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Irving Finkel

Published podcast speaker

Claims
19
Episodes
1
Shows
1
Named items
0

Claim ledger

What Irving said.

8 transcript-backed records

01 / evaluation

See, this is the important perspective that nobody considers. Because the thing is, when you have something which is contemporary, if you’re a clever journalist or a clever thinker, you can write essays about it, you can talk about it and you can see it, but you can only see it from the perspective from which you operate.

“See, this is the important perspective that nobody considers. Because the thing is, when you have something which is contemporary, if you’re a clever journalist or a clever thinker, you can write essays about it, you can talk about it and you can see it, but you can only see it from the perspective from which you operate.”
Speaker
Irving Finkel
Publisher
Lex Fridman Podcast

02 / evaluation

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.

“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.”
Speaker
Irving Finkel
Publisher
Lex Fridman Podcast

03 / evaluation

” So whenever you have the verb, it’s some form of divide or division. But actually, it’s not, because divide is like the primary root, but there’s maybe 10 nuances of what that can mean in English, where the one at the bottom and the one at the top, you’d hardly know they were connected.

“” So whenever you have the verb, it’s some form of divide or division. But actually, it’s not, because divide is like the primary root, but there’s maybe 10 nuances of what that can mean in English, where the one at the bottom and the one at the top, you’d hardly know they were connected.”
Speaker
Irving Finkel
Publisher
Lex Fridman Podcast

05 / evaluation

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.

“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.”
Speaker
Irving Finkel
Publisher
Lex Fridman Podcast

06 / evaluation

Or whatever it would be. But I think probably you have to allow for a strong creative principle surfacing in Homo sapiens at a quite early age, because of the paintings on cave walls… You try drawing a running antelope in color on a wall.

“Or whatever it would be. But I think probably you have to allow for a strong creative principle surfacing in Homo sapiens at a quite early age, because of the paintings on cave walls… You try drawing a running antelope in color on a wall.”
Speaker
Irving Finkel
Publisher
Lex Fridman Podcast

07 / evaluation

The Elamite language is much more difficult, but they got a lot of it too. So it was a very romantic thing because the inscription was carved on a mountain face far above the plain, and Henry Rawlinson, who was an upstanding young British officer who claimed to decipher cuneiform quite unjustifiably, climbed up there with some miserable kid and made squeezes of the whole thing overlooking the plain, thousands of feet up in the air, and brought those back, and they were used in the decipherment.

“The Elamite language is much more difficult, but they got a lot of it too. So it was a very romantic thing because the inscription was carved on a mountain face far above the plain, and Henry Rawlinson, who was an upstanding young British officer who claimed to decipher cuneiform quite unjustifiably, climbed up there with some miserable kid and made squeezes of the whole thing overlooking the plain, thousands of feet up in the air, and brought those back, and they were used in the decipherment.”
Speaker
Irving Finkel
Publisher
Lex Fridman Podcast
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