Irving Finkel

And having exercised that rigor from the outset, it meant that the thing became streamlined and stayed more or less as it was all the way through for three millennia or more, because the stamp put on it

by those early visionaries, not only who came up with the system and how it would work, but to preserve it and to safeguard it, was fantastically effective.

It means that there were scholars in Babylon in the third century or the second century, when Alexander was there, for example, if somebody dug up a tablet in very early writing,

they would have a pretty good idea what it meant.

They would recognize the signs even though they were so ancient and they'd see the relationships between them.

So you have a fantastically strong system where the spinal cord was structured in a lexicographic regular system.

So lexicography and what the signs were was jealously safeguarded and protected and it lasted fantastically.

Yeah.

So in the 19th century, about 1840, 1850, they started to find these things on excavations in Iraq, the biggest Syrian cities and sometimes further south, the Babylonian cities.

They found these clay tablets, which in the ground lasted...

unimaginable lengths of time.

And they were all written in what we call cuneiform script.

And the cuneiform part of it means wedge-shaped, because cuneos in Latin means wedge.

And when they first saw these signs, they realized that a cluster of marks broke down into...

um different arrangements of triangular shapes and it's most clear on the syrian reliefs where the writing is very big and you can easily tell that they were that shape on a tablet the wedge is not quite so predominant so that was it so they first called them cuneatic or cuneiform and the word stuck and of course growing up in the british museum and reading these things for a living becomes a kind of

lifetimes work to make sure that everybody in the country knows what cuneiform means because once in a while you meet somebody you never heard of the word at all and this is appalling so people do survive however but it's an important mission because it's such an achievement by man and so much knowledge was encapsulated in these lumps of clay because they used it for everyday things like letters and business documents and contracts this is one thing and then the kings wrote

long, elaborate accounts of their campaigns and their military activities.

And then there was proper literature, belles-lettres and magic and medicine and...

All other genres of literature that we would naturally list on a sheet of paper in alphabetic writing, what you would use writing for, they basically did.

And it had the unexpected quality that most of these clay things lasted in the ground until now.