Dr. Irving Finkel

The other thing is that the clay in the modern Western world, you associate it with either being a potter who has clay all over their clothes and all over the carpet and gets into trouble, or messy stuff at school when children are supposed to make something and actually spend the afternoon throwing bits at one another.

It's all to do with mess.

But the thing is, in Mesopotamia, it was nothing like that.

It was their natural resource.

And the Sumerians and the Babylonians after them

They were masters of clay and the control and use of clay on the highest level.

It was their thing.

Their hands were a kind of naturally adjusted to it.

So I think that it was just free.

It was endless.

And it would dry in the hot sun or out of the hot sun and be perfectly usable forever and ever.

So it seems the right natural thing.

Of course, they were perfectly right, because everything that we have is going to rot, fall to pieces.

Everything on computers is going to go down the toilet for certain.

So in the end, it'll only be the clay tablets which survive.

And they'll say, didn't they realize how stupid it was to invent the internet?

That kind of thing.

Yes, they certainly are.

I mean, the thing is, the very earliest pictures, which we ought to talk about first because they come first.

Should we do that?