Deciphering Secrets of Ancient Civilizations, Noah's Ark, and Flood Myths | Lex Fridman Podcast #487

0:00 The following is a conversation with Irving Finkel,

0:02 who is a scholar of ancient languages.

0:03 He's a curator at the British Museum for over 45 years,

0:08 and is a much admired and respected world expert.

0:11 He's an expert on cuneiform script and more generally,

0:15 on ancient languages like Sumerian, Akkadian, and Babylonian.

0:19 He's also an expert on ancient board games,

0:23 Mesopotamia magic, medicine, literature, and culture.

0:27 I should also mention that both on and off the mic,

0:31 Irving was a super kind and fun person to talk to.

0:35 He has an infectious enthusiasm for ancient

0:37 history that of course I already love, but fell in love with even more.

0:41 This is the Lex Fridman Podcast.

0:43 To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description.

0:45 You can also find links to contact me, ask questions, get feedback, and so on.

0:49 And now, dear friends, here's Irving Finkel.

0:56 Where and when did writing originate in human civilization?

1:00 Let's go back a few thousand years.

1:05 The first attempts at writing that we could call

1:07 writing go back to the middle of the fourth millennium,

1:09 say around 3500 BC, something like that.

1:16 There were people in the Middle East,

1:17 individuals who lived between the Euphrates and Tigris Rivers.

1:20 They had clay as their operating material

1:21 for building and all sorts of other purposes.

1:24 Eventually, as a writing support,

1:25 they somehow developed the idea of the basis of writing,

1:29 which means that you can make a sign.

1:31 People agree on it, on a surface that another person,

1:35 when they see it, they know what sound it engenders.

1:40 That is the essence of writing, that there's an agreed system of symbols

1:44 that A can use and B can then play back,

1:47 either in their heads or literally with their voices,

1:50 a bit like a gramophone record.

1:51 So, when it really began is a terribly, terribly awkward question for us,

1:56 because the truth of the matter is, we have no idea when anything began.

2:02 All we can say is that the oldest evidence we have is around 3500 BC,

2:08 but whether that was anywhere near the time or the stage when

2:12 this started off for the first time seems to me very, very unlikely.

2:19 So, among these Mesopotamians around 3500, they started to do this.

2:25 They made up signs which everybody understood

2:27 and they could write simple pictographic messages.

2:29 Foot is a foot, leg is a leg, and barley is barley.

2:34 Then very, very gradually,

2:36 they had the idea of how you could represent numerals.

2:41 They also had the idea that the pictures could also represent sounds,

2:44 and once they had the idea that you could write sounds with pictures,

2:49 that's the crucial thing, that a picture of a foot not only meant foot,

2:51 but it meant the sound of the word for foot.

2:53 Once this happened, some probably very,

2:55 very imaginative and clever persons had a kind of light bulb moment when they

3:01 realized that they could develop a whole

3:05 panoply of signs which could convey sound.

3:08 And once you had that, you're liberated from pictographic

3:13 writing into a position where you can record language.

3:18 So language, grammar, and all the rest of it, and before long,

3:24 proverbs and literature, and all the other things that got written down.

3:27 So it was a pretty gigantic step whenever it was taken,

3:31 but we really have no idea when it was first taken.

3:35 But the first evidence we have presents a sort of clear-ish picture.

3:39 It was simple and it got more complicated, then it became magnificent.

3:43 So that with all the signs, a fluent,

3:46 well-trained scribe could not only write down the Sumerian language,

3:51 which was one of the native tongues of Iraq,

3:54 or the Babylonian language, which was the other main language of Iraq,

3:58 but also any other language he heard.

4:02 if somebody came speaking French ahead of their time and spoke out loud,

4:06 he could record with these signs the sound of French.

4:10 And we have examples of funny languages in the world around in the Bronze Age,

4:15 which were written in cuneiform purely by ear.

4:17 And often sometimes the scribes who recorded by dictation or by something,

4:22 wrote stuff they couldn't understand,

4:24 but somebody else could read and understand it.

4:27 So, what you have is long before the alphabet,

4:31 when the alphabet was not even a dream, a complex, bewildering-looking,

4:36 off-putting writing system, which was actually very beautiful, very flexible,

4:39 and lasted for well over three millennia, probably closer to four millennia.

4:44 And it took a long time for the alphabet, which anybody would say was much,

4:48 much more useful and much more sensible, to displace it.

4:51 So it's one of the major stages of man's intellect,

4:56 because quite soon after writing first took off,

5:01 the signs began to proliferate and someone said,

5:06 "Hey, we haven't got a sign for this sound," or, "We haven't

5:08 got a sign for this idea." And so it began to swell out.

5:13 And at some extremely remarkable stage, one,

5:17 probably only one person suddenly realized that if there was no control,

5:23 they would grow exponentially until it was

5:27 all nonsense and everybody had their own writing.

5:29 And the second thing is that no one could remember

5:31 them unless they were written down in a retrievable way.

5:34 So they invented not only writing, they invented lexicography,

5:38 which means that early in the third millennium,

5:41 they put down all the things that were made of wood and all the things that were

5:45 made of reeds and all the names of colors

5:47 and of countries and all the gods and everything.

5:49 They made a systematic attempt to standardize

5:52 these signs and to make them retrievable, and of course to teach them.

5:59 And having exercised that rigor from the outset,

6:03 it meant that the thing became streamlined and stayed

6:08 more or less as it was all the way through, for three millennia or more.

6:12 Because the stamp put on it by those early visionaries,

6:16 not only who came up with the system and how it would work,

6:20 but to preserve it and to safeguard it, was fantastically effective.

6:25 So, it means that there were scholars in Babylon

6:28 in the third century or the second century,

6:30 when Alexander was there, for example.

6:32 If somebody dug up a tablet in very early writing,

6:36 they would have a pretty good idea what it meant.

6:38 They would recognize the signs, even though they were so ancient,

6:40 and they'd see the relationships between them.

6:42 So, you have a fantastically strong system where

6:47 the spinal cord was structured in a lexicographic, regular system.

6:54 So, lexicography and what the signs

6:57 were was jealously safeguarded and protected, and it lasted fantastically.

7:05 We should say that the name of that system

7:08 that lasted for 3,000 years is cuneiform.

7:10 Yeah.

7:11 So, in the 19th century, about 1840, 1850,

7:14 they started to find these things on excavations in Iraq,

7:18 the big Assyrian cities and sometimes further south, the Babylonian cities.

7:22 They found these clay tablets,

7:24 which in the ground lasted unimaginable lengths of time.

7:29 And they were all written in what we call cuneiform script.

7:32 And the cuneiform part of it means wedge-shaped,

7:37 because cuneus in Latin means wedge.

7:39 And when they first saw these signs, they realized that a cluster of marks

7:45 broke down into different arrangements of triangular shapes.

7:50 And it's most clear on the Assyrian reliefs,

7:53 where the writing is very big and you can easily tell that they were that shape.

7:58 On a tablet, the wedge is not quite so predominant.

8:00 So, that was it.

8:02 So, they first called them cuneatic or cuneiform, and the word stuck.

8:07 And of course, growing up in the British

8:10 Museum and reading these things for a living becomes

8:12 a kind of lifetime's work to make sure

8:15 that everybody in the country knows what cuneiform means.

8:18 Because once in a while you meet somebody who never heard of the word at all,

8:20 and this is appalling.

8:21 So, people do survive, however.

8:23 But it's an important mission because such an achievement by man

8:28 and so much knowledge was encapsulated in these lumps of clay,

8:34 because they used it for everyday things

8:36 like letters and business documents and contracts.

8:38 This is one thing.

8:40 And then the kings wrote long,

8:43 elaborate accounts of their campaigns and their military activities.

8:46 And then there was proper literature, history,

8:49 and magic and medicine and all other genres of literature that we

8:55 would naturally list on a sheet of paper in alphabetic writing,

8:59 what you would use writing for.

9:01 They basically did.

9:02 And it had the unexpected quality that most

9:05 of these clay things lasted in the ground until now.

9:09 So, however many hundreds of thousands of tablets

9:13 are in the world's museums and collections,

9:15 there must be millions of them in the ground awaiting excavation.

9:19 So, in a way that's a comforting thought,

9:23 'cause they're safe there and protected.

9:26 You said that the development of cuneiform, of these tablets,

9:30 of written language is one of the greatest,

9:33 probably the greatest invention in human history.

9:36 How hard do you think it was to come up with this?

9:40 And we should make clear that that very

9:44 specific element of encoding sound on the tablet, that's the genius invention.

9:51 Drawing a picture makes sense.

9:53 Okay, here's, you know, barley.

9:56 Here's the sun.

9:57 Here's whatever, the actual object.

10:00 Exactly.

10:01 But to actually write down sound is a genius invention.

10:05 Well, I think it's rather paradoxical,

10:08 because the first generation or so of tablets that we have are

10:11 written in these pictographic signs where each sign means what it looks like.

10:16 So, this is a very limited method of recording messages,

10:20 and it doesn't lend itself to recording grammar.

10:23 And then the secondary phase, as we understand it from archeology,

10:27 is the perception that you could take these signs,

10:30 still meaning what they look like but also what the words sounded like.

10:34 So, then you have all these wonderful ice cubes which express all the sounds

10:38 of the language from which you can

10:41 record words and, and grammar and everything else.

10:44 Now, the thing is, the received law from Assyriology is it was that way round,

10:51 that first we had pictures and secondly we had sound.

10:55 Well, I have to say, I find this very hard to believe,

10:59 because if you had a group of people

11:03 in an environment where it was compellingly necessary

11:06 to make a system that you made marks

11:10 on a surface which everybody could understand and use,

11:13 why wouldn't you start out with signs that made sounds?

11:18 Because everybody speaks the same language, right?

11:21 So you...

11:21 they didn't have A, B, C, D, E, F, G,

11:24 but they could easily work out all the vowels

11:27 and consonants without naming them as vowels and consonants,

11:30 but they're component parts.

11:31 So, they could have had signs that started out...

11:34 Because if you decided you had...

11:36 We have 26, let's say they had 50 signs that would create the sound,

11:41 they could write anything without any further trouble.

11:43 So, I find it very bewildering that they started off

11:46 with the least flexible and the least adaptable system of pictographs,

11:52 and then they moved on to the sound.

11:54 I don't know why they bothered with it.

11:56 And my hunch is that the archeological evidence

11:59 that we have on this score is ultimately misleading,

12:02 because I think this, that probably for a very,

12:06 very long time before the Sumerians,

12:08 people in the world, the world of what we call the Middle East,

12:12 were in contact, they traded, they probably even had wars,

12:16 and they had messages between them.

12:18 And I think there was a long running system

12:20 of communication between people who didn't share a language.

12:27 for whom pictures would suffice.

12:29 So, if merchants come and they have three sheep to sell,

12:33 so they draw three little sheep.

12:35 You know how much it is and what they are and so forth.

12:38 And so I think that what happened with the Sumerians,

12:42 with their pictographic signs,

12:43 is that those signs are right at the end of a very, very,

12:49 very long period of time, when somebody thought,

12:53 "What we can do is take these stupid inhibited no

12:58 smoking signs and write language." That is what I think happened.

13:02 That's what I think happened.

13:04 Is this a controversial statement?

13:06 Highly controversial.

13:07 Many Assyriologists would leave the room.

13:12 But I'm not scared of controversy because it's natural.

13:14 I mean, if you think about it, it's natural because you don't have to have

13:21 an alphabet to divide your word into sounds, see?

13:24 For example, in Sumerian, you have a funny system of writing,

13:28 you have a root, like du, which means to go.

13:31 And then you have prefixes, like E or Mu or Ba,

13:35 and one's a passive, one's an active, and this and this.

13:38 So when you have a sentence, you have one of the Mu, Ba,

13:42 or E prefixes, then you have the root, and then you have things at the end.

13:45 So it is called agglutinative by people who like

13:48 to make things look more important than they are.

13:50 So you have the central thing, you slap stuff on the beginning,

13:52 slap stuff on the end, and each particle creates a bit of meaning.

13:55 So you have a long verb which tells you, "He would've done it if he could,

13:59 but he couldn't," kind of thing, in the form of the verb.

14:02 But the thing is, if you wanted to write down, you and I decided to write down,

14:05 so the first thing we would do is have a sign Mu,

14:08 and then we'd have Ba, and then we'd have E,

14:12 because every five minutes people made those noises.

14:15 You see what I mean?

14:17 Yeah, absolutely.

14:18 Do you think it's possible we might find much, much older—- I do-...

14:24 cuneiform type tablets?

14:26 Or, or pictographic type tablets,

14:28 before the cuneiform and it's drawing type, and I'll tell you why.

14:32 Because there's this marvelous site in Turkey called Gobekli Tepe.

14:36 Oh yeah?

14:36 Do you know about Gobekli Tepe?

14:37 Yes, of course.

14:38 Well, everybody knows about the buildings and the architecture and the...

14:42 everybody knows about it.

14:44 If you go all the way through the photographs,

14:47 which the archaeologists unwisely put online,

14:49 you will find in the middle of one color plate with lots of other things,

14:55 a round green stone like a scarab from Egypt.

14:57 That's to say, it has an arched back and a flat bottom.

15:00 And on the flat bottom, there are hieroglyphic signs carved in the stone, right?

15:05 No one said anything about it at all, but it's clear to me,

15:09 A, that this was a stamp to ratify where

15:12 the carvings of the signs on clay or some

15:14 other sealing carvings of the signs on clay

15:17 or some other sealing material would leave an impression.

15:21 It must be that.

15:23 So this is about 9000 BC.

15:26 Now when I was a boy at university my professor

15:29 said to me that the reason writing evolved in Mesopotamia,

15:33 because they had complex cities with ziggurats and big buildings

15:37 and lots of people and they had to organize everything,

15:40 and so they invented writing to cope with it.

15:42 Well, if they had to cope with that in Sumer in 3000 BC,

15:47 they sure as hell had to do it at Gobekli Tepe

15:50 because they've hardly even begun to finish excavating the sites of-...

15:54 Gobekli Tepe.

15:55 They go on and on like Manchester and Newcastle United.

15:58 And really the old rule would be

16:02 you could not have architecture like that, that...

16:06 without the...

16:07 planned and built according to principle with all the different people.

16:11 You couldn't have that without writing in southern Iraq.

16:14 So how come suddenly then 7,000 years earlier, they do it there?

16:19 That, and that green stone shows that they had writing.

16:23 That was an official who sealed this, got the stuff or whatever it was,

16:27 or it was his dad's name or whatever it is,

16:30 got a wiggly snake and a wiggly this.

16:32 That is pictographic writing.

16:33 Maybe even as phonetic writing, I don't know,

16:36 but it was writing thousands of years before in the south.

16:41 And that's what I think it is.

16:43 You know, people came with metal from, or precious stones from Anatolia.

16:47 They knew that in the south they had lots and lots of stuff,

16:50 they wanted to trade, they had to communicate.

16:52 And it's basically like having a cigarette with an X through the middle.

16:57 Everybody in the world knows what that means.

16:59 They don't know what the word for cigarette is

17:01 in this language or cancer or filter or tobacco, it doesn't matter.

17:06 That's pictographic writing.

17:07 We still use it.

17:09 And, and it's, it's, it's above all kinds of mess.

17:12 And I think that was the prevailing system because I

17:15 honestly believe that the people at this time were not stupid.

17:19 They weren't gorillas.

17:20 They weren't less advanced than we are.

17:23 They were probably indistinguishable from what we are.

17:25 So you have merchants and wanderers and people who say,

17:28 "Let's go down the river and see where we end up." And people looking for money,

17:33 looking for women, looking for everything.

17:34 I mean, and that's surely how it was.

17:36 But if you look at those Gobekli buildings

17:38 with a skeptical eye, how it could be.

17:42 I mean, the finish of it is astonishing, the structure of it, the vision of it.

17:47 So the workforce and the tools and the organization,

17:51 you know, what did they do it with?

17:53 A megaphone?

17:54 "Your breakfast!" And all that kind of stuff.

17:55 No way.

17:56 No way.

17:57 So that's a really controversial statement that...

17:59 It is really controversial- ...at the time of Gobekli Tepe,

18:01 there may have been already a writing system.

18:04 There was, because the thing is about it, that it's a seal to ratify...

18:08 it's not just a squiggle on a pot and you can say, "Oh,

18:12 that's just a piece of..." This is a finished thing with a flat surface.

18:16 You press it down, so you have some contract,

18:18 you have some building arrangement, some...

18:20 that we're paying for these bricks, whatever it was.

18:22 And the official person had to squash it down and it leaves the impression.

18:26 I mean, I am a great believer in Sherlock Holmes...

18:30 ...as a teaching system for intelligence and rationality and logic in thinking.

18:35 I read those stories a million times when I was a kid,

18:38 and the thing about them, one of the things which impresses me most of all,

18:41 was this point quoted by Holmes, not original to him,

18:45 that it is theoretically possible to infer the Niagara Falls from a raindrop.

18:52 That's a powerful statement.

18:54 Yeah.

18:55 It's a powerful statement.

18:56 Well, that seal from Gobekli Tepe is a raindrop from which I infer writing,

19:01 and it's perfectly possible they all wrote on flat leaves.

19:04 After all, in many parts of the world, that's what happened.

19:07 So for example, in the Indus Valley,

19:09 people write the most abject nonsense about the Indus Valley writing system,

19:14 but all we have is seals, basically.

19:16 So they are also for ratification purposes,

19:19 and they have the name of the owner in three or four or maybe five signs,

19:24 and it's probably me, son of my dad, or milkman or whatever it is.

19:30 And it's obvious, it's obvious that they had writing on a perishable material.

19:35 They can't just have had inscribed stone seals,

19:39 and many parts of India today write on palm leaf.

19:43 Why should it be any different?

19:45 So people think, you know, "Oh, well,

19:47 just 'cause it's now, it wouldn't be then." But actually,

19:49 that argument is utterly, utterly fallacious,

19:52 because the process of evolution is stymied left, right, and center by inertia.

19:58 Inertia is nearly as strong as evolution,

20:02 and this is something that the people who

20:04 talk about progress and ideas have no idea about.

20:07 First of all, your whole line of work, you're making me realize,

20:10 is a kind of like Sherlock Holmes type of process.

20:15 The deciphering of the language, archeology,

20:18 of taking those pieces of evidence and trying

20:20 to reconstruct a vision of that world,

20:23 and now you're making me realize that even all the cuneiform tablets we have

20:30 is just a raindrop compared to the waterfall of thousands of years of humans.

20:40 Yes, we have a lot, but it's nothing in comparison with what existed.

20:43 But not only that.

20:44 See, we don't have to decipher anymore.

20:46 We can read Akkadian or Babylonian, Sumerian pretty well fluently.

20:50 That's not a problem.

20:51 So the information which you can get from these sources,

20:55 especially three millennia of sources, is very, very substantial.

20:59 Very substantial, but it means that Assyriologists

21:04 have the in-built idea that what

21:07 we have is something like all there ever was, which is absurd.

21:10 For example, there's a period called the Ur III Period,

21:14 where people lived in city-states.

21:17 They wrote very small account tablets by the thousand,

21:20 and there were two or three major cities where this is the way they lived.

21:25 People had to bring tithes and offerings,

21:28 and everything was recorded by what I always refer

21:31 to and people sympathize with is the ancestors of the Inland Revenue,

21:34 because everything had to be written down so that some

21:37 schmuck could check it and fill out the ledger,

21:40 and some other schmuck above him could okay it,

21:42 so there's no funny business or no mistakes.

21:44 Now, the thing is, there are thousands

21:46 of those tablets written in about 2100 to 2000 BC,

21:50 thousands of them, about the size of a box of matches.

21:55 So people like to generalize about the Sumerians at this time of the world,

22:01 but they probably all came out of two rooms,

22:07 because they were dumped when they were no longer needed in some kind of room,

22:11 and the archeologists in the 19th century came down on these, and then all

22:14 the locals came and they dug them up and they sold them all over the place,

22:17 and they've gone all over the world.

22:19 Thousands and thousands of them, out of probably two storage rooms,

22:23 which is not a whole culture or a whole country,

22:26 or their whole history, or their belief systems.

22:30 So our view of it is skewed by the nature of the material,

22:35 and sometimes the material is opulent and benevolent,

22:39 but not always, and sometimes the people who work

22:42 with skewed material don't even realize how skewed it is.

22:47 I mean, you know, it's quite remarkable.

22:50 So you, in all your time of studying cuneiform tablets,

22:54 do you sometimes late at night get a glimpse of the waterfall?

22:59 Like, can you imagine?

23:01 Yes.

23:01 I can imagine.

23:02 I can imagine easily, because once in a while, a library is discovered.

23:07 In the 1850s at Nineveh, which was the Assyrian capital, there was a great king,

23:12 king of the world, called Ashurbanipal,

23:14 and he had a fantastic library and he promoted it.

23:18 He impounded tablets, he had them brought to Nineveh.

23:21 He wanted all the prevailing knowledge

23:23 and all knowledge from before under one roof.

23:25 It was kind of like an Alexandria thing.

23:28 So he was a trained scholar, and this is what he did,

23:32 and they found it in the 19th century.

23:34 They dug it up, Layard and those people.

23:36 So what did they find?

23:37 They found the tablets higgledy-piggledy all over the floor of a huge room

23:41 and in the corridors and everything- ...and lots

23:44 of them broken and lots of them burnt.

23:48 So ever since then, until really quite recently,

23:53 Assyriologists who spent all their...

23:55 Well, people who work on these Nineveh tablets

23:57 spent all their time joining the bits together,

23:59 and you have the story about Gilgamesh and the goddess

24:02 who falls in love with him in the garden,

24:04 and she wants to seduce him, and you can't find the bit.

24:06 So you look for another bit and you look for another bit.

24:08 And gradually, they piece together the literature,

24:10 and the assumption has always been that if you put them all together again,

24:13 you'll have the whole library.

24:14 But it's the absolute opposite,

24:15 because what happened was that the Babylonians in the south,

24:19 in my opinion, they worked hand-in-glove with the Elamites from Iran.

24:24 They had a pincer movement, and they beat Assyria, they conquered Assyria.

24:28 And they ran through the capital and they set fire to everything.

24:31 Pinched all the women and took all the jewelry and all the gold.

24:35 And people say that in a fit of pique, they destroyed the library.

24:38 But they wouldn't destroy the library because it was

24:41 the giant brain from which the Assyrians ran a world empire,

24:44 and it had all the knowledge in the world.

24:47 They destroyed that?

24:48 They spoke the same language, they had the same writing system.

24:51 They'd have taken them all safely home, cart after cart after cart.

24:57 And I think what's left there is duplicates and broken things,

25:01 the things that got dropped and everything, and that's everyone thinks is it.

25:06 Oh.

25:07 So this is also uncontroversial.

25:08 It's a controversial point.

25:09 You're just nonstop-- But it's common-- ...starting trouble.

25:11 It's common sense.

25:12 It's common-- You're going to get both of us canceled today.

25:15 But you see the thing.

25:17 It's predicated on the assumption that what we have is what there...

25:21 only what there was.

25:23 And this is such a fallacy.

25:25 It needs to be attacked left, right, and center.

25:29 So, a lot of the cuneiform language is already deciphered.

25:34 Can you speak to the deciphering process?

25:37 How hard is it?

25:38 Maybe take us to this place of for you yourself first learning a language.

25:45 Figuring out the puzzle of it.

25:47 How does it feel?

25:49 How does it look like to a brain that doesn't deeply understand it?

25:52 And how do you then piece stuff together?

25:54 Maybe you can go to the early days.

25:57 Sort of the Rosetta Stone of cuneiform also.

26:01 That's important.

26:01 Well, the first thing is,

26:03 is that how the cuneiform writing system works, because the crucial point,

26:07 once you see it, it makes a lot of things clear,

26:11 is that they wrote in syllables.

26:14 So, if you take the English alphabet, which of course they didn't,

26:17 you have the letter B, G, D, P, H, and so forth.

26:22 They couldn't write a consonant.

26:24 They couldn't do that.

26:26 So, what they did is they had a vowel before a consonant or one after.

26:31 Say you have Ab and Ba.

26:34 But as they had four vowels, you had to have Ab and Ba,

26:39 Ib and Bi, Ub and Bu, Eb and Be.

26:42 So you had the range of things clustered around what we call a consonant.

26:47 So they had all those for all the letters, which gave them a basic system.

26:51 There was much more to it than that, and it was more complicated than that.

26:54 Well, we don't have to really go into it,

26:57 but basically if you are a Babylonian and you want to write the word museum,

27:01 which of course is one of the most important

27:03 words in the English language and other languages too.

27:06 So what you would do is you would write the syllable

27:09 "mu"- ...and then the sign "Z" and then the sign "um".

27:13 So you split the word up into its component syllables.

27:16 When you read it in your mind, you squash them together into museum.

27:20 That's the basic system.

27:22 They had other signs which gave you a clue

27:25 as to the meaning and the bits around the edge.

27:29 But it's basically syllabic writing.

27:31 So, when you go to university to study cuneiform,

27:36 what you have to learn is all the signs and all their values,

27:42 because unfortunately they didn't just have one for each,

27:45 they had multiple ones.

27:47 And the reason is not that they were mad or they wanted to make life hell,

27:52 but because the syllables derive from the writing of Sumerian words.

27:59 So the Sumerian vocabulary had a lot

28:01 of words that were probably differentiated by tone.

28:07 So you might have "Ba" and then a rising "A" and then a lowering...

28:11 And these signs all retain the "Ba" value even though there were no tones.

28:15 So it means if you look at a sign list, there's a lot of signs.

28:19 You have "Ba" number one, which is the common.

28:21 Then there's "Ba" number two, "Ba" number three, and you have to learn them all.

28:24 And when you read, you have to learn how to do it.

28:27 So, in the modern world, if you go to university to do Assyriology,

28:31 which I hope you and all of your disciples will do as soon as possible,

28:36 you actually have to cope with two languages: the Sumerian and the Babylonian.

28:41 Now, the first thing is this, that the Babylonian language is a Semitic tongue,

28:47 which although it's extinct,

28:50 is connected to or related to Hebrew, Aramaic, Arabic, Ethiopic, Syriac.

28:55 All that family of Semitic languages which are still alive.

29:00 It's an early example of one of those.

29:03 So that when the decipherment came along,

29:05 it was the Semitic dictionary that they fell

29:08 back on to identify words, nouns, and roots.

29:12 The other language, which is Sumerian,

29:14 the one when you stick bits in the beginning and stick bits at the end,

29:19 is not only not Semitic, it's not related to any other known language.

29:25 Oh, no.

29:26 Yeah, this is a bewitching thing.

29:28 It's a bewitching thing to me, and this is how to understand it.

29:32 Because the languages that we study in the world today,

29:36 linguists study, they more or less all fall into a language group.

29:40 So you have Indo-European with Spanish, Italian, Latin,

29:45 Hittite, and so forth, French, that's one group.

29:49 And you have Germanic and you have Slavonic.

29:51 And most languages, even the far-flung ones,

29:54 fall into what can be seen to be maybe big and airy groups,

29:58 their family like that.

30:00 There's not one for Sumerian.

30:02 So this means that the truth that languages do not exist in a vacuum,

30:06 but they're part of a big family, must always have been true.

30:11 So that when writing arrives about 3000, say, 300 BC, to write properly.

30:19 It means that Sumerian was recorded just in time,

30:24 but the big languages, maybe in China,

30:28 in Russia, in somewhere else in Asia, that were related to Sumerian,- Are gone?

30:34 ...are all gone.

30:35 They're gone forever and ever and ever, unless something amazing happens.

30:38 So we've got the one representative of this bizarre family.

30:43 Is that-- Amazing.

30:45 It is.

30:45 And it's a very stimulating thing to imagine.

30:48 I personally believe that Neanderthals and early Homo sapiens,

30:52 for sure, had language.

30:55 For sure they talked to one another.

30:57 It's impossible that they didn't.

30:58 The point came when they did, they did.

31:01 And the Neanderthals, 800,000 years of rural life in Europe,

31:06 they had to deal with the Ice Age,

31:08 they all lived together, they bring up their children.

31:10 You think they couldn't speak anything?

31:12 They have the same apparatus.

31:13 And if you have a human brain, then it responds to stimulus.

31:17 And the more stimulus there is for communication, I mean,

31:20 the idea that you and I are out hunting rhino- ...and, and, and you say,

31:26 "Legs." Well, shut up, I'm concentrating.

31:29 "Legs, legs." And then I suddenly think, "Oh, I get it.

31:33 You are Legs." Right?

31:35 You only have to do that once, then you know who I am.

31:38 So I know that I'm me and that you are you.

31:41 So people who say that they couldn't

31:42 distinguish ego and all that, it's absolutely stupid.

31:45 If you cut your hand with a knife, you sure as hell experience...

31:50 You sure as hell do.

31:52 It hurts.

31:54 hurts a lot.

31:54 You might even bleed to death.

31:56 But it's not somebody else's hand,

31:59 and it's your hand and it's your existence and your life that's threatened.

32:02 You think people weren't conscious that they were an entity?

32:05 I don't believe it.

32:07 And they probably had a way to express that with sounds.

32:11 Well, eventually, yes.

32:12 Names.

32:12 I mean-- Names- ...names the things,

32:14 and then you have the idea that a label fixes to something.

32:18 Then the light bulb has gone on, and next minute you have rhino,

32:21 and you have skin, and you have babies, and you...

32:24 Because I think you have an idea,

32:26 and the idea then drives the brain, and the brain has another idea.

32:29 It works like fertility.

32:31 So what do you think is the motivation,

32:33 the primary driver of developing written language?

32:35 Is it...

32:36 Does it go hand-in-hand with civilization?

32:40 I think that the media in which it appears is

32:42 when there's a lot of people living in an urban environment.

32:47 And with rival institutions or the king

32:50 or the government or all those sorts of things.

32:54 And that's why I think Gobekle Tepe must have been the same thing.

32:58 I read somewhere that they're all nomads and they only came to Gobekle Tepe,

33:02 you know, three months a year.

33:04 I mean, that cannot be true that they were nomads, and they...

33:08 Cannot be true.

33:10 To get the stone and someone has to draw on the ground the plan of the building,

33:15 they have to work out how thick it's going to be, how high it's going to be.

33:19 I mean, you can't just, you know, like that, like gorillas.

33:25 All right.

33:26 So, deciphering, the process of deciphering.

33:29 So when I started, there were grammars and scientists, and dictionaries.

33:32 Everything was marvelous.

33:33 It was all basically deciphered.

33:34 All you had to do was get on with learning it.

33:36 But at the beginning, when the first tablets and bricks

33:40 in cuneiform and stone inscriptions came to light, no one could read them.

33:45 But they knew they were writing, but they didn't know how to read them.

33:48 And what happened was, like you said before,

33:50 with the Rosetta Stone, it was something directly comparable,

33:54 because there was an inscription of one of the Persian

33:59 kings halfway up a mountain in a place called Bisutun,

34:03 where this King Darius had written an account of his successful

34:08 career in Elamite and in Babylonian and in Old Persian, a trilingual version.

34:17 And Old Persian, although it's obviously an archaic form of the language,

34:22 Persian is still alive.

34:24 It was still alive in the 19th century.

34:26 So, since the Old Persian was written

34:28 in a very simple style of cuneiform, they deciphered it,

34:31 they twigged it was Old Persian, they read it in Persian,

34:34 and they read the names Daray awush in Old Persian.

34:38 And then suddenly, somebody realized that the other

34:41 two columns were about the same length.

34:44 Brilliant.

34:44 What do you know?

34:45 And the thing is, it said, "I am Darius the great king,

34:47 king of the world, king of the...

34:49 son of...

34:49 grandson of..." So there's a whole paragraph with repeated

34:51 things in the Persian which they could understand.

34:56 So what do you know?

34:58 They're reiterated passages in the other two languages.

35:02 So that was the key, that kind of...

35:05 the chisel that opened up cuneiform writing proper.

35:08 And the thing was, they soon twigged

35:11 that the language of the Babylonian was a Semitic tongue.

35:15 And this was so important.

35:17 I think the first word they discovered was the word for river,

35:22 which is Naharu in Akkadian andنحر in Arabic and Aramaic.

35:27 And when they realized that the word

35:30 that corresponded to the Persian had this form, this was a gift, a gift of gold,

35:35 because everybody immediately seized their Arabic

35:38 and Hebrew dictionaries and started leafing through,

35:40 looking for words that would fit in the context.

35:42 And they basically deciphered this inscription in that sort of way.

35:47 And of course, all the other inscriptions came in order,

35:50 and there were lots and lots of difficulties which had to be resolved,

35:54 but that's the basic thing.

35:55 And without that trilingual, I don't know what would have happened.

36:00 I mean, I suppose it's conceivable that in the very modern world,

36:05 something might have happened.

36:06 But as it was, it was done by sheer brainpower,

36:09 by very, very clever persons just doing it.

36:13 And they cracked it.

36:14 The Elamite language is much more difficult, but they...

36:17 got a lot of it too.

36:18 So, it was a very romantic thing because the inscription

36:21 was carved on a mountain face far above the plain, and Henry Rawlinson,

36:26 who was an upstanding young British officer

36:29 who claimed to decipher cuneiform quite unjustifiably,

36:32 climbed up there with some miserable kid and made

36:36 squeezes of the whole thing overlooking the plain,

36:39 thousands of feet up in the air,

36:41 and brought those back, and they were used in the decipherment.

36:44 So, it's very romantic.

36:46 Wait a minute.

36:47 A more controversial statement from today.

36:49 Henry Rawlinson doesn't deserve the credit for that?

36:52 No, I don't think he does.

36:54 He's called the Father of Assyriology,

36:55 but I think he's the Stepfather of Assyriology

36:58 because when he first got these inscriptions,

37:00 he wrote a long book about it, which was almost entirely wrong.

37:05 And there was a clergyman in Northern Ireland called Edward Hincks who lived

37:10 in a place called Killyleagh and had five daughters and ran this church,

37:14 who was possibly a card-carrying genius, if not jolly, jolly close.

37:20 And what happened with him was this.

37:23 There was an ongoing competition...

37:25 well, an ongoing challenge to decipher hieroglyphic writing,

37:29 which Champollion usually gets the credit for, and Hincks was

37:33 very interested in trying to decipher hieroglyphic ahead of the French.

37:39 And he ran into a sort of dead end at one stage,

37:41 and he thought he'd have a look at cuneiform to see if it was helpful.

37:46 And at the same time, he cracked it.

37:50 He worked out how it worked.

37:52 He realized that one sign can have more than one value

37:55 of sound and of meaning because they are multivalent, the signs.

37:58 I tried to shelter you from the horrible news.

38:01 But it actually, it's not a walk in the park.

38:05 It takes about five years to you probably do it in about four, probably.

38:12 That is a compliment.

38:13 I think you just complimented me.

38:15 Thank you.

38:16 Thank you very much.

38:19 So, you're saying one sign that looks exactly

38:21 the same might have different sounds, given the context?

38:25 Yeah, and you have to choose the right sound,

38:28 and also different meaning as well.

38:30 Because for example, if you have a sign for "hot," the word "hot," right?

38:34 You can't really have a picture sign for "hot." It doesn't make sense,

38:40 but what they did is they did a drawing of a kind of complex

38:45 thing with a brazier inside another sign

38:47 which meant "hot." So that sign existed, but it also meant other things as well,

38:51 and you had to choose the right one for the context.

38:54 All the context do matter.

38:55 I mean, it really is quite a matter for despair when you start cuneiform,

39:00 because on top of everything else, they didn't leave gaps between the words.

39:04 And that's really...

39:04 So they're all connected?

39:05 That's really mean.

39:06 Yeah.

39:07 So when you read what you have to do, you start with the first sign,

39:11 and you think of the sign,

39:13 and you go through the values in your mind, and there's the next sign.

39:18 And if one is "ba" and the next one is "ab" among other readings,

39:22 "ba-ab" sounds like a syllable structure for a word, and you go on like that.

39:26 So there are two things about it.

39:28 One is that if you want to, you can master it.

39:30 The other thing is that the number of variables was restricted.

39:34 They controlled it, so it wasn't insane.

39:37 So in other words, if you learn the corpus and you would

39:40 learn how the signs are composed and you learn their different values,

39:43 then you've got it down.

39:45 ...And off you go.

39:46 And it's very beautiful, I think.

39:50 It's marvelous.

39:51 Can you, in all seriousness, take me back to the time when you were learning it?

39:55 Yes.

39:55 What's the process of learning it?

39:57 Well, I had a very abnormal upbringing because when I went to university,

40:01 for about three years beforehand I'd wanted to be an Egyptologist.

40:06 So I read the grammar by Gardiner and was

40:10 looking forward very much to study ancient Egyptian,

40:13 and what happened was that I went up

40:16 to the University of Birmingham where I went to university,

40:20 and there was a man called Rundle Clark, who was an Egyptologist,

40:25 and Rundle Clark came in on the Monday and gave us one lesson

40:29 about Egyptian sculpture or something like that, and the next day he died.

40:36 Bang.

40:36 So, the professor called me into his room and said, "Look,

40:43 it's going to take me a while to get an Egyptologist.

40:46 They don't grow on trees, but there's another person in this department

40:50 who teaches another ancient language, called Lambert, and he teaches cuneiform.

40:54 So what I suggest is you go and do a bit of cuneiform with Professor Lambert,

40:58 and then when I get an Egyptologist,

41:00 you can convert back." So I go and knock on the door.

41:06 "Yes?" I went in and said, "I want to learn cuneiform." And Professor Lambert,

41:12 who was rather a Sherlock Holmes kind of figure,

41:17 aesthetic, bony, sarcastic, cruel.

41:20 Cruel.

41:21 Cruel, absolutely terrifying, and I said I wanted to learn cuneiform,

41:26 and he wasn't at all pleased because this was a time in Britain

41:32 when professors resented having students to teach

41:36 because it butted into their research time.

41:39 It was that sort of arrangement.

41:40 Yes.

41:40 Anyway, I started it off and after about, I don't know,

41:44 maybe one or maybe two lessons, I knew this was going to be my life's work.

41:47 So that's what happened to me.

41:49 It was an amazing thing.

41:50 So he gave me a list of signs to learn, basic signs.

41:56 So I did, in the next couple of days,

41:59 and then we came in and we started reading.

42:02 So, given the complexity of the signs, why did cuneiform last 3,000 years?

42:10 The most successful writing system ever.

42:12 Fair question.

42:14 There are several factors.

42:16 One is the famous factor of inertia.

42:19 The second thing is that people who could read and write,

42:23 and were in charge of archives, and were the clerks in the temple,

42:29 and the writers for the king and everything,

42:32 commanded a very great deal of power because most of the public couldn't.

42:39 So they reserved to themselves knowledge, understanding, philosophical inquiry.

42:44 I mean, no doubt it went on in pubs and things, but they were in charge.

42:49 They had everything under lock and key.

42:51 And I think the scribal schools are rather cliquey.

42:55 They were certainly cliquey in the sense of Oxford

42:59 and Cambridge being rivals, that sort of thing.

43:02 They had that sort of idea, and it was in no one's interest whatsoever.

43:06 Nobody would ever concede any interest in the idea of literacy for all.

43:12 This would never be thought of, and it would be anathema.

43:16 And so if you got on a soapbox on a Saturday afternoon and said, "Oh,

43:20 enough of this, we have to teach the children," they'd be taken away, I think.

43:26 So we're getting, in these tablets,

43:28 the output of the intellectual class, a very small fraction of humans.

43:33 So we're getting just the Oxford and the Cambridge.

43:36 We are, except that when you went to scribal school,

43:38 you had to learn Sumerian and Akkadian,

43:41 the languages properly, and all the vocabulary and the grammar.

43:45 So some boys probably had a lot of trouble doing this.

43:51 And, you know, they were okay, but then there ain't gonna be no geniuses.

43:56 And I think the situation in the school was that the teachers farmed out

44:01 the kids who would actually rather have been

44:04 outside playing football but could read and write,

44:07 to earning their living doing low-level reading and writing.

44:11 That's to say, writing contracts, letters, everyday things for people.

44:16 Because no one could read and write,

44:18 so you had to get a scribe if you're gonna marry your daughter off,

44:22 and you get all the witnesses about the presence and all

44:24 this, all that thing had to be done for four days.

44:27 So the writer would come and do...

44:30 So your medium-level writers would serve that requirement.

44:35 And very talented or clever or intellectual students would

44:40 be encouraged to go into one of the literary professions,

44:44 which would be, so to speak, medicine, law,

44:48 working for the king, working for the Church, I mean, the priesthood,

44:53 so all those things which were dependent upon archives and writing,

44:56 they would find their niveau.

44:58 And also architecture, because if a big building had to be built,

45:04 then somebody had to know about load bearing things and brick measurements.

45:07 And so some of them went into that kind of work.

45:11 And also, probably some of them went into running

45:13 the army and you had to move stores and animals.

45:17 So they, they found their niveau,

45:19 and some of them were intellectually very able indeed,

45:23 and they went into, the disciplines of, on the one hand,

45:28 astrology, but more seriously into astronomy and theoretical grammar,

45:33 because they had treatises about the relationship between the two

45:37 languages and how they worked and different parts of speech,

45:41 and they wrote learned commentaries as well, what words meant.

45:45 So there was an intellectual high-level top,

45:48 and then there were lots of professional scribes,

45:51 and then the kids who left school as soon

45:54 as possible and did all that, like today.

45:57 I apologize to be philosophical, but Wittgenstein, the philosopher, said,

46:01 "The limits of our language is the limits of our world." So to what

46:06 degree did the languages that were encoded

46:10 in cuneiform define human civilization, would you say?

46:13 What were the things that were complicated

46:16 to express and therefore were not expressed often?

46:22 That's a really interesting question.

46:25 So in terms of richness of vocabulary and richness of verbal subtlety,

46:32 I think Babylonian rivals Arabic and of course English.

46:37 In other words, you can say whatever you want in English,

46:41 however subtle it might be, even if people understand the subtlety.

46:45 You can because the tools are fantastic.

46:47 And Arabic has lots of synonyms and lots of devices and all the same.

46:51 Same in Babylonian.

46:52 It was a fully-fledged literary language.

46:56 The question about whether the language put a stop to further things,

47:01 which is basically what you're asking, is immensely complicated.

47:06 But the one thing that strikes me as relevant is

47:12 that a very huge proportion of scholarly literature in Mesopotamia,

47:17 it takes the form of omens, because they believed that events,

47:23 accidental or deliberately stimulated,

47:26 had implications for what was going to happen.

47:29 And they took omens from things in the sky

47:32 and things in the street and every single thing.

47:35 If you were a well-qualified diviner, it would have this significance.

47:42 Right?

47:42 Now, there are thousands of lines of omens, of all different kinds.

47:49 And in Akkadian, it says, for example,

47:52 "If a lizard runs across the breakfast table,

47:55 the queen will die." So if you translate the Akkadian this way,

47:59 the word, "if," verb, and everything,

48:01 "If that, then this." So there are thousands of, thousands

48:06 of lines translated into many books about omens where,

48:09 "If this happens, that will happen." So

48:11 this is how it's understood by my colleagues.

48:15 Well, this is absolutely impossible because if

48:18 you are the chief diviner for the king

48:21 and you open up a sheep to take a liver out and examine it according to the...

48:27 And if the queen's going to die and the king's there, you're not going to say,

48:31 "The queen's going to die." I mean,

48:33 you're going to look like a fucking idiot if she doesn't die.

48:36 And if she does die, you're going to be responsible.

48:38 So all you can ever do and ever, ever have been able to do is to say,

48:43 "There's a sign here that says that the queen could die." Meaning,

48:47 could die, not will die.

48:50 And therefore, the requisite ritual or magic must

48:53 immediately swing into action to defer the danger.

48:56 So the point is that A equals B is never true.

49:02 It means that with A, B could be, might be,

49:07 ought to be, should be, could be true, all those subtle things.

49:12 So that the diviner who works for the king

49:15 must have been a philosopher who looks at the king,

49:19 he looks at the king and he knows what the king wants him to say.

49:24 So he has to tell the king what he wants to hear.

49:28 He has to tell the king if it's bad news in such

49:30 a way that he doesn't mind it or he won't worry.

49:33 It's the most beautiful thing.

49:35 It's so subtle.

49:36 It's, it's like a violin concerto.

49:38 It can never have been A equals B for a minute.

49:43 So the medical texts say, "If a man has this," doo-dee-dee-doo, you know?

49:48 "You do this, your drink's..." He'll get better.

49:50 Right?

49:50 He says, "You'll get better." Have you ever met a doctor who will say,

49:55 "You do this, you'll get better"?

49:57 No.

49:57 They say, "All being well,

49:58 you'll be back on your feet." Or, "I've seen this kind of condition many times,

50:02 everything should go fine.

50:03 You should get better, you should be better soon." But never,

50:06 "You will get better," because what happens if you die?

50:09 Where are you?

50:10 The lawyers will show up.

50:12 Absolutely.

50:13 So this means that not expressible in Akkadian grammar are these modal verbs.

50:20 ...Could, might, should, ought.

50:22 They can't be expressed grammatically,

50:24 but it is impossible that it was such a magnificent literary language,

50:30 where they didn't have these subtleties.

50:35 It's utterly impossible.

50:36 And if you translate, "He will," in a literary text,

50:41 "He might," then the whole text is different.

50:43 The whole text is different.

50:45 Yeah, absolutely.

50:46 And they don't...

50:47 My colleagues translate...

50:48 It says in the grammar books, like that, automatically.

50:51 There's no self-appraisal of the folly of it.

50:57 You have said the translation is part archeology,

50:59 part detective work, part poetry.

51:01 Can we just speak about translation and the art of it a bit more?

51:05 Yes.

51:06 I mean, it's such an incredible discipline.

51:10 Just like you said, hinted at, just a subtle

51:13 variation in a single word can change everything.

51:17 Well, you know, the truth about translation is that you never

51:21 really have a word in one language which precisely equates another.

51:26 You never do.

51:28 They're always a kind of the best you can do.

51:31 And sometimes it makes no difference and sometimes it's really quite misleading.

51:34 And so what people do when they learn Akkadian,

51:38 is they learn the Akkadian word and they learn the English translation, right?

51:42 You have, "To divide." So whenever you have the verb,

51:46 it's some form of divide or division.

51:48 But actually it's not, because divide is like the primary root,

51:53 but there's maybe 10 nuances of what that can mean in English,

51:57 where the one at the bottom and the one at the top,

52:00 you'd hardly know they were connected.

52:02 And the Chicago Dictionary, which is such a magnificent thing,

52:04 when you come to the museum and see me, I'll show you this.

52:09 It's the most salient and important thing

52:12 that came out of America in all its history,

52:14 is the Chicago Assyrian Dictionary, which is this long.

52:17 There's only one rival to it for cultural importance,

52:21 which is the electric guitar, of course.

52:23 But the two of them, I think, are your countrymen's greatest achievement.

52:29 It's the pride of our nation.

52:31 I think so.

52:31 ...those two things.

52:32 The very thing.

52:33 Chicago dictionary.

52:34 Can you...

52:34 I'm sorry to take the attention.

52:36 What is the Chicago Dictionary?

52:38 It started in the '20s, and they made a dictionary of the Babylonian language.

52:42 Ah.

52:42 A to Z, so to speak.

52:44 And it's as long as this table.

52:45 It's a magnificent thing, and this big.

52:48 And the people who worked on it were real translators,

52:51 so they knew that it wasn't lexically A means B, but they had...

52:55 So if you have something in a proverb,

52:57 the meaning is gonna be a little bit different from in their letter.

53:02 And, you know, so people really, really understand Akkadian, they really do.

53:06 But this thing about the modal verbs is an interesting conundrum to me,

53:11 because there's no way it's reflected in the writing.

53:15 So I can only assume that there was some kind

53:18 of drawing out of the vowel in a verb, meaning "could".

53:22 Like you were saying, it might do it, something like that.

53:26 Anyway, nowadays we— it's not the decipherment

53:29 that's the job; it's just reading.

53:31 And if you have lots of tablets to work on, like on a dig,

53:35 it's very exciting if they come out of the ground

53:37 and no one's looked for them before you.

53:38 It's your job.

53:39 And if you're a competent Assyriologist,

53:43 you should be able to sight-read more or less.

53:46 Except most— say, a letter or something

53:49 like that, but most documents have some damage,

53:52 so you have to learn how to interpret stuff.

53:55 And also, some literature is very difficult because of technical vocabulary,

53:59 and then they had technical vocabulary and unusual words.

54:03 So you can do all of that.

54:06 You can kind of figure out the technical complexities.

54:09 You can figure out the noise, meaning missing pieces.

54:14 Yeah.

54:15 Sometimes you can calculate what it ought to be, make a reasonable suggestion.

54:19 And this dictionary, which I was talking to you about,

54:22 is such a fantastic tool, because a lot of people worked on it.

54:26 It was for the National Endowment for the Humanities,

54:29 and it was for decades and decades of work.

54:33 And most of the world's best Assyriologists collaborated on it.

54:36 So the quality of translation and understanding is really extraordinary.

54:41 What are some things you've read from that time?

54:44 Is there some jokes?

54:46 Is there some love letters?

54:48 There are one or two letters about that from a chap to a woman about, you know,

54:52 "You are very beautiful and your lips are like

54:55 radishes and your ears are like walruses," and things.

54:57 But there are some things like that.

54:59 And then there's a kind of street drama in Babylon, in 4th century BC,

55:04 something like that, when there must have

55:06 been actors who did this in the street.

55:11 And it's Marduk and Sarpanitum, his wife, and another woman.

55:17 Marduk's having an affair with this other—- Oh, no.

55:22 goddess.

55:22 And Sarpanitum is jealous,

55:23 and these women fight in the street and hurl insults at one another,

55:28 and, you know, "slop bucket" and all this kind of stuff.

55:30 It's hilarious, and it must have been a bit like

55:32 a, sort of Verdi opera without the music, I suppose.

55:35 I don't know.

55:36 But anyway, it starts off when Sarpanitum is in the room and Marduk's

55:43 in bed with this other goddess on the roof and she can hear.

55:47 You could say it was an eternal human issue.

55:50 Yeah, yeah, love, heartbreak, jealousy, all of that.

55:53 And between deities also.

55:55 Because deities are only modeled on human beings, after all, so...

55:58 Yeah, deities is a grandiose way of expressing human affairs,

56:03 human behaviors, human ways, yeah.

56:06 In the writing, what was their relationship to the divine?

56:10 Relationship with the divine, well,

56:12 the first thing to say is that they had a large pantheon of gods.

56:17 So there were three gods at the top, sometimes called Anu, Enlil, and Ea.

56:23 There were three gods at the top and hundreds of other gods and goddesses.

56:28 And you have the situation that I think

56:32 lots of small villages and towns had their old,

56:35 ancient gods, and eventually they were all worked

56:37 into a kind of theological system like a phone book.

56:41 And the lesser, minor gods were amalgamated and then they

56:44 were given jobs in the households of the big gods.

56:47 So there was a sort of structure.

56:51 So you have this in the background, a big, sweeping theology,

56:53 like you have in the world today in some parts of the world,

56:57 and this was the main system.

56:59 And the main gods were concerned with the ruler and the fate of the country,

57:03 and another god was concerned with illness and...

57:10 and the dead and what happens to the dead,

57:12 and they had other specialties, and they all had their own temples.

57:16 And when a baby came into the world, probably this was universally true,

57:21 the baby was put under the tutelage of one or other of the gods.

57:27 Sometimes, you know, the royal family,

57:28 they were the big shots, but sometimes not,

57:31 or the ones that were in the family or something like that.

57:34 So people had grown up with the idea that among all of them,

57:38 there were special ones for the family and they had

57:41 a special one who was supposed to look after them.

57:44 That's the sort of basic idea.

57:46 But the trouble is, since gods are, as you say, human beings on a larger scale,

57:51 they can be forgetful or uninterested or on holiday,

57:55 and there are lots of ways that you have to prompt your.

57:58 Make little sacrifices and little bribes so

58:00 they do their job and keep an sacrifices

58:02 and little bribes so they do their job and keep an eye on you.

58:06 So they had that kind of slightly practical view of gods,

58:09 that they were a bit unpredictable,

58:10 "Great when they were there but not always there" sort of idea.

58:13 And I also believe this, that a lot of people in the world today idea.

58:16 And I also believe this, that a lot of people in the world

58:21 today who did not have the disadvantage of growing up in a stifling religion,

58:27 but are just normal people, get a lot more interested when they're really

58:31 ill or when they have a big disaster.

58:35 All of a sudden, God or gods seem a lot more important than they do normally,

58:42 so that few people walk about in a state of religious awe,

58:47 and a good proportion of clergymen I've ever met don't do that either.

58:52 It's a kind of conception that's not actually based on reality,

58:56 that the individual's response to religious stimuli fluctuates

59:01 and is varied and is often a response to need.

59:05 It doesn't come from nothing.

59:07 I mean, people don't suddenly feel,

59:09 "I've got to thank the Lord for the rainbow," or something like that.

59:13 I think it's probably true today.

59:15 I mean, when you read the investigations they make of religion today,

59:18 Christianity in this country is on the decline,

59:21 because people who are supposed to be

59:23 Christian say they aren't anymore, they're atheists.

59:26 And people who say, "I go to church and I believe in everything,"

59:30 it is a relatively small number of people saying now this is the situation,

59:33 which is quite remarkable if you think about it.

59:36 Lord knows what the consequence will be for the human race,

59:39 whether religion will balance out, whether it will die off.

59:44 Who knows?

59:46 I think it's an ancient technology that has proven across

59:48 millennia to give a set of tools to humans to contend,

59:54 as you said, with suffering.

59:56 That's a part of life.

59:57 So when those rare moments come when you have to deal with deep pain,

1:00:04 loss, suffering, heartbreak, all those things...

1:00:08 ...looking up to the sky and asking questions and trying

1:00:12 to figure out the answers in your conversation with the divine...

1:00:15 I think that's true, but I think in Mesopotamia it was different in terms

1:00:19 of its potency and immediacy because there's no skyscrapers in Iraq.

1:00:24 You know, if you live in Southern Iraq and you sleep on the roof,

1:00:28 there are no lights at night.

1:00:30 You're under the stars,

1:00:31 you can see everything 'cause of no smog and everything like that.

1:00:35 And the idea that the gods are there watching,

1:00:38 it's not like a big artifice like it is here.

1:00:43 It just doesn't ring true here.

1:00:44 You can't come to it and really believe in it,

1:00:48 whereas these people didn't have to really believe in it because it was it.

1:00:53 It's the obvious practical part of life.

1:00:56 They're right there.

1:00:59 But it's not they didn't believe in ghosts, they took them for granted.

1:01:02 And they didn't believe in the gods, they took them for granted.

1:01:05 This is a different mechanism, because nobody here in the world today

1:01:08 takes those things for granted, just the opposite.

1:01:11 But I think that's how it worked.

1:01:13 So you didn't have people wrestling with the idea of whether

1:01:16 the gods really exist or whether they really care about me.

1:01:19 They gave them a nudge when it was necessary,

1:01:21 and they might offer this, they might offer that, but it was the system,

1:01:28 it was the prevailing system.

1:01:30 And I think it's an important difference.

1:01:32 And also that thing about ghosts is, that is clear from the inscriptions,

1:01:36 all of them that I managed to find, that nobody ever asked themselves,

1:01:42 "Do these things exist or not?" Or, "Did I really

1:01:45 see them or not?" They just took it all for granted.

1:01:49 Granted.

1:01:50 What are ghosts?

1:01:52 Is it usually ancestors?

1:01:54 Well, everybody who died in bed naturally or peacefully,

1:01:58 what we call their ghost, went down to the netherworld, and there they were.

1:02:04 So they buried people jolly quick for obvious reasons,

1:02:09 and like they do in Islam and Judaism today, it's the same kind of idea.

1:02:15 And the spirit of the person went down

1:02:20 through the gates of the netherworld and stayed there.

1:02:24 So that's the basic situation.

1:02:26 And people in their houses had actual burials under the courtyard,

1:02:30 and they had a thing where you pour stuff down a hole,

1:02:35 fluid and food, kind of symbolic offerings to them.

1:02:40 So isn't that a way to lessen the impact of mortality?

1:02:45 I don't know, because you know that everyone's going to die.

1:02:49 I think the real tragedy would be if we're not supposed to.

1:02:52 That would be the tragedy.

1:02:55 But every single person is going to die.

1:03:00 So all relationships have this finite clause in them.

1:03:05 So if you're very fond of somebody or you love somebody and they die,

1:03:10 it's kind of infantile to whine about it ever after.

1:03:14 Because what do you think was going to happen?

1:03:17 Either you or them.

1:03:18 You know, I always see it like that.

1:03:21 I don't feel grief when people die.

1:03:24 It is infantile, but I've got to tell you something about human beings.

1:03:27 We're all kind of infantile all the way through from, you know,

1:03:31 we don't stop being infantile after we're infants.

1:03:34 It's- it's one thing to know it, you know,

1:03:38 theoretically, and it's another thing to know it know it.

1:03:41 Like this thing ends, this ride ends.

1:03:45 But that's the pain, it's the fact that the whole thing ends.

1:03:49 And when people fall off the edge, they fall off the edge.

1:03:54 So yeah, the knowledge that it ends is the painful thing,

1:03:56 not the actual moment of the ending.

1:03:58 Many times what makes moments really precious is that they're going to be gone.

1:04:02 I think that's not a trivial thing for us humans to really contend with.

1:04:07 I think religion, religious thought, the divine, I think help with that.

1:04:13 I think the big mistake for mankind was the creation of monotheistic religions,

1:04:17 because they brought evil into the world.

1:04:21 Because if you believe in a monotheistic religion,

1:04:24 that means I'm right and you're wrong.

1:04:27 If you don't.

1:04:28 So it's already on that footing.

1:04:31 It's very dogmatic.

1:04:32 Yeah.

1:04:33 Dogmatic, and it's led to everything.

1:04:35 There are inquisitions and this, you know, all this kind of stuff.

1:04:38 It's all a result of it,

1:04:39 that one religion is superior and the others should be stamped out and all that.

1:04:43 And in my opinion, monotheistic religion has

1:04:46 generated the most fantastic amount of non-religious feeling.

1:04:51 Whereas when you have all the different

1:04:53 gods and they have different specialties,

1:04:55 and the ones you like and the ones that everybody likes,

1:04:58 and they have their temples and their offerings.

1:05:00 It was very interesting to me to go into a temple

1:05:04 in Kolkata when I went there with my wife, Joanna,

1:05:07 we went into the temples and saw how they were,

1:05:10 and I think they must be very much like the ones in Mesopotamia.

1:05:12 So there was never anything about them which affronted people's individuality,

1:05:18 or or, I mean, there's no religious

1:05:22 prejudice or even racial prejudice in antiquity.

1:05:24 All these things are modern disadvantageous matters.

1:05:27 If you think what's done in the name of religion, it is absolutely staggering.

1:05:34 So let's go to literature, 'cause we didn't really mention literature much,

1:05:38 except you did briefly mention Epic of Gilgamesh.

1:05:41 So that was written in cuneiform.

1:05:42 It's one of the earliest works of literature.

1:05:45 That's right.

1:05:46 Can you tell me about this work?

1:05:47 Yeah.

1:05:48 Well, we know it best from this Assyrian library set of tablets.

1:05:51 There are 12 of them.

1:05:52 It's a 12-tablet work, so it's quite long.

1:05:55 And Gilgamesh is the hero of it.

1:05:58 But the literature, we know it from earlier texts.

1:06:02 And we know that Gilgamesh lived.

1:06:04 He was a real person, he was a king in Uruk,

1:06:07 and he was one of those people who lived after their death in the world,

1:06:13 like Alexander, for example.

1:06:14 So there were stories about Gilgamesh when he was alive.

1:06:17 There were stories about him afterwards.

1:06:19 And firstly, they were oral literature, not written down at all.

1:06:25 And then around the 1800s,

1:06:27 people started to write them down in Sumerian or Babylonian.

1:06:30 So there was a corpus, and eventually they were woven into this long

1:06:35 12 Homeric-type thing about the adventures of Gilgamesh.

1:06:38 So it is certainly literature, and it's to do with humanity and immortality,

1:06:44 and man in the hands of the gods,

1:06:47 and incorporates lots of interesting and exciting stories.

1:06:50 It's very Hollywoody kind of thing.

1:06:52 And you can see within it,

1:06:56 even in the sophisticated Nineveh version, its roots are in oral literature.

1:07:02 Because when somebody speaks, it says,

1:07:04 "Gilgamesh opened his mouth to speak and addressed

1:07:07 his friend Enkidu," and then there's a speech.

1:07:09 "And then Enkidu opened his mouth and addressed his friend Gilgamesh." Well,

1:07:13 when you're reading a story, you don't need that, and that must be because

1:07:17 of when there was an enacting of an oral thing,

1:07:21 a narrator would say and it suddenly got frozen into the text.

1:07:27 So it's a very strange thing, because if you're reading it,

1:07:30 it's obvious that one person speaks and the other person speaks,

1:07:34 and they always have this complicated thing stuck in the text.

1:07:37 So it must be an echo of...

1:07:40 presumably you have your protagonists enacting their timeless matter with a...

1:07:47 And the person who's writing it down says,

1:07:50 "And then Gilgamesh said..." you know, like in a script.

1:07:55 I mean, what can you say about this, the telling

1:07:59 of stories in written form during that time?

1:08:03 Do you think that, too, stretched back in time?

1:08:07 I do.

1:08:08 I think the fireside narrative matter.

1:08:10 You know, when we were kids it would be

1:08:13 twerps with a guitar sitting around a fire on holiday.

1:08:17 But that mechanism, when people gather after dark when there is a fire and talk,

1:08:22 is the sort of environment where,

1:08:25 narrative accounts flourish naturally among human beings.

1:08:30 Stories, telling of story.

1:08:31 It doesn't have to be pragmatic, it could be— ...literary in a way.

1:08:35 Yeah.

1:08:36 Either a human person like Gilgamesh or, stories about the gods,

1:08:40 and someone sees the Milky Way and they think,

1:08:43 "There's a god riding a chariot up it,"

1:08:45 and then they have a story about you know, and all those sorts of things.

1:08:48 Whatever it would be.

1:08:49 But I think probably you have to allow for a strong

1:08:55 creative principle surfacing in homo sapiens at a quite early age,

1:09:01 because the paintings on cave walls...

1:09:04 You try drawing a running antelope in color on a wall.

1:09:08 I mean, the quality of the workmanship,

1:09:11 of the artistic ability, is unsurpassable.

1:09:15 It's not just good.

1:09:18 So, how is that an explicable thing at this very early date?

1:09:22 It means that among all the population, you have imbeciles and Einsteins,

1:09:28 and somewhere along the line you have Rembrandts.

1:09:32 And I imagine that half the cave paintings in Europe were done by one person.

1:09:38 I mean, you get the impression every family had a genius painter.

1:09:41 It's impossible.

1:09:41 Probably there was a person who went from place

1:09:44 to place doing these paintings because they were so...

1:09:47 could draw straight away accurately like that.

1:09:50 But they are a distillation of creative artistic ability plus skill.

1:09:56 So this is right at the pretty early stage,

1:10:00 is it not, the cave painting material?

1:10:02 So, if you consider the human stock which encapsulates such ideas ever after,

1:10:10 then you have to reckon with that.

1:10:12 You have to reckon with that.

1:10:13 Very creative, very creative people.

1:10:16 So the function of stories to tell the young and about

1:10:21 what happened and about famous battles or when the flood came,

1:10:25 or how people learned to make fire, or you know, how we invented the wheel.

1:10:33 All those sorts of things everybody puts

1:10:35 down as, but that's presumably what absolutely happened.

1:10:38 And you have the capacity for people

1:10:41 to adore and to respect among their own kind, people of astounding ability.

1:10:47 There must have been hunters who were ferociously quick and, you know,

1:10:52 wrestled with polar bears and all that kind of thing.

1:10:55 And all this stuff would be grist to the narrator's thing.

1:10:58 And as things got more complicated and more sophisticated,

1:11:01 so lessons might be incorporated or lessons

1:11:04 might come out of them unintentionally.

1:11:07 Because if you tell a story without a moral,

1:11:09 there is usually a moral if you think about it.

1:11:14 And many of those stories are sadly lost to time or not yet found.

1:11:19 You mentioned floods, and speaking of stories that have been lost and found,

1:11:24 you're well-known for a lot of things.

1:11:26 One of them is decoding the so-called Ark Tablet.

1:11:30 Yeah.

1:11:30 That was a challenge, because it's really hard to read.

1:11:32 You've got to tell me the story.

1:11:36 This ancient Babylonian clay tablet dating 1700 BC,

1:11:39 which contains a flood narrative that predates

1:11:42 the biblical story of Noah by a thousand years.

1:11:45 At least.

1:11:46 At least.

1:11:47 Okay.

1:11:47 Well, you gotta tell me the full story.

1:11:50 So the full story is like this.

1:11:51 Visitors used to come to the museum

1:11:53 to ask questions of the experts who worked there,

1:11:57 and one would be on duty periodically,

1:12:00 and sometimes people would bring objects, sometimes they'd ask questions.

1:12:03 And somebody once came in with a whole load of objects,

1:12:06 including this tablet, which, to cut a long story short,

1:12:09 I identified pretty much straight away as being part of the flood story.

1:12:14 It was a tablet about eight inches by three.

1:12:17 Not the whole flood story, which is a complex narrative which ended

1:12:21 up in the Gilgamesh narrative much, much later,

1:12:24 but this one was an early narrative in which

1:12:27 the point was taken up where the gods

1:12:30 in heaven had decided that the population of Mesopotamia

1:12:34 needed to be wiped out because they were so noisy.

1:12:40 This was the expression.

1:12:41 And the gods couldn't sleep after lunch, sort of thing.

1:12:45 So they decided they would wipe them

1:12:47 out and create something quieter that worked harder.

1:12:50 So this was the basic mechanism, and they had different ways of doing it.

1:12:56 And then the most effective one was they were

1:12:58 going to send a flood to wipe them all out.

1:13:00 And one of the gods, the number three in the triumvirate,

1:13:02 thought this was a deplorable idea.

1:13:04 So he took it upon himself to warn this person called Atra-Hasis,

1:13:10 who lived in Mesopotamia, to build a boat to rescue life when the waters came.

1:13:16 And in it, he told him the shape of it and the materials

1:13:21 he would need and how much he would need of the materials.

1:13:24 So he could do it safely.

1:13:26 And in the 60 lines of the tablet, all this stuff was there.

1:13:29 It was like a blueprint to build this boat.

1:13:32 And it was just extraordinary because it was round, the boat.

1:13:36 And everybody who knew their Bible, the ark's a coffin shape kind of affair.

1:13:43 And nobody thought of it being a round boat.

1:13:47 And the fact is that round boats were used in Mesopotamia on the rivers,

1:13:55 coracles that's to say, because for transporting things,

1:13:58 and they would never sink.

1:14:00 They were very appropriate.

1:14:03 And so in this story, it was decided it was going to be a giant coracle,

1:14:08 a really, really big one that would never sink,

1:14:11 and the male and female animals could go

1:14:15 in and Atra-Hasis' wife and his three sons and so forth,

1:14:19 could go in and everything would be there and it would float on the water.

1:14:23 And when it came down, they said,

1:14:24 "We'll start all over again." So it's got very many

1:14:28 points in common with the description of the flood in Genesis.

1:14:31 And of course, so did the one in Gilgamesh.

1:14:34 So in 1872, there was a serologist in the British Museum called George Smith,

1:14:42 and he was a very, very talented reader.

1:14:46 And in 1872, he discovered that one of the tablets

1:14:49 from the Nineveh library we were talking about before had

1:14:53 on it a passage which ran in parallel with Gilgamesh

1:14:58 about the waters coming and the boat and everybody floating.

1:15:02 And even to the point that when the rain

1:15:05 stopped and the ark came to rest on a mountain,

1:15:09 that the hero of this thing in Gilgamesh, who was called Utnapishtim,

1:15:13 released a bird three times to see whether the trees had come up,

1:15:18 and the first one came back and the second one, and the third one didn't.

1:15:22 So he knew that...

1:15:23 So this was not only in the Epic of Gilgamesh,

1:15:27 but it was also in the book of Genesis.

1:15:29 So what it meant was that it wasn't...

1:15:32 You couldn't have two stories...

1:15:34 It wasn't two stories about the same thing.

1:15:38 It was literary dependence.

1:15:40 It was literary dependence.

1:15:41 One was locked into the other.

1:15:43 The text of the Hebrew Bible from whenever it was written down,

1:15:46 of course, nobody knows quite when, but whenever it was,

1:15:48 it was about the same time as the one from Nineveh,

1:15:52 about the 7th century, 6th century, something like that.

1:15:56 The time interval between the Gilgamesh version from Nineveh

1:16:00 and the Hebrew Bible is not like a big expanse of time.

1:16:03 So there was an argument that one goes this way and one goes that way.

1:16:07 But then when this tablet came in, a thousand years older,

1:16:11 nobody believes the Bible was written in 1700 BC.

1:16:15 So the primacy of the Mesopotamian matter was established.

1:16:20 And it's important because you never get floods in Jerusalem.

1:16:27 You just don't.

1:16:29 But in Mesopotamia, they had floods.

1:16:31 The rivers, sometimes there wasn't enough water,

1:16:33 sometimes there was too much, sometimes there was far too much water.

1:16:37 So the mechanism that the waters could be

1:16:39 used as a destructive force by the powers

1:16:42 that be is a plausible Mesopotamian mechanism and is based in a sort of sense,

1:16:47 in my opinion, in reality.

1:16:49 I think there must have been some tsunami once most

1:16:52 people were drowned and those who survived were in boats, obviously.

1:16:56 And then afterwards, nobody ever forgot it.

1:17:00 And it went on and on and on.

1:17:01 So, you mean there actually could have

1:17:03 been a catastrophic event of a large scale?

1:17:05 Yeah, not the whole world, because people were-- But just enough to imagine.

1:17:09 Yeah, sweeping down to the Persian Gulf and, you know, the flat plains,

1:17:12 everything would be destroyed, all the houses would be destroyed,

1:17:15 animals would be drowned and...

1:17:16 This is an incredible discovery.

1:17:17 Do you think it's possible that this is the original?

1:17:20 There are flood myths in many cultures.

1:17:24 I believe this.

1:17:26 The Mesopotamians had a deep-seated horror of dependency

1:17:30 on water when they couldn't control it.

1:17:34 They were fearful of it.

1:17:36 And they had a rainbow in Babylonia, like in the Bible,

1:17:40 as a proof that the disastrous flood would never happen again.

1:17:43 But I think there must have been one episode of this kind,

1:17:48 maybe 5,000 years before the tablet, 10,000, it doesn't matter.

1:17:52 Because with the passage of time, nothing happens in that part of the world.

1:17:56 So something will be alive, grandfather to grandson,

1:17:58 before you go to sleep, "And remember, my boy, you know, you only have

1:18:03 to be careful because otherwise..." and all that stuff.

1:18:06 For sure, bogeyman stuff.

1:18:08 It never quite died out in their conscious minds.

1:18:12 So I think that when the Judeans from Jerusalem,

1:18:18 after the destruction of the temple by the Babylonians

1:18:21 and the rout of the priesthood and everything,

1:18:23 the king and the others went over land to Babylon as refugees,

1:18:27 and they had to live there

1:18:30 for three generations of time under Nebuchadnezzar's reign.

1:18:33 So I believe that the text of the Bible was written then,

1:18:37 because if you read the Bible attentively,

1:18:40 which I can't say I do on a regular basis,

1:18:43 but if you do read it dispassionately,

1:18:45 you have the mechanism that the only books that the Bible explain

1:18:49 to the reader how it is that these people are in such a mess.

1:18:53 Because they're supposed to be the chosen people doing all that.

1:18:58 And, look, they haven't got a temple,

1:19:00 they haven't got a country, they're washed up and everything like that.

1:19:03 So I think that what happened was it's, it's a complex thing,

1:19:09 but the Judeans from Jerusalem, they spoke Hebrew,

1:19:12 but they also spoke Aramaic, right?

1:19:15 The two languages, they're sister languages.

1:19:17 And the Babylonians spoke Babylonian, and they also spoke Aramaic.

1:19:21 And they all wore the same kind of clothes, and they all had brown skin.

1:19:25 And when all these refugees from Jerusalem were milling around in Babylonia,

1:19:31 they would have intermarried and disappeared within no time at all.

1:19:36 And the authorities who were there prevented this by drawing

1:19:41 up a kind of charter of their history,

1:19:45 explaining things from the beginning of time up until now,

1:19:48 how it happened and what happened, and it was all intentional.

1:19:53 So that is, in my opinion, the driving force behind the Hebrew text.

1:19:57 And the thing about it is that they didn't have in Jewish

1:20:02 philosophical tradition stuff about creation and the beginning of the world.

1:20:07 And they took Babylonian ideas,

1:20:09 which they learnt when they were there, and they recycled them.

1:20:16 So whereas the Babylonians decided that the gods

1:20:19 were gonna wipe out the noisy persons,

1:20:22 when the Jewish philosophers got this narrative to recycle about,

1:20:27 about the vengeful Almighty in the Old

1:20:30 Testament a very unpleasant and vengeful person, it was because of sin.

1:20:34 It wasn't because of rocket and playing the radio, it was sin.

1:20:38 So they took one narrative and they recycled it for their own purposes.

1:20:44 The flood is a useful tool to punish people for whatever X is?

1:20:49 That's exactly right.

1:20:50 And something else is this.

1:20:52 Something else is this, right?

1:20:53 You have five days to build the ark or whatever it is,

1:20:56 or two weeks to build the ark, so the clock goes tick, tick, tick, tick, tick.

1:21:00 And about a third of the films that come out

1:21:03 of Hollywood are the world's gonna be demolished by aliens,

1:21:06 and you've got 24 hours to think of a cure,

1:21:09 tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick.

1:21:11 So it's the...

1:21:12 that narrative is irresistible, that one man can save the world,

1:21:17 if he's lucky, in time from disaster.

1:21:19 So it starts off with Utnapishtim, and then it goes on to Noah,

1:21:23 and then it goes on to Hollywood.

1:21:27 Do you think this ark in the tablet actually was ever built?

1:21:32 You did build a replica one third the size.

1:21:36 And people should check out, you tell the story of that wonderfully.

1:21:40 What did you learn from building this replica?

1:21:42 And do you think the actual ark existed?

1:21:46 No, I don't think so.

1:21:47 I think it's a literary construction out of the reality

1:21:50 that people who did survive were on boats.

1:21:53 I mean, they had boats for sure,

1:21:55 and you might wake up in the Persian Gulf and never know what happened,

1:22:01 but, you know, it's a literary moral principle teaching narrative.

1:22:06 And look, missionaries take it all around the world.

1:22:10 That's the other thing.

1:22:11 See, there...

1:22:12 this is, this is the mystery of it, that you have flood stories everywhere,

1:22:16 and some of them are from meddlesome

1:22:18 missionaries who have all these innocent little

1:22:19 kids sitting on benches and, "I'm going to tell you a story." like that.

1:22:24 So it moves into this consciousness, then it gets recycled and it gets recycled.

1:22:28 So this is one thing.

1:22:29 And then also, there probably are spontaneous ideas,

1:22:32 because it's not so complicated or so amazing

1:22:36 that independently people would have such a narrative.

1:22:39 After all, you know, like the great river in China floods and everybody gets...

1:22:43 so that, that's not at all surprising.

1:22:45 But what was so shocking for George Smith, who was such a clever person,

1:22:49 is to read for the first time on this tablet from Nineveh,

1:22:54 long before the one that I discovered came to light,

1:22:57 about the three birds being released one after the other.

1:23:01 And that, that was the clincher that the two stories were locked together.

1:23:05 And lots of clergymen got very miserable about

1:23:08 it and didn't know what to make of it.

1:23:10 So that's, that's a definitive proof that those are liter-- A literary,

1:23:14 I think literary link.

1:23:16 I think so.

1:23:18 And I mean, these puzzles that are then connected,

1:23:21 but the ark, you discor- 1,000 years.

1:23:25 So that means that story of the flood has been told many,

1:23:33 many times across that span to, you know-...

1:23:37 "Do your homework or the flood is gonna come."- That's right.

1:23:41 Do all that can...

1:23:42 oh.

1:23:42 That's right.

1:23:43 And every time somebody built a coracle

1:23:45 and they didn't do the waterproofing right, you know what will happen?

1:23:50 You'll be out on the river and that will be your lot, you know?

1:23:53 I, I think so.

1:23:54 I think it was a...

1:23:55 I, I...

1:23:55 there's a certain amount of evidence that in Mesopotamian society,

1:23:59 people talk about the time before the flood and after the flood.

1:24:06 And it's like when I was a boy, people used to talk about,

1:24:12 "Before the war, we used to..." And now, we, we do this.

1:24:18 It's, it's a kind of cataclysmic cut

1:24:21 across history which provides a, a, a ruler,

1:24:24 so things are either before it or after it.

1:24:27 Because there's a king list, for example,

1:24:30 where they wrote down the names of all the kings,

1:24:32 all the way back to the beginning, including kings before the flood.

1:24:35 They knew about that...

1:24:36 they have their names and their great regnal years, or thousands of years.

1:24:41 Fascinating.

1:24:42 So there's a guy named Graham Hancock who

1:24:44 talks about the Younger Dryas hypothesis, 10,000 BC,

1:24:47 that there was an asteroid that hit Earth and melted the ice sheets,

1:24:54 and that created a flood in North America.

1:24:56 So that means an actual cataclysmic global event,

1:25:00 that then as all the different civilizations sprang up,

1:25:05 they all carried that knowledge, that memory.

1:25:09 That's his idea.

1:25:10 What probability would you assign to that?

1:25:13 I would say negligible, because I regard it as a literary matter,

1:25:18 which is not predicated on the existence of flood in people's minds.

1:25:22 But I do believe that the story in Mesopotamia

1:25:25 owes its inception to a disastrous flood, but nothing global.

1:25:30 Nothing that touched America or China or Birmingham.

1:25:33 So But people have made drilled cores and then they...

1:25:36 I do that all the...

1:25:36 I'm not interested in all that stuff.

1:25:38 I do that all the...

1:25:39 I'm not interested in all that stuff.

1:25:41 It's, to my mind...

1:25:43 It's a literary device.

1:25:43 It's a literary top-off of great potency, of irresistible potency,

1:25:48 because everybody identifies with the idea of being in bed

1:25:51 and someone knocks on the door, says, "Get up,

1:25:53 you got to build a boat, and this is what you're going to need,

1:25:56 and you got to get on with it, sunshine,

1:25:58 or we're all sunk." I mean, what are you going to do?

1:26:01 The most interesting thing is this Atrahasis in the 1700 text.

1:26:04 He wasn't a king and he wasn't a sailor or a boat builder.

1:26:08 and he wasn't a sailor or a boat builder.

1:26:10 So, how comes this clever god who wants to find someone to build...

1:26:14 Wouldn't you go for a look in the Yellow Pages for a boat-building company,

1:26:18 say, "Listen, fellow, I got a deal..." No.

1:26:20 He had to tell him, "This is the blueprint, this is the shape,

1:26:22 you need all this, you need all that, you need all this, you need

1:26:25 all that, you got to measure it and all that." It's a very interesting thing.

1:26:30 I mean, yeah, that's a great story.

1:26:32 You don't go to the great boat builder, go-- Taxi driver or something like that.

1:26:37 To the taxi, and then that's that hero's journey.

1:26:40 That's the stuff of great myths, yeah.

1:26:43 It is.

1:26:44 It is a great myth.

1:26:45 A little detail would be really cool about the replica, like...

1:26:49 Of the boat?

1:26:49 What did you...

1:26:50 Of the boat, yeah.

1:26:51 One-third replica, of course.

1:26:52 That was something else.

1:26:54 There were three blokes who did it.

1:26:57 And they were specialists in reconstructing medieval Arab boats.

1:27:03 Because quite often, they're found in the mud or bits, or they have information.

1:27:07 So they were at home in it.

1:27:08 And we built it on a small lagoon in Kerala.

1:27:11 in a small lagoon in Kerala.

1:27:12 It was just the most unbelievably wonderful thing,

1:27:15 the most unbelievably wonderful thing,

1:27:16 because they used the instructions as a blueprint.

1:27:19 They made it about a third of the size of the original, a pretty huge thing.

1:27:23 But they made it because it had wooden ribs, you see?

1:27:28 And they could get wood ribs.

1:27:29 They worked out by computer the maximum size they could do

1:27:31 it the maximum size they could do it when it would work.

1:27:33 Beyond it, it would be impossible, Beyond it,

1:27:35 it would be impossible, because once they built the curved ribs,

1:27:39 and then they stuffed woven all around it, it had to be covered in bitumen,

1:27:44 which is also very heavy, to make it waterproof.

1:27:46 So they calculated the size, and it worked.

1:27:50 So they built this thing on rollers and it was pushed out into the...

1:27:53 It was just just the most unbelievable...

1:27:55 I went out there with my dear wife for the last few days,

1:27:58 and was on the maiden voyage.

1:27:59 And they had trouble with the bitumen,

1:28:01 because Indian bitumen because Indian bitumen is really not up to scratch.

1:28:05 And they couldn't get Iraqi bitumen,

1:28:07 because its cultural property is carcinogenic.

1:28:09 They wouldn't export a tanker load of Iraqi.

1:28:11 So we had to use the Indian stuff.

1:28:13 But the thing is this, the bitumen which they coated it with was okay,

1:28:16 but it wasn't perfect.

1:28:17 So when it went out...

1:28:21 into the waters, there was a bit of a leak, water had to be bailed out.

1:28:25 So, they said, "Ah," you see, and I said, I s- I said, "Okay, listen,

1:28:29 sunshine," I said to this producer,

1:28:31 "You ever been in a rowing boat without water in the bottom?

1:28:35 Excuse me?"- Oh, you're saying that's a feature, not a bug.

1:28:37 That's the feature of the thing, yeah.

1:28:39 That's the feature.

1:28:40 That thing could've gone to ports.

1:28:42 So it's authentic.

1:28:43 Absolutely right.

1:28:44 We had such an adventure with that thing.

1:28:47 They made a documentary film.

1:28:50 in various languages.

1:28:51 And you know what they did?

1:28:52 You know, I was in it a bit- a bit, and they had people saying, "Oh,

1:28:56 I don't think it was this, I don't think it was that," you know,

1:28:59 and they didn't let me go back and say, "What the hell are you talking about?

1:29:01 I did it, I know what...

1:29:03 I can read, you know,...

1:29:04 you." They didn't have, they didn't do it.

1:29:06 I- I couldn't get my own back.

1:29:08 I was really annoyed.

1:29:09 Really furious.

1:29:10 So you're saying that there are some inaccurate things to it.

1:29:13 I am saying there are some inaccurate things.

1:29:15 Yeah, somebody in Iraq said, "Oh,

1:29:17 it couldn't have been that, they probably had lots

1:29:19 of little coracles all tied together." Did they f*ck?

1:29:21 I mean, I, you know, he couldn't read the stuff.

1:29:24 I mean, it's really, really, really annoying.

1:29:25 I mean, you should have a chance, shouldn't you?

1:29:27 You know, if you're gonna have a fencing match,

1:29:30 you both have to have a rapier, wouldn't you say?

1:29:32 Yeah, and you're the OG.

1:29:34 You're the person that decoded it.

1:29:37 Well, I can read.

1:29:38 Yeah.

1:29:38 But the thing is this, the proportions of the material were accurate.

1:29:42 This is the crucial thing, that, um- what had happened was,

1:29:48 is they took the information about how you make a real coracle,

1:29:52 which is usually enough, two people- ...and a few sheep and goats-- Got

1:29:56 it- ...and they bumped them up- ...so that it worked.

1:29:59 And I know why that is,

1:30:01 because it goes back to your question about oral literature,

1:30:06 because there must have been times when people

1:30:09 went to villages and told them about the flood,

1:30:12 and when they got to the question of the boat,

1:30:15 they'd say something like this, "And Enki said,

1:30:19 'You've got to build the biggest coracle you've ever seen.'" Like that, right?

1:30:23 Well, I mean, if you do this in a cinema in Guildford, people will say, "Well,

1:30:28 that's fine," but if you do it to a whole

1:30:30 load of river people who use coracles and make build,

1:30:34 they're not gonna take that, they're not...

1:30:36 "So how big was it then?

1:30:38 Come on, how big was it?" So what do they do?

1:30:41 They go to a coracle place and they work out the proportions of material.

1:30:46 and then they bump it up so that the actor

1:30:49 who reads this, for the first few times, he has in his pocket how much it is.

1:30:52 But after a while, he knows it by heart so that none of these people get angry.

1:30:57 "You can't expect us, big enough for all this." So then he'd have

1:31:00 all the stuff and he'd do it this way, "And you need all this, and you need

1:31:04 all this," and they'd all be hypnotized by it.

1:31:07 That, I think is, it's actually, regarding your question,

1:31:11 it's on the cusp of purely oral literature to purely literary literature.

1:31:18 It's actually there because you can see that it

1:31:22 was molded in the environment when people were still talking.

1:31:26 Yeah, you gotta make it authentic to really connect with people.

1:31:29 Well, you couldn't pull it w- over their eyes.

1:31:31 I mean, you know?

1:31:32 Yeah, well, I wish many of the films

1:31:34 in Hollywood today would have the same level of rigor.

1:31:37 Rigor is one of the things lacking in the world.

1:31:40 By the way, I forgot to ask, why was the flood myth focused on noisy people?

1:31:46 Well, it can't really be noisy.

1:31:47 I'll tell you what the explanation is, it's- it's something quite different.

1:31:51 Before the flood, the gods had not created death.

1:31:58 So I think the noise was a reflex of the fact there were just too many animals,

1:32:04 too many people, and they had to do something about it.

1:32:08 So it's a sort of euphemism, so to speak,

1:32:11 because after the flood, at the end of the tablet...

1:32:14 Not my tablet, but the other ones, where it's still broken.

1:32:17 It says, there's a tantalizing thing where they create barren women and who

1:32:23 can't have children and men who can't have children and people who...

1:32:27 Princesses who don't have children,

1:32:29 and they institute in society some figures who will not reproduce the species.

1:32:35 So it's actually a rather

1:32:37 sophisticated Malthusian kind of philosophical position.

1:32:41 It's remarkable.

1:32:42 So that the noise means there's so many of them,

1:32:45 not that they're actually so noisy that we can't hear ourselves think.

1:32:50 You have to tell me about the- the world of ancient games.

1:32:55 Maybe we can start with the ancient Royal Game of Ur.

1:32:58 What is it and how were you somehow able to crack the rules of it?

1:33:05 Well, the Royal Game of Ur is a board

1:33:09 of 20 squares in a rather idiosyncratic form.

1:33:12 And it was pretty much unknown until the 1920s when

1:33:18 Sir Leonard Woolley was digging at the site of Ur,

1:33:22 and in the graves of the royal family, Sumerian rulers,

1:33:26 they found four or five boards of this pattern, together with dice and pieces,

1:33:33 which showed that it was popular among them at this time,

1:33:38 and also that wherever they were going in the world to come,

1:33:42 they would want to be playing it.

1:33:43 And so that was one thing, and we had the number of pieces and some dice.

1:33:50 So lots of people had ideas about how it might have been played,

1:33:55 and that went on like that for a very long time.

1:33:59 And thereafter, boards for this game turned up

1:34:02 in most of the countries of the Middle East, sometimes quite a lot of them.

1:34:07 And- and the one from Ur dates to about 2600 BC,

1:34:12 and from then down to the end of the first millennium,

1:34:18 there's examples of boards from Mesopotamia itself and from Egypt Syria,

1:34:25 Lebanon, Jordan, Turkey, Greece, Crete, all over the place.

1:34:30 When you put all the boards together,

1:34:35 you realize that you're dealing with a board

1:34:39 game which was extremely widespread and extremely popular.

1:34:45 Across space and time.

1:34:46 across space and time.

1:34:48 So it lasted for nearly 3,000 years and it was played all over the place.

1:34:53 So it's one of those games which is like chess or backgammon,

1:34:59 which you can say are world conquerors.

1:35:03 Because the way I see the issue is that human beings,

1:35:10 for a very long time, have been, shall we say,

1:35:15 hungry for things to do, because all through the Bronze Age and the Iron Age,

1:35:22 there was no television, you know?

1:35:25 There was nothing, and kids played with pull along things and adults had

1:35:31 board games and they're kind of embedded in culture from a very early time.

1:35:38 And this game was so widespread.

1:35:41 You know, Tutankhamun, for example, in his tomb,

1:35:44 there were two or three boards for it with the pieces.

1:35:47 So it arrived in the middle of the second

1:35:51 millennium in Egypt and even the Pharaoh played it.

1:35:54 So you have a game, which the interesting point about it is that it spread

1:36:00 across the known world without written rules

1:36:06 and without people necessarily knowing the same language.

1:36:11 So a merchant would go, end up in a bar, you know, come from India,

1:36:17 or I don't know where, start seeing these guys playing,

1:36:20 have a go himself, and it looks rather interesting.

1:36:23 You go home and try and remember what it looked

1:36:25 like and try to work out how to, you know,

1:36:27 be transported this way and the other.

1:36:29 And so you can see that the board has 20 squares.

1:36:33 So you have a block of four by three and then a bridge

1:36:36 of two and then a second three by two thing at the end.

1:36:42 So it's difficult to describe the actual shape.

1:36:45 But what happened was after about 2000 BC, the squares at the far end,

1:36:51 which were two on one flank and two on the other,

1:36:56 were all put at the end of the central avenue.

1:36:58 So you end up with 12 squares down the middle.

1:37:02 So all the boards after the period of Ur have 12 squares down the middle,

1:37:06 and then four on each side at one end.

1:37:09 Mm.

1:37:09 So it meant then that when you play the game,

1:37:12 you have dice to move the pieces, you have pieces all the same,

1:37:16 and you obviously put them on your first corner and you turn

1:37:20 the corner and you go up the middle and off the end.

1:37:22 And it was a race game of the kind

1:37:24 that everybody knows from their own childhood.

1:37:26 And some squares which had rosettes on were

1:37:29 either safe squares or you had another throw,

1:37:31 and you could maybe put two on one square, we don't know.

1:37:35 You could try and block people.

1:37:37 But anyway, the crucial thing is

1:37:39 that the widespread distribution of this idiosyncratic shape,

1:37:43 and it's a lasting thing, shows it must have been a very good game,

1:37:49 if people more or less played the same thing on it everywhere.

1:37:53 I mean, it may be that they were completely different games, but probably not.

1:37:57 So this is the thing, it makes you wonder what it is about it that would

1:38:03 fit so well with a wide appetite from different persons,

1:38:06 different types of person.

1:38:08 And the thing is that although it's a race game where

1:38:12 you're at the mercy of dice and lucky squares and unlucky squares,

1:38:18 the process of getting your pieces on and off

1:38:23 the board as a winner is primarily fortuitous.

1:38:26 But it has built within it,

1:38:29 is the way I understand the game plays, a measurable quota of strategy.

1:38:36 It's a mix of probability and strategy.

1:38:39 So most games are either just probability like Snakes and Ladders,

1:38:45 like Chutes and Ladders is just a thing like that.

1:38:48 Or you have a game like chess, which is pure strategy.

1:38:51 It's a mix.

1:38:51 And the grownup game in the modern world where fortuity

1:38:55 or chance and strategy have a good balance is backgammon,

1:38:59 which is a sort of grownup version of this sort of game.

1:39:04 Where nevertheless, if you play according to the most rational interpretation,

1:39:08 its strategy is a major factor.

1:39:10 So what happened was that many people had ideas how it was played,

1:39:14 and the route followed, and I did too.

1:39:16 And then I discovered this tablet in the British Museum,

1:39:19 which was written at a very late period in the second century BC.

1:39:26 So 2,300 years after this object existed,

1:39:29 and it had on it the names of the pieces

1:39:33 and what the pieces were like and various things about the throws.

1:39:37 And it was obvious that it was,

1:39:40 the rules were to do with a game which was derived from this simple early game.

1:39:45 And that working backwards from it, you could reconstruct the game in accordance

1:39:50 with its later incarnation that might be workable.

1:39:53 And it jolly well turned out to be workable

1:39:56 because people play this all over the world now.

1:39:59 And they even play in Iraq in cafes.

1:40:03 Wait, now?

1:40:04 They do.

1:40:04 Oh, wow.

1:40:05 Because after it's come back to life,

1:40:07 it's on the internet, people play, there are different rules.

1:40:09 That's amazing.

1:40:10 The ones I invented are pretty much regular.

1:40:12 So if you have a good balance between chance and strategy and it's a fair game,

1:40:20 and doesn't take four days to play like modern board games.

1:40:23 So you could have a go and if you're lucky,

1:40:25 you win fast and then you have another go,

1:40:28 maybe best of three or something like that.

1:40:30 It works out rather well.

1:40:32 And once I was in in California, in the Getty,

1:40:38 and I had to give a talk about this with all the information,

1:40:41 and because there's lots of things to say about it.

1:40:43 And the lady who ran the Friends of the Getty had a brilliant idea,

1:40:48 so what she brought in 20 or so commercial copies of this game,

1:40:53 and they had small tables with chairs.

1:40:55 And after the lecture I was supposed to say to everybody,

1:40:58 "Okay, this is what you have to do,

1:41:00 this is how you play." Because you can get the rules down in like three minutes.

1:41:03 So I said, "Okay, first you have to do this, first you

1:41:05 have to do that, so off you go." So there was silence,

1:41:08 and then after a while someone said, "I hate you!

1:41:13 I'm never playing this game with you again." When they'd never played it before,

1:41:18 when somebody had escaped at the last minute,

1:41:21 cleaned up just when they thought they were gonna get.

1:41:24 And it provokes that salutary, which all good board games do.

1:41:32 And they were happily married couples who were, at the end of the afternoon,

1:41:36 phoning their respective lawyers to discuss the future, that kind of thing.

1:41:41 Do you think games are...

1:41:44 our desire to play games, a mix of chance,

1:41:47 a mix of strategy, it's a part of human nature?

1:41:51 Do you think that's always been there?

1:41:54 I do.

1:41:55 I do, yes.

1:41:56 I think, um...

1:41:58 I mean, you can say that, In communities, you have rivalry, hostility,

1:42:04 and who's the best, who's the fastest, who's the strongest and things.

1:42:07 And if you play a board game like that, all

1:42:10 the reality of it is sublimated into a safe terrain.

1:42:12 Yes, the safety of it,

1:42:14 where you can nevertheless get angry, but it's not like that.

1:42:17 That's one thing.

1:42:18 But more significantly,

1:42:19 I believe is the question of what in India people call time pass.

1:42:27 Mm-hmm.

1:42:27 Which is not quite the same as past time.

1:42:28 Time pass is the question of what you time.

1:42:30 Time pass is the question of what you do when it's too hot to do anything,

1:42:36 which is true a good part of the day and a good part of the year.

1:42:41 And grandmothers sit under trees with their grandchildren and they

1:42:44 tell stories and they do this and they do that.

1:42:48 And time pass is a very useful

1:42:51 catch-all phrase for the existence of board games.

1:42:54 And in India, there are many board games.

1:42:58 Chess, of course, is the famous

1:43:01 three-in-a-row type games or fox-against- geese games,

1:43:04 and wolves against sheep and all those sorts of things which

1:43:07 come out of the landscape in miniature and were played for pleasure.

1:43:12 And also in a kind of way,

1:43:14 it doesn't really matter who wins, because you might play matter who wins,

1:43:17 because you might play and it goes round and round and round,

1:43:20 eventually somebody wins and then they have another game.

1:43:22 So it's a sort of that kind of rather graceful,

1:43:27 valid function for not wasting time,

1:43:30 doing something which is stimulating and beneficial

1:43:33 without it being overpowering in either way.

1:43:36 So I think it is a human matter.

1:43:42 Of course, we humans also sometimes mix in gambling into the whole thing,

1:43:45 to mix in gambling into the whole thing,

1:43:47 to add some money on top of it, which I'm sure sometimes was involved here.

1:43:52 I think so, but probably only late on, because money as such,

1:43:58 of course, that doesn't appear till quite late.

1:44:02 But there are...

1:44:03 We know in Mesopotamia, it's a rather interesting thing,

1:44:07 there's a school tablet with three or four lines quoted

1:44:11 from one literary thing and three or four from another literary thing.

1:44:15 And one of them, it has this "Oh my astragal, oh my astragal,

1:44:24 woe is me, woe is me." And that's all we have.

1:44:28 And I think this is an example of a genre of literature

1:44:30 this is an example of a genre of literature called the gambler's lament.

1:44:36 Because they used knuckle bones or astragals as dice.

1:44:40 And I'm sure there were people who bet a sack

1:44:43 of this or a roomful of that on the throw of the knuckle bones.

1:44:48 And this extract in the school text is probably

1:44:51 from a literary tablet in which somebody lost everything,

1:44:55 even though there weren't coins,

1:44:58 because I think you're right that it's a natural-

1:45:02 it's a natural thing for it to accrue.

1:45:04 And also maybe men and women played differently,

1:45:06 also maybe men and women played differently,

1:45:08 because there are some games which were played in harems among girls,

1:45:11 you know, woman on a hot afternoon girls, you know,

1:45:14 women on a hot afternoon where nobody was gonna win anything.

1:45:18 But the rules tablet, which gives this kind of backhanded information about it,

1:45:25 is couched in such a way that it talks about people in a bar.

1:45:31 Because the movement of the pieces is calculated in terms

1:45:35 of food and drink and women, what you win.

1:45:40 So the landscape in which the rules are

1:45:43 couched for credibility are for just exactly that setup.

1:45:49 As you mentioned, you are the curator at possibly

1:45:54 the greatest place on Earth, the British Museum.

1:45:57 Oh, yes.

1:45:58 Can you tell me, what are some

1:46:00 of the incredible magical aspects of the British Museum?

1:46:04 Well, the British Museum is a magical place,

1:46:09 and it's a special case because there's a lot

1:46:12 of flurry and dispute now about what museums are,

1:46:15 and what they're for, and why they exist,

1:46:17 and whether they should ever have existed,

1:46:19 and all these sorts of issues which people go on about.

1:46:22 But the British Museum is unlike almost all museums in the world,

1:46:27 because it's to do with the achievements of mankind from the beginning onwards.

1:46:33 So it's a kind of celebration of art and more, but it's not an art museum.

1:46:39 It's to do with the struggle of the human race against

1:46:43 all the things that beset it and how it has triumphed,

1:46:47 and how marvelous it is and the things that have happened.

1:46:50 And not turning a blind eye to all

1:46:52 the contrasting horrible things that have happened.

1:46:54 But it's the narrative of the human race,

1:46:58 as I see it, as discernible in objects.

1:47:02 So it means that we serve two very important horizons.

1:47:07 One is that we represent, as far as we can,

1:47:12 the whole world with no injudicious attention paid to any one or other culture,

1:47:19 that they're all to us one.

1:47:22 So there's no favoring any religious group,

1:47:27 any country group, anything of the kind.

1:47:30 It's the human species.

1:47:32 We try to tell the narrative of, in its own right,

1:47:37 and how it overlaps with its neighbors

1:47:41 and what it's learned from what came before.

1:47:44 All those features together is really what the concern of the museum is.

1:47:49 And of course, to collect everything we...

1:47:52 or has been to collect everything we can to tell those narratives,

1:47:56 and also to look after them according to scientific principle.

1:48:01 So, all those things at once are the task for the British Museum.

1:48:07 And the second horizon it serves is the unborn.

1:48:12 So, babies yet to be born,

1:48:16 and their children, and their children, and their children.

1:48:18 And it seems to me that the task

1:48:20 of the museum is of such cultural significance and such,

1:48:24 so to speak, sacred validity, that it shouldn't have to put up

1:48:29 with people carping about this or that or saying,

1:48:33 "Museums are sinful and wicked and should

1:48:36 be demolished," because the people who say

1:48:39 these things don't really have any idea

1:48:41 of actually what it really does stand for.

1:48:44 And it's a kind of lighthouse in a universe where we are surrounded by darkness,

1:48:53 ignorance, stupidity, uninterest, disinterest,

1:48:56 skepticism, ignorance, and so forth.

1:49:02 about the very issues that we're interested in.

1:49:05 And it's one of the places in the world

1:49:08 where you can talk about truth and beauty

1:49:11 and elegance and intelligence without it being an affront

1:49:15 to people who have none of those qualities,

1:49:17 and without it being the kind of speech

1:49:19 that people shudder or they think you're being,

1:49:22 Naive about it, because those are the crucial things.

1:49:25 And also about religion,

1:49:27 that we don't favor a religion and we don't sponsor a religion.

1:49:31 We try to look at them for what they

1:49:34 are and to assess their relationships and what they offer.

1:49:40 Perhaps with less acerbity and less criticism

1:49:44 than I would if I was the director,

1:49:46 I would try to put them down the wrong end of a microscope and look at them

1:49:50 for what they are and what they have done

1:49:52 and what's been done in the name of religion.

1:49:54 You probably would never get away with that, but maybe one day that will be

1:49:59 an important part because it's a major contributive

1:50:01 factor to what's happened to the human race,

1:50:04 which has never really articulated sharply about what religion has

1:50:09 done to us and where we might have been without it.

1:50:13 Because not having religion does not mean not having law or morality

1:50:17 or sensitivity or consideration or love or any of those things.

1:50:21 None of those things depends on religion,

1:50:24 and those are the things which are important.

1:50:28 So I think it's people say, "Oh,

1:50:31 you say this 'cause you work there and you, you know,

1:50:33 you're a curator, you wouldn't say that, that the British

1:50:36 Museum is a special place." It's nothing to do with that.

1:50:38 It is actually a special place because you cannot point

1:50:42 to another museum in the world with the same task.

1:50:46 For example, the Louvre is basically a museum of art,

1:50:51 basically a museum of art, not a museum of ideas.

1:50:54 And the Met is definitely a museum of art.

1:50:57 It's called the Museum of Art and that's their priority.

1:51:00 Design and color and shape.

1:51:02 To us, to my mind, it's the British Museum.

1:51:06 factor among many others.

1:51:07 And we're not an art museum and we're not a local museum,

1:51:10 we're not a museum of the history of the bicycle,

1:51:14 we're not a celebration of evil.

1:51:16 We are, as it were, doing, as I see it, the best we could do if, for example,

1:51:23 a whole load of Martians arrived in the Great Court

1:51:29 and burst through the front door and said to us,

1:51:33 "Tell us tell us all about this place.

1:51:36 Tell us about the world.

1:51:37 Can you do it fast 'cause we got to leave?" And if you took them round and said,

1:51:42 "Look at this, look at this, look at this, look

1:51:44 at this," they'd get some picture which wasn't insane.

1:51:47 The only thing they wouldn't get is a recording of Jonny B.

1:51:51 Goode by Chuck Berry, but apparently one's been put into space.

1:51:54 Yeah.

1:51:55 I've heard about it.

1:51:56 So this is a very comforting thing.

1:51:58 But that's kind of what...

1:51:59 The task of the British Museum is to do

1:52:01 that but for the entirety of human history.

1:52:03 Yeah.

1:52:03 It can be done.

1:52:03 It would be a store of artifacts-- Yes- ...that are

1:52:07 the raindrops from which you can reconstruct the waterfall.

1:52:09 Precisely so.

1:52:10 And it's not a valid criticism to say to us

1:52:14 that most of the stuff is not on exhibition, which is what everybody says.

1:52:18 "It should go here, it should go there 'cause it's not on exhibition."

1:52:21 But we're not doing it for any

1:52:24 other reason than stockpiling for future examination.

1:52:28 See, this is the important perspective that nobody considers.

1:52:31 Because the thing is,

1:52:33 when you have something which is contemporary, contemporary,

1:52:36 if you're a clever journalist or a clever thinker,

1:52:40 you can write essays about it, you can talk about it, and you can see it,

1:52:43 but you can only see it from the perspective from which you operate.

1:52:46 And with the passage of time,

1:52:48 the significance of objects, what they stand for, time,

1:52:50 the significance of objects,

1:52:52 what they stand for, what they meant and what they can still mean shifts.

1:52:56 And the further back you go, the sharper you can understand things,

1:52:59 especially in terms of their own

1:53:01 precedent and their own modern contemporary parallels.

1:53:03 So the benefit of distance, storage, and contemplation is inestimable.

1:53:12 Inestimable.

1:53:14 There are so many questions I want to ask you.

1:53:17 What wisdom do you think the people from whom these artifacts came had,

1:53:24 that we modern-day humans may have lost or lost in part or in whole?

1:53:28 So it's often, as you've spoken about,

1:53:30 we see the ancient peoples as lesser, dumber, more primitive.

1:53:34 And you've spoken about how they are basically the same.

1:53:40 more primitive.

1:53:41 And you've spoken about how they are basically the same.

1:53:46 I think if you put them on a bus,

1:53:48 all wearing the same clothes, you wouldn't know.

1:53:50 That's my feeling.

1:53:51 But there is some, I'm sure there's

1:53:53 some greater wisdom they had about certain things,

1:53:55 as we have greater wisdom about others.

1:53:58 Thanks to Einstein, we've figured out the curvature of space-time.

1:54:04 Which they didn't know about.

1:54:07 But...

1:54:07 They knew quite a lot about astronomy, though.

1:54:09 Quite a lot about astronomy.

1:54:11 They stared at the stars.

1:54:13 Yeah, and they measured them, and they made calculations.

1:54:15 And when the Greeks went to Babylon, they thought, "Hey man,

1:54:17 this is really cool." And they wrote it all down and went home.

1:54:19 Yeah, definitely, definitely.

1:54:21 Well, I think it's a hard question to answer.

1:54:26 I think it's, it's, it's a hard question to answer.

1:54:29 But one But one of the things is that they

1:54:33 were spared things which have cluttered up the essence of humanity.

1:54:38 Because I think that the modern adherence

1:54:41 to the electronic universe is disastrous for humans,

1:54:45 and because it reduces the vitality of the human component.

1:54:52 I think it's restrictive in a way that people don't realize until it's too late.

1:54:56 that people don't realize until it's too late.

1:54:59 Like drugs, if you take drugs now and again, you think, "Oh,

1:55:02 it's fine, it's fine." Then suddenly, you realize you're addicted to heroin.

1:55:06 It's a bit like that.

1:55:07 People use the electronic world like an addictive drug,

1:55:09 and they can't get through without it.

1:55:11 And I think this is a very recent thing.

1:55:13 But I suppose I'm not a Luddite and say,

1:55:15 "We shouldn't have railway engines and we shouldn't

1:55:18 have kettles." But I think one of the things

1:55:22 about the ancient world was that people never

1:55:25 went anywhere unless they were merchants or soldiers.

1:55:27 They never went anywhere.

1:55:29 Probably people born and died in a village,

1:55:31 and then their children born and died in the village,

1:55:33 and they never knew anything about the outside world.

1:55:36 Maybe very little.

1:55:37 anything about the outside world.

1:55:39 Maybe a very little.

1:55:41 about the outside world.

1:55:42 Maybe a very little.

1:55:42 Sometimes there'd be a message, but in principle,

1:55:44 they had no idea about other countries,

1:55:46 other languages, or how big they were or anything.

1:55:50 So I don't think they had wisdom in a way

1:55:53 that you could type out following precepts will make life better.

1:55:55 Because they told lies, and they esteemed the truth, and they fell in love,

1:56:01 and they committed adultery, and they committed adultery, and they did murder.

1:56:05 They did all the things.

1:56:07 I think in a way the ancient world allowed

1:56:09 human beings to behave more naturally than it does now.

1:56:11 world allowed human beings to be- to behave more naturally than it does now,

1:56:17 the world in which we live.

1:56:19 world in which we live.

1:56:20 I mean, if you do live in a rustic environment or by the sea,

1:56:22 or you're a fisherman, in a rustic environment,

1:56:24 or by the sea, or you're a fisherman, or you...

1:56:25 I mean, all those normal, real kind of things,

1:56:28 normal, real kind of things, then it's probably all right.

1:56:30 But most people who live crammed in the cities But most

1:56:32 people who live crammed in the cities live a very,

1:56:34 very artificial life artificial life, where the principles,

1:56:37 which they regard as ineluctably crucial, are not ineluctably crucial.

1:56:39 crucial are not ineluctably crucial.

1:56:40 They're not in...

1:56:41 You know, one example is this ghastly thing on mobiles.

1:56:43 You know, one example is this ghastly thing on mobiles,

1:56:45 where you get a short clip from a real program.

1:56:47 where you get a short clip from a real program.

1:56:50 I think it's utterly, utterly wicked.

1:56:52 So you have children all over the world who cannot articulate,

1:56:56 spell, or make meaning clear, using the best,

1:56:59 most literary, and most beneficial most literary,

1:57:02 and most beneficial language that's ever been created, which is English.

1:57:06 They have to save their lives, and they use a word...

1:57:11 I'll give you an example.

1:57:14 Right?

1:57:14 Like, "I went."- Like I went.

1:57:17 Like I went.

1:57:18 So difficult to define that grammatically.

1:57:20 Difficult.

1:57:20 Like, "I should have gone," I should have gone.

1:57:23 Where "I went" or "I should have gone" means to speak.

1:57:26 gone means to speak.

1:57:27 Now, how would it be if when we see the verb "to go"

1:57:29 in Sumerian be if when we see the verb "to go" in Sumerian,

1:57:32 it actually meant to speak?

1:57:34 actually meant to speak?

1:57:35 How...

1:57:36 Where would we be?

1:57:37 Where would we be?

1:57:39 I mean, we should probably say that even at that time,

1:57:42 there was probably slang, right?

1:57:43 there was probably slang, right?

1:57:44 It just wouldn't end up written.

1:57:46 Yes, there were dialects.

1:57:47 There were words that sailors used.

1:57:48 For sure, all those things— things.

1:57:50 But they wouldn't end up in writing.

1:57:52 Sometimes they do.

1:57:53 We have to remember that Cambridge and Oxford speak

1:57:55 in a certain way that's proper and formal and very smart,

1:57:58 but there's most of the people in bars.

1:58:01 Sailors have a different way of speaking.

1:58:04 sailors have a different way of speaking.

1:58:06 They do.

1:58:07 So they would probably say, "Like, I went," and have emojis, and...

1:58:13 But the thing is, you have to moderate your vocabulary—

1:58:16 if you talk to people of a certain age,

1:58:18 because they don't know what the f*** you're talking about,

1:58:20 you're talking about, if you use language exactly.

1:58:22 And the thing that was just so

1:58:23 exquisite about English exquisite about English is, like with a barrister,

1:58:26 you can make a case which is absolutely wonderful

1:58:28 you can make a case which is absolutely wonderful,

1:58:30 because it says exactly what it means,

1:58:32 because it says exactly what it means, and there's no wiggle room.

1:58:35 And the conversation it...

1:58:36 The conversation should be like that, with no wiggle room.

1:58:38 It's not just a matter of spelling,

1:58:40 not just a matter of spelling, but the basic vocabulary.

1:58:43 You know, something...

1:58:44 You know something very interesting,

1:58:45 people say they know English or they speak English.

1:58:48 Have you ever in your life opened

1:58:50 a full-size volume of the Oxford English Dictionary?

1:58:53 It's about that thick.

1:58:54 I have a whole set.

1:58:56 I love them.

1:58:57 So this is it, you take a volume off the shelf and you

1:59:00 open the book and you run your forefinger down the various columns of writing.

1:59:05 You might have to turn several pages before

1:59:08 you find a single word you've ever heard before,

1:59:12 because English is unimaginably rich.

1:59:14 I grew up in a house where everybody read literature all the time.

1:59:20 I had three sisters and a, and then a brother, and we all read literature.

1:59:25 We went to the library every week, read lots and lots and lots of books.

1:59:28 So we all had really good vocabulary.

1:59:34 That's how you get vocabulary.

1:59:36 Otherwise you don't, because in conversation,

1:59:38 "Do you want more tea?" All this sort of stuff, you don't learn new vocabulary.

1:59:41 You have to get it from reading and listening to proper stuff.

1:59:46 Which is a very important aspect of vocabulary,

1:59:48 why it's important to know a lot of words and to speak clearly,

1:59:52 because those words also define the quality of your thoughts.

1:59:56 Sure- at the end of the day.

1:59:58 That's exactly right.

1:59:59 I must say, I think it is a pity

2:00:02 if having produced such wonderful languages in the world,

2:00:05 that their use is so inhibited.

2:00:09 I think the right way to think about it

2:00:10 is the way the British Museum thinks about it.

2:00:12 So you're commenting on the ephemeral,

2:00:15 on the thing that is in the moment right now, that is happening.

2:00:20 The reality is, only a few select things will last a hundred,

2:00:25 200 years from now about this moment in time.

2:00:28 And so we have to sort of think

2:00:33 with the big picture perspective and the slowness of time.

2:00:38 Yes, in the moment there are these catastrophes,

2:00:41 there are changing ways of speaking,

2:00:43 the technology tearing apart the fabric of society.

2:00:47 But when you zoom out, you will think about the grand ideas of Einstein,

2:00:52 the battle of ideologies with Communism and Nazism of the 20th centuries.

2:00:58 The bad, the triumphant, the rockets.

2:01:01 Humans started launching rockets, going to the moon, maybe to Mars.

2:01:05 Those things.

2:01:06 And we won't be thinking about emojis and any of that.

2:01:10 And in some sense, that's the stuff you're looking at with cuneiforms.

2:01:16 It's the things that stand the test of time, that are there.

2:01:24 That's true.

2:01:25 But I think that language, properly used,

2:01:28 is a crucial human tool for communication.

2:01:32 Absolutely, yes.

2:01:33 Speaking of which, I have to ask some more about the cuneiform tablets.

2:01:37 At the British Museum, when you're surrounded by so many...

2:01:41 And by the way, how many cuneiforms?

2:01:45 About 130,000.

2:01:47 That is so cool.

2:01:48 It is.

2:01:48 It's pretty cool.

2:01:50 What are some of the most beautiful to you?

2:01:52 Maybe ones we don't know about cuneiform.

2:01:56 Like, that make you smile?

2:01:59 Well, there are not many jokes.

2:02:00 You asked about jokes.

2:02:01 Yeah.

2:02:01 They lost their sense of humor in cuneiform.

2:02:04 Yeah, I think there is.

2:02:06 There's one I can remember.

2:02:09 A fly or a mosquito lands on the back of an elephant and says,

2:02:14 "Am I too heavy for you?" Or something like that.

2:02:16 That's sort of a Babylonian joke.

2:02:18 You wouldn't use it in the pub or anything like that.

2:02:22 Yeah, yeah.

2:02:22 You had to be there.

2:02:24 But then also, do you like Tom Lehrer?

2:02:26 Of course.

2:02:28 Okay, that's good.

2:02:29 That's good.

2:02:31 I once went to America on a lecture tour and I ended up in the town where Dr.

2:02:38 Wernher von Braun, Ended up running the American rocket-...

2:02:47 industry.

2:02:48 It doesn't matter?

2:02:50 Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down?

2:02:52 Where they come down, yeah.

2:02:52 "That's not my department," says Wernher von Braun.

2:02:55 That guy, I mean, I could tell where your wit

2:02:57 comes from, the fact that you know Tom Lehrer.

2:03:00 But he's such a- the way he plays the piano is fantastic.

2:03:04 I think my dad recorded them off the radio on a reel-to-reel tape recorder,

2:03:07 and I learned them all by heart because they were so fantastic.

2:03:10 But I- I knew a Harvard professor who I stayed with once who was a Sumerologist.

2:03:14 And his wife said that she knew Tom Lehrer when he was in the math department-

2:03:18 and they used to have parties and he always

2:03:20 played the piano in the corner of the room.

2:03:23 He's just amazing, that man.

2:03:25 Yeah, I mean, he had a real- You have that.

2:03:28 I've watched a lot of your stuff.

2:03:30 Your whole way of being, the wit.

2:03:32 There's something about that, like, biting wit.

2:03:36 It's a bit of humor, bit of sadness in it.

2:03:40 It just kind of feels like it really quickly gets

2:03:45 to the complexity of what it means to be human.

2:03:49 I think so.

2:03:50 But the paradoxical thing about Tom Lehrer is that when

2:03:54 he's talking about the bomb and all that, and devices,

2:04:00 and international trouble, it's so unchanged.

2:04:07 And- and same with Dr.

2:04:09 Strangelove.

2:04:09 It's just, it's very remarkable.

2:04:11 Anyway, next time you're here or when you're here,

2:04:13 you should come and see me in the museum-- I will-

2:04:16 and I'll show you some of these confounded things for yourself.

2:04:21 I'll show you the Chicago Dictionary and give you a grammar book to learn.

2:04:26 Irving, you're a remarkable human being.

2:04:28 Well, I'm very glad we met.

2:04:29 I-- It's truly an honor to meet you, to talk to you.

2:04:31 Me too.

2:04:32 It's been very interesting.

2:04:33 Irving, thank you so much for talking to me.

2:04:34 It's been a big pleasure for me, Lex.

2:04:36 Be well.

2:04:38 Thanks for listening to this conversation with Irving Finkel.

2:04:42 To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description,

2:04:44 where you can also find links to contact me,

2:04:47 ask questions, give feedback, and so on.

2:04:50 And now, let me leave you with some words from Ludwig Wittgenstein,

2:04:54 "The limits of my language means the limits

2:04:57 of my world." Thank you for listening.

2:05:00 I hope to see you next time.