Irving Finkel: evaluation

Transcript context

…First of all, your whole line of work, you’re making me realize, is a kind of Sherlock Holmes type of process. The deciphering of the language, archaeology, of taking those pieces of evidence and trying to reconstruct a vision of that world. And now you’re making me realize that even all the cuneiform tablets we have is just a raindrop compared to the waterfall of thousands of years of humans. Yes, we have a lot, but it’s nothing in comparison with what existed. But not only that, you see, we don’t have to decipher anymore. We can read Akkadian or Babylonian, Sumerian pretty well fluently. That’s not a problem. So the information which you can get from these sources, especially three millennia of sources, is very, very substantial. Very substantial, but it means that Assyriologists have the inbuilt idea that what we have is something like all there ever was, which is absurd. For example, there’s a period called the Ur III Period, where people lived in city-states. They wrote very small account tablets by the thousand, and there were two or three major cities where this is the way they lived. People had to bring tithes and offerings, and everything was recorded by what I always refer to, and people sympathize with, is the ancestors of the Inland Revenue, because everything had to be written down so that some schmuck could check it and fill out the ledger, and some other schmuck above him could okay it, so there’s no funny business or no mistakes. Now, the thing is, there are thousands of those tablets written in about 2100 to 2000 BC, thousands of them, about the size of a box of matches. So people like to generalize about the Sumerians at this time of the world, but they probably all came out of two rooms, because they were dumped when they were no longer needed in some kind of room, and the archaeologists in the 19th century came down on these, and then all the locals came and they dug them up and they sold them all over the place, and they’ve gone all over the world. Thousands and thousands of them, out of probably two storage rooms, which is not a whole culture or a whole country, or their whole history, or their belief systems. So our view of it is skewed by the nature of the material, and sometimes the material is opulent and benevolent, but not always, and sometimes the people who work with skewed material don’t even realize how skewed it is. I mean, you know, it’s quite remarkable. So, in all your time of studying cuneiform tablets, do you sometimes late at night get a glimpse of the waterfall? Like, can you imagine?…

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