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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“Law, working for the king, working for the church, I mean the priesthood, so forth, all those things which were dependent upon archives and writing, they would find their Nevo and also architecture because if a big building had to be built, then somebody had to know about load-bearing things and brick measurements. And so some of them went into that kind of work. And also probably some of them went into running the army and you have to move stores and animals. So they found their Nevo and some of them were intellectually very able indeed. And they went into”
2025-12-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #487 – Irving Finkel: Deciphering Secrets of Ancient Civilizations & Flood Myths · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They were okay, but there ain't going to be no geniuses. And I think the situation in the school was that the teachers farmed out the kids who would actually rather have been outside playing football but could read and write to earning their living doing low-level reading and writing. That's to say writing contracts, letters, everyday things for people, because no one could read and write. So you had to get a scribe if you're going to marry your daughter off and you get all the witnesses about the presence and all this. All the thing had to be done for four days. So the writer would come and do it. So your medium level writers would serve that requirement. And very talented or clever or intellectual students would be encouraged to go into one of the literary professions which would be, so to speak, medicine.”
2025-12-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #487 – Irving Finkel: Deciphering Secrets of Ancient Civilizations & Flood Myths · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We are, except this, that when you went to scribe or school, you had to learn Sumerian and Akkadian, the languages properly, and all the vocabulary and the grammar. So some boys probably had a lot of trouble doing this.”
2025-12-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #487 – Irving Finkel: Deciphering Secrets of Ancient Civilizations & Flood Myths · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It would never be thought of, and it would be anathema. And so if you got on a soapbox on a Saturday afternoon and say, enough for this, we have to teach the children. They be taken away”
2025-12-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #487 – Irving Finkel: Deciphering Secrets of Ancient Civilizations & Flood Myths · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Fair question. There are several factors. One is the famous factor of inertia. The second thing is that people who could read and write and were in charge of archives and with the Clerks in the temple and the writers for the king and everything commanded a very great deal of power because most of the public couldn't. So they reserved to themselves knowledge, understanding, philosophical inquiry. I mean, no doubt it went on in pubs and things, but they were in charge, they had everything under lock and key, and there were, I think the scribal schools are rather cliquy. They were certainly cliquey in the sense of Oxford and Cambridge being rivals, that sort of thing. They had that sort of idea. And it was in no one's interest whatsoever, nobody would ever concede any interest in the idea of literacy for all. This would be...”
2025-12-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #487 – Irving Finkel: Deciphering Secrets of Ancient Civilizations & Flood Myths · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Anyway I started it off and after about cutting Don't know, maybe one or maybe two lessons. I knew this was going to be my life's work, so that's what happened to me. It was an amazing thing. So he gave me a list of signs to learn basic signs. So I did. And the next couple of days, and then we came in and we started reading.”
2025-12-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #487 – Irving Finkel: Deciphering Secrets of Ancient Civilizations & Flood Myths · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So the professor called me into his room and said, look, it's going to take me a while to get an Egyptologist. They don't grow on trees. But there's another person in this department who teaches another ancient language called Lambert, and he teaches Kine form. So what I suggest is you go and do a bit of Quebe form with Professor Lambert, and then when I get in Egyptologist, you can convert back. So I... Knock on the door? Yes. So I went in and said, I want to learn cuneiform. And Professor Lambert, who was rather a Sherlock Holmes kind of figure, aesthetic, bony, sarcastic, cruel. Absolutely terrifying. And I said I wanted to learn Kiniform. And he wasn't at all pleased because this was a time in Britain when professors Resented having students to teach because it butted into their research time. It was that. Sort of arrangement”
2025-12-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #487 – Irving Finkel: Deciphering Secrets of Ancient Civilizations & Flood Myths · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I had very abnormal upbringing, because when I went to university, for about three years beforehand I'd wanted to be in Egyptologist. I'd read the grammar by Gardiner and was looking forward very much to study ancient Egyptian, and what happened was that I went up to the University of Birmingham where I went to university. Was a man called Rundell Clark, who was an esologist. And Rundell Clark came in on the Monday and gave us one lesson about Egyptian sculpture or something like that. And the next minute he died.”
2025-12-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #487 – Irving Finkel: Deciphering Secrets of Ancient Civilizations & Flood Myths · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Really mean So, when you read what you have to do, you start with the first sign and you think of the sign this and you go through the values in your mind and there's next sign. And if one is ba and the next one is ab, among other readings, ba sounds like a syllable structure for a word and you go on like that. So there are two things about it. One is that if you want to, you can master it. The other thing is that the number of variables was restricted. They controlled it so it wasn't insane. In other words, if you learn the corpus and you would learn how the signs are composed and you learn their different values, then you've got it down. And off you go. It's very beautiful, I think. It's marvelous.”
2025-12-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #487 – Irving Finkel: Deciphering Secrets of Ancient Civilizations & Flood Myths · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, and you have to choose the right sound. And also a different meaning as well. Because, for example, if you have a sound for a hot word hot, you can't really have a picture sign for hot. Make sense, but what they did is they did a drawing of a kind of Complex thing with a brazier inside another sign, which meant hot. So that sign existed, but it also meant other things as well. And you had to choose the right one for the contest. It's all a contextual matter. I mean, it really is quite a matter for despair when you start QA form, because on top of everything else, they didn't leave gaps between the words.”
2025-12-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #487 – Irving Finkel: Deciphering Secrets of Ancient Civilizations & Flood Myths · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And at the same time he cracked it, he worked out how it worked, he realized that one sign can have more than one value of sound and of meaning because they are multivalent, the signs. I tried to shelter you from the horrible news. It actually is not a walk in the park. It takes about five years to... You probably do it in about four, probably.”
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 he does. He's called the father of a seriology. But I think he's the stepfather of a seriology because when he first got these inscriptions, he wrote a long book about it which was almost entirely wrong. And there was a clergyman in Northern Ireland called Edward Hinks. Who lived in a place called Killer Lane, had five daughters and ran this church, who was possibly a card carrying genius, if not jolly, jolly clothes. And what happened with him was this. There was an ongoing competition, well, an ongoing challenge to decipher hieroglyphic writing, which Champion usually gets the credit for. And Hinks was very interested in trying to decipher hieroglyphic ahead of the French. And he ran into a sort of dead end at one stage, and he thought he'd have a look at cuneiform to see if it was helpful.”
2025-12-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #487 – Irving Finkel: Deciphering Secrets of Ancient Civilizations & Flood Myths · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“miserable kid and made squeezes of the whole thing overlooking the plain thousands of feet up in the air and brought those back and they were used in the decipherment. So it's very romantic.”
2025-12-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #487 – Irving Finkel: Deciphering Secrets of Ancient Civilizations & Flood Myths · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And started leafing through looking for words that would fit in the context. And they basically decipher this inscription in that sort of way. And of course, all the other inscriptions came in order. And there are lots and lots of difficulties which had to be resolved. But that's the basic thing. And without that trilingual, I don't know what would have happened. I mean, I suppose it's conceivable that in the very modern world something might have happened. But as it was, it was done by sheer brain power by very, very clever persons, just doing it, and they cracked it. The Elamite language is much more difficult, but they got a lot of it too. So it was a very romantic thing because the inscription was carved on a mountain face far above the plain. And Henry Rawlinson, who was a upstanding young British officer who claimed to decipher cuneiform quite unjustifiably, climbed up there with some”
2025-12-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #487 – Irving Finkel: Deciphering Secrets of Ancient Civilizations & Flood Myths · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What do you know? And the thing is, it said, I am Darius, the great king, king of the world, king, a son of grandson of. So there's a whole paragraph with repeated things in the Persian, which they could understand. So what do you know? There are reiterated passages in the other two languages. So that was the key that kind of the chisel that opened up cuneiform writing proper. And the thing was they soon twigged that the language of the Babylonian was a Semitic tongue. And this was so important. I think the first word they discovered was the word for river, which is Naru in Akkadian and Nachar in Arabic and Aramaic. And when they realize that the word that corresponded to the Persian had this form, this was a gift of gold because everybody immediately sees their Arabic and Hebrew diction.”
2025-12-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #487 – Irving Finkel: Deciphering Secrets of Ancient Civilizations & Flood Myths · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He was still alive in the 19th century. Since the old Persian was written in a very simple style of cuneiform, they deciphered it. They twigged it was Old Persian. They read it in Persian, and they read the names Dariosh in Old Persian. And then suddenly somebody realized that the other two columns about the same length.”
2025-12-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #487 – Irving Finkel: Deciphering Secrets of Ancient Civilizations & Flood Myths · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, when I started, there were grammars and sign lists and dictionaries. Everything was marvellous. It was all basically discipled. All you had to do was get on with learning it. But at the beginning, when the first tablets and bricks in cuneiform and stone inscriptions came to light, no one could read them. But they knew they were writing, but they didn't know how to read them. And what happened was, like you said before with the Rosetta Stone, it was something directly comparable because there was an inscription of one of the Persian kings halfway up a mountain in a place called Bisutun, where this king Darius had written an account of his successful career in Elimite and in Babylonian and in Old Persian. Persian is still a”
2025-12-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #487 – Irving Finkel: Deciphering Secrets of Ancient Civilizations & Flood Myths · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think that the melia in which it appears is when there's a lot of people living in an urban environment. And with rival institutions or with a king or with a government or all those sorts of Things and that's why I think Quebec must have been the same thing. I read somewhere that they're all nomads and they only came to Quebec three months yet. I mean, that cannot be true that they were nomads and they cannot be true. To get the stone and someone has to draw on the ground the plan of the building, they have to work out how thick it is going to be, how high it's going to be. And I mean, you know, you can't, you know, like that, like gorillas.”
2025-12-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #487 – Irving Finkel: Deciphering Secrets of Ancient Civilizations & Flood Myths · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Eventually, yes, names. I mean. Names the things, and then you have the idea that a label fixes to something, then the light bulb has gone on and next minute you have rhino and you have skin and you have babies because I think you have an idea and the idea then drives the brain and the brain has another idea. It works like fertility.”
2025-12-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #487 – Irving Finkel: Deciphering Secrets of Ancient Civilizations & Flood Myths · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Shut up, I'm constant. Legs. Legs. And then I suddenly think Oh I get it you are legs, right? You only have to do that once then you know who I am. So I know that I'm me and that you are you. So people who say that they couldn't distinguish ego and all that, it's absolutely stupid. If you cut your hand with a knife, you sure as hell experiences. Sure as hell do. It hurts. Hurts a lot. You might even bleed to death. But it's not somebody else's hand. And it's your hand and it's your existence and your life that's threatened you think people weren't conscious that they were an entity. I don't believe it.”
2025-12-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #487 – Irving Finkel: Deciphering Secrets of Ancient Civilizations & Flood Myths · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's a very stimulating thing to imagine. I personally believe that Neanderthals and early Homo sapiens for sure. Language. For sure, they talk to one another. It's impossible that they didn't. The point came when they did. They did. And the Neanderthals, 800,000 years live in Europe, they had to deal with the ice age. They all lived together. They bring up their children. You think they couldn't speak anything? They have the same apparatus. And if you have a human brain, then it responds to stimulus. And the more stimulus there is for communication. I mean, the idea that you and I were out hunting rhino. And you say,”
2025-12-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #487 – Irving Finkel: Deciphering Secrets of Ancient Civilizations & Flood Myths · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They're gone forever and ever and ever, unless something amazing happens. So we've got the one representative of this bizarre family.”
2025-12-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #487 – Irving Finkel: Deciphering Secrets of Ancient Civilizations & Flood Myths · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Write properly, it means that Sumerian was recorded just in time, but the big languages, maybe in China, in Russia, in somewhere else in Asia, that were related to Sumerian.”
2025-12-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #487 – Irving Finkel: Deciphering Secrets of Ancient Civilizations & Flood Myths · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This is a bewitching thing The bewitching thing to me, and this is how to understand it because the languages that we study in the world today linguists study, they more or less all fall into a language group. So you have Indo-European with Spanish, Italian, Latin, Hittite. So forth, and so that's white French, that's one group, and you have Germanic, and you have Stavonic. And most languages, even the far-flung ones, fall into what can be seen to be maybe big and airy groups, their family like that. There's not one for Sumerian. So this means that the truth that languages do not exist in a vacuum, but they're part of a big family must always have been true. So when writing arrives about 3,000, say 300 BC,”
2025-12-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #487 – Irving Finkel: Deciphering Secrets of Ancient Civilizations & Flood Myths · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is connected to or related to Hebrew, Aramaic, Arabic, Ethiopic, Syriac, or that family of Semitic languages which are still alive. It's an early example of one of those, so that when the decipherment came along, it was the Semitic dictionary that they fell back on to identify words, nouns and roots. The other language, which is Simerian, the one when you stick bits in the beginning and stick bits at the end, is not only not Semitic, it's not related to any other known language.”
2025-12-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #487 – Irving Finkel: Deciphering Secrets of Ancient Civilizations & Flood Myths · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, you might have bar and then a rising R and then a lowering, and these signs all retain the bar value even though they were no tones. So it means if you look at a sign list, there's a lot of signs you have to bar number one, which is the common, then there's bar number two, bar number three, and you have to learn them all. And when you read, you have to learn how to do it. In the modern world, if you go to university to do a serology, which I hope you and all of your disciples will do as soon as possible, you actually have to cope with two languages, the Sumerian and the Babylonian. Now, the first thing is this, that the Babylonian language is a Semitic tongue, which although it's extinct,”
2025-12-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #487 – Irving Finkel: Deciphering Secrets of Ancient Civilizations & Flood Myths · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You have to learn all the signs and all their values. Because unfortunately they didn't just have one for each, they had multiple ones. And the reason is not that they were mad or they wanted to make life hell, but because the syllables derive from the writing of Sumerian words. So the Sumerian vocabulary had a lot of words that were probably differentiated by tone.”
2025-12-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #487 – Irving Finkel: Deciphering Secrets of Ancient Civilizations & Flood Myths · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But basically, if you are a Babylonian and you want to write the word museum, which of course is one of the most important words in the English language and other languages too, so what you would do is you would write the syllable mu. And then the sign Z, and then the sign um. So you split the word up into its component syllables. When you read it in your mind, you squash them together into museum. That's the basic system. They had other signs which gave you a clue as to the meaning and bits around the edge, but it's basically syllabic writ So, when you go to university to study cuneiform,”
2025-12-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #487 – Irving Finkel: Deciphering Secrets of Ancient Civilizations & Flood Myths · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's important. Well, the first thing is how the cuneiform writing system works because the crucial point, and once you see it, makes a lot of things clear, is that they wrote in syllables. So if you take the English alphabet, which of course they didn't, you have the letter B, G, D, P, H, and so forth. They couldn't write a consonant. They couldn't do that. So what they did is they had a vowel before a consonant or one after. So you have ab and ba. But as they had four vowels, you had to have ab and ba, ib and b, ob and boo, eb and bear. So you had the range of things clustered around what we call a consonant. So they had all those for all the letters, which gave them a basic system. There was much more to it than that, and it was more complicated than that, but we didn't have to really go into it.”
2025-12-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #487 – Irving Finkel: Deciphering Secrets of Ancient Civilizations & Flood Myths · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But you see the thing, it's predicated on the assumption that what we have is what only what there was. And this is such a fallacy. It needs to be attacked left, right, and center.”
2025-12-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #487 – Irving Finkel: Deciphering Secrets of Ancient Civilizations & Flood Myths · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They worked hand in glove with the Elamites from Iran. They had a pincer movement, and they beat Assyria. They conquered Assyria. And they ran through the capital and they set fire to everything, pinched all the women into all the jewelry and all the gold. And people say that in a fit of pique, they destroyed the library. But they wouldn't destroy the library because it was the giant brain from which the Assyrians ran a world empire and it had all the knowledge in the world. They destroyed that. They spoke the same language. They had the same writing system. They'd have taken them all safely home. Cart after cart after cart. And I think what's left there is duplicates and broken things, the things that got drops and everything. And that's what everyone thinks is it.”
2025-12-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #487 – Irving Finkel: Deciphering Secrets of Ancient Civilizations & Flood Myths · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A seriologist who spent all their people who work on these Nineveh talents, but all the hand joining the bits together, and you have the story about Gilgamesh and the goddess who falls in love with him in the garden and she wants to seduce him and dot, dot, dot, you can't find the bit. So you look for another bit, you look for And gradually they pieced together the literature, and the assumption has always been that if you put more together again, you'll have the whole library. But it's the absolute opposite. Because what happened was that the Babylonians in the south, in my opinion,”
2025-12-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #487 – Irving Finkel: Deciphering Secrets of Ancient Civilizations & Flood Myths · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, I can imagine. I can imagine easily because once in a while a library's discovered in the 1850s at Nineveh, which was the Assyrian capital, there was a fat king, king of the world called Ashabanipal, and he had a fantastic library. And he promoted it. He impounded tablets. He had them brought to Nivi. He wanted all the prevading knowledge and all knowledge from before under one roof as a kind of like Alexandria thing. So he was a trained scholar and this is what he did. And they found it in the 19th century. They dug it up, Layard and those people. So what did they find? They found the tablets higgledy-piggledy all over the floor of a huge room in the corridors and everything, and lots of them broken and lots of them burnt. So, ever since then, until already quite recently,”
2025-12-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #487 – Irving Finkel: Deciphering Secrets of Ancient Civilizations & Flood Myths · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because they were dumped when they were no longer needed in some kind of room, and the archaeologists in the 19th century came down on these and then all the locals came and they bought, dug them up and they sold them all over the place and they've gone all over the world. Thousands and thousands of them out of probably two stories rooms, which is not a whole culture or a whole country or their whole history or their belief systems. So our view of it is slewed by the nature of the material. And sometimes the material is opulent and benevolent, but not always. And sometimes the people who work with slewed material don't even realize how slewed it is. I mean, you know, it's quite remarkable.”
2025-12-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #487 – Irving Finkel: Deciphering Secrets of Ancient Civilizations & Flood Myths · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Revenue because everything had to be written down so that some schmuck could check it and fill out the ledger and some other schmuck above him could okay it so there's no funny business or no mistakes. Now the thing is there are thousands of those tablets written in about two thousand one hundred to two thousand BC thousands of them about size of a box of matches So people like to generalize about the Sumerians at this time of the world But they probably all came out of two rooms”
2025-12-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #487 – Irving Finkel: Deciphering Secrets of Ancient Civilizations & Flood Myths · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Humans, we have a lot, but it's nothing in comparison with what existed. But not only that, see, we don't have to decipher anymore. We can read Akkadian or Babylonian Sumerian pretty well fluently. That's not a problem. So the information which you can get from these sources, especially three millennia of sources, is very, very substantial. Very substantial, but it means that Assyriologists have the inbuilt idea that what we have is something like all there ever was, which is absurd. For example, there's a period called the Earth III period, where people lived in city-states, they wrote very small account tablets by the thousand, and there were two or three major cities where this is the way they lived. People had to bring tithes and offerings and everything was recorded by what I always refer to and people sympathize with is the ancestors of the inland.”
2025-12-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #487 – Irving Finkel: Deciphering Secrets of Ancient Civilizations & Flood Myths · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Argument is utterly, utterly fallacious because the process of evolution is stymied left, right and centre by inertia. Inertia is nearly as strong as evolution. And this is something that the people who talk about progress and ideas have no idea about.”
2025-12-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #487 – Irving Finkel: Deciphering Secrets of Ancient Civilizations & Flood Myths · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Statement with that seal from Gebekli, Tepe, is a raindrop, from which I infer writing, and it's perfectly possible they all wrote on flat leaves, calf drawn in many parts of the world. That's what happens. So, for example, in the Indus Valley, people write the most abject nonsense about the Indus Valley writing system, but all we have is seals, basically. So they are also for ratification purposes, and they have the name of the owner in three or four or maybe five signs. And it's probably me, son of my dad, or milkman or whatever it is. And it's obvious that they had writing on a perishable material. They can't just have had inscribed stone seals. And many parts of India today write on palm leaf. Why should it be any different? So people think, you know, well, just because it's now, it wouldn't be then. But actually, that.”
2025-12-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #487 – Irving Finkel: Deciphering Secrets of Ancient Civilizations & Flood Myths · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is really Was because the thing is about it that it's a seal to ratify. It's not just a squiggle on a pot and you can say, oh, that's just a piece of debt. This is a finished thing with a flat surface. You press it down, say you have some contract, you have some building arrangement paying for these bricks, whatever it was. And the official person had to squash it down. And it leaves the impression. I mean, I'm a great believer in Sherlock Holmes as a teaching system for intelligence and rationality and logic and thinking. I read those stories a million times when I was a kid. And the thing about them, one of the things which impresses me most of all was this point quoted by Holmes, not original to him, that it is theoretically possible to infer the Niagara Falls from a raindrop.”
2025-12-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #487 – Irving Finkel: Deciphering Secrets of Ancient Civilizations & Flood Myths · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Having a cigarette with an X through the middle, everybody in the world knows what that means, that they don't know what the word for cigarette is in this language or cancer or filter or tobacco. It doesn't matter. That's pictographic writing. We still use it. And it's above all kinds of mess. And I think that was the pervading system because I honestly believe that the people at this time were not stupid. They weren't gorillas. They weren't less advanced than we are. They were probably indistinguishable from what we are. So you have merchants and wanderers and people who see let's go down the river and see where we end up and people are looking for money, looking for women, looking for everything. But that's surely how it was. But if you look at those Gebeckley buildings with a skeptical eye, how it could be, I mean, the finish of it is astonishing, the structure of it, the vision of it. So the workforce.”
2025-12-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #487 – Irving Finkel: Deciphering Secrets of Ancient Civilizations & Flood Myths · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And really, the old rule would be you could not have architecture like that that planned and built according to principle with all the different people. You couldn't have that without writing in southern Iraq. So how comes suddenly 7,000 years earlier, they do it there. And that green stone shows that they had writing. That was an official who sealed this, got the stuff or whatever it was, or it was his dad's name or whatever it is, got a wiggly snake and a wiggly this. That is pictographic writing. Maybe even as phonetic writer, I don't know, but it was writing thousands of years before in the south. And that's what I think it is. People came with metal from precious stones from Anatolia. They knew that in the south, they had lots and lots of stuff. They wanted to trade. They had to communicate. And it's basically like...”
2025-12-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #487 – Irving Finkel: Deciphering Secrets of Ancient Civilizations & Flood Myths · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When I was a boy at university, my professor said to me that the reason writing evolved in Mesopotamia because they had complex cities with zigzags and big buildings and lots of people and they had to organize everything and so they invented writing to cope with it. Well, if they had to cope with that in Suma in 3000 BC, they sure as hell had to do it at Gabekli Tepe because they'd hardly even begun to finish excavating the sites of Gabli. They go on and on like Manchester and Newcastle United.”
2025-12-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #487 – Irving Finkel: Deciphering Secrets of Ancient Civilizations & Flood Myths · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Know about Quebec. Well, everybody knows about the buildings and the architecture and the sculpture. Everybody knows about it. If you go all the way through the photographs which the archaeologists unwisely put online, you'll find in the middle of one colour plate with lots of other things a round green stone like a scarab from Egypt. That's to say it has an arched back and a flat bottom. And on the flat bottom there are hieroglyphic signs carved in the stone. No one said anything about it at all, but it's clear to me A that this was a stamp to ratify where the carvings of the signs on clay or some other ceiling material would leave an impression. It must be that. So this is about 9000 BC.”
2025-12-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #487 – Irving Finkel: Deciphering Secrets of Ancient Civilizations & Flood Myths · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Or pictographic type tablets before the cuneiform and the drawing type. And I tell you why, because there's this marvelous site in Turkey called Gebekli Tepe.”
2025-12-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #487 – Irving Finkel: Deciphering Secrets of Ancient Civilizations & Flood Myths · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Have a sign mu, and then we'd have bar, and then we'd have E because every five minutes people make those noises. See what I mean”
2025-12-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #487 – Irving Finkel: Deciphering Secrets of Ancient Civilizations & Flood Myths · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Have a funny system of right. You have a root like do, which means to go. And then you have prefixes like E or Mu or Ba. And one's a passive, one's an activeness and this. So when you have a sentence, one of the mu, ba, or e prefixes, then you have the root. And then you have things at the end. So it's called agglutinative by people who like to make things look more important than they are. So you have the central thing, you slap stuff on the beginning, slap stuff on the end, and each particle creates a bit of meaning. So you have a long verb which tells you he would have done it if he could, but he couldn't kind of thing in the form of the verb. But the thing is, if you wanted to write that, you and I decided to write down the answer.”
2025-12-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #487 – Irving Finkel: Deciphering Secrets of Ancient Civilizations & Flood Myths · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Highly controversial, highly ethereologist would leave the room. I'm not scared of controversy because it's natural. I mean, if you think about it, it's natural because You don't have to have an alphabet to divide your word into sounds. See, for example, in Sumerium,”
2025-12-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #487 – Irving Finkel: Deciphering Secrets of Ancient Civilizations & Flood Myths · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so I think that what happened with the Sumerians, with their pictographic signs, is that those signs are right at the end of a very, very, very long period of time when somebody thought what we can do is take these stupid, inhibited no smoking signs and write language. That is what I think happened. That's what I think ha”
2025-12-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #487 – Irving Finkel: Deciphering Secrets of Ancient Civilizations & Flood Myths · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Then they moved on to the sound. I don't know why they bothered with it, and my hunch is that the archaeological evidence that we have on this score is ultimately misleading, because I think this, that probably for a very, very long time before the Sumerians, people in the world, the world of what we call the Middle East, were in contact, they traded, they probably even had wars, and they had messages between them. And I think there was a long-running system of communication between people who didn't share a language, for whom pictures would suffice. So if merchants come and they have three sheep to sell, so they draw three little sheep, you know how much it is and what they are and so forth.”
2025-12-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #487 – Irving Finkel: Deciphering Secrets of Ancient Civilizations & Flood Myths · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Find this very hard to believe, because if you had a group of people in an environment where it was compellingly necessary to make a system that you may have marks on a surface which everybody could understand and use, why wouldn't you start out with signs that made sounds? Because everybody speaks the same language, right? So they didn't have A, B, C, D, E, F, G, but they could easily work out all the vowels and consonants without naming them as vowels and consonants, but the component parts. So they could have had signs that started out, because if you decided you had, we have 26, let's say they had 50 signs that would create the sound, they could write anything. Without any further trouble. So I find it very bewildering that they started off with the least flexible and the least adaptable system of pictographs.”
2025-12-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #487 – Irving Finkel: Deciphering Secrets of Ancient Civilizations & Flood Myths · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source