The Ancients — "How to Write Cuneiform" with Dr. Irving Finkel
Podcast: The Ancients (History Hit)
Host: Tristan Hughes
Guest: Dr. Irving Finkel (Senior Assistant Keeper, British Museum, Cuneiform Expert)
Date: February 8, 2026

Episode Overview

This episode explores the origins, evolution, use, and decipherment of cuneiform—the world’s earliest known writing system—with Dr. Irving Finkel, one of the world’s leading experts on cuneiform from the British Museum. The discussion delves into how cuneiform was invented, its remarkable endurance over millennia, technical aspects of how it was written and read, and its impact on the structure and legacy of ancient Mesopotamian civilization. Dr. Finkel’s rich anecdotes and hands-on knowledge bring the ancient clay tablets to life, showing how this wedge-shaped script still shapes how we count and tell time today.

Key Discussion Points and Insights

1. Introduction to Cuneiform

• Cuneiform as the Oldest Script: The hosts set the stage, noting cuneiform as the first known archaeological writing system, dating from as early as c. 4000 BCE.

  "The cuneiform script...the earliest pieces that we can say are writing. They're part of the history of writing, but they are...the earliest that we know of." — Dr. Irving Finkel (03:02)

• Origins: Likely developed in Sumer (Southern Iraq), cuneiform may have drawn on even older unrecorded traditions.

2. Languages & Cultures Using Cuneiform

• Primary users: Cuneiform was first used to write Sumerian, a unique language unlike any known relatives. (04:34)
• Adaptation for Other Languages: Soon adopted for Akkadian (Babylonian & Assyrian dialects), Old Persian, Elamite, and more—often for unrelated language families.

  "The writing system...was pressed into use to write other even more unrelated languages...So...you have the sort of lingua franca situation." — Dr. Finkel (07:56)

3. Materials and Methods

• Why Clay?: Clay was abundant, durable, and a hallmark of Mesopotamian culture. Unlike wood or parchment, it preserved texts over millennia.

  "Clay underpinned the whole of Sumerian culture...Make a bit of clay into a kind of tablet, make marks on it, and when it dried, they would, they survived." — Dr. Finkel (14:26)

• The Stylus: Made from reeds, it was the tool for impressing wedge-shaped marks.
• Evolution from Drawing: Early signs were pictographic (lines drawn in clay); later, signs became more stylized, made with wedge-shaped impressions.

  "The first conception that you can do a mark on a surface, that another person can come along and see it and understand what it meant...led to the creation of this script and its ancestral form..." — Dr. Finkel (17:25)

4. How Cuneiform Evolved (Proto-cuneiform to Script)

• Proto-cuneiform/Early Pictographs: Started with drawings depicting objects—e.g., jars denoting beer, animals, or body parts.
  • Transitioned to stylized, linear, wedge-based script for efficiency and standardization.

  "What happened is there was a shift at some point from the drawings on clay into a system whereby you could do the same images with a straight edge..." — Dr. Finkel (20:54)

• Dating the Earliest Inscriptions: Difficult due to lack of direct archaeological context; best estimates place experimental writing before 4000 BCE. (18:33)

5. The Purpose and Societal Impacts

• Bookkeeping and Bureaucracy: Writing arose to track goods, labor, and transactions in city-states with complex economies.

  "Required a recording system to keep track of everything and ultimately to make people accountable for what they were responsible for." — Dr. Finkel (19:52)

• Example—Beer Tablets: Early accounting texts show pictograms for jars of beer—reflecting both practical record-keeping and Sumerians' appreciation for beer.

  "The sign for beer, which in Sumerian is pronounced cash...The primary one was used for beer because beer is a very important thing in the history of the world..." — Dr. Finkel (29:17)

6. Standardization and Control

• Maintaining Consistency: Unlike Egyptian hieroglyphs or later scripts, cuneiform was highly standardized; a single system persisted across time and regions.

  "So there are not seven or eight systems running. It's one system...compellingly certain that the direction of the script was controlled from the beginning. And the only way that can happen is by one human brain, not by a committee." — Dr. Finkel (45:53)

• Institutional Management: There was rivalry between scribal schools, but form and structure of the script never went off in divergent local directions.

7. Decipherment and the "Rosetta Stone" of Cuneiform

• Behistun Inscription: The multilingual Persian royal inscription was the key to decoding cuneiform, analogous to the Rosetta Stone for Egyptian.

  "That mountain you talked about is the key which unlocked the whole of the cuneiform world. Rather like the Rosetta stone within." — Dr. Finkel (13:02)

• Opened the way for scholars to match known Old Persian words with their cuneiform equivalents, unlocking Akkadian and Elamite scripts as well.

8. Numerical Systems and Lasting Legacy

• Mathematics—Base 60 (Sexagesimal) System:

  "The division of our time into 60 seconds and then 60 minutes and 360 degrees of the circle are a direct inheritance of the numerical system, which is already expressed in that tablet, that 60 is the basic counting system." — Dr. Finkel (36:02)

• This mathematical system, developed for record-keeping, underpins our own methods of timekeeping and geometry today.

9. Complexity and Multivalence

• Signs with Multiple Meanings/Sounds:
  • Single signs could represent a word, a sound, or act as a determinative (similar to the $ in "$1M", meaning 'dollar' without pronouncing the sign itself).

  "A given cuneiform sign can have multiple uses. That's to say it can function with more than one meaning when you look at it, more than one semantic significance, it can have more than one phonetic value..." — Dr. Finkel (51:12)

• Reading Without Spaces: Words ran together without separation—requiring experience to interpret, much like reading Hebrew or Arabic scripts.

  "They were taught to write in a continuum...But as you jump in, eventually you never think about it because somehow your mind adjusts...something comparable to that, I think." — Dr. Finkel (60:58)

10. Endurance and Final Extinction

• Millennia of Use: Cuneiform was used from its invention over 5,000 years ago until the early centuries AD (first century AD tablets include astronomical almanacs).

  "The latest dated cuneiform tablet is from the first century A.D. it's an almanac, an astronomical almanac." — Dr. Finkel (56:58)

• Succession: Replaced in daily life by alphabetic Aramaic (much easier to learn and use), but persisted much longer in scholarly and religious contexts.

11. Legacy and Memorable Moments

• Scribal Culture: Ancient scribes “wrote in a continuum” and even practiced right justification in literary tablets such as the Gilgamesh epic.
• Notable Literary Tidbits: The Babylonian astronomical diary recording Alexander the Great’s death:

  Interviewer: "That very pithy line, the king died."
  Dr. Finkel: "Yeah. And that's all they say...Alexander the Great is the king in question." (59:41–60:09)

• A Modern Parallel: Dr. Finkel jokes future civilizations will only know us through clay tablets, not lost digital records.

  "So in the end, it'll only be the clay tablets which survive, mark my words, hundreds of thousands of years from now, people will learn about humans from the clay tablets..." — Dr. Finkel (17:01)

Notable Quotes (with Timestamps & Speaker Attribution)

• On Origins and Evolution:

  "You never get a language...in a balloon of its own creation. It must be an amalgamation, a descendant or that sort of thing." — Dr. Finkel (04:34)

• On Sign Standardization and Management:

  "This must be a central truth about this script, that there was a control from day one and it was a self-regulating system." — Dr. Irving Finkel (47:47)

• On Decoding Cuneiform:

  "What turned out...was that looking at the Babylonian...it became apparent that there were certain passages...repeated verbatim three times...they started thinking...they suddenly found...a word or two in the Babylonian which was a Semitic word...That's how it all opened up." — Dr. Irving Finkel (09:58)

• On Legacy:

  "The division of our time into 60 seconds and then 60 minutes and 360 degrees of the circle are a direct inheritance..." — Dr. Irving Finkel (36:02) "When people say...it's no use to anybody...the fact is..." — Dr. Irving Finkel (36:21)

• On the Death of Alexander:

  "That very pithy line, the king died." (Interviewer, 59:41)
  "Yeah. And that's all they say...Alexander the Great is the king in question." — Dr. Irving Finkel (59:57–60:09)

Timeline of Key Segments

• [03:02]–[08:38]: Development and spread of cuneiform across languages and empires.
• [14:21]–[18:28]: Why clay? How tablets were made and earliest pictographic writing practices.
• [19:52]–[26:23]: Purpose of inventory and accounting; the role of city-states and organization.
• [27:37]–[33:44]: Demonstration & analysis of administrative tablets, symbols for beer, and early numeracy.
• [36:02]–[38:21]: Babylonian mathematical legacy—base 60 system.
• [38:21]–[47:47]: Evolution of sign forms; astonishing standardization and management of the script.
• [51:12]–[56:04]: Complexity in reading—multiple values for same sign, determinatives, analogy to modern symbols.
• [56:58]–[60:09]: Cuneiform’s last phases, final extinction, legacy, memorable diary entries.
• [60:53]–[62:13]: Visual complexity for modern eyes; method of writing in a continuum; right justification.

Conclusion

Dr. Finkel’s insights illuminate the origins, methods, intelligence, and enduring impact of cuneiform—showing how a 5,000-year-old system set civilization on the path to writing, calculation, international diplomacy, and record-keeping. The episode blends deep technical knowledge with humor and humanity, bringing to life the meaning and marvel of the world’s oldest script, and highlighting its astounding influence on the modern world.

Recommended for anyone who wants to understand not just how the ancient world wrote, but how their innovations literally shaped time.