Pod Insights The Ancients How to Write Cuneiform with Dr. Irving Finkel About this episode More than 5,000 years ago, a revolutionary script emerged in the fertile lands of Mesopotamia that would transform how people counted, governed, worshipped and told stories. This was cuneiform, the world’s earliest known writing system.
In this episode of The Ancients, Tristan Hughes is joined by Dr Irving Finkel to uncover how cuneiform actually worked and how you would write it yourself. From humble beginnings as simple pictograms tracking beer and grain, to the wedge-shaped signs that recorded myths, laws and epic tales long before the Bible, this episode explores how cuneiform spread across Sumer, Babylon, Assyria and Persia — and why these clay tablets remain one of archaeology’s richest windows into the ancient world.
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Presented by Tristan Hughes. Audio editor is Aidan Lonergan. The producer is Joseph Knight. The senior producer is Anne-Marie Luff.
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Transcript 10,271 words · 4 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
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0:42 Tristan Hughes? Over 5,000 years ago, in the land between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, one of the greatest technological leaps in human history occurred. One created with neither stone nor gold, but with clay. This is cuneiform, the first ever writing system known to archaeology that would spread across Mesopotamia and beyond. A writing system preserved today on thousands of fascinating tablets that continue to reveal more and more secrets about these ancient civilizations. From simple pictograms used to count jars of beer in ancient Sumer to the complex wedges that told the story of the great flood long before the Bible,
1:25 Tristan Hughes? cuneiform became the script of civilizations like the Babylonians, the Assyrians and the Persians. Today, we're joined by friend of the podcast, the one, the only, the legend, Dr Irving Finkel, Senior Assistant Keeper at the British Museum and one of the world's leading experts on cuneiform.
1:47 Tristan Hughes? Irving, it is such a pleasure to have you on the show.
1:49 Speaker 01 Delighted to be here.
1:51 Tristan Hughes? It's been too long.
1:52 Speaker 01 Yes, it's been much too long.
1:53 Tristan Hughes? And the first time having you in our...
1:55 Speaker 01 Luxurious studio environment, I think they would call it, yes.
1:59 Tristan Hughes? Bookcase serving.
2:00 Speaker 01 Plants, carpet, the whole works.
2:02 Tristan Hughes? A cup of coffee for you as well. And we wanted to make you feel right at home for this topic today.
2:07 Speaker 01 Absolutely relaxed and happy to talk to you.
2:09 Tristan Hughes? And to talk about cuneiform, which is, and forgive me if I'm incorrect, this is the oldest script, writing script, known to archaeology.
2:17 Speaker 01 That is exactly what it is. This cuneiform writing system, when you look what comes to us from the ancient world and the very ancient world... The cuneiform script, which the earliest things are probably at the end, about four thousand B C, three thousand, maybe even older than that, they're the earliest pieces that we can say are writing, they're part of the history of writing, but they are, as you put it, the earliest that we know of. And it's very easy and very common in books and in conversation for people to say, oh, this is the oldest language in the world, but this is an erroneous conclusion, because when you have the earliest evidence,
2:57 Speaker 01 that is all it means, it's the earliest evidence, and we actually have no idea, at least I don't, of what plausibly, or even implausibly, it might have existed before cuneiform came on the scene. It's perfectly possible there was a long history behind it, or prehistory behind it, because the very word history and prehistory, the distinction between them is predicated on the invention of writing. So before cuneiform, you can say it's prehistory, but I often wonder, and we can talk about it, but I think the intrinsic evidence from the earliest signs and the way they functioned suggests to me that they were derivative from something which already existed.
3:39 Tristan Hughes? And to set the scene Irving, I mean, which languages, which cultures, which civilizations are we talking about that used cuneiform as their writing system?
3:49 Speaker 01 Well, chronologically, the oldest is Sumerian, so the Sumerian language, which is more or less without parallel in the world, it's a kind of unique language, because it doesn't have what you might call brothers and sisters like languages generally do. So for example, if you know Spanish, Italian, French and Latin, you know they're kind of relatives in one way or another, and if you know one or two of them, it's not so hard to learn another one, because they're a family of languages. And this principle, that individual languages within a group are related, sometimes closely and sometimes not so closely, is probably true of languages as a whole, even if we can't always demonstrate it. So when
4:33 Speaker 01 Sumerian comes into the world... Maybe in three thousand nine hundred, we first know that sort of date, four thousand B C, something like that, the first evidence. We have the first glimpse of what must have been, in my opinion, a whole family of languages, older languages, which simply never got recorded, or we don't know anything about. Because you're never going to get a language, a complete functioning, literally spoken language, in a balloon of its own creation. It must be an amalgamation, a descendant, all that sort of thing. So when you think about the beginning of writing with the Sumerian business, you have
5:12 Speaker 01 a horizon, and Sumerian is rescued by the invention of script or the use of script just in time before it vanished. So the cuneiform writing system, which was used to write Sumerian, was quite early on, and this is a strange thing in the history of the world, the writing system, which was well used to express Sumerian, was also used for another language at the same time, which was unrelated to Sumerian. So this is what we call Akkadian, or sometimes Babylonian or Assyrian, they're the dialects of the Akkadian language. And the Akkadian language, spoken like by King Sargon the First, for example, is a Semitic
5:56 Speaker 01 tongue, a dead and ancient Semitic tongue, but strongly related to other ancient Semitic tongues and modern surviving Semitic tongues. So if you ever look into a text written in Babylonian or Assyrian dialect in cuneiform, and you have a look at it written out in a typescript or something, and you know a bit of Semitic, like Arabic or Hebrew or Ethiopic or Aramaic or any of those languages, you know a bit of them, you will see in this ancient script, put into English writing, familiar things that you can see. That must be a verb, that must be a preposition, that must be the feminine, you can tell something. So even though it's dead and buried. The Akkadian language, if we call it the Akkadian language,
6:41 Speaker 01 is a language which is accessible to us intellectually and in a comforting sort of way. It's a language that we know what it's like. And the Sumerian one is really strongly in contrast. And after this big step, when the two of them were written, as history progressed, the writing system, which was a proper writing system, was pressed into use to write other, even more unrelated languages around the Middle Eastern world. So, for example, Old Persian, and let me think, Canaanite kind of languages, Elamite language, Ugaritic language, some Semitic, some not.
7:23 Speaker 01 And the Old Script with its kind of system was pressed into use to write these other languages. And once in a while, many of the nations adopted the funny writing system with the people who had to do it, because it was the only thing available to them. So it spread in a way that you think would be impossible, because it was so complicated. Why didn't they make up their own writing? But they didn't. So you have the sort of lingua franca situation, where people in different countries use the one writing system for their own language.
7:53 Tristan Hughes? And you get its survival on so many different things. I mean, predominantly the clay tablets, isn't it? But also, you mentioned the Persians there, the time of, as I say, the Akhenaten Persian Empire. And you have great stone inscriptions carved into mountainsides. And what's one of the languages they used at that time? It's cuneiform. So you see it surviving on several different, very durable materials.
8:13 Speaker 01 Actually, that Old Persian situation is rather remarkable because of what happened as a result of it. Because in Mesopotamia, as you say, most bits of cuneiform are written on bits of clay. This is the standard thing. Over 3,000 years of time, we have these clay things. But at the same time, the kings of Babylonia and Assyria, if they wanted to make a big proclamation or a statement like a law code, or they wanted to decorate their palaces with statements about how marvelous they were, they adapted the signs which are usually pressed into clay that they could be carved into stone. So there was a long tradition of stone inscriptions running side by side with clay inscriptions in the heyday of Mesopotamian culture.
8:58 Speaker 01 Now, the Old Persian kings... Darius and Co, they decided they wanted to have proclamations of their own kind to write their Old Persian language. And in the mountain situation that you describe, they did it rather splendidly because they had a flattened face of rock where they wrote the same triumphant boastful description in their Old Persian cuneiform and in Babylonian cuneiform and in Elamite cuneiform. So this was a tour de force. What's intriguing is that the Persian cuneiform was not like Babylonian or Sumerian cuneiform at all.
9:38 Speaker 01 Because to write proper cuneiform, you need about a thousand different signs. But when they wrote Old Persian, they more or less had an alphabet made up of signs, made out of wedges, cuneiform wedges like the normal Babylonian or Sumerian signs, but very simplified. And they took the idea of the wedge shape in different combinations to make 26 or 28 characters like an alphabet to write their language. So this great thing up on the mountain, it looked at first like, oh no, another horrible cuneiform inscription we can't read.
10:20 Speaker 01 But because people knew the Persian language and they knew Persian literature, there were phenomena about the Old Persian inscription which opened up the decipherment of the Old Persian cuneiform script. And what turned out what was so marvellous is that the next column, the Babylonian one and the one after that, the Elamite one from Iran, were translations of the text written in the Old Persian rather simple script into mainstream cuneiform in Babylonian or Elamite. So because they could read the first one, which was really a bit of a lollipop once they got the hang of it, once they'd done that and they found that the name Darius
11:02 Speaker 01 was written Darriya Wuush, and it was king of kings, king of the mighty king or something, and they saw in the Old Persian that these things were... Repeated in it must be the king and his father with all his epithets and the grandfather with all his epithets and they read the old Persian eventually because the language was still alive. So, once they done that, the what was miraculous in a sense was looking at the Babylonian where they didn't know which way up it went before, just staring at it, it became apparent that there were certain passages in the great run of text which were repeated, verbatim, three times in the text like in the old Persian. So,
11:45 Speaker 01 they said, well, in that case, this must be the bit that says the king and his dad and his dad with all their epithets. And so they assumed that the first name, which was King Darius, as we call him, or Dariawush, in the Babylonian and in the Elamite, the beginning it ought to be something like Dariawush. So, they they took these syllables and they started thinking and then they tried to find them wherever they were and then they suddenly found like that, a word or two in the Babylonian, which was a Semitic word. For example, just by piecing things together, they got the word for river in Babylonian, Nauru, and which
12:26 Speaker 01 is like Nahru. And this this word showed them instantly that this wall of unintelligible stuff with perhaps a glimmer here or a glimmer there was writing a language which was Semitic. And once they knew that, they had the Hebrew and Arabic dictionaries, they had the grammars of all the Semitic languages. So, every time they got a new idea, they could test it against the old Persian to find the words that matches. And that's how it all opened up. So, that mountain you talked about is the key which unlocked the whole of the Cuneiform world, rather like the Rosetta Stone with Egypt.
13:05 Tristan Hughes? Is this the Rosetta Stone in Cuneiform?
13:07 Speaker 01 It is all. Yes, exactly. Exactly so.
13:10 Tristan Hughes? It's so interesting. And with that case, with the Persian and the Behestan inscription, isn't it? So, that's the first millennium B.C.
13:18 Speaker 01 Yes.
13:18 Tristan Hughes? And that's several thousand years after the creation of Cuneiform. But I think it's testament to that example alone, to the endurance of that writing script over all of those millennia. I must ask, before we delve into the origins of Cuneiform. The majority of Cuneiform inscriptions that survive are on clay.
13:37 Speaker 01 Yes.
13:37 Tristan Hughes? Why clay? Of all materials, why do they use clay?
13:42 Speaker 01 Well, the thing about the script is that the beginning signs were drawn, as we will talk about in a minute. But after a while, they simplified the drawings in order to make diagrammatic representations of signs, not by a continuous line like you do with a pencil, but by individual strikes of a stylus which impressed the clay. And why they took clay as their medium is an interesting question. But the thing is, if they hadn't used clay, which was abundant, and in fact, clay underpinned the whole of Sumerian culture, because everything was made of clay. I don't know if they wore clay, but in the underworld, people munched on it for lunch.
14:23 Speaker 01 I mean, clay was the underpinning of the whole of the culture, and it was used for everything possible. And of course, the banks of the Euphrates and Tigris have many outcrops of excellent quality clay, without stuffing them, you know, bits and pieces and stones, but really high quality clay, which will take a very sharp impression. So I suppose when they started out, they might have used skins, they might have used leather or something like they might have done, they might have written on wood if they could. But wood was always in short supply in Mesopotamia, and clay was abundant. And so somehow it just went hand in glove with the first recording that you could make a bit of clay into a kind of tablet, make marks on it.
15:06 Speaker 01 And when it dried, they would survive, somebody else could come along and they would read the signs and they would understand what you meant. So it was the natural thing. And of course, the other thing is that the clay in the modern Western world, you associate it with either being a potter who has clay all over their clothes and all over the carpet and gets into trouble, or messy stuff at school when children are supposed to make something and actually spend the afternoon throwing bits at one another, is all to do with mess. But the thing is, in Mesopotamia, it was nothing like that. It was their natural resource, and the Sumerians and the Babylonians after them, They were masters of clay and the control and use of clay on the highest level. It was their thing.
15:48 Speaker 01 Their hands were a kind of naturally adjusted to it. So I think that's that it was just free. It was endless and it would dry in the hot sun or out of the hot sun and be perfectly usable forever and ever. So it seems the right, natural thing. And of course they were perfectly right because everything that we have is going to rot, fall to pieces. Everything on computers is going to go down the toilet for certain. So in the end, it'll only be the clay tablets which survive. Mark my words.
16:17 Tristan Hughes? So hundreds of thousands of years from now, people will learn about humans.
16:21 Speaker 01 From that.
16:21 Tristan Hughes? From that.
16:22 Speaker 01 That's it. And they'll say, didn't they realise how stupid it was to invent the internet? That kind of thing.
16:30 Tristan Hughes? And must also mention the styluses as well. They made from reeds, local reeds?
16:33 Speaker 01 Yes, they certainly are. I mean, the thing is, the very earliest pictures, which we ought to talk about first because they come first.
16:40 Tristan Hughes? Shall we do that?
16:41 Speaker 01 Shall we do that? The thing about them is they use this clay like the later proper cuneiform use that as their support system. And that's it's really always been that. So when they did their first signs, the first conception that you can do a mark on a surface, that another person can come along and see it and understand what it meant. When this idea came into the world, it was an important thing and it led to the creation of this script. And its ancestral form, the earliest of which we know, has a whole fruit bowl full of signs which are drawn in the surface of a piece of clay with a point.
17:21 Speaker 01 For example, you could imagine having a nice piece of clay and having a pencil with a respectable point and dragging it in the clay. You can draw in the clay as you would on a piece of paper. And the first, I don't know, centuries, we don't know how long really, but the first stage, so to speak, when they wrote the earliest signs, they were drawn in the clay.
17:44 Tristan Hughes? And this is, just so we get our times right, for the earliest signs, do we think at the moment about early fourth millennium B.C.?
17:49 Speaker 01 I think so. I mean, the problem, among other problems, which always comes up in archaeology when it's really important, is that there's no archaeological stratified evidence for anything to do with the earliest inscriptions. Lots of them are found, for example, reused to fill up holes in the ground and that kind of thing, which is the worst diagnostic source you could ever have. To actually outside dating for this in or around 4000 thing is hopeless. So what we've got is tablets in early script of slightly evolving form. We can say this looks like the earliest, this looks like the next, this looks like the next, that kind of thing.
18:31 Speaker 01 And when we have stuff that we can date, when we extrapolate backwards, the sort of interval that must have gone before we get to the bit we can date, I would think that the first efforts to do writing on clay, the first experimental things would be before 4000 B.C. Let's say for the sake of argument, 4200. There's no evidence, but it's a good, comfortable working figure.
18:55 Tristan Hughes? And so why do we think that around that time, this early writing script, I can see some of this called like protoconair form.
19:05 Speaker 01 Yes.
19:05 Tristan Hughes? Why we think it emerges?
19:07 Speaker 01 Well, the received law when I was a student was this, that Sumerian in its early form manifested itself in the world, in a cultural and political environment in which the country which, ancient Iraq, of course, we're talking about, the ancient landscape of Iraq was not under a single ruler, but consisted of more or less independent conglomerations, which we call city-states, where quite a lot of people lived together under somebody who was in charge. There'd be a temple, there'd be a local inn, or not ruler, that's not quite the word,
19:47 Speaker 01 but some, somebody in charge of it with a kind of structure overseeing everybody and taking responsibility for security on the one hand.
19:57 Speaker 01 And food and drink for everybody and the tilling of the soil and the production of stuff, some kind of an early structure like this, where these city states functioned independently of one another, quite extensive in reach and duration, sometimes harmoniously, sometimes not, but underneath, I think they had a kind of agreed sense of unity, because there's a very early feel attested on some place surfaces, where the symbols which represent these cities are all put in a row, like that, like on the head of notepaper, and they had these symbols, sometimes we can understand them, they, sometimes they're what people
20:41 Speaker 01 would call mythological birds or something like that, but they're something like that, avian forms or symbols, one for each city, all in a row, meaning that underpinning them was some unity. And I think it would manifest, for example, if there was an invasion from outside, then they would all pull together. When there's peace and quiet, then there's rivalry, and maybe there's sometimes struggle or dynastic this and that, but in principle, that's how it worked, as far as I understand. And when you have such an institution with a central authority, which is crucial, where the in-going and outgoing stuff needs to
21:19 Speaker 01 be controlled and monitored, the theory is that bookkeeping, accountability and control for a large number, an ungainly number of persons in such, perhaps in an ungainly number of areas, required a recording system to keep track of everything and ultimately to make people accountable for what they were responsible for. It's the emergence in the world of the inland revenue argument. Well, we can all have something to say about that. But in principle, this was the received law when I was a student, and one of the reasons
21:59 Speaker 01 which makes it compelling is you have there massive architecture which requires a great deal of organisation and dedication. And clarity with people in charge and people doing what they were told and and all that. So it was in that milieu of small urban conglomerations, united by the name of the place, the local deity, the festivals and so forth that ran through the air, all those things for sure in place, that that set these up as more or less independent users. And the same situation prevailed in many of them. And there's a horizon whereby, not that somebody rang everybody else and said, listen, guys, we've got to invent writing because we can't cope with everything here, we're going to do that.
22:44 Speaker 01 But somehow, and this also shows that there was some level of contact of a harmonious type. You get the emergence of the first idea of recording on clay using these drawn characters on this material, which once once finished, once completed, will be put in the shadow of the sun on by a wall and half an hour later, the surface would be, you could pick it up, it wouldn't smudge your smear, it was ideal in a way, you just wrote the thing, dried it and there you were. So this got off the ground gradually and gradually.
23:23 Speaker 01 And so you have, as we are led to understand it by the great sages who run the seriology, that you have this panoply of drawn shapes with curvy lines, if necessary, to represent what they're talking about, like you'd have a drawing of a foot, which looked like a foot with a heel and a bit curving round above the toes, with curvy lines and everything that you draw, unless you're a robot, when you draw things, there are curves in all of them. And what actually happened is there was a shift at some point from the drawings on clay.
24:02 Speaker 01 Into a system whereby you could do the same images with a straight edge, like the edge of a chopstick or something, where you'd analyse, say, the ankle and foot, which is a curvy picture, like a child would draw a foot, to make two long ones and one at the bottom and another bit on top, to make the shape of the foot out of small, straight lines. And when that, when that border is crossed from realistic drawings, or what people like to call curvy linear, into cuneiform, where they're reduced to straight edges within the whole of the picture, the individual sign picture, then you get the appearance of cuneiform.
24:44 Speaker 01 And that took place probably at the beginning of the third millennium. So originally, the drawings, what you would do, very simply, if you want to do a river, you'd draw two parallel lines. If you want to do a woman, you'd do a triangle with a hole in the middle. If you wanted to do an animal, you'd do the animal head. All those sorts of things, very simple. And in fact, if you look at a list of early pictographs and compare it with the sort of drawings that children do when they're about two and a half or three, when they first try to reduce the universe around them to recognisable symbols, there's something common. So if a child draws a teapot, it would be a bit like a pictographic sign to represent a vessel that you might have on an early tablet.
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27:39 Tristan Hughes? I'll tell you what, we're gonna see if I can use the iPad here and then get some images up for you, which I could talk through if you're up for it, Irving.
27:45 Speaker 01 I am. It's a bit trifle anachronistic, but we can let that go.
27:49 Tristan Hughes? Hey, we're trying new things here, but I have one particular tablet up here.
27:54 Speaker 01 Yes.
27:54 Tristan Hughes? Now, do you recognize this tablet?
27:57 Speaker 01 I do recognize that tablet. So it's made of, firstly, we can see very high quality clay, right? And it's the kind of clay that the pictures which are in it are sharp and well-defined. And it's been ruled into boxes, horizontal, so it's some kind of administrative document where items are listed. Together with quantities of them, and each message, so to speak, which is part of the whole, is put in a ruled box so that it can be read in sequence, and it's a very orderly bookkeeping matter. I mean, there's nothing chaotic about it, there's nothing improvised about it, it's probably about 2800, something of that kind, I'm
28:41 Speaker 01 not sure exactly when, but it is part of a long tradition of impeccable bookkeeping in terms of the design, the form, the characters that are drawn there, the numbers and the accuracy of it. Because as time goes by, many of these tablets, where people are forced to write down the quantities, on the back they have the total.
29:05 Tristan Hughes? Ah.
29:06 Speaker 01 So there's none of this winging it and saying about 56 or something, they have to add up, because in the structure of the organisation, whoever wrote that tablet knew that somebody higher up the pecking order was going to look at this tablet and make sure it was right. So accountability is definitely intrinsic to the whole structure.
29:27 Tristan Hughes? And what I also love, though, we have this image, this feels like a pictogram, what it's showing here, it looks like a jar.
29:34 Speaker 01 It is a jar. In fact, there's a whole series of jars. And this is what happened. The primary one was used for beer, because beer is a very important thing in the history of the world, appears on stage at the very earliest moment and never goes away. So the sign for beer, which in Sumerian is pronounced cash, this is the word for beer, if you go into a pub now, you, well, I was going to say, you have to give the cash to get the beer, because they don't take cash anymore anyway, so the whole thing is redundant. But in principle, this tells you a lot about the script. So for example. Everybody, I think, will agree with this matter.
30:15 Speaker 01 That when the script was in its nascent phases, in its early phases, and somebody had this idea, and a couple of other people said, "This is brilliant." And then someone said, "Okay, let's do it." And then they say, "Well, we've got to have a sign for this, this, this, this, this, this, this." And then they gradually do, and there are pictographic recognizable things. As they do that, you have the situation that you have to have a sign for beer. So they do a jug of a type which has a pointed bottom, which I think you can, if the ground is floor or if it's soft, can be made to stand upright. That's the...
30:51 Tristan Hughes? Kind of like amphora, the idea, right?
30:53 Speaker 01 That sort of thing, but sticking the ground. So the basic vessel is used for the word "cash," which is beer. If a Samirian is sitting here, he will be very pleased to see that you've highlighted cash, the word for beer, and think you were a right-thinking chap. But the thing is this, this illustrates two things. That there were lots of different vessels, and there were lots of different things that can go in vessels. So when it started out, you could have the vessel, and then you could have the drawing of the same vessel with something inside it. Or you could have a drawing of something else inside that picture. And so you have pictographic framework of a sign like vessel.
31:33 Speaker 01 And as the script developed, they realized by bonking in a small thing, you extend the range of a given sign into other things which naturally, semantically or intellectually are obviously connected. So that was a very remarkable matter, very fruitful. So that looks to me like a straight sign for beer, standing on end. But there's something else, because cash, we agree, is an essential part of the human world. But when the script moved from doing a picture of something that everybody would understand, like, for example, a milk bottle on a piece of paper for the milkman, no problem about it.
32:17 Speaker 01 That tradition of signs that looked like what they meant... Or signs that looking like what they meant had an extra component to show what they really meant is one big sweep of the evolution of the writing system. But there's another thing, because they didn't only want to record pictures of ideas, they wanted to record language. So in Sumerian, you have animate and inanimate. So ani means his and be means its. So somebody in ancient Sumer, since you say its all the time, like you say his or hers in English all the time, they found themselves in a position that they had to have a sign
33:02 Speaker 01 for its. And you can't draw an it or a muchness or any of those complicated things. And there are many things that you can't draw. So they made a decision, and this, in my opinion, is how it worked. They decided to use a simple sign with only four wedges, which is what it turned into, for its. So when you have that sign in a cuneiform sentence, where the words are not divided up, they're all written in a continuous line, when you reach that sign in its form like that or in a later form, it can either mean beer, and you have to know this, or it can mean its, which means it's linked to the word that came before.
33:43 Tristan Hughes? Or this symbol here.
33:44 Speaker 01 That very symbol. In this case, there's no question that it means beer. Because this is an accounting text with lots of numbers. You see, there are lots of circles.
33:53 Tristan Hughes? Yes.
33:54 Speaker 01 And half circles.
33:55 Tristan Hughes? Oh, yes.
33:56 Speaker 01 They are all numbers. So the half ones are ten.
34:00 Tristan Hughes? Right.
34:01 Speaker 01 And the others are one or sixty, but there are more subtle ones as well. And as the script developed, and this script has developed to a long way, it's written not with a point, but with a stylus, once you get to this stage, the writing of numbers and the concomitant numerical system pace with it. So that literacy and numeracy, as you would say if you were running a primary school, at the beginning of history, evolved together. And many things about that are remarkable, because, for example.
34:38 Speaker 01 It's shown and established from the beginning of the study of this material that the Mesopotamians, the Sumerians first, and then the Assyrians and Babylonians, they had a mathematical system which was sex suggestive. That is to say, their convenient starting point on which everything was blasted was the number sixty.
35:01 Tristan Hughes? Okay.
35:02 Speaker 01 Mathematicians tell me that sixty is more flexible and more useful than ten. But of course, ten is the natural thing because barring accidents, people have ten digits.
35:15 Tristan Hughes? Yes.
35:16 Speaker 01 And everybody in the world counts on their fingers. So one might fume, although anthropologists or mathematicians will probably throw up their hands in horror at such a simplistic argument. But you might say that the counting's intent was intrinsic to the human brain. And in fact, you can burn me at a stake and I'll never give up that argument. But the decimal system at the very earliest level, chronologically in this long evolving story, was limited to certain materials. So there were things like barley, which are measured in sixties, and other things measured in tens. So what happened was that at a certain level, they reserved counting in sixty for things
36:01 Speaker 01 in a saurum, this, this, this, this, and all those things are sixties. And those things over there, we have to count in tens. And what happened was that the decimal system, practically speaking, vanished. So you have, what turned into grown-up geneiiform when we look at a later thing, you have a single upright wedge, which is the number one, and also the number sixty. So that you have combinations of wedges from one to sixty. Which explain everything very beautifully. The reason why this is so important is that when people say like, we don't need universities to study, it's seriology, it's no use to anybody, it's a waste of time, it has nothing to do with us today, and all those sort of well-known arguments.
36:46 Speaker 01 The fact is that the division of our time into sixty seconds and then sixty minutes and three hundred and sixty degrees of the circle are a direct inheritance of the numerical system, which is already expressed in that tablet, that sixty is the basic counting system. And it went from Corcymerian into Babylonian, all the way down to the end of the cuneiform epoch, and was scooped up by the Greeks when they went to Babylon to find out what they knew about everything and found they knew rather a lot.
37:24 Speaker 01 And they exported data sexagesmally stored within their own astronomy and mathematical system. So that's why eventually we have sixty seconds in a minute.
37:36 Tristan Hughes? It's amazing, though, that that kind of idea of sixty can originate, we've liked some of the earliest cuneiform tablets that survive, in these commerce transactions, you know, for the trade routes of Mesopotamia at that time.
37:46 Speaker 01 Well, the information in them usually involves produce within the periphery of the estate, the surrounding fields and the organised work, labour and so forth, but also with trade, both within ancient Iraq and beyond the borders, because I think trade goes back to the very beginning of time, long before this tablet was written in, what did we say, two thousand eight hundred B.C.
38:09 Tristan Hughes? Yes, early third millennium B.C. And so, well, I mean, shall we move on then from this? So we kind of covered that early story of cuneiform with pictograms. So like from there, the evolution of cuneiform, it's not like at one moment it goes from pictures to what we're more associated with today. It's quite a long evolution of cuneiform into perhaps the most detailed creation of it in the first millennium B.C.
38:38 Speaker 01 Well, if we look at a list of early pictographs, drawn with a point where it all begins, you have signs where anybody, when they see them, know what they stand for.
38:53 Speaker 01 So that is a crucial point, that's a crucial point. So we have a writing system, which when we first encounter it, serves to communicate ideas without any language. So you can write numbers and you can write picture signs to create a message without any grammar or syntax involved in it, just a simple kind of accounting system. And it must be that the very earliest signs worked this way, and very gradually it occurred to them that signs could be pressed into different kinds of function. One of them would be to express grammar, the particles of grammar, the elements of grammar,
39:38 Speaker 01 and like using the word for beer, to write its, which otherwise is a difficult problem. So this is an ongoing system, that you have a very stark and simple pictographic level, which in one way or another evolves into the situation where the individual signs are drawn with straight edges, and the straight edges themselves at the beginning are very pictograph-like. So when you look at early cuneiform, you can see what they come from. You can see it's the head of a boar with a horn, or something like that. You can tell that they are pictographic. But what happens over a long period of time is that the drawing of the signs stylizes and stylizes
40:21 Speaker 01 to the point that the innate pictographic quality disappears from view, that the signs become in a sense abstracted from their origin. This is an important matter, because when you start to learn cuneiform, you never start with the pictures. You only start with the developed cuneiform signs, of which there are about 900 or 1,000, something like that. And as time goes by, abandoning their artistic, curvy forms into straight edge and straight edge and rigour and system, then they become further and further divorced from their origins, so that for example, if you have a
41:03 Speaker 01 Written five hundred years after the beginning of cuneiform, nobody could tell you what it was about by looking at the signs and saying, oh, this is a chap, this is a that, this is that, or it must be this, like you, people used to do with Egyptian hieroglyphs before they knew how they functioned. So this is an ongoing process from curvy pictographic signs drawn with a point into mature cuneiform. And if you look through the millennia, because we have proper cuneiform by two thousand eight hundred, all the way down to the first century A D, this is a very, very long process gradually. Over this process, two things
41:44 Speaker 01 happened. One is that the way people wrote their signs in Babylonia in the south was slightly different from the way they wrote them in the north. And this is interesting because the Akkadian language, which we know at the beginning of this writing nearly, the Akkadian tongue, sharpens out into an Assyrian dialect, as we said, and a Babylonian dialect. So the language, the two languages diverge, but so do the signs in a matching way. So that, for example, if you know about cuneiform, if you see a tablet without even reading any of the words, you know it's a Babylonian hand or an Assyrian hand. So
42:25 Speaker 01 the two functions run in parallel. That's one thing. And the other thing is, and this is the most important insight into the whole matter, in my opinion, is this. It's the stylisation and the acceptance by all concerned of what the form of a sign is. So if you have a situation with fertile imaginations of lively and competitive individuals in a position of authority with a bit of power, and this new writing system comes along and they get the hang of it, so they all do it and they all think about it, and then they will have these signs and they will have their own signs for this. And then someone says, oh, we've got to have a, we've got to have a sign for chariot wheel, and we've got to have a sign for telephone
43:09 Speaker 01 box and all this kind of thing. So before you know where you are, you have a proliferation of pictograms, which are only really understandable to the people who invented the particular ones. This never happens. So when we have a horizon.
43:26 Speaker 01 With early dynastic signs and pre-early dynastic signs on clay tablets from places in Mesopotamia, there are not seven or eight systems running, it's one system.
43:38 Tristan Hughes? Right.
43:39 Speaker 01 And they may be the odd thing people says, "Oh, this looks like the way Lagash people do the sign for." Maybe, but in principle, it's one system. And this is, in my opinion, immensely diagnostic, because the natural function here would be for things to proliferate and people to compete and people to set up their own thing, "Oh, we're doing it this way, if you don't like it, no..." But that's what human beings do. And these Sumerians, they may look stiffish on their monuments and in their chariots with big noses and funny flowered skirts, but they were exactly the same as people are today. This is a very important principle. And you can attribute to these people the same kind of psychological tricks, characteristics and behaviour, in my opinion, as you would witness in any number
44:24 Speaker 01 of persons surrounding us in London. So this is serious matter. So what happens here is we have to assume that the amphictony, which is implied by this seal, with all these cities in conjunction, must have had political consequence. And it must have been that somebody called a summit at some point to say, "We all know, ladies and gentlemen, about this new writing nonsense. Well, it's going to be very useful to us all, but the first thing we have to do is to standardise it. Otherwise, it will be self-defeating." This is the sort
45:09 Speaker 01 of thing they should have done when they invented the internet. But of course, man never learned from his own history, otherwise we wouldn't have any more wars, for example, just an aside there. But the thing is... It seems to me compellingly certain that the direction of the script was controlled from the beginning. And the only way that can happen is by one human brain, not by a committee. There must have been a person who exercised sufficient compelling power and and authority and charisma, who saw what would happen if this was left to run naturally,
45:52 Speaker 01 who took over and supervised it. And the thing is this, despite the two languages and the evolution of the languages themselves, because all languages evolve, and the evolution of the way the signs were written, the repertoire was never allowed to grow wild, all the way down to the end of time. This seems to me immensely significant. So that scribes in the second millennium, they knew what all the signs were. They had their lexical text with all the lists of words, the words for colours, for lands, for different kinds of wood, different kinds of stone. And they were copied and copied and copied and copied.
46:33 Speaker 01 And the writing evolved, it got more casual, it got more, this all stylistic changes in the writing. And the language, as I said, changes, like chaucer in modern English, the language evolves, the language evolves. But the cuneiform conception ran clear and free like a river without any real deviation. And in my opinion, that is not a natural matter. So especially, for example, you could say this, in the first millennium B.C., we jump ahead a long way to when there were like universities, so to speak, in Babylonia. So in in the city of Uruk, in the city of Babylon, in the city of Borsippa, probably a few other places,
47:17 Speaker 01 there were libraries originally, temple libraries, which blossomed out into some kind of establishment where scholarly matters and astronomical matters and mathematical things and medicine were studied and developed in conjunction, people working together. They had kind of schools of stuff, very important matter. And sometimes we have a very significant document, medicine or something, and it says, "The bottom's ruled our tablet of Mr. So-and-so from Babylon. Do not show this to anybody from Uruk." Not allowed. So, you know, when you read the cuneiform, it just looks like a cuneiform. But when you suddenly hear the voice and someone wagging a finger, "Don't let those bastards get hold of this. This is our stuff. They're not allowed to."
48:02 Speaker 01 So it's not copyright for money. But nevertheless, there is a sort of guild or some such conception keeping a rivalry among them free. But even given that, you don't get sign forms going off at a mad tangent. So if they don't like us, we'll have our own. We'll invent a sign for this. It never happens. And it's easy to overlook this point. But I don't think it's easy to overemphasize it because it seems to me beyond doubt that this must be a central truth about this script, that there was a control from day one and it was a self-regulating system.
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49:53 Tristan Hughes? And I guess going back to what we were talking back on an overarching point, with those evolution of those signs, looking at a pictogram or one from the Sumerian times and then one from, let's say, Ashurbanapal's library in the first round in B.C., you wouldn't be able to realise.
50:07 Speaker 01 Except in some cases, once in a while you might. You might have an inkling of it or even identify it, but in general, that's true. So there are other things about this cuneiform writing system which are important. Because just as you have a sign for beer and it's being one sign, the principle runs that a given sign can sometimes have multiple uses.
50:32 Tristan Hughes? Right.
50:33 Speaker 01 And this is what bewilders people who throw up their career as computer programmers and shopkeepers and decide to do a seriology at university when they discover this series of unfortunate events that lies ahead of them. Because a given cuneiform sign can have multiple uses. That's to say, it can function with more than one meaning when you look at it, more than one semantic significance, it can have more than one phonetic value, so it can have different pronunciations.
51:07 Speaker 01 And then it can be used in a different way. So for example, they have things called determinatives. If you ever looked at anything about ancient Egyptian, you know that when they did the picture writing, they had special signs like for weapon or for person or something like that, which they draw in front of the hieroglyphs for the word that follows. So these are called determinatives, and they are not pronounced, but they are written with signs which have their other meanings, both in terms of sound and meaning. It's ridiculous. Let me explain. There's a simple sign with two horizontals and then one vertical. So that can be pronounced like this, gish. So in Sumerian, the word gish means wood.
51:54 Speaker 01 So if we're writing a Sumerian text and we're going to talk about a table made of a certain kind of wood, you write the sign gish as a determinative, so that the scribe, reading out to the king about the new furniture, he would read the name of the table, but not the determinative, because that's for the reader only. So this sign gish can be used in one particular instance to mean wood determinative silently. Next thing is, it can mean wood, wood. So you go into the forest and you cut down wood, here's your sign, where it's the sign wood. Then, there's another sign, as I explain, about the sound.
52:36 Speaker 01 For example, because Sumerian and Akkadian use the same writing system, the two languages are embedded with one another in the most intimate fashion. They are interwoven. You have a bilingual intellectual culture, and the two things are interwoven. So when we are writing, and we have the sign gish, which can mean, the next word is wood, it can mean wood. Now, Sumerian gish, wood, in Babylonian is itzu, S with a dot. So the word for wood in Babylonian is itzu. So you can write your sign Sumerian gish in a sentence, which, when you read it and you're reading Babylonian, you have to have the Babylonian word, so you have to know
53:20 Speaker 01 that the sign gish also is itzu in Babylonian, and supply that in the Babylonian text.
53:26 Tristan Hughes? Ah, so almost like kind of a translation of the word in the cuneiform, right?
53:31 Speaker 01 Yes. This is a mad principle. The only, the only commonplace example that people encounter in the world is this, that if you write the dollar sign in a sentence, a hundred million dollars, when you put the S with two lines in it, no one says a hundred million S's with two lines through it, they supply the word dollar immediately, largely because people are more interested in money than anything else. But this is not an obstacle in reading when you have such a thing in English, you just do it. Well, in the cuneiform world, you do it all the time. So these are the consequences that the sign for wood, which is gish in Sumerian, can be used to write itsu in Akkadian, but it can also be used to write as a syllable
54:15 Speaker 01 in Akkadian, not in a meaningful in its own way, but as a component, writing something else where the sound is or its occurs within a longer word, which has nothing to do with wood. So for example, let's say you wanted to write the word miss when you were at school, miss, miss, like that. So you have to have the sign mi, m i, and the sign is, i s. And the sign itsu can also be itsu and itsu and etsu. All the related sounds can be used with the sign which in Sumerian means wood, in Akkadian can mean wood, but also can be used just as syllables in a bigger word. So you would write mi is. And when
54:59 Speaker 01 you saw this as a Sumerian, there are different ways you could interpret it. I don't know if we're going to get into hot water here, but let's imagine that you're a Sumerian, you see the sign mi and the sign is. Well, mi can mean night or it can mean black, depending on how you pronounce it. But if you had black wood in Sumerian, you'd have to have wood with black after it. So it can't be mi is, it would have to be gish mi. So it's not that. So mi has to be a phonetic thing, spelling a sound. So write mi and then if if the next sign has the value beginning with I, well, if it's mi, i, it's very likely to link. So you write mi is, which means miss, and then you put your hand up. So
55:40 Speaker 01 this simple illustration of the multiple uses of signs is quite bewildering when you first encounter it. But if you lie down in a darkened room and drink cold water regularly, it'll all come to you in a flash. But the point is this, that the signs are multivalent. So when you have a sign which has one set of phonetic values and one set of meanings, sometimes there are many of them.
56:04 Tristan Hughes? It's a process of elimination, is it?
56:05 Speaker 01 It's a process of elimination and reading as much, many texts as possible. Because what happens is that you get into the way of thinking of the Babylonian scribe. You you know what usages are common and what are uncommon, you know, you become so familiar with the matter that it's no difficulty. And after about 25 years, you can read fluently.
56:28 Tristan Hughes? I think, I must admit, especially for like... Audio, it's a complex topic, isn't it, cuneiform? And trying to explain the many different pieces of this writing system. And as you said, it takes a long, long time to master. So I'm very grateful for you to still delve into the weeds about it. But let's bring us back up from the detail now. How long does cuneiform endure for as a writing system? And if we started more than 5,000 years ago, how long does it continue for these various Mesopotamian societies?
56:59 Speaker 01 Well, I think the latest dated cuneiform tablet is from the first century AD. It's an almanac, an astronomical almanac. And so at that period, you have probably the remnants of these, as it were, universities, in inverted commas, from earlier centuries, where things were still studied. There were still people looking at the skies, making calculations, thinking things, making records and reading older things. And the number of people who did it must have gradually reduced because at that period, Aramaic had supplanted the Babylonian language as a spoken language at the end of the first
57:44 Speaker 01 millennium, probably increasingly through the first millennium, and then Greek, and then Arabic, and into the modern world. And so you have to imagine that in these places in Babylonia, there were old men and less old men, and then not many old men, and then the last guy who could read the stuff expired, and that was that. And at that moment, cuneiform writing became extinct, and that must have happened. But the language, of course, not. And there are outpockets of spoken Aramaic, even in northern Iraq, where people today
58:26 Speaker 01 speak a form of Aramaic, which is a linear, direct descendant of the Aramaic spoken when the Assyrians and Babylonians were running the country in the first millennium. They just survived among those people and they speak that language. But Babylonian tongue probably reduced massively in comparison with Aramaic as time went by, not least for the fact you could write Aramaic with an alphabet and you could write it with 26 letters in ink and gradually, gradually.
58:58 Speaker 01 You'd have the movement that recording on clay with all its complexity and all its training gradually became redundant in the commercial world or in the business world or in the administrative world and it was reduced to these old crusty blokes looking from their ivory towers at the moon and predicting things for the future. So I think it's not over fanciful to think of that romantic rather inspiring kind of thing. So probably sometime in the first century AD, the day came that if you'd gone with your microphone and tape recorder to Babylon, looking for someone who could tell you about the old stories, there might be people who remember them by heart, but not who could read the inscriptions.
59:42 Tristan Hughes? I think one of my favourite artefacts, Irving, kind of the colliding of the Greek world, but also Mesopotamian Babylon, is one of the cuneiform tablets, one of the astronomical diary entries that you have on display at the British Museum, which has that very pithy line, "The king died."
59:59 Speaker 01 Yeah, and that's all they say.
1:00:00 Tristan Hughes? That's all they say.
1:00:00 Speaker 01 And Alexander the Great is the king in question. Excuse me, I mean, what a king!
1:00:05 Tristan Hughes? Yes. But you know, that is written in cuneiform in the fourth century BC.
1:00:10 Speaker 01 It makes you jump, doesn't it?
1:00:11 Tristan Hughes? So that's the scholars are still using cuneiform for like...
1:00:14 Speaker 01 Oh, yes. Yes, I think that that was one of the very institutions where the diaries were kept, which soldiered on and soldiered on until the first century AD. It's really rather, it's quite exciting when you see the name Alexander written in cuneiform for the person. And that also makes you jump like anything.
1:00:31 Tristan Hughes? My only other one, before we completely wrap up, is that I see on many of these cuneiform tablets, especially from the time that I know you've done lots of work around, like the the ark tablets, the Babylonian map of the world, which had the cuneiform on top. All of these symbols are jam-packed together. And for someone who doesn't know it, it's very difficult to distinguish symbol from symbol, and I guess also kind of sound from sound.
1:00:56 Speaker 01 And word from word.
1:00:56 Tristan Hughes? And word from word. Or did it ever leave spaces or anything, though?
1:00:59 Speaker 01 No, they don't. They weren't allowed to. They were taught to write in a continuum. And in the best literary tablets, we can see that in addition to that, they had right justification. So on the Gilgamesh tablets of Asher Banapal, which are the highest kind of quality scribal achievements.
1:01:17 Speaker 01 All the lines end at the same point, and if the line is empty and there's extra space, they leave the space in the middle and they move the others up to the right-hand side. So they had right justification that by and large, it is a bewildering thing when you start off, that there's no gap between the words. But as you jump in, eventually, you never think about it because somehow your mind adjusts, adjusts to it. I mean, a good analogy here is if you study languages like Arabic or Hebrew, people who write Arabic and Hebrew don't write the vowels in. So when you start out, you think, oh, how on earth can they do this? You know, without any vowels, they've just got the skeleton. But people who, whose languages, they just read it and there's never any doubt. And it's something comparable to that.
1:02:02 Tristan Hughes? I think, yeah, we'll have to save going into some of those exemplar Cunyae form texts from the Library of Asher Banapal for another day, won't we? And you see, because those are the pinnacle of
1:02:11 Speaker 01 They are. There's lots and lots to say.
1:02:14 Tristan Hughes? Well, but Irving, until that point, it just goes to me to say, as always, thank you so much for coming on the podcast and being an absolute beacon of knowledge, a fountain of knowledge.
1:02:25 Speaker 01 Well, it's a great privilege for me and a great pleasure at the same time. Thank you.
1:02:33 Tristan Hughes? Well, there you go. There was the one and only the legend, Dr Irving Finkel in fine form, talking all things how to write Cunyae form. I hope you enjoyed the episode just as much as we did recording it. It was wonderful to get Irving to the studio and to film this as well. So if you want to see the, the visual version of this podcast, well, you can, you can head over to the Ancients YouTube channel now. Thank you for listening to this episode of the Ancients. Please follow the show on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. That really helps us and you'll be doing us a big favour. If you'd also leave us a rating as well, well, we'd really appreciate that. Don't forget,
1:03:15 Tristan Hughes? you can also sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries with a new release every week. Sign up at historyhit.com/subscribe. That's all from me. I'll see you in the next episode.
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