The Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures
4 HN recommenders · recommended in 5 months, 2021–2025
58:19 · 5.1M views · Jul 20, 2016
Irving Finkel of the British Museum tells how a 4,000-year-old cuneiform tablet came to him for examination. It revealed the oldest known account of Noah's Ark and led to a book and a documentary.
HN recommends it as a funny, fascinating talk on cuneiform tablets and the ancient world by an engaging curator.
5 comments from Hacker News
If you are interesting anything related to cuneiform writing or ancient Mesopotamian culture , Irving Finkel, a British Museum curator, is a treasure. Here he is teaching how to write cuneiform: [LINK] Here is a hilarious talk he gave at Chicago's Oriental Institute on Noah's Ark: this video
Not to mention his book, about when he found an Cuneiform tablet circa 1800BC telling the story of Noah and the flood, which included more detailed instructions on how to build an ark than the biblical accounts and so he went and built it. Nice article: [LINK] Excellent lecture: this video
This lecture by Dr Finkel on how he discovered the original Babylonian version of the Noah's Ark story is equal parts fascinating and hilarious: this video
Great talk for those interested in clay tablets and technology: this video In my opinion, I would bet that those old civilizations had more technology that we give them credit for. The only thing they lacked was to have a long lasting medium to share that knowledge. Whimsical stories or songs could've been a way to share advances. We're lucky to have one civilization picking clay tablets as a medium and luckier that those survived (some even by accident - fires destroying houses but cooking those tablets and burying them), who knows maybe we were writing on leather for centuries before that have all disintegrated by now (we hunted, we had access to paint, we naturally don't want to waste scarce resources).
Somewhat related, since we're talking about cuneiform: Dr. Irving Finkel of the British Museum telling the surprisingly amusing story of how he discovered the oldest known version of the Noah's Ark story: this video