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Irving Finkel

πŸ‘€ Speaker
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1273 total appearances
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Podcast Appearances

Lex Fridman Podcast
#487 – Irving Finkel: Deciphering Secrets of Ancient Civilizations & Flood Myths

They can't just have had inscribed stone seals.

Lex Fridman Podcast
#487 – Irving Finkel: Deciphering Secrets of Ancient Civilizations & Flood Myths

And many parts of India today write on palm leaf.

Lex Fridman Podcast
#487 – Irving Finkel: Deciphering Secrets of Ancient Civilizations & Flood Myths

Why should it be any different?

Lex Fridman Podcast
#487 – Irving Finkel: Deciphering Secrets of Ancient Civilizations & Flood Myths

So people think, you know, well, just because it's now, it wouldn't be then.

Lex Fridman Podcast
#487 – Irving Finkel: Deciphering Secrets of Ancient Civilizations & Flood Myths

Actually, that argument is utterly, utterly fallacious because the process of evolution is stymied left, right, and center by inertia.

Lex Fridman Podcast
#487 – Irving Finkel: Deciphering Secrets of Ancient Civilizations & Flood Myths

Inertia is nearly as strong as evolution.

Lex Fridman Podcast
#487 – Irving Finkel: Deciphering Secrets of Ancient Civilizations & Flood Myths

And this is something that the people who talk about progress and ideas have no idea about.

Lex Fridman Podcast
#487 – Irving Finkel: Deciphering Secrets of Ancient Civilizations & Flood Myths

Yes, we have a lot, but it's nothing in comparison with what existed.

Lex Fridman Podcast
#487 – Irving Finkel: Deciphering Secrets of Ancient Civilizations & Flood Myths

But not only that.

Lex Fridman Podcast
#487 – Irving Finkel: Deciphering Secrets of Ancient Civilizations & Flood Myths

See, we don't have to decipher anymore.

Lex Fridman Podcast
#487 – Irving Finkel: Deciphering Secrets of Ancient Civilizations & Flood Myths

We can read Akkadian, or Babylonian, Sumerian pretty well, fluently.

Lex Fridman Podcast
#487 – Irving Finkel: Deciphering Secrets of Ancient Civilizations & Flood Myths

That's not a problem.

Lex Fridman Podcast
#487 – Irving Finkel: Deciphering Secrets of Ancient Civilizations & Flood Myths

So the information which you can get from these sources, especially three millennia of sources, is very, very substantial.

Lex Fridman Podcast
#487 – Irving Finkel: Deciphering Secrets of Ancient Civilizations & Flood Myths

very substantial, but it means that Assyriologists have the inbuilt idea that what we have is something like all there ever was, which is absurd.

Lex Fridman Podcast
#487 – Irving Finkel: Deciphering Secrets of Ancient Civilizations & Flood Myths

For example, there's a period called the Earth-3 period, where people lived in city-states.

Lex Fridman Podcast
#487 – Irving Finkel: Deciphering Secrets of Ancient Civilizations & Flood Myths

They wrote very small account tablets by the thousand, and there were two or three major cities where this is the way they lived.

Lex Fridman Podcast
#487 – Irving Finkel: Deciphering Secrets of Ancient Civilizations & Flood Myths

People had to bring

Lex Fridman Podcast
#487 – Irving Finkel: Deciphering Secrets of Ancient Civilizations & Flood Myths

tithes and offerings and everything was recorded by what i always refer to and people sympathize with is the ancestors of the inland revenue because everything had to be written down so that some schmuck could check it and fill out the ledger and some other schmuck above him could okay it so there's no funny business or no mistakes now the thing is there are thousands of those tablets written in about 2100 to 2000 bc thousands of them about size of a box of matches

Lex Fridman Podcast
#487 – Irving Finkel: Deciphering Secrets of Ancient Civilizations & Flood Myths

So people like to generalize about the Sumerians at this time of the world.

Lex Fridman Podcast
#487 – Irving Finkel: Deciphering Secrets of Ancient Civilizations & Flood Myths

But they probably all came out of two rooms.