Irving Finkel
Cuneiform: Writing and Literature
Summary
Irving Finkel is a curator in the British Museum who reads, curates, and translates Mesopotamian cuneiform tablets. In this lecture he discusses the style, history and significance of the cuneiform writing and literature.
Irving Finkel
Irving Finkel was born in 1951 and read Assyriology at the University of Birmingham under Professor W. G. Lambert. For three years he was Research Fellow at the University of Chicago’s Oriental Institute, as assistant to Professor Miguel Civil; in 1979 he was appointed assistant keeper at the British Museum, in what is now the Middle East Department. There, he curates, reads, and translates Mesopotamian cuneiform tablets, specializing in Babylonian magic, medicine, and literature. He is the founder of the Great Diary Project, which rescues manuscript diaries for the future. He is the author of numerous books, including The Ark Before Noah (2015) and The First Ghosts (2023), and lectures and broadcasts whenever possible, including for YouTube. He is married and lives in London with his spouse and five children.
Well, it was deciphered in about 1845, a bit, because I said on the basis of this inscription, where you had your own Persian, Royal Persian inscription, in Persian, next to a Babylonian translation. And when they could read the Persian, they knew what the whole Babylonian had to say. And then by using, as I said, the trick of identifying names that gave them some syllables, and it showed them that the writing was syllabic. And then it showed them, with a bit of luck, that, eventually, that it was Semitic. So with those two things, there were half a dozen people who made contributions. The most important was an Irish clergyman called Edward Hincks, who was a real genius. There were some very clever people, but he was a real genius. And he was the person who really understood that the same sign could have many more than one kinds of use, which is a nasty characteristic of cuneiform. But he saw it. So his is the name, Edward Hincks. It should be on fridge magnets, in my opinion.
Well, this is a jolly difficult question. When I was a student, which was quite a long time ago, I used to think there maybe were 200. There might be quite a lot more now. But actually, I mean, I don’t like to sound like a complete jerk, but reading cuneiform, if you’re going to read cuneiform, you’ve got to do nothing else for about 20 years. And then you can read cuneiform. I mean, I think a lot of people learn a bit. And they read a bit at college, or they’ve done something. But the real test is you put a cuneiform tablet in front of somebody, which can be of any date, over a three and a half thousand year period. And you say, “What does it say?” And if you can translate it, or do a good shot at it. Well, at least get the bulk of it out. Then you can say you can read cuneiform. So I don’t know how many people who, if you subjected them to that austere test, would pass. And how many would pass with flying colors? I have no idea. All I do know, which is the most important answer to this question, is there are not enough of them? Because the discipline of Assyriology is, relatively speaking, in its infancy. There are so many thousands of documents still to be read. There must be millions of documents in the ground, which one day will come to light. And it’s a branch of the humanities, which is full of drama, and excitement, money, glamour, fast cars, women. Everything you could ever ask. It’s just a fantastic career being an Assyriologist.
We know when they found out how the syllables worked, for example, they found out the words were spelt with syllables. So, for example, quite early on, they discovered that there was a place on the bricks of Nebuchadnezzar called ba-bi-lon. They wrote ba-bi-lon. And that was Babylon. So it was found in Babylon, and it was a building in Babylon. And instead of writing it in a funny complex way, sometimes they write Bab-ilu. So that was a fantastic thing, because that showed everything was right. That ba-bi-lou had been properly understood, and that the way they transcribed things was proper. So lots of things like that happened.