Irving Finkel

But what they did is they did a drawing of a kind of complex thing with a brazier inside another sign, which meant hot.

So that sign existed, but it also meant other things as well.

And you had to choose the right one for the context.

It's all a contextual matter.

I mean, it really is quite a matter for despair when you start cuneiform, because on top of everything else, they didn't leave gaps between the words.

Because they're all connected.

That's really mean.

Yeah.

So when you read, what you have to do, you start with the first sign and you think of the sign this and you go through the values in your mind and there's next sign.

And if one is bar and the next one is ab, among other readings, bar ab sounds like a syllable structure for a word and you go on like that.

So there are two things about it.

One is that if you want to, you can master it.

The other thing is that the number of variables was restricted.

They controlled it, so it wasn't insane.

In other words, if you learn the corpus, and you learn how the signs are composed, and you learn their different values, then you've got it down, and off you go.

It's very beautiful, I think.

It's marvelous.

Well, I had a very abnormal upbringing because when I went to university, for about three years beforehand, I'd wanted to be an Egyptologist.

So I'd read the grammar by Gardiner and was looking forward very much to studying ancient Egyptian.

And what happened was that I went up to the University of Birmingham, where I went to university.