Dr. Finkel did a video with Tom Scott on learning how to write using Cuneiform, and mentioned that there is a library of tablets that have yet to be translated. I am curious whether there is an initiative to put them online, and have people crowdsource either translations or merely the words, so that experts can spend their time on higher-level problems.

If ever there was a human being who needs a "channel" for his mental output, it is Dr. Finkel. He has such a wonderfully inquisitive mind, and I for one, would love to hear him in a "podcast" or conversational format. I'd especially love to hear him in interdisciplinary conversation with experts from entirely different fields. I feel he has the right sort of curious and whimsical (and sufficiently mischievous) mind to stoke great conversation, and maybe ask some new and novel questions. (Maybe RI has some such resource at their disposal. Thanks for this lecture regardless)

Mr. Finkel is a treasure: well-versed in his area of knowledge, have an inquisitive mind and is funny as hell which lets him keep his audience's attention and interest for an inordinate amount of time. Hope to see more of him soon!.

This Dumbledore guy is amazing! Smart and funny!

@@MrEiht While many of us love to visit a museum and see all the Things on occasion we are unable, for many reasons. Geography being one of them.

Personally I would say desperately

Amen

Another great mind. I love his work as well

Sobatyo Emick

Go to the British museum UKposts channel! 😆 they have some amazing content with him. I LOVE his videos. Definitely watch his “curators corner”. 🤗😉 and also there is one where he plays the Sumerian board game. His personality alone is binge worthy.

It wasn't a code

Like a Wizard

@@MasterWatchmaker I so wanted to be the one posting that XD

Looks like a man who flies a sleigh at christmas

You clearly should concentrate on his speech instead of his appearance, which although trully captivating, led you astray from the point of the presentation, which itself has at the very start stated that cuneiform is not a code. Professor is angry

I can recognize a great scholar when I see him, Or, her.

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Finkel is obviously intelligent. I had also concluded that the best invention of the last millennium was the Fender Stratocaster, which I have played for 45 years.

Geese - I'm sorta fond of the Wheel - especially 4 of em - Chromed, with a Jaguar setting atop. 🌟 Black on Black with custom Chrome - and a diamond Bling Bling key chain 🔑

@@johnmatheson2760 Mary Kaye - my fav

Moyakaku 86 yeah that was the joke

@Moyakaku 86 Yes, but no one doubts that Les Paul invented the solid body axe.

I've never wanted to put 10 thumbs up before that. (grew up in Japan wi 5000 Kanji )

@@JTA1961 Yes, I immediately saw the parallel with the uses of the Chinese Kanji pictograms mixed with the Japanese syllabary Hiragana and Katagana representations, and the Sumerian pictograms and Babylonian/Assyrian (albeit, polyvalent), syllabary. (Now, if I got all of that right then my mind really has had a bit of a work out tonight.)

Joel Atteberry 👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍 There you go 10 thumbs up. 😃

@@JTA1961 yeah lol as he was explaining that I got flashbacks to learning the radicals and on/kun readings of kanji. I only learned 200 max but it still gave me a splitting headache

Mr Kipling i presume?

I share deeply in this sentiment. I've been able to learn so much incredible information from the comfort of my home. This channel is a youtube treasure!

... and I also exceeded deeply, thank you

@@mangogarlic what?

@@mangogarlic seconded, what?

If you like him, Tom Scott's video with him of the Royal game of Ur is definitely worth watching.

Because he's a real person

I think he is Santa Claus

I think he's about as famous as an Assyriologist can hope to be. :D

He is famous! Ever heard of Moses? ;-)

I'm stealing that idea for passwords

Ahha now we have the key to your code. Now all we have to do is figure which anonymous commentator you are irl.

Sorry to burst your bubble but you're not the first to use a Greek phonetic alphabet 😅 There are inscriptions at least 2000 years old in the Jordanian desert that use Greek letters and rudimentary phonology to write Arabic names and phrases.

now, in a way, we all get to. i hope that makes sense

I had never heard of Mr. Finkel. I clicked on this vid to learn about cuneiform writing. He is an original and an iconoclast. Just like me. In fact, I am amazed my white beard is so similar to his. However, he has more hair on his head, and his eyebrows are intense. Otherwise, we must be related.

I wanted to find the Alexander the Great cuneiform at the British Museum but didnt know where it was. I went to the help desk and they called the Ancient Babylonian department, then they invited me to go to a door. A young woman answered and led me to Mr Finkel! He showed me photos of it and explained the inscription. He then attempted to guide me to where the cuneiform was but he actually had forgotten and had to ask his assistant. We had a photo together and I thanked him. A short but interesting experience.

Exactly ! He reminds me of Albert Pike !

In essence he indeed is all those things to you and others that have had the fortunate happenstance to get introduced to his skillful and affable mind. How could anybody fall asleep to this man lol? I enjoyed your comment!

It's the details that help things stick, the stuff Paul Harvey dubbed the rest of the story. I didn't need to know how big Reverend Hincks' family was but that and the "unappetizing" description of the photo make him more memorable, more real.

Professor can be changed to reflect: a variety of nouns. Grandfather, friend, advisor, family member, neighbor, partner ... The man is "special"!

each engagement is an adventure for the mind

I've had one that would used the same style of intermittent jokes and yelling to wake everyone up before some critical information.

I suppose he is Jewish , so that wouldnt be a very big feat considering his achievements ! But i think that his knowledge of Hebrew and probably Arabic helps him understanding Mesopotamian languages . Prof.Jim Khalili interviewed him during one of his shows explaining the origins of science.Worth watching !

@@planpitz4190 According to Wikipedia he was raised Orthodox Jewish but became an atheist.

A wizard looking guy named Finkel can read Hebrew; ya don't say?

@@planpitz4190 Yes, Hebrew is an ancient language which millions of people STILL can read...............hmmmmmmmm yeah, I "suppose" he is Jewish- go figure. IF you include the reference/talk w/Prof. J. Khalili I would certainly watch it. cheers

@@ian_b You never know...............wiki/wackypedia is garbage anyway.

Love how he looks like a 19th-century scientist

More vids by him on the British Museum channel r there

I finished my earlier video with the intent to turn off the TV and go do something else, and then this started autoplaying. And here I am 40 minutes later with the remote in my hand ready to turn off the TV thinking "Wait, did I just watch this whole video on cuneiform?"

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I've just ordered that book based on this interview and your post, looking forward to it!

😂

Take note all those desperately chasing bitcoin.

@Genius Art Ah. So, when... I don't know... archaeologists from some culture which hasn't developed yet; let's call them Limaeans. When Limaean archaeologists unearth your radio bitcoins 2000 years from now, what are they going to learn? >;-) But anyway, as someone with long-time interests in both electronics and computers, I find it a little bit interesting that bitcoins can be exchanged over radio, but not that interesting. The radio-based protocol may possibly be interesting, but at the end of the day it's just another communication protocol. I'm sure mining the bitcoins still takes a monstrous amount of computing power. I call it monstrous becayse I can still do _almost_ anything I actually want to do with computers with far less. I just sometimes have a hankering for the more shiny sorts of 3D graphics or I get stuck with a video encoded with one of those compression algorithms which takes 10 times the computing power for a 1% reduction in file size. I hate those.

He should be on an ancient history tv show like how Carl Sagan or Neil deGrasse Tyson did for Cosmos with natural sciences whatnot. It would be rather splendid

That’s what book are for. I do agreed with you though

@@robzagar4275 hahahaha. you got me to laugh out loud. but very fair point haha

Amen !

Forsooth. He is quite amazing.

I bet you couldn't. The novelty becomes tedious.

@Charles White uP

which method do you propose

​@@InDisskyS131 Auto-iconization à la Bentham

Passion. The difference between an average teacher and a great teacher.

too many people commenting here, what's the use. I was about to mention the radicals in Chinese words, but with >2000 you obviously beat me 🙂

yes, the similarity with "forest" kanji is is extraordinary - like it's almost the same system

It is all connected. At some point languages and cultures shared their common ancestors. Japanese is certainly closer to these ancient scripts than our modern writing, meaning languages using alphabet. Letters are also on the spectrum or a continuum of evolutionary progression toward achieving the most economical abstraction and precision while staying relatively brief.

@@DanielJackson2010 nah, japanese writing came from chinese one and we have ancient chinese writing. It's definitely not connected to cuneiform. The same can be said about writing systems of mesoamerica. It would be pretty ridiculous to find all these ancient writing systems, but nothing "in between" to fill the gaps between them, but still claim they are connected. I am not sure about egyptian hyerogliphics' connection to cuneiform, but they probably aren't connected. Most of other writing systems in the world though are direct descendents of egyptian writing system: latin, cyrillic, indian, arabic, south-east asian systems, etc. Please, do not misinform people on the internet. Different peoples developed writing independent of each other. The same can be said about languages - there is no evidence of connection between all the languages of the world.

@@danzoom the Greeks and Indians had a cross-cultural exchange at one point, i believe around the time of Alexander the Great; they may not have exchanged languages but there are statues of Buddha in India with Greek curls

You guys are having the debate about monogenesis or polygenesis, so basically did something (languages, stories, etc.) arise on its own in separate locations or did they all stem from one source initially and spread? This is a popular debate that goes on currently in many fields, and interestingly there is research lately that supports the multiple arisers, however it's not possible to know for sure. It all is fascinating either way, and being able to see the similarities in how Japanese was developed and that it lives today with us at the stage cuneiform was at then is just fun all around.

Hereinafter me of Albert Pike.

@RICHY-J THE-ARCADE-GUY Don't you have some stores to loot? >

It's not unusual that peoples with the understanding of big society picture hate posers like the politicians.

I agree. The last two generations of students have been shortchanged, to put it mildly. Professors with tenure only there to fill space and indoctrinate with Marxist propaganda, instead of inspiring the love of learning, and the ability to actually THINK for themselves.

@@geezermann7865 you have no idea what you're talking about.

@@stein6811 actually he does... Perhaps you went to one of the better univeristies , but america is full of horribly dull professors.

Still can

@@theautodan7095 Yes but none of them teach "marxist propaganda" which was likely the part being referred.

Herb Quest I agree. Only men, no women!

@@Jasondavisvids Oh common, you know I mean mankind. I know its a sexist way of wording it... but it felt like the right thing to say at the time. Men of both genders of course!

Herb Quest oh, I was serious though :( jk lol

@@Jasondavisvids I should also note that I mean men of all genders, not "both" to be even more politically correct ;)

Precisely how many genders are you referring to?

In Czech, Fish is Riba, go figure!:)

Join the queue!

If it's at all possible just go. Life is short, don't die wishing you had done these things.

@@markvines7308 I agree, but it is not possible now, and later may not exist.

If the money to travel presented itself, I would.

@@helenel4126 So would I.

Same thought lol

Crunchy. If they'd put it near his eye they would have caught the words with less scratching.

This guy's face in youTube's right sidebar is automatic clickbait. And the first 5 seconds made me think I've stumbled upon a 19th century painting hanging on the wall in an Oxford hallway that became magically animated.

There are many stories about cities in the sky that maybe attributed to various atmospheric conditions. They have been around for a long time. It may be the case that on seeing them, hunter gatherers who identified species by their foot prints while hunting for them, wished to convey their presence to the people in the cities, and may have realised they were looking at a reflection of a far off unknown place, so may be they made large images of the human foot print on the ground and images of themselves to see if there were other humans living there. If we look at a human foot print the lines around the toes look like some of the symbols in early writing, before we became fixated with geometry. It could be the reason for the similarity of earth works in Britain and North America. A sheet of rain over the atlantic may be the reason for these legends. Language may not always be what Barthe's mythologies called myth, or arbitrary in form. Sorry. Did a college course years ago and they made us read that stuff.

Golden comment! Coz it's true!! Hehe

@@DinkyDiTruBlu The original language is called ogigian. The later ones like sanscrit and hebrew are derivatives.

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I must admit, before Irving I wasn't really a firm believer of strategic swearing for comedic negotiation between a speaker and a listener. What a fool I was...

His swearing and outbursts keep me engaged. I’m always attentive just in case he does a funny, which is exactly why I love this kind of teaching with comedy

انه قطعة خشب تشتعل في المحاضرة وعند ما تنقضي المحاضرة لا يبقى منه او منها الا الرماد

You mean the Arabic seems similar to them .. yes of course its similar because arabic is a Semitic language same as Hebrew which both in turn are derived from old Aramaic that was deeply routed in the neo Assyrian empire.

@No No1 That's a deeply mistaken reading of the word semite. The Semitic language group measurably stretches back at least 8000 years to Akkadian predecessors, which was 4000 years before Judaism, and in practice will have existed for much longer, pointing to one of the early human migrations out of Africa before the last ice age. Just because some linguist named the group Semitic a couple of hundred years ago doesn't make it 'designed by Jews'.

Ther are many Ancient Egyptian words that are ancestors of modern Arabic words too. "pada" meant duck "tepeh" meant apple and so on for many more.

"La" also stands in both languages for No Which is "no" suprise since both languages are related to each other.

@@HO-bndk but the Arabic language does not have the P sound. so?

We used to have a lot of Italians at my old place of work. Jokes about Italians and gestures aside, they were almost every one of 'em _very_ good at miming.

you guys know about google translate on your phone right? We went through China last July and virtually had zero issues despite no one speaking english and myself knowing zero mandarin. You speak your own languge and it spits it out in the ohter one for the other person.

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Chinese has _classifiers_ or _measure words,_ obligatory particles that must come between a number (or a demonstrative like _that,_ or quantifiers like _every_ ) and the noun being qualified, which... I guess between classifiers/measure words on the one hand and kana on the other, they both end up ranking the same. =3

@@Ice_Karma Japanese has measure words too, but these aren't quite the same things as the determinatives of cuneiform and Egyptian hieroglyphs. For one thing, they're actually words, and are pronounced in speech. This is not true of determinatives, which are a feature of the writing system but not the spoken language. Their function is to help resolve possible ambiguities among readings, and possibly as graphical honorifics when writing sacred names.

This is true, but it should be noted that the situation in Japanese is much more simple than in Sumerian and Akkadian. The basic meaning of 口 is always derived from "mouth", and the Sinitic pronunciation "kou" is pretty regular and predictable. Most kanji have less than a handful of possible pronunciations, and semantically the signs are much more contained than what you'll find in Sumerian and Akkadian. A Sumerian sign can easily have 20 different sounds and 20 different meanings, sometimes wildly different with little apparent rhyme or reason. Then of course you also have 20 different signs that have the same primary pronunciation. The signs also have so many repeating, simple constituents that they're much harder to differentiate and memorise than kanji, at least in my opinion. Add to that a lot of broken portions in the source material, so you have to do even more guesswork. I know Japanese fairly well and also studied some Assyriology in college and I can confirm what this speaker is saying, it truly is a nightmare to read for students, and the only way to get anywhere is to amass a lot of experience. There's a reason why there's still so many untranslated tablets in the world, because the number of qualified people to do the decipherment is very small in relation to the task.

@@Mogura87 , Yes, modern Japanese is a more simplified case, but ancient Japanese is another matter. When Finkel was explaining the difficulties in his cuneiform languages, I kept thinking "we have all the same problems in early Japanese" (let's say, early Heian period, before the native phonetic scripts were developed). The rebus writing (this went away in modern Japanese); the use of one language's pictograms to represent another language - sometimes with the meaning of the pictogram, and sometimes only phonetically, with no warning which is which, and no spaces between words to help out. Add in the pronunciation changes since that time (in both Chinese and Japanese) and it's a real puzzle deciphering those old texts. Of course, Akkadian and the others are even further removed from their modern relatives, so it would be even more frustrating, I'd imagine.

@@frixyg2050 I agree ancient Japanese is much more difficult to read than the modern language, but even more than that medieval genres like Sourou-bun with heavy use of obscure vocabulary, employing words with much less predictable meanings (e.g 罪 "tsumi" for "(divine) punishment" rather than "sin"), no punctuation,documents written with a myriad variations of grass script etc. Ancient Chinese also can be incredibly ambiguous both due to the extreme analytic nature of the syntax and the many possible meanings of the words. In fact I'd say classical Chinese is significantly more difficult to have a firm grasp on than classical Japanese, which at least has tangible grammar. However, I do think it's fair to say that the assyriologist has a significantly harder time than the sinologist in terms of decipherment and determining the correct transliteration of a Sumerian and/or Akkadian cuneiform text. The signs are just so much harder to differentiate than Chinese characters in my opinion. I can't for the life of me understand how one person can memorize and recognize them all from all locations and time periods, from 3000 BC Sumerian cuneiform to Assyrian 700 BC cuneiform, and be able to instantly determine that right 1 out of 20 possible phonemic values and 1 out of 20 possible meanings, word by word and phrase by phrase. When I read classical Chinese or Japanese Manyougana I never seem to have that much trouble with that first step of determining what character I'm even looking at, or which of the handful of possible pronunciations is right. Sumero-Akkadian cuneiform is definitely a lot harder at this stage than Chinese or Japanese from any time period. When the transliteration is done and the reader can proceed to transcribe, analyze and translate with the comfort of the Latin script, it might not be that bad anymore. I mean Akkadian has a lot of familiar vocabulary for anyone that knows another Semitic language, and unlike Chinese it actually has a grammatical system that helps you determine the function of a word in a sentence quite easily. Sumerian is a lot more exotic for sure, and overall not as well understood (the last time I checked at least).

I'm pretty sure the Han Chinese and Japanese have a strong relation to the Sumerian culture, the writing is just so similar and the values and philosophy too! I can read Kanji (Hanji) and the connection to cuneiform becomes obvious once you start reading cuneiform too, this can be one of the biggest clues to understand who really were the ancient Sumerians.

Pretty much the same in English. One word can have quite a few meanings. One word can have a different meaning by the tone of voice.