43) You know, people came with metal 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. 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 pictographic writing. We still use it. And it’s above all kinds of mess. And I think that was the prevailing system because I honestly believe that the people at this time were not stupid. They weren’t gorillas. They weren’t less advanced than we are. They were probably indistinguishable from what we are.

Irving Finkel (00:17:25) So you have merchants and wanderers and people who say, “Let’s go down the river and see where we end up.” 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 Gobekli buildings with a skeptical eye, how it could be. I mean, the finish of it is astonishing, the structure of it, the vision of it. So the workforce and the tools and the organization, you know, what do they do it with? A megaphone? “Your breakfast!” And all that kind of stuff. No way. No way.

Lex Fridman (00:17:57) So that’s a really controversial statement that…

Irving Finkel (00:17:59) It is really controversial

Lex Fridman (00:18:00) …at the time of Gobekli Tepe, there may have already been a writing system.

Irving Finkel (00:18:04) There was, because the thing is about it, that it’s a seal to ratify. It’s not just a squiggle on a pot and you can say, “Oh, that’s just a piece of…” This is a finished thing with a flat surface. You press it down, so you have some contract, you have some building arrangement. That we’re paying for these bricks, whatever it was, and the official person had to squash it down and it leaves the impression. I mean, I am a great believer in Sherlock Holmes- …as a teaching system for intelligence and rationality and logic in thinking. I read those stories a million times when I was a kid, and one of the things which impresses me most of all was this point quoted by Holmes, not original to him, that it is theoretically possible to infer the Niagara Falls from a raindrop.

Lex Fridman (00:18:52) That’s a powerful statement. Yeah.

Irving Finkel (00:18:54) It’s a powerful statement. Well, that seal from Gobekli Tepe is a raindrop from which I infer writing, and it’s perfectly possible they all wrote on flat leaves. After all, in many parts of the world, that’s what happened. So, for example, in the Indus Valley, people write the most abject nonsense about the Indus Valley writing system, but all we have is seals, basically. So they are also for ratification purposes, and they have the name of the owner in three or four or maybe five signs, and it’s probably me, son of my dad, or milkman or whatever it is. And it’s obvious, it’s obvious that they had writing on a perishable material. They can’t just have had inscribed stone seals, and many parts of India today write on palm leaf. Why should it be any different?

Irving Finkel (00:19:45) So people think, you know, “Oh, well, just because it’s now, it wouldn’t be then.” But actually, that argument is utterly, utterly fallacious, because the process of evolution is stymied left, right, and center by inertia. Inertia is nearly as strong as evolution, and this is something that the people who talk about progress and ideas have no idea about.

Lex Fridman (00:20:07) First of all, your whole line of work, you’re making me realize, is a kind of 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 cuneiform tablets we have is just a raindrop compared to the waterfall of thousands of years of humans.

Irving Finkel (00:20:39) Yes, we have a lot, but it’s nothing in comparison with what existed. But not only that, you see, we don’t have to decipher anymore. We can read Akkadian or Babylonian, Sumerian pretty well fluently. That’s not a problem. So the information which you can get from these sources, especially three millennia of sources, is very, very substantial. Very substantial, but it means that Assyriologists have the inbuilt idea that what we have is something like all there ever was, which is absurd. For example, there’s a period called the Ur III Period, where people lived in city-states. They wrote very small account tablets by the thousand, and there were two or three major cities where this is the way they lived.

Irving Finkel (00:21:25) People had to bring tithes and offerings, and everything was recorded by what I always refer to, and people sympathize with, is the ancestors of the Inland Revenue, 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’s no funny business or no mistakes. Now, the thing is, there are thousands of those tablets written in about 2100 to 2000 BC, thousands of them, about the size of a box of matches.

Irving Finkel (00:21:55) So people like to generalize about the Sumerians at this time of the world, but they probably all came out of two rooms, because they were dumped when they were no longer needed in some kind of room, and the archaeologists in the 19th century came down on these, and then all the locals came and they dug them up and they sold them all over the place, and they’ve 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 skewed by the nature of the material, and sometimes the material is opulent and benevolent, but not always, and sometimes the people who work with skewed material don’t even realize how skewed it is.

Irving Finkel (00:22:47) I mean, you know, it’s quite remarkable.

Lex Fridman (00:22:50) So, in all your time of studying cuneiform tablets, do you sometimes late at night get a glimpse of the waterfall? Like, can you imagine?

Irving Finkel (00:23:01) Yes, I can imagine. I can imagine easily, because once in a while, a library is discovered. In the 1850s at Nineveh, which was the Assyrian capital, there was a fat king, king of the world, called Ashurbanipal, and he had a fantastic library, and he promoted it. He impounded tablets, he had them brought to Nineveh. He wanted all the prevailing knowledge and all knowledge from before under one roof. It was a kind of Alexandria thing. So he was a trained scholar, and this is what he did, and they found it in the 19th century. They dug it up, Layard and those people. So what did they find? They found the tablets higgledy-piggledy all over the floor of a huge room and in the corridors and everything.

Irving Finkel (00:23:43) And lots of them broken and lots of them burnt. So ever since then, until really quite recently, Assyriologists who spent all their… Well, people who work on these Nineveh tablets spent all their time joining the bits together, and you have the story about Gilgamesh and the goddess who falls in love with him in the garden, and she wants to seduce him, and dot, dot, dot, you can’t find the bit… So you look for another bit and 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.

Irving Finkel (00:24:14) But it’s the absolute opposite. Because what happened was that the Babylonians in the south, in my opinion, they worked hand-in-glove with the Elamites from Iran. They had a pincer movement and they beat Assyria, they conquered Assyria. And they ran through the capital and they set fire to everything. Pinched all the women and took all the jewelry and all the gold. And people say that in a fit of pique, 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.

Irving Finkel (00:24:58) And I think what’s left there is duplicates and broken things, the things that got dropped and everything, and that’s what everyone thinks it is. So this is also a controversial point.

Lex Fridman (00:25:09) You’re just nonstop…

Irving Finkel (00:25:10) But it’s common…

Lex Fridman (00:25:10) …starting trouble.

Irving Finkel (00:25:11) It’s common sense. It’s common…

Lex Fridman (00:25:12) You’re gonna get both of us canceled today.

Irving Finkel (00:25:14) But you see, the thing is, it’s predicated on the assumption that what we have is only what there was. And this is such a fallacy. It needs to be attacked left, right, and center.

How to write and speak Cuneiform

Lex Fridman (00:25:29) So, a lot of the cuneiform language is already deciphered. Can you speak to the deciphering process? How hard is it? Maybe take us to this place for you yourself first learning a language, figuring out the puzzle of it. How does it feel? What does it look like to a brain that doesn’t deeply understand it? And how do you then piece stuff together? Maybe you can go to the early days, sort of the Rosetta Stone of cuneiform.

Irving Finkel (00:26:01) That’s important. Well, the first thing is how the cuneiform writing system works, because the crucial point, and once you see it, it 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 have the letter B, G, D, P, H, and so forth. They couldn’t write a consonant. They couldn’t do that. So what they did is they had a vowel before a consonant or one after. Say you have “Ab” and “Ba.” But as they had four vowels, you had to have Ab and Ba, Ib and Bi, Ub and Bu, Eb and Be.

Irving Finkel (00:26:43) So you had 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. We don’t have to really go into it, but basically if you are a Babylonian and you want to write the word “museum,” which of course is one of the most important words in the English language and other languages too. So what you would do is you would write the syllable mu-

Irving Finkel (00:27:09) And then the sign “Z” and then the sign “um.” 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 the bits around the edge, but it’s basically syllabic writing. So when you go to university to study cuneiform, what you have to learn is all the signs and all their values, because unfortunately they didn’t just have one for each, they had multiple ones. And the reason is not that they were mad or they wanted to make life hell, but because the syllables derive from the writing of Sumerian words. So the Sumerian vocabulary had a lot of words that were probably differentiated by tone.

Irving Finkel (00:28:07) So you might have “Ba” and then a rising “A” and then a lowering… and these signs all retain the “Ba” 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 “Ba” number one, which is the common. Then there’s “Ba” number two, “Ba” number three, and you have to learn them all. And when you read, you have to learn how to do it. So in the modern world, if you go to university to do Assyriology, which I hope you and all of your disciples will do as soon as possible, you actually have to cope with two languages: the Sumerian and the Babylonian. Now, the first thing is this, that the Babylonian language is a Semitic tongue, which although it’s extinct, is connected to or related to Hebrew, Aramaic, Arabic, Ethiopic, Syriac.

Irving Finkel (00:28:56) 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.

Lex Fridman (00:29:25) Oh, no.

Irving Finkel (00:29:26) Yeah, this is a bewitching thing. It’s a bewitching thing to me, and this is how to understand it. Because the languages that we study in the world today, linguists study, they more or less all fall into a language group. So you have Indo-European with Spanish, Italian, Latin, Hittite, and so forth, and that’s French, that’s one group. And you have Germanic and you have Slavonic. And most languages, even the far-flung ones, fall into what can be seen to be maybe big and airy groups, their family like that. There’s not one for Sumerian. So this means that the truth that languages do not exist in a vacuum but they’re part of a big family must always have been true. So that when writing arrives about 3000, say, 300 BC, to write properly.

Irving Finkel (00:30:19) It means that Sumerian was recorded just in time, but the big languages, maybe in China, in Russia, in somewhere else in Asia, that were related to Sumerian-

Lex Fridman (00:30:33) Are gone?

Irving Finkel (00:30:34) … are all gone. They’re gone forever and ever and ever, unless something amazing happens. So we’ve got the one representative of this bizarre family. Is that-

Primitive human language

Lex Fridman (00:30:44) Amazing.

Irving Finkel (00:30:44) It is. And it’s a very stimulating thing to imagine. I personally believe that Neanderthals and early Homo sapiens for sure had language, for sure they talked to one another. It’s impossible that they didn’t. The point came when they did, they did. And the Neanderthals, 800,000 years of living in Europe. They had to deal with the Ice Age, they all lived together, they bring up their children. You think they couldn’t speak anything? They 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…

Irving Finkel (00:31:23) …and you say, “Legs.” Well, shut up, I’m concentrating. “Legs, legs.” And then I suddenly think, “Oh, I get it. You are legs.” Right? You only have to do that once, then you know who I am. So I know that I’m me and that you are you. So people who say that they couldn’t distinguish ego and all that, it’s absolutely stupid. If you cut your hand with a knife, you sure as hell experience… 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’s threatened. You think people weren’t conscious that they were an entity? I don’t believe it.

Lex Fridman (00:32:06) And they probably had a way to express that with sounds.

Irving Finkel (00:32:10) Well, eventually, yes. Names. I mean…

Lex Fridman (00:32:13) Names

Irving Finkel (00:32:13) …names the things, and then you have 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. Because I think you have an idea, and the idea then drives the brain, and the brain has another idea. It works like fertility.

Development of writing systems

Lex Fridman (00:32:31) So what do you think is the motivation, the primary driver of developing written language? Does it go hand-in-hand with civilization?

Irving Finkel (00:32:40) I think that the media in which it appears is when there’s a lot of people living in an urban environment. And with rival institutions or the king or the government or all those sorts of… …Things. And that’s why I think Gobekle Tepe must have been the same thing. I read somewhere that they’re all nomads and they only came to Gobekle Tepe three months a year. I mean, that cannot be true that they were nomads. 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’s going to be, how high it’s going to be. I mean, you can’t just like that, like gorillas.

Decipherment of Cuneiform

Lex Fridman (00:33:25) All right. So deciphering, the process of deciphering.

Irving Finkel (00:33:28) So when I started, there were grammars and scientists and dictionaries. Everything was marvelous. It was all basically deciphered, all you had to do was get on with learning it. But at the beginning, when the first tablets and bricks in cuneiform and stone inscriptions came to light, no one could read them. But they knew they were writing, but they didn’t know how to read them. And what happened was, like you said before, with the Rosetta Stone, it was something directly comparable, because there was an inscription of one of the Persian kings halfway up a mountain in a place called Bisutun, where this King Darius had written an account of his successful career in Elamite and in Babylonian and in Old Persian, a trilingual version.

Irving Finkel (00:34:18) And Old Persian, although it isn’t obviously an archaic form of the language, Persian is still alive, it was still alive in the 19th century. So since the Old Persian was written in a very simple style of cuneiform, they deciphered it, they twigged it was Old Persian, they read it in Persian, and they read the names Darayawush in Old Persian. And then suddenly, somebody realized that the other two columns were about the same length.

Lex Fridman (00:34:43) Brilliant.

Irving Finkel (00:34:44) What do you know? And the thing is, it said, “I am Darius the great king, king of the world, king of the… son of… diddly, diddly, diddly, diddly… grandson of… diddly, diddly, diddly…” So there’s a whole paragraph with repeated things in the Persian which they could understand. So what do you know? They’re reiterated passages in the other two languages. So that was the key, that kind of… the chisel that opened up cuneiform writing proper. And the thing was, they soon twigged that the language of the Babylonian was a Semitic tongue. And this was so important. I think the first word they discovered was the word for river, which is Ɔaru in Akkadian and نحر in Arabic and Aramaic.

Irving Finkel (00:35:27) And when they realized that the word that corresponded to the Persian had this form, this was a gift, a gift of gold, because everybody immediately seized their Arabic and Hebrew dictionaries and started leafing through looking for words that would fit in the context. And they basically 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 trilingual, I don’t know what would have happened. I mean, I suppose it’s conceivable that in the very modern world, something might have happened. But as it was, it was done by sheer brainpower, by very, very clever persons just doing it. And they cracked it.

Irving Finkel (00:36:14) The Elamite language is much more difficult, but they got a lot of it too. So it was a very romantic thing because the inscription was carved on a mountain face far above the plain, and Henry Rawlinson, who was an upstanding young British officer who claimed to decipher cuneiform quite unjustifiably, climbed up there with some miserable kid and made squeezes of the whole thing overlooking the plain, thousands of feet up in the air, and brought those back, and they were used in the decipherment. So it’s very romantic.

Lex Fridman (00:36:46) Wait a minute. More controversial statement from today. Henry Rawlinson doesn’t deserve the credit for that?

Irving Finkel (00:36:52) No, I don’t think he does. He’s called the Father of Assyriology, but I think he’s the Stepfather of Assyriology because when he first got these inscriptions, he wrote a long book about it, which was almost entirely wrong.

Irving Finkel (00:37:05) And there was a clergyman in Northern Ireland called Edward Hincks who lived in a place called Killyleagh and had five daughters and ran this church, who was possibly a card-carrying genius, if not jolly, jolly close. And what happened with him was this: there was an ongoing competition, well, an ongoing challenge to decipher hieroglyphic writing, which Champollion usually gets the credit for, and Hincks was very interested in trying to decipher hieroglyphic ahead of the French. And he ran into a sort of dead end at one stage, and he thought he’d have a look at cuneiform to see if it was helpful.

Irving Finkel (00:37:46) And at the same time, he cracked it. He worked out how it worked. He realized that one sign can have more than one value of sound and of meaning because they are multivalent, the signs. I tried to shelter you from the horrible news… …But it’s not a walk in the park. It takes about five years to… you’d probably do it in about four, probably.

Lex Fridman (00:38:11) That is a compliment. I think you just complimented me. Thank you. Thank you very much. So, you’re saying one sign that looks exactly the same might have different sounds given the context?

Irving Finkel (00:38:24) Yeah, and you have to choose the right sound, and also different meaning as well. Because, for example, if you have a sign for the word hot, right? You can’t really have a picture sign for hot. It doesn’t make sense, but what they did is they did a drawing of a kind of complex thing with a brazier inside another sign, which meant hot. So that sign existed, but it also meant other things as well, and you had to choose the right one for the context. It’s… all the context does matter. I mean, it really is quite a matter for despair when you start cuneiform, because on top of everything else, they didn’t leave gaps between the words. And that’s really…

Lex Fridman (00:39:04) So they’re all connected?

Irving Finkel (00:39:05) That’s really mean. Yeah. So when you read, what you have to do is start with the first sign, and you think of the sign, this, and you go through the values in your mind, and there’s the next sign. And if one is ‘ba’ and the next one is ‘ab’ among other readings, ba-ab sounds like a syllable structure for a word, and you go on like that. So there are two things about it. One is that if you want to, you can master it. The other thing is that the number of variables was restricted. They controlled it so it wasn’t insane. So in other words, if you learn the corpus and you learn how the signs are composed and you learn their different values, then you’ve got it down. And off you go. And it’s very beautiful, I think. It’s marvelous.

Lex Fridman (00:39:51) Can you, in all seriousness, take me back to the time when you were learning it? What’s the process of learning it?

Irving Finkel (00:39:57) Well, I had a very abnormal upbringing because when I went to university, for about three years beforehand, I’d wanted to be an Egyptologist. So I read the grammar by Gardiner and was looking forward very much to studying ancient Egyptian. What happened was that I went up to the University of Birmingham, where I went to university, and there was a man called Rundle Clark, who was an Egyptologist. Rundle Clark came in on the Monday and gave us one lesson about Egyptian sculpture or something like that, and the next minute, next day, he died. Bang.

Irving Finkel (00:40:38) So the professor called me into his room and said, “Look, it’s going to take me a while to get an Egyptologist. They don’t grow on trees, but there’s another person in this department who teaches another ancient language called Lambert, and he teaches cuneiform. So what I suggest is you go and do a bit of cuneiform with Professor Lambert, and then when I get an Egyptologist, you can convert back.” So I went and knocked on the door. “Yes?” So I went in and said, “I want to learn cuneiform.” And Professor Lambert, who was rather a Sherlock Holmes kind of figure—aesthetic, bony, sarcastic… Cruel-

Lex Fridman (00:41:20) Cruel.

Irving Finkel (00:41:20) …cruel, absolutely terrifying. And I said I wanted to learn cuneiform, and he wasn’t at all pleased because this was a time in Britain when professors resented having students to teach because it cut into their research time. It was that sort of arrangement. Anyway, I started it, and after about, I don’t know, maybe one or 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 basic signs to learn. I did, and in the next couple of days, then we came in and we started reading.

Lex Fridman (00:42:02) So given the complexity of the signs, why did cuneiform last 3,000 years? The most successful writing system ever.

Irving Finkel (00:42:12) Fair question. There are several factors. One is the famous factor of inertia- The second thing is that people who could read and write and were in charge of archives, and were the clerks in the temple, and the writers for the king and everything, commanded a very great deal of power because most of the public couldn’t. So they reserved to themselves knowledge, understanding, philosophical inquiry. I mean, no doubt it went on in pubs and things, but they were in charge. They had everything under lock and key. And I think the scribal schools were rather cliquey. They were certainly cliquey in the sense of Oxford and Cambridge being rivals, that sort of thing.

Irving Finkel (00:43:02) They had that sort of idea. And it was in no one’s interest whatsoever. Nobody would ever concede any interest in the idea of literacy for all. This would be—it would never be thought of, and it would be anathema. And so if you got on a soapbox on a Saturday afternoon and said, “Oh, enough of this, we have to teach the children,” they’d be taken away, I think.

Lex Fridman (00:43:25) So we’re getting, in these tablets, the output of the intellectual class, a very small fraction of-

Irving Finkel (00:43:32) We are

Lex Fridman (00:43:32) …humans.

Irving Finkel (00:43:33) We are.

Lex Fridman (00:43:33) So we’re getting just the Oxford and the Cambridge.

Irving Finkel (00:43:35) We are, except that when you went to scribal school, you had to learn Sumerian and Akkadian, the languages properly, and all the vocabulary and the grammar.

Irving Finkel (00:43:45) So some boys probably had a lot of trouble doing this. And, you know, they were okay, but then there ain’t gonna be no geniuses. And I think the situation in the school was that the teachers farmed out the kids who would actually rather have been outside playing football but could read and write, to earning their living doing low-level reading and writing. That’s to say writing contracts, letters, everyday things for people. Because no one could read and write, so you had to get a scribe if you’re gonna marry your daughter off, and you get all the witnesses about the presence and all this, all that thing had to be done for four days. So the writer would come and do… So your medium-level writers would serve that requirement.

Irving Finkel (00:44:35) And very talented or clever or intellectual students would be encouraged to go into one of the literary professions, which would be, so to speak, medicine, law, working for the king, working for the church, I mean, the priesthood. All those things which were dependent upon archives and writing, they would find their niveau. And also architecture, because if a big building had to be built, then somebody had to know about load-bearing things and brick measurements. And so some of them went into that kind of work. And also, probably some of them went into running the army. You had to move stores and animals and…

Irving Finkel (00:45:17) So they found their niveau, and some of them were intellectually very able indeed, and they went into the disciplines of, on the one hand astrology, but more seriously into astronomy and theoretical grammar. Because they had treatises about the relationship between the two languages and how they worked and different parts of speech, and they wrote learned commentaries as well, what words meant. So there was an intellectual high-level top, and then there were lots of professional scribes, and then the kids who left school as soon as possible and did all that, like today.

Limits of language

Lex Fridman (00:45:57) I apologize to be philosophical, but Wittgenstein, the philosopher, said, “The limits of our language is the limits of our world.” To what degree did the languages that were encoded in cuneiform define human civilization, would you say? What were the things that were complicated to express and therefore were not expressed often?

Irving Finkel (00:46:21) That’s a really an interesting question. So in terms of richness of vocabulary and richness of verbal subtlety, I think Babylonian rivals Arabic and of course English. You know, in other words, you can say whatever you want in English- …however subtle it might be, even if people understand the subtlety. You can, because the tools are fantastic. And Arabic has lots of synonyms and lots of devices, and all the same. Same in Babylonian. It was a fully-fledged literary language. The question about whether the language put a stop to further things, which is basically what you’re asking…

Irving Finkel (00:47:05) …is immensely complicated. But the one thing that strikes me as relevant is that a very huge proportion of scholarly literature in Mesopotamia takes the form of omens, because they believed that events, accidental or deliberately stimulated, had implications for what was going to happen.

Irving Finkel (00:47:29) And they took omens from things in the sky and things in the street, every single thing. If you were a well-qualified diviner, it would have this significance, right? Now, there are thousands of lines of omens of all different kinds. And in Akkadian it says, for example, “If a lizard runs across the breakfast table, the queen will die.” So if you translate the Akkadian this way, the word “if,” verb and everything, “If that, then this.” So there are thousands upon thousands of lines translated into many books about omens where, “If this happens, that will happen.” So this is how it’s understood by my colleagues.

Irving Finkel (00:48:15) Well, this is absolutely impossible, because if you’re the chief diviner for the king, and you open up a sheep to take a liver out and examine it according to the… And if the queen’s gonna die and the king’s there, you’re not gonna say, “The queen’s gonna die.” I mean, you’re gonna look a fucking idiot if she doesn’t die.

Irving Finkel (00:48:36) And if she does die, you’re gonna be responsible. So all you can ever do and ever, ever have been able to do is to say, “There’s a sign here that says that the queen could die,” meaning “could die,” not “will die.” And therefore, the requisite ritual or magic must immediately swing into action to defer the danger. So the point is that A equals B is never true. It means that with A, B could be, might be, ought to be, should be, could be true, all those subtle things. So that the diviner who works for the king must have been a philosopher who looks at the king, 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 it or he won’t worry.

Irving Finkel (00:49:32) It’s the most beautiful thing. It’s so subtle. It’s like a violin concerto. It can never have been A equals B for a minute. So the medical texts say, “If you do… If a man has this,” doo-dee-dee-doo, you know? “You do this, your drink’s…” He’ll get better, right? He says, “You’ll get better.” So have 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,” because what happens if you die? Where are you?

Lex Fridman (00:50:10) Th- the lawyers will show up.

Irving Finkel (00:50:12) Absolutely. So this means that not expressible in Akkadian grammar are these modal verbs… …Could, might, should, ought. They can’t be expressed grammatically, but it is impossible that it was such a magnificent literary language where they didn’t have these subtleties. It’s utterly impossible. And if you translate, “He will,” in a literary text, “He might,” then the whole text is different. The whole text is different.

Lex Fridman (00:50:45) Yeah, absolutely.

Irving Finkel (00:50:46) And, and they don’t… My colleagues translate… It says in the grammar books, ne-ne-ne-ne-ne, like that, automatically. There’s no self-appraisal of the folly of it.

Art of translation

Lex Fridman (00:50:57) You have said the translation is part archeology, part detective work, part poetry. Can we just speak about translation and the art of it a bit more?

Irving Finkel (00:51:05) Yes.

Lex Fridman (00:51:06) I mean, it’s such a, such an incredible discipline. Just like you said, hinted at, just a subtle variation in a single word can change everything.

Irving Finkel (00:51:16) 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 Akkadian, is they learn the Akkadian word and they learn the English translation, right? You have, “To divide.” So whenever you have the verb, it’s some form of divide or division. But actually, it’s not, because divide is like the primary root, but there’s maybe 10 nuances of 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.

Irving Finkel (00:52:02) And the Chicago Dictionary, which is such a magnificent thing, when you come to the museum and see me- …I’ll show you this. It’s the most salient and important thing that came out of America in all its history, is the Chicago Assyrian Dictionary, which is this long. There’s only one rival to it for cultural importance, which is the electric guitar, of course. But the two of them, I think, are your countrymen’s greatest achievement.

Lex Fridman (00:52:29) It’s the pride of our nation-

Irving Finkel (00:52:31) I think so

Lex Fridman (00:52:31) … those two things.

Irving Finkel (00:52:32) The very thing.

Lex Fridman (00:52:33) Chicago Dictionary… Can you… I’m sorry to take the attention. What is the Chicago Dictionary?

Irving Finkel (00:52:37) It started in the ’20s, and they made a dictionary of the Babylonian language.

Lex Fridman (00:52:42) Ah.

Irving Finkel (00:52:42) A, A to Z, so to speak. And it’s as long as this table. It’s magnificent thing, and this big. And the people who worked on it were real translators, so they knew that it wasn’t lexically A means B, but they had… So if you have something in a proverb, the meaning is going to be a little bit different from in their letter. And, you know, so people really, really understand Akkadian, they really do. But this thing about the modal verbs is an interesting conundrum to me, because there’s no way it’s reflected in the writing. So I can only assume that there was some kind of drawing out of the vowel in a verb, meaning could… Now, like you were saying, it might do it, you know, something like that. Anyway, so nowadays we… It’s not the decipherment that’s the job, it’s just reading.

Irving Finkel (00:53:31) 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, you know, it’s your job. And if you’re a competent assyriologist, 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 interpret stuff. And also, some literature is very difficult because of technical vocabulary, and then they had technical vocabulary and unusual words.

Lex Fridman (00:54:03) So you can do all of that. You can kind of figure out the technical complexities.

Irving Finkel (00:54:09) Sure.

Lex Fridman (00:54:09) You can figure out the noise, meaning missing pieces.

Irving Finkel (00:54:14) Yeah. Sometimes you can calculate what it ought to be, make a reasonable suggestion. And this dictionary, which I was talking to you about, is such a fantastic tool because a lot of people worked on it. It was the National Endowment for the Humanities, and it was for decades and decades of work. And most of the world’s best Assyriologists collaborated on it, so the quality of translation and understanding is really extraordinary.

Lex Fridman (00:54:41) What are some things you’ve read from that time? Are there some jokes? Are there some love letters?

Irving Finkel (00:54:48) There are one or two letters about that 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 then 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 Marduk and Sarpanitum, his wife, and another woman. Marduk’s having an affair with this other…

Lex Fridman (00:55:21) Oh, no

Irving Finkel (00:55:21) …goddess. And Sarpanitum is jealous, and these women fight in the street and hurl insults at one another, and, you know, “slop bucket” and all this kind of stuff. It’s hilarious, and it must have been a bit like a sort of Verdi opera without the music, I suppose. I don’t know. But anyway, it starts off when Sarpanitum is in the room and Marduk’s in bed with this other goddess on the roof, and she can hear. You could say it was an eternal human issue.

Lex Fridman (00:55:50) Yeah, love, heartbreak, jealousy, all of that.

Irving Finkel (00:55:53) And between deities also. Because deities are only modeled on human beings, after all, so…

Lex Fridman (00:55:58) Yeah, deities are a grandiose way of expressing human affairs, human behaviors, human ways, yeah.

Irving Finkel (00:56:05) Indeed.

Gods

Lex Fridman (00:56:06) In the writing, what was their relationship to the divine?

Irving Finkel (00:56:10) Relationship with the divine, well, the first thing to say is that they had a large pantheon of gods. So there were three gods at the top, sometimes called Anu, Enlil, and Ea. There were three gods at the top and hundreds of other gods and goddesses. And you have the situation that I think lots of small villages and towns had their old, ancient gods, and eventually they were all worked into a kind of theological system like a phone book. And the lesser, minor gods were amalgamated and then they were given jobs in the households of the big gods. So there was a sort of structure. So you have this in the background, a big, sweeping theology, like you have in the world today in some parts of the world, and this was the main system.

Irving Finkel (00:56:59) And the main gods were concerned with the ruler and the fate of the country. Another god was concerned with illness and the dead, and what happens to the dead, and they had other specialties, and they all had their own temples. And when a baby came into the world, probably this was universally true, the baby was put under the tutelage of one or other of the gods. Sometimes, you know, the royal family, they were the big shots, but sometimes 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. That’s the sort of basic idea.

Irving Finkel (00:57:46) 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 them. Make little sacrifices and little bribes so they do their job and keep an eye on you. So they had that kind of slightly practical view of gods, that they were a bit unpredictable, “great when they were there but not always there” sort of idea. And I also believe this, that a lot of people in the world today who did not have the disadvantage of growing up in a stifling religion, but are just normal people, get a lot more interested when they’re really ill or when they have a big disaster.

Irving Finkel (00:58:36) All of a sudden, God or gods seem a lot more important than they do normally. So 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 the individual’s response to religious stimuli fluctuates and is varied and is often a response to need. It doesn’t come from nothing. I mean, people don’t suddenly feel, “I got to thank the Lord for the rainbow,” or something like that. I think it’s probably true today, I mean, when you read the investigations they make of religion today, Christianity in this country is on the decline because people who are supposed to be Christian say they aren’t anymore, they’re atheists.

Irving Finkel (00:59:27) And people who say, “I go to church and I believe in everything,” it is a relatively small number of people saying now this is the situation, which is quite remarkable if you think about it. Lord knows what the consequence will be for the human race, whether religion will balance out, whether it will die off. Who knows?

Lex Fridman (00:59:45) I think it’s an ancient technology that has proven across millennia to give a set of tools to humans to contend, as you said, with suffering. That’s a part of life. So when those rare moments come when you have to deal with deep pain, loss, suffering, heartbreak, all those things… …Looking up to the sky and asking questions and trying to figure out the answers in your conversation with the divine.

Irving Finkel (01:00:15) I think that’s true, but I think in Mesopotamia it was different in terms of its potency and immediacy because there are no skyscrapers in Iraq. You know, if you live in Southern Iraq and you sleep on the roof, there are no lights at night. You know, you’re under the stars, you can see everything because of no smog and everything like that. And the idea that the gods are there watching, it’s not like a big artifice like it is here. It just doesn’t ring true here. You can’t come to it and really believe in it, whereas these people didn’t have to really believe in it because it was it.

Lex Fridman (01:00:53) It’s the obvious practical part of life. They’re right there.

Irving Finkel (01:00:57) Yeah. But they didn’t believe in ghosts, they took them for granted. And they didn’t believe in the gods, they took them for granted. This is 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 whether they really care about me. They gave them a nudge when it was necessary, and they might offer this, they might offer that, but it was the system, it was the prevailing system. And I think it’s an important difference.

Ghosts

Irving Finkel (01:01:32) 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, “Do these things exist or not?” Or, “Did I really see them or not?” They didn’t. They just took it all for granted.

Lex Fridman (01:01:50) What are ghosts? Is it usually ancestors?

Irving Finkel (01:01:54) Well, everybody, everybody who died in bed naturally or peacefully, what we call their ghost, went down to the netherworld, and there they were. So they buried people jolly quick for obvious reasons, and like they do in Islam and Judaism today, it’s the same kind of idea. And the spirit of the person went down through the gates of the 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 them.

Lex Fridman (01:02:39) So isn’t that a way to lessen the impact of mortality?

Irving Finkel (01:02:44) I don’t know, because you know that everyone’s going to die. I think the real tragedy would be, is if we’re not supposed to. That would be the tragedy. But every single person is going to die. So all relationships have this finite clause in them. So if you’re very fond of somebody or you love somebody and they die, it’s kind of infantile to whine about it ever after. Because what did you think was gonna happen? Either you or them. You know, I always see it like that. I don’t feel grief when people die.

Lex Fridman (01:03:24) It is infantile, but I gotta tell you something about human beings. We’re all kind of infantile all the way through from, you know, we don’t stop being infantile after we’re infants. It’s 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.

Irving Finkel (01:03:45) But that’s the pain, it’s the fact that the- the whole thing ends. And when people fall off the edge, they fall off the edge.

Lex Fridman (01:03:54) 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.

Irving Finkel (01:04:12) 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, that means I’m right and you’re wrong if you don’t. So it’s already on that footing.

Lex Fridman (01:04:31) It’s very dogmatic. Yeah.

Irving Finkel (01:04:32) Dogmatic, and it’s led to everything, there’s inquisitions and this, you know, all this kind of stuff. It’s all a result of it, that one religion is superior and the others should be stamped out and all that. And in my opinion, monotheistic religion has generated the most fantastic amount of non-religious feeling. Whereas when you have all the different gods and they have different specialties, and the ones you like and the ones that everybody likes, and they have their temples and their offerings. It was very interesting to me to go into a temple in Kolkata when I went 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.

Irving Finkel (01:05:13) So there was never anything about them which affronted people’s individuality, 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.

Lex Fridman (01:05:33) So let’s talk… go to literature, ’cause we didn’t really mention literature much, except you did briefly mention Epic of Gilgamesh. So that was written in cuneiform. It’s one of the earliest works of literature.

Irving Finkel (01:05:45) That’s right.

Lex Fridman (01:05:45) Can you tell me about this work?

Irving Finkel (01:05:47) Yeah. Well, we know it best from this Assyrian library set of tablets. There are 12 of them, it’s a 12-tablet work, so it’s quite long. And Gilgamesh is the hero of it. But the literature, we know it from earlier texts, and we know that Gilgamesh lived. He was a real person, he was a king in Uruk, and he was one of those people who lived after their death in the world, like Alexander, for example. So there were stories about Gilgamesh when he was alive, there were stories about him afterwards. And firstly, they were oral literature, not written down at all, and then around the 1800s, people started to write them down in Sumerian or Babylonian. So there was a corpus, and eventually they were woven into this long 12 Homeric-type thing about the adventures of Gilgamesh.

Irving Finkel (01:06:38) So it is certainly literature, and it’s to do with humanity and immortality and man in the hands of the gods, and incorporates lots of interesting and exciting stories. It’s very Hollywoody kind of thing. And you can see within it, even in the sophisticated Nineveh 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 an enacting of an oral thing, a narrator would say and it suddenly got frozen into the text.

Irving Finkel (01:07:28) So it’s a very strange thing, because if you’re reading it, it’s obvious that one person speaks and the other person speaks, and they always have this complicated thing stuck in the text. So it must be an echo of presumably you have your protagonists enacting their timeless matter with a and the person who’s writing it down says, “And then Gilgamesh said…” you know, like in a script.

Lex Fridman (01:07:55) I mean, what can you say about the telling of stories in written form during that time? Do you think that, too, stretched back in time?

Irving Finkel (01:08:06) I do. I think the fireside narrative matters. You know, when we were kids it would be twerps with a guitar 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.

Lex Fridman (01:08:30) Stories, telling of stories. It doesn’t have to be pragmatic, it could be… …Literary in a way.

Irving Finkel (01:08:35) 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. 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 of the paintings on cave walls…

Irving Finkel (01:09:04) You try drawing a running antelope in color on a wall. I mean, the quality of the workmanship, of the artistic ability, is unsurpassable. It’s not just good. So how is that an explicable thing at this very early date? It means that among all the population, you have imbeciles and Einsteins, and somewhere along the line you have Rembrandts. And I imagine that half the cave paintings in Europe were done by one person. I mean, you get the impression every family had a genius painter. It’s impossible. Probably there was a person who went from place to place doing these paintings because they could draw straight away accurately like that. But they are a distillation of creative artistic ability plus skill.

Irving Finkel (01:09:57) So this, this is right at a pretty early stage, is it not, the cave painting material? So if you consider the human stock which encapsulates such ideas ever after, then you have to reckon with that. You have to reckon with that. Very creative, very creative people. So the function of stories to tell the young and about what happened and about famous battles or when the flood came, or how people learned to make fire, or how we invented the wheel. All those sorts of things everybody puts down, 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.

Irving Finkel (01:10:47) There must have been hunters who were ferociously quick and, you know, wrestle with polar bears and all that kind of… And all this stuff would be grist to the narrator’s thing. And as things got more complicated and more sophisticated, so lessons might be incorporated or lessons might come out of them unintentionally. Because if you tell a story without a moral, there is usually a moral if you think about it.

Ancient flood stories

Lex Fridman (01:11:13) 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.

Irving Finkel (01:11:29) Yeah. That was a challenge, because it’s really hard to read.

Lex Fridman (01:11:32) You gotta tell me the story. This ancient Babylonian clay tablet dating 1700 BC which contains a flood narrative that predates the biblical story of Noah by a thousand years.

Irving Finkel (01:11:45) At least.

Lex Fridman (01:11:46) At least. Okay. Well, you gotta tell me the full story.

Irving Finkel (01:11:50) So the full story is like this. Visitors used to come to the museum to ask questions of the experts who worked there, and one would be on duty periodically, and sometimes people would bring objects, sometimes they’d ask questions. And somebody once came in with a whole load of objects, including this tablet, which, to cut a long story short, I identified pretty much straight away as being part of the flood story. It was a tablet about eight inches by three. Not the whole flood story, which is a complex narrative which ended up in the Gilgamesh narrative much, much later, but this one was an early narrative in which the point was taken up where the gods in heaven had decided that the population of Mesopotamia needed to be wiped out because they were so noisy.

Irving Finkel (01:12:40) This was the expression. And the gods couldn’t sleep after lunch, sort of thing. So they decided they would wipe them out and create something quieter that worked harder. So this was the basic mechanism, and they had different ways of doing it. And 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 Atra-Hasis, who lived in Mesopotamia, to build a boat to rescue life when the waters came. And in it, he told him the shape of it and the materials he would need and how much he would need of the materials so he could do it safely. And in the 60 lines of the tablet, all this stuff was there.

Irving Finkel (01:13:29) It was like a blueprint to build this boat. And it was just extraordinary because the boat was round. And everybody who knew their Bible, the ark’s a coffin-shape kind of affair. And nobody thought of it being a round boat. And the fact is that round boats were used in Mesopotamia on the rivers, coracles that’s to say, because for transporting things, and they would never sink. They were very appropriate. And so in this story, it was decided it was going to be a giant coracle, a really, really big one that would never sink, and the male and female animals could go in and Atra-Hasis’ wife and his three sons and so forth, could go in and everything would be there and it would float on the water.

Irving Finkel (01:14:23) And when it came down, they said, “We’ll start all over again.” So it’s got very many points in common with the description of the flood in Genesis. And of course, so did the one in Gilgamesh. So in 1872, there was a Assyriologist in the British Museum called George Smith, and he was a very, very talented reader. And in 1872, he discovered that one of the tablets from the Nineveh library we were talking about before had on it a passage which ran in parallel with Gilgamesh about the waters coming and the boat and everybody floating.

Irving Finkel (01:15:02) And even to the point that when the rain stopped and the ark came to rest on a mountain, the hero of this thing in Gilgamesh, who was called Utnapishtim, released a bird three times to see whether the trees had come up, and the first one came back and the second one and the third one didn’t. So he knew that… So this was not only in the Epic of Gilgamesh, but it was also in the Book of Genesis. So what it meant was that it wasn’t… You couldn’t have two stories… It wasn’t two stories about the same thing. It was literary dependence.

Irving Finkel (01:15:40) It was literary dependence. The one was locked into the other. The text of the Hebrew Bible, from whenever it was written down, of course, nobody knows quite when, but whenever it was, it was about the same time as the one from Nineveh, about the 7th century, 6th century, something like that. The time interval between the Gilgamesh version from Nineveh and the Hebrew Bible is not like a big expanse of time. So there was an argument that one goes this way and one goes that way. But then when this tablet came in, a thousand years older, nobody believes the Bible was written in 1700 BC. So the primacy of the Mesopotamian matter was established. And it’s important because you never get floods in Jerusalem. You just don’t. But in Mesopotamia, they had floods.

Irving Finkel (01:16:31) The rivers, sometimes there wasn’t enough water, sometimes there was too much, sometimes there 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 is 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 survived were in boats, obviously. And then afterward, nobody ever forgot it. It went on and on and on.

Lex Fridman (01:17:01) So you mean there actually could have been a catastrophic event of a large scale?

Irving Finkel (01:17:04) Yeah, not the whole world, ’cause people were…

Lex Fridman (01:17:07) But just enough to imagine.

Irving Finkel (01:17:08) Yeah, sweeping down to the Persian Gulf, and, you know, the flat plains, everything would be destroyed, all the houses would be destroyed, animals would be drowned, and…

Lex Fridman (01:17:16) This is an incredible discovery. Do you think it’s possible that this is the original? There are flood myths in many cultures.

Irving Finkel (01:17:24) I believe this. The Mesopotamians had a deep-seated horror of dependency on water when they couldn’t control it. They were fearful of it. And they had a rainbow in Babylonia, like in the Bible, as a proof that the disastrous flood would never happen again. But I think there must have been one episode of this kind, maybe 5,000 years before the tablet, 10,000, it doesn’t matter. Because with the passage of time, nothing happens in that part of the world. So something will be alive, grandfather to grandson, before you go to sleep, “And remember, my boy, you know, you only have to be careful because otherwise…” and all that stuff. For sure, bogeyman stuff. It never quite died out in their conscious minds.

Irving Finkel (01:18:12) So I think that when the Judeans from Jerusalem, after the destruction of the temple by the Babylonians and the rout of the priesthood and everything, the king and the others went overland to Babylon as refugees, and they had to live there for three generations of time under 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, you have the mechanism that the only books in 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.

Irving Finkel (01:18:58) And, and look, they haven’t got a temple, they haven’t got a country, they’re washed up and everything like that. So I think that what happened was it’s a complex thing, but the Judeans from Jerusalem, they spoke Hebrew, but they also spoke Aramaic, right? The two languages, they’re sister languages. And the Babylonians spoke Babylonian, and they also spoke Aramaic. And they all wore the same kind of clothes, and they all had brown skin. And when all these refugees from Jerusalem were milling around in Babylonia, they would have intermarried and disappeared within no time at all.

Irving Finkel (01:19:36) And the authorities who were there prevented this by drawing up a kind of charter of their history, explaining things from the beginning of time up until now, how it happened and what happened, and it was all intentional. So that is, in my opinion, the driving force behind the Hebrew text. And the thing about it is that they didn’t have in Jewish philosophical tradition stuff about creation and the beginning of the world. And they took Babylonian ideas, which they learned when they were there, and they recycled them. So whereas the Babylonians decided that the gods were going to wipe out the noisy persons, when the Jewish philosophers got this narrative to recycle about the vengeful Almighty who was in the Old Testament a very unpleasant and vengeful person, it was because of sin.

Irving Finkel (01:20:34) 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.

Lex Fridman (01:20:43) The flood is a useful tool to, to punish people for whatever X is?

Irving Finkel (01:20:49) That’s exactly right. And 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. So it’s that narrative is irresistible, that one man can save the world, if he’s lucky, in time from disaster. So it starts off with Utnapishtim, and then it goes on to Noah, and then it goes on to Hollywood.

Noah’s Ark

Lex Fridman (01:21:27) Do you think this ark in the tablet actually was ever built? You did build a replica one third the size. And you, people should check out, you tell the story of that wonderfully. What did you learn from building this replica? And do you think the actual ark existed?

Irving Finkel (01:21:46) No, I don’t think so. I think it’s a literary construction out of the reality that people who did survive were on boats. I mean, they had boats for sure, and you might wake up in the Persian Gulf and never know what happened, but, you know, it’s a literary moral principle teaching narrative. And look, missionaries take it all around the world. That’s the other thing. See, this is the mystery of it, that you have flood stories everywhere, and some of them are from meddlesome missionaries who have all these innocent little kids sitting on benches, and, “I’m going to tell you a story,” like that. So it moves into this consciousness, then it gets recycled, and it gets recycled. So this is one thing.

Irving Finkel (01:22:29) 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 great river in China floods and everybody gets… so that’s not at all surprising. But what was so shocking for George Smith, who was such a clever person, is to read for the first time on this tablet from Nineveh, long before the one that I discovered came to light, about the three birds being released one after the other. And that was the clincher that the two stories were locked together. And lots of clergymen got very miserable about it and didn’t know what to make of it.

Lex Fridman (01:23:10) So that’s, that’s a definitive proof that those are literary-

Irving Finkel (01:23:13) A literary, I think literary link. I think so.

Lex Fridman (01:23:18) And I mean, these puzzles are then connected, but the ark you discovered is 1,000 years older. So that means that story of the flood has been told many, many times across that span to, you know… … “Do your homework or the flood is gonna come.”

Irving Finkel (01:23:40) That’s right.

Lex Fridman (01:23:40) Do all that, can… oh.

Irving Finkel (01:23:42) That’s right. And every time somebody built a coracle and they didn’t do the waterproofing right—

Irving Finkel (01:23:49) …you know what will happen? You’ll be out on the river, and that will be your lot, you know? I, I think so. I think it was a… I, I… there, there’s a certain amount of evidence that in Mesopotamian society, people talk about the time before the flood and after the flood. And it’s like when I was a boy, people used to talk about, “Before the war, we used to…” And now, we, we do this. It’s, it’s a kind of cataclysmic cut across history, which provides a, a, a ruler, so things are either before it or after it. Because there’s a king list, for example, where they wrote down the names of all the kings, all the way back to the beginning, including kings before the flood. They knew about that… they have their names and their great regnal years, or thousands of years. Fascinating.

Lex Fridman (01:24:42) So there’s a guy named Graham Hancock who talks about the Younger Dryas hypothesis, 10,000 BC, that there was an asteroid that hit Earth and melted the ice sheets, and that created a flood in North America. So that means an actual cataclysmic global event, that then as all the different civilizations sprung up, they all carried that knowledge, that memory. That’s his idea. What probability would you assign to that?

Irving Finkel (01:25:13) 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 cores and then they, and then they… I do that all the… I’m not interested in all that stuff. It’s, to my mind—

Lex Fridman (01:25:42) It’s a literary device.

Irving Finkel (01:25:43) …it’s a literary top-off 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’ve got to build a boat and this is what you’re going to need, and you’ve 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 Atrahasis 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, a boat building company, say, “Listen, fellow, I’ve got a deal…” No.

Irving Finkel (01:26:22) He had to tell him, “This is the blueprint, this is the shape, you need all this, you need all that, you’ve got to measure it and all that.” It’s a very interesting thing.

Lex Fridman (01:26:30) I mean, yeah, that’s a great story. You don’t go to the great boat builder, you go—

Irving Finkel (01:26:35) Taxi driver or something like that.

Lex Fridman (01:26:36) …to the taxi, and then that’s that—that hero’s journey. That’s the stuff of great myths, yeah.

Irving Finkel (01:26:43) It is, it is a great myth.

Lex Fridman (01:26:45) A little detail would be really cool about the replica, like, uh—

Irving Finkel (01:26:49) Of the boat?

Lex Fridman (01:26:49) What did you… Of the boat, yeah. One-third replica, of course.

Irving Finkel (01:26:51) That was something else. There were three blokes who did it. And they were specialists in reconstructing medieval Arab boats. Because quite often, they’re found in the mud or bits, or they have information and they reconstruct them, so they were at home in it. And we built it on a small lagoon 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 because it had wooden ribs, you see?

Irving Finkel (01:27:28) They could get wood ribs. They worked out by computer the maximum size they could do it when it would work. Beyond it, it would be impossible, because once they built the curved ribs, and then they stuffed woven all around it, it had to be covered in bitumen, which is also very heavy, to make it waterproof. So they calculated the size and it worked. So they built this thing on rollers and it was pushed out into the… It was just the most unbelievable… 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 bitumen because Indian bitumen is really not up to scratch, and they couldn’t get Iraqi bitumen because its cultural property is carcinogenic.

Irving Finkel (01:28:10) They wouldn’t export a tanker load of Iraqi, so we had to use the Indian stuff. But the thing is this, the bitumen which they coated it with was okay but it wasn’t perfect, so when it went out into the waters, there was a bit of a leak, water had to be bailed out. So, they said, “Ah,” you see, and I said, I said, “Okay, listen, sunshine,” I said to this producer, “Have you ever been in a rowing boat without water in the bottom? Excuse me?”

Lex Fridman (01:28:35) Oh, you’re saying that’s- that’s a feature, not a bug.

Irving Finkel (01:28:37) That’s the feature of the thing, yeah. That’s the feature. That thing could have gone to ports.

Lex Fridman (01:28:41) So it’s authentic.

Irving Finkel (01:28:43) Absolutely right. We had such an adventure with that thing. They made a documentary film. In various languages. And you know what they did? You know, I was in it a bit, and they had people saying, “Oh, I don’t think it was this, I don’t think it was that,” you know. And they didn’t let me go back and say, “What the hell are you talking about? I did it. I know what… I can read, you know, funkan you.” They didn’t have, they didn’t do it. I couldn’t get my own back. I was really annoyed. Really furious.

Lex Fridman (01:29:10) So you’re- you’re saying that there’s some inaccurate things to it.

Irving Finkel (01:29:13) 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 f-? I mean, I, you know, he couldn’t read the stuff. I mean, it’s really, really, really annoying. I mean, you should have a chance, shouldn’t you? You know, if you’re gonna have a fencing match, you both have to have a rapier, wouldn’t you say?

Lex Fridman (01:29:32) Yeah, and you’re the OG. You’re the person that decoded it.

Irving Finkel (01:29:37) Well, I can read. Yeah. But the thing is this, the proportions of the material were accurate. This is the crucial thing, that, um- …what had happened was, they took the information about how you make a real coracle, which is usually enough, two people… …And a few sheep and goats…

Lex Fridman (01:29:56) Got it.

Irving Finkel (01:29:56) …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’ve 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 coracle you’ve ever seen.'” Like that, right? Well, I mean, if you do this in a cinema in Guildford, people will say, “Well, that’s fine,” but if you do it to a whole load of river people who use coracles and make them, they’re not going to take that, they’re not… “So how big was it then? Come on, how big was it?” So what do they do? They go to a coracle place and they work out…

Irving Finkel (01:30:45) …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. “You can’t expect us, big enough for all this.” So then he’d have all the stuff and he’d do it this way, “And you need all this and, and you need all this,” and they’d all be hypnotized by it. That, I think, is, it’s actually, regarding your question, it’s on the cusp of purely oral literature to purely literary literature. It’s actually there because you can see that it was molded in the environment when people were still talking.

Lex Fridman (01:31:26) Yeah, you’ve got to make it authentic to really connect with people.

Irving Finkel (01:31:29) Well, you couldn’t pull it over their eyes. I mean, you know?

Lex Fridman (01:31:32) Yeah, well, I wish many of the films in Hollywood today would have the same level of rigor.

Irving Finkel (01:31:37) Rigor is one of the things lacking in the world.

Lex Fridman (01:31:40) By the way, I forgot to ask, why was the flood myth focused on noisy people?

Irving Finkel (01:31:45) Well, it can’t really be noisy. I’ll tell you what the explanation is; it’s something quite different. Before the flood, the gods had not created death. So I think the noise was a reflex of the fact there were just too many animals, too many people, and they had to do something about it. So it’s a sort of euphemism, so to speak, because after the flood, at the end of the tablet… not my tablet, but the other ones, where it’s still broken. It says, there’s a tantalizing thing where they create barren women who can’t have children and men who can’t have children and princesses 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.

Irving Finkel (01:32:41) It’s remarkable. So that the noise means there are so many of them, not that they’re actually so noisy that we can’t hear ourselves think.

The Royal Game of Ur

Lex Fridman (01:32:50) You have to tell me about the world of ancient games. Maybe we can start with the ancient Royal Game of Ur. What is it and how were you somehow able to crack the rules of it?

Irving Finkel (01:33:05) Well, the Royal Game of Ur is a board of 20 squares in a rather idiosyncratic form. And it was pretty much unknown until the 1920s when Sir Leonard Woolley was digging at the site of Ur, and in the graves of the royal family, Sumerian rulers, they found four or five boards of this pattern, together with dice and pieces, which showed that it was popular among them at this time, and also that wherever they were going in the world to come, they would want to be playing it. And so that was one thing, and we had the number of pieces and some dice. So lots of people had ideas about how it might 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.

Irving Finkel (01:34:07) And the one from Ur dates to about 2600 BC, and from then down to the end of the first millennium, there are examples of boards from Mesopotamia itself and from Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Turkey, Greece, Crete, all over the place. And when you put all the boards together, you realize that you’re dealing with a board game which was extremely widespread and extremely popular.

Lex Fridman (01:34:44) Across space and time.

Irving Finkel (01:34:46) 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 that’s like chess or backgammon, which you can say are world conquerors. Because the way I see the issue is that human beings for a very long time have been, shall we say, hungry for things to do. Because all through the Bronze Age and the Iron Age, there was no television, you know? There was nothing, and kids played with pull-along things and adults had board games, and they’re kind of embedded in culture from a very early time.

Irving Finkel (01:35:38) And this game was so widespread, you know, Tutankhamun, for example, in his tomb, there were two or three boards for it with the pieces. So it arrived in the middle of the second millennium in Egypt and even the Pharaoh played it. So you have a game, which the interesting point about it is that it spread across the known world without written rules and without people necessarily knowing the same language. So a merchant would go, end up in a bar, you know, come from India or, I don’t know, where, start 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.

Irving Finkel (01:36:29) And so you can see that the board has 20 squares, so you have a block of four by three and then a bridge of two and then a second three by two thing at the end. So it’s difficult to describe the actual shape. But what happened was after about 2000 BC, the squares at the far end, which 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. All the boards after the period of Ur 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 and you go up the middle and off the end.

Irving Finkel (01:37:22) And it was a race game of the kind that everybody knows from their own childhood. Some squares, which had rosettes on, were either 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. But anyway, the crucial thing is that the widespread distribution of this idiosyncratic shape, and it’s a lasting thing, shows it must have been a very good game if people more or less played the same thing on it everywhere. I mean, it may be that 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.

Irving Finkel (01:38:08) 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, 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 measurable quota of strategy. It’s a mix of probability and strategy. So most games are either just probability like Snakes and Ladders, like Chutes and Ladders is just a thing like that. Or you have a game like chess, which is pure strategy. It’s a mix, and the grown-up game in the modern world where fortuity or chance and strategy have a good balance is backgammon, which is a sort of grown-up version of this sort of game.

Irving Finkel (01:39:03) where, nevertheless, if you play according to the most rational interpretation, its strategy is 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 second century BC, so 2,300 years after this object existed, and it had on it the names of the pieces and what the pieces were like and various things about the 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.

Irving Finkel (01:39:54) And it jolly well turned out to be workable ’cause people play this all over the world now. And they even play in Iraq in cafes. “Wait, now?” They do. “Oh, wow.” Because after it’s come back to life, it’s on the internet, people play, there are different rules. “That’s amazing.” The ones I invented are pretty much regular. So if you have a good balance between chance and strategy, and it’s a fair game, and doesn’t take four days to play like modern board games. So you could 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.

Irving Finkel (01:40:32) And once I was in California, at the Getty, and I had to give a talk about this with all the information, because there’s lots of things to say about it. And the lady who ran the Friends of the Getty had a brilliant idea. So what she brought in 20 or so commercial copies of this game, and they had small tables with chairs. And after the lecture, I was supposed to say to everybody, “Okay, this is what you have to do, this is how you play.” Because you can get the rules down in like three minutes. 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!

Irving Finkel (01:41:13) I’m never playing this game with you again.” When they’d never played it before, when somebody had escaped at the last minute, cleaned up just when they thought they were going to get it. And it provokes that salutary, 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. Do you think games, our desire to play games, a mix of chance, a mix of strategy, is a part of human nature? Do you think that’s always been there? I do. I do, yes. I think…

Irving Finkel (01:41:59) I mean, you can say that in communities you have rivalry, hostility, and who’s the best, who’s the fastest, who’s the strongest and things. And if you play a board game like that, all the reality of it is sublimated into a safe terrain, yes, the safety of it, where you can nevertheless get angry, but it’s not like that. That’s one thing. But more significantly, I believe is the question of what in India people call “time pass.” Which is not quite the same as “past time.” Time pass is the question of what you do when it’s too hot to do anything, which is true a good part of the day and a good part of the year. And grandmothers sit under trees with their grandchildren and they tell stories and they do this and they do that.

Irving Finkel (01:42:47) And “time pass” is a very useful catch-all phrase for the existence of board games. And in India, there are many board games. Chess, of course, is the famous one, but there are quite a lot of three-in-a-row type games or fox-against-geese games, and wolves against sheep and all those sorts of things which come out of the landscape in miniature and were played for pleasure. And also in a kind of way, it doesn’t really matter who wins, because you might play and it goes round and round and round, 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 overpowering in either way. So I think it is a human matter.

Lex Fridman (01:43:42) Of course, 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.

Irving Finkel (01:43:52) I think so, but probably only late on, because money as such… … Of course that doesn’t appear until quite late. But there are… We know in Mesopotamia, it’s a 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 of them, it has this, “Oh my astragal, oh my astragal, woe is me, woe is me.” And that’s all we have. And I think this is an example of a genre of literature called “the gambler’s lament.” Because they used knucklebones or astragals as dice. And I’m sure there were people who bet a sack of this or a roomful of that on the throw of the knucklebones.

Irving Finkel (01:44:48) And this extract in the school text is probably from a literary tablet in which somebody lost everything, even though there weren’t coins, because I think you’re right that it’s a natural thing for it to accrue. And also maybe men and women played differently, because there are some games which were played in harems among girls, you know, woman 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 are couched for credibility are for just exactly that setup.

British Museum

Lex Fridman (01:45:49) As you mentioned, you are the curator at the, possibly the greatest place on Earth, the British Museum.

Irving Finkel (01:45:57) Oh, yes.

Lex Fridman (01:45:58) Can you tell me what are some of the incredible, magical aspects of the British Museum?

Irving Finkel (01:46:04) Well, the British Museum is a magical place and it’s a special case because there’s a lot of flurry and dispute now about what museums are and what they’re for and why they exist and whether they should ever have existed, and all these sorts of issues which people go on about. But the British Museum is unlike almost all museums in the world because it’s to do with 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.

Irving Finkel (01:46:50) And not turning a blind eye to all the contrasting horrible things that have happened, but it’s the narrative of the human race, as I see it, as discernible in objects. So it means that we serve two very important horizons. One is that we represent, as far as we can, the whole world with no injudicious attention paid to any one or other culture, that they’re all to us one. So there’s no favoring any religious group, any country group, anything of the kind. It’s the human species. We try to tell the narrative of, in its own right, and how it overlaps with its neighbors and what it’s learned from what came before. All those features together is really what the concern of the museum is. And of course, to collect everything we…

Irving Finkel (01:47:53) Or has been, to collect everything we can to tell those narratives, and also to look after them according to scientific principle. So, all those things at once are the task for the British Museum. And the second horizon it serves is the unborn. So babies yet to be born, and their children, and their children, and their children. And it seems to me that the task of the museum is of such cultural significance and such, so to speak, sacred validity, that it shouldn’t have to put up with people carping about this or that or saying, “Museums are sinful and wicked and should be demolished,” because the people who say these things don’t really have any idea of actually what it really does stand for.

Irving Finkel (01:48:44) 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 the 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 at them for what they are and to assess their relationships and what they offer.

Irving Finkel (01:49:40) Perhaps less, with a less acerbity 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 name 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 has 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.

Irving Finkel (01:50:28) So I think it’s people say, “Oh, you say this ’cause you work there and you, you know, you’re a curator, you wouldn’t say that the British Museum is a special place.” It’s nothing to do with that. It is actually a special place because you cannot point to another museum in the world with the same task. For example, the Louvre is basically a museum of art, basically a museum of art, not a museum of ideas. And the Met is definitely a museum of art. It’s called the Museum of Art and that’s their priority. Design and color and shape, to my mind, it’s the British Museum. This is one factor among many others. And we’re 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.

Irving Finkel (01:51:16) 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 burst through the front door and said to us, “Tell us all about this place. Tell us about the world. Can you do it fast ’cause we got to leave?” And if you took them around and said, “Look at this, look at this, look at this, look at this,” they’d get some picture which wasn’t insane. The only thing they wouldn’t get is a recording of “Johnny B. Goode” by Chuck Berry, but apparently one’s been put into space. Yeah. I’ve heard about it. So this is a very comforting thing.

Lex Fridman (01:51:58) But that’s kind of what… The task of the British Museum is to do that, but for the entirety of human history.

Irving Finkel (01:52:02) Yeah. It can be done.

Lex Fridman (01:52:03) It would be a store of artifacts…

Irving Finkel (01:52:05) Yes

Lex Fridman (01:52:06) …that are the raindrops from which you can reconstruct the waterfall.

Irving Finkel (01:52:09) 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 ’cause 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.

Irving Finkel (01:52:57) And the further back you go, the sharper you can understand things, especially in terms of their own precedent and their own contemporary parallels. So the benefit of distance, storage, and contemplation is inestimable.

Evolution of human civilization

Lex Fridman (01:53:13) There are so many questions I want to ask you. What wisdom do you think the people from whom these artifacts came had that we, the modern-day humans, may have lost or lost in part or in whole? It’s often, as you’ve spoken about, we see the ancient peoples as lesser, dumber, more primitive. And you’ve spoken about how they are basically the same.

Irving Finkel (01:53:46) I think if you put them on a bus all wearing the same clothes, you wouldn’t know. That’s my feeling.

Lex Fridman (01:53:51) But there is some… I’m sure there’s some greater wisdom they had about certain things, as we have greater wisdom about others. Thanks to Einstein, we’ve figured out the curvature of space-time.

Irving Finkel (01:54:05) Yeah.

Lex Fridman (01:54:05) Which they didn’t know about. But…

Irving Finkel (01:54:07) They knew quite a lot about astronomy, though. Quite a lot about astronomy.

Lex Fridman (01:54:11) They stared at the stars.

Irving Finkel (01:54:12) Yeah, and they measured them and they made calculations. And when the Greeks went to Babylon, they thought, “Hey man, this is really cool.” And they wrote it all down and went home. Yeah, definitely, definitely. Well, I think it’s a hard question to answer. But one of the things is that they were spared things which have cluttered up the essence of humanity. Because I think that the modern adherence to the electronic universe is disastrous for humans, and because it reduces the vitality of the human component. I think it’s restrictive in a way that people don’t 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.

Irving Finkel (01:55:06) People use the electronic world like an addictive drug and they can’t get through without it. And I think this is a very recent thing, but I suppose I’m not a Luddite and say we shouldn’t have railway engines and we shouldn’t have kettles. But I think one of the things about the ancient world was that people never went anywhere unless they were merchants or soldiers. They never went anywhere. Probably people born and died in a village and then their children born and died in the village, and they never knew anything about the outside world. Maybe a very little. Sometimes there’d be a message, but in principle, they had no idea about other countries, other languages, or how big they were or any…

Irving Finkel (01:55:50) So I don’t think they had wisdom in a way that you could type out following precepts will make life better. Because they told lies and they esteemed the truth, and they fell in love and they committed adultery and they did murder, and they did all the things. I think in a way, the ancient world allowed human beings to behave more naturally than the world in which we live now. I mean, if you live in a rustic environment or by the sea, 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 ineluctably crucial are not ineluctably crucial. They’re not in…

Irving Finkel (01:56:43) You know, one example is this ghastly thing on mobiles where you get a short clip from a real program.

Lex Fridman (01:56:50) Yeah, yeah.

Irving Finkel (01:56:50) 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 that’s ever been created, which is English. They have to save their lives, and they use a word… I’ll give you an example.

Lex Fridman (01:57:13) Yeah.

Irving Finkel (01:57:14) Right? Like I went.

Lex Fridman (01:57:16) Like I went.

Irving Finkel (01:57:17) Like I went.

Lex Fridman (01:57:18) Yeah.

Irving Finkel (01:57:18) So 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”? Where would we be? Where would we be?

Lex Fridman (01:57:39) I mean, we should probably say that even in that time there was probably slang, right? It just wouldn’t end up written.

Irving Finkel (01:57:45) Yes, there were dialects. There were words that sailors used. For sure, all those things.

Lex Fridman (01:57:50) But they wouldn’t end up in writing.

Irving Finkel (01:57:52) Sometimes they do.

Lex Fridman (01:57:53) We have to remember that Cambridge and Oxford speak in a certain way that’s proper and formal and very smart, but most of the people in bars, sailors, have a different way of speaking.

Irving Finkel (01:58:06) They do.

Lex Fridman (01:58:06) So they would probably say “like I went” and have emojis and…

Irving Finkel (01:58:13) But the thing is, you have to moderate your vocabulary. If you talk to people of a certain age, because they don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about if you use language. And the thing that was just so exquisite about English is like with a barrister, you can make a case which is absolutely wonderful because it says exactly what it means and there’s no wiggle room. The conversation should be like that, with no wiggle room. 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 thick, this fat. I have a whole set. I love them. So this is it.

Irving Finkel (01:58:58) 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, and I had three sisters 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.

Lex Fridman (01:59:46) Which is a very important aspect of vocabulary, why it’s important to know a lot of words and to speak clearly, because those words also define the quality of your thoughts.

Irving Finkel (01:59:56) Sure

Lex Fridman (01:59:56) … at the end of the day.

Irving Finkel (01:59:57) That’s exactly right. I must say, I think it is a pity if having produced such wonderful languages in the world that their use is so inhibited.

Lex Fridman (02:00:08) I think the right way to think about it is the way the British Museum thinks about it. So you’re commenting on the ephemeral, on the thing that is in the moment right now is happening. The reality is only a few select things will last a hundred, 200 years from now about this moment in time. And so we have to sort of think with the big picture perspective and the slowness of time. Yes, in the moment there are these catastrophes, there are 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. Humans started launching rockets, going to the moon, maybe to Mars.

Lex Fridman (02:01:05) Those things. And we won’t be thinking about emojis and any of that. And in some sense, that’s the stuff you’re looking at with cuneiforms, is the things that stand the test of time, that are there.

Irving Finkel (02:01:23) That’s true. But I think that language, properly used, is a crucial human tool for communication.

Lex Fridman (02:01:32) Absolutely, yes. Speaking of which, I have to ask some more about the cuneiform tablets at the British Museum, when you’re surrounded by so many… And by the way, how many cuneiforms?

Irving Finkel (02:01:45) About 130,000.

Lex Fridman (02:01:47) That is so cool.

Irving Finkel (02:01:48) It is. It’s pretty cool.

Lex Fridman (02:01:49) What are some of the most beautiful cuneiforms to you? Maybe ones we don’t know about, that make you smile?

Irving Finkel (02:01:59) Well, there are not many jokes. You asked about jokes.

Lex Fridman (02:02:01) Yeah, they lost their sense of humor in cuneiform.

Irving Finkel (02:02:04) Yeah, I think there are. There’s one that I can remember. A fly or a mosquito lands on the back of an elephant and says, “Am I too heavy for you?” Or something like that. That’s sort of a Babylonian joke. You wouldn’t use it in the pub or anything like that.

Lex Fridman (02:02:21) Yeah, yeah. You had to be there.

Irving Finkel (02:02:24) But then also, do you like Tom Lehrer?

Lex Fridman (02:02:26) Of course.

Irving Finkel (02:02:27) Okay, that’s good. That’s good. I once went to America on a lecture tour and I ended up in the town where Dr. Wernher von Braun ended up running the American rocket… … Industry.

Lex Fridman (02:02:48) It doesn’t matter?

Irving Finkel (02:02:49) Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down?

Lex Fridman (02:02:51) Where they come down, yeah.

Irving Finkel (02:02:52) “That’s not my department,” says Wernher von Braun.

Lex Fridman (02:02:55) That guy, I mean, I could tell where your wit comes from, the fact that you know Tom Lehrer.

Irving Finkel (02:03:00) But he’s such a… The way he plays the piano is fantastic. I think my dad recorded them off the radio on a reel-to-reel tape recorder, and I learned them all by heart because they were so fantastic. But I knew a Harvard professor who I stayed with once who was a Sumerologist. And his wife said that she knew Tom Lehrer when he was in the math department… …And they used to have parties and he always played the piano in the corner of the room. He’s just amazing, that man.

Lex Fridman (02:03:25) Yeah, 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 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.

Irving Finkel (02:03:49) I think so. But the paradoxical thing about Tom Lehrer is that when he’s talking about the bomb and all that, and devices, and international trouble, it’s so unchanged. And same with Dr. Strangelove. It’s just, it’s very remarkable. Anyway, next time you’re here or when you’re here, you should come and see me in the museum.

Lex Fridman (02:04:16) I will

Irving Finkel (02:04:16) And I’ll show you…

Lex Fridman (02:04:16) I will

Irving Finkel (02:04:16) …some of these confounded things for yourself, and show you the Chicago Dictionary and give you a grammar book to learn.

Lex Fridman (02:04:26) Irving, you’re a remarkable human being. It’s-

Irving Finkel (02:04:28) Well, I’m very glad we met.

Lex Fridman (02:04:29) It’s truly an honor to meet you, to talk to you.

Irving Finkel (02:04:31) Me- me too. It’s been very interesting.

Lex Fridman (02:04:33) Irving, thank you so much for talking to me.

Irving Finkel (02:04:34) It’s been a big pleasure for me, Lex. Be well.

Lex Fridman (02:04:38) Thanks for listening to this conversation with Irving Finkel. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description where you can also find links to contact me, ask questions, give feedback and so on. And now, let me leave you with some words from Ludwig Wittgenstein, “The limits of my language means the limits of my world.” Thank you for listening. I hope to see you next time.

Lex Fridman

Research Scientist at MIT. Host of Lex Fridman Podcast.

Transcript for Irving Finkel: Deciphering Secrets of Ancient Civilizations & Flood Myths | Lex Fridman Podcast #487

Table of Contents