Irving Finkel

Inertia is nearly as strong as evolution.

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

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

But not only that.

See, we don't have to decipher anymore.

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

That's not a problem.

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

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.

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

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

People had to bring

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

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

But they probably all came out of two rooms.

because they were dumped when they were no longer needed in some kind of room.

And the archaeologists in the 19th century came down on these, and then all the locals came and they dug them up and they sold them all over the place, and they got all over the world, thousands and thousands of them, out of probably two storage rooms, which is not a whole culture or a whole country or their whole history or their belief systems.

So our view of it is slewed.

by the nature of the material.

And sometimes the material is opulent and benevolent, but not always.