Dr. Irving Finkel

So on the Gilgamesh tablets of Ashurbanipal, which are the highest kind of quality scribal achievements,

All the lines end at the same point.

And if the line is empty and there's extra space, they leave the space in the middle and they move the others up to the right-hand side.

So they had right justification.

But by and large, it is a bewildering thing when you start off that there's no gap between the words.

But as you jump in, eventually you never think about it because somehow your mind adjusts to it.

I mean, a good analogy here is if you study languages like Arabic or Hebrew,

People who write Arabic and Hebrew don't write the vowels in.

So when you start out, you think, oh, how on earth can they do this without any vowels?

They've just got the skeleton.

But people whose languages, they just read it, and there's never any doubt.

And it's something comparable to that.

Lovely.

They are.