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

TL;DR

Irving Finkle reveals that cuneiform writing, dating to 3500 BC, likely had far older roots and encodes civilizations we've barely begun to understand.

Key Points

• 1.Writing originated around 3500 BC in Mesopotamia between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, using clay tablets with pictographic signs that evolved into sound-based syllabic writing.
• 2.The genius leap wasn't drawing pictures — it was realizing a picture of a foot could also represent the *sound* of the word "foot," unlocking the ability to record full language and grammar.
• 3.Finkle controversially believes pictographic writing came at the *end* of a long period of symbolic communication, not the beginning — meaning sound-based writing may have preceded pictures.
• 4.A round green stamp seal found at Göbekli Tepe (c. 9000 BC) has hieroglyphic-style carvings on its flat face, suggesting a formal writing/ratification system existed 6,000 years before Sumerian tablets.
• 5.Göbekli Tepe's architectural complexity — massive planned stone structures — would have required written coordination, just as Sumerian cities did, making the absence of acknowledged writing there suspicious.
• 6.Cuneiform ("wedge-shaped" from Latin *cunea*) was rediscovered in the 1840s–1850s during excavations of Assyrian cities in Iraq, with tablets preserved in clay surviving thousands of years underground.
• 7.The decipherment key was a trilingual inscription at Bisutun mountain carved by King Darius in Old Persian, Elamite, and Babylonian — the cuneiform equivalent of the Rosetta Stone.
• 8.The first Babylonian word decoded was *naru* (river), matching Arabic and Aramaic roots — confirming Babylonian as a Semitic language and unlocking rapid dictionary-based decipherment.
• 9.Sumerian, unlike Babylonian, is a linguistic isolate — unrelated to any known language family, suggesting its related languages vanished entirely before writing could record them.
• 10.The Chicago Assyrian Dictionary, started in the 1920s and spanning the length of a table, is Finkle's candidate for America's greatest cultural achievement (alongside the electric guitar).
• 11.Cuneiform lasted over 3,000 years partly due to inertia and partly because scribes deliberately kept literacy exclusive — literacy for the masses was unthinkable and would have been considered dangerous.
• 12.The famous Library of Ashurbanipal at Nineveh was NOT destroyed by enemies — Finkle argues the Babylonians took the valuable tablets home; what archaeologists found are merely the leftovers and duplicates.
• 13.Omen texts ("if a lizard crosses the table, the queen will die") were never meant as absolute predictions — the royal diviner's real job was probabilistic advice using ritual to deflect danger.
• 14.Babylonian lacks grammatical modal verbs (could, might, should), yet its literature is deeply nuanced — Finkle argues translators who render everything as certainties are systematically misreading the texts.
• 15.Edward Hinks, an Irish clergyman from Kilyleagh with five daughters, deserves more credit than Henry Rawlinson for cracking cuneiform — Finkle calls Rawlinson the "stepfather" of Assyriology.