Irving Finkel on Ancient Mesopotamia, Cuneiform, and the Ark Tablet

Irving Finkel

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.

Irving Finkel

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.

Irving Finkel

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.

Irving Finkel

So it was a pretty gigantic step whenever it was taken, but we really have no idea when it was first taken.

Irving Finkel

And we have examples of funny languages around the world in the Bronze Age, which were written in cuneiform purely by ear.

Irving Finkel

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.

Irving Finkel

So they invented not only writing, they invented lexicography.

Irving Finkel

Yeah. So in the 19th century, about 1840, 1850, they started to find these things on excavations in Iraq.

Irving Finkel

So, they first called them cuneatic or cuneiform, and the word stuck.

Irving Finkel

And of course, growing up in the British Museum and reading these things for a living becomes a kind of lifetime's work.

Irving Finkel

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.

Irving Finkel

Exactly.

Irving Finkel

Well, I think it's rather paradoxical, because the first generation or so of tablets that we have are written in these pictographic signs.

Irving Finkel

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?

Irving Finkel

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.

Irving Finkel

And my hunch is that the archaeological evidence that we have on this score is ultimately misleading.

Irving Finkel

And I think there was a long running system of communication between people who didn't share a language for whom pictures would suffice.

Irving Finkel

So, if merchants come and they have three sheep to sell, so they draw three little sheep.

Irving Finkel

That is what I think happened. That's what I think happened.

Irving Finkel

Highly controversial. Many Assyriologists would leave the room.

Irving Finkel

But I'm not scared of controversy because it's natural.

Irving Finkel

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.

Irving Finkel

I do

Irving Finkel

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.

Irving Finkel

Do you know about Gobekli Tepe?

Irving Finkel

Well, everybody knows about the buildings and the architecture. Everybody knows about it.

Irving Finkel

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.

Irving Finkel

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.

Irving Finkel

No one said anything about it at all, but it's clear to me, A, that this was a stamp to ratify.

Irving Finkel

So this is about 9000 BC.

Irving Finkel

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.

Irving Finkel

Well, if they had to cope with that in Sumer in 3000 BC, they sure as hell had to do it at Gobekli Tepe.

Irving Finkel

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.

Irving Finkel

You couldn't have that without writing in southern Iraq. So how come suddenly then 7,000 years earlier, they do it there?

Irving Finkel

That, and that green stone shows that they had writing. That was an official who sealed this, got the stuff or whatever it was.

Irving Finkel

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.

Irving Finkel

And it's basically like having a cigarette with an X through the middle. Everybody in the world knows what that means.

Irving Finkel

They don't know what the word for cigarette is in this language or cancer or filter or tobacco, it doesn't matter.

Irving Finkel

It's pictographic writing. We still use it. And it's above all kinds of mess.

Irving Finkel

And I think that was the prevailing system because I honestly believe that the people at this time were not stupid.

Irving Finkel

They weren't gorillas. They weren't less advanced than we are. They were probably indistinguishable from what we are.

Irving Finkel

So you have merchants and wanderers and people who say, "Let's go down the river and see where we end up."

Irving Finkel

And people looking for money, looking for women, looking for everything. I mean, that's surely how it was.

Irving Finkel

But if you look at those Gobekli buildings with a skeptical eye, how it could be.

Irving Finkel

I mean, the finish of it is astonishing, the structure of it, the vision of it.

Irving Finkel

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.

Irving Finkel

It is really controversial

Irving Finkel

There was, because the thing is about it, that it's a seal to ratify.

Irving Finkel

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.

Irving Finkel

You press it down, so you have some contract, you have some building arrangement.

Irving Finkel

That we're paying for these bricks, whatever it was, and the official person had to squash it down and it leaves the impression.

Irving Finkel

I mean, I am a great believer in Sherlock Holmes- …as a teaching system for intelligence and rationality and logic in thinking.

Irving Finkel

I read those stories a million times when I was a kid.

Irving Finkel

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.

Irving Finkel

It's a powerful statement. Well, that seal from Gobekli Tepe is a raindrop from which I infer writing.

Irving Finkel

And it's perfectly possible they all wrote on flat leaves. After all, in many parts of the world, that's what happened.

Irving Finkel

So, for example, in the Indus Valley, people write the most abject nonsense about the Indus Valley writing system.

Irving Finkel

But all we have is seals, basically. So they are also for ratification purposes.

Irving Finkel

And they have the name of the owner in three or four or maybe five signs.

Irving Finkel

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.

Irving Finkel

They can't just have had inscribed stone seals.

Irving Finkel

And many parts of India today write on palm leaf. Why should it be any different?

Irving Finkel

So people think, you know, "Oh, well, just because it's now, it wouldn't be then."

Irving Finkel

But actually, that argument is utterly, utterly fallacious, because the process of evolution is stymied left, right, and center by inertia.

Irving Finkel

Inertia is nearly as strong as evolution.

Irving Finkel

And this is something that the people who talk about progress and ideas have no idea about.

Irving Finkel

Yes, we have a lot, but it's nothing in comparison with what existed.

Irving Finkel

But not only that, you see, we don't have to decipher anymore. We can read Akkadian or Babylonian, Sumerian pretty well fluently.

Irving Finkel

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.

Irving Finkel

But it means that Assyriologists have the inbuilt idea that what we have is something like all there ever was, which is absurd.

Irving Finkel

For example, there's a period called the Ur III Period, where people lived in city-states.

Irving Finkel

They wrote very small account tablets by the thousand.

Irving Finkel

And there were two or three major cities where this is the way they lived.

Irving Finkel

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.

Irving Finkel

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.

Irving Finkel

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

So people like to generalize about the Sumerians at this time of the world.

Irving Finkel

But they probably all came out of two rooms, because they were dumped when they were no longer needed in some kind of room.

Irving Finkel

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.

Irving Finkel

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.

Irving Finkel

So our view of it is skewed by the nature of the material.

Irving Finkel

And sometimes the material is opulent and benevolent, but not always.

Irving Finkel

And sometimes the people who work with skewed material don't even realize how skewed it is.

Irving Finkel

I mean, you know, it's quite remarkable.

Irving Finkel

Yes, I can imagine. I can imagine easily, because once in a while, a library is discovered.

Irving Finkel

In the 1850s at Nineveh, which was the Assyrian capital, there was a fat king, king of the world, called Ashurbanipal.

Irving Finkel

And he had a fantastic library, and he promoted it. He impounded tablets, he had them brought to Nineveh.

Irving Finkel

He wanted all the prevailing knowledge and all knowledge from before under one roof. It was a kind of Alexandria thing.

Irving Finkel

So he was a trained scholar, and this is what he did, and they found it in the 19th century.

Irving Finkel

They dug it up, Layard and those people. So what did they find?

Irving Finkel

They found the tablets higgledy-piggledy all over the floor of a huge room and in the corridors and everything.

Irving Finkel

And lots of them broken and lots of them burnt.

Irving Finkel

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.

Irving Finkel

And you have the story about Gilgamesh and the goddess who falls in love with him in the garden.

Irving Finkel

And she wants to seduce him, and dot, dot, dot, you can't find the bit…

Irving Finkel

So you look for another bit and you look for another bit. And gradually, they piece together the literature.

Irving Finkel

And the assumption has always been that if you put them all together again, you'll have the whole library.

Irving Finkel

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.

Irving Finkel

They had a pincer movement and they beat Assyria, they conquered Assyria.

Irving Finkel

And they ran through the capital and they set fire to everything.

Irving Finkel

Pinched all the women and took all the jewelry and all the gold.

Irving Finkel

And people say that in a fit of pique, they destroyed the library.

Irving Finkel

But they wouldn't destroy the library because it was the giant brain from which the Assyrians ran a world empire.

Irving Finkel

And it had all the knowledge in the world. They destroyed that?

Irving Finkel

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

And I think what's left there is duplicates and broken things, the things that got dropped and everything.

Irving Finkel

And that's what everyone thinks it is. So this is also a controversial point.

Irving Finkel

But it's common…

Irving Finkel

It's common…

Irving Finkel

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.

Irving Finkel

It needs to be attacked left, right, and center.

Irving Finkel

That's important. Well, the first thing is how the cuneiform writing system works.

Irving Finkel

Because the crucial point, and once you see it, it makes a lot of things clear, is that they wrote in syllables.

Irving Finkel

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.

Irving Finkel

They couldn't write a consonant. They couldn't do that.

Irving Finkel

So what they did is they had a vowel before a consonant or one after. Say you have "Ab" and "Ba."

Irving Finkel

But as they had four vowels, you had to have Ab and Ba, Ib and Bi, Ub and Bu, Eb and Be.

Irving Finkel

So you had the range of things clustered around what we call a consonant.

Irving Finkel

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.

Irving Finkel

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.

Irving Finkel

So what you would do is you would write the syllable mu-

Irving Finkel

And then the sign "Z" and then the sign "um." So you split the word up into its component syllables.

Irving Finkel

When you read it in your mind, you squash them together into "museum." That's the basic system.

Irving Finkel

They had other signs which gave you a clue as to the meaning and the bits around the edge.

Irving Finkel

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.

Irving Finkel

Because unfortunately they didn't just have one for each, they had multiple ones.

Irving Finkel

And the reason is not that they were mad or they wanted to make life hell.

Irving Finkel

But because the syllables derive from the writing of Sumerian words.

Irving Finkel

So the Sumerian vocabulary had a lot of words that were probably differentiated by tone.

Irving Finkel

So you might have "Ba" and then a rising "A" and then a lowering…

Irving Finkel

And these signs all retain the "Ba" value even though there were no tones.

Irving Finkel

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.

Irving Finkel

Then there's "Ba" number two, "Ba" number three, and you have to learn them all.

Irving Finkel

And when you read, you have to learn how to do it.

Irving Finkel

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.

Irving Finkel

Now, the first thing is this, that the Babylonian language is a Semitic tongue.

Irving Finkel

Which although it's extinct, is connected to or related to Hebrew, Aramaic, Arabic, Ethiopic, Syriac.

Irving Finkel

All that family of Semitic languages which are still alive.

Irving Finkel

It's an early example of one of those.

Irving Finkel

So that when the decipherment came along, it was the Semitic dictionary that they fell back on to identify words, nouns, and roots.

Irving Finkel

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.

Irving Finkel

Yeah, this is a bewitching thing. It's a bewitching thing to me.

Irving Finkel

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.

Irving Finkel

So you have Indo-European with Spanish, Italian, Latin, Hittite, and so forth, and that's French, that's one group.

Irving Finkel

And you have Germanic and you have Slavonic.

Irving Finkel

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.

Irving Finkel

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.

Irving Finkel

So that when writing arrives about 3000, say, 300 BC, to write properly.

Irving Finkel

It means that Sumerian was recorded just in time.

Irving Finkel

But the big languages, maybe in China, in Russia, in somewhere else in Asia, that were related to Sumerian-

Irving Finkel

… are all gone. They're gone forever and ever and ever, unless something amazing happens.

Irving Finkel

So we've got the one representative of this bizarre family. Is that-

Irving Finkel

It is. And it's a very stimulating thing to imagine.

Irving Finkel

I personally believe that Neanderthals and early Homo sapiens for sure had language, for sure they talked to one another.

Irving Finkel

It's impossible that they didn't. The point came when they did, they did.

Irving Finkel

And the Neanderthals, 800,000 years of living in Europe.

Irving Finkel

They had to deal with the Ice Age, they all lived together, they bring up their children.

Irving Finkel

You think they couldn't speak anything? They have the same apparatus.

Irving Finkel

And if you have a human brain, then it responds to stimulus.

Irving Finkel

And the more stimulus there is for communication, I mean, the idea that you and I are out hunting rhino…

Irving Finkel

…and you say, "Legs." Well, shut up, I'm concentrating. "Legs, legs."

Irving Finkel

And then I suddenly think, "Oh, I get it. You are legs." Right?

Irving Finkel

You only have to do that once, then you know who I am.

Irving Finkel

So I know that I'm me and that you are you.

Irving Finkel

So people who say that they couldn't distinguish ego and all that, it's absolutely stupid.

Irving Finkel

If you cut your hand with a knife, you sure as hell experience… You sure as hell do. It hurts. It hurts a lot.

Irving Finkel

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.

Irving Finkel

You think people weren't conscious that they were an entity? I don't believe it.

Irving Finkel

Well, eventually, yes. Names. I mean…

Irving Finkel

…names the things, and then you have the idea that a label fixes to something.

Irving Finkel

Then the light bulb has gone on, and next minute you have rhino and you have skin and you have babies.

Irving Finkel

Because I think you have an idea, and the idea then drives the brain, and the brain has another idea. It works like fertility.

Irving Finkel

I think that the media in which it appears is when there's a lot of people living in an urban environment.

Irving Finkel

And with rival institutions or the king or the government or all those sorts of…

Irving Finkel

…Things. And that's why I think Gobekle Tepe must have been the same thing.

Irving Finkel

I read somewhere that they're all nomads and they only came to Gobekle Tepe three months a year.

Irving Finkel

I mean, that cannot be true that they were nomads. Cannot be true.

Irving Finkel

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.

Irving Finkel

I mean, you can't just like that, like gorillas.

Irving Finkel

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.

Irving Finkel

But at the beginning, when the first tablets and bricks in cuneiform and stone inscriptions came to light, no one could read them.

Irving Finkel

But they knew they were writing, but they didn't know how to read them.

Irving Finkel

And what happened was, like you said before, with the Rosetta Stone, it was something directly comparable.

Irving Finkel

Because there was an inscription of one of the Persian kings halfway up a mountain in a place called Bisutun.

Irving Finkel

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

And Old Persian, although it isn't obviously an archaic form of the language, Persian is still alive.

Irving Finkel

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.

Irving Finkel

They twigged it was Old Persian, they read it in Persian, and they read the names Darayawush in Old Persian.

Irving Finkel

And then suddenly, somebody realized that the other two columns were about the same length.

Irving Finkel

What do you know? And the thing is, it said, "I am Darius the great king, king of the world, king of the…

Irving Finkel

son of… diddly, diddly, diddly, diddly… grandson of… diddly, diddly, diddly…"

Irving Finkel

So there's a whole paragraph with repeated things in the Persian which they could understand.

Irving Finkel

So what do you know? They're reiterated passages in the other two languages.

Irving Finkel

So that was the key, that kind of… the chisel that opened up cuneiform writing proper.

Irving Finkel

And the thing was, they soon twigged that the language of the Babylonian was a Semitic tongue.

Irving Finkel

And this was so important. I think the first word they discovered was the word for river.

Irving Finkel

Which is Ɔaru in Akkadian and نحر in Arabic and Aramaic.

Irving Finkel

And when they realized that the word that corresponded to the Persian had this form, this was a gift, a gift of gold.

Irving Finkel

Because everybody immediately seized their Arabic and Hebrew dictionaries and started leafing through looking for words that would fit in the context.

Irving Finkel

And they basically deciphered this inscription in that sort of way.

Irving Finkel

And of course, all the other inscriptions came in order, and there were lots and lots of difficulties which had to be resolved.

Irving Finkel

But that's the basic thing. And without that trilingual, I don't know what would have happened.

Irving Finkel

I mean, I suppose it's conceivable that in the very modern world, something might have happened.

Irving Finkel

But as it was, it was done by sheer brainpower, by very, very clever persons just doing it. And they cracked it.

Irving Finkel

The Elamite language is much more difficult, but they got a lot of it too.

Irving Finkel

So it was a very romantic thing because the inscription was carved on a mountain face far above the plain.

Irving Finkel

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.

Irving Finkel

So it's very romantic.

Irving Finkel

No, I don't think he does. He's called the Father of Assyriology.

Irving Finkel

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

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.

Irving Finkel

Who was possibly a card-carrying genius, if not jolly, jolly close.

Irving Finkel

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.

Irving Finkel

And Hincks was very interested in trying to decipher hieroglyphic ahead of the French.

Irving Finkel

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

And at the same time, he cracked it. He worked out how it worked.

Irving Finkel

He realized that one sign can have more than one value of sound and of meaning because they are multivalent, the signs.

Irving Finkel

I tried to shelter you from the horrible news…

Irving Finkel

…But it's not a walk in the park. It takes about five years to… you'd probably do it in about four, probably.

Irving Finkel

Yeah, and you have to choose the right sound, and also different meaning as well.

Irving Finkel

Because, for example, if you have a sign for the word hot, right?

Irving Finkel

You can't really have a picture sign for hot. It doesn't make sense.

Irving Finkel

But what they did is they did a drawing of a kind of complex thing with a brazier inside another sign, which meant hot.

Irving Finkel

So that sign existed, but it also meant other things as well, and you had to choose the right one for the context.

Irving Finkel

It's… all the context does matter. I mean, it really is quite a matter for despair when you start cuneiform.

Irving Finkel

Because on top of everything else, they didn't leave gaps between the words.

Irving Finkel

And that's really…

Irving Finkel

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.

Irving Finkel

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.

Irving Finkel

So there are two things about it. One is that if you want to, you can master it.

Irving Finkel

The other thing is that the number of variables was restricted. They controlled it so it wasn't insane.

Irving Finkel

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.

Irving Finkel

And off you go. And it's very beautiful, I think. It's marvelous.

Irving Finkel

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.

Irving Finkel

So I read the grammar by Gardiner and was looking forward very much to studying ancient Egyptian.

Irving Finkel

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.

Irving Finkel

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

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.

Irving Finkel

But there's another person in this department who teaches another ancient language called Lambert, and he teaches cuneiform.

Irving Finkel

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."

Irving Finkel

So I went and knocked on the door. "Yes?" So I went in and said, "I want to learn cuneiform."

Irving Finkel

And Professor Lambert, who was rather a Sherlock Holmes kind of figure—aesthetic, bony, sarcastic…

Irving Finkel

Cruel-

Irving Finkel

…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.

Irving Finkel

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.

Irving Finkel

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.

Irving Finkel

Fair question. There are several factors. One is the famous factor of inertia-

Irving Finkel

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.

Irving Finkel

So they reserved to themselves knowledge, understanding, philosophical inquiry.

Irving Finkel

I mean, no doubt it went on in pubs and things, but they were in charge. They had everything under lock and key.

Irving Finkel

And I think the scribal schools were rather cliquey.

Irving Finkel

They were certainly cliquey in the sense of Oxford and Cambridge being rivals, that sort of thing.

Irving Finkel

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.

Irving Finkel

This would be—it would never be thought of, and it would be anathema.

Irving Finkel

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.

Irving Finkel

We are

Irving Finkel

We are.

Irving Finkel

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

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.

Irving Finkel

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.

Irving Finkel

That's to say writing contracts, letters, everyday things for people.

Irving Finkel

Because no one could read and write, so you had to get a scribe if you're gonna marry your daughter off.

Irving Finkel

And you get all the witnesses about the presence and all this, all that thing had to be done for four days.

Irving Finkel

So the writer would come and do…

Irving Finkel

So your medium-level writers would serve that requirement.

Irving Finkel

And very talented or clever or intellectual students would be encouraged to go into one of the literary professions.

Irving Finkel

Which would be, so to speak, medicine, law, working for the king, working for the church, I mean, the priesthood.

Irving Finkel

All those things which were dependent upon archives and writing, they would find their niveau.

Irving Finkel

And also architecture, because if a big building had to be built, then somebody had to know about load-bearing things and brick measurements.

Irving Finkel

And so some of them went into that kind of work.

Irving Finkel

And also, probably some of them went into running the army.

Irving Finkel

You had to move stores and animals and…

Irving Finkel

So they found their niveau, and some of them were intellectually very able indeed.

Irving Finkel

And they went into the disciplines of, on the one hand astrology, but more seriously into astronomy and theoretical grammar.

Irving Finkel

Because they had treatises about the relationship between the two languages and how they worked and different parts of speech.

Irving Finkel

And they wrote learned commentaries as well, what words meant.

Irving Finkel

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.

Irving Finkel

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.

Irving Finkel

You know, in other words, you can say whatever you want in English- …however subtle it might be, even if people understand the subtlety.

Irving Finkel

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.

Irving Finkel

The question about whether the language put a stop to further things, which is basically what you're asking…

Irving Finkel

…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.

Irving Finkel

Because they believed that events, accidental or deliberately stimulated, had implications for what was going to happen.

Irving Finkel

And they took omens from things in the sky and things in the street, every single thing.

Irving Finkel

If you were a well-qualified diviner, it would have this significance, right?

Irving Finkel

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."

Irving Finkel

So if you translate the Akkadian this way, the word "if," verb and everything, "If that, then this."

Irving Finkel

So there are thousands upon thousands of lines translated into many books about omens where, "If this happens, that will happen."

Irving Finkel

So this is how it's understood by my colleagues.

Irving Finkel

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…

Irving Finkel

And if the queen's gonna die and the king's there, you're not gonna say, "The queen's gonna die."

Irving Finkel

I mean, you're gonna look a fucking idiot if she doesn't die.

Irving Finkel

And if she does die, you're gonna be responsible.

Irving Finkel

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."

Irving Finkel

Meaning "could die," not "will die." And therefore, the requisite ritual or magic must immediately swing into action to defer the danger.

Irving Finkel

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.

Irving Finkel

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.

Irving Finkel

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

It's the most beautiful thing. It's so subtle. It's like a violin concerto.

Irving Finkel

It can never have been A equals B for a minute.

Irving Finkel

So the medical texts say, "If you do… If a man has this," doo-dee-dee-doo, you know?

Irving Finkel

"You do this, your drink's…" He'll get better, right? He says, "You'll get better."

Irving Finkel

So have you ever met a doctor who will say, "You do this, you'll get better"?

Irving Finkel

No. They say, "All being well, you'll be back on your feet."

Irving Finkel

Or, "I've seen this kind of condition many times, everything should go fine. You should get better, you should be better soon."

Irving Finkel

But never, "You will get better," because what happens if you die?

Irving Finkel

Where are you?

Irving Finkel

Absolutely. So this means that not expressible in Akkadian grammar are these modal verbs…

Irving Finkel

…Could, might, should, ought. They can't be expressed grammatically.

Irving Finkel

But it is impossible that it was such a magnificent literary language where they didn't have these subtleties.

Irving Finkel

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.

Irving Finkel

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.

Irving Finkel

Yes.

Irving Finkel

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.

Irving Finkel

And sometimes it makes no difference, and sometimes it's really quite misleading.

Irving Finkel

And so what people do when they learn Akkadian, is they learn the Akkadian word and they learn the English translation, right?

Irving Finkel

You have, "To divide." So whenever you have the verb, it's some form of divide or division.

Irving Finkel

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.

Irving Finkel

Where the one at the bottom and the one at the top, you'd hardly know they were connected.

Irving Finkel

And the Chicago Dictionary, which is such a magnificent thing, when you come to the museum and see me- …I'll show you this.

Irving Finkel

It's the most salient and important thing that came out of America in all its history, is the Chicago Assyrian Dictionary.

Irving Finkel

Which is this long. There's only one rival to it for cultural importance, which is the electric guitar, of course.

Irving Finkel

But the two of them, I think, are your countrymen's greatest achievement.

Irving Finkel

I think so

Irving Finkel

The very thing.

Irving Finkel

It started in the '20s, and they made a dictionary of the Babylonian language.

Irving Finkel

A, A to Z, so to speak. And it's as long as this table. It's magnificent thing, and this big.

Irving Finkel

And the people who worked on it were real translators, so they knew that it wasn't lexically A means B.

Irving Finkel

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.

Irving Finkel

And, you know, so people really, really understand Akkadian, they really do.

Irving Finkel

But this thing about the modal verbs is an interesting conundrum to me, because there's no way it's reflected in the writing.

Irving Finkel

So I can only assume that there was some kind of drawing out of the vowel in a verb, meaning could…

Irving Finkel

Now, like you were saying, it might do it, you know, something like that.

Irving Finkel

Anyway, so nowadays we… It's not the decipherment that's the job, it's just reading.

Irving Finkel

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.

Irving Finkel

And if you're a competent assyriologist, you should be able to sight-read more or less.

Irving Finkel

Except most… Say, a letter or something like that, but most documents have some damage, so you have to learn how to interpret stuff.

Irving Finkel

And also, some literature is very difficult because of technical vocabulary.

Irving Finkel

And then they had technical vocabulary and unusual words.

Irving Finkel

Sure.

Irving Finkel

Yeah. Sometimes you can calculate what it ought to be, make a reasonable suggestion.

Irving Finkel

And this dictionary, which I was talking to you about, is such a fantastic tool because a lot of people worked on it.

Irving Finkel

It was the National Endowment for the Humanities, and it was for decades and decades of work.

Irving Finkel

And most of the world's best Assyriologists collaborated on it.

Irving Finkel

So the quality of translation and understanding is really extraordinary.

Irving Finkel

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.

Irving Finkel

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.

Irving Finkel

And it's Marduk and Sarpanitum, his wife, and another woman. Marduk's having an affair with this other…

Irving Finkel

…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.

Irving Finkel

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.

Irving Finkel

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.

Irving Finkel

You could say it was an eternal human issue.

Irving Finkel

And between deities also. Because deities are only modeled on human beings, after all, so…

Irving Finkel

Indeed.

Irving Finkel

Relationship with the divine, well, the first thing to say is that they had a large pantheon of gods.

Irving Finkel

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.

Irving Finkel

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.

Irving Finkel

And the lesser, minor gods were amalgamated and then they were given jobs in the households of the big gods.

Irving Finkel

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

And the main gods were concerned with the ruler and the fate of the country.

Irving Finkel

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.

Irving Finkel

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.

Irving Finkel

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.

Irving Finkel

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.

Irving Finkel

That's the sort of basic idea.

Irving Finkel

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.

Irving Finkel

Make little sacrifices and little bribes so they do their job and keep an eye on you.

Irving Finkel

So they had that kind of slightly practical view of gods, that they were a bit unpredictable.

Irving Finkel

"Great when they were there but not always there" sort of idea.

Irving Finkel

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

All of a sudden, God or gods seem a lot more important than they do normally.

Irving Finkel

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.

Irving Finkel

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.

Irving Finkel

I mean, people don't suddenly feel, "I got to thank the Lord for the rainbow," or something like that.

Irving Finkel

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

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.

Irving Finkel

Lord knows what the consequence will be for the human race, whether religion will balance out, whether it will die off. Who knows?

Irving Finkel

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.

Irving Finkel

You know, if you live in Southern Iraq and you sleep on the roof, there are no lights at night.

Irving Finkel

You know, you're under the stars, you can see everything because of no smog and everything like that.

Irving Finkel

And the idea that the gods are there watching, it's not like a big artifice like it is here.

Irving Finkel

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.

Irving Finkel

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.

Irving Finkel

This is a different mechanism, because nobody here in the world today takes those things for granted, just the opposite.

Irving Finkel

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.

Irving Finkel

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.

Irving Finkel

And I think it's an important difference.

Irving Finkel

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.

Irving Finkel

Well, everybody, everybody who died in bed naturally or peacefully, what we call their ghost, went down to the netherworld, and there they were.

Irving Finkel

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.

Irving Finkel

And the spirit of the person went down through the gates of the netherworld and stayed there.

Irving Finkel

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.

Irving Finkel

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.

Irving Finkel

But every single person is going to die. So all relationships have this finite clause in them.

Irving Finkel

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.

Irving Finkel

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.

Irving Finkel

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.

Irving Finkel

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.

Irving Finkel

So it's already on that footing.

Irving Finkel

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.

Irving Finkel

That one religion is superior and the others should be stamped out and all that.

Irving Finkel

And in my opinion, monotheistic religion has generated the most fantastic amount of non-religious feeling.

Irving Finkel

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.

Irving Finkel

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.

Irving Finkel

And I think they must be very much like the ones in Mesopotamia.

Irving Finkel

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.

Irving Finkel

If you think what's done in the name of religion, it is absolutely staggering.

Irving Finkel

That's right.

Irving Finkel

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.

Irving Finkel

And Gilgamesh is the hero of it. But the literature, we know it from earlier texts, and we know that Gilgamesh lived.

Irving Finkel

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.

Irving Finkel

So there were stories about Gilgamesh when he was alive, there were stories about him afterwards.

Irving Finkel

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.

Irving Finkel

So there was a corpus, and eventually they were woven into this long 12 Homeric-type thing about the adventures of Gilgamesh.

Irving Finkel

So it is certainly literature, and it's to do with humanity and immortality and man in the hands of the gods.

Irving Finkel

And incorporates lots of interesting and exciting stories. It's very Hollywoody kind of thing.

Irving Finkel

And you can see within it, even in the sophisticated Nineveh version, its roots are in oral literature.

Irving Finkel

Because when somebody speaks, it says, "Gilgamesh opened his mouth to speak and addressed his friend Enkidu," and then there's a speech.

Irving Finkel

"And then Enkidu opened his mouth and addressed his friend Gilgamesh."

Irving Finkel

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

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.

Irving Finkel

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.

Irving Finkel

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.

Irving Finkel

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.

Irving Finkel

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.

Irving Finkel

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

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.

Irving Finkel

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.

Irving Finkel

And I imagine that half the cave paintings in Europe were done by one person.

Irving Finkel

I mean, you get the impression every family had a genius painter. It's impossible.

Irving Finkel

Probably there was a person who went from place to place doing these paintings because they could draw straight away accurately like that.

Irving Finkel

But they are a distillation of creative artistic ability plus skill.

Irving Finkel

So this, this is right at a pretty early stage, is it not, the cave painting material?

Irving Finkel

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.

Irving Finkel

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.

Irving Finkel

All those sorts of things everybody puts down, but that's presumably what absolutely happened.

Irving Finkel

And you have the capacity for people to adore and to respect among their own kind people of astounding ability.

Irving Finkel

There must have been hunters who were ferociously quick and, you know, wrestle with polar bears and all that kind of…

Irving Finkel

And all this stuff would be grist to the narrator's thing.

Irving Finkel

And as things got more complicated and more sophisticated, so lessons might be incorporated or lessons might come out of them unintentionally.

Irving Finkel

Because if you tell a story without a moral, there is usually a moral if you think about it.

Irving Finkel

Yeah. That was a challenge, because it's really hard to read.

Irving Finkel

At least.

Irving Finkel

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.

Irving Finkel

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.

Irving Finkel

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

This was the expression. And the gods couldn't sleep after lunch, sort of thing.

Irving Finkel

So they decided they would wipe them out and create something quieter that worked harder.

Irving Finkel

So this was the basic mechanism, and they had different ways of doing it.

Irving Finkel

And the most effective one was they were going to send a flood to wipe them all out.

Irving Finkel

And one of the gods, the number three in the triumvirate, thought this was a deplorable idea.

Irving Finkel

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.

Irving Finkel

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.

Irving Finkel

And in the 60 lines of the tablet, all this stuff was there.

Irving Finkel

It was like a blueprint to build this boat. And it was just extraordinary because the boat was round.

Irving Finkel

And everybody who knew their Bible, the ark's a coffin-shape kind of affair.

Irving Finkel

And nobody thought of it being a round boat. And the fact is that round boats were used in Mesopotamia on the rivers.

Irving Finkel

Coracles that's to say, because for transporting things, and they would never sink.

Irving Finkel

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.

Irving Finkel

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

And when it came down, they said, "We'll start all over again."

Irving Finkel

So it's got very many points in common with the description of the flood in Genesis.

Irving Finkel

And of course, so did the one in Gilgamesh. So in 1872, there was a Assyriologist in the British Museum called George Smith.

Irving Finkel

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

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.

Irving Finkel

So he knew that… So this was not only in the Epic of Gilgamesh, but it was also in the Book of Genesis.

Irving Finkel

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

It was literary dependence. The one was locked into the other.

Irving Finkel

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.

Irving Finkel

The time interval between the Gilgamesh version from Nineveh and the Hebrew Bible is not like a big expanse of time.

Irving Finkel

So there was an argument that one goes this way and one goes that way.

Irving Finkel

But then when this tablet came in, a thousand years older, nobody believes the Bible was written in 1700 BC.

Irving Finkel

So the primacy of the Mesopotamian matter was established. And it's important because you never get floods in Jerusalem.

Irving Finkel

You just don't. But in Mesopotamia, they had floods. The rivers, sometimes there wasn't enough water, sometimes there was too much, sometimes there was far too much water.

Irving Finkel

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.

Irving Finkel

I think there must have been some tsunami once, most people were drowned, and those who survived were on boats, obviously.

Irving Finkel

And then afterward, nobody ever forgot it. It went on and on and on.

Irving Finkel

Yeah, not the whole world, 'cause people were…

Irving Finkel

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…

Irving Finkel

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.

Irving Finkel

And they had a rainbow in Babylonia, like in the Bible, as a proof that the disastrous flood would never happen again.

Irving Finkel

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.

Irving Finkel

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.

Irving Finkel

It never quite died out in their conscious minds.

Irving Finkel

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.

Irving Finkel

And they had to live there for three generations of time under Nebuchadnezzar's reign.

Irving Finkel

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

And, and look, they haven't got a temple, they haven't got a country, they're washed up and everything like that.

Irving Finkel

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.

Irving Finkel

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.

Irving Finkel

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

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.

Irving Finkel

So that is, in my opinion, the driving force behind the Hebrew text.

Irving Finkel

And the thing about it is that they didn't have in Jewish philosophical tradition stuff about creation and the beginning of the world.

Irving Finkel

And they took Babylonian ideas, which they learned when they were there, and they recycled them.

Irving Finkel

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

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.

Irving Finkel

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.

Irving Finkel

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.

Irving Finkel

So it's that narrative is irresistible, that one man can save the world, if he's lucky, in time from disaster.

Irving Finkel

So it starts off with Utnapishtim, and then it goes on to Noah, and then it goes on to Hollywood.

Irving Finkel

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.

Irving Finkel

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.

Irving Finkel

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.

Irving Finkel

So it moves into this consciousness, then it gets recycled, and it gets recycled. So this is one thing.

Irving Finkel

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.

Irving Finkel

After all, you know, like the great river in China floods and everybody gets… so that's not at all surprising.

Irving Finkel

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.

Irving Finkel

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.

Irving Finkel

A literary, I think literary link. I think so.

Irving Finkel

That's right.

Irving Finkel

That's right. And every time somebody built a coracle and they didn't do the waterproofing right—

Irving Finkel

…you know what will happen? You'll be out on the river, and that will be your lot, you know? I, I think so.

Irving Finkel

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.

Irving Finkel

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.

Irving Finkel

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.

Irving Finkel

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.

Irving Finkel

They knew about that… they have their names and their great regnal years, or thousands of years. Fascinating.

Irving Finkel

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—

Irving Finkel

…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."

Irving Finkel

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.

Irving Finkel

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

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."

Irving Finkel

It's a very interesting thing.

Irving Finkel

Taxi driver or something like that.

Irving Finkel

It is, it is a great myth.

Irving Finkel

Of the boat?

Irving Finkel

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.

Irving Finkel

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.

Irving Finkel

They made it about a third of the size of the original, a pretty huge thing.

Irving Finkel

But they made it because it had wooden ribs, you see? They could get wood ribs. They worked out by computer the maximum size they could do it when it would work.

Irving Finkel

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.

Irving Finkel

So they calculated the size and it worked. So they b

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