Dr. Irving Finkel

So me has to be a phonetic thing spelling a sound.

So write me, and then if the next sign has the value beginning with I, well, if it's me-e, it's very likely to link.

So you write me-is, which means miss, and then you put your hand up.

So this simple illustration...

of the multiple uses of signs is quite bewildering when you first encounter it.

But if you lie down in a darkened room and drink cold water regularly, it'll come to you in a flash.

But the point is this, that the signs are multivalent.

So when you have a sign which has one set of phonetic values and one set of meanings, sometimes there are many of them.

It's a process of elimination, is it?

It's a process of elimination and reading as many texts as possible because what happens is...

that you get into the way of thinking of the Babylonian scribe.

You know what usages are common, what are uncommon.

You become so familiar with the matter that there's no difficulty.

And after about 25 years, you can read fluently.

Well, I think the latest dated cuneiform tablet is from the first century AD.

It's an almanac, an astronomical almanac.

And so at that period...

you have probably the remnants of these, as it were, universities, in inverted commas, from earlier centuries where things were still studied, there were still people looking at the skies, making calculations, thinking things, making records and reading older things.

And the number of people who did it must have gradually reduced because at that period, Aramaic had supplanted the Babylonian language as a spoken language at the end of the first millennium, probably increasingly through the first millennium, and then Greek and then Arabic and into the modern world.

And so you have to imagine that in these places in Babylonia,