169. Decoding the World’s First Writing

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1:05When I say the word cuneiform, what comes to mind? If you're like me, the answer is not much. But my guest today, Irving Finkel, is trying to change that. He's a curator in the Department of the Middle East at the British Museum, where he's worked for over 45 years. He's responsible for the museum's collection of roughly 130 ,000 clay tablets engraved with cuneiform, the oldest writing system in the world. Once you give up six or seven years of your life to learn cuneiform, everything changes. Your daily life is full of throb and excitement, money, women, cars, everything you could ever ask for.

1:41It's just the most fantastic career, and nobody does it apart from a few decrepit nerds like myself. Welcome to People I Mostly Admire with Steve Levitt. Is there anything useful that we can learn from these writings from thousands of years ago? That's what I hope to find out today. But first, I asked Irving for a crash course on cuneiform.

2:11As far as we know, cuneiform writing is the oldest writing that appeared on the face of the globe. At least it is the oldest one we know about. And the landscape in which it appeared is ancient Iraq, what the Greeks called Mesopotamia. And Mesopotamia, of course, means between the rivers, because the landscape has the Euphrates and Tigris rivers, which characterizes the heartland. And that is where, archaeologically speaking, we find the first evidence for writing. So cuneiform is something that most normal civilized people have no encounter with in the course of their lives. But it is a very fascinating and marvelous matter.

2:55Firstly, cuneiform means wedge-shaped like a piece of brie. And in the 19th century, when they first found these tablets and first started to scrutinize them, they called them cuneiform wedge-shaped because the signs themselves, which they utilized by pressing a stylus into clay, were made up of small triangular shapes like wedges. So we have these people who lived in ancient Iraq, say in the fourth millennium, we're talking about the second half of the fourth millennium, about 3 ,500 BC, It's probably about that period that the first attempts, the first overtures in the direction of recording sound and language in script were made.

3:48They started off with what scholars call pictographic signs, a whole load of very simple drawn pictures to represent things that people would recognise. They look a bit like the sort of drawings that four-year-olds do when they first get the hang of a pencil. And you can go a fair way with pictographic signs. So, for example, you could say you want three bottles of milk to the milkman. So if you drew three milk bottles and an X for a kiss, then the milkman would understand exactly what you wanted and he would leave the bottles. But if you wanted to say, look, I ordered this last week and it was mouldy and there was a worm in one of them and I'm never going to buy anything from you again, you can't do that with pictures very easily.

4:34And the jump was made to use these picture signs to write things that engendered a sound, often the sound of what they look like, but often other sounds. And before very long, the beginning scribes who wrestled with this had a whole load of cuneiform signs which reduced sound to manageable small syllables. So they really wrote in syllables. and wrote them in a row, and then you pushed it together, and there you were. It became a very fluid and very mobile writing system, which meant they could record the Sumerian language and the Babylonian language equally, which were the languages spoken in Iraq, but also, remarkably, other languages as well.

5:20And after a while, places round about ancient Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Egypt, There were people there who used this same very crazy-looking writing system to write their own languages, and that lasted right until the alphabet came into the world. So spoken language must have been around 100 ,000 years ago, maybe 50 ,000 years ago. And I think hieroglyphics actually began to emerge around the same time as cuneiform. Do you think it was more than a coincidence after so many thousands of years with only spoken language that multiple written languages emerged around the same time? Well, the thing with human inventions like writing, when someone could tell their mates or their boss or somebody with whom they worked, look, I've got this system, we make these marks, I can record all these words, happy birthday to you, and you can read them and you can get the sound of the words from it.

6:18So once you have that in Mesopotamia, there are two ways of viewing the evolution of discoveries. Some people think it goes plod, plod, very, very slowly, bit by bit, and it takes ages before there's another improvement. But I think with writing, it must have gone off like a firework, because once the principle was there, all the administrations in ancient Iraq utilised it. There were lots of scribes who did administration, which was necessary for all the people who lived together in the city-states. But also, before you knew where you were, you had dictionaries appearing as new signs and new words were put together.

6:59And then you have hymns and prayers and literature. But you made an interesting question about when you have language and then you have writing. So writing comes right at the end of the story. 3 ,000 BC is not very long ago, five and a bit thousand years ago, in terms of evolution, in terms of wider history. There's no time at all. So it's a very late phenomenon that people could write. But languages must have existed in human societies and even maybe pre-Homo sapien communities since the beginning of time. I've never believed it at all plausible that people lived together in communities, went hunting, had children, did pictures and did all those things you do.

7:39and didn't talk to one another, they for sure did. And I think we have to imagine that one of the defining features of homo sapiens is the ability to talk and to produce sounds that other people can recognise. It's illustrated with a small child. If you have a baby, all they do is make funny noises and imitate the sounds of people. But when they suddenly grasp that they can recognise a sound and reproduce it and it has the right effect, like cake or apple, It's a miraculous thing. And in miniature, this is the same kind of principle. Because I think that the whole process of civilization is it goes along with very little happening.

8:20And all of a sudden, there's a huge thing which changes everything. So hieroglyphics, I assume, evolved completely separately than cuneiform. But roughly at the same time, do you think that was his chance? Well, this is a difficult political question for somebody working in the British Museum. because Egyptians say, oh, well, they invented everything. But in fact, I think it's much more probable that the Egyptian writing system used to write ancient Egyptian language sprung up as a consequence of an older prevailing system of writing the cuneiform languages because there are so many points in common.

8:57The only real difference between hieroglyphic writing and cuneiform writing is the actual signs themselves. They couldn't be more different because cuneiforms are abstract, geometrical kind of designs where you have to learn the values, whereas with Egyptian hieroglyphs, you can often tell what they are, more or less, and you can soon learn to read them. It's much more accessible. Nevertheless, I think it's slightly more likely that people from Egypt, maybe merchants, maybe travellers, maybe diplomats, in contact with people in Iraq for one reason or another, or possibly even warfare, who knows, but contact between what looks like two distinct nations, that encountering this thing, which had been running for quite a long time, would strike somebody intelligent as the sort of thing that we jolly would ought to have.

9:48And probably when they got home, they couldn't remember much about how it worked, but they knew that you had to have writing, so they decided to have pretty pictures, which everybody loves. So I think it's more likely, in a way, that hieroglyphic post-dated and even derived from cuneiform writing as a kind of horizon. But the other thing is, when people talk about these issues, there is a kind of hysterical appraisal of the invention of writing because people think, well, it must have been invented once and then spread out from some node all over the place. But my own view is that actually the conception of making signs to create meaning and sound is not huge for a human brain because in a way it's obvious.

10:33So I don't believe that there's any ever one invention of writing. And I think after all, if you look at people in the world today, say you have 500 of them in a queue, people at one end are going to be as thick as two stalk planks. Then you're going to have a whole load in the middle or okay, not so bright. And at the far end, you're going to have people who are geniuses. And that's what we have in our world today. And that must have been the situation from day one. There will have been individuals who stood out from others with abilities and intelligence and the capacity to visualize things.

11:06And in their hands, these developments took place. At least in the version that economists tell, and I'm sure it has no relation to the truth, the first use of written language was to help rulers collect taxes better. Is that actually right or just a fun story to tell to our undergraduate economic students? I must admit I've often used it in public lectures, blaming the inland revenue who is the scourge of every human being's life on the Sumerians. This is the truth of the matter that among early tablets, numeration developed rapidly. The Sumerians counted in 60s. That was the way they did it, not in 10s.

11:44And they developed a capacity to record numbers and very big numbers and multiply them together and all sorts of acrobatics, numerically speaking, really quite soon after the beginning of writing. So side by side with the script, they had the capacity for bookkeeping. As far as we can reconstruct things, in ancient Mesopotamia, around the fourth to the third millennium, there were city-states, which were more or less independent. They each had a primary deity, special temples, special gods. Sometimes there was war between them. But they were practically speaking independent, and it meant that the people who ran those city-states were in charge of produce and feeding the multitude for whom they were responsible and many other things for which records were deemed essential.

12:33And so the Sumerians in particular, and these are the guilty ones, in around 2100 BC, a good millennium after writing begins, We have a situation called the Sumerian Er-3 period, where you had a kind of empire of these states being amalgamated, working together and spreading out. And from all these sites, we have bookkeeping documents which would delight anybody who is a professional accountant. For example, there was a tithe system or something like that where local people had to bring sheep and wool to the temple regularly. and you had chaps who sat at the door with their clay tablet in one hand, their left hand, and a stylus or writing stick in the other hand and they wrote down three sheep, four goats, Mr.

13:23So-and-so, sealed by me, Mr. So-and-so, this is the date, a perfect record of the fulfilment of the duty. And then they decided that they had to make a big book at the end of the month and put all the entries in, all the entries in, and add them all up. The seeds of this madness do go back to this period. The sumberologists tell me that the totals which come, which are quite large, are usually flawlessly accurate. So there's a whole subspecies of persons who shuffle about looking at the ground, who like nothing more than making records of absolutely trivial details very carefully, adding them up, checking them, and putting them somewhere in the equivalent of a filing cabinet, because no doubt they had special arrangements to keep their records.

14:10So the story which one can tell to undergraduates is intrinsic to human society, and it's been there from the beginning. If they're going to become accountants themselves and propagating the same kind of ghastly activity, they might feel gratified to know that they are treading in a well-worn path by other persons. As we've talked, we've taken for granted that we can read cuneiform, or you can read cuneiform. I'm curious, how did the first modern scholars even begin to crack the code of something that looks so inscrutable at first glance? It does look inscrutable. And the old joke is that you don't know which way up it goes.

14:44And actually, does it make any difference? When you look at these tablets, one of the things that strikes your eye is that there's no gap between the words. So this means that when you start to learn cuneiform, there is a group of special, malicious, devilish problems that beset you. There's about a thousand signs, maybe more altogether. And each sign has more than one sound and more than one meaning. So this looks like madness. When you read cuneiform, you have to have in your mind a thing like a filing cabinet. You have to go in your head through the possible values of that sign. And then you go through the possible values of the next sign and see if they meet.

15:28So for example, if you have a sign, one of the values of which is ba, and the next one is ab, then Baab sounds like a word and in fact in Semitic Akkadian it means gate so the first word is established by quickly assessing the different possible readings into one which makes lucid sense it is strange and foreboding it seems so alien when you start but once you become immersed in it you start to think like these people you understand them you have a kind of sympathy and the script instead of becoming an obstacle which you have to pole vault over it becomes something very welcome. You feel at home with it.

16:08So it's learnable now. But when these tablets just started appearing in the 1800s, how in the world did the first people figure out how to read this? Oh, yes, you mean the decipherment. Oh, yes. I forgot even to mention that terribly important thing. You're quite right. Well, the simplest point to make is, you know what happened with Egyptian hieroglyphs with the Rosetta Stone and the Greek transcription of the Egyptian, which in the 19th century, the scholars used because they could read the Greek to open up the hieroglyphic writing. Because before that, before the Rosetta Stone, which had the same text in Greek and hieroglyphics, we couldn't make any sense of the hieroglyphics, even though the pictures were pretty obvious, right?

16:52That is true, because there was always a disjunct between the simplicity of the original picture and all the things it could represent. And in the 19th century, the same thing happened in Mesopotamian studies, because in Iran, there was a high mountain pass where one of the old Persian kings, Darius, had carved a long inscription in Persian cuneiform, in Babylonian cuneiform, and in Elamite cuneiform, because the three languages existed side by side in the world at the time. The old Persian inscription, it was written in cuneiform, but it wasn't anything as complicated as the Babylonian cuneiform.

17:35So what Persians did is they made up 28 or 30 cuneiform signs for the letters of their Persian alphabet. It was a very interesting intellectual jump. So when the scholars in Germany and in England in the 19th century realised that the inscription existed side by side at this place Bisutun in Iran, they had an idea to see whether it could be the Persian language. Because Persian, of course, is still alive. It's still a very important world language and scholars knew Persian. And before long, they could decipher the old Persian cuneiform and read it as Persian language. There were passages where there was a long sequence of signs followed by several words, and then there was another sequence of signs followed by the same words, and then another sequence followed by the same words again.

18:31They had an idea that maybe the first one was the king, and it said the great king of the world, king of his father. And that's what happened. They cracked the old Persian on the basis of patterns which showed that there were repetitive things in the old Persian. It was a very clever and marvellous thing. But once they read that, they knew what the Babylonian inscription had to say. They got a kind of intellectual chisel and they bashed away at this cuneiform writing from Babylon. And before long, they realised that the language behind that was a Semitic language. Now, this was very, very important because although Babylonian and Syrian were completely extinct, they, being a Semitic language, meant that they would have a lot in common with living Semitic languages, Hebrew, Arabic, Aramaic, Syriac.

19:26And so from living Semitic words, living Semitic language, they managed to start the proper decipherment. They brought it back to life by painstaking and really quite miraculous work. We'll be right back with more of my conversation with Irving Finkel after this short break.

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21:28So one of the key moments in this early study of cuneiform was one of your heroes, I think his name was George Smith, discovered a tablet with the Ark story, which we associate in modern society with Noah, but it has much deeper links. Well, I have great respect for George Smith. I regard him as a kind of hero. And he worked in the middle of the 19th century in the British Museum. And he had a fantastic ability to read and understand cuneiform. He just had a sort of flair and a sort of God-given understanding. It was a remarkable thing. Anyway, he was the person who, in the department, was reading a tablet from Nineveh, because lots of tablets came from Nineveh, and they were all written in beautifully clear writing from the King's Library.

22:16And that's what everybody worked on. And Smith had this large piece of tablet in his hands, which he was quietly reading to himself. And all of a sudden, boy, something happened. And he dropped the tablet on the desk. Now, you're not allowed to do that in the British Museum. If you do, you go straight to the Tower of London and you're never seen again. But Smith dropped the tablet and then he stood up and then he started running around the room holding his head and making funny squeaking noises. And finally, he started to take his clothes off. This is all recorded in departmental records. Smith had read the crucial part of the flood story when the ark is in the water and the guy in charge, so to speak, in the boat knew the rain had stopped and they opened a window and let out a bird to see whether the trees had appeared above the water and the bird came back and then they did it a second time and the third time the bird didn't come home.

23:16Pishdim, the Babylonian knower, knew that the waters were subsiding and they'd all come out of the ark and carry on reproducing exactly as in the Bible. So this is the situation. In the 19th century, educated persons like Smith knew their Bible back to front. It was part of their psyche. And so nobody knew, nobody had the slightest suspicion that anything in the biblical text might have existed on such a bizarre surface, alien thing as a cuneiform tablet. And when Smith read it, it induced in him this quite bizarre, uncontrollable reaction, which I come to the conclusion is a kind of epilepsy.

23:58I think he was provoked into an epileptic fit by this discovery because it was so unexpected. The key is it was a thousand years before the Old Testament, right? That's what must have been so incredibly shocking to the people of that time. In a way, yes. The question about the time is a little complex because the 7th century BC, nobody knows exactly, of course, what happened about the biblical text when it was put together, who did it exactly when, it's a matter for faith, scholarship, analysis, detection, and all those other conflicting principles. But I think that the biblical text is not likely to have taken shape much before the time when this tablet was written.

24:42So Smith, who was a very rational person, wrote about it in his book saying that it wasn't quite clear which came first. and many clergymen, of course, were furious about this. So there was quite a furore which actually has not quite died down to this day as I know to my cost. Smith worked in the museum. He read tablets and he had a long beard and I work in the museum and I read tablets and I also have a long beard, not quite as long as Smith's. So I feel in a way slightly a disciple of his and something on a slightly less dramatic scale happened to me because a person brought in a tablet from the street, so to speak.

25:19Wait, tablets exist on the street? Well, it's a matter of speech. The thing is, cuneiform tablets are mostly in the ground, and then a lot of other ones are in museums and collections. And once in a while, they're in the possession of private individuals. Because from the 19th century into the 20th century, tablets arrived in Britain in great number. It's not uncommon to find that somebody's grandfather or great-grandfather had one of these things. For example, if they were in Iraq in the First World War, people used to go in the souk and buy keepsakes to take home to their wives and sweethearts.

25:56And maybe people thought that a tablet would be just the thing for their beloved. And this was one of those that a person who had it in his family brought it in with a load of other bits and pieces to the department where I work in the museum for identification. Because we used to offer this as a service. and the thing was it was part of the flood story it was one tablet part of the flood story and it's about a thousand years older than the one from Nineveh which Smith had read about a thousand years you could tell from the writing from the grammatical forms all these things added up certainly to what we call the old Babylonian period and this piece of clay that no one had ever seen before arrived on my desk there are hundreds of of thousands of these tablets in your collection.

26:47How or why do you think such a special one that tells the flood story a thousand years earlier? It's not like there's a lot of these floating around. You think it's just by chance that this incredible one ends up in the hands of a private collection? All I can say is that in all the time I've been in the British Museum, which is since 1979, maybe 350 tablets have come in like that, one at a time from people who have them or found them or know about them. It was not uncommon, especially those horrible tablets we were talking about with all the bookkeeping on. There are lots and lots of those. So that it should be a tablet itself is not so remarkable because many people had a lot to do with Iraq in the First and Second World War.

27:34What is remarkable here is it should be such a plum specimen. I don't know how to explain it, but it's fortuity because until I read it, nobody had any idea what it was or, as you might say, which way up it went. And when I read the first four lines, they're very famous lines, where the god Enki tells the Babylonian equivalent of Noah, there's going to be a flood, you've got to build a boat, and you've got to build it fast. And he gives them all the instructions. This tablet was a gem, so it took me quite a long time to recuperate from the heart-stopping shock of it. And then I got on with it and deciphered it.