Irving Finkel: preference

Transcript context

……at the time of Gobekli Tepe, there may have already been a writing system. There was, because the thing is about it, that it’s a seal to ratify. It’s not just a squiggle on a pot and you can say, “Oh, that’s just a piece of…” This is a finished thing with a flat surface. You press it down, so you have some contract, you have some building arrangement. That we’re paying for these bricks, whatever it was, and the official person had to squash it down and it leaves the impression. I mean, I am a great believer in Sherlock Holmes- …as a teaching system for intelligence and rationality and logic in thinking. I read those stories a million times when I was a kid, and one of the things which impresses me most of all was this point quoted by Holmes, not original to him, that it is theoretically possible to infer the Niagara Falls from a raindrop. That’s a powerful statement. Yeah.…

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