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

Today I’m talking with Irving Finkel, a legendary British Museum scholar of ancient languages, cuneiform, and Mesopotamian culture—and a wonderfully warm, funny human; let’s head back a few thousand years.

The earliest clear evidence for writing appears around 3500 BC in Mesopotamia, where pictorial marks slowly turned into a system that could capture sound, which unlocked grammar, literature, and everything that followed.

Cuneiform became a powerful, flexible script used for Sumerian, Akkadian, and even foreign speech heard by ear; early scholars standardized thousands of signs and compiled lists, which kept the system coherent for millennia.

And that system is called cuneiform, the wedge-shaped script impressed into clay that somehow endured for three thousand years.

Clay tablets survived in the ground astonishingly well, so museums hold hundreds of thousands today and many more likely wait untouched; they contain royal records, science, medicine, magic, and literature.

The real leap was encoding sound, not just pictures; how hard was that to invent?

It’s odd to think they began with pictures then realized pictures could stand for sounds; I suspect sound-based writing or long-standing pictorial communication predated the tablets we have, with Sumerians adapting an older system into full language.

A carved stamp from Gobekli Tepe looks like a seal for ratifying documents, which hints at organized writing or sign use around 9000 BC on perishable materials; think of Indus Valley seals—the paperwork likely vanished, the seals did not.

So your claim is controversial: there might have been writing, or at least contract seals, long before Sumerian tablets.

Yes, and common sense supports it—large projects and trade need plans and records; people then were as smart as us, and inertia often hides long gestation before breakthroughs show up archaeologically.

Hearing you, the surviving tablets feel like a raindrop compared to the waterfall that once existed.

Exactly; archives skew our view—thousands of tiny Ur III receipts may come from a couple of storerooms, and the famous Nineveh library was probably the broken leftovers while the conquerors carried the good tablets away.

Most of cuneiform is deciphered; what’s the system, and how did scholars crack it?

It’s syllabic: you write words as sequences like mu-zi-am, with many signs holding multiple values; Akkadian is a Semitic language, while Sumerian is an isolate with affixes stacked around roots.

Decipherment came via the trilingual Behistun inscription, where Old Persian provided a foothold to unlock Akkadian; Henry Rawlinson gets the fame for copying it, but Edward Hincks grasped the core insight that signs carry many readings.

Reading still demands judgment, especially with damage and technical vocabulary, and translation is an art because no word maps perfectly one-to-one; the Chicago Assyrian Dictionary is a towering achievement that captures nuance.

Why did cuneiform last so long, and what did that mean for who got to write?

Inertia and gatekeeping—scribes held power, schools were cliquish, and mass literacy wasn’t the goal; average scribes handled everyday legal work, while the best moved into court, temple, science, law, and architecture.

Do the limits of language shape the world they could describe?

Akkadian is richly expressive, but one subtlety is under-translated: modal force; divination and medicine rarely mean will, they mean could or should, yet many renderings flatten that, changing entire texts.

How did you learn this world of signs?

I arrived at university set on Egyptian, the professor died, and I was steered to W. G. Lambert for cuneiform; within a lesson or two I knew this would be my life, and I began memorizing signs and reading tablets.

What sorts of everyday human things show up on clay?

There are playful love lines and lively street pieces with jealous quarrels; the gods mirror humans too, with a big pantheon, personal tutelary deities, and a practical approach to keeping divine attention.

Ghosts and gods were assumed realities, not debated; people made offerings to family dead, and death’s finality was accepted, though I think later monotheism introduced dogma that fueled conflict.

Tell me about the Epic of Gilgamesh.

It grew from oral tales of a real king of Uruk into a twelve-tablet masterpiece about friendship, mortality, and the whims of gods, and it still carries oral storytelling formulas frozen into text.

Do you see written storytelling reaching back to fireside narratives?

Absolutely; humans have told stories by firelight since deep prehistory, and cave paintings show early, astonishing creative genius that fed myth, memory, and moral lessons.

You’re famous for the Ark tablet; what did you discover?

A visitor’s tablet turned out to be a flood blueprint: the god warns Atrahasis to build a huge round coracle, with materials and measurements spelled out, to save life from waters decreed to wipe out a noisy mankind.

It predates the biblical story by a millennium, matches motifs like sending out birds, and makes sense in a land of river floods; during the Babylonian exile, Judean writers likely recast Mesopotamian themes through their own theology.

I don’t think there was a single global deluge; the flood is a gripping literary device grounded in real disasters, and the ticking-clock urgency of “build the boat now” is timeless—made better by choosing an unexpected hero, not a master shipwright.

We rebuilt the ancient boat in Kerala at about one-third size, calculated the limits, ribbed it in wood, sealed it with heavy bitumen, and launched it; the sealant leaked a little, but the craft was authentic and seaworthy, despite a documentary that let critics claim it was a raft of tiny boats, which was nonsense.

The tablet’s recipe for materials was right because storytellers likely scaled real coracle proportions for audiences who knew boats, sitting on the cusp between oral performance and written tradition.

Why did the flood myth blame noisy people?

Noise stands in for overpopulation in a world without death; after the flood the gods introduce non-reproducing roles, a strikingly Malthusian fix wrapped in myth.

Tell me about the Royal Game of Ur and how you decoded it.

It’s a 20-square board first found in royal graves at Ur, then across the Near East and into Egypt, even with Tutankhamun, spreading by travelers without written rules.

After about 2000 BC the layout standardized with a central run, and the play was a race with lucky and safe squares, blending chance and tactics much like backgammon.

A late Babylonian tablet naming pieces and throws let me reverse-engineer rules that work; people now play them worldwide, and at the Getty I watched first-timers erupt in the good-natured fury only a great game provokes.

Are games part of human nature?

They sublimate rivalry into safe play and help with what India calls time pass; gambling likely joined later, as laments about knucklebones suggest, and one rules text even frames play like a barroom scene.

What makes the British Museum magical?

It tells the human story through objects, not just art, representing all cultures without favor, preserving and studying for those not yet born, a lighthouse against ignorance and dogma.

We analyze religions rather than promote them; unlike art museums, we center ideas, and if Martians asked for a quick tour of humanity, we could show them a coherent picture.

And holding objects in storage is part of that mission because meaning matures with time.

Exactly; most pieces wait off display so future scholars can reinterpret them as distance sharpens understanding.

What did the ancients have that we may have lost?

They were us in different clothes, but modern screens act like an addiction that dulls vitality, whereas most people then lived more naturally in one place, not necessarily wiser, just less distorted by technology.

I’m also worried about language decay; clipped media and sloppy usage blur meaning, while English is immense, and real reading grows the vocabulary that clear thinking depends on.

Language shapes thought.

Which is why neglecting great languages is a real loss.

With approximately one hundred thirty thousand tablets around you, any that make you smile?

A proverb about a mosquito teasing an elephant still delights me, and I adore Tom Lehrer’s razor wit, which, like Dr. Strangelove, feels sadly evergreen.

Next time you’re here, come by and I’ll show you tablets, the Chicago dictionary, and a grammar to get you going.

You’re a remarkable human being, and this was an honor.

Mutual feelings; this was a real pleasure.

Thanks for listening; I’ll leave you with Wittgenstein’s reminder that the reach of our language sets the reach of our world.