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

Irving Finkel, British Museum curator of 45+ years, argues writing began at Göbekli Tepe (~9000 BC), predating Mesopotamian cuneiform by millennia, and that the biblical flood myth derives from a Babylonian tablet he personally decoded.

• Finkel argues a carved stamp seal found at Göbekli Tepe (~9000 BC) proves writing existed 6,000 years before the accepted Sumerian origin of ~3500 BC.
• The Nineveh library of Assyrian king Ashurbanipal was likely looted intact by Babylonians, meaning what archaeologists found is just discarded duplicates and broken remnants.
• Sumerian is a language isolate with no known relatives — its parent language family is completely extinct and unrecoverable.
• Cuneiform was deciphered via a trilingual cliff inscription at Bisutun (Old Persian/Elamite/Babylonian); Finkel disputes that Henry Rawlinson deserves credit as ‘father of Assyriology.’
• A Babylonian flood tablet Finkel studied predates the biblical Noah narrative and contains precise boat-building instructions for a circular coracle; a replica was built in Kerala at roughly one-third scale.
• The flood myth’s ‘noisy humans’ rationale is a Malthusian metaphor — gods created infertile humans post-flood to control overpopulation, not because noise was the literal complaint.
• The Royal Game of Ur (2600 BC) spread across Egypt, Turkey, Greece, and India over ~3,000 years without written rules; Finkel reconstructed the rules from a 2nd-century BC British Museum tablet and the game is now played again in Iraqi cafes.
• The British Museum holds ~130,000 cuneiform tablets; Finkel estimates millions more remain unexcavated underground.

Guests: Irving Finkel, curator and Assyriologist, British Museum · 2025-12-12 · Watch on YouTube