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Published · transcript-backedIrving Finkel: commitment
12 Dec 2025 Lex Fridman Podcast #487 – Irving Finkel: Deciphering Secrets of Ancient Civilizations & Flood Myths
“Anyway, I started it, and after about, I don’t know, maybe one or two lessons, I knew this was going to be my life’s work.”
Source trail
Everything needed to verify it.
- Speaker
- Irving Finkel
- Attribution
- Verified speaker
- Claim type
- commitment
- Recorded
- 12 Dec 2025
- Publisher
- Lex Fridman Podcast
Transcript context
…Cruel. …cruel, absolutely terrifying. And I said I wanted to learn cuneiform, and he wasn’t at all pleased because this was a time in Britain when professors resented having students to teach because it cut into their research time. It was that sort of arrangement. Anyway, I started it, and after about, I don’t know, maybe one or two lessons, I knew this was going to be my life’s work. So that’s what happened to me. It was an amazing thing. So he gave me a list of basic signs to learn. I did, and in the next couple of days, then we came in and we started reading. So given the complexity of the signs, why did cuneiform last 3,000 years? The most successful writing system ever.…
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