Dr. Irving Finkel

It has been too long.

That is exactly what it is.

This cuneiform writing system, when you look at what comes to us from the ancient world, and the very ancient world, the cuneiform script, which the earliest things are probably at the end of about 4000 BC, 3000, maybe even older than that,

They're the earliest pieces that we can say are writing.

They're part of the history of writing.

But they are, as you put it, the earliest that we know of.

And it's very easy and very common in books and in conversation for people to say, oh, this is the oldest language in the world.

But this is an erroneous conclusion, because when you have the earliest evidence, that is all it means.

It's the earliest evidence.

And we actually have no idea, at least I don't, of what

plausibly or even implausibly it might have existed before cuneiform came on the scene it's perfectly possible there was a long history behind it or prehistory behind it because the very word history and prehistory the distinction between them is predicated on the invention of writing so before cuneiform you can say it's prehistory but i often wonder and we can talk about it but i think the

The intrinsic evidence from the earliest signs and the way they functioned suggests to me that they were derivative from something which already existed.

Well, chronologically, the oldest is Sumerian.

So the Sumerian language, which is...

more or less without parallel in the world.

It's a kind of unique language because it doesn't have what you might call brothers and sisters like languages generally do.

So, for example, if you know Spanish, Italian, French and Latin, you know they're kind of relatives in one way or another.

And if you know one or two of them, it's not so hard to learn another one because they're a family of languages.

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

So when Sumerian comes into the world, maybe in 3,900, we first know that sort of date, 4,000 BC, something like that, the first evidence that