Irving Finkel: Deciphering Secrets of Ancient Civilizations & Flood Myths

Lex Fridman introduces Irving Finkel as a scholar of ancient languages who has been a curator at the British Museum for over 45 years and a world expert on cuneiform script. Fridman also lists his expertise in Sumerian, Akkadian and Babylonian, in ancient board games, and in Mesopotamian magic, medicine, literature and culture. The conversation opens with a basic question: where and when did writing first appear?

Finkel places the first attempts that "we could call writing" in the middle of the fourth millennium, "say around 3500 BC." They came from people living between the Euphrates and Tigris Rivers, who already used clay for building and many other purposes before it became a surface for writing. He defines the core of writing as an agreed set of symbols: one person makes a sign, and another person who sees it knows what sound it stands for. He compares the reader to playback, either in the head or out loud, "a bit like a gramophone record."

He is careful to separate the earliest evidence from the actual beginning. "The truth of the matter is, we have no idea when anything began," he says. The oldest evidence dates to around 3500 BC, but he finds it "very, very unlikely" that this was close to the moment writing first started. The earliest messages were simple and pictographic, where each sign meant the thing it showed: "Foot is a foot, leg is a leg, and barley is barley."

In the standard account Finkel describes, the shift happened "very, very gradually." First came ways to write numbers. Then came the realization that a picture could stand for the sound of a word as well as the thing itself, so a picture of a foot also meant the sound of the word for foot. He calls this "the crucial thing." He suggests that "some probably very, very imaginative and clever persons" had a lightbulb moment and saw they could build a full range of sound signs. That freed writing from pictures and let people record language itself: grammar, and soon proverbs and literature.

He repeats that the timing is unknown: "we really have no idea when it was first taken." The surviving evidence still shows a "clear-ish" path. The system started simple, grew more complex, and "then it became magnificent." A well-trained scribe could write Sumerian and Babylonian, which Finkel calls the two main native languages of Iraq. The same scribe could also write down the sound of any other language he heard. Finkel's playful example is someone speaking French "ahead of their time."

As evidence, Finkel points to Bronze Age texts in "funny languages around the world" that were written in cuneiform purely by ear. Sometimes the scribes taking dictation wrote down material they could not understand themselves, although someone else could read and understand it. He sums up cuneiform as "complex, bewildering-looking, off-putting" but also "very beautiful, very flexible." It lasted well over three millennia, "probably closer to four," before the alphabet, which he concedes was "much, much more useful and much more sensible," slowly replaced it.

Finkel argues that the most important step after the invention itself was controlling it. Soon after writing took off, scribes kept adding signs for sounds or ideas that had no sign yet. He believes that at some stage "probably only one person" saw two problems. Without control, the number of signs would keep multiplying until everyone had their own writing. And no one could remember the signs unless they were written down in a way that could be looked up.

The answer, he says, was lexicography. Early in the third millennium, scribes compiled lists of things made of wood, things made of reeds, colours, countries, gods and more. These lists were a systematic effort to standardize the signs, make them retrievable, and teach them. Finkel credits this early rigour with keeping the script "more or less as it was" for three millennia or more. He calls the influence of "those early visionaries" "fantastically effective."

How Finkel illustrates the script's continuity: scholars in Babylon in the third or second century, when Alexander was there, could look at a dug-up tablet in very early writing and "have a pretty good idea what it meant"; they would recognize the ancient signs and see how they related; the lexical lists worked like a "spinal cord" for the system and were "jealously safeguarded and protected."

Fridman names the system: cuneiform. Finkel explains how the name arose. Around 1840 to 1850, excavations at the large Assyrian cities in Iraq, and sometimes further south at Babylonian cities, turned up clay tablets that had survived "unimaginable lengths of time" in the ground. The name means wedge-shaped, from the Latin "cuneus." Early observers saw that each cluster of marks broke down into arrangements of triangular shapes. Finkel notes that the wedges are clearest on the large writing of Assyrian reliefs and less obvious on tablets.

Finkel jokes that making sure everyone in the country knows the word cuneiform has become a lifetime's work, because meeting someone who has never heard of it "is appalling." He treats the mission seriously, though. The tablets hold a huge amount of knowledge, from everyday letters, business documents and contracts to royal accounts of military campaigns.

The genres also included literature, magic and medicine, which Finkel says covers essentially everything people would use writing for. Clay had "the unexpected quality" of surviving in the ground. He estimates that besides the "hundreds of thousands of tablets" in museums and collections, "there must be millions of them in the ground awaiting excavation." He presents this as an estimate, not a count, and calls it "a comforting thought, because they're safe there and protected."

Fridman calls writing perhaps the greatest invention in human history and asks how hard it was to come up with. He singles out the encoding of sound as the real leap: drawing barley or the sun makes intuitive sense, "But to actually write down sound is a genius invention." Finkel agrees that the distinction matters, then calls the accepted sequence "rather paradoxical."

He sets out the standard view first. The earliest tablets use pictographs that mean what they show, "a very limited method" that cannot record grammar. Archaeology suggests the second phase came when the same signs also took on the sounds of words, which Finkel describes as "all these wonderful ice cubes" able to express every sound of the language. He calls this pictures-then-sound order "the received law from Assyriology."

Well, I have to say, I find this very hard to believe

His objection is practical. If a community that shared one language urgently needed a common system of marks, why not start with sound signs? Speakers could have worked out the language's sound components without naming them vowels and consonants. He offers a hypothetical: "We have 26, let's say they had 50 signs." With that many sound signs, they "could write anything without any further trouble." He finds it "very bewildering" that they would begin with the least flexible system, and says, "I don't know why they bothered with it."

Finkel frames his alternative explicitly as a hunch: the archaeological evidence on this point "is ultimately misleading." He proposes that long before the Sumerians, people across the Middle East were in contact. They traded, "probably even had wars," and exchanged messages. People who did not share a language would have relied on a long-running picture system, such as merchants drawing "three little sheep" to show they had three sheep to sell. On this view, the Sumerian pictographs come at the end of a very long period, when someone decided to take "these stupid inhibited no smoking signs and write language."

He presents this as his own interpretation, not established fact: "That is what I think happened." He gives a reason for why pictures might come first, but he does not cite any surviving examples of the earlier cross-language picture system he proposes. When Fridman asks whether the view is controversial, Finkel answers: "Highly controversial. Many Assyriologists would leave the room."

Irving Finkel starts by saying he is not afraid of controversy, and his first point explains why a syllabic writing system is a natural development. He says you do not need an alphabet to break words into sounds. Sumerian builds its verbs from a central root, his example being “du,” meaning “to go,” with prefixes such as E, Mu or Ba attached before it. He says one of these is a passive and another an active, and more elements follow the root. In his words, “each particle creates a bit of meaning.” He jokes that the system is “called agglutinative by people who like to make things look more important than they are.”

His illustration is a single long verb form that can carry a meaning like “He would’ve done it if he could, but he couldn’t.” His practical claim is that anyone setting out to write such a language would first make signs for the syllables that keep recurring, Mu, Ba and E, “because every five minutes people made those noises.” He presents this as common sense about how phonetic signs arise, not as a documented historical sequence.

Lex Fridman asks whether much older cuneiform-type tablets might be found. Finkel says he thinks so, and widens the question to pictographic tablets older than cuneiform. His evidence comes from Göbekli Tepe in Turkey. He says that among the archaeologists' published photographs, which he says they “unwisely put online,” one color plate shows “a round green stone like a scarab from Egypt.” It has an arched back and a flat bottom, and signs he calls hieroglyphic are carved into the flat side. He says “No one said anything about it at all.”

His reading is that “this was a stamp to ratify”: pressed into clay or another sealing material, it would leave an impression. He insists “It must be that,” and dates the object to “about 9000 BC.” He rests the case on the object's form. Because it is a finished object with a flat surface made for pressing, he argues it cannot be dismissed as “just a squiggle on a pot.” He imagines it used for a contract or building arrangement, such as paying for bricks, with an official pressing it down to approve the deal.

That is pictographic writing. Maybe even as phonetic writing, I don’t know, but it was writing thousands of years before in the south.

He states the claim firmly but limits how far it goes. He calls the signs pictographic, describes them as “a wiggly snake and a wiggly this,” and admits he does not know if they were phonetic. He also leaves open what the seal recorded: an official approving goods, or “his dad’s name or whatever it is.” When Fridman calls this “a really controversial statement,” Finkel agrees, “It is really controversial,” and still answers that there was writing at the time of Göbekli Tepe.

Finkel takes on the account his professor gave him as a student: writing appeared in Mesopotamia because complex cities, with ziggurats, large buildings and many people, needed administration. He turns that reasoning around. If Sumer needed writing to run things around 3000 BC, he argues, Göbekli Tepe “sure as hell” needed it too. He says excavation there is far from finished and the site goes “on and on like Manchester and Newcastle United.”

He frames the old rule as saying that architecture planned and built on principle, with many different people involved, was impossible without writing in southern Iraq. So he asks how it could suddenly happen much earlier at Göbekli Tepe. He says the seal answers that question. One thing to note: by his own dates, about 9000 BC against about 3000 BC, the gap is roughly 6,000 years, yet he says “7,000 years earlier.”

His case from organization appeals to plausibility, not to excavated texts. He describes the finish, structure and vision of the Göbekli buildings as “astonishing.” He asks how the workforce, tools and coordination could have been managed without writing, and mocks the idea of doing it by megaphone (“Your breakfast!”) before answering “No way. No way.”

Finkel offers a social setting for early writing. People from Anatolia brought metal or precious stones south, knew the south had plenty of goods, wanted to trade, and needed to communicate. His modern comparison is a cigarette with an X through it, a sign everyone understands without knowing the local words for cigarette, cancer, filter or tobacco. “It’s pictographic writing. We still use it,” he says. He believes that was the main system in use at that time.

Behind this sits an assumption about people in the past: “the people at this time were not stupid. They weren’t gorillas. They weren’t less advanced than we are.” He suggests they were “probably indistinguishable from what we are.” He pictures merchants, wanderers and people who say “Let’s go down the river and see where we end up,” and calls it “surely how it was.” This picture comes from intuition and analogy. He cites no specific evidence for it in this passage.

Finkel names his method openly. He calls himself a great believer in Sherlock Holmes as a way of teaching intelligence, rationality and logic. He recalls a line Holmes quotes, which he notes was not original to Holmes, that “it is theoretically possible to infer the Niagara Falls from a raindrop.” Then he applies it: “that seal from Gobekli Tepe is a raindrop from which I infer writing.”

He supports the inference with a parallel. He says it is “perfectly possible they all wrote on flat leaves,” because that has happened in many parts of the world. He brings in the Indus Valley, where, he says, “all we have is seals, basically,” and adds that people write “the most abject nonsense” about that script. In his view those seals also served to ratify, and carry an owner's name in three, four or perhaps five signs, “probably me, son of my dad, or milkman or whatever it is.” He calls it “obvious” that the Indus people also wrote on perishable material, since they “can’t just have had inscribed stone seals,” and points out that many parts of India still write on palm leaf.