Finkel, Irving

Assyriologist, cuneiform scholar, curator at the British Museum for 45+ years

Deciphering Secrets of Ancient Civilizations, Noah's Ark, and Flood Myths

Lex Fridman Podcast · Dec 12, 2025

• cuneiform
• Assyriology
• Mesopotamia
• Epic of Gilgamesh
• Noah's Ark
• flood myths
• decipherment
• Sumerian
• British Museum
• Royal Game of Ur

Core ideas

Finkel traces cuneiform's origin to roughly 3500 BC in Mesopotamia, where clay-using communities between the Tigris and Euphrates developed pictographic marks that eventually gained the capacity to encode sound rather than just meaning — the pivotal leap that let writing capture grammar, literature, and any spoken language, not just simple pictographable nouns. He offers a genuinely controversial personal theory (one he says "many Assyriologists would leave the room" over): that the standard sequence — pictures first, sound second — is backwards, and that a long prior era of trade-driven, pictographic-only communication among people who didn't share a language must have preceded the Sumerian system, with the phonetic breakthrough coming only when someone realized a language's small set of recurring syllable-particles could each be assigned a sign. He extends this skepticism to Göbekli Tepe (c. 9000 BC): a rarely-discussed sealstone found there, engraved with markings and used to leave impressions, convinces him that some form of writing must already have existed thousands of years before Sumer, since (in his view) construction on that scale and precision is simply incompatible with a purely oral, unorganized society. He's similarly skeptical of the received account of Ashurbanipal's famous library at Nineveh — he argues invading Babylonians and Elamites, who shared the writing system and valued knowledge, would have looted the intact tablets rather than only leaving behind the broken duplicates modern archaeologists actually found — and repeatedly stresses that surviving cuneiform (hundreds of thousands of tablets, likely millions still buried) represents only "a raindrop" against the "waterfall" of everything that was actually written, skewing scholarly generalizations about entire cultures.

He walks through cuneiform's actual mechanics (syllabic writing, no word-spacing, individual signs carrying multiple possible sound values depending on context) and the 19th-century decipherment story, crediting the trilingual Behistun inscription (Old Persian, Elamite, Babylonian) as the "Rosetta Stone" breakthrough — but controversially reassigns credit away from Henry Rawlinson (whom he calls the "Stepfather," not "Father," of Assyriology, given his largely wrong initial publication) to the underappreciated Irish clergyman Edward Hincks, who correctly worked out that individual signs are multivalent. A recurring theme is the sophistication routinely lost in translation: Akkadian grammar has no modal verbs ("could," "might," "should"), yet Finkel argues court diviners and physicians must have had ways to hedge predictions (since a diviner who flatly predicted the queen's death and was wrong would be finished) — meaning translators who render every "if X then Y" omen or medical prognosis as a flat, unhedged certainty are fundamentally misunderstanding the pragmatics of the language.

On religion and mortality, Finkel describes Mesopotamian polytheism as practical and unagonized — people didn't debate whether gods or ghosts existed any more than modern people debate gravity — and argues (provocatively) that monotheism, by building in the claim that other beliefs are simply wrong, introduced a uniquely durable engine for religious conflict that polytheistic systems lacked. The episode's centerpiece is his own discovery and decipherment of the "Ark Tablet," a c. 1700 BC Old Babylonian text he identified when a visitor brought it into the British Museum: it gives the god Enki's precise instructions to Atra-Hasis for building a giant circular coracle (not an angular ark) to survive a god-sent flood — a text that predates the biblical Noah story by at least a millennium and, combined with George Smith's 1872 discovery of the parallel bird-release episode in the Gilgamesh flood narrative, establishes (in Finkel's view) clear literary dependence rather than coincidental parallel invention. He connects this to a broader theory that Judean exiles in Babylon under Nebuchadnezzar recycled Babylonian cosmological and flood material into what became Genesis, partly as a deliberate strategy by community leaders to keep an assimilating diaspora population culturally distinct. He explicitly rejects Graham Hancock's Younger Dryas global-flood-memory hypothesis as "negligible" in probability, attributing the flood motif instead to a real but regional Mesopotamian catastrophe whose memory endured culturally, plus the story's built-in narrative appeal (an ordinary person given an urgent deadline to save everyone — the same structure as countless later disaster stories). He also recounts building a one-third-scale working replica of the coracle-ark in Kerala based on the tablet's specifications, and separately describes his own reconstruction of the rules of the Royal Game of Ur — a 3,000-year-old, geographically ubiquitous race game he pieced together from a late Babylonian rules tablet, now playable again worldwide. He closes with a defense of the British Museum's mission as distinct from art museums like the Louvre — a comprehensive, non-partisan record of human achievement stored for future generations, not just current exhibition — and a case (echoing Wittgenstein) that the erosion of rich vocabulary and grammatical precision in modern short-form digital communication represents a real loss of expressive and cognitive capacity relative to earlier, more literate eras.

Excerpts