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

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“I think it's rather paradoxical because the first generation or so of tablets that we have are written in these pictographic signs where each sign means what it looks like. So this is a very limited method of recording messages and it doesn't lend itself to recording grammar. And then the secondary phase, as we understand it from archaeology, is the perception that you could take these signs still meaning what they look like, but also what the word sounded like. So then you have all these wonderful ice cubes which express all the sounds of the language from which you can record words and grammar and everything else. Now the thing is the received law from a seriology is it was that way around that first we had pictures and secondly we had sound. Well I have to say”
2025-12-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #487 – Irving Finkel: Deciphering Secrets of Ancient Civilizations & Flood Myths · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“All others on of literature that we would naturally list on a sheet of paper in alphabetic writing what you would use writing for, they basically did. And it had the unexpected quality that most of these claythings lasted in the ground until now. So, however many hundreds of thousands of tablets are in the world's museums and collections, there must be millions of them in the ground awaiting excavation. In a way that's a comforting thought because they're safe there and protected.”
2025-12-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #487 – Irving Finkel: Deciphering Secrets of Ancient Civilizations & Flood Myths · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“People do survive, however, but it's an important mission because it's such an achievement by man and so much knowledge was encapsulated in these lumps of clay because they used it for everyday things like letters and business documents and contracts. This is one thing. And then the kings wrote, Long elaborate accounts of their campaigns from the military activities, and then there was proper literature, Belle Lettres and Magic and Medicine and”
2025-12-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #487 – Irving Finkel: Deciphering Secrets of Ancient Civilizations & Flood Myths · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Different arrangements of triangular shapes. And it's most clear on the Syrian reliefs, where the writing is very big, and you can easily tell that they were that shape on a tablet. The wedge is not quite so predominant. So that was it. So they first called them cuneatic or cuneiform, and the word stuck. And, of course, growing up in the British Museum and reading these things for a living becomes a kind of Lifetime's work to make sure that everybody in the country knows what cuneiform means, because once in a while you meet somebody you never heard of the word at all. And this is appalling.”
2025-12-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #487 – Irving Finkel: Deciphering Secrets of Ancient Civilizations & Flood Myths · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So in the 19th century, about 1840, 1850, they started to find these things on excavations in Iraq, the big Assyrian cities and sometimes further south, the Babylonian cities. They found these clay tablets, which in the ground lasted unimaginable lengths of time, and they were all written in what we call cuneiform script. And the cuneiform part of it means wedge shape because cuneos in Latin means wedge. And when they first saw these signs, they realized that a cluster of marks broke down into.”
2025-12-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #487 – Irving Finkel: Deciphering Secrets of Ancient Civilizations & Flood Myths · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“and stayed more or less as it was all the way through for three millennia or more because the stamp put on it by those early visionaries not only who came up with the system and how it would work but to preserve it and to safeguard it was fantastically effective. So it means that there were scholars in Babylon in the third century or the second century when Alexander was there for example if somebody dug up a tablet in very early Would have a pretty good idea what it meant. They would recognize the signs even though they were so ancient and they'd see the relationships between them. So you have a fantastically strong System where the spinal cord was structured in a lexicographic regular system. So lexicography and what the signs were was jealously safeguarded and protected and it lasted fantastically.”
2025-12-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #487 – Irving Finkel: Deciphering Secrets of Ancient Civilizations & Flood Myths · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It began to swell out and at some extremely remarkable stage one probably only one person suddenly realized that if there was no control they would grow exponentially and exponentially until it was all nonsense and everybody had their own writing and the second thing is that no one could remember them unless they were written down in a retrievable way. So they invented not only writing, they invented lexicography which means that early in the third millennium they put down all the things that were made of wood and all the things that were made of reeds and all the names of colours and of countries and all the gods and everything they made a systematic attempt to make these signs standardize them and to make them retrievable and of course to teach them and having exercised that rigor from the outset. It meant that the thing became streamlined.”
2025-12-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #487 – Irving Finkel: Deciphering Secrets of Ancient Civilizations & Flood Myths · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Complex, bewildering looking, off-putting writing system which was actually very beautiful and very flexible and lasted for well over three millennia, probably closer to four millennia, and it took a long time for the alphabet which anybody would say was much, much more useful and much more sensible to displace it. So it's one of the major stages of man's intellect because quite soon after the writing first took off. Signs began to proliferate, and someone said, Hey, we haven't got a sign for this sound or we haven't got a sign for this idea. And so”
2025-12-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #487 – Irving Finkel: Deciphering Secrets of Ancient Civilizations & Flood Myths · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Somebody came speaking French ahead of their time and spoke out loud he could record with these signs the sound of French, and we have examples of funny languages in the world around in the Bronze Age which were written in cuneiform purely by ear and often sometimes the scribes who, recorded by dictation or by something, wrote stuff they couldn't understand, but somebody else could read and understand it. What you have is long before the alphabet, when the alphabet was not even a dream,”
2025-12-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #487 – Irving Finkel: Deciphering Secrets of Ancient Civilizations & Flood Myths · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“All the rest of it, and before long, proverbs and literature and all the other things that got written down. So it was a pretty gigantic step whenever it was taken, but we really have no idea when it was first taken. But the first evidence we have presents a sort of clear-ish sort of picture. It was simple and it got more complicated and then it became magnificent so that with all the signs a fluent and well-trained scribe could not only write down the Sumerian language, which was one of the native tongues of Iraq, or the Babylonian language, which was the other main language of Iraq, but also any other language he heard.”
2025-12-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #487 – Irving Finkel: Deciphering Secrets of Ancient Civilizations & Flood Myths · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Probably very, very imaginative and clever persons had a kind of light bulb moment when they realize that they could develop a whole panoply of signs which could convey sound. And once you had that You're liberated from pictographic writing into a position where you can record language, so language, grammar,”
2025-12-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #487 – Irving Finkel: Deciphering Secrets of Ancient Civilizations & Flood Myths · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of the matter is, we have no idea when anything began, and all we can say is that the oldest evidence we have is around 3500 BC. But whether that was anywhere near the time or the stage when this started off for the first time seems to me very, very unlikely. So among these the Mesopotamians around 3500, they started to do this. They made up signs which everybody understood and they could write simple pictographic messages. Foot is a foot, a leg is a leg, and barley is barley. And then very, very gradually they had the idea of how you could represent numerals, and then they had the idea that the pictures could also represent signs. And once they had the idea that you could write sounds with pictures, that's the crucial thing, a picture of a foot not only meant foot, but it meant the sound of the word foot. Foot. Once this happened”
2025-12-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #487 – Irving Finkel: Deciphering Secrets of Ancient Civilizations & Flood Myths · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The first attempts at writing that we could call writing go back to the middle of the fourth millennium, say, around thirty five hundred BC, something like that. There were people in the Middle East, individuals who lived between the Euphrates and Tigris rivers, who had clay as their operating material for building and all sorts of other purposes, and eventually as a writing support, they somehow developed the idea of the basis of writing, which means that you can make a sign, which people agree on, on a surface, that another person, when they see it, they know what sound it engenders. That is the essence of writing, that there's an agreed system of symbols that A can use and B can then play back either in their heads or literally with their voices, a bit like a gramophone record. So when it really began, it's a terribly, terribly awkward question for us because the truth”
2025-12-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #487 – Irving Finkel: Deciphering Secrets of Ancient Civilizations & Flood Myths · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source