#487 – Irving Finkel: Deciphering Secrets of Ancient Civilizations & Flood Myths

Irving Finkel is a scholar of ancient languages and a longtime curator at the British Museum, renowned for his expertise in Mesopotamian history and cuneiform writing. He specializes in reading and interpreting cuneiform inscriptions, including tablets from Sumerian, Akkadian, Babylonian, and Assyrian contexts. He became widely known for studying a tablet with a Mesopotamian flood story that predates the biblical Noah narrative, which he presented in his book “The Ark Before Noah” and in a documentary that involved building a circular ark based on the tablet’s technical instructions. Thank you for listening ❤ Check out our sponsors: https://lexfridman.com/sponsors/ep487-sc See below for timestamps, transcript, and to give feedback, submit questions, contact Lex, etc. Transcript: https://lexfridman.com/irving-finkel-transcript CONTACT LEX: Feedback – give feedback to Lex: https://lexfridman.com/survey AMA – submit questions, videos or call-in: https://lexfridman.com/ama Hiring – join our team: https://lexfridman.com/hiring Other – other ways to get in touch: https://lexfridman.com/contact EPISODE LINKS: Irving’s Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/drirvingfinkel/ The Ark Before Noah (book): https://amzn.to/4j2U0DW Irving Lectures Playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLYXwZvOwHjVcFUi9iEqirkXRaCUJdXGha British Museum Video Playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL0LQM0SAx603A6p5EJ9DVcESqQReT7QyK British Museum Website: https://www.britishmuseum.org/ The Great Diary Project: https://thegreatdiaryproject.co.uk/ SPONSORS: To support this podcast, check out our sponsors & get discounts: Shopify: Sell stuff online. Go to https://shopify.com/lex https://lexfridman.com/s/shopify-ep487-sc Miro: Online collaborative whiteboard platform. Go to https://miro.com/ https://lexfridman.com/s/miro-ep487-sc Chevron: Reliable energy for data centers. Go to https://chevron.com/power https://lexfridman.com/s/chevron-ep487-sc LMNT: Zero-sugar electrolyte drink mix. Go to https://drinkLMNT.com/lex https://lexfridman.com/s/lmnt-ep487-sc AG1: All-in-one daily nutrition drink. Go to https://drinkag1.com/lex https://lexfridman.com/s/ag1-ep487-sc OUTLINE: (00:00) – Introduction (00:43) – Sponsors, Comments, and Reflections (09:53) – Origins of human language (15:59) – Cuneiform (23:12) – Controversial theory about Göbekli Tepe (34:23) – How to write and speak Cuneiform (39:42) – Primitive human language (41:26) – Development of writing systems (42:20) – Decipherment of Cuneiform (54:51) – Limits of language (59:51) – Art of translation (1:05:01) – Gods (1:10:25) – Ghosts (1:20:13) – Ancient flood stories (1:30:21) – Noah’s Ark (1:41:44) – The Royal Game of Ur (1:54:43) – British Museum (2:02:08) – Evolution of human civilization

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Lex Fridman?

  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.

• 0:29Lex Fridman?

  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.

• 0:44Lex Fridman?

  And now, a quick few second mention of each sponsor. Check them out in the description or at lexfridman.com/sponsors. It is, in fact, the best way to support this podcast. We've got Shopify for selling stuff online, Miro for brainstorming ideas with your team, Chevron for reliable energy that powers data centers, Element for electrolytes, and AG1 for my daily multivitamin. Choose wisely, my friends. And now, on to the full ad reads. I do try to make them interesting, but if you skip, please still check out the sponsors. I enjoy their stuff, maybe you will too. To get in touch with me, for whatever reason, go to lexfridman.com/contact. All right, let's go. This episode is brought to you by Shopify,

• 1:28Lex Fridman?

  the platform designed for anyone to sell anywhere with a great looking online store. So of course Shopify is great as an app, as a service, but the thing that always fascinates me is the engineering behind the scenes. And this is truly an incredible engineering team. And I could talk about this for many hours, and perhaps it's good to give an example, like they built a custom search engine rather than using Elasticsearch or any of the off-the-shelf engines that will require significant re-architecture at their scale. C++ was the core language for close to hardware optimizations, memory efficiency across hundreds of millions of items. They created Rankflow, a domain-specific language combining Python-like simplicity with C++

• 2:12Lex Fridman?

  performance, rejected hybrid Python call in C++ approaches due to deployment complexity, version skew, and operational overhead. I'm reading these things from their recent blog about it. I highly recommend. There's so many technical blogs about the various problems they're solving. And they do this incremental phase-type development, deployment, where they ship fast, optimize later, maintain compatibility always. So in phase one was the first four weeks. They built Simscore DSL, which is a basic C++ engine to unblock data science experiments. And then in phase two, which took two to four months, they built Turbo DSL, which is a high-performance engine version of that, which achieves 48% speedup.

• 2:57Lex Fridman?

  There's so much more to talk about, but incredible engineering that brings you an incredible product at the end. Sign up for a $1 per month trial period at Shopify.com/lex. And that's all lowercase. Go to Shopify.com/lex to take your business to the next level today. This episode is also brought to you by Miro, an online collaborative platform. The very kind that the peoples and the civilizations of the ancient world that Irving talks about didn't have. Now imagine that. One of the great things about the computing age is that we can work together. It's not just the productivity gains for the individuals. It's the productivity gains for teams.

• 3:41Lex Fridman?

  And nowhere is that more true than in the process of idea development. As I talked about in a recent episode with Michael Levin. Do we have ideas or do ideas have us? And ideas have a way of kind of occupying for a time or for a generation, the brains of multiples of people. And those ideas are formed and shaped and modified and evolved across those brains, utilizing those brains. Or the brains do the modification. Whichever it is, you want to have the best tools for the job. And Miro is incredible for that. Convert sticky notes, screenshots and so on into diagrams or prototypes in minutes.

• 4:24Lex Fridman?

  Super easy to use, makes teamwork fun. Help your teams develop great ideas into results with Miro. Go to Miro.com to find out how. That's M I R O dot com.

• 4:38Lex Fridman?

  This episode is also brought to you by Chevron, an energy company that delivers affordable, reliable energy to US data centers. I'm attending Europe's in San Diego, which is a machine learning conference. And boys, one thing clear. Aside all the fascinating technical details, the turmoil of the research world, the excitement, the wonder, the mystery. Beyond all that is the reality that in order for the scaling laws to hold, the compute needs to scale. And for the compute to scale, we need energy. In the United States,

• 5:21Lex Fridman?

  the scaling of the energy infrastructure is essential because the demand for electricity is growing at an unprecedented scale. Chevron is working hard to provide multi gigawatts of delivered power with the flexibility to scale further. Energy is not an easy problem, especially if the scaling laws hold, especially if there's benefits to the products that rely on artificial intelligence, both for the training side and the inference side. And frankly, I think it is the inference side that will over time consume more and more energy and require more and more compute. What a fascinating world we live in.

• 6:02Lex Fridman?

  The full stack is full of scientific and engineering challenges. And I love it. Visit chevron.com/power to learn more. That's chevron.com/power. This episode is also brought to you by Element, my daily zero sugar and delicious electrolyte mix. Every once in a while, I'll also partake in the sparkling water. But majority of my Element consumption is the OG drink mix. I can't live without it. The electrolytes, sodium, potassium, magnesium are essential. If you're doing fasting, if you're doing a carnivore, low carb diet, if you're doing anything where your body is pushed to the limit at all, you have to make sure you get

• 6:47Lex Fridman?

  the electrolytes right. My favorite flavor is watermelon salt. I had a really nice family Thanksgiving in Ohio. O H I O. Boy, the football fans go hard there. But anyway, it was below freezing and I was planning to run outside long distance, you know, to prepare for the full overeating that is Thanksgiving. But it was rough. I've gotten soft, I think, about the cold. And I just did a lot of pushups and pullups.

• 7:27Lex Fridman?

  I'm more and more realizing as much as I am challenged by running spiritually and physically, it is a thing that if I don't do, I'm less happy. And if I do, after I'm done with the run, I just have a greater clarity about the world than about myself. So I try to run every day. But anyway, get a free eight count sample pack with any purchase. Try it at drinkelement.com/lex.

• 7:57Lex Fridman?

  This episode is also brought to you by AG1, an all-in-one daily drink to support better health and peak performance. Like I said, I was hanging out with family and my parents swear by AGZ, which I still haven't tried, but they recommend it very highly. So I'm an AG1 guy. I guess AGZ is a nightly sleep support that helps with restful, restored sleep. Anyway, my parents really swear by it. So if that's the thing you're interested in, please try it out. It is melatonin free and doesn't just help you fall asleep. It helps with the quality of the sleep. But yeah, AG1 is in the stack of things I consume.

• 8:42Lex Fridman?

  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. And the feeling of home,

• 8:56Lex Fridman?

  the feeling of being grounded in a place that feels like home is really important. So it's the little traditions, the little habits I build for myself to remind me that

• 9:07Lex Fridman?

  even when I'm far away, I can carry a little bit of the comforts of home with me.

• 9:14Lex Fridman?

  All right, they'll give you one month's supply of fish oil when you sign up at drinkag1.com/lex. This is the Lex Freedom Podcast. 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. And now, dear friends, here's Irving Finkel.

• 9:53Lex Fridman?

  Where and when did writing originate in human civilization? Let's go back a few thousand years.

• 9:59Speaker 02

  The first attempts at writing that we could call writing go back to the middle of the fourth millennium, say, around thirty five hundred B.C., 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

• 10:41Speaker 02

  and B can then play back, either in their heads or literally with their voices, a bit like a gramophone record. So, when it really began is a terribly, terribly awkward question for us, because the truth of the matter is, we have no idea when anything began. And all we can say is that the oldest evidence we have is around three thousand five hundred B.C., but whether that was anywhere near the time or the stage when this started off for, for the first time seems to me very, very unlikely. So, in, among these, the Mesopotamians, around three thousand five hundred, they started to do this, they made up signs which everybody understood and they could write simple pictographic

• 11:26Speaker 02

  messages. Foot is a foot, leg is a leg, and barley is barley. And then, very, very gradually, they had the idea of how you could represent numerals, and then they had the idea that the pictures could also represent signs. And once they had the idea that you could write sounds with pictures, 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, once this happened, some probably very, very imaginative and clever persons had a kind of lightbulb moment when they realised that they could develop a whole panoply of signs which could convey sound. And once you had that...

• 12:09Speaker 02

  You're liberated from pictographic writing into a position where you can record language, so language, grammar, and all the rest of it, and before long, proverbs and literature and all the other things that got written down. So it was a pretty gigantic step whenever it was taken, but we really have no idea when it was first taken. But the first evidence we have presents a sort of clearish sort of picture. It was simple and it got more complicated and then it became magnificent. 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, and or the Babylonian language, which was one the

• 12:51Speaker 02

  other main language of Iraq, but also any other language he heard. So if somebody came speaking French ahead of their time and spoke out loud, he could record with these signs the sound of French. 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. So what you have is, long before the alphabet, when the alphabet was not even a dream, um, complex, bewildering-looking, off-putting writing system, which was actually very beautiful, very flexible, and lasted for well over three

• 13:36Speaker 02

  millennia, probably closer to four millennia. 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. So it's one of the major stages of man's intellect, because quite soon after the writing first took off, the signs began to proliferate. And someone said, hey, we haven't got a sign for this sound, or we haven't got a sign for this idea. And so It began to swell out and at some extremely remarkable stage, one, probably only one person, suddenly realised that if there was no control, they would grow exponentially and exponentially

• 14:21Speaker 02

  until it was all nonsense and everybody had their own writing. And the second thing is that no one could remember them unless they were written down in a retrievable way. 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 colours and of countries and all the gods and everything. They made a systematic attempt to make these signs, to standardise them and to make them retrievable and of course to teach them. And having exercised that rigor from the outset, it meant that the thing became streamlined and stayed more

• 15:03Speaker 02

  or less as it was all the way through for three millennia or more, because the stamp put on it 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. So it means that there were scholars in Babylon in the third century or the second century, when Alexander was there, for example, if somebody dug up a tablet in very early writing, they would have a pretty good idea what it meant. They would recognise the signs even though they were so ancient and they'd see the relationships between them. So you have a fantastically strong system where the spinal cord was structured in a lexicographic

• 15:48Speaker 02

  regular system. So lexicography and what the signs were was jealously safeguarded and protected and it lasted fantastically.

• 15:59Lex Fridman?

  We should say that the name of that system that lasted for 3,000 years is cuneiform.

• 16:05Speaker 02

  Yeah, 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 Babylonia 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 Syrian reliefs, where the writing is very big, and you can

• 16:50Speaker 02

  easily tell that they were that shape. On a tablet, the wedge is not quite so predominant. So that was it. So they first called them cuneatic or cuneiform, and the word stuck. 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, because once in a while you meet somebody you've never heard of the word at all, and this is appalling. So people do survive, however. But it's an important mission because it's such an achievement by man, 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, this is one thing.

• 17:35Speaker 02

  And then the kings wrote long elaborate accounts of their campaigns and their military activities. And then there was proper literature, belle lettre, and magic and medicine, and all other genres of literature that we would naturally list on a sheet of paper in alphabetic writing, what you would use writing for. They basically did. And it had the unexpected quality, that most of these clay things lasted in the ground until now. 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. So.

• 18:16Speaker 02

  In a way, that's a comforting thought because they're safe there and protected.

• 18:20Lex Fridman?

  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. How hard do you think it was to come up with this? And we should make clear that that very specific element of encoding sound

• 18:44Lex Fridman?

  on the tablet, that's the genius invention. Drawing a picture makes sense. Okay, here's, you know, barley, here's the sun, here's whatever, the actual object.

• 18:55Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 18:55Lex Fridman?

  But to actually write down sound is a genius invention.

• 19:00Speaker 02

  Well, I think it's rather paradoxical because the first generation or so of tablets that we have are written in these pictographic signs where each sign means what it looks like. So this is a very limited method of recording messages and it doesn't lend itself to recording grammar. 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. So then you have all these wonderful ice cubes which express all the sounds of the language from which you can record words and, and grammar and everything else. Now, the thing is, the received law from a seriology is it was that way around.

• 19:46Speaker 02

  That first we had pictures and secondly, we had sound. Well, I have to say, I find this very hard to believe because if you had a group of people in an environment where it was compellingly necessary to make a system that you made marks on a surface which everybody could understand and use. Why wouldn't you start out with signs that made sounds? Because everybody speaks the same language, right? So you, 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. So they could have had signs that started out,

• 20:29Speaker 02

  because if you decided you had, we have twenty six, let's say they had fifty signs that would create the sound. They could write anything without any further trouble. 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. I don't know why they bothered with it. And my hunch is 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.

• 21:13Speaker 02

  And I think there was a long-running system of communication between people who didn't share a language, for whom pictures would suffice. 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. 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, what we can do is take these stupid, inhibited, no-smoking signs and write language.

• 21:55Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 21:55Speaker 02

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

• 21:58Lex Fridman?

  Is this a controversial statement?

• 22:00Speaker 02

  Highly controversial, highly controversial. Many, many astereologists would leave the room.

• 22:05Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 22:07Speaker 02

  But I'm not scared of controversy, because it's natural. I mean, if you think about it, it's natural, because... You don't have to have an alphabet to divide your word into sounds. See, for example, in Sumerian, you have a funny system of writing. You have a root, like do, which means to go. And then you have prefixes like e or mu or ba. And they, one's a passive, one's an active, and this and this. 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. So it's called agglutinative by people who like to make things look more important than they are. 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. So you have a long verb, which tells you,

• 22:52Speaker 02

  he would have done it if he could, but he couldn't, kind of thing, in, in the form of the verb. But the thing is, if you wanted to write that, you and I decided to write the answer. The first thing we would do is have a sign mu. And then we'd have ba, and then we'd have e, because every five minutes, people make those noises.

• 23:09Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 23:10Speaker 02

  You see what I mean?

• 23:11Lex Fridman?

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

• 23:18Speaker 02

  I do.

• 23:18Lex Fridman?

  Cuneiform-type tablets?

• 23:20Speaker 02

  Well, or pictographic-type tablets, before the cuneiform, when they're drawing-type. And I'll tell you why, because there's this marvelous site in Turkey called Gubekli Tepe.

• 23:30Lex Fridman?

  Oh, yeah.

• 23:31Speaker 02

  Do you know about Gubekli Tepe?

• 23:32Lex Fridman?

  Yes, of course.

• 23:32Speaker 02

  Well, everybody knows about the buildings and the architecture and the skull. Everybody knows about it. If you go all the way through the photographs, which the archaeologists unwisely put online, you will find in the middle of one color plate with lots of other things, a round green stone like a scarab from Egypt. 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? No one said anything about it at all. But it's clear to me, A. That this was a stamp to ratify where the in the carvings of the signs on clay

• 24:12Speaker 02

  or some other sealing material would leave an impression. It must be that. So this is about nine thousand B C. Yeah. Now, when I was a boy at university, my professor said to me that the reason you you can writing evolved in Mesopotamia because they had complex cities with ziggurats and big buildings and lots of people and they had to organise everything. And so they invented writing to cope with it. Well, if they had to cope with that in Sumer in three thousand B C, they sure as hell had to do it at Gobekli Tepe because they hardly even begun to finish excavating the sites of Gobekli Tepe. They go on and on like Manchester and Newcastle

• 24:52Speaker 02

  reunited. And really, the old rule would be you could not have architecture like that

• 25:02Speaker 02

  without that planned and built according to principle with all the different people. You couldn't have that without writing in southern Iraq. So how come suddenly, seven thousand years earlier, they do it there? And that green stone shows that they had writing. 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. That is pictographic writing, maybe even as phonetic writing, I don't know. But it was writing thousands of years before in the south. And that's what I think it is. You know, people came with metal from or precious stones from Anatolia. They knew that in the south

• 25:43Speaker 02

  they had lots and lots of stuff. They wanted to trade. They had to communicate. And it's basically like having a cigarette with an X through the middle. Everybody in the world knows what that means, that they don't know what the word for cigarette is in this language or cancer or filter or tobacco. It doesn't matter. That's pictographic writing. We still use it. And And it's it's it's above all kinds of mess. And I think that was the prevailing system, because I honestly believe that the people at this time were not stupid. They weren't guerrillas. They weren't less advanced than we are. They were probably indistinguishable from what we are. So you have merchants and wanderers and people who see, let's go down the river and see where we end up. And and people looking for money,

• 26:28Speaker 02

  looking for women, looking for everything. But that's surely how it was. But if you look at those Gobekli buildings with a skeptical eye, how it could be, I mean, the finish of it is astonishing, the structure of it, the vision of it. So the workforce and the tools and the organization, you know, what do they do it with a megaphone, your breakfast and all that kind of thing. No way, no way.

• 26:52Lex Fridman?

  So that's a really controversial statement that at the time of Gobekli Tepe, they may have been already a writing system.

• 26:58Speaker 02

  There was, because the thing is about it, that it's it's a seal to ratify. It's not just a squiggle on a pot. And you can say, oh, that's just a piece of debt. This is a finished thing with a flat surface. You press it down. So you have some contract, you have some building arrangement, some we paying for these bricks, whatever it was. And the official person had to squash it down. And it leaves the impression. I mean, I'm a great believer in Sherlock Holmes as a teaching system for intelligence and rationality and logic and thinking. I read those stories a million times when I was a kid. And the thing about about one of the things which impressed me most of all, was this point quoted

• 27:37Speaker 02

  by Holmes, not original to him, that it is theoretically possible to infer the Niagara Falls from a raindrop.

• 27:47Lex Fridman?

  That's a powerful statement. Yeah.

• 27:49Speaker 02

  Powerful statement. Well, that seal from Gobekli Tepe is a raindrop from which I infer writing. And it's perfectly possible. They all wrote on flat leaves, carved, drawn in many parts of the world. That's what happens. 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. So they are also for ratification purposes. And they have the name of the owner in three or four, maybe five signs. And it's probably me, son of my dad, or. Milkman or whatever it is. And it's obvious, it's obvious that they had writing on a perishable material. They can't just have had inscribed stone seals.

• 28:34Speaker 02

  And many parts of India today write on palm leaf. Why should it be any different? So people think, you know, well, just because it's now, it wouldn't be then. But actually, that argument is utterly, utterly fallacious. Because the process of evolution is stymied left, right and centre by inertia. Inertia is nearly as strong as evolution. And this is something that the people who talk about progress and ideas have no idea about.

• 29:02Lex Fridman?

  First of all, your whole line of work, you're making me realise is a kind of like Sherlock Holmes type of process. The deciphering of the language, archaeology of taking those pieces of evidence and trying to reconstruct a vision of that world. And now you're making me realise that even all the cuneiform tablets we have is just a raindrop compared to the waterfall of, of thousands of years of humans.

• 29:34Speaker 02

  We have a lot, but it's nothing in comparison with what existed. But not only that, see, we don't have to decipher anymore. We can read Decadian or Babylonian, pretty well fluently. That's not a problem. So the information which you can get from these sources, especially three millennia of sources, is very, very substantial, very substantial. But it means that the serologists have the inbuilt idea that what we have is something like all there ever was, which is absurd. For example, there's a period called the Earth III period where people lived in city-states. They wrote very small account tablets by the thousand.

• 30:15Speaker 02

  And there were two or three major cities where this is the way they lived. 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 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. Now, the thing is, there are thousands of those tablets written in about 2100 to 2000 B.C., thousands of them, about size of a box of matches. So people like to generalize about the Sumerians at this time of the world, but they probably

• 30:56Speaker 02

  all came out of two rooms. Because they were dumped when they were no longer needed in some kind of room 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've gone all over the world, thousands and thousands of them, out of probably two storage rooms, which is not a whole culture or a whole country or their whole history or their belief systems. So our view of it is slewed by the nature of the material. And sometimes the material is opulent and benevolent, but not always. And sometimes the people who work with slewed material don't even realize how slewed it

• 31:41Speaker 02

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

• 31:44Lex Fridman?

  So you, in all your time of studying cuneiform tablets, do you sometimes, late at night, get a glimpse of the waterfall? Like, can you imagine?

• 31:55Speaker 02

  Yes, I can imagine. 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 Asher Barnipal, and he had a fantastic library and he promoted it. He impounded tablets, he had them brought to Nineveh. He wanted all the prevailing knowledge and all knowledge from before under one roof. He has a kind of, like Alexandria thing. So he was a trained scholar and this is what he did. And they found it in the 19th century. They dug it up, Layard and those people. So what did they find? They found the tablets higgledy piggledy all over the floor of a huge room and in the corridors and everything, and lots of them broken and lots of them burnt.

• 32:43Speaker 02

  So ever since then, until really quite recently, Assyriologists have spent all their, a lot of people who work on these in interview times, but all the time joining the bits together. 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. So you look for another bit, you look for another bit. And gradually they piece together the literature. And the assumption has always been that if you put them all together again, you will have the whole library. But it's the absolute opposite. Because what happened was that the Babylonians in the south, in my opinion, they, they worked hand in glove with the Elamites from Iran. 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, to

• 33:26Speaker 02

  all the jewelry and all the gold. And people say that in a fit of pique, 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. They destroyed that. They spoke the same language. They had the same writing system. They'd have taken them all safely home, cart after cart after cart. And I think what's left there is duplicates and broken things, the things that got drops and everything. And that's what everyone thinks is it. So this is also a controversial point.

• 34:03Lex Fridman?

  You just knocked up. It's starting trouble.

• 34:06Speaker 02

  It's common sense.

• 34:07Lex Fridman?

  You're gonna get both of us cancelled today.

• 34:09Speaker 02

  But you see the thing, you see the thing, it's predicated on the assumption that what we have is what there, only what there was. And this is such a fallacy. It needs to be attacked left, right and centre.

• 34:23Lex Fridman?

  So a lot of the cuneiform language is already deciphered?

• 34:28Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 34:29Lex Fridman?

  Can you speak to the deciphering process? How hard is it? Maybe take us to this place of, for you yourself, first learning the language, figuring out the puzzle of it. How does it feel? The, how 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, the early days, sort of the Rosetta Stone of cuneiform also.

• 34:55Speaker 02

  That's important. Well, the first thing is, is that how the cuneiform writing system works. Because the crucial point, and once you see it, is 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. So you have ab and ba. But as they had four vowels, you had to have ab and ba, ib and b, ub and bu, eb and be.

• 35:37Speaker 02

  So you had the the range of things clustered around what we call a consonant. So they had all those for all the letters, which gave them a basic system. There was much more to it than that, and it was more complicated than that, but we don't have to really go into it. But basically, if you are a Babylonian and 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. So what you would do is you would write the syllable moo. And then the sign z and then the sign om. So you split the word up into its component syllables. When you read it in your mind, you squash them together into museum. That's the basic system. They had other signs which gave you a clue as to the meaning and the other bits around the edge.

• 36:22Speaker 02

  But it's basically syllabic writing.

• 36:26Speaker 02

  So when you go to university to study cuneiform, what you have to learn is all the signs and all their values. Because unfortunately, they didn't just have one for each, they had multiple ones. 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. So the Sumerian vocabulary had a lot of words that were probably differentiated by tone.

• 37:01Speaker 02

  So you might have bar and then a rising ah and then a lowering. And these signs all retain the bar value even though there were no tones. So it means if you look at a sign list, there's a lot of signs. You have bar number one, which is the common, then there's bar number two, bar number three, and you have to learn them all. And when you read, you have to learn how to do it. So when, in the modern world, if you go to university to do a seriology, which I hope you and all of your disciples will do as soon as possible, you actually have to cope with two languages, the Sumerian and the Babylonian. Now, the first thing is this, that the Babylonian language is a Semitic tongue,

• 37:42Speaker 02

  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. It's an early example of one of those. So that when the decipherment came along, it was the Semitic dictionary that they fell back on to identify words, nouns and roots. The other language, which is Sumerian, the one when you stick bits in the beginning and stick bits at the end, is not only not Semitic, it's not related to any other known language. Oh, no. Yeah, this is a bewitching thing. It's a bewitching thing to me. And this is how to understand it.

• 38:26Speaker 02

  Because the languages that we study in the world today, linguists study, they more or less all fall into a language group. So you have Indo-European, Spanish, Italian, Latin, Hittite, and so forth. And so that's why French, that's one group, and you have Germanic, and you have Stavonic. 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. There's not one for Sumerian. So this means that the truth that languages do not exist in a vacuum, but they're part of a big family, must always have been true. So that when writing arrives about 3,000, say, 300 B.C.

• 39:11Speaker 02

  To write proper, properly, it means that Sumerian was recorded just in time. But the big languages, maybe in China, in Russia, in somewhere else in Asia, that were related to Sumerian.

• 39:28Lex Fridman?

  Are gone?

• 39:28Speaker 02

  Are all gone. They're gone forever and ever and ever, unless something amazing happens. So we've got the one representative of this bizarre family.

• 39:38Lex Fridman?

  Amazing.

• 39:39Speaker 02

  It isn't, 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, eight hundred thousand years of rule, we live in Europe, they had to deal with the Ice Age. They all lived together, they bring up their children, they couldn't speak anything. They had 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 were out hunting rhino and you'd say, Lex, shut up, I'm constantly, Lex, Lex.

• 40:24Speaker 02

  And then I suddenly think, oh, I get it. You are Lex. Right? You only have to do that once, then you know who I am. So I know that I'm me and that you are you. So people who say that they couldn't distinguish ego and all that, it's absolutely stupid. If you cut your hand with a knife, you sure as hell experiencing. You sure as hell do. It hurts. It hurts a lot. You might even bleed to death. But it's not somebody else's hand. And it's your hand and it's your existence and your life that's threatening. You think people weren't conscious that they were an entity? I don't believe it.

• 41:01Lex Fridman?

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

• 41:05Speaker 02

  Well, eventually, yes, names. I mean, names, the things. And then you have the idea that a label fixes to something. Then the light bulb has gone on and next minute you have rhino and you have skin and you have babies. And you have, because I think you have an idea and the idea then drives the brain and the brain has another idea. It works like fertility.

• 41:26Lex Fridman?

  So what do you think is the motivation, the primary driver of developing written language? Is it? Is it goes hand in hand with civilization?

• 41:34Speaker 02

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

• 41:41Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 41:42Speaker 02

  And wi- wi- with rival institutions or with a king or with a government or all those sorts of

• 41:47Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 41:48Speaker 02

  Things. And that's why I think in Gobekli Tepe must have been the same thing. I read somewhere that they're all nomads and they only came to Gobekli Tepe, you know, three months, yeah. I mean, that cannot be true that they were nomads and they 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 is going to be, how high it's going to be. And I mean, you know, you can't just, you know, like that, like guerrillas.

• 42:19Lex Fridman?

  Uh, all right. So deciphering, the process of deciphering.

• 42:23Speaker 02

  So when I started, there were grammars and sign lists and dictionaries. Everything was marvelous. It was all basically deciphered. All you had to do is 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 um, 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

• 43:08Speaker 02

  and in Old Persian, trilingual version. And Old Persian, although it is an obviously an archaic form of the language, Persian is still alive. It was still alive in the 19th century. So they, 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 Dariarwoosh in Old Persian. And then suddenly somebody realized that the other two columns about the same length. What do you know? And the thing is, it said, I am Darius, the great king, king of the working, the son of didly didly didly, grandson of didly didly. So there's a whole paragraph with repeated things in the Persian, which they could understand. So what do you know?

• 43:53Speaker 02

  They're reiterated passages in the other two languages. So that was the key, the kind of the chisel that opened up cuneiform writing proper. And the thing was, they soon twigged that the language of the Babylonian was a Semitic tongue. And this was so important. I think the first word they discovered was the word for river, which is Nauru in Akkadian and Nahar in Arabic and Aramaic. And when they realized that the word that corresponded to the Persian had this form, 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.

• 44:37Speaker 02

  And they basically, they decipher this inscription in that sort of way. 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. And without that trilingual, I don't know what would have happened. I mean, I suppose it's conceivable that in the very modern world, something might have happened. But as it was, it was done by sheer brain power, by very, very clever persons, just doing it. And they cracked it. The Elamite language is much more difficult, but they got a lot of it too. So it was a very romantic thing, because the inscription was carved on a mountain face far above the plain.

• 45:19Speaker 02

  And Henry Rawlinson, who was an upstanding young British officer who claimed to decipher cuneiform quite unjustifiably, climbed up there with some miserable kid and made squeezes of the whole thing overlooking the plain, thousands of feet up in the air, and brought those back and they were used in the decipherment. So it's very romantic.

• 45:40Lex Fridman?

  Wait a minute. More controversial statement from Murring today. Henry Rawlinson doesn't deserve the credit for that?

• 45:47Speaker 02

  No, I don't think he does. 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. 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 possibly a card carrying genius, if not jolly, jolly close. And what happened with with him was this, there was an ongoing competition, well, an ongoing challenge to decipher hieroglyphic writing, which Chomponio usually gets the credit for. And Hinks was very interested in trying to decipher hieroglyphic head of the French.

• 46:33Speaker 02

  And he ran into a sort of dead end at one stage and he thought he'd have a look at Cuné form to see if it was helpful. And at the same time, he cracked it, he worked out how it worked. He realised that one sign can have more than one value of sound and of meaning because they are multivalent, the signs. I tried to shelter you from the horrible news, but it actually, it is not. It's not a walk in the park. It takes about five years to to.

• 47:04Speaker 02

  You probably do it in about four, probably.

• 47:06Lex Fridman?

  That is a compliment. I think you just complimented me. Uh, thank you. Thank you very much. So what, so you're saying one, one sign that looks exactly the same might have different sounds, given the context?

• 47:19Speaker 02

  Yeah, and you have to choose the right sound and and and also different meaning as well. Because for example, if you, if you have a sign for hot, word hot, right, you, you can't really have a picture sign for hot. Doesn't make sense, but what they did is they did a drawing of a kind of

• 47:39Speaker 02

  complex thing with a brazier inside another sign, which meant hot. So that sign existed, but it also meant other things as well. And you had to choose the right one for the context. Is all the context to matter? I mean, it really is quite a matter for despair when you start Cuné form. Because on top of everything else, they didn't leave gaps between the words.

• 47:59Lex Fridman?

  Because they're all connected.

• 48:00Speaker 02

  That's really mean. Yeah. So when you read, um, what you have to do, you start with the first sign and you think of the sign this and you go. Through the values in your mind and there's next sign. 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. So there are two things about it. One is that if you want to, you can master it. The other thing is that the number of variables was restricted. They controlled it, so it wasn't insane. 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. And, and it's, it's very beautiful, I think. It's, it's marvelous.

• 48:46Lex Fridman?

  Can you, in all seriousness, take me back to the time when you were learning it? What's the process of learning it?

• 48:51Speaker 02

  Well, I had a very abnormal upbringing because when I went to university, for about three years beforehand, I'd wanted to be an Egyptologist. So I'd read the Grammar by Gardner and was looking forward very much to studying ancient Egyptian. And what happened was that I went up to the University of Birmingham, where I went to university. And there was a man called Rundle Clark, who was an Egyptologist. And Rundle Clark came in on the Monday and gave us one lesson about Egyptian sculpture or something like that. And the next minute, he, next day, he died. Bang.

• 49:32Speaker 02

  So the professor called me into his room and said, look, it's going to take me a while to get an Egyptologist. They don't grow on trees. But there's another person in this department who teaches another ancient language called Lambert and he teaches kinéiform. So what I suggest is you go and do a bit of kinéiform with Professor Lambert. And then when I get an Egyptologist, you can convert back. So I go and knock on the door. Yes.

• 50:03Speaker 02

  So I went in and said, I want to learn kinéiform. And Professor Lambert, who was rather a Sherlock Holmes kind of figure, aesthetic, bony, sarcastic, cruel.

• 50:14Lex Fridman?

  Cruel.

• 50:15Speaker 02

  Cruel, absolutely terrifying. And I said, I, I wanted to learn kinéiform. And he wasn't at all pleased because this was a time in Britain when professors.

• 50:29Speaker 02

  Resented having students to teach because it butted into their research time. It was that sort of arrangement.

• 50:34Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 50:35Speaker 02

  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. So that's what happened to me. It was an amazing thing. So he gave me a list of signs to learn, basic signs. So I did. And the next couple of days, and then we came in and he, we started reading.

• 50:56Lex Fridman?

  So given the complexity of the signs, why did cuneiform last 3,000 years? The most successful writing system ever.

• 51:07Speaker 02

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

• 51:14Speaker 02

  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 writers for the king and everything, commanded a very great deal of power because most of the public couldn't.

• 51:34Speaker 02

  So they reserved to themselves knowledge, understanding, philosophical inquiry. I mean, no doubt it went on in pubs and things, but they were, they were in charge. They had everything under lock and key. And they were, I think the scribal schools are rather cliquey. They were certainly cliquey in the sense of Oxford and Cambridge being rivals, that sort of thing. They had that sort of idea. And it was in no one's interest whatsoever. Nobody would ever concede any interest in the idea of literacy for all. This would be, it would never be thought of and it would be anathema. And so if you got on a soapbox on a Saturday afternoon and say, ah, enough of this, we have to teach the children,

• 52:18Speaker 02

  they'd be taken away, I think.

• 52:20Lex Fridman?

  So we're getting in these tablets, the output of the intellectual class, a very small fraction of humans. So we're getting just the Oxford and the Cambridge.

• 52:30Speaker 02

  We are, except this, that when you went to scribal school, you had to learn Samarian and Akkadian, the languages properly, and all the vocabulary and the grammar. So some boys probably had a lot of trouble doing this and, you know.

• 52:48Speaker 02

  They were okay, but there ain't gonna be no geniuses. And I think the situation in the school was that the teachers farmed out the kids who would actually rather have been outside playing football, but could read and write, to earning their living doing low level reading and writing. That's to say, writing contracts, letters, everyday things for people, because no one could read and write. So you had to get a scribe if you're gonna marry your daughter off and you get all the witnesses about the presence and all this. All the thing had to be done for four days. So the writer would come and do it. So your your medium level writers would serve that requirement.

• 53:30Speaker 02

  And very talented or clever or intellectual students would be encouraged to go into one of the literary professions, which would be, so to speak, medicine,

• 53:43Speaker 02

  law, working for the king, working for the church. I mean, the priests would serve. All those things which were dependent upon archives and writing, they would find their nevo. And also, um, architecture, because if a big building had to be built, then somebody had to know about load bearing things and brick measurements. And so some of them went into that kind of work. And also, probably some of them went into running the army and you had to move stores and animals. And so they they found their nevo. And some of them were intellectually very able indeed. And they went into um, the disciplines of, on the one hand astrology, but more seriously into astronomy and theoretical grammar.

• 54:29Speaker 02

  Because they they had treatises about the relationship between the two languages and how they worked and different parts of speech. And and they wrote learned commentaries as well, what words meant. So there was an intellectual. High level, top. And then there were lots of professional scribes. And then the kids who left school as soon as possible and did all that, like today.

• 54:52Lex Fridman?

  I apologize to be philosophical, but Wittgenstein, the philosopher, said that the limits of our language is the limits of our world. So to which degree did the languages that were encoded in cuneiform define human civilization, would you say? What were the, what were the things that were complicated to express and therefore were not expressed often?

• 55:16Speaker 02

  That's a really interesting question. So in terms of richness of vocabulary and richness of verbal subtlety, I think Babylonian rivals Arabic and of course, English, you know? 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. And Arabic has lots of synonyms and lots of devices and all the same. Same in Babylonian. It was a fully fledged literary language. The question about, about whether the language put a stop to further things, which is basically what you're asking,

• 56:00Speaker 02

  is immensely complicated. But the one thing that strikes me as relevant is that a very huge proportion of scholarly literature in Esprit d'Amia, it takes the form of omens, because they believed that events, accidental or deliberately stimulated, had implications for what was going to happen. And they took omens from things in the sky and things in the street and every single thing. If you were a well-qualified divine, it would have this significance, right? Now, there are thousands of lines of omens of all different kinds.

• 56:44Speaker 02

  And in Akkadian, it says, for example, if a lizard runs across the breakfast table, the queen will die. So if you translate the Akkadian this way, the word if, verb and everything, if that, then this. So there are thousands of, thousands of lines translated in many books about omens where if this happens, that will happen. So this is how it's understood by my colleagues.

• 57:10Speaker 02

  Well, this is absolutely impossible. Because if you are the, you're the, you're the chief diviner for the king, and you open up a sheep to take a liver out and examine it according to the, and if the queen's gonna die and the king's there, you're not gonna say, uh, the queen's gonna die. I mean, you're gonna look like a fucking idiot if she doesn't die. And if she does die, you're gonna be responsible. 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.

• 57:52Speaker 02

  So the point is that A equals B is never true. It means that with A, B could be, might be, ought to be, should be, could be true. All those subtle things. So that the diviner who works for the king must have been a philosopher, who looks at the king, he looks at the king and he knows what the king wants him to say. So he has to tell the king what he wants to hear. He has to tell the king if it's bad news in such a way that he doesn't mind or he won't worry. It's the most beautiful thing. It's so subtle. It's, it's like a, it's like a violin concerto.

• 58:34Speaker 02

  It can never have been A equals B for a minute. So the medical texts say, if you do, if a man has this, you do this, you drink this, he'll get better. Right? It says you'll get better. So you ever met a doctor who will say, you do this, you'll get better? No. They say, all being well, you'll be back on your feet. Or I've seen this kind of condition many times, or everything should go fine, you should get better, you should be better soon. But never you will get better, because what happens if you die? Where are you? The lawyers will show up. Absolutely. So this means that not expressible in Akkadian grammar are these modal verbs. Could, might, should, ought.

• 59:17Speaker 02

  They can't be expressed grammatically, but it is impossible that it was such a magnificent literary language where they...

• 59:27Speaker 02

  Didn't have these subtleties is utterly impossible. And if you translate, he will um in a literary text, he might, then the whole text is different. The whole text is.

• 59:39Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, absolutely.

• 59:40Speaker 02

  And and they don't, my colleagues translate, it says in the grammar books, in it, in it, like that. Automatically, there's no self appraisal of the folly of it.

• 59:51Lex Fridman?

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

• 59:59Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:00:00Lex Fridman?

  I mean, it's such a such an incredible discipline. Just like you said, hinted at, just a subtle variation in a single word can change everything.

• 1:00:11Speaker 02

  Well, you know, the truth about translation is that you never really have a word in one language, which precisely equates another. You never do. They're always a kind, the best you can do. And sometimes it makes no difference and sometimes it's really quite misleading. And so what people do when they learn Akkadian is they learn the Akkadian word and they learn the English translation. Right, you have the parasus is to divide. So whenever you have the verb parasus, it's some form of divide or division. But actually, it's not because divide is like the primary root. But there's maybe ten nuances of 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.

• 1:00:56Speaker 02

  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, it's the most salient and important thing that came out of America in all its history. It's the Chicago Assyrian Dictionary, which is this long. There's only a one rival to it for cultural importance, which is the electric guitar, of course. But the two of them, I think, are.

• 1:01:21Speaker 02

  Your countrymen's greatest achievement.

• 1:01:24Lex Fridman?

  It's the pride of our nation.

• 1:01:25Speaker 02

  I think so.

• 1:01:26Lex Fridman?

  Two things.

• 1:01:26Speaker 02

  The very thing.

• 1:01:28Lex Fridman?

  Chicago dictionary, can you, I'm sorry to take the tension. What is the Chicago dictionary?

• 1:01:32Speaker 02

  It started in the twenties and they made a dictionary of the Babylonian language. A, A to Z, so to speak, and it's, it's as long as this table, this magnificent thing and this big. 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, you, the meaning is going to be a bit different from in a letter and, you know. So people really, really understand the Cadian, they really do. But this thing about, about the modal verbs is an interesting conundrum to me because and there's no way it's reflected in the writing. So I can only assume that there was some kind of drawing out of the vowel in a verb.

• 1:02:16Speaker 02

  Meaning could, now like you were saying, it might do it, you know, something like that. Anyway, so nowadays we, it's not the decipherment that's the job, it's just reading. 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. And if you're a competent de seriologist, 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. So you have to learn how to interpret stuff and also some literature. It's very difficult because of technical vocabulary and they had technical vocabulary and unusual words.

• 1:02:57Lex Fridman?

  So you can do all of that. You can

• 1:03:01Lex Fridman?

  kind of figure out the technical complexities. You can figure out the, the noise, meaning missing pieces.

• 1:03:09Speaker 02

  Yeah, sometimes you can calculate to what it ought to be, make a reasonable suggestion. And this dictionary, which I was talking to you about is such a fantastic tool because. 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. And most of the world's best acereologists collaborated on it. So the quality of translation and understanding is really extraordinary.

• 1:03:36Lex Fridman?

  What are some things you've read from that time? Is there some jokes? Is there some love letters?

• 1:03:42Speaker 02

  There are one or two letters about, from a chap to a woman about, you know, you are very beautiful and your lips are like radishes and your ears are like walruses and things. But, I mean, there are some things like that. And there's a kind of street drama in Babylon in fourth century B.C., something like that, when there must have been actors who did this in the street. And it's Marduk and Saphanitum, his wife, and another woman. Marduk's having an affair with this other goddess. And Saphanitum is jealous and the women fight in the street and heard insults of one another and, you know, slot bucket and all this kind of stuff.

• 1:04:25Speaker 02

  It's hilarious and it must have been a bit like a sort of Verdi opera without the music, I suppose, I don't know. But anyway, it starts off when Saphanitum is in the room and Marduk is in bed with this other goddess on the roof and she can hear. You could say it was an eternal human issue.

• 1:04:44Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, yeah, love, heartbreak, jealousy, all that.

• 1:04:48Speaker 02

  Between deities also.

• 1:04:49Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:50Speaker 02

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

• 1:04:52Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, deity is a grandiose way of expressing human affairs, human behaviours, human ways, yeah.

• 1:05:00Speaker 02

  Indeed.

• 1:05:01Lex Fridman?

  In the writing, what was their relationship to the divine?

• 1:05:04Speaker 02

  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 Aya. 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 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

• 1:05:49Speaker 02

  world today, in some parts of the world. And this was the main system, and the main gods were concerned with the ruler and the fate of the country. And another god was concerned with illness and the dead and what happens to the dead. And they had other specialities, and they all had their own temples. 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. 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.

• 1:06:29Speaker 02

  So people had, grew up with the idea that among all of them, that there were special ones for the family, and they had a special one who was supposed to look after them. That's the sort of basic idea. But the trouble is, since gods are, as you say, human beings on a larger scale, they can be forgetful, or uninterested, or on holiday, and there are lots of ways that you have to prompt your, make little sacrifices and little bribes so they do their job and keep an eye on you. So they had that kind of slightly practical view of gods, that they were a bit unpredictable, great when they were there, but not always there, sort of idea.

• 1:07:12Speaker 02

  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. God or gods seem a lot more important than they do normally. 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. It's a kind of conception that's not actually based on reality, that the individual's response to religious stimuli...

• 1:07:55Speaker 02

  Fluctuates and is varied and is often a response to need. It doesn't come from nothing. I mean, people don't suddenly feel, I've got to thank the Lord for the rainbow or something like that. I think it's probably true today. I mean, when you read the investigations they make of religion today, Christianity in this country is on the decline. Because people who are supposed to be Christians say they aren't anymore. They're atheists. So the people who say, I go to church and I believe in everything, is a relatively small number of people saying, now, this is the situation, which is quite remarkable if you think about it. No one knows what the consequence will be for the human race, whether religion will balance out, whether it will die off. Who knows?

• 1:08:40Lex Fridman?

  I think it's an ancient technology that has proven across millennia to give a set of tools to humans to contend, as you said, with suffering. That's a part of life. 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.

• 1:09:10Speaker 02

  I think that's true, but I think in Mesopotamia it was different in terms of its potency and immediacy, because there's no skyscrapers in Iraq. 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 everything like that. And the idea that the gods are there watching, it's not like a big artifice like it is here. It just doesn't ring true here. You can't come to it and really believe in it. Whereas these people didn't have to really believe in it because it was it.

• 1:09:47Lex Fridman?

  It's the obvious practical part of life. They're right there.

• 1:09:52Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's like they didn't believe in ghosts, they took them for granted. And they didn't believe in the gods, they took them for granted. This is a different mechanism, because nobody here in the world today takes those things for granted, just the opposite. But I think that's how it worked. So you didn't have people wrestling with the idea of whether the gods really exist or that whether they really care about me. They gave them a nudge when it was necessary. And they might offer this, they might offer that, but they, it was the, it was the system. It was the prevailing system. And I think it's an important difference. And also that thing about ghosts is, that is clear from the inscriptions, all of them, that I managed to find,

• 1:10:34Speaker 02

  that nobody ever asked themselves, do these things exist or not? Or did I really see them or not? Or did I not? They didn't, they didn't, they just took it all for granted.

• 1:10:44Lex Fridman?

  What are ghosts? Is it usually ancestors?

• 1:10:48Speaker 02

  Um, well, everybody, everybody who died in bed naturally or peacefully, what we call their ghost, went down to the netherworld. And there they were. So they buried people jolly quick, um, for obvious reasons. And like they do in Islam and Judaism today, it's the same kind of idea. And, uh, the spirit of the person

• 1:11:14Speaker 02

  went down through the gates of the netherworld and stayed there.

• 1:11:19Speaker 02

  So that's the basic situation. And people in their houses had actual burials under the courtyard. And they had a thing where you pour stuff down, a whole fluid and food, it's kind of symbolic offerings to them.

• 1:11:34Lex Fridman?

  So is that a way to lessen the impact of mortality?

• 1:11:39Speaker 02

  I don't know, because you know that everyone's going to die. I think the real tragedy would be is if we're not supposed to. That would be the tragedy. But every single person. Is going to die. So all relationships have this finite clause in them. So if you're very fond of somebody or you love somebody and they die, it's kind of infantile to whine about it ever after. Because what do you think was going to happen, either you or them? You know, I I always see it like that. I don't feel grief when people die.

• 1:12:18Lex Fridman?

  It is infantile, but I gotta tell you something about human beings. We're all kind of infantile all the way through from, you know, we don't stop being infantile after we're infants. It's it's one thing to know it, you know, theoretically, and it's another thing to know it, know it. Like this thing ends, this ride ends.

• 1:12:39Speaker 02

  But that's the pain. It's the fact that the whole thing ends.

• 1:12:43Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:44Speaker 02

  And when people fall off the edge, they fall off the edge.

• 1:12:48Lex Fridman?

  So, yeah, the knowledge that it ends is the painful thing, not the actual moment of the ending. Yeah.

• 1:12:53Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:12:53Lex Fridman?

  Many times what makes moments really precious is that they're going to be gone. I think that's not a trivial thing for us humans to really contend with. I think religion, religious thought, the divine, I think, help with that.

• 1:13:07Speaker 02

  I I think the big mistake for mankind was the creation of monotheistic religions. Because they brought evil into the world. Because if you believe in a monotheistic religion, it means I'm right and you're wrong. If you don't, so that it's already on that footing.

• 1:13:25Lex Fridman?

  It's very dogmatic, yeah.

• 1:13:27Speaker 02

  Dogmatic, and it's led to everything, there's inquisitions and this, you know, all this kind of stuff. It's always a result of it that one religion is superior and the others should be stamped out and all that. And in my opinion, monotheistic religion has generated the most fantastic amount of nonreligious feeling. Whereas when you have all the different gods and have different specialities and the ones you like and the ones everybody likes and they have their temples and their offerings. It was very interesting to me to go into a temple in Calcutta. And I went to there with my wife Joanna, we went into. The temples and saw how they were, and I think they must be very much like the ones

• 1:14:07Speaker 02

  in Mesopotamia. So there was never anything about them which affronted people's individuality or, or, or, I mean, there's no religious prejudice or even racial prejudice in antiquity. All these things are modern, disadvantageous matters. If you think what's done in the name of religion, it is absolutely staggering.

• 1:14:28Lex Fridman?

  So let's go to literature, because we didn't really mention literature much, except you did briefly mention Epic of Gilgamesh.

• 1:14:35Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:14:35Lex Fridman?

  So that was written in Cuneiform. It's one of the earliest works of literature.

• 1:14:39Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 1:14:40Lex Fridman?

  Can you tell me about this work?

• 1:14:42Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, we know it best from this Assyrian Library set of tablets. There are twelve of them. It's a twelve tablet work. It's quite long. And Gilgamesh is the hero of it. But the literature, we know it from earlier texts, and we know that Gilgamesh lived. He was a real person. He was a king in Uruk, and he was one of those people who lived after their death in the world, like Alexander, for example. So there were stories about Gilgamesh when he was alive. There were stories about him afterwards. And firstly, they were oral literature, not written down at all. And then around the eighteen hundreds, people started to write them down in Sumerian or Babylonian. So there was a corpus, and

• 1:15:27Speaker 02

  eventually they were woven into this long twelve Homeric-type thing about the adventures of Gilgamesh. So it is certainly literature, and it's to do with humanity and immortality and man in the hands of the gods, and incorporates lots of interesting, exciting stories. It's very Hollywood-y kind of thing. And you can see within it, even in the sophisticated Nynivae version, its roots are in oral literature, because when somebody speaks, it says Gilgamesh opened his mouth to speak and addressed his friend Enkidu, and then there's a speech, and then Enkidu opened his mouth and addressed his friend Gilgamesh. Well, when you're reading a story, you don't need that.

• 1:16:12Speaker 02

  And that must be because of when there was when there was a enacting of an oral thing, a narrator would say, and it suddenly got frozen into the text. So it's it's very a strange thing, because if you're reading, it is obvious that one person speaks and the other person speaks. And and they always have this complicated thing stuck in the text. So it must be an echo of presumably you have your protegenists enacting their timeless matter with with and the person who's writing it down says, and then Gilgamesh said, you know, like, like in a, like in a script.

• 1:16:50Lex Fridman?

  I mean, what what can you say about the the telling of stories in written form during that time? Do you think that too stretched back in time?

• 1:17:01Speaker 02

  I do. I think the fireside narrative matter, you know, when we were kids, it would be twerks with a guitar and sitting around a fire on holiday. But that mechanism when people gather after dark, when there is a fire and talk, is the sort of environment where narrative accounts flourish naturally among human beings.

• 1:17:24Lex Fridman?

  Stories, telling a story, and doesn't have to be pragmatic, it can be literary in in a way.

• 1:17:29Speaker 02

  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 then they have a story about, you know, and all those sorts of things, or whatever it would be. But I think probably 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. I mean, the quality of the workmanship of the artistic

• 1:18:07Speaker 02

  ability is unsurpassable. It's not just good. So how is that an explicable thing at this very early date? It means.

• 1:18:19Speaker 02

  That among all the population, you have Imusils and Einsteins and somewhere along the line, you have Rembrandts. And I imagine that half the cave paintings in Europe were done by one person. I mean, you got the impression every family had a genius painter. It's impossible. Probably there was a person who went from place to place doing these paintings because they were so could draw straight away accurately like that. But they are a distillation of creative artistic ability plus skill. So this is right at the pretty early stage, is it not, the cave painting material? So if you consider the

• 1:18:59Speaker 02

  human stock which encapsulates such ideas ever after, then you have to reckon with that. You have to reckon with that. Very creative, very creative people. So the function of stories to tell the young and about what happened and about famous battles, or when the flood came, or how people learned to make fire, or, you know, how we invented the, all those sorts of things, everybody puts down as, but that's presumably what absolutely happened. And you have the capacity for people to adore and to respect among

• 1:19:39Speaker 02

  their own kind, people of astounding ability. There must have been hunters who were ferociously quick and, you know, wrestle with polar bears and all that kind of thing. And all this stuff will be grist to the narrators. Again, as things got more complicated and more sophisticated, so lessons might be incorporated, or lessons might come out of them unintentionally. Because if you tell a story without a moral, it is usually a moral if you, if you think about it.

• 1:20:08Lex Fridman?

  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.

• 1:20:24Speaker 02

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

• 1:20:27Lex Fridman?

  You gotta tell me the story. This ancient Babylonian clay tablet dating seventeen hundred B.C. Which contains a flood narrative that predates the biblical story of Noah by a thousand years.

• 1:20:40Speaker 02

  At least.

• 1:20:40Lex Fridman?

  At least.

• 1:20:41Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:20:42Lex Fridman?

  Okay, well, you gotta tell me the full story.

• 1:20:44Speaker 02

  So the full story is like this. Visitors used to come to the museum. And to ask questions of the experts who worked there. And one would be on duty periodically. And sometimes people would bring objects, sometimes they'd ask questions. And somebody once came in with a whole load of objects, including this tablet, which to cut a long story short. I identified pretty much straight away as being part of the flood story. It was a tablet about eight inches by three. Not the whole flood story, which is the complex narrative, which ended up in the Gilgamesh narrative much, much later. But this one was an early narrative in which the point was

• 1:21:24Speaker 02

  taken up where the gods in heaven had decided that the population of Mesopotamia needed to be wiped out. Because they were so noisy. This was the expression. And the gods couldn't sleep after lunch, sort of thing. So they decided they would wipe them out and create something quieter that worked harder. So this was the basic mechanism and they had different ways of doing it. And then the most effective one was they were going to send a flood to wipe them all out. And one of the gods, the number three in the triumvirate, thought this was a deplorable idea, so he took it upon himself to warn this person called Atrechasis, who lived in Mesopotamia,

• 1:22:07Speaker 02

  to build a boat to rescue life when the waters came. And in it, he told him the shape of it and the materials he would need and how much he would need of the materials. And so he could do it safely. And in the sixty lines of the tablet, all this stuff was there. It was like a blueprint to build this boat. And it was extraordinary because it was round, the boat. And and everybody who knew their Bible, the Ark's got a coffin shape kind of affair. And nobody thought of it being a round boat. And.

• 1:22:43Speaker 02

  The fact is that round boats wouldn't use in Mesopotamia on the rivers, coracles, as to say, because for transporting things and they would never sink, they were very appropriate. And so in this story, it was decided it was going to be a giant coracle, a really, really big one that would never sink and the male and female animals could go in and Adrashas' wife and his three sons and so forth could go in and everything would be there and it would float on the water. And when it came down, they said, we'll start all over again. So it's got very many points in common with the description of the flood in Genesis. And of

• 1:23:26Speaker 02

  course, so did the one in Gilgamesh. So in 1872, there was a a serologist in the British Museum called George Smith. And he was a very, very talented reader. And in 1872, he discovered that one of the tablets from the Nineveh Library we were talking about before, had on it a passage which ran in parallel with Gilgamesh about the waters coming and the boat and everybody floating. And even to the point that when the rain stopped and the ark came to rest on a mountain, that the hero of this thing in Gilgamesh, who was

• 1:24:07Speaker 02

  called Utnapishtim, released a bird three times to see whether the trees had come up. And the first one came back and the second one and the third one didn't. So he knew that. So this was not only in the epic of Gilgamesh, but it was also in the Book of Genesis. So what it meant was that it wasn't, you couldn't have two stories. It wasn't two stories about the same thing. It was literary dependence. It was literary dependence. The one was locked into the other. The text of the Hebrew Bible from whenever it was written down, of course, nobody knows quite when, but whenever it was, it was about the same time as the one from Nineveh, about the

• 1:24:47Speaker 02

  seventh century, sixth, something like that, that the time interval between the Gilgamesh version from Nineveh and the Hebrew Bible is not like a big expanse of time. So there was an argument that one goes this way and one goes that way. But then when this tablet came in a thousand years old, nobody believes the Bible was written in 1700 B.C.

• 1:25:11Speaker 02

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

• 1:25:22Speaker 02

  You just don't. But in Mesopotamia, they had floods, the rivers. Sometimes there wasn't enough water, sometimes there was too much, sometimes it was far too much water. So the mechanism that the waters could be used as a destructive force by the powers that be is a plausible Mesopotamian mechanism. And it's based in a sort of sense, in my opinion, in reality, I think there must have been some tsunami once, most people were drowned and those who survived were in boats, obviously. And then afterwards, nobody ever forgot it.

• 1:25:55Speaker 02

  And it went on and on and on.

• 1:25:56Lex Fridman?

  You mean, uh, there actually could have been a catastrophic event of a large scale?

• 1:25:59Speaker 02

  Yeah, not the whole world, because people.

• 1:26:01Lex Fridman?

  Or just enough to imagine.

• 1:26:03Speaker 02

  Yeah, sweeping down to the Persian Gulf and, you know, the flat plains, everything would be destroyed. All the houses would be destroyed and then more would be drowned.

• 1:26:11Lex Fridman?

  This is an incredible discovery. Do you think it's possible that this is the original? There are flood myths in many cultures.

• 1:26:19Speaker 02

  I believe this, the Mesopotamians had a deep-seated horror of dependency on water when they couldn't control it. They were fearful of it. And they had a rainbow in Babylon, like in the Bible, as a proof that the disastrous flood would never happen again. But I think there must have been one episode of this kind, maybe five thousand years before the tablet, ten thousand, it doesn't matter. Because with the passage of time, nothing happens in that part of the world. So something will be alive, grandfather to grandson, before you go to sleep and remember, my boy, you know, you only have to be careful because otherwise, and all that stuff, for sure.

• 1:27:02Speaker 02

  Bogeyman stuff, it never quite died out in their conscious minds.

• 1:27:07Speaker 02

  So I think that when the Judeans from Jerusalem, after the destruction of the temple and by the Babylonians and the rout of the priesthood and everything, the king and the others went over land to Babylon as refugees and they had to live there for three generations of time under Nebuchadnezzar's reign. So I believe that the text of the Bible was written then, because if you read the Bible attentively, which I can't say I do on a regular basis, but if you do read it dispassionately, you have the mechanism that the early books of the Bible explain to the reader how it is that these people are in such a mess, because they're supposed to be the chosen people

• 1:27:52Speaker 02

  doing all that. Look at them, they haven't got a temple, they haven't got a country, they're washed up and everything like that. So I think that what happened was, it's a complex thing, but the Judeans from Jerusalem, they spoke Hebrew, but they also spoke Aramaic, right? The two languages, they're sister languages. And the Babylonians spoke Babylonian, and they also spoke Aramaic. And they all wore the same kind of clothes, and they all had brown skin. And when all these refugees from Jerusalem were milling around in Babylonia, they would have intermarried and disappeared within no time at all.

• 1:28:31Speaker 02

  And the authorities who were there prevented this by drawing up a kind of charter of their history, explaining things from the beginning of time up until now, how it happened and what happened, and it was all intentional. So that is, in my opinion, the driving force behind the Hebrew text. And the thing about it is that they didn't have, in Jewish philosophical tradition, stuff about creation and the beginning of the world. And they took Babylonian ideas, which they learnt when they were there, and they recycled

• 1:29:11Speaker 02

  So whereas the Babylonians decided that gods were going to wipe out noisy persons. When the Jewish philosophers got this narrative to recycle about the vengeful almighty, he was in the Old Testament, a very unpleasant vengeful person. It was because of sin, it wasn't because of rocket and playing the radio, it was sin. So they took one narrative and they recycled it for their own purposes.

• 1:29:38Lex Fridman?

  The flood is a useful tool to punish people for whatever X is?

• 1:29:43Speaker 02

  That's exactly right. And something else is this, something else is this, right? You have five days to build the ark, or whatever it is, or two weeks to build the ark. So the clock goes tick, tick, tick, tick, tick. And about a third of the films that come out of Hollywood are the world's going to be demolished by aliens. And you've got 24 hours to think of a cure, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick. So that narrative is irresistible, that one man can save the world if he's lucky in time from disaster. So it starts off with Napistim and it goes on to Noah, and then it goes on to Hollywood.

• 1:30:21Lex Fridman?

  Do you think this ark in the tablet actually was ever built? You did build a replica, one third the size?

• 1:30:30Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:30:31Lex Fridman?

  And you, people should check out, you tell the story of that wonderfully. Now, what did you learn from building this replica? And do you think the actual ark existed?

• 1:30:40Speaker 02

  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, it gets recycled. So

• 1:31:23Speaker 02

  this is one thing. And then also there probably are spontaneous ideas because it's not so complicated or so amazing that independently people would have such a narrative. After all, you know, like the great river in China floods and everybody gets, so that's not at all surprising. But what was so shocking for George Smith, who was such a clever person, is to read for the first time on this tablet from Nineveh, long before the one that I discovered came to light, about the three birds being released, one after the other. And that, that was the clincher, that the two stories were locked together. And lots of clergymen got very miserable about it and didn't know what to make of it.

• 1:32:05Lex Fridman?

  So that's, that's a definitive proof that there's a literary.

• 1:32:08Speaker 02

  Literary, I think literary link. I think so.

• 1:32:12Lex Fridman?

  And, I mean, these puzzles that are then connected, but the arc you discover a thousand years. So that means that story of the flood has been told many, many times across that span to, you know,

• 1:32:31Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:32:32Lex Fridman?

  Do your homework or the flood is gonna come.

• 1:32:34Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 1:32:35Lex Fridman?

  To all the.

• 1:32:37Speaker 02

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

• 1:32:43Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:32:44Speaker 02

  You know, what will happen? You'll be out on the river and that will be your lot, you know? I, I think so. I think it was a, I, I, there, there's a certain amount of evidence that in Mesopotamian society, people talk about the time before the flood and after the flood. And it's like when I was a boy, people used to talk about before the war, we used to.

• 1:33:09Speaker 02

  And now we we do this, it's a kind of cataclysmic cut across history, which provides a ruler, so things are either before it or after it. Because there's a king list, for example, where they wrote down the names of all the kings, all the way back to the beginning, including kings before the flood. They knew about that. They had their names and their great regnal years or thousands of years. Fascinating.

• 1:33:36Lex Fridman?

  So there's a guy named Graham Hancock, who talks about the Younger Dryas hypothesis, 10,000 B.C., that there was an asteroid that hit Earth and melted the ice sheets and that created a flood in North America. So that means an actual cataclysmic global event, that then, as all the different civilizations sprung up, they all carried that knowledge, that memory. That's his idea. What probability would you assign to that?

• 1:34:07Speaker 02

  I would say negligible, because I regard it as a literary matter, which is not predicated on the existence of flood in people's minds. But I do believe that the story in Mesopotamia owes its inception to a disastrous flood, but nothing global, nothing that touched America or China or Birmingham. So I don't have any sympathy with that. But people have made drilled of cause and I don't know all over. I'm not interested in all that stuff. It's to my mind, it's a literary topos of great potency, of irresistible potency. Because everybody identifies with the idea of being in bed and someone knocks on the door, says, get up, you've got to build a boat and this is what you're going to need and you've got to get on with it, sunshine,

• 1:34:52Speaker 02

  or we're all sunk. I mean, what are you going to do? The most interesting thing is this Atrocasis in the 1700 text. He wasn't a king and he wasn't a sailor or a boat builder. So how comes this clever god who wants to find someone to build? Wouldn't you go for a look in the Yellow Pages for a boat building company? Say, listen fellow, I've got a deal. No, he had to tell him, this is the blueprint, this is the shape. You need all this, you need all that, you've got to measure it and all that. It's a very interesting thing.

• 1:35:25Lex Fridman?

  I mean, yeah, that's a great story. You don't go to the great boat builder. You go.

• 1:35:30Speaker 02

  Taxi driver or something.

• 1:35:31Lex Fridman?

  To the taxi. And then that's that that hero's journey. That that's the stuff of great myths. Yeah.

• 1:35:38Speaker 02

  It is. It is a great myth.

• 1:35:39Lex Fridman?

  A little detail would be really cool about the the replica. Like, uh, what did you of the boat? Yeah.

• 1:35:45Speaker 02

  One third replica. Something else. There were. There were three blokes who did it.

• 1:35:50Lex Fridman?

  Yep.

• 1:35:51Speaker 02

  And they were specialists in reconstructing medieval Arab boats. Because quite often they found in the mud or bits or they have information and they rig it. So they were at home in it. And we built it on a small lagoon in in Kerala. It was just the most unbelievably wonderful thing because they used the instructions as a blueprint. They made it about a third of the size of the original. A pretty huge thing, but they made it they because it had wooden ribs, you see. And they could get wooden ribs. They worked out by computer the maximum maximum size they could do it when it would work. Beyond it, it would be impossible because once they built the curved ribs.

• 1:36:34Speaker 02

  And then the stuff woven all around it, it had to be covered in bitumen, which is also very heavy to make it waterproof. So they calculated the size and it worked. So they built this thing on rollers and it was pushed out into the is just the most unbelievable. I went out there with my dear wife for the last few days and was on the maiden voyage. And they had trouble with the bitumen because Indian bitumen is really not up to scratch. And they couldn't get Iraqi bitumen because it's cultural property. It's carcinogenic. They wouldn't export a tanker load of Iraqis. So we had to use Indian stuff. But the thing is this, the bitumen which they coated it with was okay, but it wasn't perfect.

• 1:37:15Speaker 02

  So when it went out into the waters, there was a bit of a leak. Water had to be bailed out. So I was ah, you see, I said, I said, okay, it's in sunshine, I said to this producer. You ever been in a rowing boat without water in the bottom? Excuse me.

• 1:37:30Lex Fridman?

  Oh, you're saying that's that's a feature, not a bug.

• 1:37:32Speaker 02

  That's the feature of the thing. Yeah, that's the feature. That thing could have gone to ports.

• 1:37:36Lex Fridman?

  So it's authentic.

• 1:37:37Speaker 02

  Absolutely right. We had such an adventure with that thing. They made a documentary film.

• 1:37:43Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:37:45Speaker 02

  In various languages. And you know what they did, you know, I was in it a bit, a bit. And they had people saying, oh, I don't think it was this. I don't think it was that, you know. And they didn't let me go back and say, what the hell are you talking about? I did it. I know what I can read, you know, from can you? They didn't, they didn't do it. I, I couldn't get my own back. I was really annoyed, really furious.

• 1:38:04Lex Fridman?

  So you're, you're saying that there's some inaccurate things.

• 1:38:08Speaker 02

  I am saying there's some inaccurate things. Yeah, somebody in Iraq said, oh, it couldn't have been that. They probably had lots of little coracles all tied together. Did they? Fuck. I mean, I, you know, he couldn't read the stuff. I mean, it's really, really, really annoying. I mean, you should have a chance, shouldn't you? You know, if you're going to have a fencing match, you both have to have a rape here, wouldn't you say?

• 1:38:26Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, and you're the, the O G. You're the person that.

• 1:38:30Speaker 02

  Well, I can read.

• 1:38:31Lex Fridman?

  Decoded it.

• 1:38:31Speaker 02

  Yeah. But the thing is this, the proportions of the material were accurate.

• 1:38:37Lex Fridman?

  Hmm.

• 1:38:38Speaker 02

  This is the crucial thing. That, um, what had happened was is they took the information about how you make a real coral. Which is usually enough, two people and a few sheep and goats.

• 1:38:50Lex Fridman?

  Got it.

• 1:38:51Speaker 02

  And they bumped them up.

• 1:38:52Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:38:52Speaker 02

  So that it worked. And I know why that is. Because it goes back to your question about oral literature. Because there must have been times when people went to villages and told them about the flood.

• 1:39:08Speaker 02

  And when they got to the question of the boat, they'd say something like this. And Enki said, you got to build the biggest coracle you've ever seen, like that, right? Well, I mean, if you do this in cinema in Guildford, people will say, well, that's fine. But if you do it to a whole load of river people who use coracles and make build, they're not going to take that. They're not going to say, how big was it then? Come on, how big was it? So what do they do? They go to a coracle place and they work out. The proportions of material and then they bump it up so that the actor who reads this for the first few times, he has in his pocket how much he is, but after a while he knows it by heart. So that none of these people get angry. You can't expect us big

• 1:39:53Speaker 02

  enough for all this. So then you'd have all the stuff and they'd do it with this way. And you need all this and you need all this. And they'd all be hypnotized by it. That, I think, is actually, regarding your question, it's on the cusp of purely oral literature to purely literary literature. It's actually there because you can see that it was molded in the environment when people were still talking.

• 1:40:21Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, you gotta make it authentic to really connect with people.

• 1:40:23Speaker 02

  Well, you couldn't pull it over their eyes. I mean, you know.

• 1:40:26Lex Fridman?

  I wish many of the films in Hollywood today would have the same level of rigor.

• 1:40:31Speaker 02

  Rigor is one of the things lacking in the world.

• 1:40:34Lex Fridman?

  By the way, I forgot to ask, why was the flood myth focused on noisy people?

• 1:40:40Speaker 02

  Well, it can't really be noisy. I tell you what the explanation is. It's something quite different. Before the flood, the gods had not created death. So I think the noise was a reflex of the fact there were just too many animals, too many people, and they had to do something about it. So it's a sort of euphemism, so to speak, because after the flood, at the end of the tablet, not my tablet, but the other ones, where it's still broken, it says, there's a tantalizing thing where they create barren women and who can't have children and men who can't have children and people who, precesses who

• 1:41:23Speaker 02

  don't have children, and they institute in society some figures who will not reproduce the species. So it's actually a rather sophisticated Malthusian kind of philosophical position. It's remarkable. So that the noise means there's so many of them, not, they're actually so noisy that we can't hear ourselves think.

• 1:41:45Lex Fridman?

  You have to tell me about the, the world of ancient games. Maybe we could start with the ancient royal game of Ur. What is it? And how were you somehow able to crack the rules of it?

• 1:42:00Speaker 02

  Well, the royal game of Ur is a board of 20 squares in a rather idiosyncratic form.

• 1:42:09Speaker 02

  And it was pretty much unknown until the nineteen twenties, 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.

• 1:42:53Speaker 02

  And thereafter, boards for this game turned up in most of the countries of the Middle East, sometimes quite a lot of them. And the ones from Ur dates to about two thousand six hundred B.C. And from then down to the end of the first millennium, there's examples of boards from Mesopotamia itself, and from Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Turkey, Greece, Crete, all over the place. And when you put all the boards together, you realise that you're dealing with a board

• 1:43:32Speaker 02

  game which was extremely widespread and extremely popular. Across space and time. Across space and time. So it lasted for nearly three thousand years, and it was played all over the place. So it's one of those games which is like chess or backgammon, which you can say are world conquerors. Because the way I see that the issue is that human beings, for a very long time, have been, shall we say, hungry for...

• 1:44:13Speaker 02

  Things to do, because all through the Bronze Age and the Iron Age, there was no television. You know, there weren't, there weren't no nothing. And kids played with pull along things and adults had board games and they're kind of embedded in culture from a very early time. And this game was so widespread, you know, Tutankhamun, for example, in his tomb, there were two or three boards for it with the pieces. So it arrived in the middle of the second millennium in Egypt. And even the pharaoh played it. So you have a game, which the interesting point about it is that it spread

• 1:44:54Speaker 02

  across the gnome world without written rules and without people necessarily knowing the same language. So a merchant would go, end up in a bar, you know, come from India or I don't know where, start playing, seeing these guys playing, have a go himself. And it looks rather interesting. You go home and try and remember what it looked like and try and work out how to, you know, it'd be transported this way and the other. And so you can see that the board has 20 squares. So you have a block of four by three and then a bridge of two and then a second three by two thing at the end.

• 1:45:37Speaker 02

  So it's difficult to describe the actual shape. But what happened was after about 2000 B.C. the squares at the far end, which there were two on one flank and two on the other, were all put at the end of the central avenue. So you end up with 12 squares down the middle. So all the boards after the period of Oor have 12 squares down the middle and then four on each side at one end. So it meant then that when you play the game, you have dice to move the pieces, you have pieces all the same. And you obviously put them on. Your first corner and you turn the corner, you go up the middle and off the end. And it was a race game of the kind that everybody knows from their own childhood.

• 1:46:20Speaker 02

  And some squares which had rosettes on were either safe squares or you had another throw. And you could maybe put two on one square, we don't know, you could try and block people. And but anyway, the crucial thing is that the widespread distribution of this idiosyncratic shape and its lasting thing shows it must have been a very good game. Um, if if people more or less played the same thing on it everywhere. I mean, it may be that they were completely different games, but probably not. So this is the thing, it makes you wonder what would be about it that would fit so well with a wide appetite from different persons, different types of person.

• 1:47:03Speaker 02

  And the thing is that although it's a race game where you're at the mercy of dice and lucky squares and unlucky squares, that the process of getting your pieces on and off the board as a winner is primarily fortuitous. But it has built within it, as the way I understand the game plays, a measurable quota of strategy.

• 1:47:31Lex Fridman?

  It's a mix of probability and strategy.

• 1:47:34Speaker 02

  Yeah, so most games are either just um probability, like snakes and ladders, snake shoots and ladders. It's just a thing like that, or you have a game like chess, which is pure strategy.

• 1:47:46Lex Fridman?

  It's a mix.

• 1:47:47Speaker 02

  And the grown up game in the modern world, where fortuity or chance and strategy have a good balance is backgammon, which is a sort of grown up version of this sort of game. Where nevertheless, if you play according to the most rational interpretation, it's strategy is a major factor. So what happened was that many people had ideas how it was played and the route followed and I did too. And then I discovered this tablet in the British Museum, which was written at a very late period in the second century B C. So two thousand three hundred years after this object existed. And it had on it the names of the pieces and what the pieces were like and various things about the throws.

• 1:48:31Speaker 02

  And it was obvious that it was. The rules were to do with a game which was derived from this simple early game. And that working backwards from it, you could reconstruct the game in accordance with its later incarnation that might be workable. And it jolly well turned out to be workable because people play this all over the world now. And they um they even play in Iraq in cafes.

• 1:48:58Lex Fridman?

  Wait, now now?

• 1:48:59Speaker 02

  They do, because after it's come come back to life, it's on the internet, people play. There are different rules, the ones I invented are pretty much regular. So if you have a good balance between chance and strategy. And it's a fair game and doesn't take four days to play like modern board games. So you can have a go and if you're lucky, you win fast and then you have another go, maybe best of three or something like that. It works out rather well. And on- once I was in um uh in in California, in in in the Getty. And I had to give a talk about this with all the information and there's lots of things to say about it. And the the lady who ran the Friends of the Getty had a brilliant idea.

• 1:49:43Speaker 02

  So what she bought in twenty or so commercial copies of this game and they had small tables with chairs. And after the lecture, I was supposed to say to everybody, okay, this is what you have to do. This is how you play because you can get the rules down in like three minutes like this. So I said, okay, first you have to do this, first you have to do that. So off you go. So there was silence and then after a while, someone said, I hate you. I'm never playing this game with you again, when they'd never played it before. When somebody had escaped at the last minute, cleaned up, but just when they thought they were going to get. And it provokes that solitary benevolent fury and rage in the players, which all good board games do.

• 1:50:27Speaker 02

  And they were happily married couples who were at the end of the afternoon phoning their respective lawyers to discuss the future, that kind of thing. Beautiful matter.

• 1:50:36Lex Fridman?

  You think games are, you know, our desire to play games, a mix of chance, a mix of strategy? Is it part of human nature? You think that's always been there?

• 1:50:47Speaker 02

  I do, I do, yes. I think um.

• 1:50:53Speaker 02

  I mean, you can, you can say that in communities you have rivalry hostility and who's the best, who's the fastest, who's the strongest and things. And if you play a board game like that, all the reality of it is sublimated into a safe terrain.

• 1:51:07Lex Fridman?

  Yes.

• 1:51:08Speaker 02

  Where you can nevertheless get angry, but it's not, it's not like that. That's one thing. But more significantly, I believe, is, is the question of what in India people call time pass,

• 1:51:23Speaker 02

  which is not quite the same as pastime. Time pass is the question of what you do when it's too hot to do anything, which is true a good part of the day and a good part of the year. And grandmothers sit under trees with their grandchildren and they tell stories and they do this and they do that. And time pass is a very useful catch-all phrase for the existence of board games. And in India, there are many board games. Chess, of course, is the famous one, but there are quite a lot of three in a row type games or fox against geese games and wolves against sheep and all those sorts of things, which come out of the landscape in miniature

• 1:52:04Speaker 02

  and were playful pleasure. And also, uh, in, in a kind of way, it doesn't really matter who wins because you might play and it goes round and round and round. Eventually somebody wins and then they have another game. So it's a sort of that kind of rather graceful, valid function for not wasting time, doing something which is stimulating and beneficial without it being, um,

• 1:52:31Speaker 02

  overpowering in either way. So I think it is a human matter.

• 1:52:36Lex Fridman?

  Of course, uh, we humans also sometimes mix in gambling into the whole thing to add some money on top of it, which I'm sure sometimes was involved here.

• 1:52:47Speaker 02

  I think, I think so, but probably only late on because money as such.

• 1:52:52Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:52:52Speaker 02

  Of course, that doesn't appear till quite late, but there, there are, uh,

• 1:52:59Speaker 02

  We know in Mesopotamia, it's a rather interesting thing, there's a school tablet with three or four lines quoted from one literary thing and three or four from another literary thing. And one of them has this, "Oh, my astragal, oh, my astragal, woe is me, woe is me." And that's all we have. And I think this is an example of a genre of literature called the gambler's lament, because they use knucklebones or astragal as dice. And I'm sure there were people who bet sack of this or room full of that and on the throw of the knucklebones.

• 1:53:42Speaker 02

  And this extract in the school text is probably from a literary tablet in which somebody lost everything, even though they weren't coins. Because I think you're right, that it's a natural, it's a natural thing to, for it to accrue. And also, maybe men and women play differently, because there are some games which were played in the harrems among girls, you know, all on a hot afternoon where nobody was going to win anything. But the rules tablet, which gives this kind of backhanded information about it, is couched in such a way that it talks about people in a bar.

• 1:54:26Speaker 02

  Because the movement of the pieces is calculated in terms of food and drink and women, what you win. So the landscape in which the rules are couched for credibility are, is just exactly that setup.

• 1:54:44Lex Fridman?

  As you mentioned, you're the curator at the, possibly the greatest place on earth, the British Museum?

• 1:54:51Speaker 02

  Oh, yes.

• 1:54:53Lex Fridman?

  Can you tell me what are some of the incredible magical aspects of the British Museum?

• 1:54:58Speaker 02

  Well, the British Museum is a magical place and is a special.

• 1:55:05Speaker 02

  Case, because there's a lot of flurry and dispute now about what museums are and what they're for and why they exist and whether they should ever have existed and all these sorts of issues which people go on about. But the British Museum is unlike almost all museums in the world because it's to do with the achievements of mankind from the beginning onwards. So it's a kind of celebration of art and more, but it's not an art museum. It's to do with the struggle of the human race against all the things that beset it and how it has triumphed and how marvellous it is and the things that have happened and not turning a blind eye to all the contrasting horrible things that have happened.

• 1:55:50Speaker 02

  But it's the narrative of the human race, as I see it, as discernible in objects. So it means that we serve two very important horizons. One is that we represent, as far as we can, the whole world with no injudicious attention paid to any one or other culture, that they're all to us one. So there's no favouring any religious group, any country group, anything of the kind. It's the human species we try to tell the narrative of in its own right and how it overlaps

• 1:56:33Speaker 02

  with its neighbours and how, what it's learnt from what came before. All those features together is really what the concern of the museum is. And of course, to collect everything we, or has been, to collect everything we can to tell those narratives and also to look after them according to scientific principle. So all those things at once are the task of the British Museum. And the second horizon it serves is the unborn.

• 1:57:08Speaker 02

  So babies yet to be born, and their children, and their children, and their children. And it seems to me that the task of the museum is of such cultural significance and such, so to speak, sacred validity, that it shouldn't have to put up with people carping about this or that, or saying museums are sinful and wicked and should be demolished. Because the people who say these things don't really have any idea of actually what it really does stand for. And it's a kind of lighthouse in a universe where we are surrounded by darkness,

• 1:57:47Speaker 02

  ignorance, stupidity, uninterest, disinterest, scepticism, ignorance, and so forth, about the very issues that we're interested in. And it's one of the places in the world where you can talk about truth and beauty and elegance and intelligence, without it being an affront to people who have none of those qualities, and without it being a kind of speech that people shudder, or they think you're being naive about it. Because those are the crucial things. And also about religion, that we don't favour a religion and we don't sponsor a religion.

• 1:58:26Speaker 02

  We try to look at them for what they are and to assess their relationships and what they offer, perhaps less with a less acerbity and less criticism than I would if I was the director. I would try to put them down the wrong end of a microscope and look at them for what they are and what they have done and what's been done in the names of a religion. You probably would never get away with that, but maybe one day that will be an important part, because it's a major contributive factor to what's happened to the human race, which is never really articulated sharply about what religion has done to us and where we might have been without it. Because not having religion does not mean not having law

• 1:59:11Speaker 02

  or morality or sensitivity or consideration or love or any of those things. None of those things depends on religion. And those are the things which are important. So I think it's, people say, ah, you say this because you worked there and you know, you're a curator, you would say that, that the British Museum is a special place. It's nothing to do with that. It is actually a special place because you cannot point to another museum in the world with the same task. For example, the Louvre is basically a museum of art, basically a museum of art, not a museum of ideas. And the Met is definitely a museum of art. It's called the Museum of Art, and that's their priority.

• 1:59:55Speaker 02

  Design and colour and shape to us, to my mind, is the British Museum. This is one factor among many others. And we are not an art museum, and we're not a local museum, we're not a museum of the history of the bicycle, we're not a celebration of evil. We are, as it were, doing, as I see it, the best we could do if, for example, a whole load of Martians arrived in the Great Court and burst through the front door and said to us, tell us all about this place, tell us about the world, can you do it fast because we got to leave? And if you took them round and said, look at this, look at this, look at this, look

• 2:00:38Speaker 02

  at this, they'd get some picture which wasn't insane. The only thing they wouldn't get is a recording of Johnny Be Good by Chuck Berry, but apparently one's been put into space. So this is a very comforting thing.

• 2:00:52Lex Fridman?

  But that's kind of what the task for the British Museum is to do that, but for the entirety of human history.

• 2:00:57Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:00:58Lex Fridman?

  It'd be a store of artefacts that are the raindrops from which you can reconstruct the waterfall.

• 2:01:04Speaker 02

  Precisely so. And it's not a valid criticism to say to us that most of the stuff is not on exhibition, which is what everybody says it should go here, it should go there because it's not on exhibition. But we're not doing it for any other reason than stockpiling for future examination. See, this is the important perspective that nobody considers. Because the thing is, when you have something which is contemporary. If you're a clever journalist or a clever thinker, you can write essays about it. You can talk about it and you can see it, but you can only see it from the perspective from which you operate.

• 2:01:43Speaker 02

  And with the passage of time, the significance of objects, what they stand for, what they meant and what they can still mean shifts. And the further back you go, the sharper you can understand things, especially in terms of their own precedent and their own modern contemporary parallels. So the benefit of distance, storage and contemplation is inestimable.

• 2:02:08Lex Fridman?

  There's so many questions I want to ask you. What wisdom do you think the people from whom these artifacts came had? That we may have, the modern day humans may have lost or lost in part or in whole. So it was often, as you've spoken about, we see the ancient peoples as lesser, dumber,

• 2:02:35Lex Fridman?

  more primitive, and you've spoken about how they are basically the same.

• 2:02:40Speaker 02

  I think you put them on a bus, all wearing the same clothes, you wouldn't know. That's my feeling.

• 2:02:46Lex Fridman?

  But there is some, I'm sure there's some greater wisdom they had about certain things as we have greater wisdom on others. Thanks to Einstein, we figured out the curvature of spacetime, which they didn't know about, but.

• 2:03:02Speaker 02

  They knew quite a lot about astronomy, though, quite a lot about astronomy.

• 2:03:05Lex Fridman?

  They stared at the stars.

• 2:03:07Speaker 02

  Yeah, and they measured them and they made calculations. When the Greeks went to Babylon, they think, hey, man, this is really cool. And they wrote it all down and went home. Yeah, definitely, definitely. Well, I think it's a hard question to answer. But one of the things is that they were spared.

• 2:03:29Speaker 02

  Things which have cluttered up the essence of humanity. Because I think that the modern adherence to the electronic universe is disastrous for humans. And because it reduces the vitality of the human component. I think it's restrictive in a way that people don't realise until it's too late. Like drugs, if you take drugs now and again, you think, oh, it's fine, it's fine. Then suddenly you realise you're addicted to heroin. It's a bit like that. People use the electronic world like an addictive drug and they can't get through without it. And I think this is a very recent thing. But I suppose it's not, I'm a Luddite and say we shouldn't have railway engines and we shouldn't have kettles.

• 2:04:15Speaker 02

  But I think one of the things about the ancient world was that people never went anywhere. Unless they were merchants or soldiers, they never went anywhere. Probably people born and died in a village and then their children born and died in the village. And they never knew anything about the outside world, maybe very little. Sometimes there'd be a message, but in principle, they had no idea about other countries, other languages. Or how big they were or anything. So I don't think they had wisdom in a way that you could type out following precepts will make life better.

• 2:04:54Speaker 02

  Because they told lies and they esteemed the truth and they fell in love and they committed adultery. And they did murder and they did all the things. I think in a way, the ancient world allowed human beings to behave more naturally than it does now.

• 2:05:14Speaker 02

  The world in which we live. I mean, if you do live in a rustic environment or by the sea or you're a fisherman or you, I mean, all those normal, real kind of things, then it's probably all right. But most people who live crammed in the cities, live a very, very artificial life. Where the principles which they regard as ineluctably crucial are not ineluctably crucial. They're not in, you know, one example is this ghastly thing on mobiles. Where you get a short clip from a real programme. Yeah, yeah. I think it's utterly, utterly wicked. So you have children all over the world who cannot articulate, spell.

• 2:05:54Speaker 02

  Or make meaning clear using the best, most literary and most beneficial language that's ever been created, which is English, to save their lives. And they use a word, I'll give you an example.

• 2:06:08Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:06:08Speaker 02

  Right, like I went.

• 2:06:11Lex Fridman?

  Like I went.

• 2:06:12Speaker 02

  Like I went.

• 2:06:12Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:06:13Speaker 02

  So it's difficult to define that grammatically, difficult, like I should have gone. Where I went or I should have gone means to speak.

• 2:06:24Speaker 02

  Now, how would it be if when we see the verb to go in Sumerian, it actually meant to speak? How, where would we be? Where would we be?

• 2:06:34Lex Fridman?

  I mean, we should probably say that even in that time, there was probably slang, right? It just wouldn't end up written.

• 2:06:40Speaker 02

  There were dialects, there were words that sailors used, for sure, all those things.

• 2:06:45Lex Fridman?

  But they wouldn't end up in writing.

• 2:06:47Speaker 02

  Sometimes they do.

• 2:06:48Lex Fridman?

  We have to remember that Cambridge and Oxford speak in a certain way that's proper and formal and very smart, but there's, most of the people in bars, sailors have a different way of speaking. So they would probably say, like I went and have emojis and.

• 2:07:08Speaker 02

  But the thing is, you have to moderate your vocabulary.

• 2:07:11Lex Fridman?

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:07:11Speaker 02

  You talk to people of a certain age because they don't know what the fuck you're talking about if you use language exactly. And the thing which is so exquisite about English is like with a barrister, you can make a case which is absolutely wonderful because it says exactly what it means and there's no wriggle room. And that conversation should be like that with no wriggle room. It's not, it's not just a matter of spelling, but the basic vocabulary. You know, something very interesting, people say they know English or they speak English. Have you ever in your life opened a full size volume of the Oxford English Dictionary? It's about that, like this fact, I have a whole set, I love them. So this is it.

• 2:07:53Speaker 02

  You take a volume off the shelf and you open the book and you run your forefinger down the various columns of writing. You might have to turn several pages before you find a single word you've ever heard before. Because English is unimaginably rich. I grew up in a house where. Everybody read literature all the time. I had three sisters and then a brother and we all read literature, went to the library every week, read lots and lots and lots of books. So we all had really good vocabulary. And that's how you get vocabulary. Otherwise, you don't because in conversation, do you want more tea?

• 2:08:34Speaker 02

  All this sort of stuff. You don't learn your vocabulary. You have to get it from reading and listening to proper stuff.

• 2:08:40Lex Fridman?

  Which is a very important aspect of vocabulary. Why it's important to know a lot of words and to speak clearly because those words also define the quality of your thoughts.

• 2:08:51Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 2:08:51Lex Fridman?

  At the end of the day.

• 2:08:52Speaker 02

  That's exactly right. I must say, I, I, I think it is a pity if having produced such wonderful languages in the world that they don't, that their use is so inhibited.

• 2:09:03Lex Fridman?

  I, I think the right way to think about is the way the British Museum thinks about it. So you're commenting on the ephemeral, on the, on the thing that is in the moment right now is happening. The reality is only a few select things will last a hundred, two hundred years from now about this moment in time. And so we have to sort of think

• 2:09:29Lex Fridman?

  with the big picture perspective and the slowness of time. Yes, in the moment, there is these catastrophes, there's changing ways of speaking, the technology tearing apart the fabric of society. But when you zoom out, you will think about the grand ideas of Einstein. The battle of ideologies with communism and Nazism of the twentieth centuries. The bad, the triumphant, the rockets, these humans started launching rockets going to the moon, maybe to Mars. Those, those things. And we won't be thinking about emojis and any of that. And in some sense, that's the, the stuff you're looking at with, with cuneiforms is the.

• 2:10:13Lex Fridman?

  The things that stand the test of time that are there.

• 2:10:18Speaker 02

  That's true, but I think I think that language properly used is a crucial human tool for communication.

• 2:10:26Lex Fridman?

  Absolutely, yes. Speaking of which, I have to ask some more about the cuneiform tablets. At the British Museum, when you're surrounded by so many, and by the way, how many cuneiforms?

• 2:10:39Speaker 02

  About a hundred and thirty thousand.

• 2:10:41Lex Fridman?

  That is so cool.

• 2:10:42Speaker 02

  It is. It's pretty cool.

• 2:10:44Lex Fridman?

  What are some of the most beautiful to you? Maybe ones we don't know about? Cuneiforms. Like, that make you smile?

• 2:10:53Speaker 02

  Well, there are not many jokes you asked about, do you think?

• 2:10:55Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, they lost their sense of humor in cuneiform.

• 2:10:58Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think there are. There's one that I can remember. This was the

• 2:11:05Speaker 02

  fly or no mosquito lands on the back of an elephant and says, "Am I too heavy for you?" Or something like that. I know that's a baloney joke.

• 2:11:13Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:11:14Speaker 02

  You wouldn't use it in a car, boy, you know.

• 2:11:16Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, it had to be there.

• 2:11:18Speaker 02

  And also, do you like Tom Lehrer?

• 2:11:21Lex Fridman?

  Of course.

• 2:11:22Speaker 02

  Okay, that's good. That's good.

• 2:11:26Speaker 02

  I once went to America on a lecture tour and I ended up in a town where Dr. Werner von Braun ended up running the American rocket

• 2:11:41Speaker 02

  industry.

• 2:11:43Lex Fridman?

  It doesn't matter.

• 2:11:44Speaker 02

  Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down? That's not my department, says Werner von Braun.

• 2:11:49Lex Fridman?

  That guy, I mean, I could tell where your wit comes from, the fact that you know Tom Lehrer.

• 2:11:54Speaker 02

  But he's such a, the way he plays the piano is fantastic.

• 2:11:57Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:11:58Speaker 02

  I think my dad recorded them off the radio on a reel-to-reel tape recorder and I learnt them all by heart. They were so fantastic. But I knew a Harvard professor who I stayed with once, who was a sumerologist, and his wife said that she knew Tom Lehrer when he was in the math department. And they used to have parties and he always played the piano in the corner of the room. He's just amazing.

• 2:12:19Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, the, I mean, he had a real, you have that, you know, I've watched a lot of your stuff, your whole way of being the wit. There's something about that, like. Biting wit, it's a bit of humor, a bit of sadness in it. It just kind of feels like it really quickly gets to the complexity of what it means to be human.

• 2:12:43Speaker 02

  I think so, but the paradoxical thing about Tom Lehrer is that when he's talking about the bomb and all that and devices and international trouble, it's so unchanged.

• 2:13:01Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:13:02Speaker 02

  And same with Dr. Strangelove, it's just, it's very remarkable. Anyway, next time you're here, or when you're here, you should come and see me in the museum and I'll show you some of these confounded things for yourself and show you the Chicago dictionary and give you a grammar book to learn.

• 2:13:20Lex Fridman?

  Irving, you're a remarkable human being.

• 2:13:23Speaker 02

  I'm very glad we met.

• 2:13:24Lex Fridman?

  It's truly an honor to meet you.

• 2:13:25Speaker 02

  Me too. It's been very interesting.

• 2:13:27Lex Fridman?

  Irving, thank you so much for talking.

• 2:13:29Speaker 02

  It's been a big pleasure for me, Lex. Be well.

• 2:13:33Lex Fridman?

  Thanks for listening to this conversation with Irving Finkel. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description, where you can also find links to contact me, ask questions, give feedback and so on. And now let me leave you with some words from Ludwig Wittgenstein. "The limits of my language means the limits of my world." Thank you for listening. I hope to see you next time.