YouSaid · the spoken record

Irving Finkel

lines on the record: 163
first: 2025-12-12
most recent: 2025-12-12
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“That's right That's right. And every time somebody built a coracle and they didn't do the waterproofing right. Know what will happen? He'll be out on the river, and that'll be your lot. I think so. I think it was a certain amount of evidence that in Mesopotamian society. People talk about the time before the flood and after the flood. And it's like when I was a boy people used to talk about before the war we used to And now we. Do this, it's a kind of cataclysmic cut across history which provides a ruler, so things are either before it or after it. Because there's a king list, for example, where they wrote down the names of all the kings all the way back to the beginning, including kings before the flood. They knew about that. They had their names and their great regnal years or thousands of years. Fascinating”
2025-12-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #487 – Irving Finkel: Deciphering Secrets of Ancient Civilizations & Flood Myths · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“River in China, floods, and everybody gets so that's not at all surprising. But what was so shocking for George Smith, who was such a clever person, is to read for the first time on this tablet from Ninuvi long before the one that I discover came to light, about the three birds being released, one after the other, and that was the clincher that the two stories were locked together, and lots of clergymen got very miserable about it and didn't know what to make of it.”
2025-12-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #487 – Irving Finkel: Deciphering Secrets of Ancient Civilizations & Flood Myths · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, I don't think so. I think it's a literary construction out of the reality that people who did survive were on boats. I mean, they had boats for sure. And you might wake up in the Persian Gulf and never know what happened. But it's a literary moral principle teaching narrative. And look, missionaries take it all around the world. That's the other thing. See, this is the mystery of it. that you have flood stories everywhere and some of them are from meddlesome missionaries who have all these innocent little kids sitting on benches and i'm going to tell you a story like that so it moves into this consciousness and it gets recycled it gets recycled so this is one thing and then also there probably are spontaneous ideas because it's not so complicated or so amazing that independently people would have such a narrative after all you know like the great”
2025-12-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #487 – Irving Finkel: Deciphering Secrets of Ancient Civilizations & Flood Myths · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's exactly right. And something else is this, something else is this, right? You have five days to build the ark or whatever it is, two weeks to build the ark. So the clock goes tick, tick, tick, tick, tick. And about a third of the films that come out of Hollywood are the world's going to be demolished by aliens and you've got 24 hours to think of a cure tick tick tick tick tick tick so it's that narrative is irresistible that one man can save the world if he's lucky in time from disaster so it starts off with utna pishtim and it goes on to noah and then it goes on to hollywood”
2025-12-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #487 – Irving Finkel: Deciphering Secrets of Ancient Civilizations & Flood Myths · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That is, in my opinion, the driving force behind the Hebrew text, and the thing about it is that they didn't have in Jewish philosophical tradition stuff about creation and the beginning of the world. And they took Babylonian ideas, which they learnt when they were there, and they recycled them. Where is the Babylonians decided that the gods were going to wipe out that noisy persons? When the Jewish philosophers got this narrative to recycle about the vengeful almighty, he was in the Old Testament, very unpleasant, vengeful person. It was because of sin. It wasn't because of rucket and playing the radio. It was sin. So they took one narrative and they recycled it for their own purposes.”
2025-12-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #487 – Irving Finkel: Deciphering Secrets of Ancient Civilizations & Flood Myths · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That what happened was it's a complex thing, but the Judeans from Jerusalem, they spoke Hebrew, but they also spoke Aramaic, right? The two languages, their sister languages. And the Babylonians spoke Babylonian, and they also spoke Aramaic. And they all wore the same kind of clothes. And they all had brown skin. And all these refugees from Jerusalem were milling around in Babylonia, they would have intermarried and disappeared within no time at all. And the authorities who were there prevented this by drawing up a kind of charter of their history, explaining things from the beginning of time up until now how it happened and what happened and it was all intentional.”
2025-12-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #487 – Irving Finkel: Deciphering Secrets of Ancient Civilizations & Flood Myths · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I think that when the Judeans from Jerusalem after the destruction of the temple and by the Babylonians and the rout of the priesthood and everything, the king and the others went over land to Babylon as refugees and they had to live there for three generations of time under Nebuchadnezzar's reign. So I believe that the text of the Bible was written then because if you read the Bible attentively, which I can't say I do on a regular basis, but if you do read it dispassionately, you have the mechanism that the early books of the Bible explain to the reader how it is that these people are in such a mess because they're supposed to be the chosen people doing all that. Look at there, I haven't got a temple, they haven't got a country, they're washed up and everything like that. So I think”
2025-12-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #487 – Irving Finkel: Deciphering Secrets of Ancient Civilizations & Flood Myths · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I believe this the Mesopotamians had a deep-seated horror of dependency on water when they couldn't control it. They were fearful of it. And they had a rainbow in Babylonia, like in the Bible, as a proof that the disaster was flood would never happen again. But I think there must have been one episode of this kind, maybe five thousand years before the tablet, ten thousand, it doesn't matter. Because with the passage of time, nothing happens in that part of the world. So something will be alive, grandfather to grandson, before you go to sleep. Remember, my boy, you know, you only have to be careful because otherwise from all that stuff for sure, bogeyman stuff never quite died out in their conscious minds.”
2025-12-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #487 – Irving Finkel: Deciphering Secrets of Ancient Civilizations & Flood Myths · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Imagine sweeping down to the Persian Gulf and the flat plains, everything would be destroyed, or the houses would be destroyed and them also would be drowned.”
2025-12-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #487 – Irving Finkel: Deciphering Secrets of Ancient Civilizations & Flood Myths · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Just don't. But in Mesopotamia, they had floods, the rivers, sometimes there wasn't enough water, sometimes there was too much, sometimes it was far too much water. So the mechanism that the waters could be used as a destructive force by the powers that be is a plausible Mesopotamian mechanism and is based in a sort of sense, in my opinion in reality, I think there must have been some tsunami once most people were drowned and those who survive were in boats, obviously, and then afterwards nobody ever forgot it. And it went on and on.”
2025-12-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #487 – Irving Finkel: Deciphering Secrets of Ancient Civilizations & Flood Myths · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You couldn't have two stories. It wasn't two stories about the same thing. It was literary dependence. It was literary dependence. The one was locked into the other. The text of the Hebrew Bible from whenever it was written down, of course, nobody knows quite when, but whenever it was, it was about the same time as the one from Ninu, about the 7th century. Something like that, the time interval between the Gilgamesh version from Nineveh and the Hebrew Bible is not like a big expanse of time. So there was an argument that one goes this way and one goes that way. But then when this tablet came in a thousand years old, nobody believes the Bible was written in 1700 BC. So the primacy of the Mesopotamian matter was established. And it's important because you never get floods in Jerusalem.”
2025-12-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #487 – Irving Finkel: Deciphering Secrets of Ancient Civilizations & Flood Myths · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And serologist in the British Museum called George Smith. And he was a very, very talented reader. And in 1872, he discovered that one of the tablets from the Nineveh Library we were talking about before had on it a passage which ran in parallel with Gilgamesh about the waters coming and the boat and everybody floating and even to the point that When the rain stopped and the ark came to rest on a mountain that the hero of this thing in Gilgamesh was called Napishtim released a bird three times to see whether the trees had come up and the first one came back and the second one and the third one didn't so he knew that so this was not only in the epic of Gilgamesh but it was also in the book of Genesis so what it meant was that it was”
2025-12-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #487 – Irving Finkel: Deciphering Secrets of Ancient Civilizations & Flood Myths · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Appropriate. And so, in this story, it was decided it was going to be a giant coral, a really, really big one that would never sink. And the male and female animals could go in and Adrahasi's wife and his three sons and so forth could go in and everything would be there and it would float on the water. And when it came down, they said, we'll start all over again. So it's got very many points in common with the description of the Floodian Genesis. And of course, so did the one in Gilgamesh. So in 1872.”
2025-12-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #487 – Irving Finkel: Deciphering Secrets of Ancient Civilizations & Flood Myths · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And in it he told him the shape of it and the materials he would need and how much he would need at the materials so he could do it safely. And in the 60 lines of a tablet, all this stuff was there. It was like a blueprint to build this boat. And it's extraordinary because it was round the boat. And everybody who knew their Bible, the arks, coffin shape kind of affair. And nobody thought of it being a roundboat. The fact is that round boats used in Mesopotamia on the rivers, coraclors, that's to say, because for transporting things and they would never sink. They were very...”
2025-12-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #487 – Irving Finkel: Deciphering Secrets of Ancient Civilizations & Flood Myths · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So they decided they would write them out and create something quieter that worked harder. So, this was the basic mechanism, and they had different ways of doing it. The most effective one was they were going to send a flood to wipe them all out. And one of the gods, the number three in the triumvirate, thought this was a deplorable idea. So he took it upon himself to warn this person called Atrahasis, who lived in Mesopotamia to build a boat, to rescue life when the waters came.”
2025-12-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #487 – Irving Finkel: Deciphering Secrets of Ancient Civilizations & Flood Myths · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The full story is like this visitors used to come to the museum to ask questions of the experts who work there and one would be on duty periodically and sometimes people would bring objects, sometimes they'd ask questions and somebody once came in with a whole load of objects including this tablet which to cut a long story short I identified pretty much straight away as being part of the flood story it was a tablet about eight inches by three Not the whole flood story, which is the complex narrative which ended up in the Gilgamesh narrative much, much later. But this one was an early narrative in which the point was taken up where the gods in heaven had decided that the population of Mesopotamia needed to be wiped out because they were so noisy. This was the expression and the gods couldn't sleep after lunch sort of thing.”
2025-12-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #487 – Irving Finkel: Deciphering Secrets of Ancient Civilizations & Flood Myths · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And about what happened and about famous battles when the flood came or how people learned to make fire or how we invented the all those sorts of things everybody puts down but that's presumably what absolutely happened and you have the capacity for people to adore and to respect among their own kind people of astounding ability there must have been hunters who were ferociously quick and you know wrestle with polar bears and all that kind of thing and all this stuff will be grist the narratist thing and as things got more complicated and more sophisticated so lessons might be incorporated or lessons might come out of an unintentionally because if you tell a story without a moral it is usually a moral if you if you think about it”
2025-12-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #487 – Irving Finkel: Deciphering Secrets of Ancient Civilizations & Flood Myths · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Among all the population, you have imbeciiles and Einstein's and somewhere along the line, you have Rembrandt. And I imagine that half the cave paintings in Europe were done by one person. I mean, you get the impression every family had a genius painter. It's impossible. Probably there was a person who went from place to place doing these paintings because they were so draw straight away accurately like that. But they are a distillation of creative artistic ability plus skill. So this is right at the pretty early stage, is it not? K painting material. So if you consider the human stock, which encapsulates such ideas ever after, then you have to reckon with that. You have to reckon with that. Very creative, very creative people. So the function of stories to tell the young.”
2025-12-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #487 – Irving Finkel: Deciphering Secrets of Ancient Civilizations & Flood Myths · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, either a human person like Gilgamesh or stories about the gods and someone sees the Milky Way and they think it's the god riding a chariot up it and then they have a story about, you know, and all those sorts of things or whatever it would be. But I think probably you have to allow for a strong creative principle surfacing in Homo sapiens at a quite early age because the paintings on cave walls You try drawing a running antelope in colour on a wall. I mean, the quality of the workmanship, of the artistic ability is Unsurpassable. It's not just good. So how is that an explicable thing at this very early date? It means”
2025-12-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #487 – Irving Finkel: Deciphering Secrets of Ancient Civilizations & Flood Myths · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I do. I think the fireside narrative matter. When we were kids, it would be twerks with a guitar and sitting around a fire on holiday. But that mechanism when people gather after dark, when there is a fire and talk is the sort of environment where narrative accounts flourish naturally among human beings”
2025-12-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #487 – Irving Finkel: Deciphering Secrets of Ancient Civilizations & Flood Myths · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That must be because when there was an enacting of an oral thing, a narrator would say, and it suddenly got frozen into the text. So it's a very strange thing because if you're reading, it is obvious that one person speaks and the other person speaks. And they always have this complicated thing stuck in the text. So it must be an echo of presumably you have your protagonists enacting their timeless matter. And the person who's writing it down says, and then Gilgamesh said, you know, like in a script.”
2025-12-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #487 – Irving Finkel: Deciphering Secrets of Ancient Civilizations & Flood Myths · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Adventures of Gilgamesh. So it is certainly literature and it's to do with humanity and immortality and man in the hands of the gods and incorporates lots of interesting, exciting stories. It's very Hollywood-y kind of thing. And you can see within it, even in the sophisticated Nineveh version, its roots are in oral literature because when somebody speaks it says Gilgamesh opened his mouth to speak and addressed his friend Enkidu and then there's a speech and then Enkidu opened his mouth and addressed his friend Gilgamesh. Well, when you're reading a story, you don't need that.”
2025-12-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #487 – Irving Finkel: Deciphering Secrets of Ancient Civilizations & Flood Myths · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, we know it best from this Assyrian library set of tablets. There are 12 of them. It's a 12 tablet work. That's quite long. And Gilgamesh is the hero of it The literature, we know it from earlier texts, and we know that Gilgamesh lived. He was a real person. He was a king in Uruk, and he was one of those people who lived after their death in the world. Like Alexander, for example. So there were stories about Gilgamesh when he was alive. There were stories about him afterwards. And firstly, they were oral literature, not written down at all. And then around the 1800s, people started to write them down in Simerian or Babylonian. So there was a corpus and eventually they were woven into this long twelve.”
2025-12-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #487 – Irving Finkel: Deciphering Secrets of Ancient Civilizations & Flood Myths · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Dogmatic and it's led to everything, inquisitions and all this kind of stuff. It's all as a result of it that one religion is superior and the other should be stamped out and all that. And in my opinion, monotheistic religion has generated the most fantastic amount of non-religious feeling, whereas when you have all the different gods and have different specialities and the ones you like and the ones that everybody likes and they have their temples and their offerings, it was very interesting to me to go into a temple in Calcutta when I went there with my wife Joanna. We went into the temples and saw how they were. And I think they must be very much like the ones in Mesopotamia. So there was never anything about them which affronted people's individuality or I mean there's no religious prejudice or even racial prejudice in antiquity. All these things are modern disadvantaged.”
2025-12-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #487 – Irving Finkel: Deciphering Secrets of Ancient Civilizations & Flood Myths · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think the big mistake for mankind was the creation of monotheistic religions because they brought evil into the world. Because if you believe in a monotheistic religion, it means I'm right and you're wrong. If you don't, so it's already on that footing.”
2025-12-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #487 – Irving Finkel: Deciphering Secrets of Ancient Civilizations & Flood Myths · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't know because you know that everyone's going to die. I think the real tragedy would be is if we're not supposed to That would be the tragedy for every single person who would Going to die, so all relationships have this finite clause in them. So if you are very fond of somebody or you love somebody and they die, it's kind of infantile to whine about it ever after because what do you think was going to happen either you or them? I always see it like that. I don't feel grief when people die.”
2025-12-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #487 – Irving Finkel: Deciphering Secrets of Ancient Civilizations & Flood Myths · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Everybody who died in bed naturally or peacefully, what we call their ghost, went down to the netherworld. And there they were. So they buried people jolly quick for obvious reasons. And like they do in Islam and Judaism today, it's the same kind of idea. And the spirit of the person... Down through the gates of the netherworld and stayed there. That's the basic situation. And people in their houses had actual burials under the courtyard and they had a thing where you pour stuff down a whole fluid and food kind of symbolic offerings to them.”
2025-12-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #487 – Irving Finkel: Deciphering Secrets of Ancient Civilizations & Flood Myths · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like they didn't believe in ghosts, they took them for granted, and they didn't believe in the gods. They took them for granted. This is the different mechanism because nobody here in the world today takes those things for granted, just the opposite. But I think that's how it worked. So you didn't have people wrestling with the idea of whether the gods really exist or whether they really care about me. They gave them a nudge when it was necessary. And they might offer this, they might offer that. It was the system. It was the prevailing system. And I think it's an important difference. And also that thing about ghosts that is clear from the inscriptions, all of them, that I managed to find, that nobody ever asked themselves, do these things exist or not? Or did I really see them or not? Or did I not? They didn't. They just took it all for granted.”
2025-12-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #487 – Irving Finkel: Deciphering Secrets of Ancient Civilizations & Flood Myths · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think that's true. But I think in Mesopotamia it was different in terms of its potency and immediacy because there's no skyscrapers in Iraq. You know, if you live in southern Iraq and you see from the roof. No lights at night You're under the stars, you can see everything because of no smog and anything like that. And the idea that the gods are there watching, it's not like a big artifice like it is here. It just doesn't ring true here. You can't come to it and really believe in it. Whereas these people didn't have to really believe in it because it was it.”
2025-12-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #487 – Irving Finkel: Deciphering Secrets of Ancient Civilizations & Flood Myths · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Make of religion today, Christianity in this country is on the decline because people who are supposed to be Christians say they aren't anymore they're atheists and the people who say I go to church and I believe in everything is a relatively small number of people say now this is the situation which is quite remarkable if you think about it. Leal knows what the consequence will be for the human race whether religion will. Balance out, whether it will die off, who knows”
2025-12-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #487 – Irving Finkel: Deciphering Secrets of Ancient Civilizations & Flood Myths · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Who did not have the disadvantage of growing up in a stifling religion but are just normal people, get a lot more interested when they're really ill or when they have a big disaster all of a sudden God or gods seem a lot more important than they do normally so that few people walk about in a state of religious awe and a good proportion of clergymen I've ever met don't do that either. It's a kind of conception that's not actually based on reality that the individual's response to religious stimuli fluctuates and is varied and is often a response to need. It doesn't come from nothing. I mean people don't suddenly feel I've got to thank the Lord for the rainbow or something like that. I think it's probably true today. I mean when you read the investigations they”
2025-12-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #487 – Irving Finkel: Deciphering Secrets of Ancient Civilizations & Flood Myths · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You say human beings on a larger scale, they can be forgetful or uninterested or on holiday. And there are lots of ways that you have to prompt your, make little sacrifices and little bribes so they do their job and keep an eye on you. So they had that kind of slightly practical view of gods, that they were a bit unpredictable, great when they were there but not always there sort of idea. I also believe this, that a lot of people in the world today”
2025-12-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #487 – Irving Finkel: Deciphering Secrets of Ancient Civilizations & Flood Myths · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Illness and the dead and what happens to the dead, and they had other specialities and they all had their own temples. And when a baby came into the world, Probably this was universally true. The baby was put under the tutelage of one or other of the gods. Sometimes the royal family, they were the big shots, but sometimes not. Or the ones that were in the family or something like that. So people had... Up with the idea that among all of them there were special ones for the family and they had a special one who was supposed to look after them. That's the sort of basic idea. But the trouble is since gods are...”
2025-12-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #487 – Irving Finkel: Deciphering Secrets of Ancient Civilizations & Flood Myths · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Relationship with the divine, well, the first thing to say is that they had a large pantheon of gods. So there were three guys at the top, sometimes called Arnu Enlil and A. There were three gods at the top and hundreds of other gods and goddesses. And you have the situation that I think lots of small villages and towns had their old ancient gods and eventually they're all worked into a kind of theological system like a phone book. And the lesser minor gods were amalgamated and then they were given jobs in the households of the big gods. So there was a sort of structure. You have this in the background a big sweeping theology like you have in the world today in some parts of the world. And this was the main system and the main gods were concerned with the ruler and the fate of the country. And another god was concerned with.”
2025-12-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #487 – Irving Finkel: Deciphering Secrets of Ancient Civilizations & Flood Myths · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so he to me is jealous, and the women fight in the street and heard insults of one another and slot bucket and all this kind of stuff is hilarious and it must have been a bit like a sort of verdi opera without the music, I suppose. I don't know. But anyway, it starts off. Up and eat him is in the room, and Marduk's in bed with this other goddess on the roof, and she can hear. You could say it was an eternal human issue”
2025-12-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #487 – Irving Finkel: Deciphering Secrets of Ancient Civilizations & Flood Myths · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Are one or two letters about from a chapter, a woman about you are very beautiful and your lips are like radishes and your ears are like walruses and things. But I mean, there are some things like that. And there's a kind of street drama in Babylon in 4th century BC, something like that, when there must have been actors who did this in the street. And it's Marduk. And Sarpenetum, his wife, and another woman, Marduk's having an affair with this other woman.”
2025-12-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #487 – Irving Finkel: Deciphering Secrets of Ancient Civilizations & Flood Myths · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, sometimes you can calculate what he ought to be, make a reasonable suggestion. And this dictionary, which I was talking to you about, is such a fantastic tool because a lot of people worked on it for, it was the National Endowment for the Humanities, and it was for decades and decades of work. And most of the world's best assertions collaborated on it. So the quality of translation and understanding is really extraordinary.”
2025-12-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #487 – Irving Finkel: Deciphering Secrets of Ancient Civilizations & Flood Myths · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Interpret stuff. And also, some literature is very difficult because of technical vocabulary and they had technical vocabulary in unusual words”
2025-12-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #487 – Irving Finkel: Deciphering Secrets of Ancient Civilizations & Flood Myths · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The meaning is going to be different from in a letter. So people really, really understand Akkadian. They really do. But this thing about the modal verbs is an interesting conundrum to me because there's no way it's reflected in the writing. So I can only assume that there was some kind of drawing out of the vowel in a verb, meaning could, no, like you were saying, might do it, you know, something like that. Anyway, so nowadays it's not a decipherment that's the job. It's just reading. And if you have lots of tablets to work on, not on a dig, it's very exciting if they come out of the ground and no one's looked at them before. It's your job. And if you're a combatant to seriologist, you should be able to sight, read more or less, except most, say, a letter or something like that, but most documents have some damage. So you have to learn how to.”
2025-12-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #487 – Irving Finkel: Deciphering Secrets of Ancient Civilizations & Flood Myths · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It started in the 20s, and they made a dictionary of the Babylonian language. A to Z, so to speak. And it's as long as this table. It's magnificent thing and this big. And there, the people who worked on it were real translators. So they knew that it wasn't lexically A means B, but if you have something in a proverb”
2025-12-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #487 – Irving Finkel: Deciphering Secrets of Ancient Civilizations & Flood Myths · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What people do when they learn Akkadian is they learn the Acadian word and they learn the English translation. You have the Parasaries to divide. So whenever you have the verb Parasa is some form of divide or division. But actually it's not because divide is like the primary root, but there's maybe 10 nuances of what that can mean in English, where the one at the bottom and the one at the top, you'd hardly know they were connected. And the Chicago dictionary, which is such a magnificent thing, when you come to the museum and see me, I'll show you this Chicago. It's the most salient and important thing that came out of America in all its history. It's the Chicago-Assyrian dictionary, which is this long. There's only one rival to it for cultural importance, which is the electric guitar, of course. But the two of them, I think, are...”
2025-12-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #487 – Irving Finkel: Deciphering Secrets of Ancient Civilizations & Flood Myths · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, you know, the truth about translation is that you never really have a word in one language which precisely equates another. You never do. There are always a kind, the best you can do. And sometimes it makes no difference and sometimes it's really quite misleading.”
2025-12-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #487 – Irving Finkel: Deciphering Secrets of Ancient Civilizations & Flood Myths · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And my colleagues translate, it says in the grammar books like that, automatically there's no self-appraisal of the folly of it.”
2025-12-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #487 – Irving Finkel: Deciphering Secrets of Ancient Civilizations & Flood Myths · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Absolutely. So, this means that not expressible in Acadian grammar are these modal verbs. Could, might, should ought. They can't be expressed grammatically, but it is impossible there was such a magnificent literary language where they didn't have the subtleties is utterly impossible. And if you translate he will in a literary text, he might, then the whole text is different. The whole text is.”
2025-12-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #487 – Irving Finkel: Deciphering Secrets of Ancient Civilizations & Flood Myths · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What he wants to hear? He has to tell the king if it's bad news in such a way that he doesn't mind or he won't worry. It's the most beautiful thing. It's so subtle. It's like a violin concerto. It can never have been A equals B for a minute. So the medical texts say if a man has this, you do this, he drinks, he'll get better, right? He says, you'll get better. So you ever met a doctor who will say, you do this, you'll get better. No. They say all being well, you'll be back on your feet. Or I've seen this kind of condition many times where everything should go fine. You should get better. You should be better soon. But never you will get better. Because what happens if you die? Where are you?”
2025-12-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #487 – Irving Finkel: Deciphering Secrets of Ancient Civilizations & Flood Myths · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And if she does die, you're going to be responsible. So, all you can ever do and ever, ever have been able to do is to say there's a sign here that says that the queen could die, meaning could die, not will die, and therefore the requisite ritual or magic must immediately swing into action to defer the danger. So the point is that A equals B is never true. It means that with A B could be, might be, ought to be, should be, could be true. All those subtle things. So that the diviner who works from the king must have been a philosopher who looks at the king, he looks at the king, and he knows what the king wants him to say. So he has to tell the king.”
2025-12-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #487 – Irving Finkel: Deciphering Secrets of Ancient Civilizations & Flood Myths · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, this is how it is understood by my colleagues. This is absolutely impossible because if you're the chief diviner for the king and you open up a sheep to take a liver out and examine it according to the queer is going to die and the king's there you're not going to say the queen's going to die. I mean you're going to like a fucking idiot if she doesn't die.”
2025-12-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #487 – Irving Finkel: Deciphering Secrets of Ancient Civilizations & Flood Myths · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is immensely complicated. But the one thing that strikes me as relevant is that a very huge proportion of scholarly literature in Mesopotamia, it takes the form of omens because they believe that events, accidental or deliberately stimulated, had implications for what was going to happen. And they took omens from things in the sky and things in the street and every single thing if you were a well-qualified diviner would have this significance, right? Now, there are thousands of lines of omens of all different kinds, and in Akadian it says, for example, if a lizard runs across the breakfast table, the queen will die. So if you translate the Acadian this way, the word if, verb, and everything, if that, then this. There are thousands of lines translated in many books about omens where if this happens, that will happen.”
2025-12-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #487 – Irving Finkel: Deciphering Secrets of Ancient Civilizations & Flood Myths · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A really interesting question. So, in terms of richness of vocabulary, Richness of verbal subtlety I think Babylonian rivals Arabic, and of course English. In other words, you can say whatever you want in English, however subtle it might be, even if people didn't understand the subtlety, you can, because the tools are fantastic. And Arabic has lots of synonyms and lots of devices. Same in Babylonian. It was a fully fledged literary language. The question about whether the language put a stop to further things, which is basically what you're asking.”
2025-12-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #487 – Irving Finkel: Deciphering Secrets of Ancient Civilizations & Flood Myths · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The disciplines of on the one hand astrology, but more seriously into astronomy, and theoretical grammar, because they had treatises about the relationship between the two languages and how they worked and different parts of speech. And they wrote learned commentaries as well, what words meant. So there was an intellectual high-level top. And then there were lots of professional scribes. And then the kids who left school as soon as possible and did all that like today.”
2025-12-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #487 – Irving Finkel: Deciphering Secrets of Ancient Civilizations & Flood Myths · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source