How to Write Cuneiform with Dr. Irving Finkel

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Over 5,000 years ago, in the land between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, one of the greatest technological leaps in human history occurred. One created one. neither stone nor gold, but with clay. This is cuneafon, the first ever writing. system known to archaeology that would spread across Mesopotamia and beyond. A writing system preserved today on thousands of fascinating tablets that continue to reveal more and more secrets about these ancient civilizations.

From simple pictograms used to count jars of beer in ancient Sumer, to the complex wedges that told the story of the Great Flood long before the Bible, cuneiform became the script of civilizations like the Babylonians, the Assyrians, and the Today we're joined by friend of the podcast, the one, the only, the legend, Dr. Irving Finkel, Senior Assistant Keeper at the British Museum.

Irving, it is such a pleasure to have you on the show. Delighted to be here. Let me tell you. Yes. It's been much too long. And the first time having you in our luxurious studio environment, I think they would call it. Yes. For bookcase surveys. Plants.

works. A cup of coffee for you as well. Marked. And we wanted to make you feel right at home for this talk. Absolutely relaxed and happy to talk to you. And to talk about Cunair Form, which is and forgive me if I'm incorrect, but this is the oldest

Script writing script known to archaeology. That is exactly what it is. This cuneiform writing system. When you look what comes to us from the ancient world and the very ancient world, the cuneiform script, which the earliest things are probably at the end about four thousand BC, three thousand nine may maybe even older than that. They're the earliest pieces that we can say are writing. They're part of the history of writing.

But they are, as you put it, the earliest that we know of. And it's very easy and very common in books and in conversation for people to say, Oh, this is the oldest language in the world. But this is an erroneous conclusion because when you have the earliest evidence, that is all it means it's the earliest evidence. And we actually have no idea at least I don't, of what

Plausibly or even implausibly, it might have existed before cuneiform came on the scene. It's perfectly possible there was a long history behind it, or prehistory behind it because

the very word history and prehistory, the distinction between them is predicated on the invention of writing. So before cuneiform you can say it's prehistory. But I often wonder, and we can talk about it, but I think the The intrinsic evidence from the earliest signs and the way they functioned suggests to me that they were derivative from something which already exists.

And to set the scene, Irving, I mean which languages, which cultures, which civilizations are we uh are we talking about that used cunareform as their writing system? Well chronologically the oldest is Sumerian. So the Sumerian language, which is more or less without parallel in the world. It's a kind of unique language because it doesn't have

what you might call brothers and sisters, like languages generally do. So for example, if you know Spanish, Italian, French, and Latin, you know they're kind of relatives in one way or another, and if you know one or two of them it's not so hard to learn another one because they're a family of languages.

And this principle that individual languages within a group are related, sometimes closely and sometimes not so closely, is probably true of languages as a whole, even if we can't always demonstrate it.

So when Sumerian comes into the world, maybe in three thousand nine hundred we first know that sort of date, four four thousand BC, something like that, the first evidence We have the first glimpse of what must have been, in my opinion, a whole family of languages, older languages, which simply never got recorded or we don't know anything about. Because you're never going to get a language, a complete functioning, literary spoken language.

in a balloon of its own creation. It must be an amalgamation, a descendant, all that sort of thing. So i when you think about the beginning of writing with the Sumerian business, you have a horizon and Sumerian it is rescued by the invention of script or the use of script just in time before it vanished.

So the cuneiform writing system which was used to write Sumerian, was quite early on, and this is a strange thing in the history of the world, The writing system, which was well used to express Sumerium, was also used for another language at the same time, which was unrelated to Sumerian. So this is what we call Akkadian, some sometimes Babylonian or Assyrian. They're di they're the dialects of the Akkadian language. And the Akkadian language Spoken like by King Sargon I, for example.

Is a Semitic tongue, a dead and ancient Semitic tongue, but strongly related to other ancient Semitic tongues and modern surviving Semitic tongues. So if you ever look into a text written in Babylonian or Syrian dialect. in cuneiform and you have a look at it written out in a type script or something, and you know a bit of Semitic like Arabic or Hebrew or Ethiopic or Aramaic or any of those languages, you know a bit of them, you'll see in this ancient script.

put into English writing, familiar things that you can see that must be a verb, that must be a preposition, that must be the feminine. You can tell something. So even though it's dead and buried, The Akkadian language if we call it the Akkadian language.

is a language which is accessible to us intellectually and and and in in in a comforting sort of way. It's a language that we know what it's like. And the Sumerian one He is really strongly in contrast to And after this big step when the two of them are written, as history progressed, the writing system, which was a proper writing system, was pressed into use to write other, even more unrelated languages around the Middle Eastern world.

So for example, old Persian and let me think Canaanite kind of languages. Elamite language, Ugaritic language, some Semitic, some not. And the the the old script with its kind of system was pressed into use to write these other languages, and once in a while many of the nations adopted the funny writing system, with the people who had to do it.

Because it was the only thing available to them. So it spread in a way that you think would be impossible because it was so complicated. And why didn't they make up their own writing? But they didn't. So you have the sort of lingua franca situation where people in different countries use the one writing system for their own language. And you get its survival on so many different things. I mean predominantly the clay tablets, isn't it?

Also, you mentioned the Persians there at the time of They say the Accumulate Persian Empire, and you have great stone inscriptions carved into mountainsides, and what is one of the languages they use at that time? It's cuneiform. So you see it's surviving on several different very durable materials. Actually that old Persian situation is rather remarkable because of what happened as a result of it. Because in Mesopotamia, as you say, most bits of cineform were written on bits of clay.

This is the standard thing. O over three thousand years of time we have these clay things. But at the same time, the kings of Babylonia and Assyria, if they wanted to make a big proclamation or a statement, like a law code, or they wanted to decorate their palaces with statements about how marvellous they were, they adapted the signs which are usually pressed into clay, that they could be carved into stone.

So there was a long tradition of stone inscriptions running side by side with clay inscriptions in the heyday of Mesopotamian culture. Now the old Persian kings Darius and Co, they decided they wanted to have proclamations of their own kind to write their old Persian language, and in the mountain situation that you describe, they did it rather splendidly because They had a flattened face of rock.

where they wrote the same triumphant, boastful description in their old Persian cuneiform, and in Babylonian cuneiform, and in Elamite cuneiform. So this was a tour de force. What's intriguing is that the Persian cuneiform was not like Babylonian or Sumerian cuneiform at all. Because to write proper cuneiform, you need about a thousand different signs. But when they wrote Old Persian, they more or less had an alphabet made up of signs.

Made out of wedges, cuneiform wedges, like the normal Babylonian or Sumerian signs, but very simplified. And they took the idea of the wedge shape in different combinations to make twenty-six or twenty-eight characters like an alphabet to write their language. So this great thing up on the mountain, it looked at first

like, oh no, another horrible cuneiform inscription we can't read. But because people knew the Persian language and they knew Persian literature, there were phenomena about the old Persian inscription, which opened up the decipherment of the old Persian cuneiform script. And what turned out what was so marvellous is that the next column, the Babylonian one, and the one after that, the Elamite one from Iran, were translations of the text written in the old Persian rather simple script.

into mainstream cuneiform In Babylonian or Elamite.

So because they could read the first one, which was really a bit of a lollipop once they got the hang of it, Once they'd done that and they found that the name Darius was written Dari Wu Ush, and it was King of Kings, King of the Mighty King or something, and they saw in the old Persian that these things were repeated it must be the king and his father with all his epithets and the grandfather with all his epithets, and they read the old person eventually, because the language was still alive.

So once they'd done that. The th what was miraculous in a sense was that looking at the Babylonian, where they didn't know which way up it went before, just staring at it, it became apparent that there were certain passages in the great run of text Which were repeated

verbatim three times in the text, like in the old person. So they said, Well, in that case, this must be the bit that says the king and his dad and his dad, with all their epithets, And so they assume that the first name, which was King Darius, as we call him, or Dariarwush, in the Babylonian and in the Elamite,

The beginning it ought to be something like Dari A Wu Ush. So they they took these syllables and they started thinking, and then they tried to find them wherever they were, and then they suddenly found, like that, a word or two in the Babylonian, which was a Semitic word. For example, m j just by piecing things together they got the word for river.

in Babylonian Nauru and which is like Nahru and this this word showed them instantly that this wall of unintelligible stuff with perhaps a glimmer here or a glimmer there was writing a language which will submit it. And once they knew that they had the Hebrew and Arabic dictionaries.

They had the grammars of all the Semitic languages. So every time they got a new idea, they could test it against the old Persian to find the words that matches. And that's how it all opened up. So that mountain you talked about.

is the key which unlocked the whole of the cuneiform world, rather like the Rosetta Stone of Eastern. Is this the Rosetta Stone of Cuneiform? It is or yes, exactly. Exactly so. It's so interesting. And I with that case With the Persian and the Behistun inscription is so that's the first millennium B C and that's uh several thousand years after the creation of Cuneir form, but I think it's testament to

that example alone to the endurance of that writing script over all of those millennia. I must ask before we delve into the origins of Canaire Form,

The majority of Canaire Form inscriptions that survive are on clay. Yes. Why clay? Of all materials, why do they use clay? Well, the thing about the script is that the beginning signs were drawn, as we will talk about in a minute, but after a while they simplified the drawings in order to make d diagrammatic representations of signs, not by a continuous line like you do with a pencil, but by individual strikes of a stylus which impressed the clay.

And why they took clay as their medium is an interesting question. But the thing is, if they hadn't used clay which was abundant, and in fact clay underpinned the whole of Sumerian culture, because everything was made of clay I don't know if they wore clay, but in the underworld people munched on it for lunch. I mean clay was the underpinning of the whole of the culture and it was used for everything possible. And of course the the the banks of the Euphrates and Tigris have

Many outcrops of excellent quality clay without stuff in them, you know, bits and pieces and stones, but really high quality clay which will take a very sharp impression. So I suppose when they started out They might have used skins, they might have used black. leather or something like they might have done. They might have written on wood if they could. But wood was always in short supply in Mesopotamia.

And clay was abundant, and so somehow it just went hand in glove with the first recording that you could make a bit of clay into a kind of tablet, make marks on it. Then when it dried, they would sp they'd survive. Somebody else could come along and they would read the signs and they would understand what you meant. So it was the natural thing. And of course.

The other thing is that the the clay in the modern Western world, you associate it with either being a potter who has clay all over their clothes and all over the carpet and gets into trouble, or messy stuff at school when children I'm supposed to make something and actually spend the afternoon throwing bits at one another. It's all to do with mess. But the thing is In in Mesopotamia it was nothing like that. It was their natural resource.

And the Sumerians and the Babylonians after them, they ha they were masters of clay in the control and use of clay. On the highest level, it was their thing. Their hands were a kind of Yeah, naturally adjusted to it. So I think that's that it was just free, it was endless.

And it would dry in the hot sun or or out of the hot sun and be perfectly usable for ever and ever. So it seems the right natural thing. And of course they were perfectly right, because everything that we have is going to rot, fall to pieces. Everything on computers is gonna go down the toilet for certain. So in the end, it'll only be the clay tablets which survive, mark my words. So hundreds of thousands of years from now, people will learn about humans.

From that. That's it. And they'll say, didn't they realize how stupid it was to invent the internet? That kind of thing.

And must also mention the styluses as well, they made from reeds, local reeds. Yes. Oh they they certainly are. I I mean the the thing is the very earliest pictures, which we always talk about first'cause they come first. Should we do that? Should we do that? The thing about them is they use this clay like the later proper cuneiform used at as their support system in that It's really always been that. So when they did their first signs, the first conception that you can do a mark on a surface.

that another person can come along and see it and understand what it meant. When this idea came into the world, it was an important thing and it led to the creation of this script. and its ancestral form, the earliest of which we know, has a a whole fruit bowl full of signs, which are drawn in the surface of a piece of clay,

with a point. For example, you can imagine having a nice piece of clay and having a pencil with a respectable point and dragging it in the clay. You can draw in the clay as you would on a piece of paper. And the first I don't know, centuries, we don't know how long really. But the first stage, so to speak, when they wrote the earliest signs, they were drawn in the clay.

And this is just so we get our times right, for the earliest signs, do we think at the moment about early fourth millennium BC? I think so. I mean th the problem, among other problems, it always comes up in archaeology when it's really important. Is that there's no archaeological stratified evidence for anything to do with the earliest

inscriptions, lots of them are found, for example, reused to fill up holes in the ground and that kind of thing, which is the worst diagnostic source you could ever have. So actually, outside dating for this uh in or around four thousand thing is hopeless. So what we've got is s of t tablets in early script. of slightly evolving form. We can say this looks like the earliest, this looks like the next next, this looks like the next, that kind of thing.

And when we when we have stuff that we can date, when we extrapolate backwards the sort of interval that must have gone before we get to the bit we can date. I would think that the first efforts to do writing on clay, the first experimental things, would be before 4000 BC. Let's say for the sake of argument, 4200. There's no evidence, but it's a good, comfortable working figure.

And so why do we think that around that time This early writing script I can see something called like proto-cunare form. Yes. Why we think it emerges. Well, the received law when I was a student.

was this, that Sumerian in its early form manifested itself in the world, in a cultural and political environment, in which the country which ancient Iraq Of course we're talking about the ancient landscape of Iraq was not under a single ruler, but consisted of more or less independent conglomerations which we call city states. Where quite a lot of people lived together under somebody who was in charge, they be a temple, they be a roof.

a local N or no no ruler's not quite the word, but some somebody in charge of it with a kind of structure over seeing everybody and taking responsibility for security on the one hand.

And food and drink for everybody and the tilling of the soil and the production of stuff. Some kind of um early structure like this, where these city states functioned independently of one another, quite extensive in reach and duration, Sometimes harmoniously, sometimes not, but underneath I think they had a kind of agreed sense of unity, because there's a very early seal attested on some clay surfaces, where the symbols which represent these cities are all put in a row.

like that, like on the head of note paper. And they had these symbols. Sometimes we can understand them. They sometimes they're what people would call mythological birds or something like that. But they're something like that. avine forms or symbols, one for each city, all in a row, meaning that underpinning them was some Unity.

And I think it would manifest, for example, if there was an invasion from outside, then they would all pour together. When there's peace and quiet, then there's rivalry and maybe there's sometimes struggle or dynastic this and that. But in principle, that's how it worked, as far as I understand it. And when you have such an institution with a central authority, which is crucial,

where ingoing and outgoing stuff needs to be controlled and monitored. The theory is that bookkeeping, accountability, and control for a large number, an ungainly number of persons and such perhaps in an ungainly number of areas. required a recording system to keep track of everything and ultimately to make people accountable for what they were responsible for. It's the emergence in the world of the inland revenue argument.

Well, we can all um have something to say about that. But in principle this was the received law when I was a student, and one of the reasons which makes it compelling is you have there a massive architecture which requires clarity, with people in charge and people doing what they were told, and and all that. So it was in that melia of small urban conglomerations, united by the name of the place, the local deity,

uh festivals and so forth that ran through the year, all those things for sure were in place. That th th set these up as more or less independent users. And The same situation prevailed in many of them.

And there's a horizon whereby not that somebody rang everybody else and said, Listen guys, we gotta invent writing'cause we can't cope with everything here, we're gonna do that but somehow and this also shows that there was some level of contact of a harmonious type, you get the emergence of the first idea of recording on clay using these drawn characters.

On this material which once was once finished, once completed, will be Put in the shadow o of the sun un by a wall, and half an hour later w the surface would be y you could pick it up, it wouldn't smudge or smear, it was ideal in a way, you just wrote the thing, dried it, and there you were. So this got off the ground gradually and gradually. And so you have as we uh as led to understand it by the great sages who run the seriology, that you have this r uh panoply of drawn shapes

with curvy lines if necessary to represent what they're talking about. Like you'd have a drawing of a foot, which look like a foot with a heel and a bit curving round above the toes, with curvy lines and everything that you draw

unless you're a robot, when you draw things there are curves in all of them. And what actually happened is there was a shift at some point from the drawings on clay into a system whereby you could do the same images with a straight edge, like the edge of a chopstick or something, where you'd analyse, say, the ankle and foot, which is a curvy picture, like an a like a a child would draw a foot.

To make two long ones and one at the bottom and another bit on top to make the shape of the foot out of small straight lines. And when that when that border is crossed, from realistic drawings or what people would like to call curvy linear into cuneiform where they're reduced to straight edges within the whole of the pic the individual sign picture. Then you get the appearance of cuneiform. And that took place

probably at the beginning of the third millennium. So originally the the drawings were what you would do Very simply, if if you want to do a river, you draw two parallel lines. If you want to do a woman, you do a triangle with a hole in the middle. If you want to do an animal, you do the animal head. All those sorts of things. Very simple. And in fact, if you look At a list of early pictographs and compare it with

with the sort of drawings that children do when they're about two and a half or three, when they first try to reduce the universe around them to recognizable symbols. There's something common. So if a j child draws a teapot, It will be a bit like a pictographic sign to represent a vessel that you might have on an early tablet. Tyler Eddick here from 2311 Racing. The rush of racing, nothing beats it. But Chumba Casino comes close. Fun games, Ready to hit the throttle? Get in the driver's seat.

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I tell you what, we're gonna see if I can use the iPad here and and get some images up for you which we could talk through if you're you're up for it, Irving. I am. It's a bit trifle anachronistic, but we can let that go. Yes. Hey, look, we're trying new things here. Um but I have One particular tablet up here. Yes. Now do you recognise this tablet? I do recognise that tablet.

So it's made of firstly we can see very high quality clay. Right. And it's the kind of clay that the pictures which are in it are sharp and well defined. And it's been ruled into boxes, horizont. So it's it's some kind of administrative document where items are listed. together with quantities of them, and each message, so to speak, which is part of the whole, is put in a ruled box.

So that it could be read in sequence and it's a very orderly bookkeeping matter. I mean, you there's no nothing chaotic about it.

There's nothing improvised about it. It's probably about two thousand eight hundred, or something of that kind. I'm not sure exactly when. But it is part of a long tradition of impeccable bookkeeping in terms of the design, the form, the characters that are drawn there, the numbers and the accuracy of it, because As time goes by, many of these tablets where people are forced to write down the quantities on the back, they have the total.

So there's none of this winging it and saying about fifty six or something. They have to add up. Because in the structure of the organization, whoever wrote that tablet knew that somebody higher up the pecking order was going to look at this tablet and make sure it was right. So accountability is definitely intrinsic.

to the whole structure. And what I also love owing, we have this image. This feels like a pictogram what it's showing here. It looks like a a a jar. It is a jar. In fact, there's a whole series of jars. And th this is what happened. The primary one was used for beer, because beer is a very important thing in the history of the world, appears on stage at the very earliest moment and never goes away. So the sign for beer, which

In Sumerian it's pronounced cash. This is the word for beer. If you go into a pub now, You well, I was going to say you you have to give the cash to get the beer, but of course they don't take cash anymore anyway, so the whole thing is redundant. But in principle, this tells you a lot about the script. So for example Everybody, I think, will agree with this map.

That when this when the script was in its nascent phases, in its early phases, and somebody had this idea, and a couple of other people said, This is brilliant. And then someone said, Okay, let's do it. And then they say, Well, we've got to have a sign for this, this, this, this, this, this, this, and then they gradually do. And there are pictographic recognizable things. As they do that You have the situation that you have to have a sign for beer.

So they do a a b uh a jug of a type which has a pointy bottom, which I think can s you can if the ground is flooring is soft, can be made to stand upright. I that's the what uh kind of like amphora at the end of the thing. That sort of thing, but stick in the ground. So the basic vessel is used for the word cash.

which is beer. If a Sumerian is sitting here, he will be very pleased to see that you've highlighted cash, the word for beer, and think you were a right thinking chap. But the thing is this This illustrates two things. That there were lots of different vessels.

And there were lots of different things that can go in vessels. So when it started out, you could have the vessel and then you could have the drawing of the same vessel with something inside it. Or you could have a drawing of something else inside that picture. And so you have frame pictographic framework of a sign like vessel and as the script develops. they realize by plonking in a small thing, you extend the range of a given sign

into other things which naturally, semantically or intellectually, are obviously connected. So that was a very remarkable matter, very fruitful. So that looks to me like a straight sign for beer. Standing on end, but there's something else. Because cash, we agree, is an essential part of the human world. But when the script moves from doing a picture of something that everybody would understand, like for example, a milk bottle on a piece of paper for the milkman, no problem about it.

That tradition of signs that looked like what they meant, or signs that looking like what they meant had an extra component to show what they really meant, is one big sweep of the evolution of the writing. But there's another thing, because they didn't only want to record pictures of ide of ideas, they wanted to record language. So, um in Sumerian you have animate and inanimate. So ani means his and b means it.

So somebody in ancient sumo, since you say its all the time, like you say his or hers in English all the time, they found themselves in a position that they had to have a sign for it. And you can't draw an it or a muchness or any of those complicated things. And there are many things that you can't draw. So they made a decision. And this, in my opinion, is how it works. They decided to use a simple sign with only four wedges, which is what it turned into, for it.

So when you have that sign in a cuneiform sentence, where the words are not divided up, they're all written in a continuous line, when you reach the site that sign in its form like that or in a later form, it can either mean beer, and you have to know this. Or it can mean it. Which means it's linked to the word that came before. Or this symbol here. That very symbol. In this case there's no question that it means beer. Yes. Because this is an accounting tech

with lots of numbers. You see there are lots of circles and half circles. Oh yes. And the lights. They are all numbers. So th th the the half ones are ten, and the others are one or sixty, but there are more subtle ones as well.

And as the script developed and this s script has developed to a long way, it's written not with a point but with with a with a stylus, once you get to this stage The writing of numbers and the concomitant numerical system kept pace with it. So that r literacy and numeracy, as you would say if you were running a primary school, at the beginning of history evolved together.

And th many things about that are remarkable because, for example It's shown and established from the beginning of the study of this material that the Mesopotamians, the Sumerians, first and then the Assyrians and Babylonians, they had a mathematical system which was sexuggestible. That is to say, their convenient starting point on which everything was was plastered, was the number six. And mathematicians t tell me that sixty is m more flexible and more useful than ten.

Ten is the natural thing because barring accidents are People have ten digits and everybody in the world counts on their fingers. So one it might assume, although anthropologists or mathematicians will probably throw up their hands in horror as such a simplistic argument.

But you might say that the counting counting's intense was intrinsic to the human brain, and in fact you can burn me at the stake and I'll never give up that argument. But the decimal system, at the very earliest Devil, chronologically, in this long evolving story, was limited to certain materials. So there were things like barley which are measured in sixties, and other things measured in tens.

So what happened was that at a certain level they reserved counting in sixty for things in a sorum, this, this, this, this and th all those things are sixties, and those things over there we have to count in ten. And what happened was that the decimal system, practically speaking, vanished. So you have a w what turned into a pr grown up cuneiform when we look at a later thing, you have a single upright wedge. which is the number one and also the number sixty.

So so that you have combinations of wedges from one to sixty.

w w which explain everything very beautifully. The reason why this is so important is that when people say like we don't need universities to study seriology, it's no use to anybody, it's a waste of time, has nothing to do with us today, and all those sort of well known arguments, the fact is that the division of our time into sixty seconds and then sixty minutes and three hundred and sixty degrees of the circle are a direct inheritance

of the numerical system which is already expressed in that tablet that 60 is the basic counting system. And it went from course Sumerian to Babylonian all the way down to the end of the cuneiform epoch. and was scooped up by the Greeks when they went to Babylon to find out what they knew about everything, and found they knew rather a lot, and they exported data sexagesimally

stored in their within their own astronomy and mathematical system. So that's why eventually we have sixty seconds in a minute.

It's amazing though that that kind of idea of sixty can originate with like s some of the earliest cunare form tablets that survive in these commerce transactions, you know, for the trade routes of Mesopotamia at that time. Well, the information in them usually involves produce within the periphery of the estate, the surrounding fields and the organized work, labour and so forth, but also with trade.

Both within ancient Iraq and beyond the borders, because I think trade goes back to the very beginning of time, long before this tablet was written in what did we say, two thousand eight hundred BC? Early third third millennium B C.

And so well well Irving, should we move on then from this? So we kind of covered that early story of cuneiform with pictograms. So like from there the evolution of cuneiform It's not a good thing. like at one moment it goes from pictures to what we're more associated with today. It's it's quite a long evolution of Cune Air Form into perhaps the most

detailed creation of it in the i the first millennium BC? Well, if we look at a a list of early pictographs drawn with a point where it all begins, you have signs where anybody, when they see them, know what they stand for. So th that is a crucial point. That's a crucial point. So we have a a writing system which when we first encounter it serves to communicate ideas without any language.

So you can write numbers and you can write uh picture signs to to create a message without any grammar or syntax involved in it, just a simple kind of accounting system. It must be that the very earliest signs worked this way, and very gradually it occurred to them that signs could be pressed into different kinds of function. One of them would be to express grammar, the particles of grammar, the elements of grammar, and like using the word for beer to write it.

Which as otherwise is a difficult problem. So this is an ongoing system that you have a very stark and simple pictographic level. which, in one way or another, evolves into the situation where the individual signs are drawn with straight edges, and the straight edges themselves at the beginning

are very pictograph like. So when you look at early cuneiform, you can see what they come from. You can see it it's the head of a boar with a horn or something like that. You can tell that they are pictographic. But what happens over a long period of time is that the drawing of the signs it stylizes and stylizes to the point that the innate pictographic quality disappears from view.

that the signs become in a sense abstracted from their origin. This is an important matter because when you start to learn cuneiform, you never start with the pictures. You only start with the developed cuneiform signs, of which there are about nine hundred or a thousand, something like that.

And as time goes by, abandoning their artistic curvy forms into straight edge and straight edge and rigor and system, then they become further and further divorced from their origins, so that for example, if you have a tablet written five hundred years after the beginning of cuneiform, nobody could tell you what it was about by looking at the signs.

and saying, Oh, this is a chap, this is a that, this is that or it must be this like you people used to do with Egyptian hieroglyphs before they knew how they functioned. So this is a an ongoing process from curvy pictographic signs drawn with a point. into mature cuneiform. And if you look through the millennia, because we have proper cuneiform by two thousand eight hundred, all the way down to the first century AD, so this is a very, very long process, gradually

Over this process, two things happened. One is that the way people wrote their signs in Babylonia in the south was slightly different from the way they wrote them in the north. And this is interesting because the Akkadian language, which we know at the beginning of this writing nearly, the Akkadian tongue sharpens out into an Assyrian dialect, as we said, and a Babylonian dialect. So the language

The two languages divulge, but so do the signs in a matching way. So that for example, if you know about cuneiform, if you see a tablet without even reading any of the words, you know it's a Babylonian hand or an Assyrian hand. So the two functions run in parallel. That's one thing, and the other thing is, and this is the most important insight into the whole matter in my opinion, is this.

It's the stylization and the acceptance by all concerned of what the form of a sign is. So if you have a situation that fertile imaginations of lively and competitive individuals in a position of authority with a bit of power, and this new writing system comes along and they get the hang of it.

So they all do it and they all think about it and then they all have these signs and they all have their own signs for this and then someone says, Oh, we've got to have a We've got to have a sign for chariot wheel and we've got to have a sign for telephone box and all this kind of thing. So before you know where you are, you have a proliferation of pictograms which are only really understandable to the people who invented the particular ones. This never happens.

So when we have a horizon With early dynastic signs and pre early dynastic signs on clay tablets from places in Mesopotamia, there are not seven or eight systems running, it's one system. System. And they may be the odd thing people say, Oh, this looks like the way lagash people do the sign for. Maybe. But in principle it's one system. And this is, in my opinion, immensely diagnostic. because the natural f function here would be for things to proliferate

And people to compete and people to set up their own thing and we're doing it this way if you don't like it and all that. Because that's what human beings do, and these Sumerians, they may look stiffish on their monuments and in their chariots with big noses and funny flowered skirts. But they were exactly the same as people are today. This is a very important principle, and you can attribute to these people the same kind of psychological trick.

characteristics and behaviour, in my opinion, as you would witness in any number of persons surrounding us in London. So this is s serious matter. So What happens here is we have to assume that the the amphicony uh which is implied by this seal with all these cities in conjunction must have had political consequences. and it must have been that somebody called a summit at some point to say we all know Ladies and gentlemen, about this new writing nonsense.

Well, it's gonna be very useful to us all, but the first thing we have to do is to standardize it, otherwise it will be self defeat. This is the sort of thing they should have done when they invented the internet. But of course, man never learns from his own history, otherwise we wouldn't have any more wars, for example. Just an aside there. But the thing is It seems to me compellingly certain that the direction of the script was controlled from the beginning.

And the only way that can happen is by one human brain, not by a committee. There must have been a person who exercise sufficient compelling power and and authority and charisma, who saw what would happen if this was left to run naturally, who took over and supervised it. And the thing is this. despite the two languages, and the evolution of the languages themselves,'cause all languages evolve, and the evolution of the way the signs were written, the repertoire was never allowed to grow wild.

all the way down to the end of time. This seems to me immensely significant, so that scribes In the second millennium they knew what all the signs were, they had their lexical text with all the lists of words and the w the words for colours, for lands, for different kinds of wood, different kinds of stone. And they were copied and copied and copied and copied. And the writing evolved, it got more casual, it got more Disouded.

stylistic changes in the writing and the language, as I said, changes like Chaucer in modern English, there the language evolves, the language evolves. But the cuneiform conception ran clear and free like a river. Without any real deviation. And in my opinion, that is not a natural matter. So, especially, for example, you could say this. In the first millennium BC we jump ahead a long way.

to when there were like universities, so to speak, in Babylonia. So in in in the city of Uruk, in the city of Babylon, in the city of Borsipa, probably a f a few other places. There were libraries originally, temporal libraries, which blossomed out. into some kind of establishment where Scholarly matters and astronomical matters and mathematical things and medicine were studied and developed in conjunction people working together. They had kind of schools of stuff, very important matters.

And sometimes we have a very significant document. Medine or something, and it says the bottom's ruled off tablet of Mr So and so from Babylon. Do not show this to anybody from Uruk. Not allowed. So, you know, when you read the cuneiform, it just looks like cuneiform, but when you suddenly hear the voice and someone wagging a finger, don't let those bastards get hold of this and this is our stuff. They're not allowed to. So it's not copyright for money.

But nevertheless there is a sort of guild or some such conception keeping a rivalry among them free, but even given that You don't get sign forms going off at a mad tangent. So if they don't like us, we'll have our own we'll invent a sign for this. Well it never happens. And th it's easy to overlook this point.

But I don't think it's easy to overemphasise it because it seems to me beyond doubt that this must be a central truth about this script, that there was a control from day one and it was a self-regulating Casino is here. Play at the store, play at home, play with the ball. What are you waiting for? Don't delay. Chumba Casino is free to play.

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Looking at a pictogram or one from the Sumerian times and then one from let's say Ashabanapal's library in the first one in BC, you wouldn't be able to read it. Except in some cases. Once in a while you might. You might have an inkling of it or even identify it, but it that in general that's that's true. So there are other things about this canary form writing system which are important.

Because just as you you have a sign for beer and its being one sign, the principle runs that a given sign can sometimes have multiple uses. And this is what bewilders people who throw up their career as computer programmers and shopkeepers and decide to do a seriology at university when they discover this. series of unfortunate events that lies ahead of them because again a given cuneiform sign can have multiple uses, that's to say, it can function with more than one meaning when you look at it.

More than one semantic significance. It can have more than one phonetic value. So it can have different pronunciations. And then it can be used in a different way. So for example, they have things called determinatives. Have you ever looked at anything about ancient Egyptian, you know that when they did the picture writing, they had special signs like for weapon or for person or something like that, which they draw in front of the hieroglyphs for the word that follows.

So these are called determinatives. And they are not pronounced, but they are written with signs which have their other meanings, both in terms of sound and meaning. It's it's ridiculous. Let me explain. There's a simple sign with two horizontals and then one vertical. So that can be pronounced like this, Gish. So in Sumerian, the word Gish means wood. So if we're writing a Sumerian text and we're going to talk about a table made of a certain kind of wood, you write the sign Gish.

as a determinative, so that the scribe reading out to the king about the new furniture, he would read the name of the table, but not the determinative, because that's for the reader only. So this sign Gish can be used i in one particular instance to mean wood determinative silently. Next thing is it can mean wood wood. So you go into the forest and you cut down wood. Here's your sign where it's the sign wood. Then there's another side, as I explained,

about the sound. For example, because Sumerian and Akkadian use the same writing system, the two languages are embed with one another in the most intimate fashion. They are interwoven You have a bilingual intellectual Culture and the two things are interwoven. So when we are writing and we have the sign gish, which can mean the next word is wood, it can mean wood. Now, Sumerian Gish, wood, in Babylonian is itzu. S with a dot. So the word for wood in Babylonian is eat.

So you can write the sign Sumerian Gish in a sentence. Which when you read it and you're reading Babylonian, you have to have the Babylonian word, so you have to know that the sign Gish also is Itsu in Babylonian and supply that in the Babylonian text. Ah, so almost like kind of a translation of the word in the cunei form, right? Yeah.

Th this isn't a mad principle. The only the only commonplace example that people encounter in the world is this, that if you write the dollar sign in a sentence, a hundred million dollars, Uh when you put the S with two lines in it, no one says a hundred million S's with two lines through it. They supply the word dollar immediately, largely because people are more interested in money than anything else.

But this is not an obstacle in reading when you have such a thing in English. You just do it. Well in in the cuneiform world you do it all the time. So these are the consequences that the signful wood which is Gish and Sumerian can be used to write itsu in Akkadian, but it can also be used to write as a syllable in Akkadian, not in it meaningful in its own way, but as a component writing something else. where the sound is or it's occurs within a longer word which has nothing to do with wood.

So for example, let's say you wanted to write the word miss when you were at school, miss, miss, like that. So you have to have the sign me, mi and the sign is I S. And the sign Itsu can also be Isu. And Etsu and Etsu. All the related sounds can be used with the sign which in Sumerian means wood, in Akkadian can mean wood, but also can be used just as syllables in a bigger word. Though you would write me is

And when you saw this uh as a Sumerian, th there are different ways you could interpret it. I don't know if we're going to get into hot water here, but let's imagine that you're a Sumerian, you see the sign me and the sign is. Well

can mean night or it can mean black, depending on how you pronounce it. But if you had black wood in Sumerian, you'd have to have wood with black after it. So it can't be me is, it would have to be gish me, so it's not that. So me has to be a phonetic thing spelling a sound.

So write me and then if if the next sign has the value beginning with I, well if it's me, e it's very likely to link. So you write me is, which means miss, and then you put your hand up. So this simple illustration Of the multiple uses of signs of the Is quite bewildering when you first see it. But if you lie down in a darkened room and drink cold water regularly, it'll come to you in a flash. But the point is this that the signs are multivalent. So when you have a sign which has one set

of phonetic values and one set of meanings, sometimes there are many of them. It's a process of elimination, is it? It's a process of elimination. And reading as much many texts as possible because what happens is that you get into the way of thinking of the Babylonian scribe. You you know what usages are common, what are uncommon, you know.

You become so familiar with the matter that there's no difficulty. And after about twenty five years, you can read for the I think I must admit, especially for like Audio, i it's a it's a complex topic, isn't it, Cuner for me, trying to explain the many different pieces of of this writing system and as you said, it takes a long, long time to master. So I'm very grateful for you to still delve into the weeds about it.

But let's bring us back up from the detail now. How long does cuneform endure for as a writing system? I mean if we started more than five thousand years ago. How long does it continue for these various Mesopotamian societies? Well, I think the latest dated canoform tablet is from the first century. D. It's an almanac, an astronomical almanac. And so at that period. You have to probably the remnants of these s as it were universities in verticomas.

from earlier centuries where things were still studied, there were still people looking at the skies, making calculations, thinking things, making records. And reading older things. And th the number of people who did it must have gradually reduced because at that period um Aramaic had supplanted the Babylonian language as a spoken language at the end of the first millennium.

probably increasingly through the first millennium, and then uh Greek and then Arabic and th th into the modern world. And so you have to imagine that in these places in Babylonia There were old men and less old men, and then not many old men, and then the last guy who could read the stuff expired, and that was that. And at that moment, cuneiform writing became extinct.

And that must have happened. But the language, of course, not. And there are outpockets of spoken Aramaic, even in northern Iraq. The w where people today speak a form of Aramaic which is a linear direct descendant of the Aramaic spoken when the Assyrians and Babylonians were running the country in the first millennium. They just survived among those people and they speak that.

But The Babylonian tongue probably reduced massively in comparison with Aramaic as time went by, not least for the fact that you could write Aramaic with an alphabet.

And you could write it with twenty six letters in ink and gradually, gradually you'd have the movement that recording on clay, with all its complexity and all its training, gradually became redundant in the commercial world or in the business world or in the administrative world, and it was reduced to these old crusty blokes looking from their ivory towers at the moon and predicting things for the future.

So I think it's not over over fanciful to think of that romantic, but rather in inspiring kind of thing. So probably sometime in the first century AD, the day came that if you'd um gone with your m microphone and tape recorder to Babylon looking for someone who could tell you about the old stories. There might be people who remember them by heart, but not who could read the inscription.

I I think one of my favourite artifacts, Irving, kind of a the kind of Colliding of the Greek world, but also Mesopotamian Babylon. is one of the Cuneir form tablets, one of the astronomical diary entries that you have on display at the British Museum. Which has that very pithy line, The King died. Yeah, and that's all they say. That's what they say. And Alexander the Great is the king in question. Excuse me. I mean, what a king. Yes.

But uh but you know that and that is written in cuneiform in the fourth century B C makes you jump, doesn't it? And that's so that's the s so the scholars are still using cuneiform to for like stuff and stuff in that stuff. Yeah, so I th I think

That that was one of the very institutions where the diaries were kept which soldiered on and soldiered on until the first century AD. It's really rather exc it's quite exciting when you see the name Alexander written in cuneific form for the first time. That also makes you jump like any

My only other one, before we completely wrap up, is that I see on many of these Cunareform tablets, like especially from the time that I know you've done lots of work around, like the the Ark tablet, uh the Babylonian map of the world, which have the Cuneir form on top. All of these symbols are jam-packed together. And for someone who doesn't know it, it's very difficult to dis distinguish symbol from symbol.

And I guess also kind of sound from sound. And word from word. And word from word. Or did they ever leave spaces or anything like that? No, they they don't. They weren't allowed to. They were taught to write in a continuum. And in the best literary tablets we can see that in addition to that They had right justification. So on the Gilgamesh tablets of Ashabanipal, which are the highest kind of quality scribal achievements.

All the lines end at the same point and if the line is empty and there's uh s extra space, they leave the space in the middle and they move the others up to the right hand side. So they had right justification. But by and large, it is a bewildering thing when you start off that there's no gap between the words. But as you jump in, eventually you never think about it because somehow your mind adjusts.

adjust to it. I mean a a good a good analogy here is if you study languages like Arabic or Hebrew People who write Arabic and Hebrew don't write the vowels in. So when you start it out, you think, oh, how on earth can they do this? You know, without any vowels. They've just got the skeleton. But people who whose languages, they just read it and there's never any doubt. And it's m something comparable to that. I think yeah we'll have to save

going into some of those exemplar conner form texts from the Library of Ashurbanapal for another day, won't we? And you see because that's the pin those are the pinnacle of offices. They are just lots and lots to say. Well, but I think until that point, it just goes for me to say As always, thank you so much for coming on the podcast. A fountain of knowledge. Well it's a great privilege for me and a great pleasure at the same time. Talking old things.

I hope you enjoyed the episode just as much as we did. Yeah. Thank you for listening to this episode of The Ancients. Please follow the show on Spotify. you get your podcasts, that really helps us and you'll be doing us a big favour. If you'd also leave us a rating as well, well we'd really appreciate that. Don't forget you can also sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries with a new release. Every week. Sign up at historyhit.com. slash subscribe.

That's all from me. I'll see you in the next episode.