Limits of language

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

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

We should say that the name of that system that lasted for 3,000 years is cuneiform. Yeah. So in the 19th century, about 1840, 1850, they started to find these things on excavations in Iraq, the big Assyrian cities and sometimes further south, the Babylonian cities. They found these clay tablets, which in the ground lasted unimaginable lengths of time. And they were all written in what we call cuneiform script. And the cuneiform part of it means wedge-shaped, because "cuneus" in Latin means wedge. And when they first saw these signs, they realized that a cluster of marks broke down into different arrangements of triangular shapes. And it's most clear on the Assyrian reliefs where the writing is very big and you can easily tell that they were that shape. On a tablet, the wedge is not quite so predominant. So, that was it.

Yeah, absolutely. Do you think it's possible we might find much, much older... I do

So, a lot of the cuneiform language is already deciphered. Can you speak to the deciphering process? How hard is it? Maybe take us to this place for you yourself first learning a language, figuring out the puzzle of it. How does it feel? What does it look like to a brain that doesn't deeply understand it? And how do you then piece stuff together? Maybe you can go to the early days, sort of the Rosetta Stone of cuneiform. That's important. Well, the first thing is how the cuneiform writing system works, because the crucial point, and once you see it, it makes a lot of things clear, is that they wrote in syllables. So if you take the English alphabet, which of course they didn't, you have the letter B, G, D, P, H, and so forth. They couldn't write a consonant. They couldn't do that. So what they did is they had a vowel before a consonant or one after. Say you have "Ab" and "Ba." But as they had four vowels, you had to have Ab and Ba, Ib and Bi, Ub and Bu, Eb and Be.

Amazing. It is. And it's a very stimulating thing to imagine. I personally believe that Neanderthals and early Homo sapiens for sure had language, for sure they talked to one another. It's impossible that they didn't. The point came when they did, they did. And the Neanderthals, 800,000 years of living in Europe. They had to deal with the Ice Age, they all lived together, they bring up their children. You think they couldn't speak anything? They have the same apparatus. And if you have a human brain, then it responds to stimulus. And the more stimulus there is for communication, I mean, the idea that you and I are out hunting rhino...

So what do you think is the motivation, the primary driver of developing written language? Does it go hand-in-hand with civilization? I think that the media in which it appears is when there's a lot of people living in an urban environment. And with rival institutions or the king or the government or all those sorts of... ...Things. And that's why I think Gobekle Tepe must have been the same thing. I read somewhere that they're all nomads and they only came to Gobekle Tepe three months a year. I mean, that cannot be true that they were nomads. Cannot be true. To get the stone and someone has to draw on the ground the plan of the building, they have to work out how thick it's going to be, how high it's going to be. I mean, you can't just like that, like gorillas.

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

You have said the translation is part archeology, part detective work, part poetry. Can we just speak about translation and the art of it a bit more? Yes.

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

And also that thing about ghosts is that it's clear from the inscriptions, all of them that I managed to find, that nobody ever asked themselves, "Do these things exist or not?" Or, "Did I really see them or not?" They didn't. They just took it all for granted. What are ghosts? Is it usually ancestors?

And many of those stories are sadly lost to time or not yet found. You mentioned floods, and speaking of stories that have been lost and found, you're well-known for a lot of things. One of them is decoding the so-called Ark Tablet. Yeah. That was a challenge, because it's really hard to read.

Do you think this ark in the tablet actually was ever built? You did build a replica one third the size. And you, people should check out, you tell the story of that wonderfully. What did you learn from building this replica? And do you think the actual ark existed? No, I don't think so. I think it's a literary construction out of the reality that people who did survive were on boats. I mean, they had boats for sure, and you might wake up in the Persian Gulf and never know what happened, but, you know, it's a literary moral principle teaching narrative. And look, missionaries take it all around the world. That's the other thing. See, this is the mystery of it, that you have flood stories everywhere, and some of them are from meddlesome missionaries who have all these innocent little kids sitting on benches, and, "I'm going to tell you a story," like that. So it moves into this consciousness, then it gets recycled, and it gets recycled. So this is one thing.

You have to tell me about the world of ancient games. Maybe we can start with the ancient Royal Game of Ur. What is it and how were you somehow able to crack the rules of it? Well, the Royal Game of Ur is a board of 20 squares in a rather idiosyncratic form. And it was pretty much unknown until the 1920s when Sir Leonard Woolley was digging at the site of Ur, and in the graves of the royal family, Sumerian rulers, they found four or five boards of this pattern, together with dice and pieces, which showed that it was popular among them at this time, and also that wherever they were going in the world to come, they would want to be playing it. And so that was one thing, and we had the number of pieces and some dice. So lots of people had ideas about how it might have been played, and that went on like that for a very long time. And thereafter, boards for this game turned up in most of the countries of the Middle East, sometimes quite a lot of them.

As you mentioned, you are the curator at the, possibly the greatest place on Earth, the British Museum. Oh, yes.

There are so many questions I want to ask you. What wisdom do you think the people from whom these artifacts came had that we, the modern-day humans, may have lost or lost in part or in whole? It's often, as you've spoken about, we see the ancient peoples as lesser, dumber, more primitive. And you've spoken about how they are basically the same. I think if you put them on a bus all wearing the same clothes, you wouldn't know. That's my feeling.