Irving Finkel

So it's called agglutinative by people who like to make things look more important than they are.

So you have the central thing.

You slap stuff on the beginning, slap stuff on the end, and each particle creates a bit of meaning.

So you have a long verb which tells you he would have done it if he could, but he couldn't kind of thing in the form of the verb.

But the thing is, if you wanted to write that, you and I decided to write the answer, the first thing we would do is have a sign move.

And then we'd have bar, and then we'd have E, because every five minutes people made those noises.

You see what I mean?

much much older i do cuneiform type tablets well or pictographic type tablets before the cuneiform and the drawing type and i'll tell you why because there's this marvelous site in turkey called gobekli tepe oh yeah you know about gobekli yes well everybody knows about the buildings and the architecture and the skull everybody knows about it

If you go all the way through the photographs, which the archaeologists unwisely put online, you will find in the middle of one colour plate with lots of other things, a round green stone like a scarab from Egypt.

That's to say it has an arched back and a flat bottom.

And on the flat bottom, there are hieroglyphic signs carved in the stone, right?

No one said anything about it at all.

But it's clear to me, A.

that this was a stamp to ratify where the carvings of the signs on clay or some other sealing material would leave an impression.

It must be that.

So this is about 9000 BC.

Now, when I was a boy at university, my professor said to me that the reason writing evolved in Mesopotamia because they had complex cities with ziggurats and big buildings and lots of people and they had to organize everything.

And so they invented writing to cope with it.

Well, if they had to cope with that in Sumer in 3000 BC, they sure as hell had to do it at Gobekli Tepe because they've hardly even begun to finish excavating the sites of Gobekli.

They go on and on, like Manchester and Newcastle united.