Deciphering Secrets of Ancient Civilizations, Noah's Ark, and Flood Myths | Lex Fridman Podcast #487

Where and when did writing originate in human civilization? Let’s go back a few thousand years.

The first attempts at writing that we could call writing go back to the middle of the 4th millennium, say around 3500 BC, something like that. There were people in the Middle East, individuals who lived between the Euphrates and Tigris Rivers. They had clay as their operating material for building and all sorts of other purposes.

Eventually, as a writing support, they somehow developed the idea of the basis of writing, which means that you can make a sign. People agree on it, on a surface, that another person, when they see it, knows what sound it engenders. That is the essence of writing: There’s an agreed system of symbols that A can use and B can then play back, either in their heads or literally with their voices, a bit like a gramophone record.

So when it really began is a terribly awkward question for us, because the truth of the matter is, we have no idea when anything began. All we can say is that the oldest evidence we have is around 3500 BC, but whether that was anywhere near the time or the stage when this started off for the first time seems to me very unlikely.

Among these Mesopotamians around 3500 BC, they started to do this. They made up signs which everybody understood, and they could write simple pictographic messages. Foot is a foot, leg is a leg, and barley is barley. Then gradually, they had the idea of how you could represent numerals.

They also had the idea that the pictures could represent sounds. Once they had the idea that you could write sounds with pictures, that’s the crucial thing: A picture of a foot not only meant foot, but it meant the sound of the word for foot.

Once this happened, some probably very imaginative and clever persons had a kind of light-bulb moment when they realized that they could develop a whole panoply of signs which could convey sound. Once you had that, you were liberated from pictographic writing into a position where you could record language—language, grammar, and all the rest of it. Before long, there were proverbs and literature and all the other things that got written down.

So it was a pretty gigantic step whenever it was taken, but we really have no idea when it was first taken. The first evidence we have presents a sort of clear-ish picture. It was simple and it got more complicated, then it became magnificent.

With all the signs, a fluent, well-trained scribe could not only write down the Sumerian language, which was one of the native tongues of Iraq, or the Babylonian language, which was the other main language of Iraq, but also any other language he heard.

If somebody came speaking French ahead of their time and spoke out loud, he could record with these signs the sound of French. We have examples of various languages in the world around them in the Bronze Age, which were written in cuneiform purely by ear. Often, the scribes who recorded by dictation wrote stuff they couldn’t understand, but somebody else could read and understand it.

So what you have is, long before the alphabet, when the alphabet was not even a dream, a complex, bewildering-looking, off-putting writing system, which was actually very beautiful, very flexible, and lasted for well over 3 millennia, probably closer to 4 millennia.

It took a long time for the alphabet, which anybody would say was much more useful and much more sensible, to displace it. So it’s one of the major stages of man’s intellect, because quite soon after writing first took off, the signs began to proliferate, and someone said, “Hey, we haven’t got a sign for this sound,” or, “We haven’t got a sign for this idea.”

So it began to swell out. At some extremely remarkable stage, one—probably only one—person suddenly realized that if there was no control, the signs would grow exponentially until it was all nonsense and everybody had their own writing. The second thing is that no one could remember them unless they were written down in a retrievable way.

So they invented not only writing, they invented lexicography, which means that early in the 3rd millennium, they put down all the things that were made of wood, all the things that were made of reeds, all the names of colors and countries, all the gods, and everything. They made a systematic attempt to standardize these signs, to make them retrievable, and of course to teach them.

Having exercised that rigor from the outset, it meant that the thing became streamlined and stayed more or less as it was all the way through, for 3 millennia or more. The stamp put on it by those early visionaries—not only those who came up with the system and how it would work, but those who preserved it and safeguarded it—was fantastically effective.

It means that there were scholars in Babylon in the 3rd century or the 2nd century, when Alexander was there, for example. If somebody dug up a tablet in very early writing, they would have a pretty good idea what it meant. They would recognize the signs, even though they were so ancient, and they’d see the relationships between them.

So you have a fantastically strong system where the spinal cord was structured in a lexicographic, regular system. Lexicography and what the signs were were jealously safeguarded and protected, and it lasted fantastically.

We should say that the name of that system that lasted for 3000 years is cuneiform.

Yeah. So in the 19th century, about 1840 or 1850, they started to find these things on excavations in Iraq, in the big Assyrian cities and sometimes farther south, in the Babylonian cities. They found these clay tablets, which in the ground lasted unimaginable lengths of time. They were all written in what we call cuneiform script.

The cuneiform part of it means wedge-shaped, because cuneus in Latin means wedge. When they first saw these signs, they realized that a cluster of marks broke down into different arrangements of triangular shapes. It’s most clear on the Assyrian reliefs, where the writing is very big and you can easily tell that they were that shape. On a tablet, the wedge is not quite so predominant.

So that was it. They first called them cuneatic or cuneiform, and the word stuck. Of course, growing up in the British Museum and reading these things for a living becomes a kind of lifetime’s work to make sure that everybody in the country knows what cuneiform means. Once in a while you meet somebody who has never heard of the word at all, and this is appalling. People do survive, however.

But it’s an important mission because such an achievement by man and so much knowledge was encapsulated in these lumps of clay. They used it for everyday things like letters, business documents, and contracts. This is one thing. Then the kings wrote long, elaborate accounts of their campaigns and military activities.

There was proper literature, history, magic, medicine, and all the other genres of literature that we would naturally list on a sheet of paper in alphabetic writing—what you would use writing for. They basically did. It had the unexpected quality that most of these clay things lasted in the ground until now.

However many hundreds of thousands of tablets are in the world’s museums and collections, there must be millions of them in the ground awaiting excavation. In a way, that’s a comforting thought, because they’re safe there and protected.

You said that the development of cuneiform, of these tablets, of written language, is one of the greatest—probably the greatest—invention in human history. How hard do you think it was to come up with this?

We should make clear that the very specific element of encoding sound on the tablet—that’s the genius invention. Drawing a picture makes sense. Okay, here’s barley. Here’s the sun. Here’s whatever the actual object is.

Exactly.

But to actually write down sound is a genius invention.

Well, I think it’s rather paradoxical, because the first generation or so of tablets that we have are written in these pictographic signs, where each sign means what it looks like. This is a very limited method of recording messages, and it doesn’t lend itself to recording grammar.

The secondary phase, as we understand it from archaeology, is the perception that you could take these signs, still meaning what they looked like, but also representing what the words sounded like. Then you have all these wonderful signs which express all the sounds of the language, with which you can record words and grammar and everything else.

Now, the thing is, the received law from Assyriology is that it was that way round: First we had pictures, and secondly we had sound. Well, I have to say, I find this very hard to believe, because if you had a group of people in an environment where it was compellingly necessary to make a system of marks on a surface that everybody could understand and use, why wouldn’t you start out with signs that made sounds? Because everybody speaks the same language, right? So you…

They didn’t have A, B, C, D, E, or F, but they could easily work out all the vowels and consonants without naming them as vowels and consonants. They’re component parts. They could have had signs that started out that way. We have 26; let’s say they had 50 signs that would create the sounds. They could write anything without any further trouble.

So I find it very bewildering that they started with the least flexible and least adaptable system of pictographs, and then moved on to sound. I don’t know why they bothered with it. My hunch is that the archaeological evidence we have on this score is ultimately misleading, because I think that probably, for a very, very long time before the Sumerians, people in what we call the Middle East were in contact. They traded, they probably even had wars, and they had messages between them.

I think there was a long-running system of communication between people who didn’t share a language, for whom pictures would suffice. If merchants come and have 3 sheep to sell, they draw 3 little sheep. You know how much it is and what they are, and so forth. I think what happened with the Sumerians, with their pictographic signs, is that those signs are right at the end of a very, very, very long period of time, when somebody thought, “What we can do is take these stupid, prohibitive no-smoking signs and write language.” That’s what I think happened.

Is this a controversial statement?

Highly controversial. Many Assyriologists would leave the room. But I’m not scared of controversy, because it’s natural. I mean, if you think about it, it’s natural, because you don’t have to have an alphabet to divide your word into sounds, see?

For example, in Sumerian, you have a funny system of writing. You have a root, like “du,” which means “to go,” and then you have prefixes like “e,” “mu,” or “ba.” One’s a passive, one’s an active, and so on. When you have a sentence, you have one of the “mu,” “ba,” or “e” prefixes, then you have the root, and then you have things at the end.

So it’s called agglutinative by people who like to make things look more important than they are. You have the central thing, you slap stuff on the beginning, slap stuff on the end, and each particle creates a bit of meaning. You have a long verb which tells you, “He would have done it if he could, but he couldn’t,” kind of thing, in the form of the verb.

But the thing is, if you and I decided to write something down, the first thing we would do is have a sign for “mu,” then we’d have “ba,” and then we’d have “e,” because every 5 minutes people made those noises.

Yeah, absolutely. Do you think it’s possible we might find much, much older—

I do.

—cuneiform-type tablets?

Or pictographic-type tablets, before cuneiform and its drawing type. I’ll tell you why. There’s this marvelous site in Turkey called Göbekli Tepe.

Oh, yeah?

Do you know about Göbekli Tepe?

Yes, of course.

Well, everybody knows about the buildings and the architecture. Everybody knows about it. If you go all the way through the photographs, which the archaeologists unwisely put online, you’ll find, in the middle of one color plate with lots of other things, a round green stone like a scarab from Egypt. That’s to say, it has an arched back and a flat bottom. On the flat bottom, there are hieroglyphic signs carved in the stone.

No one said anything about it at all, but it’s clear to me, first, that this was a stamp to ratify whatever it was that the carvings of the signs on clay, or some other sealing material, would leave an impression on. It must be that. So this is about 9000 BC.

When I was a boy at university, my professor said to me that the reason writing evolved in Mesopotamia was because they had complex cities with ziggurats and big buildings and lots of people, and they had to organize everything, so they invented writing to cope with it. Well, if they had to cope with that in Sumer in 3000 BC, they sure as hell had to do it at Göbekli Tepe, because they’ve hardly even begun to finish excavating the sites of Göbekli Tepe. They go on and on like Manchester United and Newcastle United.

Really, the old rule would be that you could not have architecture like that without it being planned and built according to principle, with all the different people. You couldn’t have that without writing in southern Iraq. So how come, suddenly, 7000 years earlier, they do it there?

That green stone shows that they had writing. That was an official who sealed this, got the stuff or whatever it was, or it was his dad’s name or whatever it is—got a wiggly snake and a wiggly this. That is pictographic writing. Maybe even it was phonetic writing. I don’t know, but it was writing thousands of years before in the south.

People came with metal or precious stones from Anatolia. They knew that in the south they had lots and lots of stuff. They wanted to trade, and they had to communicate. It’s basically like having a cigarette with an X through the middle. Everybody in the world knows what that means. They don’t know what the word for cigarette is in this language, or cancer, or filter, or tobacco. It doesn’t matter. That’s pictographic writing. We still use it.

It’s above all kinds of mess. I think that was the prevailing system, because I honestly believe that the people at this time were not stupid. They weren’t gorillas. They weren’t less advanced than we are. They were probably indistinguishable from what we are. You have merchants and wanderers and people who say, “Let’s go down the river and see where we end up,” and people looking for money, looking for women, looking for everything. I mean, surely that’s how it was.

But if you look at those Göbekli buildings with a skeptical eye, how could it be otherwise? The finish of it is astonishing, the structure of it, the vision of it. So the workforce and the tools and the organization—what did they do it with? A megaphone? “Your breakfast!” And all that kind of stuff. No way. No way.

So that’s a really controversial statement that—

It is really controversial.

—at the time of Göbekli Tepe, there may already have been a writing system.

There was, because the thing about it is that it’s a seal to ratify. It’s not just a squiggle on a pot. This is a finished thing with a flat surface. You press it down, so you have some contract, some building arrangement, that we’re paying for these bricks, whatever it was. The official person had to squash it down, and it left the impression.

I’m a great believer in Sherlock Holmes as a teaching system for intelligence, rationality, and logical thinking. I read those stories a million times when I was a kid, and one of the things that impressed me most of all was this point, quoted by Holmes but not original to him: that it is theoretically possible to infer Niagara Falls from a raindrop.

That’s a powerful statement. Yeah.

It’s a powerful statement. Well, that seal from Göbekli Tepe is a raindrop from which I infer writing, and it’s perfectly possible they all wrote on flat leaves. After all, in many parts of the world, that’s what happened.

For example, in the Indus Valley, people write the most abject nonsense about the Indus Valley writing system, but all we have is seals, basically. So they’re also for ratification purposes, and they have the name of the owner in 3 or 4 or maybe 5 signs. It’s probably “me, son of my dad,” or “milkman,” or whatever it is.

It’s obvious that they had writing on a perishable material. They can’t just have had inscribed stone seals, and many parts of India today write on palm leaf. Why should it be any different? People think, “Oh, well, just because it’s now, it wouldn’t be then.” But actually, that argument is utterly, utterly fallacious, because the process of evolution is stymied left, right, and center by inertia. Inertia is nearly as strong as evolution, and this is something that the people who talk about progress and ideas have no idea about.

First of all, your whole line of work is making me realize that it’s a kind of Sherlock Holmes-type process: the deciphering of the language, the archaeology, taking those pieces of evidence and trying to reconstruct a vision of that world. Now you’re making me realize that even all the cuneiform tablets we have are just a raindrop compared to the waterfall of thousands of years of humans.

Yes, we have a lot, but it’s nothing in comparison with what existed. But not only that. We don’t have to decipher anymore. We can read Akkadian or Babylonian and Sumerian pretty well, fluently. That’s not a problem. The information which you can get from these sources, especially 3 millennia of sources, is very, very substantial. Very substantial.

But it means that Assyriologists have the built-in idea that what we have is something like all there ever was, which is absurd. For example, there’s a period called the Ur III Period, where people lived in city-states. They wrote very small account tablets by the thousand, and there were 2 or 3 major cities where this was the way they lived.

People had to bring tithes and offerings, and everything was recorded by what I always refer to, and people sympathize with, as the ancestors of the Inland Revenue. Everything had to be written down so that some schmuck could check it and fill out the ledger, and some other schmuck above him could okay it, so there’d be no funny business or mistakes.

Now, the thing is, there are thousands of those tablets, written from about 2100 to 2000 BC—thousands of them—about the size of a box of matches.

So people like to generalize about the Sumerians at this time in the world, but they probably all came out of 2 rooms, because they were dumped when they were no longer needed in some kind of room. The archaeologists in the 19th century came down on these, and then all the locals came and dug them up and sold them all over the place. They’ve gone all over the world.

Thousands and thousands of them, out of probably 2 storage rooms, which is not a whole culture or a whole country, or their whole history, or their belief systems. Our view of it is skewed by the nature of the material, and sometimes the material is opulent and benevolent, but not always. Sometimes the people who work with skewed material don’t even realize how skewed it is. It’s quite remarkable.

So you, in all your time of studying cuneiform tablets, do you sometimes, late at night, get a glimpse of the waterfall? Can you imagine?

Yes. I can imagine. I can imagine easily, because once in a while, a library is discovered. In the 1850s at Nineveh, which was the Assyrian capital, there was a great king, King of the World, called Ashurbanipal. He had a fantastic library, and he promoted it.

He impounded tablets and had them brought to Nineveh. He wanted all the prevailing knowledge and all knowledge from before under 1 roof. It was kind of like an Alexandria thing. He was a trained scholar, and this is what he did. They found it in the 19th century. They dug it up—Layard and those people.

So what did they find? They found the tablets higgledy-piggledy all over the floor of a huge room and in the corridors and everything, and lots of them were broken and lots of them were burnt. So ever since then, until quite recently, Assyriologists—people who work on these Nineveh tablets—spent all their time joining the bits together.

You have the story about Gilgamesh and the goddess who falls in love with him in the garden, and she wants to seduce him, and you can’t find the bit. So you look for another bit, and you look for another bit. Gradually, they piece together the literature, and the assumption has always been that if you put them all together again, you’ll have the whole library. But it’s the absolute opposite.

What happened was that the Babylonians in the south, in my opinion, worked hand in glove with the Elamites from Iran. They had a pincer movement, and they beat Assyria. They conquered Assyria. They ran through the capital and set fire to everything, pinched all the women, and took all the jewelry and all the gold.

People say that, in a fit of pique, they destroyed the library. But they wouldn’t destroy the library, because it was the giant brain from which the Assyrians ran a world empire, and it had all the knowledge in the world. They destroyed that? They spoke the same language and had the same writing system. They’d have taken them all safely home, cart after cart after cart.

I think what’s left there is duplicates and broken things—the things that got dropped and everything—and that’s what everyone thinks is it.

Oh.

So this is also uncontroversial. It’s a controversial point.

You’re just nonstop starting trouble.

But it’s common sense.

You’re going to get both of us canceled today.

But you see the thing. It’s predicated on the assumption that what we have is all that there was. This is such a fallacy. It needs to be attacked left, right, and center.

So a lot of the cuneiform language is already deciphered. Can you speak to the deciphering process? How hard is it? Maybe take us to this place of, for you yourself, first learning a language—figuring out the puzzle of it. How does it feel? What does it look like to a brain that doesn’t deeply understand it? How do you then piece stuff together? Maybe you can go to the early days, sort of the Rosetta Stone of cuneiform as well.

That’s important. The first thing is how the cuneiform writing system works, because the crucial point, once you see it, makes a lot of things clear: they wrote in syllables. If you take the English alphabet, which, of course, they didn’t, you have the letter B, G, D, P, H, and so forth. They couldn’t write a consonant. They couldn’t do that.

What they did was have a vowel before a consonant or 1 after it. Say you have “ab” and “ba.” But as they had 4 vowels, you had “ab” and “ba,” “ib” and “bi,” “ub” and “bu,” “eb” and “be.” You had the range of things clustered around what we call a consonant. They had all those for all the letters, which gave them a basic system.

There was much more to it than that, and it was more complicated than that. We don’t have to really go into it, but basically, if you are a Babylonian and you want to write the word “museum,” which, of course, is 1 of the most important words in the English language and other languages, too, you would write the syllable “mu,” then the sign “se,” and then the sign “um.” You split the word up into its component syllables. When you read it in your mind, you squash them together into “museum.” That’s the basic system.

They had other signs that gave you a clue as to the meaning and the bits around the edge. But it’s basically syllabic writing. So when you go to university to study cuneiform, what you have to learn is all the signs and all their values, because, unfortunately, they didn’t just have 1 for each. They had multiple ones.

The reason is not that they were mad or wanted to make life hell, but because the syllables derive from the writing of Sumerian words. The Sumerian vocabulary had a lot of words that were probably differentiated by tone. So you might have “ba” with a rising tone and then a lowering tone. These signs all retain the “ba” value, even though there were no tones.

It means that if you look at a sign list, there are a lot of signs. You have “ba” 1, which is the common one. Then there’s “ba” 2, “ba” 3, and you have to learn them all. When you read, you have to learn how to do it.

In the modern world, if you go to university to do Assyriology—which I hope you and all of your disciples will do as soon as possible—you actually have to cope with 2 languages: Sumerian and Babylonian. The first thing is that the Babylonian language is a Semitic tongue, which, although it’s extinct, is connected to or related to Hebrew, Aramaic, Arabic, Ethiopic, and Syriac—all that family of Semitic languages that are still alive. It’s an early example of 1 of those.

When the decipherment came along, it was the Semitic languages that they fell back on to identify words, nouns, and roots. The other language, Sumerian, the 1 where you stick bits in the beginning and bits at the end, is not only not Semitic, it’s not related to any other known language.

Oh, no.

Yeah, this is a bewitching thing. It’s a bewitching thing to me, and this is how to understand it. The languages that we study in the world today, the ones linguists study, more or less all fall into a language group. So you have Indo-European, with Spanish, Italian, Latin, Hittite, French, and so forth—that’s 1 group. You have Germanic and you have Slavonic.

Most languages, even the far-flung ones, fall into what can be seen to be maybe big, airy groups—a family like that. There’s not 1 for Sumerian. This means that the truth that languages do not exist in a vacuum, but are part of a big family, must always have been true.

So when writing arrives around 3,000 BC, it means that Sumerian was recorded just in time, but the big languages—maybe in China, in Russia, or somewhere else in Asia—that were related to Sumerian—

Are gone?

—are all gone forever and ever and ever, unless something amazing happens. So we’ve got the 1 representative of this bizarre family.

Amazing.

It is. It’s a very stimulating thing to imagine. I personally believe that Neanderthals and early Homo sapiens, for sure, had language. For sure, they talked to one another. It’s impossible that they didn’t.

The point came when they did. The Neanderthals had 800,000 years of rural life in Europe. They had to deal with the Ice Age, they all lived together, and they brought up their children. You think they couldn’t speak anything? They had the same apparatus.

If you have a human brain, then it responds to stimulus. The more stimulus there is for communication, I mean, the idea that you and I are out hunting rhino and you say, “Legs.” Well, shut up, I’m concentrating. “Legs, legs.” Then I suddenly think, “Oh, I get it. You are Legs.” Right? You only have to do that 1 time, then you know who I am. So I know that I’m me and that you are you.

People who say that they couldn’t distinguish ego and all that are absolutely stupid. If you cut your hand with a knife, you sure as hell experience it. It hurts a lot. You might even bleed to death. But it’s not somebody else’s hand; it’s your hand, and it’s your existence and your life that’s threatened. You think people weren’t conscious that they were an entity? I don’t believe it.

And they probably had a way to express that with sounds.

Well, eventually, yes. Names.

Names.

Names the things, and then you have the idea that a label fixes to something. Then the light bulb has gone on, and next minute you have rhino, skin, and babies. I think you have an idea, and the idea then drives the brain, and the brain has another idea. It works like fertility.

So what do you think is the motivation, the primary driver, of developing written language? Does it go hand in hand with civilization?

I think that the medium in which it appears is when there are a lot of people living in an urban environment, with rival institutions, or the king, or the government, or all those sorts of things.

And that's why I think Göbekli Tepe must have been the same thing. I read somewhere that they're all nomads and only came to Göbekli Tepe 3 months a year. That cannot be true: they were nomads? It cannot be true. To get the stone, someone has to draw on the ground the plan of the building. They have to work out how thick it's going to be and how high it's going to be. You can't just do it like that, like gorillas.

All right. So, deciphering—the process of deciphering.

When I started, there were grammars and sign lists and dictionaries. Everything was marvelous. It was all basically deciphered. All you had to do was get on with learning it. But at the beginning, when the first tablets and bricks in cuneiform and stone inscriptions came to light, no one could read them. They knew they were writing, but they didn't know how to read them.

What happened was, like you said before with the Rosetta Stone, there was something directly comparable: an inscription of 1 of the Persian kings halfway up a mountain in a place called Behistun, where King Darius had written an account of his successful career in Elamite, Babylonian, and Old Persian—a trilingual version. Although it's obviously an archaic form of the language, Persian is still alive. It was still alive in the 19th century.

Since Old Persian was written in a very simple style of cuneiform, they deciphered it. They twigged it was Old Persian, they read it in Persian, and they read the name Dārayavahuš in Old Persian. Then suddenly, somebody realized that the other 2 columns were about the same length.

Brilliant.

What do you know? The thing is, it said, “I am Darius the great king, king of the world, king of the ... son of ... grandson of ...” So there's a whole paragraph with repeated things in the Persian which they could understand. What do you know? They're reiterated passages in the other 2 languages. That was the key, the chisel that opened up cuneiform writing proper.

They soon twigged that Babylonian was a Semitic tongue. This was so important. I think the first word they discovered was the word for river, which is nāru in Akkadian and nahr in Arabic and Aramaic. When they realized that the word that corresponded to the Persian had this form, this was a gift, a gift of gold, because everybody immediately seized their Arabic and Hebrew dictionaries and started leafing through, looking for words that would fit in the context.

They basically deciphered this inscription in that sort of way. Of course, all the other inscriptions came in their turn, and there were lots and lots of difficulties which had to be resolved, but that's the basic thing. Without that trilingual inscription, I don't know what would have happened. I suppose it's conceivable that in the very modern world, something might have happened. But as it was, it was done by sheer brainpower, by very, very clever persons just doing it. They cracked it. The Elamite language is much more difficult, but they got a lot of it, too.

It was a very romantic thing because the inscription was carved on a mountain face far above the plain. Henry Rawlinson, an upstanding young British officer who claimed to decipher cuneiform quite unjustifiably, climbed up there with some miserable kid and made squeezes of the whole thing, overlooking the plain, thousands of feet up in the air. He brought them back, and they were used in the decipherment. So, it's very romantic.

Wait a minute. A more controversial statement from today: Henry Rawlinson doesn't deserve the credit for that?

No, I don't think he does. He's called the Father of Assyriology, but I think he's the Stepfather of Assyriology, because when he first got these inscriptions, he wrote a long book about them which was almost entirely wrong.

There was a clergyman in Northern Ireland called Edward Hincks, who lived in a place called Killyleagh, had 5 daughters, and ran this church. He was possibly a card-carrying genius, if not jolly, jolly close. There was an ongoing challenge to decipher hieroglyphic writing, which Champollion usually gets the credit for, and Hincks was very interested in trying to decipher hieroglyphic writing ahead of the French. He ran into a sort of dead end at 1 stage, and he thought he'd have a look at cuneiform to see if it was helpful.

At the same time, he cracked it. He worked out how it worked. He realized that 1 sign can have more than 1 value of sound and meaning because the signs are multivalent.

I tried to shelter you from the horrible news. But actually, it's not a walk in the park. It takes about 5 years. You'd probably do it in about 4, probably.

That is a compliment. I think you just complimented me. Thank you. Thank you very much. So, you're saying 1 sign that looks exactly the same might have different sounds, given the context?

Yeah, and you have to choose the right sound, and also a different meaning as well. For example, if you have a sign for “hot,” the word “hot,” right? You can't really have a picture sign for “hot.” It doesn't make sense. But what they did is they made a drawing of a kind of complex thing with a brazier inside another sign which meant “hot.” So that sign existed, but it also meant other things as well, and you had to choose the right 1 for the context.

All the contexts matter. It really is quite a matter for despair when you start cuneiform, because on top of everything else, they didn't leave gaps between the words. That's really mean.

So they're all connected?

Yeah. When you read, what you have to do is start with the first sign, think of the sign, and go through the values in your mind. Then there's the next sign. If 1 is “ba” and the next 1 is “ab,” among other readings, “ba-ab” sounds like a syllable structure for a word, and you go on like that.

There are 2 things about it. One is that, if you want to, you can master it. The other thing is that the number of variables was restricted. They controlled it, so it wasn't insane. In other words, if you learn the corpus, learn how the signs are composed, and learn their different values, then you've got it down. Off you go. It's very beautiful, I think. It's marvelous.

Can you, in all seriousness, take me back to the time when you were learning it?

Yes.

What's the process of learning it?

I had a very abnormal upbringing because when I went to university, for about 3 years beforehand I'd wanted to be an Egyptologist. So I read Egyptian Grammar by Gardiner and was looking forward very much to studying ancient Egyptian.

What happened was that I went up to the University of Birmingham, where I went to university, and there was a man called Rundle Clark, who was an Egyptologist. Rundle Clark came in on the Monday and gave us 1 lesson about Egyptian sculpture or something like that, and the next day he died. Bang.

The professor called me into his room and said, “Look, it's going to take me a while to get an Egyptologist. They don't grow on trees, but there's another person in this department who teaches another ancient language, called Lambert, and he teaches cuneiform. So what I suggest is you go and do a bit of cuneiform with Professor Lambert, and then when I get an Egyptologist, you can convert back.”

So I went and knocked on the door. “Yes?” I went in and said, “I want to learn cuneiform.” Professor Lambert, who was rather a Sherlock Holmes kind of figure—ascetic, bony, sarcastic, cruel—

Cruel.

Cruel, absolutely terrifying. I said I wanted to learn cuneiform, and he wasn't at all pleased because this was a time in Britain when professors resented having students to teach because it butted into their research time. It was that sort of arrangement.

Anyway, I started, and after maybe 1 or 2 lessons, I knew this was going to be my life's work. So that's what happened to me. It was an amazing thing. He gave me a list of basic signs to learn, so I learned them over the next couple of days, and then we came in and started reading.

Given the complexity of the signs, why did cuneiform last 3,000 years? The most successful writing system ever.

Fair question. There are several factors. One is the famous factor of inertia. The second thing is that people who could read and write, who were in charge of archives, who were the clerks in the temple, and who were the writers for the king and everything, commanded a very great deal of power because most of the public couldn't.

So they reserved to themselves knowledge, understanding, and philosophical inquiry. No doubt it went on in pubs and things, but they were in charge. They had everything under lock and key.

I think the scribal schools were rather cliquey. They were certainly cliquey in the sense of Oxford and Cambridge being rivals, that sort of thing. They had that sort of idea, and it was in no one's interest whatsoever. Nobody would ever concede any interest in the idea of literacy for all. This would never be thought of, and it would be anathema.

If you got on a soapbox on a Saturday afternoon and said, “Enough of this. We have to teach the children,” you'd be taken away, I think.

So we're getting, in these tablets, the output of the intellectual class, a very small fraction of humans. So we're getting just the Oxford and the Cambridge.

We are, except that when you went to scribal school, you had to learn Sumerian and Akkadian—the languages—properly, and all the vocabulary and the grammar. Some boys probably had a lot of trouble doing this. They were okay, but then there ain't gonna be no geniuses.

I think the situation in the school was that the teachers farmed out the kids who would actually rather have been outside playing football but could read and write, to earn their living doing low-level reading and writing.

That's to say, writing contracts, letters, and everyday things for people. Because no one could read and write, you had to get a scribe if you were going to marry your daughter off, and get all the witnesses in the presence of everyone. All that had to be done for 4 days. So the writer would come and do it.

Your medium-level writers would serve that requirement. Very talented or clever or intellectual students would be encouraged to go into one of the literary professions, which would be, so to speak, medicine, law, working for the king, working for the Church—I mean, the priesthood. All those things that were dependent upon archives and writing, they would find their niche.

Architecture, as well, because if a big building had to be built, then somebody had to know about load-bearing things and brick measurements. Some of them went into that kind of work. Also, probably, some of them went into running the army, and you had to move stores and animals. So they found their niche, and some of them were intellectually very able indeed.

They went into the disciplines of, on the one hand, astrology, but more seriously, astronomy and theoretical grammar, because they had treatises about the relationship between the 2 languages, how they worked, and the different parts of speech. They wrote learned commentaries as well, about what words meant. So there was an intellectual, high-level top, and then there were lots of professional scribes, and then the kids who left school as soon as possible and did all that, like today.

I apologize for being philosophical, but Wittgenstein, the philosopher, said, “The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.” To what degree did the languages that were encoded in cuneiform define human civilization, would you say? What were the things that were complicated to express and therefore were not expressed often?

That's a really interesting question. In terms of richness of vocabulary and richness of verbal subtlety, I think Babylonian rivals Arabic and, of course, English. In other words, you can say whatever you want in English, however subtle it might be, even if people understand the subtlety, because the tools are fantastic. Arabic has lots of synonyms and lots of devices, and all the same. Same in Babylonian.

It was a fully fledged literary language. The question about whether the language put a stop to further things, which is basically what you're asking, is immensely complicated. But the 1 thing that strikes me as relevant is that a very huge proportion of scholarly literature in Mesopotamia takes the form of omens, because they believed that events, accidental or deliberately stimulated, had implications for what was going to happen.

They took omens from things in the sky and things in the street and every single thing. If you were a well-qualified diviner, it would have this significance, right? There are thousands of lines of omens of all different kinds. In Akkadian, it says, for example, “If a lizard runs across the breakfast table, the queen will die.”

If you translate the Akkadian this way, the word “if,” the verb, and everything, “If that, then this.” There are thousands of lines translated into many books about omens where, “If this happens, that will happen.” So this is how it's understood by my colleagues.

Well, this is absolutely impossible, because if you are the chief diviner for the king and you open up a sheep to take its liver out and examine it, and if the queen's going to die and the king's there, you're not going to say, “The queen's going to die.” I mean, you're going to look like a fucking idiot if she doesn't die. And if she does die, you're going to be responsible.

So all you can ever do is say, “There's a sign here that says that the queen could die,” meaning “could die,” not “will die.” Therefore, the requisite ritual or magic must immediately swing into action to defer the danger. The point is that A equals B is never true. It means that with A, B could be, might be, ought to be, should be, or could be true—all those subtle things.

The diviner who works for the king must have been a philosopher. He looks at the king, and he knows what the king wants him to say. So he has to tell the king what he wants to hear. He has to tell the king if it's bad news in such a way that he doesn't mind it or won't worry. It's the most beautiful thing. It's so subtle. It's like a violin concerto. It can never have been A equals B for a minute.

The medical texts say, “If a man has this, you do this.” He'll get better, right? They say, “You'll get better.” Have you ever met a doctor who will say, “You do this, you'll get better”? No. They say, “All being well, you'll be back on your feet,” or, “I've seen this kind of condition many times. Everything should go fine. You should get better. You should be better soon.” But never, “You will get better,” because what happens if you die? Where are you?

The lawyers will show up.

Absolutely. So this means that these modal verbs—could, might, should, ought—are not expressible in Akkadian grammar. But it's impossible that it was such a magnificent literary language and they didn't have these subtleties. It's utterly impossible.

If you translate “He will” in a literary text as “He might,” then the whole text is different. The whole text is different.

Yeah, absolutely.

And they don't. My colleagues translate it as it says in the grammar books, automatically. There's no self-appraisal of the folly of it.

You have said the translation is part archaeology, part detective work, part poetry. Can we speak about translation and the art of it a bit more?

Yes.

It's such an incredible discipline. Just as you hinted at, a subtle variation in a single word can change everything.

Well, the truth about translation is that you never really have a word in 1 language that precisely equates to another. You never do. They're always the best you can do. Sometimes it makes no difference, and sometimes it's really quite misleading.

What people do when they learn Akkadian is learn the Akkadian word and the English translation. You have “to divide,” so whenever you have the verb, it's some form of “divide” or “division.” But actually, it's not, because “divide” is like the primary root, but there are maybe 10 nuances of what that can mean in English, where the 1 at the bottom and the 1 at the top, you'd hardly know they were connected.

The Chicago Assyrian Dictionary, which is such a magnificent thing—when you come to the museum and see me, I'll show you this—is the most salient and important thing that came out of America in all its history. It's the Chicago Assyrian Dictionary, which is this long. There's only 1 rival to it for cultural importance, which is the electric guitar, of course. But the 2 of them, I think, are your countrymen's greatest achievement.

It's the pride of our nation.

I think so.

Those 2 things.

The very thing.

Chicago Assyrian Dictionary. I'm sorry to take the attention away from that, but what is the Chicago Assyrian Dictionary?

It started in the 1920s, and they made a dictionary of the Babylonian language, A to Z, so to speak. It's as long as this table. It's a magnificent thing, and this big. The people who worked on it were real translators, so they knew that it wasn't lexically “A means B.”

If you have something in a proverb, the meaning is going to be a little bit different from that in a letter. People really, really understand Akkadian. They really do. But this thing about the modal verbs is an interesting conundrum to me, because there's no way it's reflected in the writing.

I can only assume that there was some kind of drawing out of the vowel in a verb, meaning “could.” Like you were saying, it might do it, something like that. Anyway, nowadays, it's not the decipherment that's the job; it's just reading.

If you have lots of tablets to work on, like on a dig, it's very exciting if they come out of the ground and no one's looked at them before you. It's your job. If you're a competent Assyriologist, you should be able to sight-read more or less.

Except that most documents—say, a letter or something like that—have some damage, so you have to learn how to interpret stuff. Some literature is very difficult because of technical vocabulary, and they had technical vocabulary and unusual words.

So you can do all of that. You can figure out the technical complexities. You can figure out the noise, meaning missing pieces.

Yeah. Sometimes you can calculate what it ought to be and make a reasonable suggestion. This dictionary, which I was talking to you about, is such a fantastic tool, because a lot of people worked on it. It was for the National Endowment for the Humanities, and it was decades and decades of work. Most of the world's best Assyriologists collaborated on it, so the quality of translation and understanding is really extraordinary.

What are some things you've read from that time? Are there some jokes? Are there some love letters?

There are 1 or 2 letters like that, from a chap to a woman, about, you know, “You are very beautiful, and your lips are like radishes, and your ears are like walruses,” and things. There are some things like that.

Then there's a kind of street drama in Babylon, in the 4th century BC, something like that, when there must have been actors who did this in the street. It's Marduk and Sarpanitum, his wife, and another woman. Marduk's having an affair with this other—

Oh, no.

Goddess. Sarpanitum is jealous, and these women fight in the street and hurl insults at one another, “slop bucket” and all this kind of stuff.

It's hilarious, and it must have been a bit like a sort of Verdi opera without the music, I suppose. I don't know. But anyway, it starts off when Sarpanitum is in the room and Marduk's in bed with this other goddess on the roof, and she can hear. You could say it was an eternal human issue.

Yeah, love, heartbreak, jealousy, all of that.

And between deities also. Because deities are only modeled on human beings, after all.

Yeah, deities is a grandiose way of expressing human affairs, human behaviors, human ways. In the writing, what was their relationship to the divine?

The relationship with the divine—well, the first thing to say is that they had a large pantheon of gods. So there were 3 gods at the top, sometimes called Anu, Enlil, and Ea. There were 3 gods at the top and hundreds of other gods and goddesses.

You have the situation that, I think, lots of small villages and towns had their old, ancient gods, and eventually they were all worked into a kind of theological system, like a phone book. The lesser, minor gods were amalgamated, and then they were given jobs in the households of the big gods. So there was a sort of structure.

You have this in the background: a big, sweeping theology, like you have in the world today in some parts of the world. This was the main system. The main gods were concerned with the ruler and the fate of the country, and another god was concerned with illness and the dead and what happens to the dead. They had other specialties, and they all had their own temples.

When a baby came into the world, probably this was universally true, the baby was put under the tutelage of one or other of the gods. Sometimes, you know, the royal family—they were the big shots—but sometimes not, or the ones that were in the family or something like that. So people had grown up with the idea that, among all of them, there were special ones for the family, and they had a special one who was supposed to look after them. That's the basic idea.

But the trouble is, since gods are, as you say, human beings on a larger scale, they can be forgetful or uninterested or on holiday. There are lots of ways that you have to prompt them: make little sacrifices and little bribes so they do their job and keep an eye on you.

So they had that kind of slightly practical view of gods—that they were a bit unpredictable. They were great when they were there, but not always there.

I also believe this: that a lot of people in the world today who did not have the disadvantage of growing up in a stifling religion, but are just normal people, get a lot more interested when they're really ill or when they have a big disaster. All of a sudden, God or gods seem a lot more important than they do normally.

Few people walk about in a state of religious awe, and a good proportion of clergymen I've ever met don't do that either. It's a conception that's not actually based on reality: the individual's response to religious stimuli fluctuates and is varied and is often a response to need. It doesn't come from nothing. People don't suddenly feel, "I've got to thank the Lord for the rainbow," or something like that.

I think it's probably true today. When you read the investigations they make of religion today, Christianity in this country is on the decline because people who are supposed to be Christian say they aren't anymore; they're atheists. People who say, "I go to church and I believe in everything," are a relatively small number of people now. This is the situation, which is quite remarkable if you think about it.

Lord knows what the consequence will be for the human race, whether religion will balance out or whether it will die off. Who knows?

I think it's an ancient technology that has proven across millennia to give a set of tools to humans to contend, as you said, with suffering. That's a part of life. So when those rare moments come when you have to deal with deep pain, loss, suffering, heartbreak, all those things—looking up to the sky and asking questions and trying to figure out the answers in your conversation with the divine—

I think that's true, but I think in Mesopotamia it was different in terms of its potency and immediacy because there are no skyscrapers in Iraq. If you live in southern Iraq and you sleep on the roof, there are no lights at night. You're under the stars; you can see everything because there's no smog and everything like that.

The idea that the gods are there watching—it's not like a big artifice like it is here. It just doesn't ring true here. You can't come to it and really believe in it, whereas these people didn't have to really believe in it because it was it.

It's the obvious practical part of life. They're right there.

But it's not that they didn't believe in ghosts; they took them for granted. They didn't believe in the gods; they took them for granted. This is a different mechanism, because nobody here in the world today takes those things for granted—just the opposite.

I think that's how it worked. You didn't have people wrestling with the idea of whether the gods really exist or whether they really care about me. They gave them a nudge when it was necessary, and they might offer this or they might offer that, but it was the system. It was the prevailing system. I think it's an important difference.

And also, that thing about ghosts is clear from all the inscriptions that I managed to find: nobody ever asked themselves, "Do these things exist or not?" or "Did I really see them or not?" They just took it all for granted.

What are ghosts? Is it usually ancestors?

Well, everybody who died in bed, naturally or peacefully—what we call their ghost—went down to the netherworld, and there they were. So they buried people jolly quick, for obvious reasons, like they do in Islam and Judaism today. It's the same kind of idea.

The spirit of the person went down through the gates of the netherworld and stayed there. So that's the basic situation. People in their houses had actual burials under the courtyard, and they had a thing where you poured stuff down a hole—fluid and food, kind of symbolic offerings to them.

So isn't that a way to lessen the impact of mortality?

I don't know, because you know that everyone's going to die. I think the real tragedy would be if we're not supposed to. That would be the tragedy. But every single person is going to die, so all relationships have this finite clause in them.

If you're very fond of somebody or you love somebody and they die, it's kind of infantile to whine about it ever after. What do you think was going to happen? Either you or them. I always see it like that. I don't feel grief when people die.

It is infantile, but I've got to tell you something about human beings: we're all kind of infantile all the way through. We don't stop being infantile after we're infants. It's one thing to know it theoretically, and it's another thing to know it—like, this thing ends. This ride ends.

But that's the pain. It's the fact that the whole thing ends. When people fall off the edge, they fall off the edge.

So, yeah, the knowledge that it ends is the painful thing, not the actual moment of the ending. Many times, what makes moments really precious is that they're going to be gone. I think that's not a trivial thing for us humans to really contend with. I think religion, religious thought, the divine, help with that.

I think the big mistake for mankind was the creation of monotheistic religions, because they brought evil into the world. If you believe in a monotheistic religion, that means I'm right and you're wrong if you don't. So it's already on that footing.

It's very dogmatic.

Dogmatic, and it's led to everything. There are inquisitions and all this kind of stuff. It's all a result of one religion being superior and the others being stamped out and all that.

In my opinion, monotheistic religion has generated the most fantastic amount of nonreligious feeling. Whereas when you have all the different gods and they have different specialties, and the ones you like and the ones that everybody likes, and they have their temples and their offerings, it's very interesting.

It was very interesting to me to go into a temple in Kolkata when I went there with my wife, Joanna. We went into the temples and saw how they were, and I think they must be very much like the ones in Mesopotamia.

There was never anything about them which affronted people's individuality. There's no religious prejudice or even racial prejudice in antiquity. All these things are modern, disadvantageous matters. If you think what's done in the name of religion, it is absolutely staggering.

So let's go to literature, because we didn't really mention literature much, except you did briefly mention The Epic of Gilgamesh. So that was written in cuneiform. It's one of the earliest works of literature.

That's right.

Can you tell me about this work?

Yeah. Well, we know it best from this Assyrian library set of tablets. There are 12 of them. It's a 12-tablet work, so it's quite long. Gilgamesh is the hero of it.

But the literature—we know it from earlier texts. We know that Gilgamesh lived. He was a real person; he was a king in Uruk, and he was one of those people who lived after their death in the world, like Alexander, for example.

So there were stories about Gilgamesh when he was alive. There were stories about him afterward. At first, they were oral literature, not written down at all. Then, around 1800 BC, people started to write them down in Sumerian or Babylonian.

There was a corpus, and eventually they were woven into this long, 12-tablet, Homeric-type thing about the adventures of Gilgamesh.

So it is certainly literature, and it's to do with humanity and immortality, man in the hands of the gods, and it incorporates lots of interesting and exciting stories. It's very Hollywood-y. You can see within it, even in the sophisticated Nineveh version, that its roots are in oral literature.

Because when somebody speaks, it says, “Gilgamesh opened his mouth to speak and addressed his friend Enkidu,” and then there's a speech. “And then Enkidu opened his mouth and addressed his friend Gilgamesh.” When you're reading a story, you don't need that, and that must be because, when there was an enactment of an oral story, a narrator would say it, and it suddenly got frozen into the text.

So it's a very strange thing, because if you're reading it, it's obvious that one person speaks and the other person speaks, and they always have this complicated thing stuck in the text. So it must be an echo of an oral performance. Presumably, you have your protagonists enacting their timeless matter, and the person who's writing it down says, “And then Gilgamesh said...” like in a script.

What can you say about the telling of stories in written form during that time? Do you think that, too, stretched back in time?

I do. I think the fireside narrative mattered. When we were kids, it would be twerps with a guitar sitting around a fire on holiday. But that mechanism, when people gather after dark, when there is a fire and talk, is the sort of environment where narrative accounts flourish naturally among human beings.

Stories, the telling of stories. It doesn't have to be pragmatic; it could be literary in a way.

Yeah. Either a human person like Gilgamesh, or stories about the gods. Someone sees the Milky Way and they think, “There's a god riding a chariot up it,” and then they have a story about that, and all those sorts of things.

But I think you probably have to allow for a strong creative principle surfacing in Homo sapiens at a quite early age, because of the paintings on cave walls. You try drawing a running antelope in color on a wall. I mean, the quality of the workmanship, of the artistic ability, is unsurpassable. It's not just good.

So how is that an explicable thing at this very early date? It means that among all the population, you have imbeciles and Einsteins, and somewhere along the line you have Rembrandts. I imagine that half the cave paintings in Europe were done by 1 person. You get the impression every family had a genius painter. It's impossible.

Probably there was a person who went from place to place doing these paintings because they could draw straight away, accurately, like that. But they are a distillation of creative artistic ability plus skill. So this is right at the pretty early stage, is it not, the cave-painting material?

If you consider the human stock which encapsulates such ideas ever after, then you have to reckon with that. You have to reckon with that. Very creative, very creative people.

So the function of stories is to tell the young about what happened, about famous battles, or when the flood came, or how people learned to make fire, or how we invented the wheel. All those sorts of things everybody puts down as though that's presumably what absolutely happened.

And you have the capacity for people to adore and respect, among their own kind, people of astounding ability. There must have been hunters who were ferociously quick and wrestled with polar bears and all that kind of thing. All this stuff would be grist to the narrator's mill.

As things got more complicated and more sophisticated, lessons might be incorporated, or lessons might come out of them unintentionally. Because if you tell a story without a moral, there is usually a moral if you think about it.

Many of those stories are sadly lost to time or not yet found. You mentioned floods, and speaking of stories that have been lost and found, you're well known for a lot of things. One of them is decoding the so-called Ark Tablet.

Yeah. That was a challenge, because it's really hard to read.

You've got to tell me the story. This ancient Babylonian clay tablet, dating to 1700 BC, contains a flood narrative that predates the biblical story of Noah by 1,000 years.

At least.

At least. Okay. Well, you've got to tell me the full story.

So the full story is like this. Visitors used to come to the museum to ask questions of the experts who worked there. One would be on duty periodically, and sometimes people would bring objects, and sometimes they'd ask questions.

Somebody once came in with a whole load of objects, including this tablet, which, to cut a long story short, I identified pretty much straight away as being part of the flood story. It was a tablet about 8 inches by 3 inches.

It wasn't the whole flood story, which is a complex narrative that ended up in the Gilgamesh narrative much, much later. This was an early narrative in which the story begins at the point where the gods in heaven had decided that the population of Mesopotamia needed to be wiped out because they were so noisy. This was the expression. The gods couldn't sleep after lunch.

So they decided they would wipe them out and create something quieter that worked harder. They had different ways of doing it, and the most effective one was to send a flood to wipe them all out.

One of the gods, the 3rd in the triumvirate, thought this was a deplorable idea. So he took it upon himself to warn this person called Atra-Hasis, who lived in Mesopotamia, to build a boat to rescue life when the waters came.

He told him the shape of it and the materials he would need, and how much of the materials he would need, so he could do it safely. In the 60 lines of the tablet, all this stuff was there. It was like a blueprint to build this boat.

It was just extraordinary because it was round, the boat. Everybody who knew their Bible thought the ark was a coffin-shaped kind of affair. Nobody thought of it as being a round boat.

The fact is that round boats were used in Mesopotamia on the rivers—coracles, that is to say—for transporting things, and they would never sink. They were very appropriate.

So in this story, it was decided it was going to be a giant coracle, a really, really big one that would never sink. The male and female animals could go in, and Atra-Hasis' wife and his 3 sons and so forth could go in, and everything would be there and it would float on the water.

When it came down, they said, “We'll start all over again.” So it's got very many points in common with the description of the flood in Genesis. Of course, so did the one in Gilgamesh.

In 1872, there was an Assyriologist at the British Museum named George Smith, and he was a very, very talented reader. He discovered that 1 of the tablets from the Nineveh library we were talking about before had on it a passage which ran in parallel with Gilgamesh, about the waters coming and the boat and everybody floating.

Even to the point that when the rain stopped and the ark came to rest on a mountain, the hero of this thing in Gilgamesh, who was called Utnapishtim, released a bird 3 times to see whether the trees had come up. The first one came back, and so did the second one, but the 3rd one didn't.

This was not only in the Epic of Gilgamesh, but it was also in the book of Genesis. So what it meant was that it wasn't 2 stories about the same thing. It was literary dependence. It was literary dependence. One was locked into the other.

The text of the Hebrew Bible, from whenever it was written down—of course, nobody knows quite when, but whenever it was—was from about the same time as the one from Nineveh, about the 7th century or 6th century, something like that.

The time interval between the Gilgamesh version from Nineveh and the Hebrew Bible isn't a big expanse of time. So there was an argument that one goes this way and one goes that way.

But then when this tablet came in, 1,000 years older, nobody believes the Bible was written in 1700 BC. So the primacy of the Mesopotamian matter was established.

It's important because you never get floods in Jerusalem. You just don't. But in Mesopotamia, they had floods. The rivers sometimes didn't have enough water, sometimes there was too much, and sometimes there was far too much water.

So the mechanism that the waters could be used as a destructive force by the powers that be is a plausible Mesopotamian mechanism and is based, in a sense, in my opinion, in reality. I think there must have been some tsunami once, most people were drowned, and those who survived were in boats, obviously. Then afterwards, nobody ever forgot it. It went on and on and on.

So you mean there actually could have been a catastrophic event on a large scale?

Yeah, not the whole world, because people were—

But just enough to imagine.

Yeah. Sweeping down to the Persian Gulf and over the flat plains, everything would be destroyed. All the houses would be destroyed, animals would be drowned, and—

This is an incredible discovery. Do you think it's possible that this is the original? There are flood myths in many cultures.

I believe this. The Mesopotamians had a deep-seated horror of dependence on water when they couldn't control it. They were fearful of it.

They had a rainbow in Babylonia, like in the Bible, as proof that the disastrous flood would never happen again. But I think there must have been 1 episode of this kind, maybe 5,000 years before the tablet, maybe 10,000. It doesn't matter.

With the passage of time, nothing happens in that part of the world. So something would stay alive from grandfather to grandson before you go to sleep: “And remember, my boy, you only have to be careful because otherwise...” and all that stuff.

For sure, bogeyman stuff. It never quite died out in their conscious minds. So I think that when the Judeans from Jerusalem—the king and the others—went overland to Babylon as refugees, after the destruction of the temple by the Babylonians, the rout of the priesthood, and everything, they had to live there for 3 generations under Nebuchadnezzar's reign.

So I believe that the text of the Bible was written then, because if you read the Bible attentively—which I can't say I do on a regular basis—but if you do read it dispassionately, you have the explanation. The books in the Bible explain to the reader how it is that these people are in such a mess. They're supposed to be the chosen people doing all that, and look, they haven't got a temple, they haven't got a country, they're washed up, and everything like that.

So I think that what happened was this: it's a complex thing, but the Judeans from Jerusalem spoke Hebrew, but they also spoke Aramaic, right? The 2 languages are sister languages. The Babylonians spoke Babylonian, and they also spoke Aramaic. They all wore the same kind of clothes, and they all had brown skin.

When all these refugees from Jerusalem were milling around in Babylonia, they would have intermarried and disappeared within no time at all. The authorities who were there prevented this by drawing up a kind of charter of their history, explaining things from the beginning of time up until now—how it happened, what happened—and it was all intentional. So that is, in my opinion, the driving force behind the Hebrew text.

The thing about it is that they didn't have, in Jewish philosophical tradition, stuff about creation and the beginning of the world. They took Babylonian ideas, which they learned when they were there, and they recycled them. So whereas the Babylonians decided that the gods were going to wipe out the noisy persons, when the Jewish philosophers got this narrative to recycle about the vengeful Almighty in the Old Testament—a very unpleasant and vengeful person—it was because of sin. It wasn't because of rocking and playing the radio; it was sin. So they took one narrative and recycled it for their own purposes.

The flood is a useful tool to punish people for whatever X is?

That's exactly right. And something else is this, right? You have 5 days to build the ark, or whatever it is, or 2 weeks to build the ark, so the clock goes, “Tick, tick, tick, tick, tick.” About a third of the films that come out of Hollywood are, “The world's going to be demolished by aliens, and you've got 24 hours to think of a cure. Tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick.” So that narrative is irresistible: that one man can save the world, if he's lucky, in time from disaster.

It starts off with Utnapishtim, and then it goes on to Noah, and then it goes on to Hollywood.

Do you think this ark in the tablet actually was ever built? You did build a replica one-third the size, and people should check that out. You tell the story of that wonderfully. What did you learn from building this replica? And do you think the actual ark existed?

No, I don't think so. I think it's a literary construction out of the reality that people who did survive were on boats. They had boats, for sure, and you might wake up in the Persian Gulf and never know what happened, but it's a literary, moral, principle-teaching narrative.

Missionaries take it all around the world. That's the other thing. This is the mystery of it: you have flood stories everywhere, and some of them are from meddlesome missionaries who have all these innocent little kids sitting on benches, saying, “I'm going to tell you a story,” like that. So it moves into this consciousness, then it gets recycled and recycled.

There probably are spontaneous ideas, because it's not so complicated or so amazing that independently people would have such a narrative. After all, the great river in China floods, and everybody gets affected. That's not at all surprising.

But what was so shocking for George Smith, who was such a clever person, was to read for the first time on this tablet from Nineveh, long before the one that I discovered came to light, about the 3 birds being released one after the other. That was the clincher that the 2 stories were locked together. Lots of clergymen got very miserable about it and didn't know what to make of it.

So that's definitive proof that those are literary links?

A literary link, I think. I think so.

And I mean, these pieces are then connected, but the ark you discovered was 1,000 years older. So that means that story of the flood has been told many, many times across that span, to, you know—

That's right.

“Do your homework, or the flood is going to come.”

That's right. And every time somebody built a coracle and they didn't do the waterproofing right, you know what will happen? You'll be out on the river, and that will be your lot, you know? I think so.

There's a certain amount of evidence that in Mesopotamian society, people talked about the time before the flood and after the flood. It's like when I was a boy, people used to talk about, “Before the war, we used to...” And now we do this. It's a kind of cataclysmic cut across history which provides a ruler, so things are either before it or after it.

Because there's a king list, for example, where they wrote down the names of all the kings, all the way back to the beginning, including kings before the flood. They knew about that. They have their names and their great regnal years, or thousands of years.

Fascinating. So there's a guy named Graham Hancock who talks about the Younger Dryas hypothesis, 10,000 BC, that there was an asteroid that hit Earth and melted the ice sheets, and that created a flood in North America. So that means an actual cataclysmic global event, and then, as all the different civilizations sprang up, they all carried that knowledge, that memory. That's his idea. What probability would you assign to that?

I would say negligible, because I regard it as a literary matter, which is not predicated on the existence of a flood in people's minds. But I do believe that the story in Mesopotamia owes its inception to a disastrous flood, but nothing global. Nothing that touched America or China or Birmingham.

I'm not interested in all that stuff.

It's a literary device.

It's a literary topos of great potency, of irresistible potency, because everybody identifies with the idea of being in bed and someone knocks on the door and says, “Get up, you've got to build a boat, and this is what you're going to need, and you've got to get on with it, sunshine, or we're all sunk.” I mean, what are you going to do?

The most interesting thing is this: Atrahasis in the 1700 BCE text wasn't a king, and he wasn't a sailor or a boatbuilder. So how comes this clever god, who wants to find someone to build a boat?

Wouldn't you go for a look in the Yellow Pages for a boat-building company and say, “Listen, fellow, I've got a deal...”?

No. He had to tell him, “This is the blueprint. This is the shape. You need all this, you need all that, you need all this, you need all that. You've got to measure it,” and all that. It's a very interesting thing.

I mean, yeah, that's a great story. You don't go to the great boatbuilder, you go—

Taxi driver or something like that.

To the taxi, and then that's that hero's journey. That's the stuff of great myths, yeah.

It is. It is a great myth.

A little detail would be really cool about the replica, like—

Of the boat?

Of the boat, yeah. One-third replica, of course.

That was something else. There were 3 blokes who did it, and they were specialists in reconstructing medieval Arab boats. Quite often, they're found in the mud or in bits, or they have information. So they were at home in it.

We built it on a small lagoon in Kerala. It was just the most unbelievably wonderful thing, because they used the instructions as a blueprint. They made it about a third of the size of the original—a pretty huge thing. They made it because it had wooden ribs, you see, and they could get wood ribs.

They worked out by computer the maximum size they could make it at which it would work. Beyond that, it would be impossible, because once they built the curved ribs and then stuffed woven reeds all around it, it had to be covered in bitumen, which is also very heavy, to make it waterproof.

So they calculated the size, and it worked. They built this thing on rollers, and it was pushed out into the water. It was just the most unbelievable thing. I went out there with my dear wife for the last few days and was on the maiden voyage.

They had trouble with the bitumen, because Indian bitumen is really not up to scratch. They couldn't get Iraqi bitumen because it's cultural property. It's carcinogenic. They wouldn't export a tanker load of Iraqi bitumen. So we had to use the Indian stuff.

But the thing is this: the bitumen which they coated it with was okay, but it wasn't perfect. So when it went out into the waters, there was a bit of a leak, and water had to be bailed out.

So they said, “Ah,” you see, and I said to this producer, “Okay, listen, sunshine. Have you ever been in a rowing boat without water in the bottom? Excuse me?”

Oh, you're saying that's a feature, not a bug.

That's the feature of the thing, yeah. That's the feature. That thing could've gone to ports.

So it's authentic.

Absolutely right. We had such an adventure with that thing. They made a documentary film in various languages. I was in it a bit, and they had people saying, “Oh, I don’t think it was this. I don’t think it was that,” and they didn’t let me go back and say, “What the hell are you talking about? I did it. I know what I’m talking about. I can read, you know.” They didn’t have me do it. I couldn’t get my own back. I was really annoyed—really furious.

So you’re saying that there are some inaccurate things in it.

I am saying there are some inaccurate things. Somebody in Iraq said, “Oh, it couldn’t have been that. They probably had lots of little coracles all tied together.” Did they fuck? I mean, he couldn’t read the stuff. It’s really, really, really annoying. You should have a chance, shouldn’t you? If you’re going to have a fencing match, you both have to have a rapier, wouldn’t you say?

Yeah, and you’re the OG. You’re the person that decoded it.

Well, I can read. But the thing is this: the proportions of the material were accurate. This is the crucial thing. What had happened was they took the information about how you make a real coracle, which is usually enough for 2 people—and a few sheep and goats—and they bumped it up so that it worked.

I know why that is, because it goes back to your question about oral literature. There must have been times when people went to villages and told them about the flood, and when they got to the question of the boat, they’d say something like this: “And Enki said, ‘You’ve got to build the biggest coracle you’ve ever seen.’” Like that, right? Well, if you do this in a cinema in Guildford, people will say, “Well, that’s fine.” But if you do it to a whole load of river people who use coracles and make them, they’re not going to take that. They’re going to say, “So how big was it then? Come on, how big was it?”

So what do they do? They go to a coracle place and work out the proportions of the material, and then they bump it up so that the actor who reads this, for the first few times, has in his pocket how much it is. After a while, he knows it by heart, so that none of these people get angry: “You can’t expect us to believe that it’s big enough for all this.” Then he’d have all the stuff and he’d do it this way: “And you need all this, and you need all this,” and they’d all be hypnotized by it.

That, I think, regarding your question, is on the cusp of purely oral literature and purely literary literature. It’s actually there because you can see that it was molded in the environment when people were still talking.

Yeah, you’ve got to make it authentic to really connect with people.

Well, you couldn’t pull it over their eyes. I mean, you know?

Yeah. I wish many of the films in Hollywood today would have the same level of rigor.

Rigor is one of the things lacking in the world.

By the way, I forgot to ask: Why was the flood myth focused on noisy people?

Well, it can’t really be noisy. I’ll tell you what the explanation is. It’s something quite different. Before the flood, the gods had not created death. So I think the noise was a reflection of the fact that there were just too many animals and too many people, and they had to do something about it.

It’s a sort of euphemism, so to speak, because after the flood, at the end of the tablet—not my tablet, but the other ones, where it’s still broken—there’s a tantalizing thing where they create barren women who can’t have children, men who can’t have children, and princesses who don’t have children. They institute in society some figures who will not reproduce the species.

So it’s actually a rather sophisticated Malthusian kind of philosophical position. It’s remarkable. The noise means there are so many of them, not that they’re actually so noisy that we can’t hear ourselves think.

You have to tell me about the world of ancient games. Maybe we can start with the ancient Royal Game of Ur. What is it, and how were you somehow able to crack the rules of it?

The Royal Game of Ur is a board of 20 squares in a rather idiosyncratic form. It was pretty much unknown until the 1920s, when Sir Leonard Woolley was digging at the site of Ur. In the graves of the royal family, the Sumerian rulers, they found 4 or 5 boards of this pattern, together with dice and pieces, which showed that it was popular among them at this time, and also that wherever they were going in the world to come, they would want to be playing it.

That was one thing, and we had the number of pieces and some dice. Lots of people had ideas about how it might have been played, and that went on like that for a very long time. Thereafter, boards for this game turned up in most of the countries of the Middle East, sometimes quite a lot of them.

The one from Ur dates to about 2600 BC, and from then down to the end of the first millennium, there are examples of boards from Mesopotamia itself and from Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Turkey, Greece, Crete—all over the place. When you put all the boards together, you realize that you’re dealing with a board game that was extremely widespread and extremely popular.

Across space and time.

Across space and time. It lasted for nearly 3000 years, and it was played all over the place. It’s one of those games which is like chess or backgammon, which you can say are world conquerors.

The way I see the issue is that human beings, for a very long time, have been hungry for things to do, because all through the Bronze Age and the Iron Age, there was no television. There was nothing. Kids played with pull-along things, and adults had board games. They’re embedded in culture from a very early time.

This game was so widespread. Tutankhamun, for example, had 2 or 3 boards for it in his tomb, with the pieces. So it arrived in Egypt in the middle of the second millennium, and even the Pharaoh played it.

You have a game where the interesting point is that it spread across the known world without written rules and without people necessarily knowing the same language. A merchant would come from India—or I don’t know where—end up in a bar, start seeing these guys playing, and have a go himself. It looks rather interesting. You go home and try to remember what it looked like and try to work out how to move the pieces this way and the other.

You can see that the board has 20 squares. You have a block of 4 by 3, then a bridge of 2, and then a second 3-by-2 thing at the end, so it’s difficult to describe the actual shape. What happened was that after about 2000 BC, the squares at the far end, which were 2 on one flank and 2 on the other, were all put at the end of the central avenue.

You end up with 12 squares down the middle. All the boards after the period of Ur have 12 squares down the middle, and then 4 on each side at one end. When you play the game, you have dice to move the pieces. You have pieces all the same, and you obviously put them on your first corner, turn the corner, go up the middle, and off the end.

It was a race game of the kind that everybody knows from their own childhood. Some squares that had rosettes on them were either safe squares or gave you another throw, and you could maybe put 2 on 1 square. We don’t know. You could try to block people.

The crucial thing is that the widespread distribution of this idiosyncratic shape, and its lasting presence, shows it must have been a very good game if people more or less played the same thing on it everywhere. It may be that they were completely different games, but probably not. It makes you wonder what it is about it that would fit so well with a wide appetite from different people, different types of person.

Although it’s a race game where you’re at the mercy of dice and lucky squares and unlucky squares, the process of getting your pieces on and off the board to win is primarily fortuitous. But it has built within it, in the way I understand the game plays, a measurable quota of strategy. It’s a mix of probability and strategy.

Most games are either just probability, like Snakes and Ladders, or you have a game like chess, which is pure strategy. This is a mix. The grown-up game in the modern world where fortuity, or chance, and strategy have a good balance is backgammon, which is a sort of grown-up version of this sort of game. Nevertheless, if you play according to the most rational interpretation, strategy is a major factor.

Many people had ideas about how it was played and the route followed, and I did too. Then I discovered this tablet in the British Museum, which was written at a very late period, in the 2nd century BC. So, 2300 years after this object existed, it had on it the names of the pieces, what the pieces were like, and various things about the throws.

It was obvious that the rules were for a game derived from this simple early game. Working backward from it, you could reconstruct the game in accordance with its later incarnation that might be workable. It jolly well turned out to be workable, because people play this all over the world now. They even play it in Iraq, in cafés.

Wait, now?

They do. After it came back to life, it was put on the internet, and people played it. There are different rules. The ones I invented are pretty much regular.

If you have a good balance between chance and strategy, and it’s a fair game, and it doesn’t take 4 days to play like modern board games.

So you could have a go, and if you're lucky, you win fast and then have another go, maybe best of 3 or something like that. It works out rather well. Once I was in California, at the Getty, and I had to give a talk about this with all the information, because there are lots of things to say about it. The lady who ran the Friends of the Getty had a brilliant idea, so she brought in 20 or so commercial copies of this game, and they had small tables with chairs.

After the lecture, I was supposed to say to everybody, “Okay, this is what you have to do. This is how you play.” You can get the rules down in 3 minutes. So I said, “Okay, first you have to do this, first you have to do that, so off you go.” There was silence, and then after a while someone said, “I hate you! I’m never playing this game with you again.”

They had never played it before, but somebody had escaped at the last minute and cleaned up just when they thought they were going to get them. It provokes that salutary feeling that all good board games do. They were happily married couples who were, at the end of the afternoon, phoning their respective lawyers to discuss the future, that kind of thing.

Do you think games—our desire to play games, a mix of chance and a mix of strategy—is a part of human nature? Do you think that’s always been there?

I do, yes. You can say that in communities, you have rivalry, hostility, and questions of who’s the best, who’s the fastest, who’s the strongest, and things like that. If you play a board game like that, all the reality of it is sublimated into a safe terrain. Yes, the safety of it, where you can nevertheless get angry, but it’s not like that. That’s one thing.

More significantly, I believe, is the question of what in India people call time pass, which is not quite the same as pastime. Time pass is the question of what you do when it’s too hot to do anything, which is true a good part of the day and a good part of the year. Grandmothers sit under trees with their grandchildren, and they tell stories, and they do this and they do that. Time pass is a very useful catch-all phrase for the existence of board games.

In India, there are many board games. Chess, of course, is the famous one. There are three-in-a-row-type games, fox-against-geese games, wolves-against-sheep games, and all those sorts of things which come out of the landscape in miniature and were played for pleasure.

Also, in a kind of way, it doesn’t really matter who wins, because you might play and it goes round and round and round. Eventually somebody wins, and then they have another game. So it’s a sort of graceful, valid function for not wasting time, doing something which is stimulating and beneficial without it being overpowering in either way. I think it is a human matter.

Of course, we humans also sometimes mix gambling into the whole thing, add some money on top of it, which I’m sure sometimes was involved here.

I think so, but probably only late on, because money as such, of course, doesn’t appear till quite late. But there are—we know in Mesopotamia, it’s a rather interesting thing—a school tablet with 3 or 4 lines quoted from one literary thing and 3 or 4 from another literary thing. In one of them, it has this: “Oh, my astragal, oh, my astragal, woe is me, woe is me.” And that’s all we have.

I think this is an example of a genre of literature called “The Gambler’s Lament,” because they used knucklebones, or astragals, as dice. I’m sure there were people who bet a sack of this or a roomful of that on the throw of the knucklebones. This extract in the school text is probably from a literary tablet in which somebody lost everything, even though there weren’t coins, because I think you’re right that it’s a natural thing for it to accrue.

Maybe men and women played differently, because there are some games which were played in harems among women on a hot afternoon, where nobody was going to win anything. But the rules tablet, which gives this kind of backhanded information about it, is couched in such a way that it talks about people in a bar. The movement of the pieces is calculated in terms of food and drink and women—what you win. So the landscape in which the rules are couched for credibility is just exactly that setup.

As you mentioned, you are the curator at possibly the greatest place on Earth, the British Museum.

Oh, yes. The British Museum is a magical place, and it’s a special case because there’s a lot of flurry and dispute now about what museums are, what they’re for, why they exist, and whether they should ever have existed, and all these sorts of issues which people go on about.

But the British Museum is unlike almost all museums in the world, because it’s to do with the achievements of mankind from the beginning onward. So it’s a kind of celebration of art and more, but it’s not an art museum. It’s to do with the struggle of the human race against all the things that beset it, how it has triumphed, how marvelous it is, and the things that have happened, without turning a blind eye to all the contrasting horrible things that have happened. But it’s the narrative of the human race, as I see it, as discernible in objects.

It means that we serve 2 very important horizons. One is that we represent, as far as we can, the whole world, with no injudicious attention paid to any one or other culture. They’re all, to us, one. There’s no favoring any religious group, any country group, anything of the kind. It’s the human species.

We try to tell the narrative of the human species in its own right, how it overlaps with its neighbors, and what it’s learned from what came before. All those features together are really what the museum is concerned with. Of course, to collect everything we can to tell those narratives, and also to look after them according to scientific principle—all those things at once are the task for the British Museum.

The second horizon it serves is the unborn: babies yet to be born, and their children, and their children, and their children. It seems to me that the task of the museum is of such cultural significance and such, so to speak, sacred validity that it shouldn’t have to put up with people carping about this or that, or saying, “Museums are sinful and wicked and should be demolished,” because the people who say these things don’t really have any idea what it actually stands for.

It’s a kind of lighthouse in a universe where we are surrounded by darkness, ignorance, stupidity, uninterest, disinterest, skepticism, ignorance, and so forth about the very issues that we’re interested in. It’s one of the places in the world where you can talk about truth and beauty and elegance and intelligence without it being an affront to people who have none of those qualities, and without it being the kind of speech that makes people shudder or think you’re being naive about it, because those are the crucial things.

Also, about religion: we don’t favor a religion, and we don’t sponsor a religion. We try to look at them for what they are, and to assess their relationships and what they offer. Perhaps with less acerbity and less criticism than I would if I was the director, I would try to put them down the wrong end of a microscope and look at them for what they are, what they have done, and what’s been done in the name of religion. You probably would never get away with that, but maybe one day that will be an important part, because it’s a major contributive factor to what’s happened to the human race, which has never really articulated sharply what religion has done to us and where we might have been without it.

Not having religion does not mean not having law or morality or sensitivity or consideration or love or any of those things. None of those things depends on religion, and those are the things which are important.

I think people say, “Oh, you say this because you work there and you’re a curator. You wouldn’t say that the British Museum is a special place.” It’s nothing to do with that. It is actually a special place because you cannot point to another museum in the world with the same task.

For example, the Louvre is basically a museum of art, not a museum of ideas. The Met is definitely a museum of art. It’s called the Museum of Art, and that’s their priority: design and color and shape. To us, to my mind, it’s the human factor among many others. We’re not an art museum, and we’re not a local museum. We’re not a museum of the history of the bicycle. We’re not a celebration of evil.

We are, as it were, doing, as I see it, the best we could do if, for example, a whole load of Martians arrived in the Great Court and burst through the front door and said to us, “Tell us all about this place. Tell us about the world. Can you do it fast, because we’ve got to leave?”

If you took them round and said, “Look at this, look at this, look at this, look at this,” they’d get some picture which wasn’t insane. The only thing they wouldn’t get is a recording of “Johnny B. Goode” by Chuck Berry, but apparently one’s been put into space.

Yeah, I’ve heard about it. So this is a very comforting thing. But that’s kind of what the task of the British Museum is: to do that, but for the entirety of human history.

Yeah, it can be done.

It would be a store of artifacts—

Yes.

—that are the raindrops from which you can reconstruct the waterfall.

Precisely so. And it’s not a valid criticism to say to us that most of the stuff is not on exhibition, which is what everybody says: “It should go here, it should go there because it’s not on exhibition.” But we’re not doing it for any other reason than stockpiling for future examination.

This is the important perspective that nobody considers. When you have something which is contemporary, if you’re a clever journalist or a clever thinker, you can write essays about it, you can talk about it, and you can see it, but you can only see it from the perspective from which you operate. With the passage of time, the significance of objects—what they stand for, what they meant, and what they can still mean—shifts. The further back you go, the more sharply you can understand things, especially in terms of their own precedent and their own modern, contemporary parallels. So the benefit of distance, storage, and contemplation is inestimable.

There are so many questions I want to ask you. What wisdom do you think the people from whom these artifacts came had that we modern-day humans may have lost, either in part or in whole? Often, as you’ve spoken about, we see ancient peoples as lesser, dumber, more primitive. You’ve spoken about how they are basically the same.

I think if you put them on a bus, all wearing the same clothes, you wouldn’t know. That’s my feeling.

But I’m sure there’s some greater wisdom they had about certain things, as we have greater wisdom about others. Thanks to Einstein, we’ve figured out the curvature of spacetime, which they didn’t know about.

They knew quite a lot about astronomy, though. Quite a lot about astronomy.

They stared at the stars.

Yeah, and they measured them, and they made calculations. When the Greeks went to Babylon, they thought, “Hey, man, this is really cool.” They wrote it all down and went home.

I think it’s a hard question to answer. One of the things is that they were spared things which have cluttered up the essence of humanity. I think that the modern adherence to the electronic universe is disastrous for humans because it reduces the vitality of the human component. I think it’s restrictive in a way that people don’t realize until it’s too late.

Like drugs: if you take drugs now and again, you think, “Oh, it’s fine, it’s fine.” Then suddenly, you realize you’re addicted to heroin. It’s a bit like that. People use the electronic world like an addictive drug, and they can’t get through without it. I think this is a very recent thing.

I suppose I’m not a Luddite who says, “We shouldn’t have railway engines, and we shouldn’t have kettles.” But I think one of the things about the ancient world was that people never went anywhere unless they were merchants or soldiers. Probably people were born and died in a village, and then their children were born and died in the village, and they never knew anything about the outside world. Maybe they knew very little. Sometimes there’d be a message, but in principle, they had no idea about other countries, other languages, how big they were, or anything.

So I don’t think they had wisdom in a way that you could type out: following precepts will make life better. They told lies, and they esteemed the truth, and they fell in love, and they committed adultery, and they committed murder. They did all the things. I think, in a way, the ancient world allowed human beings to behave more naturally than the world in which we live does now.

If you do live in a rustic environment or by the sea, or you’re a fisherman, or you do all those normal, real kinds of things, then it’s probably all right. But most people who live crammed into cities live a very, very artificial life, where the principles they regard as ineluctably crucial are not ineluctably crucial.

One example is this ghastly thing on mobiles, where you get a short clip from a real program. I think it’s utterly, utterly wicked. You have children all over the world who cannot articulate, spell, or make meaning clear using the best, most literary, and most beneficial language that’s ever been created, which is English. They have to save their lives, and they use a word. I’ll give you an example: “I went.”

Like, “I went.”

It’s so difficult to define that grammatically. Difficult. “I should have gone.” Where “I went” or “I should have gone” means to speak. How would it be if, when we see the verb “to go” in Sumerian, it actually meant to speak? Where would we be?

I mean, we should probably say that even at that time, there was probably slang, right? It just wouldn’t end up written.

Yes, there were dialects. There were words that sailors used. For sure, all those things.

But they wouldn’t end up in writing.

Sometimes they do.

We have to remember that Cambridge and Oxford speak in a certain way that’s proper and formal and very smart, but most of the people in bars—sailors—have a different way of speaking.

They do.

So they would probably say, “Like, I went,” and have emojis, and—

The thing is, you have to moderate your vocabulary if you talk to people of a certain age, because they don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about if you use language exactly. The thing that was so exquisite about English is that, like with a barrister, you can make a case which is absolutely wonderful because it says exactly what it means, and there’s no wiggle room. Conversation should be like that, with no wiggle room.

It’s not just a matter of spelling, but the basic vocabulary. Something very interesting is that people say they know English or they speak English. Have you ever in your life opened a full-size volume of the Oxford English Dictionary? It’s about that thick. I have a whole set. I love them.

You take a volume off the shelf, open the book, and run your forefinger down the various columns of writing. You might have to turn several pages before you find a single word you’ve ever heard before, because English is unimaginably rich. I grew up in a house where everybody read literature all the time. I had 3 sisters and then a brother, and we all read literature. We went to the library every week and read lots and lots and lots of books, so we all had really good vocabularies.

That’s how you get vocabulary. Otherwise, you don’t, because in conversation—“Do you want more tea?” and all this sort of stuff—you don’t learn new vocabulary. You have to get it from reading and listening to proper stuff.

Which is a very important aspect of vocabulary: why it’s important to know a lot of words and to speak clearly, because those words also define the quality of your thoughts.

Sure.

At the end of the day.

That’s exactly right. I must say, I think it is a pity that, having produced such wonderful languages in the world, their use is so inhibited.

I think the right way to think about it is the way the British Museum thinks about it. You’re commenting on the ephemeral, on the thing that is in the moment right now, that is happening. The reality is that only a few select things will last 100 or 200 years from now about this moment in time. So we have to think with the big-picture perspective and the slowness of time.

In the moment, there are these catastrophes, there are changing ways of speaking, and there’s technology tearing apart the fabric of society. But when you zoom out, you will think about the grand ideas of Einstein, the battle of ideologies with Communism and Nazism of the 20th century, the bad, the triumphant, the rockets. Humans started launching rockets, going to the Moon, maybe to Mars. Those things. We won’t be thinking about emojis and any of that. In some sense, that’s the stuff you’re looking at with cuneiform. It’s the things that stand the test of time, that are there.

That’s true. But I think that language, properly used, is a crucial human tool for communication.

Absolutely, yes. Speaking of which, I have to ask some more about the cuneiform tablets. At the British Museum, when you’re surrounded by so many—and by the way, how many cuneiform tablets?

About 130,000.

That is so cool.

It is. It’s pretty cool.

What are some of the most beautiful to you? Maybe ones we don’t know about—cuneiforms that make you smile?

Well, there are not many jokes. You asked about jokes.

They lost their sense of humor in cuneiform.

Yeah, I think there is one I can remember. A fly or a mosquito lands on the back of an elephant and says, “Am I too heavy for you?” or something like that. That’s sort of a Babylonian joke. You wouldn’t use it in the pub or anything like that.

Yeah, yeah. You had to be there. But then also, do you like Tom Lehrer?

Of course.

Okay, that's good. That's good. I once went to America on a lecture tour, and I ended up in the town where Dr. Wernher von Braun ended up running the American rocket industry.

It doesn't matter?

Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down?

Where they come down, yeah.

"That's not my department," says Wernher von Braun. That guy—I could tell where your wit comes from, the fact that you know Tom Lehrer.

The way he plays the piano is fantastic. I think my dad recorded him off the radio on a reel-to-reel tape recorder, and I learned all the songs by heart because they were so fantastic. But I knew a Harvard professor who I stayed with once who was a Sumerologist, and his wife said that she knew Tom Lehrer when he was in the math department. They used to have parties, and he always played the piano in the corner of the room. He's just amazing, that man.

He has a real wit. You have that. I've watched a lot of your stuff. Your whole way of being has that wit. There's something about that biting wit. It's a bit of humor, a bit of sadness in it. It just feels like it very quickly gets to the complexity of what it means to be human.

I think so. But the paradoxical thing about Tom Lehrer is that when he's talking about the bomb and all that, and devices, and international trouble, it's so unchanged. And the same with Dr. Strangelove. It's just very remarkable. Anyway, next time you're here, you should come and see me in the museum.

I will.

I'll show you some of these confounded things for yourself. I'll show you the Chicago Assyrian Dictionary and give you a grammar book to learn.

Irving, you're a remarkable human being.

Well, I'm very glad we met.

It's truly an honor to meet you, to talk to you.

Me too. It's been very interesting.

Irving, thank you so much for talking to me.

It's been a big pleasure for me, Lex. Be well.