🪨 "We Are Not So Different From People Who Lived 4,000 Years Ago"

All our knowledge of the ancient world might simply be a survivor's error, said Irving Finkel, a longtime curator of the British Museum in London and one of the world’s leading experts on old inscriptions and Mesopotamian history, in an interview with Lex Fridman.

According to the scholar, what we consider to be the history of Sumer is actually based on clay tablets found in just two or three archives. We judge the whole world based on randomly preserved bureaucratic records from a couple of government offices, without realizing how distorted this data could be.

What else did Irving Finkel say?

⚫️ The story of the Great Flood appeared a 1,000 years before the Bible, Finkel insists. A clay tablet from 1700 BC contains 60 lines stating that the gods decided to destroy the population of Mesopotamia because it was "too noisy." This actually duplicates the Old Testament story of Noah. Only the ark there was not coffin-shape, as in the Bible, but round—these were the types of boats built in that region at the time. This story was most likely inspired by a real flood, but not a global one: in Mesopotamia, unlike Jerusalem, floods occurred frequently.

⚫️ We are not so different from the people who lived several millennia ago. But the advantage of the latter is that the structure of the ancient world allowed them to lead a more natural life than the one people in crammed cities live today.

⚫️ If a group of Martians arrived on Earth and wanted to quickly understand the most important things about our world, it would be worth taking them on a tour of the British Museum. There, they would get a fairly complete picture of how life on Earth is organized.

📱 You can watch the full interview here.

@hiaimediaen