#487 – Irving Finkel: Deciphering Secrets of Ancient Civilizations & Flood Myths
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
0:00–1:16
2
What are the origins of human language?
1:16–1:46
3
How does cuneiform writing work?
1:46–2:28
4
What is the significance of Göbekli Tepe in ancient history?
2:28–3:30
5
How can we learn to write and speak cuneiform?
3:30–5:30
6
What are the limits of language and the art of translation?
5:30–13:12
7
What do ancient flood myths reveal about civilization?
13:12–15:59
8
How did the Royal Game of Ur influence ancient cultures?
15:59–2:14:06
Speakers
3 identifiedMore from Lex Fridman Podcast
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