Dr. Irving Finkel

And that's how it all opened up.

So that mountain you talked about is the key which unlocked the whole of the cuneiform world, rather like the Rosetta Stone in Egypt.

Is this the Rosetta Stone in cuneiform?

It is.

Well, the thing about the script is that the beginning signs were drawn, as we will talk about in a minute.

But after a while, they simplified the drawings in order to make

diagrammatic representations of signs not by a continuous line like you do with a pencil but by individual strikes of a stylus which impressed the clay and why they took clay as their medium is an interesting question but the thing is if they hadn't used clay which was abundant and in fact clay underpinned the whole of Sumerian culture because everything was made of clay

I don't know if they wore clay, but in the underworld, people munched on it for lunch.

I mean, clay was the underpinning of the whole of the culture, and it was used for everything possible.

And of course, the banks of the Euphrates and Tigris have many outcrops of excellent quality clay without stuff in them, you know, bits and pieces and stones, but really high quality clay, which will take a very sharp impression.

So I suppose when they started out, they might have used skins, they might have used...

Leather or something like they might have done.

They might have written on wood if they could.

But wood was always in short supply in Mesopotamia.

And clay was abundant.

And so somehow it just went hand in glove with the first recording that you could make a bit of clay into a kind of tablet, make marks on it.

And when it dried, they'd survive.

Somebody else could come along and they would read the signs and they would understand what you meant.

So it was the natural thing.

And of course,