Dr. Irving Finkel

Should we do that?

The thing about them is they use this clay like the later proper cuneiform used that as their support system.

And that's, it's really always been that.

So when they did their first signs, the first conception that you can do a mark on a surface, that another person can come along and see it and understand what it meant.

When this idea came into the world, it was an important thing and it led to the creation of this script.

And its ancestral form, the earliest of which we know, has a whole fruit bowl full of signs which are drawn in the surface of a piece of clay.

with a point.

For example, you can imagine having a nice piece of clay and having a pencil with a respectable point and dragging it in the clay.

You can draw in the clay as you would on a piece of paper.

And the first, I don't know, centuries, we don't know how long really, but the first stage, so to speak, when they wrote the earliest signs, they were drawn in the clay.

I mean, the problem, among other problems, which always comes up in archaeology when it's really important, is that there's no archaeological stratified evidence for anything to do with the earliest signs.

Lots of them were found, for example, reused to fill up holes in the ground and that kind of thing, which is the worst diagnostic source you could ever have.

So actually outside dating for this, you know, around 4,000 thing is hopeless.

So what we've got is tablets in early script

of slightly evolving form.

We can say this looks like the earliest, this looks like the next, this looks like the next, that kind of thing.

And when we have stuff that we can date, when we extrapolate backwards, the sort of interval must have gone before we get to the bit we can date.

I would think that the first efforts to do writing on clay, the first experimental things, would be before 4000 BC.

Let's say, for the sake of argument, 4200 BC.

There's no evidence, but it's a good, comfortable working figure.