Irving Finkel

meaning could, you know, like you were saying, you might do it, you know, something like that.

Anyway, so nowadays, it's not a decipherment that's the job, it's just reading.

And if you have lots of tablets to work on, like on a dig, it's very exciting if they come out of the ground and no one's looked for them before, you know, it's your job.

And if you're a competent estereologist,

You should be able to sight read more or less, except most say a letter or something like that.

But most documents have some damage.

So you have to learn how to interpret stuff.

And also some literature is very difficult because of technical vocabulary and they had technical vocabulary and unusual words.

Yeah.

Sometimes you can calculate to what it ought to be, make a reasonable suggestion.

And this dictionary, which I was talking to you about, is such a fantastic tool because...

A lot of people worked on it.

It was the National Endowment for the Humanities, and it was for decades and decades of work.

And most of the world's best Assyriologists collaborated on it.

So the quality of translation and understanding is really extraordinary.

There are one or two letters from a chap to a woman about, you know, you are very beautiful and your lips are like radishes and your ears are like walruses and things.

But, I mean, there are some things like that.

And there's a kind of street drama in Babylon in 4th century BC, something like that.

when there must have been actors who did this in the street.

And it's Marduk and Sarpanitum, his wife, and another woman.