Irving Finkel: evaluation

Transcript context

…Wait a minute. More controversial statement from today. Henry Rawlinson doesn’t deserve the credit for that? No, I don’t think he does. He’s called the Father of Assyriology, but I think he’s the Stepfather of Assyriology because when he first got these inscriptions, he wrote a long book about it, which was almost entirely wrong. And there was a clergyman in Northern Ireland called Edward Hincks who lived in a place called Killyleagh and had five daughters and ran this church, who was possibly a card-carrying genius, if not jolly, jolly close. And what happened with him was this: there was an ongoing competition, well, an ongoing challenge to decipher hieroglyphic writing, which Champollion usually gets the credit for, and Hincks was very interested in trying to decipher hieroglyphic ahead of the French. And he ran into a sort of dead end at one stage, and he thought he’d have a look at cuneiform to see if it was helpful. And at the same time, he cracked it. He worked out how it worked. He realized that one sign can have more than one value of sound and of meaning because they are multivalent, the signs. I tried to shelter you from the horrible news… …But it’s not a walk in the park. It takes about five years to… you’d probably do it in about four, probably. That is a compliment. I think you just complimented me. Thank you. Thank you very much. So, you’re saying one sign that looks exactly the same might have different sounds given the context?…

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