Phil Wang

If it's not in the BM, did it even happen? That's always been my motto.

And this library is a library of tablets? Mm-hmm.

My brain doesn't quite compute. And at that point, would they have been able to understand cuneiform from 2,500 years ago?

Was it always clay?

Mm-hm.

Because they spread it everywhere. Ended up in different places. Because it was cool. Because it was exciting. He's spiralling. He's losing it. I don't see how it could have been good.

Oh, wow. And sort of hardened it.

Why didn't they do that already?

It's cuneiform week here at the tent.

Was it a cumulative script? So they started off with some characters and as time progressed, they just created more and more characters in cuneiform to represent new things?

Oh, that's lovely. Two tablets across time. Oh, wow. Look at this. OK, beautiful. So I'm looking at it's a clay tablet from different angles and it looks like a flat sourdough loaf. I mean, it's kind of lumpy. It's irregular in that way. It looks... It's not like a perfectly square tablet. It looks like bread. Okay, so in the top left corner, it's sort of made out in grids.

It's almost like a comic book. There are squares. It's sort of a grid pattern, and within each grid are a collection of symbols. Like the top left, there's two circles and then what looks like a sailboat. And then below that is more circles. Lost circles. Not so many triangles, actually. Lost circles and what looks like a fish. And under that, three circles and what looks like a river.

I feel like I'm picking out a theme here. I'm going to say this is a tablet about... A fisherman. He's caught 60 fish. Three from the river. This is live philology. There's something here that looks a bit like a harp and some reeds. So he plays music in his spare time. He practices in the reed garden. Is it a dating profile? Is this Hinge?

It's Phil Wang. Welcome back again. Hello. Thanks for having me. Yes, Moody is an Assyriologist. I'm Assyriologist. Hey! In Comedy Corner. Bring in the silly, baby.

Yeah, there's something here about how he doesn't like pineapple on pizza. Loves long walks in the rain. Yeah, yeah. Wait, there's lots of circles. Is that counting? That's exactly right.

Well, yeah. I'm sort of using a lot of my knowledge of Chinese writing forms. Because counting in Chinese, one, two, three, one is one line, two is two lines, three is three lines. And then after that I go, this is not sustainable. And then it becomes.

So is there a case to be made, you know, it's... We often sort of credit rivers, and especially in Mesopotamia's case, the two rivers, as being crucial to the success of these civilisations because of the fertility they provide in the soil. Mm-hm. But it's a case of you said that beyond that, they also provided the clay to write things down and for the society to progress in that domain as well.

So it wasn't just sort of agriculture that the rivers allowed to happen, but record keeping as well.

So river's good. River's good. River's good.

So I guess when something was written by those professionals in cuneiform, the intention was only ever for other professionals in the same field to be able to read it, really. There's no expectation that other people could read a pop science book about astrology at the time. It was only for other professionals to...

I picture triangles. Yeah. So carved triangles, a lot of grain, barley, the sort of the recording of barley. That's fairly good knowledge straight off the bat. And the biggest word in my, one of those diagrams called the word bubbles, the word cloud. Oh yeah, word cloud. The biggest word there is old. That's my, that's my header. Am I on the right ballpark?

Sargon, there's a king. I mean, not Darius. Sargon sounds bad. That's scary.

And the hymns, so are we able to sing these hymns now?

And was this system available to people outside of the kings? So regular people could do this as well?

Probably like, this place sucks. It's really hot. It's really hot. We've got a river. That's pretty good, I guess. What's it like over there? This place sucks too, actually. It's really hot. I have to go to this stupid scribe every time I want to send a letter to someone. So you think it's just like people just complaining? It must have been, yeah. The arrogance, though.

I don't think there's a lot to complain about back then.

I'm sorry, but you mentioned a few times now the word rations. What do you mean by that in this context? What were rations?

Yeah, the O is a triangle, the L is a triangle, and the D is a triangle. But if you know, if you can read the uniform, you can tell the difference. So, what do you know?

I was going to ask, are these good reads? Are they real tablet turners? LAUGHTER

What were people writing about? I mean, there's the letters, presumably, and also, all of it, literature and records as well.

Almost, almost. We don't know how it ends. And then Gilgamesh did what, did what. It's like Game of Thrones, he's still not finished it.

Things like, how are you? Good trip? You get in all right? No. That must have been something. How was the journey? Must have been something like that. How was the journey? And then he's running back, how are the kids? How's the barley? I mean, he must have been there for a while if there was time for them to have a clay tablet exchange, right?

I feel like there's more drama in these tablets, Moody.

Wow. So she's invoicing him as well. I know. On top of all that.

It's not going well, that relationship, is it? God, she's making it sound like it's his fault the entire city is falling apart. I feel like it's a little dramatic. Because of you, the whole city is starving. But it's amazing. You never think of these old forms of writing being able to convey such emotion or such nuance or anger even.

I've always thought of them as very specific numbers, dates, names. Not like feelings, not emotions.

Do we have his replies? I'm invested now. I see why you got into this. New tablet, who dis?

Yeah. Yeah, triangle stands for cat.

Triangle stands for dog.

So there were schools and kids were taught uniform at school?

They do look like sourdough, like I said.

Yeah, right, as I have.

Is there a modern language that is related to Akkadian in any way?

Yeah.

You have to think about the average quality of life at the time and how much of an upgrade that would have been, even just for two months. I would have considered it. Yeah? Yeah, for sure. Yeah, depending on what age I was. If I was 40... I was already knocking on death's door, to be honest. So, you know, I'd take that. Two months in heaven and then death. Yeah, I'll take that.

Is it sort of like a tea leaves reading kind of thing? Like the pattern they fall into tells a story? So you're watching sheep flock? Yeah, you get up on a hill and you look down and see what sort of... See what they spell out. Yeah, exactly. If they spell out SOS, it's like, uh-oh. If they spell out King Dead, you go, oh, not this again. All right, who wants two months in paradise?

Unfortunately, no, the sheep has to die here. Oh, entrails.

They didn't think guts could tell.

The cruciform... The cruciform monument of Manish Tushu. So cruciform means, is that a cross? Mm-hmm. Okay, monument of Manish Tushu. Mm-hmm. Hmm. Hmm. It's a big... It's a building, and there's a tower, an obelisk, but it's got a cross in it. A big obelisk, but it's got a cross across it. So it's a big T. Big T. It's not bad, yes.

Oh, it's a mini T. I feel like monument kind of overplays the size of it. It's a minument. So it's about foot...

Oh, 600 B.C.?

Oh, B.C.

And so you said it's cross-shaped documents, so there's writing all over the... There's writing all over the sides of it, yeah, on every edge.

It's not an English. I feel like Neo. Start again. I'm like Neo when he says, I know Kung Fu. Yeah. I know cuneiform. You know cuneiform. I can speak it very fluently. No. I don't know why you have such a problem with me saying that.

It's a script.

The nuance window!

As always happens when I'm on this show, you tell me about the quiz at the start of the episode, and when you tell me about it at the end, I'm always surprised. So I'm not feeling too confident just now.

Oh, it was used to elicit messages from the gods. That's right.

A drawing of probably his teacher with a cane. That's right, yeah. And also teeth marks as well.

Your favourite. It is a lie. It is an ancient lie that some priests cooked up to look important.

You are a philologist. Triangle out of triangle. Correct.

It really was, yeah. It's always amazing because we do think about these ancient peoples, like you say, as being more about, more robotic in a way, that they were just about survival, that their writing was just about practical things, but there's so much sort of life and drama that we would recognise today. Yeah, it's so proper stuff, isn't it?

They're an even simpler shape.

I've got it. I've tried to solve it. Triangles. Yeah, we don't need to draw every brick in the pyramid. We just need the triangle shape, actually.

Yeah, so they come after the Assyrians. Can't be bothered to come up with a new name. Everyone else came up with a new name. They're like, we're just the Assyrians again. Yeah, okay, all right. But it's not a language, cuneiform.

That's what I actually wanted to say, but I thought I wasn't allowed to say that.

Is it?

An innate interest in this. Yeah. I wish I did. No, I do have an interest in it. I want me to say I wish I had a skill in it. Okay. Yeah. All right. But I do not know that. Okay.

Yeah, right.

Well, ideally you have some sort of key. You find some sort of key a la Rosetta Stone. Sure. Right? Something that just tells you what each symbol means. Aside from that, without that, I'm guessing you're looking for patterns. Sure. You're looking for structures, you're looking for sentences, and then looking for what repeats, where particular symbols lie, and seeing if there's a logic to them.

This is good stuff, Phil, I think. That's exactly right.

It's just me and Phil. We're going to solve this. Well, my name is Philology Wang. Exactly. Philology Wang.

Is Behistun similar to Rosetta Stone in that it's the same script in two or three different languages?

No, I imagine there's a lot of beef. I imagine it was a Kendrick Lamar, Drake situation between the two.

Yeah, yeah, cuneiform songs about each other, yeah.

No, you've got to have a little healthy competition, I think, in philology. Yeah. You've got to... That's the force that keeps the discipline moving forward, you know? You can't all just be friends.

I mean, there could be hundreds of others, but you've... I'm the only Phil Wang, anyway. I've buried at least three Phil Wang.

Oh, man. Like a kind of spelling bee. Nice. Like a cuneiform spelling bee. And he's like, spell corn. Yeah. And Rollins and Hinks had to stand there and go, triangle, triangle pointing to the top left, triangle pointing to the top right. Is it something like that? I think that's great.

Oh, I see. So the test was if these three people can decipher this independent of one another, then right.