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Lex AI Irving Finkel

2:14:13 recording · EN · 2 speakers

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Brief overview

Irving Finkel argues cuneiform's story is far older and far larger than the surviving tablets suggest.

  1. Recording sound, not pictures, was the real leapOnce a picture of a foot meant the sound of foot, language itself could be written down.
  2. What survives is a raindrop, not the waterfallThousands of Ur III tablets probably came out of two storage rooms, yet scholars treat them as a whole culture.
  3. The Babylonian flood predates Genesis by a millenniumThe 1700 BC Ark tablet, plus George Smith's 1872 Nineveh find of the three released birds, shows literary dependence.
Executive Summary AI
  • Irving Finkel dates the first writing we can see to around 3500 BC, among people living between the Euphrates and Tigris who made agreed signs on clay and eventually realised a picture could carry a sound rather than a thing.9:59
  • He rejects the standard sequence that pictures came first and sound second, calling it bewildering that anyone would start with the least flexible system, and argues pictographic signs were already the end of a very long trading-and-messaging tradition.20:43
  • His most controversial evidence is a round green stone from Göbekli Tepe, about 9000 BC, with signs carved on its flat bottom: a seal used to ratify, which to him proves writing some 7,000 years before Sumer.24:18
  • On decipherment he describes the trilingual inscription of Darius at Bisutun, read first through Old Persian, and credits Edward Hinks, a clergyman in Killaloe, over Henry Rawlinson, whom he calls the stepfather rather than the father of Assyriology.42:51
  • He recounts identifying the Ark tablet, a 1700 BC Babylonian tablet about eight inches by three whose 60 lines give a blueprint for a round coracle, making the Mesopotamian flood story a thousand years older than the biblical one.1:22:24
Key Quote
“Well, that seal from Gobekli Tepe is a raindrop from which I infer writing.”
— Irving Finkel27:50
Key Quote
“It's predicated on the assumption that what we have is only what there was.”
— Irving Finkel34:12
Key Quote
“It means that with A, B could be, might be, ought to be, should be, could be true.”
— Irving Finkel57:55