The Ark Before Noah
"British Museum expert Dr Irving Finkel reveals how decoding the symbols on a 4,000 year old piece of clay enable a radical new interpretation of the Noah's Ark myth. A world authority on the period, Dr Finkel's enthralling real-life detective story began with a most remarkable event at the British Museum - the arrival one day in 2008 of a single, modest-sized Babylonian cuneiform tablet - the palm-sized clay rectangles on which our ancestors created the first documents. It had been brought in by a member of the public and this particular tablet proved to be of quite extraordinary importance. Not only does it date from about 1850 BC, but it is a copy of the Babylonian Story of the Flood, a myth from ancient Mesopotamia revealing among other things, instructions for building a large boat to survive a flood. But Dr Finkel's pioneering work didn't stop there. Through another series of enthralling discoveries he has been able to decode the story of the Flood in ways which offer unanticipated revelations to readers of THE ARK BEFORE NOAH."--Publisher's website
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What Hacker News says
- Irving Finkel wrote a fascinating book called The Ark Before Noah, which explained how the process worked. Hes also given some great talks about it which are available on YouTube.
There were many breakthrough steps in understanding Sumerian over about 100 years.
From what I remember, (and this is explained better on the wikipedia page for the Sumerian language), in 1838 somebody first decoded the cuneiform script by reading the Behistun inscription of Darius the Great in Western Iran. This was written in Old Persian, Elamite and Akkadian, all in the cuneiform script. The guy who deciphered it could understand modern Persian and so was able to descipher the Old Persian.
From there, others working on a published version of the inscription were able to decipher the Elamite and Akkadian languages. These were all Semitic. Sumerian is non-Semitic in origin, but used a similar writing system. I think the decoding of Sumerian built on this and took place over the next 100 years with many scholars making incremental breakthroughs.
- There were Sumerians solving differential equations at least 3700 years ago. Irving Finkel has a wonderful book about this: "The Ark Before Noah".
- Also, you should also listen to "The Ark Before Noah" by Irving Finkel
the reason why you should listen to him read his own book, is because he is a one of a kind academic that _lives_ his craft. its infectious as it is informative.
it gives a background about how Sumerian and Akkadian was decoded.
