Irving Finkel: Cuneiforms, Ghosts and Speaking with the Dead

Oh hey, how are you. What are you doing? Come on in to have a seat. It's been a while since we had doctor Irvin Finkel on the program. Actually the last time he was with us was in twenty

eighteen when he had published a book called The Arc Before Noah. You know, and when we talk about ancient cultures, the ancient Sumerians, the Babylonians, the Assyrians, these are extremely advanced cultures that were getting a sense of each day through these clay tablets known as cuneiform tablets, and they were made of a specific kind of clay that allowed for writing for passages for daily activities.

And I was shocked when I discovered that the British Museum in London has about one hundred and thirty thousand of these and the general estimate, given the fact that they have so many, and they have missing pages, missing chronicles, missing chapters of books, papers and dialogue, that the estimate is around ten million that are left to be found. I don't know where they came up with that number, but that's an extraordinary number of documents that are left

to be found. We're going to hear more about that today from Irving in our interview. But I just want to mention that there's only a handful of people who can read these tablets, and Irving is one of them. And it comes down to it, he's an anomalous like at me. And this is why I love the guy and I love having him on the program because he's always looking for curiosities outside of the mainstream and he's found quite a few

of them. Now, if you remember when he was on in twenty eighteen, and if you didn't hear that interview, you should go back, download it and listen to it. The theme is the arc before Noah. He actually found specific details on boat building four thousand to six thousand years ago in ancient Sumerian Samaria, and he brings it forward and he believes, and based on his decipherment, that these ships were not typical with the bow with the

stern and aft design. They were round. They were round boats that would float down the river on the nile or whatever. And this was a shock to the academic world when he published this, because it's like, what are you talking about. Well, he actually got and this is why you got

to get the book. He actually got a detailed rendition of it by from an archaeologist who actually was also an architect and who actually created a number of designs of these ships, and apparently some of them were as big as a cruise ship that were round, circular, very very strange. So that was

that was kind of an unveiling. And then what we'll hear today is this new theme of working with these other realms where ghosts appear and the dead appear, and having community, having conversations with these people about the people who are left who are in physical form, the families and the former associates in different administrations are presenting information from the other realms. And this wasn't just a curiosity.

Apparently the Sumerians took it extremely, took it serious and jotted down the steps to access these realms. And this is something that a typical academic would not even broach because it's like, I'm not going to talk about that because that's beneath me. I don't feel it is of any value. But Irving, being like I mentioned, being anomalist, found this not in a few

references and passages and in journals. He found hundreds of references of working with the dead in a two forms, exorcism and necromancy, which is actually working with dead spirits. We would call them souls. And apparently it's not channeling the spirit that comes through, it's hearing it through the former body. And what they would do is they would work with the person's skull. They would have the skull of the deceased, and they would use special ointments and candles

and scents and extract and open up a vortex for communication. Now is where does this sounds? Apparently this was very much mainstream. Here's a short three minute interview that I want to play prior to this book we're going to talk today called The First Ghosts Most Ancient Legacies. Here is doctor Finckel speaking to the BBC on what necromancy is and why it was thought of as being very important by the agents. My name is Irving Finkel and I'm a curator in

the British Museum in the Middle East department. One of the interesting things about ancient magic is to in a particular culture look at things which are peculiar to that culture and things which all over the world people do. And most of the things that happened in ancient Mesopotamia written in cunatiform are more or less like the sort of things you find everywhere. So my favorite magic ritual, it's a manual written by an exhaustist who wants to tell the future and he wants

to practice necromancy. So here's somebody who wants to bring a ghost up from where it's peacefully in the basement, so to speak, and ask it questions. And he has a special way doing this. You have to get a skull, and you put the skull on the table and you burn all this heady material to create the right atmosphere, and then there's a kind of oil which is used to anoint the skull. And then when everything is ready,

this is what happens. The sun god, who really should know better, brings up from below the ghost of the dead person who goes into the skull like that. And then the exorcist or the specialist and necromancer asks this spirit a question and you're supposed to get a true answer by means of this skull from this dead person who's inside it. Now, that is a very interesting

matter which I've been dying to try out. I've got a skull, but the diabolical problem is getting the right stuff for the oil, And in our supermarket you can't get all the bits. So this I think is something worth trying. If you have the opportunity, you need to know who's going to win the grand national get your great grandfather's skull, put you on the kitchen table. Bit at HP source, ask the question fat City. Now, it should be obvious to you that we can't even conceive of this type of

communication in today's society. You know, I have worked and spoken with people who channel entities the dead. In some cases they believe they're channeling ets from other race, other planetary systems. I was into this for a while, and we had speak We had people who were speaking at conferences who were channeling.

I mean, we had the best of the best. It's faded because there's a there's a whole belief system, and this is under psychiatry psychology that the individual who's speaking for this dead person or this soul or the spirit is also bringing their own consciousness through and so it can be tainted. And this is the problem with a lot of people who channel Bashar. You might have heard of Bashar who channels an Et Lazaris, Jane Roberts. I can go

on and on. There's a lot of very well known channels who brought through information. And if you're interested in any of these channels, go back and listen to the names I just gave you and look for their books. Read their books. Some people are very much into it and that it appeals to a different audience, and if that's if you don't want to get more into it, check it out. It might interest you. But from that period to today, I'm talking a few decades ago when channeling was really really big.

I'm talking about here in the United States. I'm not really familiar with the United with Europe or any other part of the world. It had its place, and it still may have its place, and it's been going on for centuries. But what these Sumerians were doing, what these Babylonians and Assyrians and the Sumerians were doing, was bringing forth the spirit of dead loved ones.

And this is the focus of this book. The first ghosts that we're talking about today, and a whole bunch of other stuff that was just fascinating. So today's program is Cuneiforms, Ghosts and Speaking with the Dead, and my guest is doctor Irving Finkel. Sabaturs is well organized. Everything flowed easily. It was a fantastic tour from beginning to end. To be honest, I was shocked by the private visits. I could not believe that we were

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food, the beverages and the environment is first class. For more information, please go to Earthancients dot Com Forward Slash Tours all the informations there The Earth Ancients Grand Egyptian Tour April twenty eighth through May ninth. We can't talk about ancient civilizations without discussing cuneiforms, these clay tablets that have been found in the thousands and various burials, various vaults, various locations in the Middle East otherwise

known as the Mesopotamian area. And when we talk about them, we had to look at the people who are deciphering that, and we're inviting and we have back with this doctor Irving Finkel, who we had back in twenty eighteen. He was the author of a fun book called The Arc Before Noah, and what he discovered in that decipherment was it wasn't a typical ship. It

was a round ship and that was kind of a fun unveiling. But today we're going to catch up with him, not only because he continues to break important ground on decipherment, but there's a lot of topics that are fascinating that we want to hear from him. I want to just mention this and I was looking at doctor Finkel's background. The British Museum has a collection of one hundred and thirty thousand pieces, which I didn't know, and they are headquartered

in quartered in the British Museum, which is in London. So hey, Irving, welcome back to Earth, Ancients. It's been a while. I apologize for the length of time, and it's always great to see you. I'm glad to see you. Good about one hundred and thirty thousand pieces of clay, you're right that, Oh, they cover about three thousand years of

time or more. And they were all written in QUINEI form of one kind or another, so they run between about three thy five hundred b seen actually until about the first century AD, so it's more than three thousand years of time. So when the nineteenth century excavations started in the Middle East, they

found lots of inscriptions on clay tablets. And in those days the whole situation about archaeology and cultural property was completely different, and Mesopotamia was under the Turkish administration and there was an agreement with the government that objects discovered would come back to Britain for the museum, which is what happened then in the eighteen forties and eighteen fifties, and one advantage of It was that the things which came

out of the ground, which of course no one could read, came to be deciphered. A lot of very clever people worked on them, and eventually the breakthrough was made, and so it was possible to take these pieces of clay with their impressions on which looked like nothing at all familiar, and actually

read them. The languages were, the signs were cracked, the languages were deciphered, vocabulary understood, so that nowadays people who do this sort of work can read tablets written in Sumerian on the one hand, or Babylonian on the other with relative comfort. As long as the object isn't broken or cracked in the middle or something. If it's more or less all there, we can

read it pretty reliably, in fact, very reliably. You know. I'm curious, you said the eighteen hundreds of when most of these play tablets were found. Were they digs in like or you are, or were they digs in neighboring cities, and there were what they would call repositories where these were kept. Well, what happened was that when archaeology began, the Romantic Old kind of archaeology, with big sites and big team diggers and things. They

started off in the area which was where the Bible had taken place. They were most interested in that. So they found in Assyria, the northern part of modern Iraq, the northern half, there were several obvious cities, great mounds that came out of the ground like small mountains, where there was a

successive deposits of archological material, sometimes over thousands of years. And they they started digging on the biggest sites and at the top of the biggest sites sometimes the names already were very suggestive, looking for the kings of the Biblical period, and they found them. They found the kings of Assyria like Sanakarib and Isar Hadden and Ashore Barnepal. The kings of Assyria. They found it Linuvi, their palace, their palaces, the contents the library, and about the

empire that they had ruled. And with their decide the script, it became possible to put the Sumerians, who were the older group, and then the Syrians and Babylonians into their right geographical terrain and their right chronological period, and the span of the period covers that the really the beginning of writing. As far as we know for the first time. It's probably not really the first

time, as far as we have it. The first evidence for writing all the way through pasted the development of the alphabet until the first century AD, so three and a half thousand years of writing. And the marvelous thing is these pieces you describe, one hundred and thirty thousand. They're made of clay, and a special sort of clay which was freely available in Mesopotamia between the

Euphrates and Tigris rivers. Their banks had this marvelous clay which took good impressions, didn't have gun in it, and would dry in the sun or dry in the warm to a point that the inscriptions would be safe. Sometimes they fired them. But so they used this clay as their normal writing support, which altogether different from most civilizations with which people are familiar today. I mean then they didn't have paper. They didn't write on wood or parchment or bone

or skin, not very often anyway, But they used this clay. And the thing about the clay was, even if it wasn't probably fired in a kiln, if it was in the ground with a room that was destroyed, overrun by the enemy, and everything was set on fire and the buildings collapsed

or there was something happened that people moved away. Things in the ground just stay there they last, so that when Austin Layard, who was the first British archaeologist who was really successful in ancient Mesopotamia ancient Iraq, when they found these tablets, they found sometimes in great quantity because they just survived in the ground. So it was an unlooked for benefit that in fact, the whole of daily life, state life, religious life. There's a great slew of

information about all these things on these bits of clay. So it's a rather miraculous thing. So it was very important that they deciphered it. And when they got to the stage when it was properly deciphered, the whole of this ancient culture opened up. So it's before the Greeks, it's before the Romans. It's that sort of area. It overlaps in chronology more or less with

ancient Egypt. So ancient Egypt had about a three thousand year run before the Greeks got to Egypt, and Mesopotamia had about three thousand year run or more before the Greeks arrived there. I mean archaeologically, of course, they're much older, but the historic period is about the same. So when you go to school, you're supposed to learn about the ancient Egyptian and the ancient Mesopotamians, and then you do the Greeks and the Romans, and then you do

everything else that came after. So they're that part of school education which people are supposed to know a bit about, although I'm not sure if they do it anymore in schools. They did when I was a boy, but maybe they don't anymore. Doesn't seem like Sumerian was something that we talked a great deal when I was in high school and college. And I'm curious when you talk about the interpretations of these cuneiforms, these aublets, how detailed are they.

Are they talking about daily life, the function of a relationship and marriage. Are they really giving us the details of their culture? Well, pretty much. They use writing pretty much for the same sort of areas that we do. So there is information about human relationships, and about domestic law and

state law, and religion and religious belief and all those things. There's quite a lot of information about all of them, sometimes over many centuries of time, sometimes out of archives where you can follow the fate of different individuals, and then their sons and daughters and their grandchildren and so forth. So there's a continuum also which you can sometimes follow. The only point to answer your question in perhaps the way you are asking me, is when they wrote about

this sort of thing, they weren't writing for us. They were writing for them, which means that all their documents take for granted stuff that they knew, and then their recipients of the letters knew, and the people with whom they operated knew. They didn't try to explain everything like for a future reader.

It was contemporary and functional. So the result was that the reality is that sometimes when we have things, we have to really think hard about reading a bit beyond the immediate paragraph to what it implies, what you can understand. And for example, you could have lots of business letters, and if you read them, it says mister so and so writes to mister so and so, and they have a business relationship, and they've obviously been working together

more or less peace would be for a long time. And sometimes deliveries are made and the payment doesn't come, and sometimes it doesn't come for a very long time. And sometimes there are letters that say, you know, Hello, Hello, where's the staff? So we do get we get the flat information about business operations and sometimes safe from let is, we get a bit

of a window about which reveals interesting things. And then we have other things like for example, magic or medicine to do with the diseases that people get, and how they dealt with them, and some women couldn't have children, and how unhappy they were about it, and how they tried to deal with all these things. So we have a tremendous amount of information and each area

you can get a superficial immediate understanding. And then if you're going to work with these materials, you have to kind of read everything that exists within the reources in order to fill out the picture, because what you don't want to do is to put too much modern imagination into the interpretation. It's very tempting to think that everything is identical and you can attribute an intelligible person to an

inscription and think that you know they do what you would do. That must be in your training, irving, because I would say that your teacher, your professor, or whoever is helping you understand this is going to lay that down as not to flavor or color and interpretation. I think proper people who

are proper teachers make this point. But there's more to the point than that, because, for example, if you do ancient religion and you know about the world's religion, and you grow up thinking that things in a temple are idols and the idolators, and you have a personal view of a monotheistic religion, you're intolerant to other religion. Then when you read about an ancient civilization where they had lots of gods, you have to shut up your own mind.

You have to accept perfectly that's how things are. There are of course cuties like that in the world today, and for some people it's very difficult to throw off their own prejudices and look at things carefully. But there's a deeper level, I think to this, which I think is much more important, because in a way it's obvious not to thrust a modern interpretation into the

past. It's kind of not so complex. But I think the deeper point is that Homo sapiens, the species of Homo sapiens that we are and that everybody else on the planet are, is the same species as people in antiquity. And the corollary of that is that My own view is that if you tell an ancient Sumerian or a Babylonian person and one of us and look at

them side by side superficially, there'd be a lot different. The clothes would be different, their hairstyle than what they eat, the language they taught, their religious ideas, all sorts of things big and different, big and small,

would be different. But the inner element of Homo sapiens, the inner way in which the human operates in the world, for example, is a loyal and faithful and treacherous at the same time, and tells the truth and lies, and is a hypocrite and a pure person, and all those things that go on mixed up with a human being certainly applied in antiquity. So it means that the person's in terms of their behavior, their motives on a

deep way, are very familiar. And the difficulty is to is to tread the path where you feel united by with these people, because they live like ants crawling under heaven, and they have disease and they have illness and they're frightened, and they don't want to die, and they want to have lots of children, and they want to be rich, and they want to have a certain amount of power, and they hate bullies, and they don't want to work every day and they have to work, and all those things.

Everybody has that, so that that has a kind of unity about it, which is something deeper than the thing that we can the superficial thing. Because most of the things when people are you, don't you look completely different from me, You're you're not like me. Are cosmetic, they're outer cosmetic. So I think you have the different levels of reality accessible. But my own feeling is that the one thing to hold on to is that underneath they are

like us. Underneath they are like us. And one of the points which supports this is that if you will know perfectly well that you could go out in the street and get a hundred people in to line up in a queue, and the one one end will be a card carrying genius with all the documents to prove it, and the one at the other end would be a totally stupid idiot, and in between you have all the extremes of intelligence. Well, that, for example, is a human characteristic which certainly applies in

antiquity and other things of that kind. I think it gives you a sort of under grid of trust that if you try to read what people write and you try to think about what they say and understand it, you can't go really far wrong if you operate on that kind of principle. So of the things, you know, like this book, I write about ghosts, and it's very It came to me when writing this book most importantly because ghosts of things that everybody in the world knows about, and the world divides into three

categories. There are people who have seen a ghost and they jolly well believe in them, and whatever anybody says, they know that they do, and they may not talk about it, but they jolly well know. And then there are people in white coats in laboratories who know that ghosts jolly well don't exist, and whatever you tell me, I won't believe it because they don't exist. And then you get the people in the middle who are agnostics.

So, yeah, what the situation about the ghost phenomenon in the world, And I don't just mean where you and I live, but in general is a very interesting thing because I believe that that in ancient I mean, writing this book convinced me entirely about the Mesopotamian ghost situation in antiquity, there was none of the I believe in ghosts, Oh, I see ghosts, and someone saying, we must be an idiot if you believe this, and come

on, you know it's not really really And although so you have a conversation at a bus stop and one of your neighbors says, I think I saw a ghost yesterday. And if you're in a bad mood or you don't believe that, you say, come on, come on, you know this is old rubbish. I don't believe it would. So none of this ever happened in antiquity because it wasn't true that the Greeks, well maybe the Greeks are slightly different, but before that, the ancient Mesopotamians, for certain, from

their writings, it's not that they believed or didn't believe in ghosts. They took them for granted. They were part of life. It was a stratum of reality because the dead were buried, and the dead were supposed to be buried and say that, but they came back and people saw them when they made them ill, and they were an irritant, and they were this and that and the other, and all the inscriptions, the whole range of them, which is available, which I tried to stuff into this book as much

as possible. The principle that unites them all is the idea that everybody knew that ghosts exists. It wasn't a matter for personal taste or for dispute. Let me stop you just for a second, Irving. So this is the new book, the first ghost Most Ancient Legacies. I have one here in factory. I'm not without Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's a fantastic premise. Before you get into the details, I want you to give us an overview. So you're saying, and I think you're doing this right now.

You're saying that if we look in today's society, there's a huge population that says ghosts don't exist. Yeah, it's not. You can't measure it scientifically, so the scientific method does not apply. And if you intellectualize it too much, it doesn't happen. You're saying that the Sumerians, the Babylonians, and the Assyrians accepted it because it was what handed down as kind of a religious belief or how would you classify it as a well as a as a

as a believer or an understanding. Well, I think it's it's it's definitely not a belief. I think it's something that everybody took for granted, as I say, and kids for granted, and somebody might see their grandfather in the garden or something like that, and no one would faint. And if somebody saw their grandfather and the gardener went and told their mom they were we'd read to take you to the doctor, there's something wrong with your mind or

patching or eating your vegetables. They would say, well, did he look happy or was he cross? Something like that. It was part of the strust. And see the thing what I was what I think is this that this is the default human understanding. This is one that the reasons why I

like to think of the Homo sapiens matter. And I think that the conception that when the body's rots and stinks, the element inside it which makes the human being survives and goes somewhere the soul the universe, what you call it the soul or whatever you fancy this is. But this is a thing that goes back to the neodertals. In my opinion, it's a characteristic of the species. It's a deep, hard wired thing. So I think that this

is the default position of mankind. From the beginning, and that what has happened is at a certain stratum in evolution history history historical evolution is that you have you have monotheistic religions which are very dogmatic, very unforgiving, very uncatholic in their view of the universe, very restrictive, and you have science, which is even worse. So the description to the idea that goes a part of the human universe is squashed down by modern religion and or monotheistic religion and

science. It's squashed down into a question where its status is altered, and it ends up that some people still believe in it as it were, and some people never will, and some people don't know it's changed its status. But there are many places in the world where, for example, you might go and go into a village with a notebook and a hat, looking like an anthropologist, and sit down talk to an old person under retreat, doesn't matter where it is, and say, oh, somebody told me that in

your country nobody believes in ghosts. And what will happen is that the grandmother or whoever it is, they were young men, she will say, how

much time do you have? I think you better sit down, and I will tell you all about it. And this, I think is that this is the reality of the human position with regard to ghosts, and that we are so suave, we're so slick, we're so easy with scientific guff, we're so easy with condemnation and intolerance that it get suppressed, so that a person who has seen a ghost, and let's say, for the sake of argument, that they have done, can't tell anybody. They can't tell anybody.

They don't want to go and join a society of weirdos where everybody sees. They don't want that at all. They want their mom and dad and uncle to believe them because they did. Like if you say that you past or diving tests, they believe you. And if you see a ghost like that, it's the same thing you saw it, you know, And so it's a difference. So people don't talk about it. They just don't talk about it. So I want to get the foundation of or the basis of

this book. Were you working on a series of tablets and you developed or you started seeing a theme of ghost discussions, sacred ghost worship? What was it? Because to write a book, you must have really that to yourself. Wait a minute, this is. I'll explain. I'll explain when these one hundred and thirty thousand tablets in the British Museum are in boxes, in draws, in cupboards. And when I arrived in the British Museum, I went through the entire collection, draw by draw, box by box to see

what we had. And I did that, I think three times, so I have a kind of grasp of what these one hundred and thirty thousand tablets are in bulk. And in the process, when I found something in the topic which really interested me, I made a note of the number. So by meandering through the collection and looking at things, ah, this is this, when I realized it quite a lot of them. I todo with the ghosts in every sense. I recorded all the numbers, and then I got

these tablets out and I had a good look at them. And then I realized that they have a a a wide spectrum of things to do with ghosts. So, for example, one of them is there are omens. When people say this happens, this is the consequence. This is a mesopertamin idea. Lots and lots and lots of omens. So if a frog jumps into your cup of tea. This means something, or that means something else. And there were lots of omens about what happens if you saw a ghost,

what did it mean? And it wasn't just three or four lines, there were hundreds of lines of these. One if you see a ghost on a Monday or Tuesday or a wenzy, if they're wearing a hat or they're not wearing a hat, or if it's a woman. You do know women, you don't know all these things. There's a whole phone book of data about if you see a ghost what it might mean. So this is one corner

of it. Then there was the thing about the rituals, because if you were the oldest son when your father died, you were responsible for the regular offerings for the spirit the dead, ghosts, the spirits of the of the person who died, so they were believed to be first they were buried under

the courtyard, so they were under there. You knew where they were, But that was the horrible body, and the essence of the person was in the underworld with lots of other essences of people hanging around and waiting, and they knew it was down there. They didn't know whether it was ten miles or one hundred miles, but it was and they knew all about the underworld. They wrote about it. So there's a thing about the offerings which you

have to do, and about the ghosts going down to the underworld. And there's the ghosts that don't get the offerings because you forget and they get cross and they come back and they pull people's here, you know, where's my offering? Where's my offering? Just basically, so then you have to modify them, and you have to do magic to make the ghosts happy, and you do all that, and then there's a lot of other things as well that sometimes ghosts come when you don't know who they are, and they can

be very dangerous. They follow you about, so it's like being followed on the street, and people get very jumpy, and then they do other things they make you ill. So if you go to sleep, it's impossible to go to sleep with both ears covered. Well, I mean you can nowadays you can wear your earphones, but in principle, normally when you went to bed, your head was on one side, so the other ear was exposed,

and ghosts were believed to go in through the ear. The really horrible ones they'd go in there and they would drive you mad, and they would make it half for you to breathe, and they'd have to be exercised by the specialists who drove them away. So there were people who had magic to make ghosts disappear, to come out of the body, to leave a person alone, to make things better. And there were lots of other things as

well, amulets they had to write and did. There were myths about the underworld and what it was like and who was there and what went on. And then there was this thing you mentioned before about necromancy, which is a rather specialist trade, where it was believed in principle, like all people who practiced necromancy, that if you can get somebody from below to come up,

you can ask them questions and they will tell you. No explains this that if you bring up somebody from down there and you want to ask them about something which is important to you, it's never explained how they know the answer. It's never explained that in all cultures where necromancy is ever practiced, it is assumed that the dead are privy to the sort of information that a living

person seeks. So there were they were there were exorcists and diviners and necromancers who were efficient, efficient practitioners of this art, and there were special things you had to do to get ready. And the most important thing with necromancy, which is actually really rather fascinating, is you get the skull, preferably

of the person whom you want to speak to. So if your father and grandfather are buried under the courtyard, sometimes they had the kind of vault so when the next lot die, they opened the door or chuck them in as well, so you might get quite a accumulation of persons all in the same family, so you could, if necessary, get a skull from the grandfather

or something that they thought that that was the best person. And then the exorcist does all this material it's anointily things, and then there's incense and what have you, and the spells and the sun god and has to bring up the spirit from below from the nether world to enter into the skull and answer questions to the practitioner or to the person who wants to find out the future.

Quite an alarming thing to do in reality. So although most of the magic that we have is to identify ghosts and get rid of them, send them back where they belong. This specialized thing was to bring them up to ask them a question or two about the future. And the manual which is to do with this is rather interesting because there are some jolly good spells at the end to drive the ghost back again because they don't want it hanging around ever after, so they have to and they let it back down. So

you actually found the manual to working with the dead. Yeah, to bring them up is it's it's it's a tablet with instruction spells. We're going to take a short commercial break to allow our sponsors to identify themselves, and we will return shortly with my guests today, doctor Irving Finkel, discussing his latest

book, The First Ghosts. We'll be right back. My guest today is doctor Irving Finkel, who is a cuneiform expert at the British Museum in London, and he's written a new book on ghosts called The First ghost Most Ancient Legacies. Would you say that the information that they were receiving was considered valid or was it more of a kind of an a game or something that a

specialist would come in and do just to connect with the ancestors. No, that's a very important question, but it's absolutely nothing to do with the game. I think it was dead serious. I think it was if you did it, it was quite costly because you had to pay the person that preparations had to be carried out and the room made ready and all that kind of thing. And then there's the danger of fooning around with the dead, because if you believe in ghosts and you believe you know that they exist, then

you know there's going to be trouble if you don't control it. So I think it was only done probably under other serious circumstances where somebody really needed to

know. For example, we do know one case from the royal court in Syria in Ninity when Asher Barneipal, who later became king and the most famous king, when he was youthful, it was uncertain whether his older brother would become king when the father died, because that was the principle as everywhere in the world, that the first son normally becomes king when the old king dies, and Asher Barneipal, who was immensely more intelligent and able and capable than

his older brother, was very restless and wanted to know whether it was ordained that his brother would become and he got a necromancer to come into the palace in the dead of night, and they called up the Queen's his grandmother, because the old king's mother will be privyty all this. Then she was deceased and they called up to ask her whether he would become king. And there's a reply which is written on this tablet which implies that he will become king.

So that was no game. It was a dead serious matter. And I imagine that the prince doing this somewhere in the basement of the palace in the middle of the night. If there was one or two persons who who did this with him, they wouldn't surprise me at all if he didn't have them bumped off, because it's a very very secret matter to be privy to the inner workings of the of the future ruler. And you know, if anything happened to the older brother, there'd be the suspicion of murder and so

forth. So it's a very dicey thing. So I think people partly it must have been costly to do it, and partly rather frightening because I imagine if you're in a room and with all the build up by an exorcist and you're asking questions and all of a sudden there's a skull starts moving and outcomes

the answer, I mean, you probably die of fear. But you know, it's an interesting snippet in the history of this that the among Jews of the Talmudic period, which is not long after the end of Babylonia, and of course these people have been taken to from Jerusalem to Bin libikad Neezza to live in Babylon. They were there until they left to go this way and

that, but some of them stayed in Mesopotamia until the recent times. And among these more authorities, necromancy was investigated in the Tongue Ward in their scripture they wrote about that you can call up the dead with a skull. It's somehow they knew that the Babylonian practice from their own associations. They knew about it. But one of the rabbis who writes about it says, well, the question is if they do this, do they really hear the voice or

do they imagine it? So this was a medieval French rabbi writing about this. It got to the stage of modern thinking where he asked the question, did they really hear this voice or did they imagine? And that's the modern inquiry that comes from a modern person. It's very remarkable thing that it goes from everybody absolutely taking it for granted, to somebody else standing back and saying, maybe it's just in the mind. Maybe not so. I think.

To trace these things as far as one can, it's very fascinating. Talk a bit about what was I would think is a form of metaphysics in this questioning of the ghosts or the dead. Was it just practiced among the elite in these ancient cultures or have you found that it was, as you say, in a very expensive ritual that was only available to those who had the money to request this. Well, I think this is not something that you'd find going on in the countryside, or in the army, or among merchants

or something. It's something of a certain class, what you might call the upper class, who might have some preoccupation where talking to the dead, so to speak, bring them an answer. There is another angle which is covered in a different document, where it looks like someone is trying to find out whether he's going to be successful in conquering a woman that he's after. I think that's what it's about. It's rather terse, but I think the idea is am I going to get her in the end, and so that's a

different level of thing. And of course everybody in the world would have this kind of problem. But I think going to an acromancer and fooling about with a dead person was not done lightly, not done lightly at all. But of course this is one of the This is one of the points which I was thinking about before, that we have sometimes a lot of information, but we don't have the information round it, so we don't know what the questions are, and we don't know who did it. And as you say,

whether it's just the elite. But I think there are other ways of divining the future. Some of them were much more accessible and much less complicated. So you could go to a fortune teller and get them to find out something which wouldn't involve the use of her bringing up a dead person. I would think that. And I'm curious about what you discovered you. I saw you

in a video talking about extra exorcism and nacro mancy. Yeah, would they would a family or a physician who was dealing with somebody who was ill say they were possessed and then there was somebody who was an expert at exorcism who would come in and work with the spirit to remove the ill spirit from the body. Is that what your suggested also a good question. So on the whole and the healers. There were doctors who had drugs and applications and fumigants

and amulets and rituals and all the thing. The two kinds of healers had these operations and they would deal with the sick. And the basic idea with the sick and started off that people were made ill by the malice of other people, like witches. They operated on people and when they were sick in their body, when they had things wrong with them, that was the effect

of witchcraft or sorcery. And this was the first stage of explanation, because when people are presented with illness, they need to have a reason behind it. They need to know how it works. And I think from the time of about Hammurabi about eighteen hundred BC, I think there was a general feeling that it was human malice that made people ill, and gradually, gradually there was a shift in understanding where they thought that it was evil, evil spirits,

demons and devils that made them ill. And what grew up was a wide range of these characters, some of them faceless and not very easy to identify, some of them well identifiable, who tormented the human race and could make them very ill indeed, and in fact even bring about their death. And they had to be the effects of what they did were tackled by the doctors, and sometimes they were driven out. There were spells that they come out of the body, go away, go back to where you belong.

So they had a kind of too pronged attack, which was medicaments and pharmaceutical material and spells and incantations, all of which would clear the patient out. So it's a kind of possession, that's the right word. But it's not possession like with the witches of Salem, where it's familiar to everybody. It's more subtle that. It's more that there were these forces that were believed to make people ill, which were a long way from witches. They were much

more dangerous than witches. These devils and demons. Sometimes they knew what they looked like. But the point about them is they were not made They were not made of human stuff. We don't know the ancestry of the demons and devil. We don't know who how they came into the world, so that they were unfathomable and you couldn't kill them, and they had to be dealt

with very firmly. So sometimes in the first millennium, when people were sick or ill, the doctors would say that this was a demon of one kind or another, and they know what to do. And sometimes it was the effect of a ghost who, as I said, might come in the ear or tormented person all together in a way and possess them as you describe, and the ghosts have to be driven out, and the ghost is much more

it's much easier to drive them out for two reasons. One that I believe that the Babylonians were quite sympathetic to ghosts because they knew they were troubled. They couldn't settle in the nether world, they couldn't find tranquility, and they came back because they were agitated or had some unfinished business. So they had a sort of sympathy with ghosts. And of course ghosts were at bottom human beings, so they were more susceptible to compelling spells and compelling utterances. And

whereas the demons had nothing to do with humanity. They were cold and unfathomable and in a way more more dangerous. And you can say that this is all a rather stupid and simple and infantile way of looking at things, but

it's not quite like that. For example, you could say that what they call the demon that was in the blood in the body and had to be removed is what we call microbes, because they what they wanted to do was to have an explanation for the fact that people could get ill without they don't know why. And sometimes they were a bit ill, and sometimes they were very ill, and sometimes they had an idea about contagion, for example,

things like that. But otherwise they wanted to know if someone got ill without doing anything terrible and they were wicked, there must be a reason. And this is this is really they settle or attributing the root cause of this to something they could never see and never would see. And that's exactly what happens with modern medicine, because no one's ever seen a microbe, and certainly no patient has ever seen a microbe or a virus or whatever it is that doctors

say you've got. You never see the thing we have a complete ascription to the eye that the expert tells us what it is without us seeing it. And even if we had a microscope, we couldn't see the thing in ourselves. So in a way, it's a kind of similarity that they called these things demons, and they describe what they looked like, and they had special things to get rid of them, but nobody ever actually saw them and they went. They weren't. They didn't jump on you when you're going down the

street like a monkey or something. Let me just stop you right there for a second. Did they have a classic you say like a police officer when you say that, that's what I say, I just don't. I don't. I don't want to shift your your your chain of thought because it's a it's a good flow, but I want to add little bits and pieces that you thought, so I stop. Stop. I wish there was a more elegant way to do it. But that's it. So so uh would you

say there was a classification of demons or a classification of ghosts. This type of of presence means that you're screwed because this is a powerful ghost who will possess you, or there's a lighter ghost that just upsets the stomach, or a lighter ghost that takes over the mind. Was there a classification or well, it wasn't a structure that was written down, but I think there was an understanding because there's quite a wide range of things that ghosts can do to

make you unwell. And my explanation for it is this. It's like this that the ghost you're given ghost up here and making trouble has the character that he had in life. So if you have an unhappy ghost who is a diffident, shy person and would never harm a fly, then they wouldn't harm a fly in their ghostly existence. If you had someone who is a lunatic, say this in a psychopath in real life, then you might expect that their ghost, if it was coming back, would have the same heartless,

dangerous property, caused evil wherever it could. And I think that they saw ghosts in this way that they were human underneath. So depending on how ill you were, there'd be different things to make you better. I mean it sounds a bit strange, but in fact it was a kind of working system because it's like this when you have an understanding of what causes things and what has to be done about it. You don't have to fret about the philosophical

deep issues that it would otherwise raise. I mean, that is how religion works. It gives you a nice little tweet explanation of things that you have to believe in, miracles and all this, and it distructs you and many kind of intelligence thought about well actually involved in all this. I mean, this is the same human thing. I think, the same principle. Okay, the Egyptians have the Book of the Dead, and the Dynastics pren Anastics

had a real fetish about afterlife. They did, I think so Egyptologists say, no, it's just the accident of discovery because we have tombs. But I do know one gets the impressionment that they just couldn't wait to die, the Egyptians so they could dress up in all these things and go on the journey and get I mean, it's strange when you're really ornate. Do you see the same patterns in the uniforms from the Sumerians, Assyrians or Babylonians.

Do they go under the great lengths about how to get ready for the afterlife, what you will see, who you will meet, and so on? Not in the same way as the Egyptians. Because the Egyptian and the people to whom this was concerned, it was all laid out. They had a whole understanding of what they're going to go through. In the Mesopotamian thing, they're not so specific and not so deep. But I mean, there is a myth, for example, that in Anna, the Goddess of Love,

wanted to rescue her partner Donmozie, who was trapped in the underworld. She went down this winding thing with seven gates which she had to get through in order to rescue him and bring him back. So in a literary text there is some information about that. You start at the top when you go through all the gates and you get down to the court of the Queen of the underworld. So you could have a little map, you could draw a picture of it. But it's nothing like as ornate and complex as it is with

the Egyptians and they it's a different kind of thing. It's a different kind of thing. I have a theory which I wrote about in this book. Nobody who's reviewed it as noticed it, let alone argue with it, or accepted it. But I believe this to be the case that when a person died and their body was buried out of the way, and their spirit will we called it that, and went down into the underworld, and they're just

it's described how grim it is in the underworld. It's kind of dusty, and they hang about in the poor light, and it's not a very pleasant place. It's a shortage of water, and there are millions of other people there, and it sounds horrible, really, it sounds like being in the army probably, and uh ghosts seemed to me from the description of it,

have every reason to be unhappy and want to escape. But the thing is this, there is a kind of esoteric literature in Mesopotamia where things are explained, or complex things are explained, sometimes even more complex ways than the original.

But they had they had a kind of interesting, interesting way that you take one of the classic texts that everybody had to know, and then you analyze the words for other meanings and explain that this means this because of this, and they quote from other things as a kind of exegesis of important texts. And some of these exegetical passages add up to this picture that the Mesopotamian

I believe this to be true. The Mesopotamian principle was that the life as such, the life force, was finite, with the consequence that for a new baby to be born, somebody had to die. So when somebody died, that opened up in order to maintain the equilibrium of the universe, the balance. It opened up the option of another life and the spirits which are

down there in the basement. And I think when the baby was going to be coming, one was released, and I don't know whether it entered the fallopian tube or the testicle of the Babylonian there's no there's no detailed response to it. It's just that there's an implication that that's how it worked. So it's not like reincarnation because people couldn't remember their earlier lives. There's no evidence of that in Mesopotamia, or do they even give the impression of that.

They don't say anything about this. It's just these esoteric remarks in these learned texts. But I think it means that there was a balance of this precious what they call it, you know that film, what's it called precious bodily fluids? You know, yeah, yeah, it's precious bodily fluids. It

always makes me laugh. That film, and that that line is it so that there was a there was a finite amount, and that there was a balance between death and life and it worked like this, which is a very wonderful conception, in my opinion, very remarkable conception, possessed of a lot

of power. And I go so far as to say that I think it's contingent upon the reality that the Mesopotamians depended so drastically and so visibly on water, on the river's coming and fertilizing their land because and as long as the rivers ran, everything was fine. But there have been episodes in time when because of warfare, one or other parties tried to damn the resources water and interfere with it, which is an absolute disaster. And I think that the

psychological dependence on water has this manifestation about life itself. It's a bit difficult to if I was faced with a High Court judge and I had to through this, and it would be very difficult to be one hundred percent convincing about it. But it seems to me this all of a picture with a Mesopotamian psychology, that this should be true and that this is the idea, And of course The interesting thing is if you have a conception that the path from

here down to the underworld is manned by seven gatekeepers. Everybody always assumes that it's to keep everything down there, but of course it might be to let one out the time. It might be a different conception that these spirits. Anyway. The other conclusion I reached in the course of my writing this book, which we're not supposed to be talking about all the time, was this that all the religions of the world believe that the spirit of a person or

something of the person, goes somewhere after they died. All clergymen tell this to widows, that your Alfred is up there somewhere or other, and your meetium one day when you go. Then all their religions have this idea, so there's no shame about it. This is a central religious principle that the human species lumbering about in an awkward body when the body is no good, the real bit of the person survives. This is a human universal principle.

So I had an idea how beautifully one could reconcile this with the ghost matter, Because, as I say, lots of people say it's all nonsense, and all that but I don't know how many white coats, and when they're being consoled by the clergy, in the clergy says that your Mabel is in the right place with the Lord, then they're not going to So I don't believe a word of that. There's no proof of it. I mean, I like to see a demonstration before I believe you, or before I take

any comfort from this argument. I'm sorry, it's not good enough. I need to see some statistics. I need to see some written papers with footnotes. And the thing is this, I believe that the ghost thing which say part of the world, and that people don't die, but they go somewhere according to a religion. It's exactly the same principle. And the only difference is this that ghosts are visible according to the whole span of things, and the spirits aren't. So this is it. So if you have this,

there's no opposition between the two systems, but there are one. The only difference between them technically is that people see ghosts, and that's that. So this allows one to formulate a very neat psychological and pseudo scientific explanation, which is that some people can see ghosts because of the way their minds are and some people can't, Like some people can see colors, and some people are tone deaf, and some people are this, and some people are that.

So maybe some brains have a susceptibility to this kind of thing and others. And I mean, you know, where as I do that, there are people you offer MEETI in life who were so like this. They go in a room and say someone's been murdered here like that and all over the place, and it's a very very common thing those sorts of people. And so that's it. I think that this one system, and that the religion takes advantage of it to comfort the dead, and the people who believe in ghosts

take advantage it to comfort the dead or comfort the living. And that's the panical difference that one lot of visible and one lot aren't. I'd like to argue about that with the Pope, but I don't suppose I ever will. I want to ask you if you came across any passages where a ghost was asked about an event and was able to prophesize the coming of either a new

king. I think you gave a hint with a king between a family, a younger brother and an older brother becoming a But was there other prophecy that no discoverment actually came through through the connection with the other. That would be very tasty, But in point of fact, we don't have the questions. We don't we don't know, they don't write them down. No, that's one of the one of the one of the ways in which we're impoverished because we only get what survives. We don't get all the stuff around it.

So, yeah, that's an interesting question, but we can't answer it. But also prophesying is a slightly strange word because it's to do with profits and the Bible and all that. Whereas these people were not profits, they were they were specialists and part of the whole mesopotape spectrum of people who try to predict the future. There were lots of ways they did it, and smoke and oil and water and examining in trails and hundreds of well, one hundreds.

There were about twenty different ways in which professionals could tell the future. So if you wanted to know somebody, if if I get married, am I going to have a son? Will a son be born? That there'd be people who could try and find out like that, but not prophescience in the sense, well, let me let me, let me spend that a little bit is and this is funny that we're talking about this. Are there references to astrological focal points or astronomical focal points. There's a lot of people

that believe that the Maya, as an example, use the combination. And the Egyptians, we know they used astrology, but astrology astronomy as a science for predicting certain events to come or just general life. They certainly died, they certainly did. They had complex astronomy, complex mathematical astronomy, and they had extensive astrology. And they both are a function of observation of the heavens

over a very very long period of time. So the people who were mathematically capable and who observe what happened in the heavens, and they started to notice how things moved, and they tried to work it out, ended up with very sophisticated astronomy, which meant they could predict when eclips would take place and many other things as well, And they reached a level of astronomy which had a marked effect on the development of astronomy among the Greeks. Is no doubt

about it. They were high level astronomers. And side by side you have astrology, which is an observation of things that happen in the heavens and what that meant for us on earth. And people did derive predictions about things from the astrological changes and the movements in the zodiac and all these kind of things. And with the first visibility, in the last visibility, they collected all

these material and some of it had ominous significance for individuals. And in fact, in the late period and third third century BC, that kind of time, horoscopes were written when a baby was born, with the conjunction of the things in the heavens and what it meant for life, and the zodiac appeared for the first time in Mesopotamia, the twelve divisions of the heavens, and the path of the Sun, the path of the moon, and the movements

of the planets. They had all this stuff down because they spent a lot of time making observations and recording what they saw. So it fell into a quite remarkable scientific thing. So sometimes the same guys profited from the same knowledge. But you have a sharp division really between astronomy, which is of all the things they did in Mesopotamia. Perhaps the closest to what a modern person

would say was science and astrology, which flourished and never really died. I mean, the stuff that you read nowadays in the newspapers is a direct inheritance from that framework of Babylonian astrology, which came into Greek and into the world and thereafter. So yes, indeed, yes, indeed, we're going to take a short break to allow our sponsors to identify themselves, and we will return shortly with my guest today, doctor Irvin. Think all of the British

Museum will be right back. My guest today is Irving Finkel, a curator at the British Museum in London who has spent most, if not all, of his career as a cuneiform expert, and he specializes in Sumerian, Babylonian and Assyrian cuneiform clay tablets. Are you reading these cuneiform tablets more in a journalistic way or are there actual books that are like Volume one of local history?

Right? Well, you get both, so for example, letters and administrative documents and legal decisions, you get a tablet for each, so they're on their own. But sometimes if you're lucky you get an archive, so they will fit together. So that's one sort of the difference between the single and the bulk. If you have an archive of a family over several generations

can be very interesting, very fruitful. So that's one thing. So then you have pieces of literature which take up one tablet, and only ever did take up one tablet. And then you have other works which were conceived of as consisting of many parts. So for example, the famous story about Gilgamesh is written on twelve separate tablets, tablets one to twelve, which in our case we would call chapters of a big book. But they never bound the tablets. They were just you know, made of play. They were kept

separately, one by one. But there was practically speaking a book of Gilgamesh of twelve chapters length, written on twelve clay tablets. And there were many other things like that. So, for example, in the Palace at Ninevy, they collected together all the medical prescriptions they could ever find, old ones and new ones, and they arranged them according to parts of the body, from head to foot, and each chapter, like the head has four or

five tablets and the next one has six tablets. So they put together all the therapeutic rituals, therapeutic procedures, the spells, the analysis on a huge archive of tablets, which is like an encyclopedia. So you could call Gilgamesh would be like one book of ten chapters, and then the medical encyclopedia would be like a modern twelve volume encyclopedia with everything in it. So they had

the conception of works that belonged together in sequence. And this is actually a useful thing because if you have a literary text like Gilgamesh, for example, so you write the first side, you turn it over and you write the second side, and at the bottom they say this is the for example, this is the fifth tablet of the Gilgamesh story, and then they write the

first line of the next tablet. So when you find the next tablet, if you're lucky, you have a tablet with the first line, and then you think, ah, this is the first line from the bottom of this one. So you know they get running sequence and that they were very careful ascribes to to do this. They say, this is tablet six, this is the first line of tablet seven. And when you've got tablet seven, it clicks in and if the end of Tablet seven is preserved. We'll have

the beginning of tablet eight. And since George Smith in the eighteen fifties, this has gradually happened. So we know there are twelve tablets of Gilgamesh and the great new translation by my friend Andrew. George, who's a Londoner seriologist, has got good bits of all twelve tablet. It's not everything because they've all got holes in, but at least we've got the series the story in

order. And what happens is that sometimes in their museum somebody finds an old thing that's not being read, or someone digs something up on a new dig and a bit more of the story comes, and a bit more of the story comes. That's how that worked. Before we get into our next subject, which has to do with artificial intelligence. What was your hope in this book the first ghost? What was your hope that the reader would discern from

your rating? Oh? Well, they are two basic things. One is that the whole subject of ghosts in our society is ruined by fraud and cheating and imitation and commercial productions. There's an awful lot of fake so that's one thing. And secondly, there's a lot of literature about ghosts, which is

complete nonsense, and also people deluded by fraud. But on top of it, the beginnings of the story are very vague because people think, well, they was invented in the Middle Ages or something like that, and nobody really knows, and nobody writes about the fact that the Romans and the Greeks had lots and lots of literature about ghosts, much more than we do in Mesopotama,

marvelous things. And then we have the Mesopotamian stuff, which is older, so we can say that ghosts existed in the world the minute we had writing. It's already written down, there's something about them. So in other words, it's a very, very long running thing. And this is important because it's very easy to think to misjudge the importance of phenomena, and people say that, you know, they don't really have any idea about how old

ghosts are. They don't really like talking about it at all. But people who have written about it have no idea that this stuff exists because there was no book really which presents so that was one reason. And also I've met quite a lot of people since I wrote this book who have told me that they've seen ghosts things like that. Now, of course that one isn't doesn't

believe everything everybody says by any manner of means. But I've met some people who, after I gave a lecture about this where the subject is permissible to talk about, have told me things that have happened to them which are very remarkable. And there are people of this kind that I know that I can't imagine that anything they would ever tell me would be invented or erroneous anymore than

I would doubt anything else. They said that there's something about ghosts that people might have a perfectly normal relationship with the person, believe everything they say until they talk about ghosts, then all of a sudden they switch off. Well, I'll tell you one small thing like that. There was a literary festival in the north of a bitten where I went and talked about the ghost room full of people and after what I said to anybody, see you wanted to

put your hands up. Eventually some people do, and it's good anyway after it's over. We were at dinner in a restaurant all the people from the conference, and this lady came round when we were having the last bit of the tea pot, came round and sat down next to me, and she said, I'm very glad to hear your lecture. I was very encouraged, and I said yes. She said, I want to tell you about something

that happened to me. She said, when I was a teenager, about seventeen, I was at home in our family house, in my bedroom, which was on the upper floor, sitting at my desk, and I looked out the window into the garden, and I saw my grandfather walking across the grass. And she said, this was a very extraordinary thing because her grandfather, my grandfather, she said, was dead. So she sat there sort of hooleaxed, and anyway, eventually she got up and she went downstairs in

a rather wobbly way and went into the kitchen to find her mom. And her mom was leaning on the kitchen sink with her chin like this, gazing out of the kitchen window. And when her daughter came in the room, she said, you're never going to believe this. I just saw my dad walking across the lawn. Now that is not science, it's not proof. But the point about it is, this lady, I'm absolutely sure had not talked about that for decades. It wasn't slick, you know, like a

dinner party thing. Let me tell you about my when she told me, and I'm hard bitten about all this stuff, you know, the thing about the on the back of the neck. They sure as hell, sure as hell stood up. And I would say that simply not only do I believe her that she wasn't inventing it, and that she didn't make it up,

and she wasn't trying to. I'm sure she did. And what I like about it is two independent witnesses, neither of whom could make a mistake, because you don't mistake some old fart in a raincoat for your dad or your grandfather if it isn't your grandfather. So I thought that was a punchy, pretty interesting thing. And quite a lot of people told me things in a way that is difficult just to And so when I wrote the end of this

book, I wrote a chapter about the belief in it. And I think that anybody who saw or goes to any point in their life and everybody said they were nuts or they didn't tell anybody, and even now they're not sure because it was so long ago, they should read this book because they have a kin ship with people that go all the way back to the very beginning. And also I believe them. So, but I don't go around believing

everything people tell me. But sometimes that kind of statement it's completely irrational not to accept. So you're saying that in studying the ancient people, when we do see girls, it's part of the human condition. Yeah, okay, so we shouldn't we shouldn't disprove it. We should look at it a little

closer. I think. So. For example, I've often said this in giving lectures about this, that what you have to do is you get half a dozen white coated scientists who and I've heard people say this, whatever you tell me, I won't believe it. Now, that's not science in my opinion. That's one thing. So we get a haunted house in the middle

of Dartmoor in the winter, and we have a party. We invite these scientists and they get drunk and they have a lovely time in this heart with big old woman's broken minutes, and then they get really tired and they go upstairs and they go and lie down on the sultan mattresses in this great house. And when they're all asleep, you can come with me. We get a ladder and we put you up the back of the house and we climb up the ladder and then we go through the window and we will all sit

up in bed and wet themselves. Oh my god, Hey, I want to move on to a couple of other subjects in the time we have left. I have to bring this guy up, Zacharia Sitchen, who is the rug rogue philosopher's scholar or whatever you want to call him. Hisn't he wrote numerous books I'm sure you're aware of, and claim that the Sumerians were the descendants of the Ananaki, a very very early race of beings who had come

from another planet. Have you run across any reference to this information that are and if you did, did you discounted as a myth or storytelling or why? Well, I've spent my whole adult life reading to know form inscription since the age of seventeen. In fact, I'm now seventy two, so that's a fair whack. And I've never seen anything in any form inscription which would do anything to support that idea at all. And are not an ancient race

older than the Sumerians. The Anuniki are one of the groups of gods in the Sumerian pantheon. We know who the Anniki are. They are not kings, They're not ancient kings. They are part of the divine universe. They are gods. And there's not a single whisper of a breath of an idea of that to be confirmed by anything that's come mount of the ground in Mesopotamia. So I put it to one side because I don't see any legitimacy in in that claim at all. A lot of people, of course, believe

it. A lot of people write as letters and you know he's he's very popular writer, and it's it's it's strange matter. But to answer your question, no is the answer. Okay, uh, one other one the anarkotheria

mechanism that was found in the water that are here. Is there anything like that referenced in any of these uniforms and and and in the case of your work, it would probably be somebody's talking about using the machine to navigate or no, it's not it's not that I'm I'm not the person to answer this in detail, but I've read about the antikither and I know roughly that it has on it clever mechanisms which calculate things according to principles that are already understood.

Those principles are already understood in Babylonia. Right, the astronomy of Babylon would provide, as far as I know, the data on which the Antikitherra was actually produced. Now it's got written on it and it's made out to be written by Greeks. Maybe it was written by Greeks, but there's no reason why the same thing couldn't have been made in Mesopotamia in terms of the knowledge and the know how. So that's one thing. And what was the

other question? Was there another question about Well, no, it was basically you know, it was found under Sodinia. It was the shipwreck I think it was a Roman ship and when they began looking at it and had more myrawn equipment to X ray that's very intricate device. Yes, but look the intricacy. There were two parts to the Antikythrie. Are two conceptions. One is the knowledge of movements in the heavens measuring time or whatever would be.

There's the knowledge, and then there's the physical ability to cut metal, to calculate the number of teeth in the cogs, to cut things and to make them so that they worked in this computer like way. That is a matter of nothing to do with knowledge. That's to do with mathematical calculation and skill, and they're separate. Think I think the important thing is that the knowledge embodied in it is not only present in Mesopotamia, but very likely comes from

there. I wouldn't be at all surprised. I wouldn't. Okay, as we conclude, uh, we started before before we started recording, the question of artificial intelligence in not only decipherment of the cuneiform tablets, but interpretation. And I'm curious with this advancing technology that's permeating everything, really, what do you see the future? And I and I wanted to ask you because they My thinking of it is they would scan a tablet, pass it through a

system, and it out would come a basic interpretation. And if well that I mean that it's not like something that would really cut through a lot of time. If fine guys like you would you could sit back, maybe you would be the final analysis of what came through. Well, look, let's think about it simply. Let's say you have a letter in canaoform to miss it, so and then the contents of the letter and the date at the

bottom. Right. There are lots and lots of tablets like that. So if you have a first class digital photograph of the tablet front and back so that all the signs are clear, you can easily scan the photograph with a machine that can identify the signs one by one because you fed into it or the data about all the different signs. Let's say they're nine hundred caniform signs,

right. The first thing is that over three millennia they change their shape, so you'd have to learn the computer would have to learn each of the nine hundred signs in its different incarnations of shape throughout the whole of the period

of the canoform time. That's not a problem for the computer. You just have to feed it in so it would know all all the signs and what they always look like, so that in other words, if you had a letter of one period and there was a particular sign there, then if they had a letter of document of another period of the same sign, they would recognize it as being an earlier version of that sign. That's easy for a computer. It's just a matter of whether anybody can feed it in. That's

one thing. Then there's The second thing that all the signs can be used in multiple ways, so they have different sound values and different meaning values. Now this is a complicated thing to explain in abstract, but for example, you have a sign like moo okay. So the Sumerian word MoU is a useful syllable in writing words in like museum, where meu is a syllable because they wrote in syllables. But moo also means cook and it also means year.

So if you have a mood, you don't know whether it's just the move sound or whether it means year, which is pronounced move, or whether it means cook, which is pronounced muchaldim. So you don't know that. This is one little problem, and all the signs have this characteristic. Also you can use signs not to spell the sound, but also to tell you

what kind or word it is, like it's made of wood. And you can have things called phonetic compliments when you have a sign which is unusual and then you write a sign next to it which gives you a clue how to read it. So they are all these small things which to a seriologist are bread and butter, And to me, I can do it in my sleep. But they'd all have to be programmed into this computer according to the basis of all these signs, and then they would have to learn the grammar.

They'd have to learn the grammar so that when they have a tablet and they scan the signs, they can identify the words. They have to learn the grammar and the vocabulary, but otherwise they don't know how to see where one word stops and another word starts. So they'd have to learn all the vocabulary in all its different periods of time, and all the grammar. Now you may say that sounds like a taught order. It's happened to me. That's what's happened to me. I know all that stuff like that, and I

can read uniform fluently. So if it can be done by me, it can sure as hell be done by a computer. So the problem is it's really finding a computer of efficient kind of strength and the right people to feed in the right information, so it's most economically effective. If this were to

happen, obviously it would go through a progression of reliability. When I was a teenager, and if you bought a camera from Japan, you would have a whole sheet of instructions about how to use it, which was practically speaking unintelligible because the person in the company in Japan had an English Japanese dictionary and they plucked out the words. You must have seen this kind of thing,

so you have no idea what the hell they're talking about. And then maybe fifteen years later you would have a thing like that where it was fine but there were some funny mistakes, and now probably you get something which was perfect,

more or less perfect. And that's what would happen. So if you had these rough caste translations of say a simple letter, done through all this system by a computer with a print out of the translation, it would make some obvious mistakes, some big mistake, but you could always a person could easily correct it, and it would be quicker than starting from scratch. Maybe I'm not sure, but it might be so, But justine it would be

good for maybe the most basic interpretation. But then if you wanted the fine points and the subtleties, it would take a human being to be well, I think it would. I think if you try to translate Gilgamesh, it would be a laughable thing. But the thing is, the thing is which I mean relatively speaking, all these things are in their infancy, and there's no doubt that the computer translation has made leaps of progress nowadays. It's absolutely

astonishing what they can do. And if they can do that, they could definitely do this. The question is whether it's worth the money that it would cost and the time it would cost, because you know, we have one hundred and thirty thousand tablets in the British Museum. Maybe there's one hundred thousand all over the rest of the world, and maybe there's ten million in the ground of Iraq. But there are only five people in Britain who can read

this thing, and they're probably fifty in America. And who who gives a monkey's you know? I mean, we're all worried about the things we're worried about. But it's very important because it's the beginning of humanity and our history. It's so it is important. But I think it will be a long time before. I mean, I think people who are good at AI like to have things that they can show they can do and people go ooh and

are and this will be a choice one. If you had a clay tablet, they know which way up it goes and you plug it in and ten minutes later you get the translation. That would be marvelous. Well, I was just reading the other day they are the AI computing power is growing exponentially, and they just predicted this is about twenty four hours ago, that they think it can be close to the human mind. I don't know how they can think that, because we don't know what the human minds about. So

it's weird. Well, look, the thing is, you can get a thing to write a novel, like as if Jane Austen wrote it. Yeah, but it's not you know, how original, truly original? Will the work be? Well, it depends on what you've done with the computer. But the thing is, I don't know much about this, but I have read something to the effect that when AI, artificial AI tries to imitate poetry or writing by people who do poetry and writing is very successful. I mean

it's not. I mean it's pretty hard to tell whether poetry is any good anyway, and it's pretty damned difficult really. It's not like an absolute thing, and some people go crazy about a particular poem is a voice for our time and all the rest of it. It's just a lot of cliches, but this is this is an interesting thing. But I think that the point is that there's a disjunct between the needs of the world and what can be done with AI, and AI is really an indulgence for the human race because

we don't really need most of the things it can do. Then we need a lot of other things a lot more. So I think I regard it. I think it's a distraction from dealing with starvation, hunger, disease, war, all those things which intelligent people should actually be dealing with, because there are quite a lot of intelligent people in the world and they have nothing

to do with those issues. And then we can do the AI. When everything's fine, there's no more cancer, there's no more this, no more road accidents, then they can do that, but it's not a priority. It's a priority for them to show what they can do, and of course there'll be money and money and money. But I think probably the bulk of human beings, if they were fully aware of the threat to clear thought that

this represents, will be very, very panicky. But on the other hand, they're not all that many people who really care a whot about clear thought anyway, So who knows I think the bottom line is there using it to better human existence in some capacity, so it's disguised the limit as to the applications of AI. So yeah, but hold on, the usual application is to control people better, so don't forget that historical evidence to support this claim.

Anyway, it's great to see you. I really enjoy talking. It's always a pleasure irving to have you on the program. And before we leave, give people an idea of what your typical day is. How many hours do you spend at the British Museum, And also you have two books that you've completed, what's what's happening in the future, or lots of books underway? Well, I usually end up getting there about nine thirteen, I stated about six and I'm what I'm trying to do now is to finish projects that

I have had underway, some new, some being a while. I'm writing a book about dreams in Mesopotamia about that's one subject. I'm writing a lot about the Royal Game of Er because I found out a lot more recently about this game and text to do with it, and other sorts of things which

I have to do. I'm writing a book about diaries. This is something we must talk about one day, because I started this project a rescue manuscript diaries from being thrown away in Britain, and there's about fourteen thousand of them now, and I'm trying to write a book about why it's important not to throw diaries away, how interesting they are. And I've written fiction and all sorts of stuff which I'm trying to find a publisher for. So who knows.

It's just a non ending stream of streams. I got to say that I've seen more and more video of you on YouTube and I find it fascinating. So obviously you do enjoy speaking in public. We do, and you do it fairly consistentlysistently, which is kind of nice. I do like it. I like looking on stage more because you know, with lockdown and all those things, that and zoom rather changed. But I have a mission.

I think I want people to know about the seriology and what we know about all that because it's full of amazing things, and about the British Museum and why museums are important, and why money is not the most important thing in the world, and all those sorts of things. Because he isn't wonderful, a real pleasure and like I said before, we're going to have to have

you back fairly more consistently because twenty eighteen was a while ago. So will be in touch more regularly, Kid at any time, see you soon. I really like speaking with him Irving, simply because of his openness to all the possibilities. You know, I mean, somebody who's steeped in tradition, especially an archaeologist or a museum curator, may not venture outside of the box, outside of what's comfortable. And you know, these topics are very,

very fluid, and they are a challenge for a lot of people. And I appreciate his point of view, and I appreciate his openness, and I really appreciate the fact, and I think you might agree too, that he's an anomalist. He's seeking these unusual stories events. It's just so much fun to speak with someone like that and so and you know, it's funny. I've been doing Earth Ancients for ten years in our tenth year anniversary what is

it in April, and I've only interviewed him once. And he is really what I would call a staple for Earth Ancients, a foundational piece in the same vein that we have Graham Hancock, or people like doctor Edwin Barnhardt, who under the tutelage of Linda Sheeley, this tremendous mayanist helped shape his her students like ed and others to think outside the box and to accept individuals who are seeing ancient history from a different lens and reporting it and rather than putting

them down or writing skating letters like Graham received when he was the host of Ancient Apocalypse, that Netflix series, she helped her students consider other points of view. And this is where we really get a series of brilliant discoveries, a way to look at the ancient past with more clarity. And this is important and this is what Earth Agents is all about. So I'm gonna have to have Erring back. And I mentioned this when we finished our interview,

that hey, buddy, we got to get you back more consistently. So he agreed, and he likes, he likes to be on the show and he likes to speak about his topic, so it was fun to have him on the program. Hey, I want to mention that we are a sponsor of this upcoming conference called Cosmic Summit. It is June fifteenth and sixteenth it's going to be held in North Carolina. A lot of people won't be able to go because it's you know, that's kind of out of the way,

it's expensive. But the producer it's going to be on the program in a few weeks, as well as a number of the keynotes. And I gotta mention this because it is live streamed, meaning that you can sit on your in your desk at home or your office or wherever, and you can see these fascinating speakers. And they have people like Preven Mohan, Randall, Carlson, Luke Caverns, just a whole list of great people that you can stream and see these people alive. And would you believe it's as little as twenty

five bucks a day, just nothing, nothing. I was shocked when George the producer, George Howard the producer, said to me, hey, we're only going to charge it. I said, that is amazing. These types of programs are usually one hundred and fifty or more. Twenty five bucks a day, that is nothing. You have no excuse not to do this. For more information, go to cosmicsummit dot com, scroll to the bottom and look for the streaming pass. I think it's at the very bottom of the

page. I'll have another direct link that you can use that is it might be quicker, but for now, check this summit out. It is packed with really, really good people. It's two days, the fifteenth and the sixteenth in the June. And wow, what this is the kind of programming I really like. I mean, and we sponsor a handful of shows each year, and they want you to get They want, you know, people to sit and attend because it, you know, makes some money. People

can't do it. It's too expensive to fly from San Francisco, where I'm at, all the way across the country to North Carolina. I would love to be there. I'm going to be coming back from Egypt, so I can't do it. But I really encourage you to go to Cosmic Summit dot com. Scroll the bottom first of all, look at the lineup. Then scroll the bottom and become a subscriber or sign up for the streaming twenty five

bucks a day. God, it's a nothing, it's totally nothing. So we're gonna hear from more of the people who are speaking and who are presenting there, and it's a really good one. I'm really encouraging these conferences to consider streaming as more of a foundation to reach out to people rather than getting seats filled because it's just so expensive. And I mean I have been doing and producing conferences and program directing conferences for a long long time and the technology

is much better than it used to be. It's so smooth, it's like watching TV and that's what you want. So again, check it out Cosmic Summit. We'll have George the producer on the program in a few weeks plus. We'll be interviewing a few of the guests that are are a few of the centers that are at the show for you to get some more insights. So check it out cosmicsummit dot com. Hey, I want to mention that our first tour is coming up. It's our Grand Egyptian Tour number five.

It's April twenty eight through May ninth, and I just want to mention this really quickly. People go, hey, you know what, that's really more money than I can deal with. Most of these tours are ten grand. I just saw a competitor posting for twelve thousand. That's ridiculous. That is totally ridiculous. And I'm very proud of our group and our team at Stabatur, which is Mohammed Imbrahem and his team. We've been working with him for a while now. Ours is less than five thousand. You're going, dude,

that's a lot of money. But if you can take a break, pull a little money out of your savings. This is a spring break. This is a once in a lifetime tour. I'm not going to I'll be doing it in twenty twenty five. I'm skipping a year, so this is the last available time I have because I'm in the middle of writing a bunch of stuff, a bunch of books and a bunch of articles and a bunch of research. So twenty twenty five I'm gonna kind of lay low, not

going to go to the East Coast or Europe. I think I might do one trip to Yucatan, no excuse me, to Guatemala with doctor Ed. That's going to be November. I think we're still working on in the details, but that's it for twenty twenty five. So if you want to come with me and Muhammad, go to Earth Ancients dot Com forward slash Tours.

I speak about it every single week. It is an amazing tour. Everything's covered, food, beverages, bus, ride, flight, accommodations and hotels accommodations on the Nile River with a private cruise ship, and that by itself is worth the price of admission. I mean, great to see you, great to be with you. This is not to be missed. And like I said, I'm not gonna be doing it in twenty twenty five. So if you want more information, go to earth ansients dot com Forward slash Tours,

look for the banner for Egypt. Come out and join us. It is fabulous. It's a rock bottom price and I don't know if I can hold it after this year, so consider it. It's fifty percent less than what most people pay for the tour and we have a blast earth acients dot

com Forward slash Tours. All right, that's it for today. I want to thank my guest, doctor Irving Finkel, coming to us from the British Museum in London, England, as always, the team of Gail Tour in Hollywood, California, and then there is Mark Foster in London, England, and everyone who makes this thing happen. You guys rock all right, take care of me well and we will talk to you next time. Studio