A green stone seal from Göbekli Tepe (c. 9000 BC) with carved hieroglyphic signs is evidence of writing thousands of years before Sumer — contradicting the standard narrative that writing emerged only in urban Mesopotamia.

(00:00:00) The following is a conversation with Irving Finkel, who is a scholar of ancient languages curator at the British Museum for over 45 years and is a much admired and respected world expert on cuneiform script and more generally on ancient languages of Sumerian, Akkadian, and Babylonian, and also on ancient board games and Mesopotamian magic, medicine, literature, and culture. (00:00:29) 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. (00:00:44) And now, a quick few second mention of each sponsor. (00:00:47) Check them out in the description or at lexfriedman.com/sponsors. (00:00:51) It is in fact the best way to support this podcast. 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(00:07:39) And if I do, after I'm done with the run, I just have a greater clarity about the world and about myself. (00:07:46) So I try to run every day. (00:07:50) But anyway, get a free 8 count sample pack with any purchase. (00:07:53) Try it at drinkelement.com/lex. (00:07:57) This episode is also brought to you by AG1, an all-in-one daily drink to support better health and peak performance. (00:08:04) Like I said, I was hanging out with family and my parents were by AGZ, which I still haven't tried, but they recommend it very highly. (00:08:14) So I'm an AG1 guy. (00:08:16) I guess AGZ is a nightly sleep support that helps with restful, restorative sleep. (00:08:26) Anyway, my parents really do swear by it. (00:08:28) So if that's the thing you're interested in, please try it out. (00:08:31) It is melatonin free and doesn't just help you fall asleep, it helps with the quality of the sleep. (00:08:39) But yeah, AG1 is in the stack of things I consume. (00:08:43) When I'm traveling to help me feel like I'm at home and I've been traveling quite a lot recently and I will be traveling a lot in the new year. (00:08:53) And the feeling of home. (00:08:56) The feeling of being grounded in a place that feels like home is really important. (00:09:01) So it's the little traditions, the little habits I build for myself to remind me that even when I'm far away, I can carry a little bit of the comforts of home with me. (00:09:14) All right, they'll give you one month's supply of fish oil when you sign up at drinkag1.com slash Lex. (00:09:22) This is the Lex Friedman Podcast. (00:09:24) To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description, where you can also find links to contact me, ask questions, get feedback, and so on. (00:09:33) And now, dear friends, here's Irving Finkel. (00:09:53) Where and when did writing originate in human civilization? (00:09:57) Let's go back a few thousand years. (00:10:00) The first attempts at writing that we could call writing go back to the middle of the 4th millennium, say, around 3,500 BC, something like that. (00:10:11) There were people in the Middle East, individuals who lived (00:10:14) 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, a surface, that another person, when they see it, they know what sound it engenders. (00:10:36) That is the essence of writing, that there's an agreed system of symbols, (00:10:40) 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. (00:10:49) So when it really began, it's a... (00:10:51) terribly, terribly awkward question for us, because the truth of the matter is we have no idea when anything began. (00:10:58) And all we can say is that the oldest evidence we have is around 3,500 BC. (00:11:05) But whether that was anywhere near the time or the stage when this started off for the first time seems to me very, very unlikely. (00:11:15) So among these, the Mesopotamians, around 3,500, they started to do this. (00:11:21) They made-up signs, which everybody understood, and they could write simple pictographic messages. (00:11:28) Foot is a foot, leg is a leg, and barley is barley. (00:11:31) And then very, very gradually, they had the idea of how you could represent numerals. (00:11:37) And then they had the idea that the pictures could also represent signs. (00:11:40) And once they had the idea that you could write sounds, (00:11:44) with pictures. (00:11:44) That's the crucial thing, that a picture of a foot not only meant foot, but it meant the sound of the word for foot. (00:11:51) Once this happened, some probably very, very imaginative and clever persons had a kind of light bulb moment when they realized that they could develop a whole panoply of signs which could convey sound. (00:12:07) And once you had that, (00:12:10) you're liberated from pictographic writing into a position where you can record language. (00:12:16) So language, grammar, and all the rest of it, and before long, proverbs and literature and all the other things that got written down. (00:12:24) So it was a pretty gigantic step whenever it was taken, but we really have no idea when it was first taken. (00:12:30) But the first evidence we have presents a sort of clear-ish sort of picture. (00:12:35) It was simple and it got more complicated and then it became magnificent. (00:12:40) so that with all the signs, a fluent, well-trained scribe could not only write down the Sumerian language, which was one of the native tongues of Iraq, or the Babylonian language, which was the other main language of Iraq, but also any other language he heard. (00:12:55) So if somebody came speaking French ahead of their time and spoke out loud, he could record (00:13:03) with these signs, the sound of French. (00:13:05) And we have examples of funny languages in the world around in the Bronze Age, which were written in cuneiform purely by ear and often sometimes the scribes who recorded by dictation or by something wrote stuff they couldn't understand, but somebody else could read and understand it. (00:13:21) So what you have is long before the alphabet, when the alphabet was not even a dream, (00:13:30) complex, bewildering-looking, off-putting writing system, which was actually very beautiful and very flexible, and lasted for well over 3 millennia, probably closer to 4 millennia. (00:13:40) And it took a long time for the alphabet, which anybody would say was much, much more useful and much more sensible to displace it. (00:13:47) So it's one of the major stages of man's intellect, because quite soon after the writing first took off, (00:13:58) the signs began to proliferate. (00:14:00) And someone said, hey, we haven't got a sign for this sound, or we haven't got a sign for this idea. (00:14:05) And so it began to swell out. (00:14:09) And at some extremely remarkable stage, one, probably only one person, suddenly realized that if there was no control, they would grow exponentially and exponentially until it was all nonsense and everybody had their own writing. (00:14:24) And the second thing is that no one could remember them. (00:14:27) unless they were written down in a retrievable way. (00:14:29) So they invented not only writing, they invented lexicography, which means that early in the third millennium, they put down all the things that were made of wood and all the things that were made of reeds and all the names of colors and of countries and all the gods and everything. (00:14:45) They made a systematic attempt to make these signs. (00:14:50) to standardize them and to make them retrievable, and of course to teach them. (00:14:54) And having exercised that rigor from the outset, it meant that the thing became streamlined and stayed more or less as it was all the way through for three millennia or more, because the stamp put on it (00:15:10) by those early visionaries, not only who came up with the system and how it would work, but to preserve it and to safeguard it was fantastically effective. (00:15:21) So it means that there were scholars in Babylon in the 3rd century or the 2nd century when Alexander was there, for example, if somebody dug up a tablet in very early writing, (00:15:31) They would have a pretty good idea what it meant. (00:15:33) They would recognize the signs even though they were so ancient and they'd see the relationships between them. (00:15:38) So you have a fantastically strong system where the spinal cord was structured in a lexicographic regular system. (00:15:50) So lexicography and what the signs were was jealously safeguarded and protected and it lasted fantastically. (00:16:00) We should say that the name of that system that lasted for 3,000 years is cuneiform. (00:16:05) Yeah. (00:16:06) So in the 19th century, about 1840, 1850, they started to find these things on excavations in Iraq, the biggest Syrian cities and sometimes further south, the Babylonian cities. (00:16:18) They found these clay tablets, which in the ground lasted unimaginable lengths of time. (00:16:24) And they were all written in what we call cuneiform script. (00:16:27) And the cuneiform part of it (00:16:30) means wedge shaped, because cuneus in Latin means wedge. (00:16:35) And when they first saw these signs, they realized that a cluster of marks broke down into different arrangements of triangular shapes. (00:16:46) 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. (00:16:53) On a tablet, the wedge is not quite so predominant. (00:16:57) So that was it. (00:16:57) So they first called them cuneatic or cuneiform and the word stuck. (00:17:02) And of course, growing up in the British Museum and reading these things for a living becomes a kind of lifetime's work to make sure that everybody in the country knows what cuneiform means. (00:17:13) Because once in a while you meet somebody you've never heard of the word at all. (00:17:16) And this is appalling. (00:17:17) So people do survive, however, but it's an important mission because it's such an achievement by man. (00:17:24) And so much knowledge was encapsulated in these lumps of clay because they used it for everyday things like letters and business documents and contracts. (00:17:34) This is one thing. (00:17:35) And then the kings wrote long, elaborate accounts of their campaigns and their military activities. (00:17:42) And then there was proper literature, belle, letter, and magic and medicine. (00:17:48) All other genre of literature that we would naturally list on a sheet of paper in alphabetic writing, what you would use writing for, they basically did. (00:17:57) And it had the unexpected quality that most of these clay things lasted in the ground until now. (00:18:04) So however many hundreds of thousands of tablets are in the world's museums and collections, there must be millions of them in the ground awaiting excavation. (00:18:14) So (00:18:16) In a way, that's a comforting thought because they're safe there and protected. (00:18:21) You said that the development of cuneiform, of these tablets, of written language is one of the greatest, probably the greatest invention in human history. (00:18:31) How hard do you think it was to come up with this? (00:18:35) And we should make clear that that very specific element of encoding sound (00:18:44) the tablet, that's the genius invention. (00:18:47) Drawing a picture makes sense. (00:18:49) Okay, here's, you know, barley, here's the sun, here's whatever, the actual object. (00:18:55) Exactly. (00:18:56) But to actually write down sound is a genius invention. (00:19:00) Well, I think it's rather paradoxical, because the first generation or so of tablets that we have are written in these pictographic signs, (00:19:09) where each sign means what it looks like. (00:19:11) So this is a very limited method of recording messages, and it doesn't lend itself to recording grammar. (00:19:18) And then the secondary phase, as we understand it from archaeology, is the perception that you could take these signs, still meaning what they look like, but also what the words sounded like. (00:19:30) So then you have all these wonderful ice cubes, (00:19:33) which express all the sounds of the language from which you can record words and grammar and everything else. (00:19:40) Now, the thing is, the received law from assyriology is it was that way round, that first we had pictures and secondly we had sound. (00:19:50) Well, I have to say, I find this very hard to believe, because if you had a group of people in an environment where it was compellingly necessary (00:20:02) to make a system that you made marks on a surface which everybody could understand and use. (00:20:08) Why wouldn't you start out with signs that made sounds? (00:20:13) Because everybody speaks the same language, right? (00:20:16) So they didn't have A, B, C, D, E, F, G, but they could easily work out all the vowels and consonants without naming them as vowels and consonants, but the component parts. (00:20:26) So they could have had signs that started out because if you decided you had, we have 26, (00:20:32) say they had 50 signs that would create the sound. (00:20:36) They could write anything without any further trouble. (00:20:39) So I find it very bewildering that they started off with the least flexible and the least adaptable system of pictographs and then they moved on to the sound. (00:20:50) I don't know why they bothered with it and my hunch is (00:20:54) that the archaeological evidence that we have on this score is ultimately misleading, because I think this, that probably for a very, very long time before the Sumerians, people in the world, the world of what we call the Middle East, were in contact, they traded, they probably even had wars, and they had messages between them. (00:21:13) And I think there was a long-running system of communication between people who didn't share a language. (00:21:22) for whom pictures would suffice. (00:21:25) So if merchants come and they have three sheep to sell, so they draw three little sheep, you know how much it is and what they are and so forth. (00:21:34) And so I think that what happened with the Sumerians, with their pictographic signs, is that those signs are right at the end of a very, very, very long period of time when somebody thought, (00:21:48) What we can do is take these stupid, inhibited, no smoking signs and write language. (00:21:55) Yeah. (00:21:55) That is what I think happened. (00:21:57) That's what I think happened. (00:21:59) Is this a controversial statement? (00:22:00) Highly controversial. (00:22:02) Highly controversial. (00:22:03) Many asteriologists would leave the room. (00:22:05) Yeah. (00:22:07) But I'm not scared of controversy because it's natural. (00:22:10) I mean, if you think about it, it's natural because... (00:22:15) You don't have to have an alphabet to divide your word into sounds. (00:22:19) See, for example, in Sumerian, you have a funny system of you have a root like do, which means to go, and then you have prefixes like i or mu or ba. (00:22:31) and one's a passive, one's an active, and this and this. (00:22:34) So when you have a sentence, you have one of the mu, ba, or e prefixes, then you have the root, and then you have things at the end. (00:22:41) So it's called agglutinative by people who like to make things look more important than they are. (00:22:45) So you have the central thing, you slap stuff on the beginning, slap stuff on the end, and each particle creates a bit of meaning. (00:22:51) So you have a long verb, which tells you he would have done it if he could, but he couldn't kind of thing in the form of the verb. (00:22:57) But the thing is, if you wanted to write that, you and I decided to write the answer, the first thing we would do (00:23:02) is have a sign moo and then we'd have bar and then we'd have E because every 5 minutes people make those noises. (00:23:10) Yeah. (00:23:10) You see what I mean? (00:23:11) Yeah, absolutely. (00:23:12) Do you think it's possible we might find... (00:23:16) much, much older. (00:23:18) I do. (00:23:19) Cuneiform type tablets. (00:23:21) Well, or pictographic type tablets, but before the cuneiform and the drawing type, and I'll tell you why, because there's this marvelous site in Turkey called Gobekli Tepe. (00:23:31) Oh, yeah. (00:23:31) You know about Gobekli Tepe? (00:23:32) Yes. (00:23:33) Well, everybody knows about the buildings and the architecture and the sculpture. (00:23:38) Everybody knows about it. (00:23:39) If you go all the way through the photographs, which the archaeologists unwisely put online, you will find in the middle of (00:23:46) one color plate with lots of other things, a round green stone like a scarab from Egypt, that's to say it has an arched back and a flat bottom, and on the flat bottom there are hieroglyphic signs carved in the stone, right? (00:24:00) No one said anything about it at all, but it's clear to me, A, (00:24:06) that this was a stamp to ratify where the carvings of the signs on clay or some other ceiling material would leave an impression. (00:24:16) It must be that. (00:24:18) So this is about 9000 BC. (00:24:22) Now, when I was a boy at university, my professor said to me, (00:24:25) The reason you can, writing evolved in Mesopotamia because they had complex cities with ziggurats and big buildings and lots of people and they had to organize everything. (00:24:35) And so they invented writing to cope with it. (00:24:38) Well, if they had to cope with that in Sumer in 3000 BC, they sure as hell had to do it at Gobekli Tepe because they hardly even begun to finish excavating the sites of Gobekli Tepe. (00:24:50) They go on and on like Manchester and Newcastle United. (00:24:54) And really, (00:24:56) The old rule would be you could not have architecture like that, without, planned and built according to principle with all the different people. (00:25:06) You couldn't have that without writing in southern Iraq. (00:25:10) So how come suddenly, that 7,000 years earlier, they do it there? (00:25:14) And that green stone shows that they had writing. (00:25:19) That was an official who sealed this, got the stuff or whatever it was, or was his dad's name or whatever it is, got a wiggly snake and a wiggly this. (00:25:27) That is pictographic writing. (00:25:29) Maybe even as phonetic, I don't know, but it was writing thousands of years before in the South. (00:25:37) And that's what I think it is. (00:25:38) You know, people came with metal from, or precious stones from Anatolia. (00:25:43) They knew that in the South, they had lots and lots of stuff. (00:25:45) They wanted to trade, they had to communicate. (00:25:48) And it's basically (00:25:49) like having a cigarette with an X through the middle. (00:25:52) Everybody in the world knows what that means. (00:25:54) They don't know what the word for cigarette is in this language, or cancer, or filter, or tobacco. (00:26:00) It doesn't matter. (00:26:01) That's pictographic writing. (00:26:03) We still use it. (00:26:05) And it's above all kinds of mess. (00:26:08) And I think that was the prevailing system, because I honestly believe that the people at this time were not stupid. (00:26:14) They weren't guerrillas. (00:26:16) They weren't less advanced than we are. (00:26:18) They were probably indistinguishable from what we are. (00:26:20) So you have merchants and wanderers and people who see, let's go down the river and see where we end up. (00:26:26) And people were looking for money, looking for women, looking for everything. (00:26:30) But that's surely how it was. (00:26:32) But if you look at those (00:26:33) Beckley Buildings with a skeptical eye how it could be. (00:26:38) I mean, their finish of it is astonishing, the structure of it, the vision of it, so the workforce and the tools and the organisation. (00:26:47) what do they do it with a megaphone? (00:26:49) Your breakfast and all that kind of stuff. (00:26:50) No way. (00:26:51) No way. (00:26:52) So that's a really controversial statement. (00:26:54) It is really controversial. (00:26:55) At the time of Gobekitepe, they may have been already a writing system. (00:26:59) There was, because the thing is about it, that it's a seal to ratify. (00:27:04) It's not just a squiggle on a pot and you can say, oh, that's just a piece of debt. (00:27:08) This is a finished thing with a flat surface. (00:27:11) You press it down, say you have some contract, you have some building arrangements, some, we're paying for these bricks, (00:27:17) whatever it was, and the official person had to squash it down and it leaves the impression. (00:27:22) I mean, I'm a great believer in Sherlock Holmes as a teaching system for intelligence and rationality and logic and thinking. (00:27:30) I read those stories a million times when I was a kid. (00:27:33) And the thing about them, one of the things which impresses me most of all was this point quoted by Holmes, not original to him, that it is theoretically possible to infer the Niagara Falls (00:27:45) from a raindrop. (00:27:47) That's a powerful statement. (00:27:49) It's a powerful statement. (00:27:50) Well, that seal from Gobekli, Teppe, is a raindrop, from which I infer writing. (00:27:57) And it's perfectly possible they all wrote on flat leaves, in many parts of the world, that's what happened. (00:28:02) So for example, in the Indus Valley, people write the most abject nonsense about the Indus Valley writing system, but all we have is seals basically. (00:28:12) So they are also for ratification purposes and they have the name of the owner in three or four or maybe 5 signs. (00:28:19) And it's probably me, son of my dad or (00:28:22) milkman or whatever it is. (00:28:24) And it's obvious, it's obvious that they had writing on a perishable material. (00:28:30) They can't just have had inscribed stone seals. (00:28:35) And many parts of India today write on palm leaf. (00:28:39) Why should it be any different? (00:28:40) So people think, you know, well, just because it's now, it wouldn't be then. (00:28:44) But actually, that argument is utterly, utterly fallacious because the process of evolution is stymied left, right and center (00:28:52) by inertia. (00:28:53) Inertia is nearly as strong as evolution. (00:28:57) And this is something that the people who talk about progress and ideas have no idea about. (00:29:02) First of all, your whole line of work, you're making me realize, is a kind of like Sherlock Holmes type of process. (00:29:10) The deciphering of the language, archaeology of taking those pieces of evidence and trying to reconstruct a vision of that world. (00:29:18) And now you're making me realize (00:29:21) that even all the cuneiform tablets we have is just a raindrop compared to the waterfall of thousands of years of humans. (00:29:34) Yes, we have a lot, but it's nothing in comparison with what existed. (00:29:38) But not only that, see, we don't have to decipher anymore. (00:29:41) We can read Akkadian or Babylonian Sumerian pretty well fluently. (00:29:46) That's not a problem. (00:29:47) So the information which you can get from these sources, especially 3 (00:29:51) millennia of sources is very, very substantial, very substantial, but it means that Assyriologists have the inbuilt idea that what we have is something like all there ever was, which is absurd. (00:30:06) For example, there's a period called the Earth 3 period where people lived in city-states, they wrote very small account tablets by the thousand, and there were two or three major cities (00:30:18) where this is the way they lived. (00:30:20) People had to bring tithes and offerings and everything was recorded by what I always refer to and people sympathize with is the ancestors of the inland revenue. (00:30:30) Because everything had to be written down so that some schmuck could check it and fill out the ledger and some other schmuck above him could okay it so there's no funny business or no mistakes. (00:30:40) Now the thing is there are thousands of those tablets written in about 2100 to 2000 BC, thousands of them. (00:30:48) about the size of a box of matches. (00:30:50) So people like to generalize about the Sumerians at this time of the world. (00:30:55) But they probably all came out of two rooms because they were dumped when they were no longer needed in some kind of room. (00:31:06) And the archaeologists in the 19th century came down on these and then all the locals came and they bought, dug them up and they sold them all over the place and they'd gone all over the world, thousands and thousands of them. (00:31:16) out of probably two stories rooms, which is not a whole culture or a whole country or their whole history or their belief systems. (00:31:26) So our view of it is slewed by the nature of the material. (00:31:31) And sometimes the material is opulent and benevolent, but not always. (00:31:36) And sometimes the people who work with slewed material don't even realize how slewed it is. (00:31:42) I mean, you know, (00:31:44) It's quite remarkable. (00:31:45) So you and all your time of studying cuneiform tablets, do you sometimes late at night get a glimpse of the waterfall? (00:31:54) Like, can you imagine? (00:31:56) Yes, I can imagine. (00:31:58) I can imagine easily because once in a while a library's discovered in the 1850s at Nineveh, which was the Assyrian capital, there was a fat king, king of the world called Ashurbanipal. (00:32:10) And he had a fantastic library. (00:32:13) And he promoted it. (00:32:14) He impounded tablets. (00:32:15) He had them brought in. (00:32:16) He wanted all the prevailing knowledge and all knowledge from before under one roof. (00:32:20) He was a kind of like Alexandria thing. (00:32:24) So he was a trained scholar. (00:32:25) And this is what he did. (00:32:26) And they found it in the 19th century. (00:32:29) And they dug it up, Layard and those people. (00:32:32) So what did they find? (00:32:33) They found the tablets, higgledy-piggledy, all over the floor of a huge room in the corridors and everything, and lots of them broken and lots of them burnt. (00:32:43) So ever since then, until really quite recently, (00:32:48) Assyriologists have spent all that, a lot of people who work on these Nineveh times, but all the time joining the bits together. (00:32:53) And you have the story about Gilgamesh and the goddess who falls in love with him in the garden and she wants to seduce him and dot, dot, dot, you can't find the bit. (00:33:00) So you look for another bit, you look for another bit. (00:33:02) And gradually they piece together the literature. (00:33:04) And the assumption has always been that if you put them all together again, you've got to have the whole library. (00:33:09) But it's the absolute opposite. (00:33:11) Because what happened was that the Babylonians in the south, in my opinion, (00:33:17) They worked hand in glove with the Elamites from Iran. (00:33:19) They had a pincer movement and they beat Assyria, they conquered Assyria, and they ran through the capital and they set fire to everything, pinched all the women and to all the jewelry and all the gold. (00:33:29) People say that in a fit of peak, they destroyed the library, but they wouldn't destroy the library because it was the giant brain from which the Assyrians ran a world empire and it had all the knowledge in the world. (00:33:42) They destroyed that. (00:33:43) They spoke the same language. (00:33:45) They had the same writing system. (00:33:47) They'd have taken them all safely home. (00:33:50) Cart after cart after cart. (00:33:53) And I think what's left there is duplicates and broken things and things that got dropped and everything. (00:33:59) And that's what everyone thinks is it. (00:34:02) So this is also a controversial point. (00:34:04) You just now stop starting trouble. (00:34:06) It's common sense. (00:34:07) You're going to get both of us cancelled today. (00:34:10) But you see the thing, you see the thing, it's predicated on the assumption that what we have is what the (00:34:17) only what there was. (00:34:18) And this is such a fallacy. (00:34:20) It needs to be attacked left, right, and center. (00:34:24) So a lot of the cuneiform language is already deciphered. (00:34:29) Sure. (00:34:30) Can you speak to the deciphering process? (00:34:33) How hard is it? (00:34:34) Maybe take us to this place of, for you yourself, first learning the language. (00:34:41) figuring out the puzzle of it. (00:34:42) How does it feel, how does it look like to a brain that doesn't deeply understand it? (00:34:48) And how do you then piece stuff together? (00:34:50) Maybe you can go to the early days, sort of the Rosetta Stone of cuneiform also. (00:34:56) That's important. (00:34:57) Well, the first thing is how the cuneiform writing system works, because the crucial point, and once you see it, makes a lot of things clear, is that they wrote in syllables. (00:35:09) So if you take the English alphabet, which of course they didn't, you had the letter B, G, D, P, H and so forth. (00:35:17) They couldn't write a consonant. (00:35:20) They couldn't do that. (00:35:21) So what they did is they had a vowel before a consonant or one after. (00:35:27) So you have ab and ba. (00:35:29) But as they had four vowels, you had to have ab and ba. (00:35:34) Ib and B, Ub and B, Eb and B. (00:35:38) So you had the range of things clustered around what we call a consonant. (00:35:42) So they had all those for all the letters, which gave them a basic system. (00:35:47) There was much more to it than that, and it was more complicated than that, but we didn't have to really go into it. (00:35:51) But basically, if you are a Babylonian and (00:35:55) we want to write the word museum, which of course is one of the most important words in the English language and other languages too. (00:36:01) So what you would do is you would write the syllable mu and then the sign z and then the sign um. (00:36:09) So you split the word up into its component syllables. (00:36:11) When you read it in your mind, you squash them together into museum. (00:36:16) That's the basic system. (00:36:17) They had other signs which gave you a clue as to the meaning and bits around the edge, but it's basically syllabic writing. (00:36:26) So when you go to university to study cuneiform, what you have to learn is all the signs and all their values, (00:36:37) because unfortunately they didn't just have one for each, they had multiple ones. (00:36:42) And the reason is not that they were mad or they wanted to make life hell, but because the syllables derive from the writing of Sumerian words. (00:36:54) So the Sumerian vocabulary had a lot of words that were probably differentiated by tone. (00:37:02) So you might have bar and then a rising, R and then a lowering. (00:37:06) And these signs all retain the bar value, even though there were no tones. (00:37:11) So it means if you look at a sign list, there's a lot of signs. (00:37:15) You have to bar number one, which is the common, then there's bar number two, bar number three, and you have to learn them all. (00:37:20) And when you read, you have to learn how to do it. (00:37:22) So in the modern world, if you go to university to do a syriology, which I hope you and all of your disciples will do as soon as possible, (00:37:31) you actually have to cope with two languages, the Sumerian and the Babylonian. (00:37:36) Now, the first thing is this, that the Babylonian language is a Semitic tongue, which, although it's extinct, is connected to or related to Hebrew, Aramaic, Arabic, Ethiopic, Syriac, all that family of Semitic languages, which are still alive. (00:37:55) It's an early example of one of those. (00:37:58) so that when the decipherment came along, it was the Semitic dictionary that they fell back on to identify words, nouns and roots. (00:38:08) The other language, which is Sumerian, the one when you stick bits in the beginning and stick bits at the end, is not only not Semitic, (00:38:17) It's not related to any other known language. (00:38:20) Oh, no. (00:38:21) Yeah. (00:38:21) This is a bewitching thing. (00:38:23) It's a bewitching thing to me. (00:38:25) And this is how to understand it. (00:38:27) Because the languages that we study in the world today, linguists study, they more or less all fall into a language group. (00:38:36) So you have Indo-European with Spanish, Italian, Latin, Hitite. (00:38:42) and so forth. (00:38:42) And so that's French, that's one group, and you have Germanic and you have Slavonic. (00:38:46) And most languages, even the far-flung ones, fall into what can be seen to be maybe big and airy groups, their family, like that. (00:38:55) There's not one for Sumerian. (00:38:58) So this means that the truth that languages do not exist in a vacuum, but they're part of a big family, must always have been true. (00:39:07) So that when writing arrives about 3,000, say 300 BC, (00:39:12) to write properly, it means that Sumerian was recorded just in time. (00:39:20) But the big languages, maybe in China, in Russia, in somewhere else in Asia that were related to Sumerian. (00:39:28) Are gone? (00:39:29) Are all gone. (00:39:29) They're gone forever and ever and ever, unless something amazing happens. (00:39:34) So we've got the one representative of this bizarre family. (00:39:39) Amazing. (00:39:40) It's a very stimulating thing to imagine. (00:39:43) I personally believe that Neanderthals and early Homo sapiens for sure had language. (00:39:50) For sure they talked to one another. (00:39:52) It's impossible that they didn't. (00:39:54) The point came when they did. (00:39:56) They did. (00:39:57) And the Neanderthals, 100,000 years of rule, (00:40:01) live in Europe, they had to deal with the Ice Age, they all live together, they bring up their children, they couldn't speak anything. (00:40:07) They have the same apparatus. (00:40:09) And if you have a human brain, then it responds to stimulus. (00:40:12) And the more stimulus there is for communication. (00:40:15) I mean, the idea that you and I are out hunting rhino and you say, Lex, shut up, I'm constantly, Lex, Lex. (00:40:25) And then I suddenly think, oh, I get it. (00:40:28) You (00:40:29) Our legs, right? (00:40:30) You only have to do that once, then you know who I am. (00:40:33) So I know that I'm me and that you are you. (00:40:36) So people who say that they couldn't distinguish ego and all that, it's absolutely stupid. (00:40:41) If you cut your hand with a knife, you sure as hell experiencing. (00:40:46) You sure as hell do. (00:40:48) It hurts. (00:40:48) It hurts a lot. (00:40:50) You might even bleed to death, but it's not somebody else's hand. (00:40:54) And it's your hand and it's your existence and your life that's threatened. (00:40:57) You think people weren't conscious that they were an entity? (00:41:00) I don't believe it. (00:41:02) And they probably had a way to express that with sounds. (00:41:06) Well, eventually, yes, names. (00:41:08) I mean, names of things. (00:41:10) And then you have the idea that a label fixes to something. (00:41:14) Then the light bulb has gone on and next minute you have rhino and you have skin and you have babies and you have... (00:41:19) Because I think you have an idea and the idea then drives the brain and the brain has another idea. (00:41:24) It works like fertility. (00:41:26) So what do you think is the motivation, the primary driver of developing written language? (00:41:31) Is it goes hand in hand with the civilization? (00:41:35) I think that the media in which it appears is when there's a lot of people living in an urban environment. (00:41:42) And with rival institutions or with a king or with a government or all those sorts of... (00:41:49) things and that's why I think Gobekli Tepe must have been the same thing. (00:41:54) I read somewhere that they're all nomads and they only came to Gobekli Tepe, you know, three months a year. (00:41:59) I mean that cannot be true that they were nomads and they cannot be true. (00:42:05) to get the stone and someone has to draw on the ground the plan of the building. (00:42:10) They have to work out how thick it is going to be, how high it's going to be. (00:42:14) And I mean, you know, you can't just, like that, like gorillas. (00:42:21) All right, so deciphering, the process of deciphering. (00:42:24) So when I started, there were grammars and sinists and dictionaries. (00:42:28) Everything was marvelous. (00:42:29) It was all basically deciphered. (00:42:30) All you had to do was get on with learning it. (00:42:32) But at the beginning, when the first tablets and bricks in cuneiform and stone inscriptions came to light, no one could read them. (00:42:41) But they knew they were writing, but they didn't know how to read them. (00:42:44) And what happened was, like you said before, with the Rosetta Stone, it was something directly comparable. (00:42:50) 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, trilingual version. (00:43:13) And Old Persian, although it is obviously an archaic form of the language, Persian, and it's still alive, it was still alive in the 19th century. (00:43:21) So since the Old Persian was written in a very simple style of cuneiform, they deciphered it, they twigged it was Old Persian, they read it in Persian, and they read the names Dari-ar-wush in Old Persian. (00:43:33) And then suddenly somebody realized that the other two columns, about the same length, (00:43:39) What do you know? (00:43:40) And the thing is, it said, I am Darius, the great king, king of the working, the son of, grandson of. (00:43:47) So there's a whole paragraph with repeated things in the Persian which they could understand. (00:43:52) So what do you know? (00:43:54) They're reiterated passages in the other two languages. (00:43:57) So that was the key that kind of (00:44:00) the chisel that opened up cuneiform writing proper. (00:44:04) And the thing was, they soon twigged that the language of the Babylonian was a Semitic tongue. (00:44:11) And this was so important. (00:44:12) I think the first word they discovered was the word for river, which is Nauru in Akkadian and Nahar in Arabic and Aramaic. (00:44:23) And when they realized that the word that corresponded to the Persian had this form, (00:44:28) This was a gift of gold because everybody immediately sees their Arabic and Hebrew dictionaries and started leafing through looking for words that would fit in the context. (00:44:38) And they basically, they decipher this inscription in that sort of way. (00:44:43) And of course, all the other inscriptions came in order and there were lots and lots of difficulties which had to be resolved, but that's the basic thing. (00:44:50) And without that trilingual, (00:44:54) I don't know what would have happened. (00:44:56) I mean, I suppose it's conceivable that in the very modern world, something might have happened. (00:45:02) But as it was, it was done by sheer brain power, by very, very clever persons just doing it. (00:45:08) And they cracked it. (00:45:09) The Elamite language is much more difficult, but they got a lot of it too. (00:45:13) So it was a very romantic thing because the inscription was carved on a mountain face far above the plain. (00:45:19) And Henry Rawlinson, who was an upstanding (00:45:23) young British officer who claimed to decipher coneiform quite unjustifiably, climbed up there with some miserable kid and made squeezes of the whole thing overlooking the plane thousands of feet up in the air and brought those back and they were used in the decipherment. (00:45:39) So it's very romantic. (00:45:41) Wait a minute. (00:45:42) More controversial statement from Erring today. (00:45:45) Henry Rawlinson doesn't (00:45:46) Deserve the credit for that? (00:45:47) No, I don't think he does. (00:45:49) He's called the father of Assyriology, but I think he's the stepfather of Assyriology, because when he first got these inscriptions, he wrote a long book about it, which was almost entirely wrong. (00:46:00) And there was a clergyman in Northern Ireland called Edward Hinks, who lived in a place called Killer Lane, had five daughters and ran this church, who was (00:46:11) possibly a card-carrying genius, if not jolly, jolly close. (00:46:16) And what happened with him was this. (00:46:18) There was an ongoing competition, well, an ongoing challenge to decipher hieroglyphic writing, which Champonion usually gets the credit for. (00:46:27) And Hincks was very interested in trying to decipher hieroglyphic ahead of the French. (00:46:34) And he ran into a sort of dead end at one stage, and he thought he'd have a look at cuneiform to see if it was helpful. (00:46:42) And at the same time, he cracked it. (00:46:45) He worked out how it worked. (00:46:46) He realized that one sign can have more than one value of sound and of meaning, because they are multivalent signs. (00:46:53) I tried to shelter you from the horrible news, but it's actually, it's not, it's not a walk in the park. (00:47:00) It takes about five years to, you probably do it in about four, probably. (00:47:07) That is a compliment. (00:47:08) I think he just complimented me. (00:47:10) Thank you. (00:47:11) Thank you very much. (00:47:14) So you're saying one sign that looks exactly the same might have different sounds given the context? (00:47:20) Yeah. (00:47:20) And you have to choose the right sound and also different meaning as well. (00:47:26) Because, for example, if you have a sign for hot, the word hot, you can't really have a picture sign for hot. (00:47:32) It doesn't make sense. (00:47:35) But what they did is they did a drawing of a kind of (00:47:40) complex thing with a brazier inside another sign, which meant hot. (00:47:44) So that sign existed, but it also meant other things as well. (00:47:47) And you had to choose the right one for the context. (00:47:49) It's all a contextual matter. (00:47:51) I mean, it really is quite a matter for despair when you start cuneiform, because on top of everything else, they didn't leave gaps between the words. (00:47:59) Because they're all connected. (00:48:00) That's really mean. (00:48:01) Yeah. (00:48:02) So when you read, what you have to do, you start with the first sign and you think of the scientist and you go, (00:48:09) through the values in your mind and there's next sign. (00:48:13) And if one is bar and the next one is ab, among other readings, bar ab sounds like a syllable structure for a word and you go on like that. (00:48:21) So there are two things about it. (00:48:23) One is that if you want to, you can master it. (00:48:26) The other thing is that the number of variables was restricted. (00:48:30) They controlled it. (00:48:31) So it wasn't insane. (00:48:32) So in other words, if you learn the corpus and you would learn how the signs are composed and you learn their different values, then you've got it down and off you go. (00:48:41) And it's very beautiful, I think. (00:48:44) It's marvellous. (00:48:46) Can you, in all seriousness, take me back to the time when you were learning it? (00:48:50) What's the process of learning it? (00:48:52) Well, I had very abnormal upbringing because when I went to university, for about three years beforehand, I'd wanted to be an Egyptologist. (00:49:02) So I'd read the grammar by Gardiner and was looking forward very much to studying ancient Egyptian. (00:49:09) And what happened was that I went up to the University of Birmingham, where I went to university, and (00:49:17) There was a man called Rundle Clark who was an Egyptologist. (00:49:20) And Rundle Clark came in on the Monday and gave us one lesson about Egyptian sculpture or something like that. (00:49:27) And the next minute, next day, he died. (00:49:31) Bang. (00:49:33) So the professor called me into his room and said, look, (00:49:39) It's going to take me a while to get an Egyptologist. (00:49:41) They don't grow on trees. (00:49:43) But there's another person in this department who teaches another ancient language called Lambert, and he teaches cuneiform. (00:49:50) So what I suggest is you go and do a bit of cuneiform with Professor Lambert, and then when I get an Egyptologist, you can convert back. (00:49:59) So I go and knock on the door. (00:50:01) Yes. (00:50:03) So I went in and said, I want to learn cuneiform. (00:50:06) And Professor Lambert, who was rather a Sherlock Holmes kind of figure, aesthetic, bony, sarcastic, cruel, cruel, cruel, absolutely terrifying. (00:50:18) And I said, I wanted to learn cuneiform. (00:50:22) And he wasn't at all pleased because this was a time in Britain when professors (00:50:29) resented having students to teach because it butted into their research time. (00:50:34) It was that sort of arrangement. (00:50:35) Anyway, I started it off and after about, I don't know, maybe one or maybe two lessons, I knew this was going to be my life's work. (00:50:43) So that's what happened to me. (00:50:45) It was an amazing thing. (00:50:46) So he gave me a list of signs to learn, basic signs. (00:50:51) So I did. (00:50:51) And the next couple of days, and then we came in and he, we started reading. (00:50:57) So given the complexity of the signs, why did cuneiform last 3,000 years, the most successful writing system ever? (00:51:07) Fair question. (00:51:08) There were several factors. (00:51:10) One is the famous factor of inertia. (00:51:14) The second thing is that people who could read and write and were in charge of archives and with the clerks in the temple and the (00:51:25) writers for the king and everything, commanded a very great deal of power because most of the public couldn't. (00:51:34) So they reserved to themselves knowledge, understanding, philosophical inquiry. (00:51:41) I mean, no doubt it went on in pubs and things, but they were in charge. (00:51:45) They had everything under lock and key. (00:51:47) And they were, I think the scribal schools are rather cliquey. (00:51:51) They were certainly (00:51:53) cliquey in the sense of Oxford and Cambridge being rivals, that sort of thing. (00:51:57) They had that sort of idea. (00:51:59) And it was in no one's interest whatsoever. (00:52:02) Nobody would ever concede any interest in the idea of literacy for all. (00:52:07) This would be, it would never be thought of and it would be anathema. (00:52:12) And so if you got on a soapbox on a Saturday afternoon and say, oh, enough of this, we have to teach the children. (00:52:19) they'd be taken away, I think. (00:52:20) So we're getting, in these tablets, the output of the intellectual class, a very small fraction of humans. (00:52:28) So we're getting just the Oxford and the Cambridge. (00:52:31) We are, except this, that when you went to scribal school, you had to learn the Sumerian and Akkadian, the languages properly, and all the vocabulary and the grammar. (00:52:41) So some boys probably had a lot of trouble doing this. (00:52:46) And, you know, (00:52:49) They were okay, but there ain't going to be no geniuses. (00:52:52) And I think the situation in the school was that the teachers farmed out the kids who would actually rather have been outside playing football, but could read and write, to earning their living. (00:53:04) doing low-level reading and writing. (00:53:06) That's to say writing contracts, letters, everyday things for people because no one could read and write. (00:53:13) So you had to get a scribe if you're going to marry your daughter off and you get all the witnesses about the presence and all this, all that thing had to be done for four days. (00:53:22) So the writer would come and so your medium-level writers would serve that requirement. (00:53:30) And very talented or clever or intellectual (00:53:34) students would be encouraged to go into one of the literary professions, which would be, so to speak, medicine, law, working for the king, working for the church, I mean, the priesthood, so forth, all those things which were dependent upon archives and writing, they would find their Nevo and also (00:53:55) architecture, because if a big building had to be built, then somebody had to know about load bearing things and brick measurements. (00:54:03) And so some of them went into that kind of work. (00:54:05) And also, probably some of them went into running the army and they had to move stores and animals. (00:54:11) And so they found their Nevo and some of them were intellectually very able indeed. (00:54:18) And they went into (00:54:21) the disciplines of, on the one hand, astrology, but more seriously into astronomy and theoretical grammar, because they had treatises about the relationship between the two languages and how they worked and different parts of speech. (00:54:36) And they wrote learned commentaries as well, what words meant. (00:54:40) So there was an intellectual high-level top. (00:54:45) And then there were lots of professional scribes, and then the kids who left school as soon as possible and did all that, like today. (00:54:52) I apologize to be philosophical, but Wittgenstein, the philosopher, said that the limits of our language is the limits of our world. (00:55:01) So to which degree did the languages that were encoded in cuneiform define human civilization, would you say? (00:55:09) What were the things that were complicated to express and therefore were not expressed often? (00:55:16) That's a really interesting question. (00:55:18) So in terms of richness of vocabulary and richness of verbal subtlety, I think Babylonian rivals Arabic. (00:55:32) and of course, English. (00:55:33) In other words, you can say whatever you want in English, however subtle it might be, even if people didn't understand the subtlety, you can, because the tools are fantastic. (00:55:42) And Arabic has lots of synonyms and lots of devices and all the same. (00:55:46) Same in Babylonian. (00:55:47) It was a fully fledged literary language. (00:55:52) The question about whether the language put a stop to further things, which is basically what you're asking, (00:56:00) is immensely complicated. (00:56:03) But the one thing that strikes me as relevant is that a very huge proportion of scholarly literature in Mesopotamia, it takes the form of omens because they believed that events, accidental or deliberately stimulated, had implications for what was going to happen. (00:56:24) And they took omens from things in the sky and (00:56:28) things in the street and every single thing. (00:56:31) If you were a well-qualified divine, they would have this significance, right? (00:56:38) Now, there are thousands of lines of omens of all different kinds. (00:56:45) And in Akkadian, it says, for example, if a lizard runs across the breakfast table, the queen will die. (00:56:52) So if you translate the Akkadian this way, the word if, (00:56:56) verb and everything. (00:56:57) If that, then this. (00:56:59) So there are thousands of lines translated in many books about omens where if this happens, that will happen. (00:57:06) So this is how it's understood by my colleagues. (00:57:11) Well, this is absolutely impossible. (00:57:13) Because if you're the chief diviner for the king, and you open up a sheep to take a liver out and examine it according to them, if the queen's going to die and the king's there, you're not going to say, (00:57:26) the Queen's going to die. (00:57:27) I mean, you're going to look like a fucking idiot if she doesn't die. (00:57:31) And if she does die, you're going to be responsible. (00:57:33) So all you can ever do and ever, ever have been able to do is to say, there's a sign here that says that the Queen could die, meaning could die, not will die, and therefore the requisite ritual or magic must immediately swing into action to defer the danger. (00:57:52) So the point is that A equals B is never true. (00:57:57) It means that with A, B, could be, might be, ought to be, should be, could be true. (00:58:06) All those subtle things. (00:58:08) So that the diviner who works from the king must have been a philosopher who looks at the king. (00:58:15) He looks at the king and he knows what the king wants him to say. (00:58:19) So he has to tell the king (00:58:22) What he wants to hear, he has to tell the king if it's bad news in such a way that he doesn't mind or he won't worry. (00:58:27) It's the most beautiful thing. (00:58:29) It's so subtle. (00:58:31) It's like a violin concerto. (00:58:34) It can never have been A equals B for a minute. (00:58:39) So the medical texts say, if you do, if a man has this, you do this, you drink, he'll get better, right? (00:58:45) He says, you'll get better. (00:58:47) So you ever met a doctor who will say, you do this, you'll get better? (00:58:52) No. (00:58:52) They say, all being well, you'll be back on your feet. (00:58:55) Or I've seen this kind of condition many times. (00:58:58) Everything should go fine. (00:58:59) You should get better. (00:58:59) You should be better soon. (00:59:01) But never you will get better. (00:59:02) Because what happens if you die? (00:59:04) Where are you? (00:59:06) The lawyers will show up. (00:59:07) Absolutely. (00:59:08) So this means that not expressible in Akkadian grammar are these modal verbs. (00:59:16) could, might, should, ought. (00:59:18) They can't be expressed grammatically, but it is impossible that it was such a magnificent literary language where they didn't have these subtleties. (00:59:30) It's utterly impossible. (00:59:32) And if you translate, he will, (00:59:35) in a literary text, he might, then the whole text is different. (00:59:39) The whole text is different. (00:59:40) Yeah, absolutely. (00:59:41) And they don't, my colleagues translate, like it says in the grammar books, like that, automatically. (00:59:47) There's no self-appraisal of the folly of it. (00:59:52) You have said that translation is part archaeology, part detective work, part poetry. (00:59:57) Can we just speak about translation and the art of it a bit more? (01:00:00) Yes. (01:00:01) I mean, it's such a, such an incredible discipline. (01:00:05) just like you said, hinted at, just a subtle variation in a single word can change everything. (01:00:12) Well, you know, the truth about translation is that you never really have a word in one language which precisely equates another. (01:00:22) You never do. (01:00:23) They're always a kind, the best you can do. (01:00:26) And sometimes it makes no difference, and sometimes it's really quite misleading. (01:00:30) And so, (01:00:32) What people do when they learn Akkadian is they learn the Akkadian word and they learn the English translation. (01:00:38) You have the parasu is to divide. (01:00:40) So whenever you have the verb parasu, it's some form of divide or division. (01:00:44) But actually, it's not, because divide is like the primary root, but there's maybe 10 nuances. (01:00:51) of what that can mean in English, where the one at the bottom and the one at the top, you'd hardly know they were connected. (01:00:57) And the Chicago dictionary, which is such a magnificent thing, when you come to the museum and see me, I'll show you this Chicago. (01:01:04) It's the most salient and important thing that came out of America in all its history. (01:01:09) It's the Chicago Assyrian dictionary, which is this long. (01:01:13) There's only one rival to it for cultural importance, which is the electric guitar, of course. (01:01:18) But the two of them, I think, are (01:01:21) your countryman's greatest achievement. (01:01:24) It's the pride of our nation, those two things. (01:01:27) The very thing. (01:01:28) Chicago Dictionary, can you, I'm sorry to take the tension, what is the Chicago Dictionary? (01:01:32) It started in the 20s, and they made a dictionary of the Babylonian language. (01:01:37) A to Z, so to speak, and it's as long as this table. (01:01:41) It's a magnificent thing, and this big. (01:01:43) And there, the people who worked on it were real translators, so they knew that it wasn't lexically A means B, but they had, so if you have something in a proverb, (01:01:54) the meaning is going to be a little bit different from in a letter. (01:01:57) And, you know, so people really, really understand the Kadian. (01:02:01) They really do. (01:02:02) But this thing about the modal verbs is an interesting conundrum to me because there's no way it's reflected in the writing. (01:02:10) So I can only assume that there was some kind of drawing out of the vowel in a verb. (01:02:17) meaning could, now like you were saying, you might do it, something like that. (01:02:21) Anyway, so nowadays, it's not a decipherment that's the job, it's just reading. (01:02:26) And if you have lots of tablets to work on, like on a dig, it's very exciting if they come out of the ground and no one's looked for them before, you know, it's your job. (01:02:34) And if you're a competent disseriologist, (01:02:38) You should be able to sight read more or less, except most, say a letter or something like that, but most documents have some damage. (01:02:47) So you have to learn how to interpret stuff. (01:02:50) And also some literature is very difficult because of technical vocabulary and they had technical vocabulary and unusual words. (01:02:58) So you can do all of that. (01:02:59) You can... (01:03:01) kind of figure out the technical complexities. (01:03:05) You can figure out the noise, meaning missing pieces. (01:03:09) Yeah, sometimes you can calculate what it ought to be, make a reasonable suggestion. (01:03:15) And this dictionary, which I was talking to you about, is such a fantastic tool because (01:03:21) A lot of people worked on it for, it was the National Endowment for the Humanities, and it was for decades and decades of work. (01:03:28) And most of the world's best assyriologists collaborated on it. (01:03:32) So the quality of translation and understanding is really extraordinary. (01:03:36) What are some things you've read from that time? (01:03:40) Is there some jokes? (01:03:41) Is there some love letters? (01:03:43) There are one or two letters about, from a chapter to a woman about, you know, you are very beautiful and you're, (01:03:49) Lips are like radishes and your ears are like walruses and things. (01:03:52) But I mean, there are some things like that. (01:03:55) And there's a kind of street drama in Babylon in 4th century BC, something like that, when there must have been actors who did this in the street. (01:04:05) And it's Marduk and Sarpanitum, his wife, and another woman. (01:04:13) Marduk's having an affair with this other goddess. (01:04:18) And Salponetum is jealous and there's women fight in the street and heard insults to one another and, you know, slop bucket and all this kind of stuff. (01:04:25) It's hilarious. (01:04:26) And it must have been a bit like a sort of Verdi opera without the music, I suppose. (01:04:31) I don't know. (01:04:32) But anyway, it starts off when Salponetum is in the room and Marduk is in bed with this other goddess on the roof and she can hear. (01:04:42) You could say it was an eternal human issue. (01:04:45) Yeah, love, heartbreak, jealousy, all of that. (01:04:48) Between deities also. (01:04:50) Yeah. (01:04:50) Because deities are only modeled on human beings after all. (01:04:53) Yeah, deities is a grandiose way of expressing human affairs, human behaviors, human ways, yeah. (01:05:00) Indeed. (01:05:01) In the writing, what was their relationship to the divine? (01:05:05) Relationship with the divine? (01:05:07) Well, the first thing to say is that they had a large pantheon of gods. (01:05:13) So there were three gods at the top, sometimes called Anu, Enlil, and Ea. (01:05:18) There were three gods at the top and hundreds of other gods and goddesses. (01:05:24) 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. (01:05:36) And the (01:05:37) Lesser, minor gods were amalgamated and then they were given jobs in the households of the big gods. (01:05:43) So there was a sort of structure. (01:05:46) So you have this in the background, a big sweeping theology like you have in the world today, in some parts of the world. (01:05:52) And this was the main system and the main gods were concerned with the ruler and the fate of the country. (01:05:59) And another god was concerned with illness and the (01:06:06) the dead and what happens to the dead, and they had other specialities, and they all had their own temples. (01:06:11) And when a baby came into the world, probably this was universally true, the baby was put under the tutelage of one or other of the gods. (01:06:22) Sometimes, you know, the royal family, they were the big shots, but sometimes not, or the ones that were in the family or something like that. (01:06:29) So people had grew up with the idea that among all of them, (01:06:35) there were special ones for the family and they had a special one who was supposed to look after them. (01:06:40) That's the sort of basic idea. (01:06:41) But the trouble is, since gods are, as you say, human beings on a larger scale, they can be forgetful or uninterested or on holiday. (01:06:51) And there are lots of ways that you have to prompt your little sacrifices and little bribes so that they do their job and keep an eye on you. (01:07:02) So they had that kind of slightly (01:07:04) practical view of gods, that they would be unpredictable, great when they were there, but not always there, sort of idea. (01:07:13) And I also believe this, that a lot of people in the world today who did not have the disadvantage of growing up in a stifling religion, but are just normal people, get a lot more interested when they're really ill or when they have a big disaster all of a sudden. (01:07:34) God or gods seem a lot more important than they do normally. (01:07:38) So that few people walk about in a state of religious awe, and a good proportion of clergymen I've ever met don't do that either. (01:07:47) It's a kind of conception that's not actually based on reality, that the individual's response to religious stimuli (01:07:56) fluctuates and is varied and is often a response to need. (01:08:02) It doesn't come from nothing. (01:08:03) I mean, people don't suddenly feel, I've got to thank the Lord for the rainbow or something like that. (01:08:09) I think it's probably true today. (01:08:11) I mean, when you read the investigations they make of religion today, Christianity in this country is on the decline because (01:08:19) people who are supposed to be Christians say they aren't anymore, they're atheists. (01:08:22) And the people who say, I go to church and I believe in everything, is a relatively small number of people. (01:08:27) So now this is the situation, which is quite remarkable if you think about it. (01:08:32) No one knows what the consequence will be for the human race, whether religion will balance out, whether it will die off, who knows? (01:08:40) I think it's an ancient technology that has proven across millennia to (01:08:46) give a set of tools to humans to contend, as you said, with suffering. (01:08:51) That's a part of life. (01:08:52) So when those rare moments come when you have to deal with deep pain, loss, suffering, heartbreak, all those things, looking up to the sky and asking questions and trying to figure out the answers in your conversation with the divine. (01:09:10) I think that's true. (01:09:11) But I think in Mesopotamia, it was different. (01:09:14) in terms of its potency and immediacy, because there's no skyscrapers in Iraq. (01:09:20) You know, if you live in southern Iraq and you sleep on the roof, there are no lights at night, you know, you're under the stars, you can see everything because of no smog and anything like that. (01:09:31) And the idea that the gods are there watching, it's not like a big artifice like it is here. (01:09:38) It just doesn't ring true here. (01:09:40) You can't come to it (01:09:42) and really believe in it, whereas these people didn't have to really believe in it because it was it. (01:09:48) It's the obvious practical part of life. (01:09:50) They're right there. (01:09:52) Yeah. (01:09:54) They didn't believe in ghosts, they took them for granted and they didn't believe in the gods, they took them for granted. (01:10:00) This is a different mechanism because nobody here in the world today takes those things for granted, just the opposite. (01:10:06) But I think that's how it worked. (01:10:08) So you didn't have people wrestling with the idea of whether the gods really exist or whether they really care about me. (01:10:15) They gave them a nudge when it was necessary and they might offer this, they might offer that, but they... (01:10:21) It was the system. (01:10:23) It was the prevailing system. (01:10:25) And I think it's an important difference. (01:10:28) And also that thing about ghosts is clear from the inscriptions, all of them, that I managed to find, that nobody ever asked themselves, did these things exist or not? (01:10:40) Or did I really see them or not? (01:10:42) Or did I not? (01:10:43) They didn't, they just took it all for granted. (01:10:45) What are ghosts? (01:10:46) Is it usually ancestors? (01:10:49) everybody who died in bed naturally or peacefully, what we call their ghost, went down to the netherworld. (01:10:58) And there they were. (01:11:00) So they buried people jolly quick, for obvious reasons, like they do in Islam and Judaism today. (01:11:08) It's the same kind of idea. (01:11:10) And the spirit of the person went down through the gates of the netherworld and stayed there. (01:11:19) So that's the basic situation. (01:11:21) And people in their houses had actual burials under the courtyard and they had a thing where you pour stuff down a whole fluid and food kind of symbolic offerings to them. (01:11:34) So is that a way to lessen the impact of mortality? (01:11:39) I don't know. (01:11:41) because you know that everyone's going to die. (01:11:44) I think the real tragedy would be is if we're not supposed to. (01:11:48) That would be the tragedy. (01:11:50) But every single person is going to die. (01:11:54) So all relationships have this finite clause in them. (01:12:00) So if you are very fond of somebody or you love somebody and they die, it's kind of infantile to (01:12:08) whine about it ever after, because what do you think was gonna happen? (01:12:12) Either you or them? (01:12:14) You know, I always see it like that. (01:12:16) I don't feel grief when people die. (01:12:19) It is infantile, but I gotta tell you something about human beings. (01:12:23) We're all kind of infantile all the way through from, you know, we don't stop being infantile after we're infants. (01:12:29) It's one thing to know it, you know, theoretically, and it's another thing to know it, know it. (01:12:36) Like this thing, (01:12:38) ends. (01:12:39) This ride ends. (01:12:40) That's the pain. (01:12:41) It's the fact that the whole thing ends. (01:12:44) And when people fall off the edge, they fall off the edge. (01:12:49) So yeah, the knowledge that it ends is the painful thing, not the actual moment of the ending. (01:12:53) Yeah. (01:12:54) Many times what makes moments really precious is that they're going to be gone. (01:12:58) I think that's not a trivial thing for us humans to really contend with. (01:13:02) I think religion, (01:13:04) religious thought, the divine, I think, help with that. (01:13:08) I think the big mistake for mankind was the creation of monotheistic religions, because they brought evil into the world. (01:13:16) Because if you believe in a monotheistic religion, it means I'm right and you're wrong if you don't. (01:13:23) So it's already on that footing. (01:13:26) It's very dogmatic, yeah. (01:13:27) Dogmatic, and it's led to (01:13:30) everything, inquisitions and all this kind of stuff, it's always a result of it, that one religion is superior and the other should be stamped out and all that. (01:13:38) And in my opinion, monotheistic religion has generated the most fantastic amount of non-religious feeling. (01:13:46) Whereas when you have all the different gods and they have different specialities and the ones you like and the ones that everybody likes and they have their temples and their offerings, (01:13:55) It was very interesting to me to go into a temple in Calcutta when I went there with my wife, Joanna. (01:14:02) We went into the temples and saw how they were. (01:14:05) And I think they must be very much like the ones in Mesopotamia. (01:14:08) So there was never anything about them which affronted people's individuality or (01:14:15) I mean, there's no religious prejudice or even racial prejudice in antiquity. (01:14:20) All these things are modern, disadvantageous matters. (01:14:24) If you think what's done in the name of religion, it is absolutely staggering. (01:14:28) So let's go to literature, because we didn't really mention literature much, except you did briefly mention Epic of Gilgamesh. (01:14:36) Yeah. (01:14:36) So that was written in cuneiform. (01:14:38) It's one of the earliest works of literature. (01:14:40) That's right. (01:14:41) Can you tell me about this work? (01:14:42) Yeah, well, we know it best from this Assyrian library. (01:14:45) every set of tablets. (01:14:46) There are 12 of them. (01:14:47) It's a 12-tablet work. (01:14:49) It's quite long. (01:14:50) And Gilgamesh is the hero of it. (01:14:53) But the literature, we know it from earlier texts, and we know that Gilgamesh lived. (01:14:59) He was a real person. (01:15:00) He was a king in Uruk, and he was one of those people who lived after their death in the world, like Alexander, for example. (01:15:10) So there were stories about Gilgamesh when he was alive. (01:15:12) There were stories about him afterwards. (01:15:14) And firstly, they were oral literature, not written down at all. (01:15:19) And then around the 1800s, people started to write them down in Sumerian or Babylonian. (01:15:26) So there was a corpus and eventually they were woven into this long 12 Homeric type thing about the adventures of Gilgamesh. (01:15:33) So it is certainly literature. (01:15:36) And it's to do with humanity and immortality and man in the hands of the gods and incorporates lots of interesting, exciting stories. (01:15:45) It's a very Hollywoody kind of thing. (01:15:48) And you can see within it, even in the sophisticated Nineveh version, its roots are in oral literature because when somebody speaks, (01:15:59) It says, Gilgamesh opened his mouth to speak and addressed his friend Enkidu. (01:16:04) And then there's a speech. (01:16:05) And then Enkidu opened his mouth and addressed his friend Gilgamesh. (01:16:08) Well, when you're reading a story, you don't need that. (01:16:12) And that must be because of when there was an enacting of an oral thing, a narrator would say, and it suddenly got frozen into the text. (01:16:23) So it's a very strange thing because if you're reading it, it's obvious that one person speaks and the other person speaks. (01:16:30) And they always had this complicated thing stuck in the text. (01:16:33) So it must be an echo of, presumably, you have your protagonists enacting their timeless matter. (01:16:43) And the person who's writing it down says, and then Gilgamesh said, you know, like in a script. (01:16:50) I mean, what can you say about the telling of stories? (01:16:55) in written form during that time. (01:16:57) Do you think that too stretched back in time? (01:17:01) I do. (01:17:02) I think the fireside narrative matter. (01:17:06) You know, when we were kids, it would be twerps with a guitar and sitting around a fire on holiday. (01:17:13) But that mechanism, when people gather after dark, when there is a fire and talk, is the sort of environment where (01:17:21) narrative accounts flourished naturally among human beings. (01:17:25) Stories, telling a story. (01:17:26) And it doesn't have to be pragmatic. (01:17:28) It can be literary in a way. (01:17:30) Yeah, either a human person like Gilgamesh or stories about the gods and someone sees the Milky Way and they think it's a god riding a chariot up it and they have a story about, you know, and all those sorts of things or whatever it would be. (01:17:45) But I think probably, (01:17:47) You have to allow for a strong creative principle surfacing in Homo sapiens at a quite early age, because the paintings on cave walls, you try drawing a running antelope in color on a wall. (01:18:03) I mean, the quality of the workmanship, of the artistic ability is unsurpassable. (01:18:11) It's not just good. (01:18:13) So how is that an inexplicable thing at this very early date? (01:18:17) It means that among all the population, you have imbeciles and Einsteins, and somewhere along the line, you have Rembrandt's. (01:18:27) And I imagine that half the cave paintings in Europe were done by one person. (01:18:33) I mean, you got the impression every family had a genius painter. (01:18:36) It's impossible. (01:18:37) Probably there was a person who went from place to place doing these paintings because they were so... (01:18:42) could draw straight away accurately like that, but they are a distillation of creative artistic ability plus skill. (01:18:52) So this is right at the pretty early stage, is it not, the cave painting material? (01:18:57) So if you consider the human stock, which encapsulates such ideas ever after, (01:19:05) then you have to reckon with that. (01:19:07) You have to reckon with that. (01:19:08) Very creative, very creative people. (01:19:11) So the function of story is to tell the young and about what happened and about famous battles or when the flood came or how people learned to make fire or, you know, (01:19:27) how we invented the wheel, all those sorts of things everybody puts down. (01:19:31) But that's presumably what absolutely happened. (01:19:34) And you have the capacity for people to adore and to respect among their own kind of people of astounding ability. (01:19:42) There must have been hunters who were ferociously quick and, you know, wrestle with polar bears and all that kind of thing. (01:19:50) And all this stuff would be grist, the narratest thing. (01:19:54) And as things got more complicated and more sophisticated, so (01:19:57) Lessons might be incorporated, or lessons might...