"- The following is a conversation with Irving Finkel, who is a scholar of ancient languages. He's a curator at the British Museum for over 45 years, and is a much admired and respected world expert. H..."

"Let's go back a few thousand years. - The first attempts at writing that we could call writing go back to the middle of the fourth millennium, say around 3500 BC, something like that. There were peopl..."

"- We should say that the name of that system that lasted for 3,000 years is cuneiform. - Yeah. So, in the 19th century, about 1840, 1850, they started to find these things on excavations in Iraq, the ..."

"- I do - ... cuneiform type tablets? - Or, or pictographic type tablets, before the cuneiform and it's drawing type, and I'll tell you why. Because there's this marvelous site in Turkey called Gobekli..."

"- So, a lot of the cuneiform language is already deciphered. Can you speak to the deciphering process? How hard is it? Maybe take us to this place of for you yourself first learning a language. Figuri..."

"personally believe that Neanderthals and early Homo sapiens, for sure, had language. For sure they talked to one another. It's impossible that they didn't. The point came when they did, they did. And ..."

"- So what do you think is the motivation, the primary driver of developing written language? Is it... Does it go hand-in-hand with civilization? - I think that the media in which it appears is when th..."

"- All right. So, deciphering, the process of deciphering. - So when I started, there were grammars and scientists, and dictionaries. Everything was marvelous. It was all basically deciphered. All you ..."

"- I apologize to be philosophical, but Wittgenstein, the philosopher, said, "The limits of our language is the limits of our world." So to what degree did the languages that were encoded in cuneiform ..."

"- You have said the translation is part archeology, part detective work, part poetry. Can we just speak about translation and the art of it a bit more? - Yes. - I mean, it's such an incredible discipl..."

"In the writing, what was their relationship to the divine? - Relationship with the divine, well, the first thing to say is that they had a large pantheon of gods. So there were three gods at the top, ..."

"ghosts is, that is clear from the inscriptions, all of them that I managed to find, that nobody ever asked themselves, "Do these things exist or not?" Or, "Did I really see them or not?" They just too..."

"You mentioned floods, and speaking of stories that have been lost and found, you're well-known for a lot of things. One of them is decoding the so-called Ark Tablet. - Yeah. That was a challenge, beca..."

"- Do you think this ark in the tablet actually was ever built? You did build a replica one third the size. And people should check out, you tell the story of that wonderfully. What did you learn from ..."

"- You have to tell me about the- the world of ancient games. Maybe we can start with the ancient Royal Game of Ur. What is it and how were you somehow able to crack the rules of it? - Well, the Royal ..."

"- As you mentioned, you are the curator at possibly the greatest place on Earth, the British Museum. - Oh, yes. - Can you tell me, what are some of the incredible magical aspects of the British Museum..."

"- There are so many questions I want to ask you. What wisdom do you think the people from whom these artifacts came had, that we modern-day humans may have lost or lost in part or in whole? So it's of..."