Irving Finkel

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.

And really, the old rule would be you could not have architecture like that, planned and built according to principle with all the different people.

You couldn't have that without writing in southern Iraq.

So how come suddenly, 7,000 years earlier, they do it there?

And that green stone shows that they had writing.

That was an official who sealed this, got the stuff, or whatever it was, or it was his dad's name or whatever it is, got a wiggly snake and a wiggly this.

That is pictographic writing.

Maybe even as phonetic writing, I don't know.

But it was writing thousands of years before in the South.

And that's what I think it is.

You know, people came with metal or precious stones from Anatolia.

They knew that in the South they had lots and lots of stuff.

They wanted to trade.

They had to communicate.

And it's basically like having a cigarette lit.

with an X through the middle.