Lex Fridman Podcast
#487 – Irving Finkel: Deciphering Secrets of Ancient Civilizations & Flood Myths
12 Dec 2025
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
The following is a conversation with Irving Finkel, who is a scholar of ancient languages, curator at the British Museum for over 45 years, and is a much admired and respected world expert on cuneiform script, and more generally on ancient languages of Sumerian, Akkadian, and Babylonian, and also on ancient board games and Mesopotamian magic, medicine, literature, and culture.
I should also mention that both on and off the mic, Irving was a super kind and fun person to talk to, with an infectious enthusiasm for ancient history that of course I already love, but fell in love with even more. And now a quick few second mention of each sponsor. Check them out in the description or at lexfriedman.com slash sponsors. It is in fact the best way to support this podcast.
We got Shopify for selling stuff online, Miro for brainstorming ideas with your team, Chevron for reliable energy that powers data centers, Element for electrolytes, and AG1 for my daily multivitamin. Choose wisely, my friends. And now, on to the full ad reads. I do try to make them interesting, but if you skip, please still check out the sponsors.
Chapter 2: What are the origins of human language?
I enjoy their stuff, maybe you will too. To get in touch with me, for whatever reason, go to lexfriedman.com slash contact. Alright, let's go. This episode is brought to you by Shopify, a platform designed for anyone to sell anywhere with a great looking online store.
So of course, Shopify is great as an app, as a service, but the thing that always fascinates me is the engineering behind the scenes. And this is truly an incredible engineering team.
Chapter 3: How does cuneiform writing work?
And I could talk about this for many hours, and perhaps it's good to give an example. Like, they built a custom search engine rather than using Elasticsearch or any of the off-the-shelf engines that will require significant re-architecture at their scale. C++. was the core language for close-to-hardware optimizations, memory efficiency across hundreds of millions of items.
They created RankFlow, a domain-specific language combining Python-like simplicity with C++ performance, rejected hybrid Python calling C++ approaches due to deployment complexity, version skew, and operational overhead. I'm reading these things from their recent blog about it. I highly recommend. There's so many technical blogs about the various problems they're solving.
Chapter 4: What is the significance of Göbekli Tepe in ancient history?
And they do this incremental phase type development deployment where they ship fast, optimize later, maintain compatibility always. So in phase one was the first four weeks. They built SimScore DSL, which is a basic C++ engine to unblock data science experiments. And then in phase two, which took two to four months, they built Turbo DSL, which is a high-performance engine version of that.
which achieves 48% speed up. There's so much more to talk about, but incredible engineering that brings you an incredible product at the end. Sign up for a $1 per month trial period at shopify.com slash lex, and that's all lowercase. Go to shopify.com slash lex to take your business to the next level today. This episode is also brought to you by Miro, an online collaborative platform.
The very kind that the peoples and the civilizations of the ancient world that Irving talks about didn't have. Now imagine that.
Chapter 5: How can we learn to write and speak cuneiform?
One of the great things about the competing ages is that we can work together. It's not just the productivity gains for the individuals. It's the productivity gains for teams. And nowhere is that more true than in the process of idea development. As I talked about in a recent episode with Michael Levin, do we have ideas or do ideas have us?
And ideas have a way of kind of occupying, for a time or for a generation, the brains of multiples of people. And those ideas are formed and shaped and modified and evolved. across those brains, utilizing those brains, or the brains do the modification. Whichever it is, you want to have the best tools for the job, and Miro's incredible for that.
Converts sticky notes, screenshots, and so on into diagrams or prototypes in minutes. Super easy to use, makes teamwork fun, help your teams develop great ideas into results with Miro. Go to Miro.com to find out how. That's M-I-R-O dot com. This episode is also brought to you by Chevron, an energy company that delivers affordable, reliable energy to US data centers.
I'm attending NeurIPS in San Diego, which is a machine learning conference. And boys, one thing clear, aside all the fascinating technical details... the turmoil of the research world, the excitement, the wonder, the mystery, beyond all that is the reality that in order for the scaling laws to hold, the compute needs to scale. And for the compute to scale, We need energy.
In the United States, the scaling of the energy infrastructure is essential because the demand for electricity is growing at an unprecedented scale.
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Chapter 6: What are the limits of language and the art of translation?
Chevron is working hard to provide multi-gigawatts of delivered power with the flexibility to scale further. Energy is not an easy problem, especially if the scaling laws hold, especially if there's benefits to the products that rely on artificial intelligence, both for the training side and the inference side.
And frankly, I think it is the inference side that will over time consume more and more energy and require more and more compute. What a fascinating world we live in. The full stack is full of scientific and engineering challenges. And I love it. Visit chevron.com slash power to learn more. That's chevron.com forward slash power.
This episode is also brought to you by Element, my daily zero sugar and delicious electrolyte mix. Every once in a while, I'll also partake in their sparkling water, but majority of my Element consumption is the OG drink mix. I can't live without it. The electrolytes, sodium, potassium, magnesium are essential if you're doing fasting, if you're doing a carnivore low-carb diet, if you're doing...
Anything where your body is pushed to the limit at all, you have to make sure you get the electrolytes right. My favorite flavor is watermelon salt. I had a really nice family Thanksgiving in Ohio. O-H-I-O.
boy are the football fans go hard there but anyway it was below freezing and i was planning to run outside long distance you know to prepare for the full overeating that is thanksgiving but it was rough i've gotten soft i think about the cold and uh I just did a lot of push-ups and pull-ups.
I'm more and more realizing, as much as I am challenged by running, spiritually and physically, it is a thing that if I don't do, I'm less happy. And if I do, after I'm done with the run, I just have a greater clarity about the world and about myself. So I try to run every day. But anyway, get a free 8-count sample pack with any purchase. Try it at drinkelement.com.
This episode is also brought to you by AG1, an all-in-one daily drink to support better health and peak performance. Like I said, I was hanging out with family, and my parents swear by AGZ, which I still haven't tried, but they recommend it very highly, so I'm an AG1 guy. I guess AGZ is nightly sleep support. That helps with restful, restorative sleep.
Anyway, my parents really do swear by it, so if that's the thing you're interested in, please try it out. It is melatonin-free and doesn't just help you fall asleep. It helps with the quality of the sleep. But yeah, AG1 is in the stack of things I consume when I'm traveling to help me feel like I'm at home and I've been traveling quite a lot recently.
And I will be traveling a lot in the new year. And the feeling of home, the feeling of being grounded in a place that feels like home, is really important. So it's the little traditions, the little habits I build for myself to remind me that even when I'm far away, I can carry a little bit of the comforts of home with me.
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Chapter 7: What do ancient flood myths reveal about civilization?
And often, sometimes the scribes who recorded by dictation or by something wrote stuff they couldn't understand, but somebody else could read and understand it. So,
What you have is, long before the alphabet, when the alphabet was not even a dream, a complex, bewildering-looking, off-putting writing system, which was actually very beautiful, very flexible, and lasted for well over three millennia, probably closer to four millennia.
And it took a long time for the alphabet, which anybody would say was much, much more useful and much more sensible, to displace it. So it's one of the major stages of man's intellect, because quite soon after the writing first took off, signs began to proliferate. And someone said, hey, we haven't got a sign for this sound, or we haven't got a sign for this idea. And so it began to swell out.
And at some extremely remarkable stage, one, probably only one person, suddenly realized that if there was no control, they would grow exponentially and exponentially until it was all nonsense and everybody had their own writing. And the second thing is that no one could remember them unless they were written down in a retrievable way.
So they invented not only writing, they invented lexicography, which means that early in the third millennium, they put down all the things that were made of wood and all the things that were made of reeds and all the names of colors and of countries and all the gods and everything. They made a systematic attempt
to make these signs, to standardize them and to make them retrievable, and of course to teach them. And having exercised that rigor from the outset, it meant that the thing became streamlined and stayed more or less as it was all the way through for three millennia or more, because the stamp put on it
by those early visionaries, not only who came up with the system and how it would work, but to preserve it and to safeguard it, was fantastically effective. It means that there were scholars in Babylon in the third century or the second century, when Alexander was there, for example, if somebody dug up a tablet in very early writing, they would have a pretty good idea what it meant.
They would recognize the signs even though they were so ancient and they'd see the relationships between them. So you have a fantastically strong system where the spinal cord was structured in a lexicographic regular system. So lexicography and what the signs were was jealously safeguarded and protected and it lasted fantastically.
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Chapter 8: How did the Royal Game of Ur influence ancient cultures?
We should say that the name of that system that lasted for 3,000 years is cuneiform.
Yeah. So in the 19th century, about 1840, 1850, they started to find these things on excavations in Iraq, the biggest Syrian cities and sometimes further south, the Babylonian cities. They found these clay tablets, which in the ground lasted... unimaginable lengths of time. And they were all written in what we call cuneiform script.
And the cuneiform part of it means wedge-shaped, because cuneos in Latin means wedge. And when they first saw these signs, they realized that a cluster of marks broke down into...
um different arrangements of triangular shapes and it's most clear on the syrian reliefs where the writing is very big and you can easily tell that they were that shape on a tablet the wedge is not quite so predominant so that was it so they first called them cuneatic or cuneiform and the word stuck and of course growing up in the british museum and reading these things for a living becomes a kind of
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.
You said that the development of cuneiform of these tablets of written language is one of the greatest, probably the greatest invention in human history. How hard do you think it was to come up with this? We should make clear that that very specific element of encoding sound On the tablet, that's the genius invention. Drawing a picture makes sense.
Okay, here's barley, here's the sun, here's whatever, the actual object. Exactly. But to actually write down sound is a genius invention.
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