Dr. Irving Finkel
👤 SpeakerAppearances Over Time
Podcast Appearances
There were old men and less old men and then not many old men and then the last guy who could read the stuff expired.
And at that moment cuneiform writing became extinct.
And there are outpockets of spoken Aramaic, even in northern Iraq, where people today speak a form of Aramaic which is a linear direct descendant of the Aramaic spoken when the Assyrians and Babylonians were running the country in the first millennium.
They just survived among those people and they speak that language.
The Babylonian tongue probably reduced massively in comparison with Aramaic as time went by, not least for the fact that you could write Aramaic with an alphabet, and you could write it with 26 letters in ink, and gradually, gradually, you'd have the movement that recording on clay, with all its complexity and all its training, gradually became more
redundant in the commercial world or in the business world or in the administrative world and it was reduced to these old crusty blokes looking from their ivory towers at the moon and predicting things for the future so i think it's not over over fanciful to think of that romantic rather inspiring kind of thing but
So probably sometime in the first century AD, the day came that if you'd gone with your microphone and tape recorder to Babylon looking for someone who could tell you about the old stories, there might be people who remember them by heart, but not who could read the inscriptions.
That was one of the very institutions where the diaries were kept, which soldiered on and soldiered on until the first century AD.
It's quite exciting when you see the name Alexander written in Cuneiform for the first time.
That also makes you jump like anything.
They were taught to write in a continuum.
And in the best literary tablets, we can see that in addition to that, they had right justification.