Irving Finkel: evaluation

Transcript context

…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? Yes, I can imagine. I can imagine easily, because once in a while, a library is discovered. In the 1850s at Nineveh, which was the Assyrian capital, there was a fat king, king of the world, called Ashurbanipal, and he had a fantastic library, and he promoted it. He impounded tablets, he had them brought to Nineveh. He wanted all the prevailing knowledge and all knowledge from before under one roof. It was a kind of Alexandria thing. So he was a trained scholar, and this is what he did, and they found it in the 19th century. They dug it up, Layard and those people. So what did they find? They found the tablets higgledy-piggledy all over the floor of a huge room and in the corridors and everything. And lots of them broken and lots of them burnt. So ever since then, until really quite recently, Assyriologists who spent all their… Well, people who work on these Nineveh tablets spent all their time joining the bits together, and you have the story about Gilgamesh and the goddess who falls in love with him in the garden, and she wants to seduce him, and dot, dot, dot, you can’t find the bit… So you look for another bit and you look for another bit. And gradually, they piece together the literature, and the assumption has always been that if you put them all together again, you’ll have the whole library. But it’s the absolute opposite. Because what happened was that the Babylonians in the south, in my opinion, they worked hand-in-glove with the Elamites from Iran. They had a pincer movement and they beat Assyria, they conquered Assyria. And they ran through the capital and they set fire to everything. Pinched all the women and took all the jewelry and all the gold. And people say that in a fit of pique, they destroyed the library. But they wouldn’t destroy the library because it was the giant brain from which the Assyrians ran a world empire, and it had all the knowledge in the world. They destroyed that? They spoke the same language, they had the same writing system. They’d have taken them all safely home, cart after cart after cart. And I think what’s left there is duplicates and broken things, the things that got dropped and everything, and that’s what everyone thinks it is. So this is also a controversial point. You’re just nonstop……

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