Irving Finkel

No way.

It is really controversial.

They was, because the thing is about it, that it's a seal to ratify.

It's not just a squiggle on a pot, and you can say, oh, that's just a piece of debt.

This is a finished thing with a flat surface.

You press it down, say you have some contract, you have some building arrangement, we're paying for these bricks, whatever it was, and the official person had to...

squash it down, and it leaves the impression.

I mean, I'm a great believer in Sherlock Holmes as a teaching system for intelligence and rationality and logic and thinking.

I read those stories a million times when I was a kid.

And the thing about them, one of the things which impressed me most of all, was this point quoted by Holmes, not original to him, that it is theoretically possible to infer the Niagara Falls from a raindrop.

It's a powerful statement.

Well, that seal from Gobekli Tepe is a raindrop from which I infer writing.

And it's perfectly possible they all wrote on flat leaves, carved through in many parts of the world.

That's what happened.

So, for example, in the Indus Valley, people write the most abject nonsense about the Indus Valley writing system.

But all we have is seals, basically.

So they are also for ratification purposes.

And they have the name of the owner in three or four or maybe five signs.

And it's probably me, son of my dad or milkman or whatever it is.

And it's obvious, it's obvious that they had writing on a perishable material.