Irving Finkel

high-level, top, and then there were lots of professional scribes, and then the kids who left school as soon as possible and did all that, like today.

That's a really interesting question.

In terms of richness of vocabulary and richness of verbal subtlety,

I think Babylonian rivals Arabic and, of course, English.

In other words, you can say whatever you want in English, however subtle it might be, even if people don't understand the subtlety.

You can, because the tools are fantastic.

And Arabic has lots of synonyms and lots of devices.

Same in Babylonian.

It was a fully-fledged literary language.

The question about whether the language put a stop to further things, which is basically what you're asking, is immensely complicated.

But the one thing that strikes me as relevant is that a very huge proportion of

scholarly literature in mesopotamia it takes the form of omens because they believe that events accidental or deliberately stimulated had implications for what was going to happen and they took omens from things in the sky and things in the street and every single thing if you were a well-qualified diviner would have this significance right

Now, there are thousands of lines of omens of all different kinds.

And in Akkadian, it says, for example, if a lizard runs across the breakfast table, the queen will die.

So if you translate the Akkadian this way, the word if, verb and everything, if that, then this.

So there are thousands of lines translated in many books about omens where if this happens, that will happen.

So this is how it's understood by my colleagues.

But this is absolutely impossible.

Because if you're the chief diviner for the king and you open up a sheep to take a liver out and examine it according to the queen's going to die and the king's there, you're not going to say the queen's going to die.

I mean, you're going to look like a fucking idiot if she does.