169. Decoding the World’s First Writing

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When I say the word cuneiform, what comes to mind?

If you're like me, the answer is not much.

But my guest today, Irving Finkel, is trying to change that.

He's a curator in the Department of the Middle East at the British Museum, where he's worked for over 45 years.

He's responsible for the museum's collection of roughly 130,000 clay tablets engraved with cuneiform, the oldest writing system in the world.

Once you give up six or seven years of your life to learn cuneiform, everything changes.

Your daily life is full of throb and excitement, money, women, cars, everything you could ever ask for.

It's just the most fantastic career, and nobody does it apart from a few decrepit nerds like myself.

Welcome to People I I Mostly Admire with Steve Levitt.

Is there anything useful that we can learn from these writings from thousands of years ago?

That's what I hope to find out today.

But first, I asked Irving for a crash course on cuneiform.

As far as we know, cuneiform writing is the oldest writing that appeared on the face of the globe.

At least it is the oldest one we know about.

And the landscape in which it appeared is ancient Iraq, what the Greeks called Mesopotamia.

And Mesopotamia, of course, means between the rivers, because the landscape has the Euphrates and Tigris rivers, which characterizes the heartland.

And that is where, archaeologically speaking, we find the first evidence for writing.

So cuneiform is something that most normal civilized people have no encounter with in the course of their lives, but it is a very fascinating and marvelous matter.

Firstly, cuneiform

means wedge-shaped, like a piece of brie.

And in the 19th century, when they first found these tablets and first started to scrutinize them, they called them cuneiform wedge-shaped.

because the signs themselves, which they utilized by pressing a stylus into clay, were made up of small triangular shapes like wedges.

So we have these people who lived in ancient Iraq, say, in the fourth millennium.

We're talking about the second half of the fourth millennium, about 3500 BC.

It's probably about that period that the first attempts, the first overtures in the direction of recording sound and language in script were made.

They started off with what scholars call pictographic signs.

A whole load of very simple drawn pictures to represent things that people would recognise.

They look a bit like the sort of drawings that four-year-olds do when they first get the hang of a pencil.

And you can go a fair way with pictographic signs.

So, for example, you could say you want three bottles of milk to the milkman.

So, if you drew three milk bottles and an X for a kiss, then the milkman would understand exactly what you wanted and he would leave the bottles.

But if you wanted to say, look, I ordered this last week and it was moldy and there was a worm in one of them and I'm never going to buy anything from you again, you can't do that with pictures very easily.

And the jump was made to use these picture signs to write things that engendered a sound.

often the sound of what they looked like, but often other sounds.

And before very long, the beginning scribes who wrestled with this had a whole load of cuneiform signs which reduced sound to manageable small syllables.

So they really wrote in syllables and wrote them in a row and then you pushed it together and there you were.

It became a very fluid and very mobile writing system which meant they could record the Sumerian language and the Babylonian language equally, which were the languages spoken in Iraq, but also, remarkably, other languages as well.

And after a while, places round about ancient Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Egypt, there were people there who used this same very crazy looking writing system to write their own languages.

And that lasted right until the alphabet came into the world.

So spoken language must have been around 100,000 years ago, maybe 50,000 years ago.

And I think hieroglyphics actually...

began to emerge around the same time as cuneiform.

Do you think it was more than a coincidence after so many thousands of years with only spoken language that multiple written languages emerged around the same time?

Well, the thing with human inventions, like writing, when someone could tell their mates or their boss or somebody with whom they worked, look, I've got this system, we make these marks, I can record all these words, happy birthday to you, and you can read them and you can get the sound of the words from it.

So once you have that, in Mesopotamia, there are two ways of viewing the evolution of discoveries.

Some people think it goes plod, plod, very, very slowly, bit by bit, and it takes ages before there's another improvement.

But I think with writing, it must have gone off like a firework, because once the principle was there, all the administrations in ancient Iraq utilized it.

There were lots of scribes who did administration, which was necessary for all the people who lived together in the city-states.

But also, before you knew where you were, you had dictionaries appearing as new signs and new words were put together.

And then you have hymns and prayers and literature.

But you made an interesting question about when you have language and then you have writing.

So, writing comes right at the end of the story.

3000 BC is not very long ago, five and a bit thousand years ago.

In terms of evolution, in terms of wider history, it's no time at all.

So, it's a very late phenomenon that people could write.

But languages must have existed in human societies and even maybe pre-Homo sapien communities since the beginning of time.

I've never believed it at all plausible that people lived together in communities, went hunting, had children, did pictures and did all those things you do and didn't talk to one another.

They for sure did.

And I think we have to imagine that one of the defining features of Homo sapiens is the ability to talk and to produce sounds that other people can recognize.

It's illustrated with the small child.

If you have a baby, all they do is make funny noises and imitate the sounds of people.

But when they suddenly grasp that they can recognise a sound and reproduce it and it has the right effect, like cake or apple, it's a miraculous thing.

And in miniature, this is the same kind of principle because I think that the whole process of civilization is it goes along with very little happening.

And all of a sudden, there's a huge thing which changes everything.

So, hieroglyphics, I assume, evolved completely separately than cuneiform, but roughly at the same time, do you think that was just chance?

Well, this is a difficult political question for somebody working in the British Museum because Egyptians say, oh, well, they invented everything.

But in fact, I think it's much more probable that the Egyptian writing system used to write ancient Egyptian language sprung up as a consequence of an older prevailing system of writing the cuneiform languages because there are so many points in common.

The only real difference between hieroglyphic writing and cuneiform writing is the actual signs themselves.

They couldn't be more different because cuneiform are abstract geometrical kind of designs where you have to learn the values.

Whereas with Egyptian hieroglyphs, you can often tell what they are, more or less, and you can soon learn to read them.

It's much more accessible.

Nevertheless, I think it's slightly more likely likely that people from Egypt, maybe merchants, maybe travelers, maybe diplomats, in contact with people in Iraq for one reason or another, or possibly even warfare, who knows?

But contact between what looks like two distinct nations, that encountering this thing, which had been running for quite a long time,

would strike somebody intelligent as the sort of thing that we Jollywood ought to have.

And probably when they got home, they couldn't remember much about how it worked, but they knew that you had to have writing so they decided to have pretty pictures which everybody loves so I think it's more likely in a way that hieroglyphic post-dated and even derived from cuneiform writing as a kind of horizon but the other thing is when people talk about these issues there is a kind of hysterical appraisal of the invention of writing because People think, well, it must have been invented once and then spread out from some node all over the place.

But my own view is that actually

the conception of making signs to create meaning and sound is not huge for a human brain, because in a way it's obvious.

So I don't believe that there's any ever one invention of writing.

And I think after all, if you look at people in the world today, say you have 500 of them in a queue, people at one end are going to be as thick as two stalk planks, then you're going to have a whole load in the middle or okay, not so bright.

And at the far end, you're going to have people who are geniuses.

And that's what we have in our world today.

And that must have been the situation from day one.

There will have been individuals who stood out from others with abilities and intelligence and the capacity to visualize things.

And in their hands, these developments took place.

At least in the version that economists tell, and I'm sure it has no relation to the truth, the first use of written language was to help rulers collect taxes better.

Is that actually right or just a fun story to tell to to our undergraduate economic students?

I must admit, I've often used it in public lectures, blaming the inland revenue, who's the scourge of every human being's life, on the Sumerians.

This is the truth of the matter, that among early tablets, numeration developed rapidly.

The Sumerians counted in 60s.

That was the way they did it, not in tens.

And they developed a capacity to record numbers and very big numbers and multiply them together and do all sorts of acrobatics, numerically speaking, really quite soon after the beginning of writing.

So side by side with the script, they had the capacity for bookkeeping.

As far as we can reconstruct things, in ancient Mesopotamia, around the fourth to the third millennium, there were city-states which were more or less independent.

They each had a primary deity, special temples, special gods.

Sometimes there was war between them.

But they were practically speaking independent.

And it meant that the people who ran those city-states were in charge of produce and feeding the multitude for whom they were responsible and many other things for which records were deemed essential.

And so the Sumerians in particular

and these are the guilty ones, in around 2100 BC, a good millennium after writing begins, we have this situation called the Sumerian Ur III period, where you had a kind of empire of these states being amalgamated, working together and spreading out.

And from all these sites, we have bookkeeping documents which would delight anybody who is a professional accountant.

For example, there was a tithe system or something like that where local people had to bring sheep and wool to the temple regularly.

And you had chaps who sat at the door with their clay tablet in one hand, their left hand, and a stylus or writing stick in the other hand, and they wrote down, three sheep, four four goats, Mr.

So-and-so, sealed by me, Mr.

So-and-so, this is the date, a perfect record of the fulfillment of the duty.

And then they decided that they had to make a big book at the end of the month and put all the entries in, all the entries in and add them all up.

The seeds of this madness do go back to this period.

The sumerologists tell me that the totals which come, which are quite large, are usually flawlessly accurate.

So there's a whole sub-species of persons who shuffle about looking at the ground, who like nothing more than making records of absolutely trivial details very carefully, adding them up, checking them and putting them somewhere in the equivalent of a filing cabinet because no doubt they had special arrangements to keep their records.

So the story which one can tell to undergraduates is intrinsic to human society and it's been there from the beginning.

If they're going to become accountants themselves and propagating the same kind of ghastly activity, they might feel gratified to know that they are treading in a well-worn path by other persons.

As we've talked, we've taken for granted that we can read cuneiform, or you can read cuneiform.

I'm curious, how did the first modern scholars even begin to crack the code of something that looks so inscrutable at first glance?

It does look inscrutable, and the old joke is that you don't know which way up it goes, and actually, does it make any difference?

When you look at these tablets, one of the things that strikes your eye is that there's no gap between the words.

So this means that when you start to learn cuneiform, there is a group of special, malicious, devilish problems that beset you.

There's about a thousand signs, maybe more altogether.

And each sign has more than one sound and more than one meaning.

So this looks like madness.

When you read cuneiform, you have to have in your mind a thing like a filing cabinet.

You have to go

in your head through the possible values of that sign and then you go

to the possible values of the next sign and see if they meet.

So for example if you have a sign one of the values of which is ba and the next one is ab

then ba ab sounds like a word and in fact in Semitic Akkadian it means gate.

So the first word is established by quickly assessing the different possible readings into one which makes lucid sense.

It is strange and foreboding.

It seems so alien when you start but once you become immersed in it, you start to think like these people, you understand them, you have a kind of sympathy, and the script, instead of becoming an obstacle which you have to pole vault over, it becomes something very welcome.

You feel at home with it.

So it's learnable now.

But when these tablets just started appearing in the 1800s, how in the world did the first people figure out how to read this?

Oh, yes, you mean the decipherment.

Oh, yes.

I forgot even to mention that terribly important thing.

You're quite right.

Well the simplest point to make is you know what happened with Egyptian hieroglyphs with the Rosetta Stone and the Greek transcription of the Egyptian, which in the 19th century the scholars used because they could read the Greek to open up the hieroglyphic writing.

Because before that, before the Rosetta Stone, which had the same text in Greek and hieroglyphics, we couldn't make any sense of the hieroglyphics, even though the pictures were pretty obvious, right?

That is true, because there was always a disjunct between the simplicity of the original picture and all the things it could represent.

And in the 19th century, the same thing happened in Mesopotamian studies, because in Iran, there was a high mountain pass where one of the old Persian kings, Torias, had carved a long inscription in Persian cuneiform, in Babylonian cuneiform, and in Elamite cuneiform, because the three languages existed side by side in the world at the time.

The old Persian inscription, it was written in cuneiform, but it wasn't anything as complicated as the Babylonian cuneiform.

So what Persians did is they made up 28 or 30 cuneiform signs for the letters of their Persian alphabet.

It was a very interesting intellectual jump.

So when the scholars in Germany and in England in the 19th century realized that the inscription existed side by side at this place Bisutun in Iran, they had an idea to see whether it could be the Persian language because Persian, of course, is still alive.

It's still a very important world language and scholars knew Persian.

And before long, they could decipher the old Persian cuneiform and read it as Persian language.

There were passages where there was a long sequence of signs followed by several words,

and then there was another sequence of signs followed by the same words, and then another sequence followed by the same words again.

They had an idea that maybe the first one was the king, and it said the great king of the world, king of his father.

And that's what happened.

They cracked the old person on the basis of patterns which showed that there were repetitive things in the old person.

It was a very clever and marvellous thing.

But once they read that, they knew what the Babylonian inscription had to say.

They got a kind of intellectual chisel and they bashed away at this cuneiform writing from Babylon.

And before long, they realized that the language behind that was a Semitic language.

Now, this was very, very important because although Babylonian and Syrian were completely extinct, they being a Semitic language meant that they would have a lot in common with living Semitic languages, such as Hebrew, Arabic, Aramaic, Syriac.

And so, from living Semitic words, living Semitic language, they managed to start the proper decipherment.

They brought it back to life by painstaking and really quite miraculous work.

We'll be right back with more of my conversation with Irving Finkel after this short break.

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So, one of the key moments in this early study of cuneiform was one of your heroes, I think his name was George Smith, discovered a tablet with the Ark story, which we associate in modern society with Noah, but it has much deeper links.

Well, I have great respect for George Smith.

I regard him as a kind of hero.

And he worked in the middle of the 19th century in the British Museum.

And he had a fantastic ability to read and understand cuneiform.

He just had a sort of flair and a sort of God-given understanding, as a remarkable thing.

Anyway, he was the person who in the department was reading a tablet from Nineveh because lots of tablets came from Nineveh and they were all written in beautifully clear writing from the King's Library.

and that's what everybody worked on and Smith had this large piece of tablet in his hands which he was quietly reading to himself and all of a sudden boy something happened and he dropped the tablet on the desk.

Now you're not allowed to do that in the British Museum.

If you do you go straight to the Tower of London and you're never seen again.

But Smith dropped the tablet and then he stood up and then he started running around the room holding his head and making funny squeaking noises and finally he started to take his clothes off.

This is all recorded in departmental records.

Smith had read the crucial part of the flood story when the ark is in the water and the guy in charge, so to speak, in the boat knew the rain had stopped and they opened a window and let out a bird to see whether the trees had appeared above the water and the bird came back and then they did it a second time and the third time the bird didn't come home.

Pishtim, the Babylonian Noah, knew that the waters were subsiding and they'd all come out of the ark and carry on reproducing exactly as in the Bible.

So this is the situation.

In the 19th century, educated persons like Smith knew their Bible back to front.

It was part of their psyche.

And so nobody knew, nobody had the slightest suspicion that anything in the biblical text might have existed on such a bizarre surface and alien thing as a cuneiform tablet.

And when Smith read it, it induced in him this quite bizarre, uncontrollable reaction, which I come to the conclusion is a kind of epilepsy.

I think he was provoked into an epileptic fit by this discovery because it was so unexpected.

The key is that it was a thousand years before the Old Testament, right?

That's what must have been so incredibly shocking to the people of that time.

In a way, yes.

The question about the time is a little complex because the 7th century BC, nobody knows exactly, of course, what happened about the biblical text, when it was put together, who did it exactly when.

It's a matter for faith, scholarship, analysis, detection, and all those other conflicting principles.

But I think that the biblical text is not likely to have taken shape much before the time when this tablet was written.

So

Smith, who was a very rational person, wrote about it in his book, saying that it wasn't quite clear which came first.

And many clergymen, of course, were furious about this.

So there was quite a few,

which actually has not quite died down to this day, as I know to my cost.

Smith worked in the museum, he read tablets, and he had a long beard.

And I work in the museum, and I read tablets, and I also have a long beard, not quite as long as Smith's.

So I feel, in a way, slightly a disciple of his.

And something on a slightly less dramatic scale happened to me because a person brought in a tablet from the street so to speak.

Wait, tablets exist on the street?

Well as a matter of speech.

The thing is cuneiform tablets are mostly in the ground and then a lot of other ones are in museums and collections and once in a while they're in the possession of private individuals because from the nineteenth century into the twentieth century, tablets arrived in Britain in great number.

It's not uncommon to find that somebody's grandfather or great-grandfather had one of these things.

For example, if they were in Iraq in the First World War, people used to go in the souk and buy keepsakes to take home to their wives and sweethearts.

And maybe people thought that a tablet would be just the thing for their beloved.

And this was one of those, that the person who had it in his family brought it in with a load of other bits and pieces to the department where I work in the museum for identification because we used to offer this as a service.

And the thing was, it was part of the flood story.

It was one tablet, part of the flood story, and it's about a thousand years older than the one from Nineveh, which Smith had read.

About a thousand years.

You could tell from the writing, from the grammatical forms, all these things added up certainly to what we call the old Babylonian period.

And this piece of clay that no one had ever seen before arrived on my desk.

There are hundreds of thousands of these tablets in your collection.

How or why do you think such a special one that tells the flood story a thousand years earlier?

It's not like there's a lot of these floating around.

You think it's just by chance that this incredible one ends up in the hands of a private collection?

All I can say is that in all the time I've been in the British Museum, which is since 1979,

maybe 350 tablets have come in like that, one at a time, from people who have them or found them or know about them.

It was not uncommon, especially those horrible tablets we were talking about with all the bookkeeping on.

There are lots and lots of those.

So that it should be a tablet itself is not so remarkable because many people had a lot to do with Iraq in the First and Second World War.

What is remarkable here is it should be such a plum specimen.

I don't know how to explain it, but it's fortuity because until I read it, nobody had any idea what it was or as you might say, which way up it went.

And when I read the first four lines, they're very famous lines, where the God Enki tells the Babylonian equivalent of Noah, there's going to be a flood, you've got to build a boat, and you've got to build it fast.

And he gives them all the instructions.

This tablet was a gem.

So it took me quite a long time to recuperate from the heart-stopping shock of it.

And then I got on with it and deciphered it.

So this is the most incredible discovery of your life.

This man brings this in.

Yes.

And then what happens next?

Well, he had a sort of bag and he poured out the contents on the table.

And there was a tablet, which, of course, was the main point of my interest.

But there was all sorts of other things.

There was a couple of figurines.

There was a Greek lamp.

There was some beads.

They're just curiosities and they're not valuable things.

They're not important things.

And I picked up the tablet and said, ah, hmm, ah, hmm.

I said, I think I know what this is.

It's something to do with the flood story.

And he then took it back.

And what's this?

And I said, well, it's a lamp.

It's just a lamp.

And so he went through everything like that.

And then he said, right, well, it's very kind of you.

And off he went.

And he didn't come back for quite a long time.

Wait, I'm confused.

You discovered this amazing tablet.

How did you let him walk away with it?

Well, left to myself, I would have knocked him to the ground with a lethal chop to the back of the neck.

taken the tablet out of the bag, written on it a number with the signs BM in front of it, found a box, put it in there, powdered it with dust so it looked like we'd had it for ages, and then said, I can't account for this.

Look, we've had this for a hundred years.

And that would have been at one time the best way forward.

But we were very polite to the public.

We were consulted for opinions.

I gave him an opinion.

I told him what it was.

He was very grateful.

And that was the whole of it.

I couldn't actually stop him.

But I knew this boy.

He'd brought some cylinder seals in before, and he'd given cylinder seals to our collection.

He was a very charming person.

Somehow I knew that it wasn't going to disappear.

I met him in the gallery once.

He was walking about and I said, is there any chance you might bring in that rather interesting tablet?

I'd like to read it.

And then after some time, he came in with it and left it with me to work on.

What was striking about this particular tablet is that it was extremely complete.

It said things that no one had seen in three thousand years.

What was the biggest surprise that you found on it?

That's an easy question to answer.

There were 60 lines, and the god Enki, who found out there was going to be a flood and thought it would be a bad mistake if all the human beings were eliminated, went and woke up the guy who in our terms is Noah, and in the Quran is Nukh.

But in Babylonia, he was called Atram Hasis.

And he woke up Atrachasis and told him what was going to happen.

And the thing which was so extraordinary, Atrachasis means very clever.

So you'd think that the god who was going to pick one human being to build a boat to rescue the world's life forces would pick somebody who knew about boats.

But it's just the opposite.

So what he did is he told him exactly what he wanted him to build.

And this is where the gigantic surprise came up because it was a round boat.

He specified it had to be a round boat with the dimensions.

Is there such a thing as a round boat?

On many of the major waterways of the world, people

utilize coracles.

They're made like a basket with a round bottom, and they're usually heavily waterproof from top to bottom, inside and out.

In the British Isles, we have them in Ireland and Wales, and they're all over Asia.

Up until about 1920, you could see coracles on the Euphrates and Tigris rivers, and they're a natural, cheap form of boat.

And of course, the Babylonians and the Assyrians had coracles themselves they're sometimes even depicted on the Assyrian sculptures the coracle apart from being cheap and easy has the special value that it never sinks it's pretty much impossible to sink a coracle and so the Babylonian poet who shaped this part of the flood story his idea was that if you were going to rescue all the animals male and female and Noah's family all together in this boat what you wanted was something that wouldn't sink.

The coracle you could make as big as you like, you can put all the animals in carefully and then put the lid on and it will be safe until the flood was over.

From about 1700 BC, 1800 BC, we have this one tablet with just this episode when humanity finds out the disaster that's going to happen and one elected miserable son of a bitch who gets all the information that he needs and he builds it and they go all the animals on and then the rain comes.

So it's a very dramatic thing.

And I had this thing, and I worked on it and worked on it.

And some of it was diabolical.

The condition it was in.

The tablet's shape is perfectly preserved, but all the good bits, it looks like elephants sat on it and God knows what.

But I got it all, almost all out in the end, and ended up writing a whole book about it.

What turned out to be so astonishing was that this God, instead of saying, just build a big coracle and get out of here, he gave him all the specifics, the details, the sizes, and everything.

But when you get to the George Smith tablet, the God there doesn't tell Utna Pishtim, who's the later version of Noah.

He doesn't tell him anything about it.

He just says, get on with it.

So how could that be?

I think it's like this.

Normally, when you read Babylonian literature, it says this.

Gilgamesh, the hero, opened his mouth and spoke to Enkidu, his friend, addressing him as follows.

And every time there's a conversation in the mythological text you have this so-and-so opened his mouth and spoke every time and the thing is in the tablet which I worked on for so long it doesn't say God so-and-so opened his mouth and addressed Atrahasi it just gives these speeches so I came to the conclusion that this was what happened when traveling narrators

did the flood story with different voices and different people.

That was what they had.

If it's going to be live in front of persons, you don't have to say anybody opened their mouth and said, because they do open their mouth and say.

So I think it was on the cusp when the sort of literature that we call mythology, which for so long had been oral in its existence and in its delivery, then was reduced to writing.

which was framed between all these so-and-so opened his mouth and said as follows.

When you follow this thought process, it makes a lot of sense.

Because if you imagine you're a traveling storyteller in Mesopotamia, you have exotic-looking clothes, and you have a monkey or a drum or something like that.

And you go from village to village, and you tell the flood story, which you know by heart, and you do the different voices.

And I have this idea that once upon a time, one of these storysellers says, and then you have to build a coracle for all the animals to go in.

So he's acting the gods, and he says to this Noah character, that's what you have to do.

You have to build a coracle big enough for all somebody in the village who makes coracles for a living is going to stand up and say, well, how big was that then?

How big was this coracle?

What did they use?

How did they make it?

So I think it was a response to audience irritation when they were demanding.

So they must have collaborated.

with a coracle making family and written the text out and got the details and put the numbers in as part of it.

So the next time he could say, oh, and by the way, these are the details in case anybody's interested.

You're listening to People I Mostly Admire.

I'm Steve Levitt.

After this short break, Irving Finkel and I will return to talk about a project to build a replica of the Babylonian Ark.

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If you study cuneiform and you discover a tablet that gives you precise instructions on how to build the ark, what else are you going to do other than actually go out and try to build it?

The effort was even captured on film and included in the PBS Nova series.

I asked Irving how the attempt to build the ark turned out, but I think my use of the word attempt offended him.

This wasn't an attempt, it was a highly successful procedure.

The ark was built in a kind of inland lake area in Kerala in southwest India.

Why did you build that ark?

The way you've described it now, you're saying it was just storytelling.

These were minstrels.

What made you interested in actually trying to build the ark?

What struck me so forcibly is that the proportions on the tablet made sense.

You know, you wrap rope around the boat once you've got the struts in position, and the length of the rope worked out according to the diameter of the circular vessel and so forth.

It was, as it were, correct.

So I would never have had the courage to propose anybody should build this, but a television company said they wanted to raise the funds and get the materials and build the thing in India.

And they had three guys

who specialized in the reconstruction of archaeological boats.

I sent the person in charge of the whole matter my translation of the tablet and the numbers and everything.

And he wrote back, and I think he must have been lying down in a darkened room with shock when he realized how big the thing was.

It was about two-thirds the size of a football pitch.

And he said that it will be impossible to build a coracle at that size, even with the information that we have, because it wouldn't sustain its own weight.

And when you consider that the thing was made like a basket, and then it was coated in bitumen, which is very heavy, then the boat would be unmanageable, and it would collapse on itself, and you couldn't get the timbers big enough to make the frame.

So they suggested a rational compromise.

They said they would take the measurements.

and all the information that I could give them and they would work out to make the ark a third of the size recommended by the tablets.

The people who did the building were very scientific because they agreed that they should reproduce the craft according to the inscription using ancient tools and they built this boat and it was beautiful and when it was ready they launched it on the lake and it was just the most spectacular thing you could ever imagine.

It's interesting that boats in Babylonia, the noun Aleppu is a female noun And everybody talks about she when they talk about boats in Britain.

It's a commonplace thing in other cultures.

But when I saw the shapely bottom, if I may put it this way, of our giant coracle floating on the waters under the sun, it was spectacular.

And you could see why they thought boats were she.

Is there a sense whether Babylonians actually took this story seriously or was it just kind of like mythology?

The question about whether the original thing, what it was, is very difficult to judge.

I think it was a kind of poised thing between reality and literature.

So whether or not they actually believed that anybody built it, which is of course the basic story, is unanswerable.

I don't think it was necessarily part of it.

They had the blueprint and they could talk about it and it was part of the narrative.

I don't think they actually had to build it.

Mythology is a very dicky term in our world because if something's mythological, it practically means it's not true whereas ancient mythology concerns the gods it concerns big events creation and stories and giants and all the rest of it and it's like our prehistory which when you don't have writing what people call prehistory is pretty half made up anyway so I rather think that it's injurious to condemn it as mythology because it implies that people as it were when they heard it folded their arms and said yeah yeah very interesting I don't think so at all I think it was a hypnotically fantastic story with at the last minute when the boat came and that life was saved, then the gods relented.

They were pleased that everything was going to go forward and they had a rainbow in Babylonia, just like in the Bible.

So we've been talking about how the Babylonian version of the flood story predates the biblical narrative of Noah.

But do the stories actually match in the end?

Do we know for certain or as certain as anything in history that that the biblical story derived from the Babylonian story?

I don't think there can be any doubt that the general global flood story with the boat, the generic narrative, owed its inception to Mesopotamia.

The narrative in the Hebrew Bible and subsequently in the Quran and elsewhere is derived from this old Babylonian matter, which was already from the early second millennium and reflected a culture in which floods and disastrous floods were a reality.

It's vested in this culture.

But in the Bible, they attributed a different function to the whole matter.

Because in the Babylonian story, the gods decide to wipe everybody out because they're noisy.

They're very noisy.

And you have to imagine the gods sitting in their deck chairs after lunch and tell them to shut up.

They decided they get rid of them and they create something.

peaceful and hard-working and not so noisy after all.

And when this matter fell into the hands of the Judean philosophers with their stories and their narratives and their principles, the story was too good not to utilize.

But God, who was very vengeful at the beginning of Genesis, it was all to do with sin and the punishment was to do with sin.

And it was only at the last minute that they got away with it.

And so they took the Hollywood principle of one bloke, one boat, and the clock ticking to save the world, and they recycled it in the Bible.

And then it passed into the Quran with nuk

and very much the same story has had this staple position in many cultures of the world.

So this fortuitous arrival of this tablet on my desk transformed my existence because I did write with a great deal of excitement a book about it and that was published and I got invited to give talks and people in America wrote and said I should be tarred and feathered for my sinful destruction of the Old Testament And one of them even wrote, Some clergyman from the south, I should be excommunicated.

And it didn't really worry me because I happened to be Jewish and pleased about that.

But in the end, the principle that the story is pre-biblical but represented a recycling for a different understanding makes it digestible to many parties who initially probably threw up their hands in resentment.

Because, as you might easily argue, nobody ever invents a new plot, ever.

It's impossible.

And all literature is predicated on and develops and builds what exists before.

And I think the flood story was such a corking narrative as a way to teach people that this is what can happen, you ants crawling about on the surface of the world.

If you're wicked and wicked, this is what's going to happen to you.

A very powerful message.

And that's, I think, why it made the shift from mad cuneiform writing into elegant Hebrew writing and on from there.

I'm not sure Irving fully convinced me of the importance of studying cuneiform, but I had a lot of fun learning about it.

Could there be a better spokesperson for cuneiform?

Irving's humor and love for what he does is infectious.

If you'd like to learn more about the Ark story, Irving's book is called The Ark Before Noah, Decoding the Story of the Flood.

And if you'd like to watch the attempt, or should I say the highly successful procedure to build the replica arc, the Nova episode is called The Secrets of Noah's Ark.

It's episode 12 of season 42 of Nova.

This is the point in the show where I welcome on my producer Morgan to tackle a listener question.

Hi, Steve.

Instead of a listener question today, I thought we could talk about the fact that Jane Goodall, one of our past Pima guests, died recently.

She was 91 years old, and it was reported that she was on a speaking tour when she passed away.

When I started producing People I Mostly Admire in 2021, she was a guest that you really wanted to book for the show.

And it took us about two years, but we finally did get her on.

And that episode aired in October of 2022.

I was thinking that maybe in light of her passing, you could share why you wanted her to be a a guest on the show.

Who wouldn't want to interview Jane Goodall?

It's totally self-evident.

At least for someone in my generation, it's weird to think, but there was this attitude that animals didn't know anything and couldn't do anything.

And it was changing because of people like Jane Goodall.

To people my age, Jane Goodall is just legendary.

She was just someone who you grew up with and you admired.

She was this 20-something year old woman who went out into Africa and basically taught us everything we knew about chimpanzees and changed the way we think about animals.

I think anyone my age would say, if I could interview five people, Jane Goodall would be one of those five people.

For people of my age too, she was pretty iconic.

I even did a report on her in fourth grade.

I think the interview with her really did not disappoint either.

Are there moments of the interview that you remember?

Yeah, the thing I remember was, I mean, we worked so hard with her team to find a day when she would talk to us because she was touring and talking and doing things all the time.

It was hard for her to take a day off.

So when we finally get to do the interview, she apologizes and she says, I'm sorry, my voice is a little weak today.

I've got COVID.

This is an 88-year-old woman with COVID who doesn't break our date.

to do an interview because she's so committed to the cause.

She was drinking whiskey throughout the interview because her voice was a little sore, and an opera singer had told her once that was the only thing that would soothe the throat.

It helps my voice.

Yeah.

I've heard that kind of line from a lot of people who find alcohol to be quite pleasing.

The thing that sticks out to me and is really relevant is that you actually asked her about

dying.

I want to play.

the clip of you asking the question and her response for our listeners right now.

Now you are not young, you're 88 years old, and it's largely taboo to speak about death in our society, but I suspect you don't mind talking about death.

Is that a topic you're comfortable with?

I'm extremely comfortable with it.

We all have to die.

You can't hide from that fact.

And how do you feel about dying?

Well, I really put it into words when I was asked in a very big lecture of about 10,000 people a question I'd never been asked before.

And that was, Jane, what is your next big adventure?

And if I'd been asked like 10 years ago, I would say, oh, I want to go into the unknown regions of places like Papua New Guinea, where new species are being discovered.

But I know I can't do that now.

When you're 88, you have certain physical limitations.

Let's put it that way.

Even though your mind is young, young, your body is getting older.

So I thought about this and after a bit I said, dying.

And there was dead silence for a few minutes and then some nervous titters.

And I said, well, when you die, there's either nothing, which is fine, or there's something, which I happen to believe.

And if there is something beyond our death, then I cannot think of a greater adventure than finding out what that something is.

She's roughly the same age as my parents.

I've never talked to my own parents about dying, but there was something about Jane that made me feel like it would be okay, even though socially it's just really, I think, seen as rude to ask people, especially old people, about dying.

But somehow I felt like she was giving me permission.

And I asked her, and her response was such that, interestingly, when I heard that she had died, I didn't feel the kind of sorrow that one usually feels.

Because of her answer to my question, it was clear that she was content.

And that changes the way you perceive someone's death when you realize that they're ready for it.

Well, it's only 8 a.m.

when we're recording this, so I am not drinking whiskey, but I think we can still do a cheers to Jane Goodall.

Yeah, an amazing life.

Listeners, if you have a question for Steve Levitt or an issue that could use an economic solution, our email inbox is open.

The email is pima at freakonomics.com.

That's p-i-m-a at freakonomics.com.

We read every email that's sent and we look forward to reading yours.

In two weeks, we're back with a brand new episode featuring Brian Cox.

He's a particle physicist who helped find the Higgs boson, a best-selling author, and believe it or not, he's hit a number one single on the British pop charts.

As always, thanks for listening, and we'll see you back soon.

People I Mostly Admire is part of the Freakonomics Radio Network, which also includes Freconomics Radio and the Economics of Everyday Things.

All our shows are produced by Stitcher and Renbud Radio.

This episode was produced by Morgan Levy and mixed by Jasmine Klinger.

We had research assistance from Daniel Moritz-Rabson.

Our theme music was composed by Luis Guerra.

We can be reached at pima at freakonomics.com.

That's p-i-m-a at freakonomics.com.

Thanks for listening.

It's been translated into French, Russian, Polish, Japanese, Armenian, and a few other things I can't remember.

So probably wherever I go, I'll get into trouble with their clergy, but it's good fun.

The Freconomics Radio Network, the hidden side of everything.

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