Dr. Irving Finkel

Do not show this to anybody from Uruk.

Not allowed.

So, you know, when you read the cuneiform, it just looks like cuneiform.

But when you suddenly hear the voice and someone wagging a finger, don't let those bastards get hold of this.

This is our stuff.

They're not allowed to.

So it's not copyright for money.

But nevertheless, there is a sort of guild or some such conception keeping a rivalry among them free.

But even given that, you don't get sign forms going off at a mad tangent.

So if they don't like us, we'll invent a sign for this.

It never happens.

And it's easy to overlook this point.

But I don't think it's easy to overemphasize it because it seems to me beyond doubt that this must be a central truth about this script, that there was a control from day one and it was a self-regulating system.

Once in a while you might have an inkling of it or even identify it, but in general that's true.

So there are other things about this cuneiform writing system which are important because just as you have a sign for beer and its being one sign, the principle runs that a given sign can sometimes have multiple uses.

And this is what bewilders people who throw up their career as computer programmers and shopkeepers and decide to do a seriology at university, when they discover this series of unfortunate events that lies ahead of them.

Because a given cuneiform sign can have multiple uses.

That's to say, it can function with more than one meaning when you look at it.

more than one semantic significance.

It can have more than one phonetic value, so it can have different pronunciations.