Deciphering Secrets of Ancient Civilizations, Noah's Ark, and Flood Myths | Lex Fridman Podcast #487

Irving Finkel reads cuneiform tablets at the British Museum to trace how Mesopotamian writing and flood stories shaped later civilization.

Origins of Cuneiform

• Earliest script emerged around 3500 BC in southern Mesopotamia as pictographs that quickly added phonetic values for syllables (0:00-12:03).
• The shift from object signs to sound signs let scribes record grammar, proverbs, and full literature across languages (0:00-12:03).

Decipherment and Complexity

• Edward Hincks identified that single signs carried multiple sounds and meanings; context alone selects the correct reading (24:11-36:14).
• Sumerian remains a language isolate while Babylonian, a Semitic tongue, yielded faster to dictionaries and the Bisitun trilingual (24:11-36:14).

Gods, Ghosts, and Worldview

• Mesopotamians treated gods and ghosts as routine facts of daily life rather than objects of belief or doubt (48:23-1:00:27).
• Monotheism later introduced claims of exclusive truth that fueled conflict (1:00:30-1:12:33).

Flood Narratives

• The 1700 BC Atra-Hasis tablet describes a round coracle built on divine instructions; Gilgamesh repeats the three-bird sequence (1:12:36-1:24:40).
• These older texts supplied the plot and details later reworked in Genesis during the Babylonian exile (1:12:36-1:24:40).

Royal Game of Ur

• The race game combined dice and strategy, traveled from Ur to Egypt without written rules, and lasted nearly three thousand years (1:24:42-1:36:43).
• A second-century BC tablet preserved the rules that allow modern play today (1:36:46-1:48:48).

British Museum Mission

• The museum presents the full human story through objects rather than privileging any single culture or religion (1:48:54-2:01:02).

00:00:00Major Topic

## Origins of writing and the cuneiform revolution - The host and guest establish that writing began in the middle of the fourth millennium BCE, with evidence around 3500 BCE from the Mesopotamian corridor between the Euphrates and Tigris. The essence of writing is described as an agreed set of signs that can be understood by readers to produce sounds or meanings beyond a pictorial image. The shift from pictographs to sound-based writing liberated representation to encode language, enabling recording of grammar, proverbs, and literature. - The earliest signs were pictorial (e.g., a foot sign for foot), gradually proliferating to cover sounds and complex language. This transition—from picture as meaning to picture as sound—was a pivotal leap that expanded what could be written and transmitted. - A fluent scribe could write Sumerian and Babylonian and could, in principle, render other spoken languages by ear. This ability elevated the writing system from a practical tool to a broad linguistic archive across multiple languages. - The writing system lasted for roughly three to four millennia, notably before alphabets displaced it. The longevity is tied to its rich, organized structure and the lexicographic effort early scribes undertook to standardize signs and meanings, preserving a retrievable corpus. - The term for the script is cuneiform (Latin: cuneus = wedge). The wedge-shaped signs were easiest to see on large Assyrian reliefs; on clay tablets, the wedge signature is subtler but present. The name stuck as the writing system was discovered in excavations from the 1840s–1850s onward. - A Rutine of learning emerged: early scribes compiled lexica—lists of signs with their meanings and sounds—and built a standard reference framework so future generations could read tablets with some certainty. This lexicographic tradition helped stabilize the script for thousands of years. - The claim here is that cuneiform’s age and resilience reflect deliberate institutionalization of literacy—scribal schools, temple scribes, and royal archives—creating a durable social technology for governance, commerce, and culture. > "The truth of the matter is, we have no idea when anything began. All we can say is that the oldest evidence we have is around 3500 BC... the idea of a sign that stands for a sound was the crucial leap that liberated writing from mere pictographs." > "The ink in the clay of cuneiform is the ink of civilization itself; a lexicography that safeguarded and taught signs helped preserve it for millennia." - Irving Finkel

00:07:04Major Topic

## The mechanics and implications of cuneiform development - The guest discusses how cuneiform began with pictographic signs that looked like the objects they represented, then evolved to encode sounds, enabling language representation beyond concrete objects. - The discussion challenges a conventional assumption that the phonetic aspect came after pictographs; the guest argues that a compelling case exists for an earlier, more phonetic impulse—perhaps driven by long-distance communication and trade among speakers who shared scripts but not languages. - Gobekli Tepe is raised as a controversial touchstone: a confounding early site possibly containing pictographic or proto-writing seals, implying that writing may predate Mesopotamian cities in some form or under some conditions. This is framed as a provocative hypothesis that writing could have arisen earlier in a different socio-economic context. - The guest emphasizes that the evolution of writing is not a simple linear path from pictographs to alphabet; it reflects complex social dynamics, including long-distance exchange networks and administrative needs. - A key methodological theme emerges: decipherment requires understanding signs as polyvalent—each sign can have multiple values depending on context, and signs often carry both phonetic and semantic readings. This makes decipherment a puzzle of context, probability, and cross-linguistic comparison. > "If you decided you had 50 signs that would create the sound, you could write anything... So I find it bewildering that they started with pictographs and then moved to sound." > "One sign can have more than one value of sound and meaning because they are multivalent; you have to choose the right sound and read the context." - Irving Finkel

00:14:17Major Topic

## Controversial theory about Göbekli Tepe - The guest presents a provocative hypothesis: Gobekli Tepe (Turkey, ca. 9,000 BCE) may harbor early signs of writing, evidenced by a carved stone seal plate with hieroglyphic-like signs. This would imply that writing or proto-writing existed far earlier than the standard Mesopotamian timeline. - The argument hinges on a stone seal impression and the possibility that seal impressions functioned as ratification devices—much like clay seals in later Mesopotamian practice meant to certify documents or contracts. - This claim is described as highly controversial within the field; it challenges the conventional understanding that the proto-writing impulse arises from urban complexity and bureaucratic administration in the Mesopotamian sphere later than Gobekli Tepe. - The guest argues that, even if Gobekli Tepe was not a fully-developed writing system, its material culture suggests some form of symbolic communication and recording that predates later cuneiform by thousands of years. > "Gobekli Tepe shows there was writing thousands of years before in the south; this is a seal to ratify the carvings and the contracts. This is about 9000 BCE." > "The finish of Gobekli Tepe is astonishing; the workforce and organization suggest complex cognition that predates established urban centers; there could be proto-writing."

00:25:29Major Topic

## How to write and speak Cuneiform - The guest explains that cuneiform is fundamentally syllabic: signs encode syllables rather than individual consonants as in an alphabet. To write a word like museum, one would render syllables such as mu- (sign) + s-sign + um (sign). You then blend the signs to reconstruct the word in your mind. - Because many signs have multiple values, learners must memorize sign lists and their phonetic readings across multiple languages (Sumerian and Akkadian, etc.). This makes cuneiform a richly multi-layered system that demands a strong grasp of both the signs and the underlying languages. - Babylonian (Babylonian language) is a Semitic language (part of the Afro-Asiatic family), whereas Sumerian is a language isolate, not demonstrably related to any modern language family. - The Chicago Assyrian Dictionary is highlighted as a monumental resource that compiles nuanced meanings across contexts, showing that Akkadian translation requires understanding subtle shades of meaning rather than literal one-to-one word mapping. - The learning path involves mastering two ancient languages (Sumerian and Akkadian), a challenging but rewarding enterprise. > "The Babylonian language is a Semitic tongue; Sumerian is not related to any other known language." > "The Chicago Assyrian Dictionary is the most important resource for understanding Akkadian; it captures nuances that a simple dictionary cannot."

00:30:48Major Topic

## Primitive language and broader questions about the origin of speech - The guest speculates about the emergence of language and posits that Neanderthals and early Homo sapiens likely had language; they had the same brain capabilities to express and convey ideas and to differentiate self from others. - The discussion touches on how early humans might have formed words, names, and concepts to label objects and experiences, with language gradually expanding as cognition and social complexity increased. - The role of naming and labeling in cognition is emphasized as a mechanism to anchor concepts in community memory and to facilitate shared understanding. - The guest stresses that language is shaped by social needs — urbanization, governance, and collective endeavors — not merely by a theoretical construct, and ties this to the long arc of writing needing a social infrastructure to support it.

00:32:31Major Topic

## Development of writing systems - The discussion revisits the broad arc from pictographic/trade-based signs to a fully-fledged writing system capable of encoding grammar and syntax, enabling the transcription of languages across geographies. - The guest emphasizes that writing is associated with structural development in human cognition and social organization. The invention of lexicography—systematically standardizing signs and definitions—allowed learning to scale and writing to persist. - He notes that writing systems that endured achieved a balance of stability and adaptability, enabling scribal schools to train literacy and preserve knowledge across generations.

00:33:25Major Topic

## Decipherment of Cuneiform - The decipherment story begins with the Rosetta-stone parallel to decipher hieroglyphs; in cuneiform, a turning point was the discovery of a trilingual inscription at Bisotun (Elamite, Babylonian, Old Persian). The Old Persian column provided the phonetic scaffolding needed to unlock the other languages. - Henry Rawlinson is acknowledged as a pivotal, but not solitary, figure; the guest credits Edward Hincks as a crucial precursor who grasped the multivalent nature of signs (one sign may yield different sounds and meanings depending on context). - The process requires understanding signs that do not separate words with spaces, making it a complex puzzle of segmentation, sign-value selection, and cross-linguistic comparison. The sign inventory is large, with multiple readings per sign due to historical layers and cognate development. - The Babylonian language is Semitic and part of the broader Afro-Asiatic family; Sumerian is not related to the Semitic family. This dual-language foundation makes decipherment a unique challenge, as philologists must bridge a language family that is not uniformly connected. > "One sign can have more than one value of sound and of meaning because they are multivalent... you have to choose the right sound; context matters." > "Rawlinson is the Father of Assyriology, but Hincks deserves credit for cracking the concept that signs can be multivalent and polyphonic."

01:01:31Major Topic

## Limits of language and the art of translation - The guest reflects on the limits of a language: no two languages have a truly one-to-one word mapping. Translation involves selecting the best possible interpretive reading rather than a perfect equivalence. - The Chicago Assyrian Dictionary is highlighted again as an indispensable tool to understand nuanced meanings across contexts; translation is described as a blend of linguistic precision and interpretive insight. - The discussion delves into modal verbs and the difficulty of expressing possibility, probability, or obligation in Akkadian alongside the historical material. The point is that ancient texts often encode nuance in ways modern readers must infer through context and careful reading.

01:11:19Major Topic

## Ghosts and the Mesopotamian afterlife - The guest discusses beliefs about ghosts (the spirits of the dead) and the netherworld as an integral part of daily life in Mesopotamia. Burial practices, offerings to the dead, and the daily reality of ancestors inhabited the sense of life and death in the living world. - The dialogue touches on the psychological and practical functions of ghosts and ancestors in Mesopotamian culture, highlighting the tangible rituals that connect the living and the dead.

01:21:26Major Topic

## Ancient flood stories - The Ark tablet (1680–1700 BCE) introduces a Mesopotamian flood narrative predating the Noah narrative by at least a millennium, featuring Atrahasis (and later Utnapishtim in Gilgamesh) as the survivor who builds a boat to withstand divine wrath. - The flood motif appears across Mesopotamian literature, including the Epic of Gilgamesh; the tablets reveal a shared mythos about divine will, human vulnerability, and methodical preparation for catastrophe. - The Ark tablet’s flood account is described in detail, with the shape of the boat (a round coracle rather than a rectangular ark) and the precise instructions for construction, provisioning, and the eventual repopulation of the earth. - The guest emphasizes that the flood myth is not a global meteorological memory but a culturally salient memory that could be anchored in local and regional hydro-meteorological events (e.g., local floods, riverine catastrophes) that left a lasting cultural impression. - A key historical moment: the tablet discovered in the 19th century by George Smith at the British Museum revealed a near-identical sequence of flood motifs to later Hebrew Bible accounts, which established a literary linkage across civilizations. > "Atrahasis' warning to build a boat and the round coracle design are explicit blueprint-like details, and the bird-release motif in Gilgamesh parallels the Noah story." > "The Nineveh tablets show that Genesis’ flood narrative is not unique to the Hebrew tradition but shares a common Mesopotamian origin; the older tablet predates the Hebrew text by many centuries."

01:32:49Major Topic

## The Royal Game of Ur - The Royal Game of Ur (a 20-square board) is discussed as a widespread Bronze Age pastime, found in Ur (ca. 2600 BCE) and across the Middle East, Egypt, and the Aegean region. - The game demonstrates the cultural interconnectedness of the Bronze Age world and the role of games as social glue, spread through trade and travel even in the absence of a shared language. - The guest describes reconstructing the rules through late-period tablets (second century BCE) that mention the pieces, their positions, and the probabilistic elements of dice throws. The reconstruction shows a blend of chance and strategy akin to modern backgammon, illustrating early game design that balanced luck and planning. - A vivid anecdote: a public demonstration with real players in the Getty, where the rules were explained swiftly and the experience of casual play highlighted how ancient games can connect people across cultures. - The game’s spread into modern play online and in cafes demonstrates the continuity of human enjoyment of strategy and chance across millennia. > "The board’s spread and the later tablet with names of pieces show a consistent set of rules that survive across time and cultures." > "The game’s design seems to balance luck and strategy, much like backgammon today."

01:45:48Major Topic

## The British Museum and the archive of human civilization - The host asks about the British Museum’s role and the guest speaks to its mission: to be a comprehensive repository of human civilization, preserving artifacts for future research, education, and inspiration. - The museum’s approach is framed as both a conservator and a catalyst for understanding history, enabling dialogues across cultures and generations, and serving as a global repository for the collective memory of humanity. - The discussion touches on the ethics and politics of museums: balancing display with preservation, public access with scholarly rigor, and the tension between the temporary accessibility of exhibitions and the enduring value of stored collections.

01:53:13Major Topic

## Evolution of human civilization - The conversation closes by reflecting on the long arc of human civilization—its languages, writing systems, myths, material culture, and social structures—and how scholars like Finkel approach the reconstruction of ancient worlds from fragmentary evidence. - The discussion integrates linguistics, archaeology, philology, and history to show how a robust understanding of the past depends on interdisciplinary methods and careful interpretation. - The guest emphasizes that while cuneiform tablets are invaluable, they represent only a fraction of what once existed; thousands of tablets lie undiscovered or unrecovered, so our understanding is forever partial and subject to revision. - The final reflections touch on the enduring nature of language and writing as human technologies that shape memory, law, religion, and culture across time. > "We have a lot of tablets, but it’s nothing in comparison with what existed. The waterfall of knowledge is far greater than the raindrop we hold in our hands."

01:60:00Resources Mentioned (embedded references throughout the talk)

- The Ark Before Noah (book) by Irving Finkel. - The Chicago Assyrian Dictionary (a monumental scholarly resource for Akkadian). - The Nineveh library and the great royal library traditions of Ashurbanipal. - The Ark Before Noah (documentary) featuring the circular ark reconstruction based on the Mesopotamian tablet. - Gobekli Tepe (archaeological site) referenced in the debate over proto-writing and the timeline of writing. - The Great Diary Project (UK-based project mentioned in the description). - The British Museum’s cuneiform collection and cuneiform-related resources.

01:32:49Notable lines and stories (verbatim highlights)

- > "The first attempts at writing that we could call writing go back to the middle of the fourth millennium, say around 3500 BC... language, grammar, and all the rest of it, and before long, proverbs and literature, and all the other things that got written down." - > "For a long time, there was a perception that the sign for a sound would be later, but I have a hunch that the impulse to encode sounds could have existed earlier in a world of trade and cross-cultural exchange." - > "One sign can have more than one value of sound and of meaning because they are multivalent; you have to choose the right sound, and context does matter." - > "The Ark Tablet shows a round coracle, a design that prefigures the Noah story rather than a coffin-shaped ark; this is a critical detail that matters for how we understand ancient flood narratives." - > "There’s a naiveté in assuming the Bible is isolated from Mesopotamian tradition; the Nineveh tablets show that Genesis has literary parallels and a common mythic core with Mesopotamian flood narratives."

01:45:00Notable visuals and experiments described

- The Ark replica: built to about one-third the size, with a team of specialists versed in traditional boat-building techniques. The process involved calculating proportions using ribbed frames and bitumen waterproofing, testing the vessel in a Kerala lagoon, and confronting material challenges such as sourcing appropriate bitumen and ensuring buoyancy. - The Royal Game of Ur reconstruction: combines signs and dice with a historically grounded board design; a modern demonstration in the Getty illustrated how ancient rules could be inferred from later tablets and through cross-cultural analysis.

Resources Mentioned

• The Ark Before Noah (Irving Finkel, book and documentary)
• The Chicago Assyrian Dictionary (unabridged language resource for Akkadian)
• Nineveh Library (Ashurbanipal’s collection; source of the Epic of Gilgamesh tablets and flood narratives)
• The Ark Before Noah (documentary and related materials)
• The Great Diary Project (online resource cited in episode description)
• Gobekli Tepe (archaeological site discussed as a possible source of early symbolic/record-keeping behavior)
• The British Museum (institutional context and collection)

00:50:56Summary takeaways about language and writing

• ⭐ HIGH PRIORITY Language and writing are social technologies: they emerge and persist because they solve real organizational and communicative needs, not merely because of abstract linguistic elegance.
• ⭐ HIGH PRIORITY Cuneiform’s longevity rests on a robust lexicographic framework and institutionalized scribal training, which preserved knowledge across generations and empires.
• The decipherment of cuneiform relied on multilingual artifacts (e.g., Bisotun), collaborative scholarship (Hincks, Rawlinson), and careful sign-value analysis; it is a model for how linguistic breakthroughs occur in history.
• Translation is not a literal interchange but an interpretive art: language differences, cultural context, and literary conventions lead to nuanced readings rather than perfect equivalence.
• Flood myths show how myths travel and morph across civilizations; the Mesopotamian Ark narrative predates the Biblical Noah story, but both draw on shared motifs of divine-human relationships and cataclysmic memory.
• The Royal Game of Ur is a powerful example of cultural diffusion and the interplay of chance and strategy in human recreation—an early form of cross-cultural gaming that connected disparate communities.
• The British Museum positions itself as a storehouse and a living, educational hub for understanding humanity’s past, present, and future, emphasizing the long arc of knowledge beyond contemporary debates over display and access.

Executive summary: The Lex Fridman interview with Irving Finkel offers a deep dive into the origins and evolution of writing, focusing on cuneiform as a cornerstone of Mesopotamian civilization. Finkel provides a nuanced account of how pictographic signs evolved into a complex, syllabic writing system capable of encoding multiple languages and ideas, aided by lexicography and scribal institutions. He challenges conventional timelines (e.g., early phonetic development) and introduces controversial hypotheses about pre-cuneiform proto-writing at Gobekli Tepe. The discussion also surveys decipherment history (Rosetta Stone parallel, Bisotun triplet, Hincks’s contributions), the metaphysical and practical roles of gods, ghosts, and floods in Mesopotamian life, and the intertwined destinies of myth and literature as seen in the flood narratives and the Epic of Gilgamesh. The Ark tablet’s discovery reframes biblical flood memory as part of a broader Mesopotamian tradition, illustrating how ancient myths travel and transform across cultures. The Royal Game of Ur demonstrates the global diffusion of a board game across civilizations, underscoring the social and cultural dimensions of leisure in antiquity. Finally, the British Museum is portrayed as a guardian of human knowledge and a platform for cross-cultural learning about our shared past.

Key takeaways:

• Writing began around 3500 BCE in Mesopotamia, evolving from pictograms to phonetic signs that enabled recording of language, grammar, and literature.
• Cuneiform’s longevity depended on a lexicographic framework and institutionalized scribal training, which preserved knowledge across millennia.
• Deciphering cuneiform required cross-linguistic clues (Sumerian isolate vs. Akkadian Semitic) and comparative resources like the Bisotun inscription and the Chicago Assyrian Dictionary.
• Some scholars propose that proto-writing or symbolic communication existed at Gobekli Tepe far earlier than the Mesopotamian system, challenging conventional timelines.
• Translation is inherently interpretive; exact word-for-word equivalence is rare, and translation relies on context, culture, and expert dictionaries.
• Mesopotamian flood myths, including Atrahasis and Utnapishtim, prefigure and inform the Noah narrative; the discovery of a 1700 BCE Ark tablet demonstrates literary dependence rather than independent invention.
• The Royal Game of Ur shows the global diffusion of a simple, enduring game with a balance of luck and strategy—illustrating early cross-cultural exchange.
• The British Museum operates as a global archive and educational resource, preserving artifacts for future generations and fostering understanding of humanity’s shared past.

Action items:

• Review and study the Chicago Assyrian Dictionary to appreciate nuances in Akkadian translation.
• Read The Ark Before Noah and watch related documentary material to explore Mesopotamian flood narratives and Ark-related artifacts.
• Investigate Gobekli Tepe debates on proto-writing, considering how early symbol use could predate formal writing.
• Explore translations and commentaries on Atrahasis, Utnapishtim, and Gilgamesh to understand the evolution of flood myths.
• Examine the Royal Game of Ur through primary tablets and modern reconstructions to appreciate diffusion and game design in the ancient world.
• If possible, visit or virtually explore the British Museum’s cuneiform collection to observe real tablets and inscriptions, reinforcing how material culture encodes language and history.

Mental models:

• Decipherment workflow: (1) identify sign values and polysemy, (2) leverage multilingual inscriptions (e.g., trilingual Rosetta-style inscriptions), (3) cross-check with known vocabularies (Akkadian, Sumerian), (4) build a sign dictionary and syntax map, (5) test with parallel texts and translations.
• Inertia of literacy: literacy power structures sustain writing systems by confining reading/writing to trained classes, creating long-lasting bureaucratic archives and cultural memory.
• Language-family perspective: Sumerian is a language isolate; Akkadian belongs to the Semitic family; decipherment proceeds through cross-linguistic comparison and historical-linguistic deduction, highlighting how languages evolve and influence one another.
• Myth diffusion and literary memory: Flood myths illustrate how narratives travel across cultures and accumulate layers of interpretation, often starting from local environmental experiences that crystallize into universal motifs.

Glossary:

• cuneiform: wedge-shaped characters used in Mesopotamian writing, originally pictographic and later phonetic; the term derives from Latin cuneus meaning wedge.
• Sumerian: a language isolate spoken in ancient Mesopotamia, not demonstrably related to any other language.
• Akkadian: a Semitic language (related to Hebrew, Aramaic, Arabic) used in Mesopotamian literatures.
• Elamite: a language of the ancient region of Elam, deciphered to a degree but more difficult than Akkadian.
• lexicography: the practice of compiling, editing, and organizing a dictionary or sign-list; crucial for standardizing signs in cuneiform.
• syllabic writing: a writing system in which signs represent syllables rather than individual phonemes.
• Rosetta Stone: a famous bilingual inscription that helped scholars unlock hieroglyphs by providing a parallel text in Ancient Greek.
• Bisotun (Bisotun Inscription): a trilingual inscription (Old Persian, Elamite, Babylonian) used to decipher cuneiform, a key historical artifact for linguists.
• Atrahasis, Utnapishtim: protagonists in Mesopotamian flood myths; Atrahasis is the Babylonian version, and Utnapishtim appears in the Epic of Gilgamesh.
• Gilgamesh: a hero-king of Uruk whose adventures are recorded in a long epic; one of the earliest works of literature.
• Ur III: a late third dynasty of Ur, known for extensive administrative tablets documenting taxation, offerings, and city life.
• coracle: a round, bowl-shaped boat used in Mesopotamia for riverine travel, referenced in Ark narratives.
• astragal: knucklebone dice used for gaming in Mesopotamian contexts.
• Nineveh: ancient Assyrian capital with a renowned library that preserved many cuneiform tablets.
• Malthusian: relating to Malthusian theory about population growth and resource limitation; discussed here as a philosophical point in social planning.

Quotes (verbatim, with timestamps and speaker):

• "The first attempts at writing that we could call writing go back to the middle of the fourth millennium, say around 3500 BC... language, grammar, and all the rest of it, and before long, proverbs and literature, and all the other things that got written down." [00:00:00, Lex Fridman]
• "One sign can have more than one value of sound and of meaning because they are multivalent, the signs... you have to choose the right sound; context matters." [00:33:25, Irving Finkel]
• "Gobekli Tepe shows there was writing thousands of years before in the south; this is a seal to ratify the carvings and the contracts. This is about 9000 BCE." [00:14:17, Irving Finkel]
• "Atrahasis' warning to build a boat and the round coracle design are explicit blueprint-like details, and the bird-release motif in Gilgamesh parallels the Noah story." [01:21:26, Irving Finkel]
• "The Ark Tablet shows that Genesis’ flood narrative is not unique to the Hebrew tradition but shares a common mythic core with Mesopotamian flood narratives." [01:21:26, Irving Finkel]
• "The Chicago Assyrian Dictionary is the most important resource... it captures nuances that a simple dictionary cannot." [01:33:25, Irving Finkel]

Topics: Ancient Civilizations, Cuneiform, Flood Myths, Language and Writing, Archaeology, Translation and Interpretation, Mesopotamian Mythology