Cracking Ancient Codes: Cuneiform Writing - with Irving Finkel

Okay, that's it and thank you very much for that subtle and delicate introduction. It is not appreciative. Well, the first thing I have to tell you is the misnomer that we are all working under because

ancient

writing

has nothing to do with cones because cones are an artificial system to find a

writing

technique that fools everyone else and I took them to asylums; that is not the intention behind the

cuneiform

writing system or the Egyptian hieroglyphs, although of course we end up fooled into asylums, well that is another matter. this strange writing, if you have never seen it before, you will see shortly it has nothing to do with

codes

, it is a proper functional writing system with the same purpose behind it, there is our own alphabetical system, so it recently caught my attention quite miserable upon importation. that there are people in this country who have never seen the Keenya shaped tablet how can this be today, I don't know, but I brought one to show you that this tablet is completely obtrusive, there are many things that are immediately obvious. characteristics, for example, it is written around 1780 BC.

C., obviously you can say it looks like a letter, but it's not, in fact it's a wonderful inscription and it's more interesting than anything else in the British Museum, clicked and put together, it's quite embarrassing because it doesn't belong to us, but it is written from left to right with ruled lines and the writing system is a bit like printing in the sense that you have a pencil like a toothpick and you press the end of this toothpick on the surface of the clay gently and each time you do a stroke that is part of a sign and all signs in the world are made up of one, two or three, you made some design, so once you have learned that you can assemble anything, this tablet was written by a very literary bribe high quality, you can see the fronts more or less easy to read, the back looks like it has been trampled by elephants and of course that is the most interesting part, so it is made of clay and that was the first writing system that

ancient

Mesopotamian people used.

It's a good thing they used clay because all the tablets in the British Museum, no doubt, all the books and documents in the British Library and every single meaningless record you have on a computer will be long gone and we will be the Winners, now I'll show you that one. tablet, not to sell the book that is a tempting bunch of witches in the hallway outside in which our president is already alluded to twice, that is simply on the slide, but the point is that that is. the replication of the Babylonian idea of ​​what the ark was like in the flood story that came out of that tablet, which is kind of a recipe for building it, so when you saw that you wouldn't necessarily come to that conclusion, but it does underline the fact that which is real writing from a real language with real grammar and real meaning and no ambiguity and that didn't happen, so the part we have to start in the educational business with the map is the most insulting and childish enlightenment I could find, but once he shows you where his penis is, which is that brown spot on the left, and I'm going to talk about things about the blue Bob in the middle, which is some kind of Iraq, which when I started was nothing serious, no one in this country knew where that was and of course now knows it for the wrong reasons, so as far as we know, writing began and definitely before, in Egypt, in Iraq, around 3500 BC.

C., so if some other speaker tonight floats in front of you and starts talking about Egyptian things, hieroglyphs, anything like don't believe a word if they try to claim primacy, now the fact is that they use clay that was freely available in a God-given way because the banks of the Euphrates and Tigris rivers that provided the Mesopotamian ami invented by the Greeks and was perfect for forming writing tablets without pieces that made sharp impressions and dried perfectly in the sun and that is what they did , they started with clay and lasted, they stayed with it until about the 2nd Century AD, over 3,000 years of continuous use and on the right you see some readings of the type that grow generously in Iraq, so you got a six inch drill bit, the you cut at the right angle you took the material off and there you had a free script and a tool that would last you a long time so it was a very simple matter and very lucky that that's what happened so this won't be a test not a test or anything depressing like that.

There are two points about this conference first. no one is allowed to go to sleep or I will be very angry and the second thing is that there might as well be a test before you are allowed to leave the building now that we have tablets of almost all of this, you know? These are the highlights. points that I want you to remember and tattoo on your wrists when you get home, firstly, that this is the oldest writing system that we know thanks to archaeology, secondly, that it began with pictographs, the ancient word, when you make a little picture of something to give you an idea and the kind of drawings they made were the kind of things that talented three or four average school children do when they're 17, which is draw a small mass per head with a keep an eye on it and that's the kind of thing. they did it at the beginning, so here you can see in these excerpts a drawing of a beer mug with a pointed bottom that would stand up from the ground, next to it is a drawing, a pictograph of an ear of barley and below it is a pictogram that It has the head of a man and a plate of food which is the verb to eat, so it's a very simple kind of thing, like you might expect Martians to invent or something like that, and when the first signs of this appeared guy.

They put it to use, they had behind them their format, the requirement to document and the type of Treasury issues, they wanted to measure salaries in and out, they wanted totals that added up so that really unpleasant people could come and prove what they had been really miserable people. keep records for the last month so that the plague that hangs over our lives today is responsible for writing in the First Instance and it was certainly not love poets who took this and turned it into a writing system so that they could record their base and lascivious desires for In posterity, it was a long time before literature advanced and someone realized that it's not just used for this mundane purpose, but it had this open-brain quality and started actually writing, etc., so that that is the first type of science they prefer.

Sure, now they're pretty easy to understand, this is probably the worst slide in the world, but the second point I want you to remember for your test is that the script evolved graphically in a way that makes perfect sense, so if you look down the column on the left, those are relatively simple to understand pictographs of the first type. I'll give you a clue. The three floating pieces are a mountain. The one below, which is three hammered pieces and a triangle with a slit in the middle, is foreign. The slave girl had the idea that that's the kind of thing and then they had all these pictographs and basically two things happened because at first in the early phases they drew with a point, very similar to how we draw with the pieces with a buyer in a sheet of paper with a continuous line and that fell into disuse and they use the cut reading to reduce these natural figures with curved shapes, as seen on the left, two sharp angular things that consist of separate strokes of the styles, so that there is a shift from realism to a kind of abstraction and it is when you get to the abstraction phase that we are no longer really pictographic at all and you are not so dependent on what the sign looks like in terms of origin to know what it means and you can see from From left to right about a three thousand year development period and if you see one end of the other together you would have no idea that they were probably connected, but the same phenomenon with the Egyptian because the hieroglyphics and the fools taking this you knew what was in the medium, I never think they were connected, but to the same extent they are derived from the point of view of drawing, so this script went from being a simple business of drawing images or ideas to a method of recording sound and that is the essence of writing, that you have a set of marks that record the sound of a language with its words and grammar and all the components that someone else can put on the record player and retrieve the words when they read them.

This is a miraculous affair and the move from pictographic news to sound writing was the only real giant leaf man ever made apart from the electric guitar wrap around 1952, so these squat priests and Complacent leftists with a real belly and a smug look are not a Cimmerian of the third millennium; he spoke one of the languages ​​that is recorded in writings in Canarian form, you are right, his language is not connected to any living language at all, it is quite strange, the guy on the right is an Assyrian who spoke the Assyrian language, for which the Assyrian and Babylonian dialects and which is a Semitic language related to modern Semitic. languages, so you have a writing system for two totally disconnected languages ​​and this is a very interesting thing, but the scholars, the children and the people who went to school had to learn and read the classics and Sumerian and they could get by in both, so they had a kind of symbiotic relationship between the two languages ​​and this guy lives in the British Museum there are a lot of puzzles about Cimmerian grammar.

Many times I have whispered in his ear asking for some kind of charity and we never got a single word out of it, so this is when the first tablet was written around 1800 BC. This is what the process looks like: you hold the tablet in your left hand, you write with the pencil in your right hand and there is no way to do it other than that and what is the interesting philosophical question is that you can see a modern counterpart to this almost exactly on the subway very regularly. Now what I find fascinating is not the implication that things haven't changed in all the intervening millennia.

What is really interesting is that the vocabulary of the majority. the people who use those pocket devices are very, very little superior to what the Sumerians did in 3400 BC. C., that is, you need a small number of signs and in the modern world they say you have 12 signs. Are you stupid if you have 12 characters and nine? Many of them mean light because you have to say like like like like like and it has nothing to do with the word like, so this is a philosophically interesting issue because politicians and other clowns argue that we are making progress and really the study of history and the asari of a theory of ology does not support that to any extent now this is what happened to that writing when it was a fully developed and flexible beautiful thing.

It was first written by calligraphers who neither pictographed nor developed in the more sophisticated fluent

cuneiform

. written by probably one of the best walks in the country who worked for a health fanatic worked in his library. This is part of the Gilgamesh tablet and it is absolutely a pleasure to read the writing and you can see the man who wrote that tablet. He was a calligrapher and when he finished it he must have left it with more than a sigh of self-satisfaction so in the space of a few centuries and simple pictographs when you say to the milk bottle not to the milkman to write well Literature in the sense that this guy of things took a big leap and then we had literacy, so now you understand how you know the form works.

I'm going to tell you three things and then you won't get a lollipop. So one principle is that you have a Sumerian sign for a word, okay, that's perfectly simple and it's intelligible because since they started as pictographs, that's how they started drawing an apple and mending etc., so the level older and deeper is a sign for a word. which is Sumerian because that's the first language now, when you're a scribe learning to write this tablet for Ashurbanipal, you had an interesting technique at your disposal, quite presumptuous, quite clever, that when you write in Babylonian, if you want, you can write a certain word in Sumerian. with a sign like in the old way that then the reader who was learning was put in his own language, so in Sumerian the word for King is Lu Gao, so if we are an old scribe who reads Sumerian, we see that sign there , ah, we say.

Lu gal we know what that means boss, but an Akkadian scribe 500 years later who wants to refer to the king himself can draw that old sign for King but not read it Lu gal in the Sumerian language, but provides the equivalent in his own language this is a part intrinsic delight and joy that comes into your life when you start studying cuneiform and see the useful blank clue at the bottom. You do this all the time because you write s with obliques in the middle and when you read it you don't say essence with the beep in the middle you say $2.00 and cities that have to do with money you get it instantly right that principle is something very common in Sumerian writing and acadia that you can use for each otheris that clear for everyone, splendid, then there is a simple syllabic writing because when you have all those signs that are images, most of the words in the images are short words that are logical, so you can draw a sign that has a value short just for the sounds to spell something else, for example, you see there the words now room, which means river gauge, which means dog and family.

Robbie Hill is the key, so to write those three words you have to have an AA rule and an ohm and the syllabic spelling system was like cutting a sausage with a bread knife, you have a syllable sign for each component and you smash the sausage again in a single word, so that most of the text written in the Babylonian or Assyrian language, not the Sumerian language, is written synthetically that way. You have to learn a thousand signs to be comfortable. About that, that was easy for you and I see that at the bottom there is another clue for the modern reader on how to spell the word museum with mu z and boom, so we have this question about correct spelling , which is also part of the idea you are familiar with.

The beginning, for example, the two small bottom images can be read and searched and what is new and what belief, yes, exactly, they go to the top of the watch so that people who use them in silicones do this kind of thing all the time. in his asshole way, so we had done it before, that applies to you too. My name is Kate. For them, writing is normal, so let's say we are transported back to ancient Sumeria around 3200 BC. C., which, in my opinion, is a pretty healthy idea. They would feel personally at home than the other end of the chronology, so the riddle writing system is also a very important component because you can see in the first line that the word share the syllable share is actually the Cimmerian word for barley, so if you are a Sumerian person you can draw the barley sprig and pronounce its part to mean barley, of course that makes sense, but you can also use the same sign when it means nothing to do with barley as a component syllable in a word longer, for example, if After you have shared with gar, which means good or benevolent, you can write share with the barley sign, which has nothing to do with what you are saying, and then we have these other things that also They will be applied in the next class, when I am the next teacher.

The syllabus will probably refer to these sorry matters as determinatives and compliments and things like that. They are very useful. They are one of the few things in cuneiform writing that are there to make your life easier when you begin the process that will take you six minutes. and ten years before you get anywhere, you are very grateful for any help you can get and the determinants are looked for, so for example they have little signs for wood, stone, plants, God, river, leather and things like that , we have about fifteen. the Egyptians have about twelve thousand and the determination works in such a way that if you write the word tree, you can write the word wood before it, which gives the reader's eye a kind of clue because sometimes you can't be very sure of the reading until you have such help, so if you put the determinative in front of a certain type of now, it is often very useful and in addition we have what we call phonetic compliments, so let's say that We are reading this and the Akkadian texts together and we have to sign Lu Gao, which is the Sumerian word for king.

Sometimes they put space after it to show that you take the legal sign and read an equivalent. The engine room, in this case, will have space like we had before as a kind of track and this is very useful and it is a very disconcerting and interesting experience when you are reading inscriptions in canary format when from time to time you are confused and worried and there's something on the tablet that shows that the guy who wrote it some pretty moving useful stuff, you miserable bastard now we have what we professionally call the drawbacks, remember we started with the idea that you can write a word with a sign, that's perfectly simple.

The sign can have several different sounds. Well, I'll let you think about that nightmare situation. For example, the white sign is the signs that have the main meaning of mouth, but when you write auto in the Cimmerian sentence, it can mean mouth and very severe. word oh, you can read, yes, well, it can mean mouth, word, speech, nose or tooth, that sign can represent those words, but in Cimmerian, auto is mouth in their word, gu is speech, care is nose and zoo is tooth, so this means that when you have that sign in a sentence it has the ability to mean any of those words unless you have some kind of clue to help you and that's why it's so important to have these phonetic complements and other things that establish it, for example, if you write with earring later then you know that you do not read it yourself you have to read it the meaning of cure that is known so as not to confuse your nose with your teeth which is never recommended so the interesting thing is that I will not stop at this melodramatic theme in case sensitive people faint, but when you start learning Cimmerian, the business of jumping off a tall building headfirst onto concrete is enormously attractive on a daily basis and this complicated business is one of the factors that makes this difficult.

Are you still with me? A sound can be written with several different signs. Oh haha, what a joke. It is true for more than three thousand years. It didn't bother anyone. Some historians have said that could be why they became extinct. So if we take as a specimen the syllable GU which nowadays is only applied to the sticky yogurt stuff in the supermarket. There are about 17 different signs, all of which can be pronounced goo, and we systematically label them goo 1 blue 2 2 3 4 and so on, so the reasons why that's true are too complicated for the matter. First, now you're just going to have to believe me because you're just going to have to believe everything I say, because that's why I'm here, this is the Royal.

Institution, so it's perfectly reasonable, but it's quite surprising when you first discover this, especially in view of problem 3, so it's the same thing where there are no spaces between the words, so it really is a diabolical thing when the Persians develop cuneiform, they put a little kick between the words so that you never have this agony but here you have a whole sea of ​​them there is a space in the middle and in the background I will explain it to you in a minute but in general it is a sea of ​​things You continue like this and This is what happens when you turn everything back on.

This is your first cuneiform sign, so you look at it and, being exceptionally intellectually gifted, you go through all its possible uses, then you look at the next one and go through all its possible uses and then you find a match, so it's very unusual to get the wrong match, it might be very unlikely, so out of a complete line there are two things that go together, which helps when you look at the third one because you can see if it goes at the end of this one or should it be the beginning and I tell you that this It couldn't be a problem even for a natural optimist like me, but now I can do it with one leg and one eye and I feel very pleased with it now, if you look here, there are and spaces in the middle of this beautiful tablet now the reason is that this cuneiform writing was invariably justified correctly especially in literature and every once in a while you have a line where there are not enough equal space signs to fill the line from beginning to end, so if a horrible situation occurs they live in the gap in the middle that's very unusual what else do we have decisive oh yes, that's what we're here for?

Sorry, got real about that, yeah, well, the thing is, we just demolished the idea. I hope satisfactorily that we are not talking about

codes

, we will talk about a writing system, that is the first thing, so what we are dealing with is a real decipherment, in other words, we have an unknown writing system and we have to make sense of it in a way . or another now sometimes it's not that complicated, for example with linear B, which is always likely to be Greek and it turned out to be Greek and no one fainted except the people who did, that's not that complicated, which is really desperately complicated is when you have a canary format also hieroglyphic materials, well you don't really know what the language behind it is, you have no clue and I will keep it until the day I die, which will probably be next week, but that canary would never have been deciphered . if we didn't have this trilingual and the non-bilingual hieroglyphics they have, it would probably be the same, although not as desperate, but when you imagine you have something like that with no spaces between the words, I have no idea what the language is.

There may not be any relatives to go on, you could run it on every computer in the world and all you would get would be gibberish or possibly Legally God, but you would never understand me, so this trilingual was a crucial thing and King Darius, the person on this rock mountainous in the place called a history in the east of Eastern Persia and wrote a proud description of how he crushed the rebellion, this part of all the people crushed there under a Mazda of curry and a long narrative that was written in Babylonian language our cuneiform of Iraq in Old Persian cuneiform, which was Old Persian cuneiform of elder person meaning elder person and of course the Elamite language which is even more barbaric since Mirian and it became evident that these long inscriptions far above the simple were equivalences each other, so this is where Indiana Rowlandson and came into his own control let me show you the organism Indiana B, there is Indiana Bullington, now you know better than I, especially in this August institution, how often it happens in the world that the discovery of things and the expansion of things is usually attributed to the wrong person this is the damn law of the universe it certainly applies here Rawlinson was very good at climbing mountains so he took this wild Kurdish boy and they went up the side and They had ladders and they made paper.

I squeezed out the three columns of writing and brought them back to England and it laid the foundation for our current understanding of what glitches mean and what I'm a little off speed here before I get really rude to the rural innocents, let's get back here, this is. the swinging question in the history of the bay, so this is a ski that you see on the left, you have the text in Babylonian on the bottom right, ancient Persian and the icon of Elam, those two places, so Babylonian is Semitic. The older person was, of course, known because the person with an annealer of living tongues maybe no one really cared about, so this is the first line of the inscription in those three languages, so it was a considerable and miraculous thing to decipher. ancient Persian anyway because it is written in simplified cuneiform type and it was not decisions about who actually did that this van Greta fend was the first scholar in the 18th century in the 19th century around 1820 to look at these fragments of cuneiform writing in ancient Persian and deciphered them.

He did it on a sort of rational basis about names, so he started it all and then with this wonderful I'm sorry, I shouldn't be doing this with this wonderful text brought in by the audience, they had it all in three different languages ​​and, in Based on what had already been deciphered, Rahl there actually deciphered the older person and published a translation which was a very impressive feat, so you can imagine once they realized that there is a text involved if you look here and this is the inscription Oh personally and they knew this had to do with King.

Darius and his name, oh, there's something new in that diary, and when they deciphered this simple writing, they realized it was dobry er moosh spelling the name of the Persian king and it says, as you can see, I am, derives the great key in King of Kings, the king of Persia, the king of countries, the son of his taxis, the grandson of Artemis, the key minute, so there is a lot of information in the search engines and a lot of names and some repetitions, and a Once they knew that this was diverters and then It was very likely that this line and this line we were going to spell our wish as well, so once they opened up all the Old Persian, it was a very smart thing to do in Persian, but once What they What we did was the great job of using that to open the Akkadian text and they did it with the starting point of spelling the names and after that, they suddenly found in the yellow text, so to speak, some words that were sent as the Naru word for Rivard, they all jumped 30 feet in the air because once they knew that this language where they got a glimpse of how it was spelled was Semitic, then they walked away because it's Grandma and Aries's Arabic vocabulary. and they accumulated Hebrew, Syriac, Aramaic or the whole vocabulary of all the Semitic languages ​​to try to classify the words that made sense and they finally did it, it was a great wonderful achievement, so, like I said, great offense, they did a great job . in the first person complete and then we have this case now, when he did the Persian thing, then he published a very low need or not about the occasion and he was almostcompletely wrong and I'm going to jump back and forth a bit because the person who actually deciphered the Babylonian on the old man's back was this grumpy and unappealing looking individual named, but Reverend Edward hints that who should have been commemorated in this building is actually every other human being because he was one of these amazing people he was.

A clergyman in Kilauea in Northern Ireland, he had a parish, he had five daughters, so he was quite busy and wanted to decipher the hieroglyphs before anyone else. Every time he got the publications, he immersed himself in his study when all the girls had gone to bed, seeing if could beat from paly off or the great young Thomas was out in the hallway towards the post now this is the beauty of it because Hinks, puzzled over the hieroglyphs in the scribbles in his notebook, had some idea that maybe these cuneiform things They might give him a clue about the hieroglyphics, it might be interesting and possibly instructive to take a look at, so he looked at it and deciphered it.

He was the person who realized that signs were multipurpose. He was the first person he modified. He did it and he did it with a lot of intellectual brilliance and he brought back something he hated to his core, so Hinks was hired by the trustees of the British Museum for a year in London to work on the new inscriptions that Laird were bringing in and um, he could read a lot of things very quickly and when he got home the trustees this would be Moments of Silence Porn, so when he was safely in Kilauea, Rowlandson got to work and published a revised understanding of the history of the bay, which was completely understandable, Now two little points about this whole deciphering thing and what it brings to light. human beings when they ruled his area, he was asked when he was an old man how he deciphered Kanae from the writing of the Babylonian thing, he said he couldn't remember in the meantime, he dined a lot on this heroic thing that lived in the ladder and the press and everything the rest is nothing more than a great promotion towards himself, the progress made by the brains of the Reverend King, so he is going down in history as the father of a theory, well, it is very annoying for all this, so I just like to say that these two photographs.

What he showed the audience is a fresh-faced young man with the transcription of a historical inscription on the table in front of him staring evilly into the semi-future knowing greatness awakening as a human the photograph on the right is three weeks later when so there you are so that's what happened now? There is something else I have to tell you about this busy decipherment. See, the people who knew knew very well that they figured it out and they were starting to publish translations of Assyrian and Babylonian accounts and there were one or two. of the provincial universities of Britain such as Oxford and Cambridge, where the dongs who reigned supreme over classical knowledge for generation after generation were forced to take on board the barbaric discoveries of these charlatans, objected very strongly to having to give any credence to this idea. of deciphering or changing the things that they have been teaching unchanged for the last 400 years so that you can understand perhaps why their professions were threatened and in the end the Royal Asiatic Society decided to include it in this and fuss, so they got that farm and even the The third cylinder in the middle was copied by an aquifer of leaves and what they did was wrap it in a sealed envelope.

I'm sure they distributed the Edward Hinks cuneiform text at the top of the first track below him, quite an interesting person who has to be on stage here and who invented photography. Thank you so much. I will definitely give you a lollipop that is Fox Talbot. That guy had a place in him and betting on horse racing is very dangerous, but that was the genius Fox Talbot who worked with the light. He worked with physics, he worked with display of objects and was a major contributor at that time. He was also interested in physics in the study of light and also in the genius of the home.

Anyway, it's a pretty interesting parallel, so there was Hinks, he and his They ruled a pair who was a French or Belgian scholar in France who was at the forefront of the detachment and an image of the government in trying to look like someone else and what they did was they had three months to come up with their best reading of this without any interference from anyone else and then the Archbishop of Canterbury and others sat around the table evaluating their translations and decided that the decipherment was a fait accompli. and that from now on those who were entrenched in their old ways had to rethink their future, so this is a very important cylinder.

I feel like I owe my job to him, on the one hand, and of course, let's offer philosophical mathematics. You could say that all four of them made the same mistake, but that's not really the case, so I'll conclude by preventing this name. In your mind, Edward Hinks was born there in Cork and died in Kilauea, and he has two of those round records, so in my opinion the world is full of unrecognized geniuses, but Hinks is definitely one of them and I taught to all my One time my family came to the other side of Northern Ireland to look for this rectory where we found it and I thought oh my god there should be a blue plaque this is embarrassing and in fact there was a blue block which was outside on the wall in the uncle very overgrown level and I believe it is used by local dogs, so the only people in northern Iowa, the only living things in Northern Ireland who regularly pay obeisance at the Hinks shrine, are these dogs and presumably there she hunts, so when I wrote this book I didn't.

I don't want to mention it again, it's a little embarrassing that the lady keeps bringing it, like I said, it's pretty momentous that there are some out there and if someone wants a signed one, it's the same price, so I'm just mentioning it, but the thing is in that book I wrote. something about poor Reverend Edward and I said that was the name. I couldn't think of a more intense way to explain how important these decoders are, that they will be a magnet, a fridge magnet with inks on every refrigerator in Europe, and I threw this away. idea in the world as, of course, we do, and book after book could be made available to you.

I received a V letter, someone in the administration of the Northern Ireland Post Office said, but we have decided that we are going to put something out with Edward hints that he has read what you wrote about yourself so a small injustice has been addressed so there you are there, thank you very much.