Irving Finkel

It will never be thought of, and it will be anathema.

And so if you got on a soapbox on a Saturday afternoon and say, "'Ah, enough of this.

We have to teach the children.'"

They'd be taken away, I think.

We are, except this, that when you went to scribal school, you had to learn Sumerian and Akkadian, the languages properly, and all the vocabulary and the grammar.

So some boys probably had a lot of trouble understanding

doing this and you know they were okay but there ain't going to be no geniuses and i think the situation in the school was that the teachers farmed out the kids who would actually rather have been outside playing football but could read and write to earning their living

doing low-level reading and writing.

That's to say writing contracts, letters, everyday things for people because no one could read and write.

So you had to get a scribe if you're going to marry your daughter off and you get all the witnesses about the presence and all this.

All the thing had to be done for four days.

So the writer would come and do it.

So your medium-level writers would serve that requirement.

And very talented or clever or intellectual,

students would be encouraged to go into one of the literary professions which would be so to speak medicine

law, working for the king, working for the church, I mean the priesthood, so all those things which were dependent upon archives and writing, they would find their NIVO, and also architecture, because if a big building had to be built, then somebody had to know about load-bearing things and brick measurements, and so some of them went into that kind of work, and also probably some of them went into running the army, and you had to move stores and animals and

So they found their NIVO, and some of them were intellectually very able indeed, and they went into the disciplines of, on the one hand, astrology, but more seriously into astronomy.

And theoretical grammar, because they had treatises about the relationship between the two languages and how they worked and different parts of speech.

And they wrote learned commentaries as well, what words meant.

So there was an intellectual tradition.