Irving Finkel > Quotes

“The shift from pictographic use to writing sounds was the only real giant leap man has ever made apart from the development of the electric guitar.”
― Irving Finkel

“Studying the world's oldest writing for the first time compels you to wonder about what writing is and how it came about more than five thousand years ago and what the world might have looked like without it.

Writing as I would define it serves to record language by means of an agreed set of symbols that enable a message to be played back like a wax cylinder recording.

The reader's eye runs over the signs and tells the brain how each is pronounced and the inner message springs into life.”
― Irving Finkel, The Ark Before Noah: Decoding the Story of the Flood

“This unusual situation is due to the fact that the tablet omits all outbreaks of the conventional literary structure – Anu opened his mouth to speak, saying to the lady Ishtar … followed by Ishtar opened her mouth to speak, saying to her father, Anu … Gilgamesh VI: 87–88; 92–93 – with which Babylonian narrative literature is, not to put too fine a point on it, slightly tiresomely littered. In fact, I cannot come up with another example of Babylonian mythological or epic literature that is devoid of this characteristic speech-linking device. Its repetitive nature at first sight looks like a remnant of oral literature, where things are repeated more than we would repeat them today, which the modern connoisseur of cuneiform literature just has to accept, or appreciate as atmospheric and authentic. On reflection, however, it is just the opposite. The characteristic dependence on this formula originates in the very transition from oral to written literature, for who is speaking at any one time will always be clear in a storyteller’s presentation, but the process of writing down what has previously been spoken aloud creates ambiguity for the reader unless each speaker is clearly identified.”
― Irving Finkel, The Ark Before Noah: Decoding the Story of the Flood

“Cuneiform absolutely cannot be written with the left hand, and any school candidate who manifested that sinister tendency in antiquity would, no doubt, have it beaten out of him, as has often happened since in human history.”
― Irving Finkel, The Ark Before Noah: Decoding the Story of the Flood

“…для прочтения клинописного текста надо сначала идентифицировать определенный знак, затем понять, использован ли он как логограмма, силлабограмма, фонетический комплемент или детерминатив, и только после этого окончательно выбрать правильное звучание (если знак распознан как силлабограмма). Начинающие писцы, как теперь начинающие ассириологи, должны были сразу понять, что любой клинописный знак может иметь несколько звуковых значений; и наоборот — что любой звук может быть записан различными знаками; другими словами, поливалентность — наше всё. На практике, однако, не всякое использование знаков допускалось традицией. Поскольку слова обычно делятся на слоги, глазами мы быстро научаемся выбирать наиболее гармоничное и грамматически правильное прочтение последовательности знаков, отметая маловероятные или попросту невозможные варианты прочтения.
С самых древнейших времен месопотамские писцы начали составлять списки слов (словники), потребность в которых была связана с необходимостью зафиксировать значения новообразованных знаков, чтобы избежать путаницы и чтобы легче было их заучивать.”
― Irving Finkel, The Ark Before Noah: Decoding the Story of the Flood

“I think the big mistake for mankind was the creation of monotheistic religions, because they brought evil into the world. Because if you believe in a monotheistic religion, it means I'm right and you're wrong.”
― Irving Finkel

“there was no post-mortem judgement of morals to be endured by a human spirit on arrival, let alone backward-looking punishment; the shadowy entrepõt was thus no waiting-room where the dead hung about waiting for good news (upwards) or bad (further downwards). They were already ‘down’.”
― Irving Finkel, The First Ghosts: Most Ancient of Legacies

“Fingers of bitumen Here we have to understand the measure as the Sumerian ideogram ŠU.ŠI (usually written ŠU.SI), standing for the Babylonian ubānu, ‘finger’, one of which comes out at about 1.66 centimetres. Bitumen is thus applied to all ark surfaces to a depth of one finger.”
― Irving Finkel, The Ark Before Noah: Decoding the Story of the Flood

“It is an idea of great power and effect for us today, and a source of unexpected comfort. In this way do we conclude our study of the first ghosts, and how they arrived. They have been here ever since.”
― Irving Finkel, The First Ghosts: Most Ancient of Legacies

“Since the nineteenth century endless attention has been paid to the whole business of ghosts by writers, investigators, scientists, mountebanks, fakers and filmmakers.”
― Irving Finkel, The First Ghosts: Most Ancient of Legacies

“One Babylonian roué, arraigned before a judge in about 1800 BC, testified, I swear that I did not have intercourse with her, that my penis did not enter her vagina; not, one reflects, the last time someone has got off on that technicality.”
― Irving Finkel, The Ark Before Noah: Decoding the Story of the Flood

“This field of activity generated a vast literature of carefully assembled one-line omens on this pattern: If A happened, B will happen. Here the sought-for outcome B, known as the apodosis, is deemed to be the consequence of an observed phenomenon, the protasis A. One”
― Irving Finkel, The Ark Before Noah: Decoding the Story of the Flood

“When it occurs in literary texts šár = 3,600 is conventionally understood as no more than a conveniently large round number. This is evident when a well-wisher writes in a letter, ‘may the Sun God for my sake keep you well for 3,600 years’, or a battle-flushed Assyrian king claims to have ‘blinded 4 × 3,600 survivors’. Assyriologists therefore often translate šár as ‘myriad’, as conveying the right sort of mythological size and feel, although of course the Greek decimal myriad literally means ‘10,000’, whereas Mesopotamians naturally thought in sixties, one ŠÁR being 60 × 60. What is truly surprising in the Ark Tablet calculations is that this sign 3,600 does not function just as a large round number but is to be taken literally.”
― Irving Finkel, The Ark Before Noah: Decoding the Story of the Flood

“It is only the early human mid that grew to strive against the prospect of the final annihilation of the self, a hallmark rebellion that became hard-wired into, and always an essential element of, nature.”
― Irving Finkel, The First Ghosts: Most Ancient of Legacies

“This, the first ghost system that we can document in history, sets the stage in many ways for what came later. Central is the conception that ghosts tend to be restless due to unhappiness, returning to a scene of their former life and seeking closure for injustice, cruelty or violence. Coupled with this is the conviction that they can be dispelled by those who know how.”
― Irving Finkel, The First Ghosts: Most Ancient of Legacies

“The characteristic wedge feature is a direct consequence of impressing the signs with a straight-edged writing tool in contrast to drawing with a point, and it is this that led the nineteenth-century decipherers to name the script cuneiform, derived from the Latin cuneus, ‘wedge’. Each application of the edge of the stylus-tip left a line ending in a wedge-head, be it the top of a vertical, the left end of a horizontal wedge, or a diagonal produced by impressing the corner of the stylus.”
― Irving Finkel, The Ark Before Noah: Decoding the Story of the Flood

“He who can see will see He who can hear will hear”
― Irving Finkel, The First Ghosts: A rich history of ancient ghosts and ghost stories from the British Museum curator

“The substance of commentary, in general, written by experts for the public, wishes to tell them in three or four different ways the smallest amount of information that they already know.”
― Irving Finkel

“In ancient Mesopotamia, belief in their well- established and well-documented system was simple and un- questioning: ghosts were taken for granted as a fact of normal life and nobody, as far as we can judge, scoffed at another for ‘believing’ in them.”
― Irving Finkel, The First Ghosts: Most Ancient of Legacies

“Do not love, sir, do not love. Woman is a pitfall – a pitfall, a hole, a ditch. Woman is a sharp iron dagger that cuts a man’s throat.”
― Irving Finkel, The Ark Before Noah: Decoding the Story of the Flood

“Ghosts beyond Mesopotamia known to the Egyptians, the Greeks and the Romans can claim their counterparts ever after right across the span of the world; it is a simple matter to demonstrate the universal presence of ghosts in people’s minds and lives, dreams and writings.”
― Irving Finkel, The First Ghosts: Most Ancient of Legacies