Dr. Irving Finkel

Despite the two languages and the evolution of the languages themselves, because all languages evolved, and the evolution of the way the signs were written, the repertoire was never allowed to grow wild.

all the way down to the end of time.

This seems to me immensely significant.

So that scribes in the second millennium, they knew what all the signs were.

They had their lexical text with all the lists of words, the words for colors, for lands, for different kinds of wood, different kinds of stone.

And they were copied and copied and copied and copied.

And the writing evolved.

It got more casual.

It got more

There's stylistic changes in the writing and the language.

As I said, changes like Chaucer in modern English.

The language evolves, the language evolves.

But the cuneiform conception ran clear and free like a river without any real deviation.

And in my opinion, that is not a natural matter.

So especially, for example, you could say this.

In the first millennium BC, we jump ahead a long way to when there were like universities, so to speak, in Babylonia.

So in the city of Uruk, in the city of Babylon, in the city of Borsippa, probably a few other places, there were libraries originally, temporal libraries, which blossomed out

into some kind of establishment where scholarly matters and astronomical matters and mathematical things and medicine were studied and developed in conjunction, people working together.

They had kind of schools of stuff, very important matter.

And sometimes we have a very significant document, medicine or something, and it says, the bottom's ruled off, tablet of Mr. So-and-so from Babylon.