Irving Finkel

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.

So, however many hundreds of thousands of tablets are in the world's museums and collections, there must be millions of them in the ground awaiting excavation.

So...

In a way, that's a comforting thought because they're safe there and protected.

Well, I think it's rather paradoxical.

because the first generation or so of tablets that we have are written in these pictographic signs, where each sign means what it looks like.

So this is a very limited method of recording messages, and it doesn't lend itself to recording grammar.

And then the secondary phase, as we understand it from archaeology, is the perception that you could take these signs, still meaning what they look like, but also what the words sounded like.

So then you have all these wonderful ice cubes,

which express all the sounds of the language from which you can record words and grammar and everything else.

Now, the thing is, the received law from Assyriology is that it was that way round, that first we had pictures and secondly we had sound.

Well, I have to say,

I find this very hard to believe because if you had a group of people in an environment where it was compellingly necessary to make a system that you made marks on a surface which everybody could understand and use,

Why wouldn't you start out with signs that made sounds?

Because everybody speaks the same language, right?

So they didn't have A, B, C, D, E, F, G, but they could easily work out all the vowels and consonants without naming them as vowels and consonants, but the component parts.