Oh hey, how are you. What are you doing? Come on in
to have a seat. It's been a while since we had doctor Irvin Finkel
on the program. Actually the last time he was with us was in twenty
eighteen when he had published a book called The Arc Before Noah. You know,
and when we talk about ancient cultures, the ancient Sumerians, the Babylonians,
the Assyrians, these are extremely advanced cultures that were getting a sense of
each day through these clay tablets known as cuneiform tablets, and they were made
of a specific kind of clay that allowed for writing for passages for daily activities.
And I was shocked when I discovered that the British Museum in London has
about one hundred and thirty thousand of these and the general estimate, given the
fact that they have so many, and they have missing pages, missing chronicles,
missing chapters of books, papers and dialogue, that the estimate is around
ten million that are left to be found. I don't know where they came
up with that number, but that's an extraordinary number of documents that are left
to be found. We're going to hear more about that today from Irving in
our interview. But I just want to mention that there's only a handful of
people who can read these tablets, and Irving is one of them. And
it comes down to it, he's an anomalous like at me. And this
is why I love the guy and I love having him on the program because
he's always looking for curiosities outside of the mainstream and he's found quite a few
of them. Now, if you remember when he was on in twenty eighteen,
and if you didn't hear that interview, you should go back, download
it and listen to it. The theme is the arc before Noah. He
actually found specific details on boat building four thousand to six thousand years ago in
ancient Sumerian Samaria, and he brings it forward and he believes, and based
on his decipherment, that these ships were not typical with the bow with the
stern and aft design. They were round. They were round boats that would
float down the river on the nile or whatever. And this was a shock
to the academic world when he published this, because it's like, what are
you talking about. Well, he actually got and this is why you got
to get the book. He actually got a detailed rendition of it by from
an archaeologist who actually was also an architect and who actually created a number of
designs of these ships, and apparently some of them were as big as a
cruise ship that were round, circular, very very strange. So that was
that was kind of an unveiling. And then what we'll hear today is this
new theme of working with these other realms where ghosts appear and the dead appear,
and having community, having conversations with these people about the people who are
left who are in physical form, the families and the former associates in different
administrations are presenting information from the other realms. And this wasn't just a curiosity.
Apparently the Sumerians took it extremely, took it serious and jotted down the
steps to access these realms. And this is something that a typical academic would
not even broach because it's like, I'm not going to talk about that because
that's beneath me. I don't feel it is of any value. But Irving,
being like I mentioned, being anomalist, found this not in a few
references and passages and in journals. He found hundreds of references of working with
the dead in a two forms, exorcism and necromancy, which is actually working
with dead spirits. We would call them souls. And apparently it's not channeling
the spirit that comes through, it's hearing it through the former body. And
what they would do is they would work with the person's skull. They would
have the skull of the deceased, and they would use special ointments and candles
and scents and extract and open up a vortex for communication. Now is where
does this sounds? Apparently this was very much mainstream. Here's a short three
minute interview that I want to play prior to this book we're going to talk
today called The First Ghosts Most Ancient Legacies. Here is doctor Finckel speaking to
the BBC on what necromancy is and why it was thought of as being very
important by the agents. My name is Irving Finkel and I'm a curator in
the British Museum in the Middle East department. One of the interesting things about
ancient magic is to in a particular culture look at things which are peculiar to
that culture and things which all over the world people do. And most of
the things that happened in ancient Mesopotamia written in cunatiform are more or less like
the sort of things you find everywhere. So my favorite magic ritual, it's
a manual written by an exhaustist who wants to tell the future and he wants
to practice necromancy. So here's somebody who wants to bring a ghost up from
where it's peacefully in the basement, so to speak, and ask it questions.
And he has a special way doing this. You have to get a
skull, and you put the skull on the table and you burn all this
heady material to create the right atmosphere, and then there's a kind of oil
which is used to anoint the skull. And then when everything is ready,
this is what happens. The sun god, who really should know better,
brings up from below the ghost of the dead person who goes into the skull
like that. And then the exorcist or the specialist and necromancer asks this spirit
a question and you're supposed to get a true answer by means of this skull
from this dead person who's inside it. Now, that is a very interesting
matter which I've been dying to try out. I've got a skull, but
the diabolical problem is getting the right stuff for the oil, And in our
supermarket you can't get all the bits. So this I think is something worth
trying. If you have the opportunity, you need to know who's going to
win the grand national get your great grandfather's skull, put you on the kitchen
table. Bit at HP source, ask the question fat City. Now,
it should be obvious to you that we can't even conceive of this type of
communication in today's society. You know, I have worked and spoken with people
who channel entities the dead. In some cases they believe they're channeling ets from
other race, other planetary systems. I was into this for a while,
and we had speak We had people who were speaking at conferences who were channeling.
I mean, we had the best of the best. It's faded because
there's a there's a whole belief system, and this is under psychiatry psychology that
the individual who's speaking for this dead person or this soul or the spirit is
also bringing their own consciousness through and so it can be tainted. And this
is the problem with a lot of people who channel Bashar. You might have
heard of Bashar who channels an Et Lazaris, Jane Roberts. I can go
on and on. There's a lot of very well known channels who brought through
information. And if you're interested in any of these channels, go back and
listen to the names I just gave you and look for their books. Read
their books. Some people are very much into it and that it appeals to
a different audience, and if that's if you don't want to get more into
it, check it out. It might interest you. But from that period
to today, I'm talking a few decades ago when channeling was really really big.
I'm talking about here in the United States. I'm not really familiar with
the United with Europe or any other part of the world. It had its
place, and it still may have its place, and it's been going on
for centuries. But what these Sumerians were doing, what these Babylonians and Assyrians
and the Sumerians were doing, was bringing forth the spirit of dead loved ones.
And this is the focus of this book. The first ghosts that we're
talking about today, and a whole bunch of other stuff that was just fascinating.
So today's program is Cuneiforms, Ghosts and Speaking with the Dead, and
my guest is doctor Irving Finkel. Sabaturs is well organized. Everything flowed easily.
It was a fantastic tour from beginning to end. To be honest,
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Ancients Grand Egyptian Tour April twenty eighth through May ninth. We can't talk about
ancient civilizations without discussing cuneiforms, these clay tablets that have been found in the
thousands and various burials, various vaults, various locations in the Middle East otherwise
known as the Mesopotamian area. And when we talk about them, we had
to look at the people who are deciphering that, and we're inviting and we
have back with this doctor Irving Finkel, who we had back in twenty eighteen.
He was the author of a fun book called The Arc Before Noah,
and what he discovered in that decipherment was it wasn't a typical ship. It
was a round ship and that was kind of a fun unveiling. But today
we're going to catch up with him, not only because he continues to break
important ground on decipherment, but there's a lot of topics that are fascinating that
we want to hear from him. I want to just mention this and I
was looking at doctor Finkel's background. The British Museum has a collection of one
hundred and thirty thousand pieces, which I didn't know, and they are headquartered
in quartered in the British Museum, which is in London. So hey,
Irving, welcome back to Earth, Ancients. It's been a while. I
apologize for the length of time, and it's always great to see you.
I'm glad to see you. Good about one hundred and thirty thousand pieces of
clay, you're right that, Oh, they cover about three thousand years of
time or more. And they were all written in QUINEI form of one kind
or another, so they run between about three thy five hundred b seen actually
until about the first century AD, so it's more than three thousand years of
time. So when the nineteenth century excavations started in the Middle East, they
found lots of inscriptions on clay tablets. And in those days the whole situation
about archaeology and cultural property was completely different, and Mesopotamia was under the Turkish
administration and there was an agreement with the government that objects discovered would come back
to Britain for the museum, which is what happened then in the eighteen forties
and eighteen fifties, and one advantage of It was that the things which came
out of the ground, which of course no one could read, came to
be deciphered. A lot of very clever people worked on them, and eventually
the breakthrough was made, and so it was possible to take these pieces of
clay with their impressions on which looked like nothing at all familiar, and actually
read them. The languages were, the signs were cracked, the languages were
deciphered, vocabulary understood, so that nowadays people who do this sort of work
can read tablets written in Sumerian on the one hand, or Babylonian on the
other with relative comfort. As long as the object isn't broken or cracked in
the middle or something. If it's more or less all there, we can
read it pretty reliably, in fact, very reliably. You know. I'm
curious, you said the eighteen hundreds of when most of these play tablets were
found. Were they digs in like or you are, or were they digs
in neighboring cities, and there were what they would call repositories where these were
kept. Well, what happened was that when archaeology began, the Romantic Old
kind of archaeology, with big sites and big team diggers and things. They
started off in the area which was where the Bible had taken place. They
were most interested in that. So they found in Assyria, the northern part
of modern Iraq, the northern half, there were several obvious cities, great
mounds that came out of the ground like small mountains, where there was a
successive deposits of archological material, sometimes over thousands of years. And they they
started digging on the biggest sites and at the top of the biggest sites sometimes
the names already were very suggestive, looking for the kings of the Biblical period,
and they found them. They found the kings of Assyria like Sanakarib and
Isar Hadden and Ashore Barnepal. The kings of Assyria. They found it Linuvi,
their palace, their palaces, the contents the library, and about the
empire that they had ruled. And with their decide the script, it became
possible to put the Sumerians, who were the older group, and then the
Syrians and Babylonians into their right geographical terrain and their right chronological period, and
the span of the period covers that the really the beginning of writing. As
far as we know for the first time. It's probably not really the first
time, as far as we have it. The first evidence for writing all
the way through pasted the development of the alphabet until the first century AD,
so three and a half thousand years of writing. And the marvelous thing is
these pieces you describe, one hundred and thirty thousand. They're made of clay,
and a special sort of clay which was freely available in Mesopotamia between the
Euphrates and Tigris rivers. Their banks had this marvelous clay which took good impressions,
didn't have gun in it, and would dry in the sun or dry
in the warm to a point that the inscriptions would be safe. Sometimes they
fired them. But so they used this clay as their normal writing support,
which altogether different from most civilizations with which people are familiar today. I mean
then they didn't have paper. They didn't write on wood or parchment or bone
or skin, not very often anyway, But they used this clay. And
the thing about the clay was, even if it wasn't probably fired in a
kiln, if it was in the ground with a room that was destroyed,
overrun by the enemy, and everything was set on fire and the buildings collapsed
or there was something happened that people moved away. Things in the ground just
stay there they last, so that when Austin Layard, who was the first
British archaeologist who was really successful in ancient Mesopotamia ancient Iraq, when they found
these tablets, they found sometimes in great quantity because they just survived in the
ground. So it was an unlooked for benefit that in fact, the whole
of daily life, state life, religious life. There's a great slew of
information about all these things on these bits of clay. So it's a rather
miraculous thing. So it was very important that they deciphered it. And when
they got to the stage when it was properly deciphered, the whole of this
ancient culture opened up. So it's before the Greeks, it's before the Romans.
It's that sort of area. It overlaps in chronology more or less with
ancient Egypt. So ancient Egypt had about a three thousand year run before the
Greeks got to Egypt, and Mesopotamia had about three thousand year run or more
before the Greeks arrived there. I mean archaeologically, of course, they're much
older, but the historic period is about the same. So when you go
to school, you're supposed to learn about the ancient Egyptian and the ancient Mesopotamians,
and then you do the Greeks and the Romans, and then you do
everything else that came after. So they're that part of school education which people
are supposed to know a bit about, although I'm not sure if they do
it anymore in schools. They did when I was a boy, but maybe
they don't anymore. Doesn't seem like Sumerian was something that we talked a great
deal when I was in high school and college. And I'm curious when you
talk about the interpretations of these cuneiforms, these aublets, how detailed are they.
Are they talking about daily life, the function of a relationship and marriage.
Are they really giving us the details of their culture? Well, pretty
much. They use writing pretty much for the same sort of areas that we
do. So there is information about human relationships, and about domestic law and
state law, and religion and religious belief and all those things. There's quite
a lot of information about all of them, sometimes over many centuries of time,
sometimes out of archives where you can follow the fate of different individuals,
and then their sons and daughters and their grandchildren and so forth. So there's
a continuum also which you can sometimes follow. The only point to answer your
question in perhaps the way you are asking me, is when they wrote about
this sort of thing, they weren't writing for us. They were writing for
them, which means that all their documents take for granted stuff that they knew,
and then their recipients of the letters knew, and the people with whom
they operated knew. They didn't try to explain everything like for a future reader.
It was contemporary and functional. So the result was that the reality is
that sometimes when we have things, we have to really think hard about reading
a bit beyond the immediate paragraph to what it implies, what you can understand.
And for example, you could have lots of business letters, and if
you read them, it says mister so and so writes to mister so and
so, and they have a business relationship, and they've obviously been working together
more or less peace would be for a long time. And sometimes deliveries are
made and the payment doesn't come, and sometimes it doesn't come for a very
long time. And sometimes there are letters that say, you know, Hello,
Hello, where's the staff? So we do get we get the flat
information about business operations and sometimes safe from let is, we get a bit
of a window about which reveals interesting things. And then we have other things
like for example, magic or medicine to do with the diseases that people get,
and how they dealt with them, and some women couldn't have children,
and how unhappy they were about it, and how they tried to deal with
all these things. So we have a tremendous amount of information and each area
you can get a superficial immediate understanding. And then if you're going to work
with these materials, you have to kind of read everything that exists within the
reources in order to fill out the picture, because what you don't want to
do is to put too much modern imagination into the interpretation. It's very tempting
to think that everything is identical and you can attribute an intelligible person to an
inscription and think that you know they do what you would do. That must
be in your training, irving, because I would say that your teacher,
your professor, or whoever is helping you understand this is going to lay that
down as not to flavor or color and interpretation. I think proper people who
are proper teachers make this point. But there's more to the point than that,
because, for example, if you do ancient religion and you know about
the world's religion, and you grow up thinking that things in a temple are
idols and the idolators, and you have a personal view of a monotheistic religion,
you're intolerant to other religion. Then when you read about an ancient civilization
where they had lots of gods, you have to shut up your own mind.
You have to accept perfectly that's how things are. There are of course
cuties like that in the world today, and for some people it's very difficult
to throw off their own prejudices and look at things carefully. But there's a
deeper level, I think to this, which I think is much more important,
because in a way it's obvious not to thrust a modern interpretation into the
past. It's kind of not so complex. But I think the deeper point
is that Homo sapiens, the species of Homo sapiens that we are and that
everybody else on the planet are, is the same species as people in antiquity.
And the corollary of that is that My own view is that if you
tell an ancient Sumerian or a Babylonian person and one of us and look at
them side by side superficially, there'd be a lot different. The clothes would
be different, their hairstyle than what they eat, the language they taught,
their religious ideas, all sorts of things big and different, big and small,
would be different. But the inner element of Homo sapiens, the inner
way in which the human operates in the world, for example, is a
loyal and faithful and treacherous at the same time, and tells the truth and
lies, and is a hypocrite and a pure person, and all those things
that go on mixed up with a human being certainly applied in antiquity. So
it means that the person's in terms of their behavior, their motives on a
deep way, are very familiar. And the difficulty is to is to tread
the path where you feel united by with these people, because they live like
ants crawling under heaven, and they have disease and they have illness and they're
frightened, and they don't want to die, and they want to have lots
of children, and they want to be rich, and they want to have
a certain amount of power, and they hate bullies, and they don't want
to work every day and they have to work, and all those things.
Everybody has that, so that that has a kind of unity about it,
which is something deeper than the thing that we can the superficial thing. Because
most of the things when people are you, don't you look completely different from
me, You're you're not like me. Are cosmetic, they're outer cosmetic.
So I think you have the different levels of reality accessible. But my own
feeling is that the one thing to hold on to is that underneath they are
like us. Underneath they are like us. And one of the points which
supports this is that if you will know perfectly well that you could go out
in the street and get a hundred people in to line up in a queue,
and the one one end will be a card carrying genius with all the
documents to prove it, and the one at the other end would be a
totally stupid idiot, and in between you have all the extremes of intelligence.
Well, that, for example, is a human characteristic which certainly applies in
antiquity and other things of that kind. I think it gives you a sort
of under grid of trust that if you try to read what people write and
you try to think about what they say and understand it, you can't go
really far wrong if you operate on that kind of principle. So of the
things, you know, like this book, I write about ghosts, and
it's very It came to me when writing this book most importantly because ghosts of
things that everybody in the world knows about, and the world divides into three
categories. There are people who have seen a ghost and they jolly well believe
in them, and whatever anybody says, they know that they do, and
they may not talk about it, but they jolly well know. And then
there are people in white coats in laboratories who know that ghosts jolly well don't
exist, and whatever you tell me, I won't believe it because they don't
exist. And then you get the people in the middle who are agnostics.
So, yeah, what the situation about the ghost phenomenon in the world,
And I don't just mean where you and I live, but in general is
a very interesting thing because I believe that that in ancient I mean, writing
this book convinced me entirely about the Mesopotamian ghost situation in antiquity, there was
none of the I believe in ghosts, Oh, I see ghosts, and
someone saying, we must be an idiot if you believe this, and come
on, you know it's not really really And although so you have a conversation
at a bus stop and one of your neighbors says, I think I saw
a ghost yesterday. And if you're in a bad mood or you don't believe
that, you say, come on, come on, you know this is
old rubbish. I don't believe it would. So none of this ever happened
in antiquity because it wasn't true that the Greeks, well maybe the Greeks are
slightly different, but before that, the ancient Mesopotamians, for certain, from
their writings, it's not that they believed or didn't believe in ghosts. They
took them for granted. They were part of life. It was a stratum
of reality because the dead were buried, and the dead were supposed to be
buried and say that, but they came back and people saw them when they
made them ill, and they were an irritant, and they were this and
that and the other, and all the inscriptions, the whole range of them,
which is available, which I tried to stuff into this book as much
as possible. The principle that unites them all is the idea that everybody knew
that ghosts exists. It wasn't a matter for personal taste or for dispute.
Let me stop you just for a second, Irving. So this is the
new book, the first ghost Most Ancient Legacies. I have one here in
factory. I'm not without Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's a fantastic premise.
Before you get into the details, I want you to give us an
overview. So you're saying, and I think you're doing this right now.
You're saying that if we look in today's society, there's a huge population that
says ghosts don't exist. Yeah, it's not. You can't measure it scientifically,
so the scientific method does not apply. And if you intellectualize it too
much, it doesn't happen. You're saying that the Sumerians, the Babylonians,
and the Assyrians accepted it because it was what handed down as kind of a
religious belief or how would you classify it as a well as a as a
as a believer or an understanding. Well, I think it's it's it's definitely
not a belief. I think it's something that everybody took for granted, as
I say, and kids for granted, and somebody might see their grandfather in
the garden or something like that, and no one would faint. And if
somebody saw their grandfather and the gardener went and told their mom they were we'd
read to take you to the doctor, there's something wrong with your mind or
patching or eating your vegetables. They would say, well, did he look
happy or was he cross? Something like that. It was part of the
strust. And see the thing what I was what I think is this that
this is the default human understanding. This is one that the reasons why I
like to think of the Homo sapiens matter. And I think that the conception
that when the body's rots and stinks, the element inside it which makes the
human being survives and goes somewhere the soul the universe, what you call it
the soul or whatever you fancy this is. But this is a thing that
goes back to the neodertals. In my opinion, it's a characteristic of the
species. It's a deep, hard wired thing. So I think that this
is the default position of mankind. From the beginning, and that what has
happened is at a certain stratum in evolution history history historical evolution is that you
have you have monotheistic religions which are very dogmatic, very unforgiving, very uncatholic
in their view of the universe, very restrictive, and you have science,
which is even worse. So the description to the idea that goes a part
of the human universe is squashed down by modern religion and or monotheistic religion and
science. It's squashed down into a question where its status is altered, and
it ends up that some people still believe in it as it were, and
some people never will, and some people don't know it's changed its status.
But there are many places in the world where, for example, you might
go and go into a village with a notebook and a hat, looking like
an anthropologist, and sit down talk to an old person under retreat, doesn't
matter where it is, and say, oh, somebody told me that in
your country nobody believes in ghosts. And what will happen is that the grandmother
or whoever it is, they were young men, she will say, how
much time do you have? I think you better sit down, and I
will tell you all about it. And this, I think is that this
is the reality of the human position with regard to ghosts, and that we
are so suave, we're so slick, we're so easy with scientific guff,
we're so easy with condemnation and intolerance that it get suppressed, so that a
person who has seen a ghost, and let's say, for the sake of
argument, that they have done, can't tell anybody. They can't tell anybody.
They don't want to go and join a society of weirdos where everybody sees.
They don't want that at all. They want their mom and dad and
uncle to believe them because they did. Like if you say that you past
or diving tests, they believe you. And if you see a ghost like
that, it's the same thing you saw it, you know, And so
it's a difference. So people don't talk about it. They just don't talk
about it. So I want to get the foundation of or the basis of
this book. Were you working on a series of tablets and you developed or
you started seeing a theme of ghost discussions, sacred ghost worship? What was
it? Because to write a book, you must have really that to yourself.
Wait a minute, this is. I'll explain. I'll explain when these
one hundred and thirty thousand tablets in the British Museum are in boxes, in
draws, in cupboards. And when I arrived in the British Museum, I
went through the entire collection, draw by draw, box by box to see
what we had. And I did that, I think three times, so
I have a kind of grasp of what these one hundred and thirty thousand tablets
are in bulk. And in the process, when I found something in the
topic which really interested me, I made a note of the number. So
by meandering through the collection and looking at things, ah, this is this,
when I realized it quite a lot of them. I todo with the
ghosts in every sense. I recorded all the numbers, and then I got
these tablets out and I had a good look at them. And then I
realized that they have a a a wide spectrum of things to do with ghosts.
So, for example, one of them is there are omens. When
people say this happens, this is the consequence. This is a mesopertamin idea.
Lots and lots and lots of omens. So if a frog jumps into
your cup of tea. This means something, or that means something else.
And there were lots of omens about what happens if you saw a ghost,
what did it mean? And it wasn't just three or four lines, there
were hundreds of lines of these. One if you see a ghost on a
Monday or Tuesday or a wenzy, if they're wearing a hat or they're not
wearing a hat, or if it's a woman. You do know women,
you don't know all these things. There's a whole phone book of data about
if you see a ghost what it might mean. So this is one corner
of it. Then there was the thing about the rituals, because if you
were the oldest son when your father died, you were responsible for the regular
offerings for the spirit the dead, ghosts, the spirits of the of the
person who died, so they were believed to be first they were buried under
the courtyard, so they were under there. You knew where they were,
But that was the horrible body, and the essence of the person was in
the underworld with lots of other essences of people hanging around and waiting, and
they knew it was down there. They didn't know whether it was ten miles
or one hundred miles, but it was and they knew all about the underworld.
They wrote about it. So there's a thing about the offerings which you
have to do, and about the ghosts going down to the underworld. And
there's the ghosts that don't get the offerings because you forget and they get cross
and they come back and they pull people's here, you know, where's my
offering? Where's my offering? Just basically, so then you have to modify
them, and you have to do magic to make the ghosts happy, and
you do all that, and then there's a lot of other things as well
that sometimes ghosts come when you don't know who they are, and they can
be very dangerous. They follow you about, so it's like being followed on
the street, and people get very jumpy, and then they do other things
they make you ill. So if you go to sleep, it's impossible to
go to sleep with both ears covered. Well, I mean you can nowadays
you can wear your earphones, but in principle, normally when you went to
bed, your head was on one side, so the other ear was exposed,
and ghosts were believed to go in through the ear. The really horrible
ones they'd go in there and they would drive you mad, and they would
make it half for you to breathe, and they'd have to be exercised by
the specialists who drove them away. So there were people who had magic to
make ghosts disappear, to come out of the body, to leave a person
alone, to make things better. And there were lots of other things as
well, amulets they had to write and did. There were myths about the
underworld and what it was like and who was there and what went on.
And then there was this thing you mentioned before about necromancy, which is a
rather specialist trade, where it was believed in principle, like all people who
practiced necromancy, that if you can get somebody from below to come up,
you can ask them questions and they will tell you. No explains this that
if you bring up somebody from down there and you want to ask them about
something which is important to you, it's never explained how they know the answer.
It's never explained that in all cultures where necromancy is ever practiced, it
is assumed that the dead are privy to the sort of information that a living
person seeks. So there were they were there were exorcists and diviners and necromancers
who were efficient, efficient practitioners of this art, and there were special things
you had to do to get ready. And the most important thing with necromancy,
which is actually really rather fascinating, is you get the skull, preferably
of the person whom you want to speak to. So if your father and
grandfather are buried under the courtyard, sometimes they had the kind of vault so
when the next lot die, they opened the door or chuck them in as
well, so you might get quite a accumulation of persons all in the same
family, so you could, if necessary, get a skull from the grandfather
or something that they thought that that was the best person. And then the
exorcist does all this material it's anointily things, and then there's incense and what
have you, and the spells and the sun god and has to bring up
the spirit from below from the nether world to enter into the skull and answer
questions to the practitioner or to the person who wants to find out the future.
Quite an alarming thing to do in reality. So although most of the
magic that we have is to identify ghosts and get rid of them, send
them back where they belong. This specialized thing was to bring them up to
ask them a question or two about the future. And the manual which is
to do with this is rather interesting because there are some jolly good spells at
the end to drive the ghost back again because they don't want it hanging around
ever after, so they have to and they let it back down. So
you actually found the manual to working with the dead. Yeah, to bring
them up is it's it's it's a tablet with instruction spells. We're going to
take a short commercial break to allow our sponsors to identify themselves, and we
will return shortly with my guests today, doctor Irving Finkel, discussing his latest
book, The First Ghosts. We'll be right back. My guest today is
doctor Irving Finkel, who is a cuneiform expert at the British Museum in London,
and he's written a new book on ghosts called The First ghost Most Ancient
Legacies. Would you say that the information that they were receiving was considered valid
or was it more of a kind of an a game or something that a
specialist would come in and do just to connect with the ancestors. No,
that's a very important question, but it's absolutely nothing to do with the game.
I think it was dead serious. I think it was if you did
it, it was quite costly because you had to pay the person that preparations
had to be carried out and the room made ready and all that kind of
thing. And then there's the danger of fooning around with the dead, because
if you believe in ghosts and you believe you know that they exist, then
you know there's going to be trouble if you don't control it. So I
think it was only done probably under other serious circumstances where somebody really needed to
know. For example, we do know one case from the royal court in
Syria in Ninity when Asher Barneipal, who later became king and the most famous
king, when he was youthful, it was uncertain whether his older brother would
become king when the father died, because that was the principle as everywhere in
the world, that the first son normally becomes king when the old king dies,
and Asher Barneipal, who was immensely more intelligent and able and capable than
his older brother, was very restless and wanted to know whether it was ordained
that his brother would become and he got a necromancer to come into the palace
in the dead of night, and they called up the Queen's his grandmother,
because the old king's mother will be privyty all this. Then she was deceased
and they called up to ask her whether he would become king. And there's
a reply which is written on this tablet which implies that he will become king.
So that was no game. It was a dead serious matter. And
I imagine that the prince doing this somewhere in the basement of the palace in
the middle of the night. If there was one or two persons who who
did this with him, they wouldn't surprise me at all if he didn't have
them bumped off, because it's a very very secret matter to be privy to
the inner workings of the of the future ruler. And you know, if
anything happened to the older brother, there'd be the suspicion of murder and so
forth. So it's a very dicey thing. So I think people partly it
must have been costly to do it, and partly rather frightening because I imagine
if you're in a room and with all the build up by an exorcist and
you're asking questions and all of a sudden there's a skull starts moving and outcomes
the answer, I mean, you probably die of fear. But you know,
it's an interesting snippet in the history of this that the among Jews of
the Talmudic period, which is not long after the end of Babylonia, and
of course these people have been taken to from Jerusalem to Bin libikad Neezza to
live in Babylon. They were there until they left to go this way and
that, but some of them stayed in Mesopotamia until the recent times. And
among these more authorities, necromancy was investigated in the Tongue Ward in their scripture
they wrote about that you can call up the dead with a skull. It's
somehow they knew that the Babylonian practice from their own associations. They knew about
it. But one of the rabbis who writes about it says, well,
the question is if they do this, do they really hear the voice or
do they imagine it? So this was a medieval French rabbi writing about this.
It got to the stage of modern thinking where he asked the question,
did they really hear this voice or did they imagine? And that's the modern
inquiry that comes from a modern person. It's very remarkable thing that it goes
from everybody absolutely taking it for granted, to somebody else standing back and saying,
maybe it's just in the mind. Maybe not so. I think.
To trace these things as far as one can, it's very fascinating. Talk
a bit about what was I would think is a form of metaphysics in this
questioning of the ghosts or the dead. Was it just practiced among the elite
in these ancient cultures or have you found that it was, as you say,
in a very expensive ritual that was only available to those who had the
money to request this. Well, I think this is not something that you'd
find going on in the countryside, or in the army, or among merchants
or something. It's something of a certain class, what you might call the
upper class, who might have some preoccupation where talking to the dead, so
to speak, bring them an answer. There is another angle which is covered
in a different document, where it looks like someone is trying to find out
whether he's going to be successful in conquering a woman that he's after. I
think that's what it's about. It's rather terse, but I think the idea
is am I going to get her in the end, and so that's a
different level of thing. And of course everybody in the world would have this
kind of problem. But I think going to an acromancer and fooling about with
a dead person was not done lightly, not done lightly at all. But
of course this is one of the This is one of the points which I
was thinking about before, that we have sometimes a lot of information, but
we don't have the information round it, so we don't know what the questions
are, and we don't know who did it. And as you say,
whether it's just the elite. But I think there are other ways of divining
the future. Some of them were much more accessible and much less complicated.
So you could go to a fortune teller and get them to find out something
which wouldn't involve the use of her bringing up a dead person. I would
think that. And I'm curious about what you discovered you. I saw you
in a video talking about extra exorcism and nacro mancy. Yeah, would they
would a family or a physician who was dealing with somebody who was ill say
they were possessed and then there was somebody who was an expert at exorcism who
would come in and work with the spirit to remove the ill spirit from the
body. Is that what your suggested also a good question. So on the
whole and the healers. There were doctors who had drugs and applications and fumigants
and amulets and rituals and all the thing. The two kinds of healers had
these operations and they would deal with the sick. And the basic idea with
the sick and started off that people were made ill by the malice of other
people, like witches. They operated on people and when they were sick in
their body, when they had things wrong with them, that was the effect
of witchcraft or sorcery. And this was the first stage of explanation, because
when people are presented with illness, they need to have a reason behind it.
They need to know how it works. And I think from the time
of about Hammurabi about eighteen hundred BC, I think there was a general feeling
that it was human malice that made people ill, and gradually, gradually there
was a shift in understanding where they thought that it was evil, evil spirits,
demons and devils that made them ill. And what grew up was a
wide range of these characters, some of them faceless and not very easy to
identify, some of them well identifiable, who tormented the human race and could
make them very ill indeed, and in fact even bring about their death.
And they had to be the effects of what they did were tackled by the
doctors, and sometimes they were driven out. There were spells that they come
out of the body, go away, go back to where you belong.
So they had a kind of too pronged attack, which was medicaments and pharmaceutical
material and spells and incantations, all of which would clear the patient out.
So it's a kind of possession, that's the right word. But it's not
possession like with the witches of Salem, where it's familiar to everybody. It's
more subtle that. It's more that there were these forces that were believed to
make people ill, which were a long way from witches. They were much
more dangerous than witches. These devils and demons. Sometimes they knew what they
looked like. But the point about them is they were not made They were
not made of human stuff. We don't know the ancestry of the demons and
devil. We don't know who how they came into the world, so that
they were unfathomable and you couldn't kill them, and they had to be dealt
with very firmly. So sometimes in the first millennium, when people were sick
or ill, the doctors would say that this was a demon of one kind
or another, and they know what to do. And sometimes it was the
effect of a ghost who, as I said, might come in the ear
or tormented person all together in a way and possess them as you describe,
and the ghosts have to be driven out, and the ghost is much more
it's much easier to drive them out for two reasons. One that I believe
that the Babylonians were quite sympathetic to ghosts because they knew they were troubled.
They couldn't settle in the nether world, they couldn't find tranquility, and they
came back because they were agitated or had some unfinished business. So they had
a sort of sympathy with ghosts. And of course ghosts were at bottom human
beings, so they were more susceptible to compelling spells and compelling utterances. And
whereas the demons had nothing to do with humanity. They were cold and unfathomable
and in a way more more dangerous. And you can say that this is
all a rather stupid and simple and infantile way of looking at things, but
it's not quite like that. For example, you could say that what they
call the demon that was in the blood in the body and had to be
removed is what we call microbes, because they what they wanted to do was
to have an explanation for the fact that people could get ill without they don't
know why. And sometimes they were a bit ill, and sometimes they were
very ill, and sometimes they had an idea about contagion, for example,
things like that. But otherwise they wanted to know if someone got ill without
doing anything terrible and they were wicked, there must be a reason. And
this is this is really they settle or attributing the root cause of this to
something they could never see and never would see. And that's exactly what happens
with modern medicine, because no one's ever seen a microbe, and certainly no
patient has ever seen a microbe or a virus or whatever it is that doctors
say you've got. You never see the thing we have a complete ascription to
the eye that the expert tells us what it is without us seeing it.
And even if we had a microscope, we couldn't see the thing in ourselves.
So in a way, it's a kind of similarity that they called these
things demons, and they describe what they looked like, and they had special
things to get rid of them, but nobody ever actually saw them and they
went. They weren't. They didn't jump on you when you're going down the
street like a monkey or something. Let me just stop you right there for
a second. Did they have a classic you say like a police officer when
you say that, that's what I say, I just don't. I don't.
I don't want to shift your your your chain of thought because it's a
it's a good flow, but I want to add little bits and pieces that
you thought, so I stop. Stop. I wish there was a more
elegant way to do it. But that's it. So so uh would you
say there was a classification of demons or a classification of ghosts. This type
of of presence means that you're screwed because this is a powerful ghost who will
possess you, or there's a lighter ghost that just upsets the stomach, or
a lighter ghost that takes over the mind. Was there a classification or well,
it wasn't a structure that was written down, but I think there was
an understanding because there's quite a wide range of things that ghosts can do to
make you unwell. And my explanation for it is this. It's like this
that the ghost you're given ghost up here and making trouble has the character that
he had in life. So if you have an unhappy ghost who is a
diffident, shy person and would never harm a fly, then they wouldn't harm
a fly in their ghostly existence. If you had someone who is a lunatic,
say this in a psychopath in real life, then you might expect that
their ghost, if it was coming back, would have the same heartless,
dangerous property, caused evil wherever it could. And I think that they saw
ghosts in this way that they were human underneath. So depending on how ill
you were, there'd be different things to make you better. I mean it
sounds a bit strange, but in fact it was a kind of working system
because it's like this when you have an understanding of what causes things and what
has to be done about it. You don't have to fret about the philosophical
deep issues that it would otherwise raise. I mean, that is how religion
works. It gives you a nice little tweet explanation of things that you have
to believe in, miracles and all this, and it distructs you and many
kind of intelligence thought about well actually involved in all this. I mean,
this is the same human thing. I think, the same principle. Okay,
the Egyptians have the Book of the Dead, and the Dynastics pren Anastics
had a real fetish about afterlife. They did, I think so Egyptologists say,
no, it's just the accident of discovery because we have tombs. But
I do know one gets the impressionment that they just couldn't wait to die,
the Egyptians so they could dress up in all these things and go on the
journey and get I mean, it's strange when you're really ornate. Do you
see the same patterns in the uniforms from the Sumerians, Assyrians or Babylonians.
Do they go under the great lengths about how to get ready for the afterlife,
what you will see, who you will meet, and so on?
Not in the same way as the Egyptians. Because the Egyptian and the people
to whom this was concerned, it was all laid out. They had a
whole understanding of what they're going to go through. In the Mesopotamian thing,
they're not so specific and not so deep. But I mean, there is
a myth, for example, that in Anna, the Goddess of Love,
wanted to rescue her partner Donmozie, who was trapped in the underworld. She
went down this winding thing with seven gates which she had to get through in
order to rescue him and bring him back. So in a literary text there
is some information about that. You start at the top when you go through
all the gates and you get down to the court of the Queen of the
underworld. So you could have a little map, you could draw a picture
of it. But it's nothing like as ornate and complex as it is with
the Egyptians and they it's a different kind of thing. It's a different kind
of thing. I have a theory which I wrote about in this book.
Nobody who's reviewed it as noticed it, let alone argue with it, or
accepted it. But I believe this to be the case that when a person
died and their body was buried out of the way, and their spirit will
we called it that, and went down into the underworld, and they're just
it's described how grim it is in the underworld. It's kind of dusty,
and they hang about in the poor light, and it's not a very pleasant
place. It's a shortage of water, and there are millions of other people
there, and it sounds horrible, really, it sounds like being in the
army probably, and uh ghosts seemed to me from the description of it,
have every reason to be unhappy and want to escape. But the thing is
this, there is a kind of esoteric literature in Mesopotamia where things are explained,
or complex things are explained, sometimes even more complex ways than the original.
But they had they had a kind of interesting, interesting way that you
take one of the classic texts that everybody had to know, and then you
analyze the words for other meanings and explain that this means this because of this,
and they quote from other things as a kind of exegesis of important texts.
And some of these exegetical passages add up to this picture that the Mesopotamian
I believe this to be true. The Mesopotamian principle was that the life as
such, the life force, was finite, with the consequence that for a
new baby to be born, somebody had to die. So when somebody died,
that opened up in order to maintain the equilibrium of the universe, the
balance. It opened up the option of another life and the spirits which are
down there in the basement. And I think when the baby was going to
be coming, one was released, and I don't know whether it entered the
fallopian tube or the testicle of the Babylonian there's no there's no detailed response to
it. It's just that there's an implication that that's how it worked. So
it's not like reincarnation because people couldn't remember their earlier lives. There's no evidence
of that in Mesopotamia, or do they even give the impression of that.
They don't say anything about this. It's just these esoteric remarks in these learned
texts. But I think it means that there was a balance of this precious
what they call it, you know that film, what's it called precious bodily
fluids? You know, yeah, yeah, it's precious bodily fluids. It
always makes me laugh. That film, and that that line is it so
that there was a there was a finite amount, and that there was a
balance between death and life and it worked like this, which is a very
wonderful conception, in my opinion, very remarkable conception, possessed of a lot
of power. And I go so far as to say that I think it's
contingent upon the reality that the Mesopotamians depended so drastically and so visibly on water,
on the river's coming and fertilizing their land because and as long as the
rivers ran, everything was fine. But there have been episodes in time when
because of warfare, one or other parties tried to damn the resources water and
interfere with it, which is an absolute disaster. And I think that the
psychological dependence on water has this manifestation about life itself. It's a bit difficult
to if I was faced with a High Court judge and I had to through
this, and it would be very difficult to be one hundred percent convincing about
it. But it seems to me this all of a picture with a Mesopotamian
psychology, that this should be true and that this is the idea, And
of course The interesting thing is if you have a conception that the path from
here down to the underworld is manned by seven gatekeepers. Everybody always assumes that
it's to keep everything down there, but of course it might be to let
one out the time. It might be a different conception that these spirits.
Anyway. The other conclusion I reached in the course of my writing this book,
which we're not supposed to be talking about all the time, was this
that all the religions of the world believe that the spirit of a person or
something of the person, goes somewhere after they died. All clergymen tell this
to widows, that your Alfred is up there somewhere or other, and your
meetium one day when you go. Then all their religions have this idea,
so there's no shame about it. This is a central religious principle that the
human species lumbering about in an awkward body when the body is no good,
the real bit of the person survives. This is a human universal principle.
So I had an idea how beautifully one could reconcile this with the ghost matter,
Because, as I say, lots of people say it's all nonsense,
and all that but I don't know how many white coats, and when they're
being consoled by the clergy, in the clergy says that your Mabel is in
the right place with the Lord, then they're not going to So I don't
believe a word of that. There's no proof of it. I mean,
I like to see a demonstration before I believe you, or before I take
any comfort from this argument. I'm sorry, it's not good enough. I
need to see some statistics. I need to see some written papers with footnotes.
And the thing is this, I believe that the ghost thing which say
part of the world, and that people don't die, but they go somewhere
according to a religion. It's exactly the same principle. And the only difference
is this that ghosts are visible according to the whole span of things, and
the spirits aren't. So this is it. So if you have this,
there's no opposition between the two systems, but there are one. The only
difference between them technically is that people see ghosts, and that's that. So
this allows one to formulate a very neat psychological and pseudo scientific explanation, which
is that some people can see ghosts because of the way their minds are and
some people can't, Like some people can see colors, and some people are
tone deaf, and some people are this, and some people are that.
So maybe some brains have a susceptibility to this kind of thing and others.
And I mean, you know, where as I do that, there are
people you offer MEETI in life who were so like this. They go in
a room and say someone's been murdered here like that and all over the place,
and it's a very very common thing those sorts of people. And so
that's it. I think that this one system, and that the religion takes
advantage of it to comfort the dead, and the people who believe in ghosts
take advantage it to comfort the dead or comfort the living. And that's the
panical difference that one lot of visible and one lot aren't. I'd like to
argue about that with the Pope, but I don't suppose I ever will.
I want to ask you if you came across any passages where a ghost was
asked about an event and was able to prophesize the coming of either a new
king. I think you gave a hint with a king between a family,
a younger brother and an older brother becoming a But was there other prophecy that
no discoverment actually came through through the connection with the other. That would be
very tasty, But in point of fact, we don't have the questions.
We don't we don't know, they don't write them down. No, that's
one of the one of the one of the ways in which we're impoverished because
we only get what survives. We don't get all the stuff around it.
So, yeah, that's an interesting question, but we can't answer it.
But also prophesying is a slightly strange word because it's to do with profits and
the Bible and all that. Whereas these people were not profits, they were
they were specialists and part of the whole mesopotape spectrum of people who try to
predict the future. There were lots of ways they did it, and smoke
and oil and water and examining in trails and hundreds of well, one hundreds.
There were about twenty different ways in which professionals could tell the future.
So if you wanted to know somebody, if if I get married, am
I going to have a son? Will a son be born? That there'd
be people who could try and find out like that, but not prophescience in
the sense, well, let me let me, let me spend that a
little bit is and this is funny that we're talking about this. Are there
references to astrological focal points or astronomical focal points. There's a lot of people
that believe that the Maya, as an example, use the combination. And
the Egyptians, we know they used astrology, but astrology astronomy as a science
for predicting certain events to come or just general life. They certainly died,
they certainly did. They had complex astronomy, complex mathematical astronomy, and they
had extensive astrology. And they both are a function of observation of the heavens
over a very very long period of time. So the people who were mathematically
capable and who observe what happened in the heavens, and they started to notice
how things moved, and they tried to work it out, ended up with
very sophisticated astronomy, which meant they could predict when eclips would take place and
many other things as well, And they reached a level of astronomy which had
a marked effect on the development of astronomy among the Greeks. Is no doubt
about it. They were high level astronomers. And side by side you have
astrology, which is an observation of things that happen in the heavens and what
that meant for us on earth. And people did derive predictions about things from
the astrological changes and the movements in the zodiac and all these kind of things.
And with the first visibility, in the last visibility, they collected all
these material and some of it had ominous significance for individuals. And in fact,
in the late period and third third century BC, that kind of time,
horoscopes were written when a baby was born, with the conjunction of the
things in the heavens and what it meant for life, and the zodiac appeared
for the first time in Mesopotamia, the twelve divisions of the heavens, and
the path of the Sun, the path of the moon, and the movements
of the planets. They had all this stuff down because they spent a lot
of time making observations and recording what they saw. So it fell into a
quite remarkable scientific thing. So sometimes the same guys profited from the same knowledge.
But you have a sharp division really between astronomy, which is of all
the things they did in Mesopotamia. Perhaps the closest to what a modern person
would say was science and astrology, which flourished and never really died. I
mean, the stuff that you read nowadays in the newspapers is a direct inheritance
from that framework of Babylonian astrology, which came into Greek and into the world
and thereafter. So yes, indeed, yes, indeed, we're going to
take a short break to allow our sponsors to identify themselves, and we will
return shortly with my guest today, doctor Irvin. Think all of the British
Museum will be right back. My guest today is Irving Finkel, a curator
at the British Museum in London who has spent most, if not all,
of his career as a cuneiform expert, and he specializes in Sumerian, Babylonian
and Assyrian cuneiform clay tablets. Are you reading these cuneiform tablets more in a
journalistic way or are there actual books that are like Volume one of local history?
Right? Well, you get both, so for example, letters and
administrative documents and legal decisions, you get a tablet for each, so they're
on their own. But sometimes if you're lucky you get an archive, so
they will fit together. So that's one sort of the difference between the single
and the bulk. If you have an archive of a family over several generations
can be very interesting, very fruitful. So that's one thing. So then
you have pieces of literature which take up one tablet, and only ever did
take up one tablet. And then you have other works which were conceived of
as consisting of many parts. So for example, the famous story about Gilgamesh
is written on twelve separate tablets, tablets one to twelve, which in our
case we would call chapters of a big book. But they never bound the
tablets. They were just you know, made of play. They were kept
separately, one by one. But there was practically speaking a book of Gilgamesh
of twelve chapters length, written on twelve clay tablets. And there were many
other things like that. So, for example, in the Palace at Ninevy,
they collected together all the medical prescriptions they could ever find, old ones
and new ones, and they arranged them according to parts of the body,
from head to foot, and each chapter, like the head has four or
five tablets and the next one has six tablets. So they put together all
the therapeutic rituals, therapeutic procedures, the spells, the analysis on a huge
archive of tablets, which is like an encyclopedia. So you could call Gilgamesh
would be like one book of ten chapters, and then the medical encyclopedia would
be like a modern twelve volume encyclopedia with everything in it. So they had
the conception of works that belonged together in sequence. And this is actually a
useful thing because if you have a literary text like Gilgamesh, for example,
so you write the first side, you turn it over and you write the
second side, and at the bottom they say this is the for example,
this is the fifth tablet of the Gilgamesh story, and then they write the
first line of the next tablet. So when you find the next tablet,
if you're lucky, you have a tablet with the first line, and then
you think, ah, this is the first line from the bottom of this
one. So you know they get running sequence and that they were very careful
ascribes to to do this. They say, this is tablet six, this
is the first line of tablet seven. And when you've got tablet seven,
it clicks in and if the end of Tablet seven is preserved. We'll have
the beginning of tablet eight. And since George Smith in the eighteen fifties,
this has gradually happened. So we know there are twelve tablets of Gilgamesh and
the great new translation by my friend Andrew. George, who's a Londoner seriologist,
has got good bits of all twelve tablet. It's not everything because they've
all got holes in, but at least we've got the series the story in
order. And what happens is that sometimes in their museum somebody finds an old
thing that's not being read, or someone digs something up on a new dig
and a bit more of the story comes, and a bit more of the
story comes. That's how that worked. Before we get into our next subject,
which has to do with artificial intelligence. What was your hope in this
book the first ghost? What was your hope that the reader would discern from
your rating? Oh? Well, they are two basic things. One is
that the whole subject of ghosts in our society is ruined by fraud and cheating
and imitation and commercial productions. There's an awful lot of fake so that's one
thing. And secondly, there's a lot of literature about ghosts, which is
complete nonsense, and also people deluded by fraud. But on top of it,
the beginnings of the story are very vague because people think, well,
they was invented in the Middle Ages or something like that, and nobody really
knows, and nobody writes about the fact that the Romans and the Greeks had
lots and lots of literature about ghosts, much more than we do in Mesopotama,
marvelous things. And then we have the Mesopotamian stuff, which is older,
so we can say that ghosts existed in the world the minute we had
writing. It's already written down, there's something about them. So in other
words, it's a very, very long running thing. And this is important
because it's very easy to think to misjudge the importance of phenomena, and people
say that, you know, they don't really have any idea about how old
ghosts are. They don't really like talking about it at all. But people
who have written about it have no idea that this stuff exists because there was
no book really which presents so that was one reason. And also I've met
quite a lot of people since I wrote this book who have told me that
they've seen ghosts things like that. Now, of course that one isn't doesn't
believe everything everybody says by any manner of means. But I've met some people
who, after I gave a lecture about this where the subject is permissible to
talk about, have told me things that have happened to them which are very
remarkable. And there are people of this kind that I know that I can't
imagine that anything they would ever tell me would be invented or erroneous anymore than
I would doubt anything else. They said that there's something about ghosts that people
might have a perfectly normal relationship with the person, believe everything they say until
they talk about ghosts, then all of a sudden they switch off. Well,
I'll tell you one small thing like that. There was a literary festival
in the north of a bitten where I went and talked about the ghost room
full of people and after what I said to anybody, see you wanted to
put your hands up. Eventually some people do, and it's good anyway after
it's over. We were at dinner in a restaurant all the people from the
conference, and this lady came round when we were having the last bit of
the tea pot, came round and sat down next to me, and she
said, I'm very glad to hear your lecture. I was very encouraged,
and I said yes. She said, I want to tell you about something
that happened to me. She said, when I was a teenager, about
seventeen, I was at home in our family house, in my bedroom,
which was on the upper floor, sitting at my desk, and I looked
out the window into the garden, and I saw my grandfather walking across the
grass. And she said, this was a very extraordinary thing because her grandfather,
my grandfather, she said, was dead. So she sat there sort
of hooleaxed, and anyway, eventually she got up and she went downstairs in
a rather wobbly way and went into the kitchen to find her mom. And
her mom was leaning on the kitchen sink with her chin like this, gazing
out of the kitchen window. And when her daughter came in the room,
she said, you're never going to believe this. I just saw my dad
walking across the lawn. Now that is not science, it's not proof.
But the point about it is, this lady, I'm absolutely sure had not
talked about that for decades. It wasn't slick, you know, like a
dinner party thing. Let me tell you about my when she told me,
and I'm hard bitten about all this stuff, you know, the thing about
the on the back of the neck. They sure as hell, sure as
hell stood up. And I would say that simply not only do I believe
her that she wasn't inventing it, and that she didn't make it up,
and she wasn't trying to. I'm sure she did. And what I like
about it is two independent witnesses, neither of whom could make a mistake,
because you don't mistake some old fart in a raincoat for your dad or your
grandfather if it isn't your grandfather. So I thought that was a punchy,
pretty interesting thing. And quite a lot of people told me things in a
way that is difficult just to And so when I wrote the end of this
book, I wrote a chapter about the belief in it. And I think
that anybody who saw or goes to any point in their life and everybody said
they were nuts or they didn't tell anybody, and even now they're not sure
because it was so long ago, they should read this book because they have
a kin ship with people that go all the way back to the very beginning.
And also I believe them. So, but I don't go around believing
everything people tell me. But sometimes that kind of statement it's completely irrational not
to accept. So you're saying that in studying the ancient people, when we
do see girls, it's part of the human condition. Yeah, okay,
so we shouldn't we shouldn't disprove it. We should look at it a little
closer. I think. So. For example, I've often said this in
giving lectures about this, that what you have to do is you get half
a dozen white coated scientists who and I've heard people say this, whatever you
tell me, I won't believe it. Now, that's not science in my
opinion. That's one thing. So we get a haunted house in the middle
of Dartmoor in the winter, and we have a party. We invite these
scientists and they get drunk and they have a lovely time in this heart with
big old woman's broken minutes, and then they get really tired and they go
upstairs and they go and lie down on the sultan mattresses in this great house.
And when they're all asleep, you can come with me. We get
a ladder and we put you up the back of the house and we climb
up the ladder and then we go through the window and we will all sit
up in bed and wet themselves. Oh my god, Hey, I want
to move on to a couple of other subjects in the time we have left.
I have to bring this guy up, Zacharia Sitchen, who is the
rug rogue philosopher's scholar or whatever you want to call him. Hisn't he wrote
numerous books I'm sure you're aware of, and claim that the Sumerians were the
descendants of the Ananaki, a very very early race of beings who had come
from another planet. Have you run across any reference to this information that are
and if you did, did you discounted as a myth or storytelling or why?
Well, I've spent my whole adult life reading to know form inscription since
the age of seventeen. In fact, I'm now seventy two, so that's
a fair whack. And I've never seen anything in any form inscription which would
do anything to support that idea at all. And are not an ancient race
older than the Sumerians. The Anuniki are one of the groups of gods in
the Sumerian pantheon. We know who the Anniki are. They are not kings,
They're not ancient kings. They are part of the divine universe. They
are gods. And there's not a single whisper of a breath of an idea
of that to be confirmed by anything that's come mount of the ground in Mesopotamia.
So I put it to one side because I don't see any legitimacy in
in that claim at all. A lot of people, of course, believe
it. A lot of people write as letters and you know he's he's very
popular writer, and it's it's it's strange matter. But to answer your question,
no is the answer. Okay, uh, one other one the anarkotheria
mechanism that was found in the water that are here. Is there anything like
that referenced in any of these uniforms and and and in the case of your
work, it would probably be somebody's talking about using the machine to navigate or
no, it's not it's not that I'm I'm not the person to answer this
in detail, but I've read about the antikither and I know roughly that it
has on it clever mechanisms which calculate things according to principles that are already understood.
Those principles are already understood in Babylonia. Right, the astronomy of Babylon
would provide, as far as I know, the data on which the Antikitherra
was actually produced. Now it's got written on it and it's made out to
be written by Greeks. Maybe it was written by Greeks, but there's no
reason why the same thing couldn't have been made in Mesopotamia in terms of the
knowledge and the know how. So that's one thing. And what was the
other question? Was there another question about Well, no, it was basically
you know, it was found under Sodinia. It was the shipwreck I think
it was a Roman ship and when they began looking at it and had more
myrawn equipment to X ray that's very intricate device. Yes, but look the
intricacy. There were two parts to the Antikythrie. Are two conceptions. One
is the knowledge of movements in the heavens measuring time or whatever would be.
There's the knowledge, and then there's the physical ability to cut metal, to
calculate the number of teeth in the cogs, to cut things and to make
them so that they worked in this computer like way. That is a matter
of nothing to do with knowledge. That's to do with mathematical calculation and skill,
and they're separate. Think I think the important thing is that the knowledge
embodied in it is not only present in Mesopotamia, but very likely comes from
there. I wouldn't be at all surprised. I wouldn't. Okay, as
we conclude, uh, we started before before we started recording, the question
of artificial intelligence in not only decipherment of the cuneiform tablets, but interpretation.
And I'm curious with this advancing technology that's permeating everything, really, what do
you see the future? And I and I wanted to ask you because they
My thinking of it is they would scan a tablet, pass it through a
system, and it out would come a basic interpretation. And if well that
I mean that it's not like something that would really cut through a lot of
time. If fine guys like you would you could sit back, maybe you
would be the final analysis of what came through. Well, look, let's
think about it simply. Let's say you have a letter in canaoform to miss
it, so and then the contents of the letter and the date at the
bottom. Right. There are lots and lots of tablets like that. So
if you have a first class digital photograph of the tablet front and back so
that all the signs are clear, you can easily scan the photograph with a
machine that can identify the signs one by one because you fed into it or
the data about all the different signs. Let's say they're nine hundred caniform signs,
right. The first thing is that over three millennia they change their shape,
so you'd have to learn the computer would have to learn each of the
nine hundred signs in its different incarnations of shape throughout the whole of the period
of the canoform time. That's not a problem for the computer. You just
have to feed it in so it would know all all the signs and what
they always look like, so that in other words, if you had a
letter of one period and there was a particular sign there, then if they
had a letter of document of another period of the same sign, they would
recognize it as being an earlier version of that sign. That's easy for a
computer. It's just a matter of whether anybody can feed it in. That's
one thing. Then there's The second thing that all the signs can be used
in multiple ways, so they have different sound values and different meaning values.
Now this is a complicated thing to explain in abstract, but for example,
you have a sign like moo okay. So the Sumerian word MoU is a
useful syllable in writing words in like museum, where meu is a syllable because
they wrote in syllables. But moo also means cook and it also means year.
So if you have a mood, you don't know whether it's just the
move sound or whether it means year, which is pronounced move, or whether
it means cook, which is pronounced muchaldim. So you don't know that.
This is one little problem, and all the signs have this characteristic. Also
you can use signs not to spell the sound, but also to tell you
what kind or word it is, like it's made of wood. And you
can have things called phonetic compliments when you have a sign which is unusual and
then you write a sign next to it which gives you a clue how to
read it. So they are all these small things which to a seriologist are
bread and butter, And to me, I can do it in my sleep.
But they'd all have to be programmed into this computer according to the basis
of all these signs, and then they would have to learn the grammar.
They'd have to learn the grammar so that when they have a tablet and they
scan the signs, they can identify the words. They have to learn the
grammar and the vocabulary, but otherwise they don't know how to see where one
word stops and another word starts. So they'd have to learn all the vocabulary
in all its different periods of time, and all the grammar. Now you
may say that sounds like a taught order. It's happened to me. That's
what's happened to me. I know all that stuff like that, and I
can read uniform fluently. So if it can be done by me, it
can sure as hell be done by a computer. So the problem is it's
really finding a computer of efficient kind of strength and the right people to feed
in the right information, so it's most economically effective. If this were to
happen, obviously it would go through a progression of reliability. When I was
a teenager, and if you bought a camera from Japan, you would have
a whole sheet of instructions about how to use it, which was practically speaking
unintelligible because the person in the company in Japan had an English Japanese dictionary and
they plucked out the words. You must have seen this kind of thing,
so you have no idea what the hell they're talking about. And then maybe
fifteen years later you would have a thing like that where it was fine but
there were some funny mistakes, and now probably you get something which was perfect,
more or less perfect. And that's what would happen. So if you
had these rough caste translations of say a simple letter, done through all this
system by a computer with a print out of the translation, it would make
some obvious mistakes, some big mistake, but you could always a person could
easily correct it, and it would be quicker than starting from scratch. Maybe
I'm not sure, but it might be so, But justine it would be
good for maybe the most basic interpretation. But then if you wanted the fine
points and the subtleties, it would take a human being to be well,
I think it would. I think if you try to translate Gilgamesh, it
would be a laughable thing. But the thing is, the thing is which
I mean relatively speaking, all these things are in their infancy, and there's
no doubt that the computer translation has made leaps of progress nowadays. It's absolutely
astonishing what they can do. And if they can do that, they could
definitely do this. The question is whether it's worth the money that it would
cost and the time it would cost, because you know, we have one
hundred and thirty thousand tablets in the British Museum. Maybe there's one hundred thousand
all over the rest of the world, and maybe there's ten million in the
ground of Iraq. But there are only five people in Britain who can read
this thing, and they're probably fifty in America. And who who gives a
monkey's you know? I mean, we're all worried about the things we're worried
about. But it's very important because it's the beginning of humanity and our history.
It's so it is important. But I think it will be a long
time before. I mean, I think people who are good at AI like
to have things that they can show they can do and people go ooh and
are and this will be a choice one. If you had a clay tablet,
they know which way up it goes and you plug it in and ten
minutes later you get the translation. That would be marvelous. Well, I
was just reading the other day they are the AI computing power is growing exponentially,
and they just predicted this is about twenty four hours ago, that they
think it can be close to the human mind. I don't know how they
can think that, because we don't know what the human minds about. So
it's weird. Well, look, the thing is, you can get a
thing to write a novel, like as if Jane Austen wrote it. Yeah,
but it's not you know, how original, truly original? Will the
work be? Well, it depends on what you've done with the computer.
But the thing is, I don't know much about this, but I have
read something to the effect that when AI, artificial AI tries to imitate poetry
or writing by people who do poetry and writing is very successful. I mean
it's not. I mean it's pretty hard to tell whether poetry is any good
anyway, and it's pretty damned difficult really. It's not like an absolute thing,
and some people go crazy about a particular poem is a voice for our
time and all the rest of it. It's just a lot of cliches,
but this is this is an interesting thing. But I think that the point
is that there's a disjunct between the needs of the world and what can be
done with AI, and AI is really an indulgence for the human race because
we don't really need most of the things it can do. Then we need
a lot of other things a lot more. So I think I regard it.
I think it's a distraction from dealing with starvation, hunger, disease,
war, all those things which intelligent people should actually be dealing with, because
there are quite a lot of intelligent people in the world and they have nothing
to do with those issues. And then we can do the AI. When
everything's fine, there's no more cancer, there's no more this, no more
road accidents, then they can do that, but it's not a priority.
It's a priority for them to show what they can do, and of course
there'll be money and money and money. But I think probably the bulk of
human beings, if they were fully aware of the threat to clear thought that
this represents, will be very, very panicky. But on the other hand,
they're not all that many people who really care a whot about clear thought
anyway, So who knows I think the bottom line is there using it to
better human existence in some capacity, so it's disguised the limit as to the
applications of AI. So yeah, but hold on, the usual application is
to control people better, so don't forget that historical evidence to support this claim.
Anyway, it's great to see you. I really enjoy talking. It's
always a pleasure irving to have you on the program. And before we leave,
give people an idea of what your typical day is. How many hours
do you spend at the British Museum, And also you have two books that
you've completed, what's what's happening in the future, or lots of books underway?
Well, I usually end up getting there about nine thirteen, I stated
about six and I'm what I'm trying to do now is to finish projects that
I have had underway, some new, some being a while. I'm writing
a book about dreams in Mesopotamia about that's one subject. I'm writing a lot
about the Royal Game of Er because I found out a lot more recently about
this game and text to do with it, and other sorts of things which
I have to do. I'm writing a book about diaries. This is something
we must talk about one day, because I started this project a rescue manuscript
diaries from being thrown away in Britain, and there's about fourteen thousand of them
now, and I'm trying to write a book about why it's important not to
throw diaries away, how interesting they are. And I've written fiction and all
sorts of stuff which I'm trying to find a publisher for. So who knows.
It's just a non ending stream of streams. I got to say that
I've seen more and more video of you on YouTube and I find it fascinating.
So obviously you do enjoy speaking in public. We do, and you
do it fairly consistentlysistently, which is kind of nice. I do like it.
I like looking on stage more because you know, with lockdown and all
those things, that and zoom rather changed. But I have a mission.
I think I want people to know about the seriology and what we know about
all that because it's full of amazing things, and about the British Museum and
why museums are important, and why money is not the most important thing in
the world, and all those sorts of things. Because he isn't wonderful,
a real pleasure and like I said before, we're going to have to have
you back fairly more consistently because twenty eighteen was a while ago. So will
be in touch more regularly, Kid at any time, see you soon.
I really like speaking with him Irving, simply because of his openness to all
the possibilities. You know, I mean, somebody who's steeped in tradition,
especially an archaeologist or a museum curator, may not venture outside of the box,
outside of what's comfortable. And you know, these topics are very,
very fluid, and they are a challenge for a lot of people. And
I appreciate his point of view, and I appreciate his openness, and I
really appreciate the fact, and I think you might agree too, that he's
an anomalist. He's seeking these unusual stories events. It's just so much fun
to speak with someone like that and so and you know, it's funny.
I've been doing Earth Ancients for ten years in our tenth year anniversary what is
it in April, and I've only interviewed him once. And he is really
what I would call a staple for Earth Ancients, a foundational piece in the
same vein that we have Graham Hancock, or people like doctor Edwin Barnhardt,
who under the tutelage of Linda Sheeley, this tremendous mayanist helped shape his her
students like ed and others to think outside the box and to accept individuals who
are seeing ancient history from a different lens and reporting it and rather than putting
them down or writing skating letters like Graham received when he was the host of
Ancient Apocalypse, that Netflix series, she helped her students consider other points of
view. And this is where we really get a series of brilliant discoveries,
a way to look at the ancient past with more clarity. And this is
important and this is what Earth Agents is all about. So I'm gonna have
to have Erring back. And I mentioned this when we finished our interview,
that hey, buddy, we got to get you back more consistently. So
he agreed, and he likes, he likes to be on the show and
he likes to speak about his topic, so it was fun to have him
on the program. Hey, I want to mention that we are a sponsor
of this upcoming conference called Cosmic Summit. It is June fifteenth and sixteenth it's
going to be held in North Carolina. A lot of people won't be able
to go because it's you know, that's kind of out of the way,
it's expensive. But the producer it's going to be on the program in a
few weeks, as well as a number of the keynotes. And I gotta
mention this because it is live streamed, meaning that you can sit on your
in your desk at home or your office or wherever, and you can see
these fascinating speakers. And they have people like Preven Mohan, Randall, Carlson,
Luke Caverns, just a whole list of great people that you can stream
and see these people alive. And would you believe it's as little as twenty
five bucks a day, just nothing, nothing. I was shocked when George
the producer, George Howard the producer, said to me, hey, we're
only going to charge it. I said, that is amazing. These types
of programs are usually one hundred and fifty or more. Twenty five bucks a
day, that is nothing. You have no excuse not to do this.
For more information, go to cosmicsummit dot com, scroll to the bottom and
look for the streaming pass. I think it's at the very bottom of the
page. I'll have another direct link that you can use that is it might
be quicker, but for now, check this summit out. It is packed
with really, really good people. It's two days, the fifteenth and the
sixteenth in the June. And wow, what this is the kind of programming
I really like. I mean, and we sponsor a handful of shows each
year, and they want you to get They want, you know, people
to sit and attend because it, you know, makes some money. People
can't do it. It's too expensive to fly from San Francisco, where I'm
at, all the way across the country to North Carolina. I would love
to be there. I'm going to be coming back from Egypt, so I
can't do it. But I really encourage you to go to Cosmic Summit dot
com. Scroll the bottom first of all, look at the lineup. Then
scroll the bottom and become a subscriber or sign up for the streaming twenty five
bucks a day. God, it's a nothing, it's totally nothing. So
we're gonna hear from more of the people who are speaking and who are presenting
there, and it's a really good one. I'm really encouraging these conferences to
consider streaming as more of a foundation to reach out to people rather than getting
seats filled because it's just so expensive. And I mean I have been doing
and producing conferences and program directing conferences for a long long time and the technology
is much better than it used to be. It's so smooth, it's like
watching TV and that's what you want. So again, check it out Cosmic
Summit. We'll have George the producer on the program in a few weeks plus.
We'll be interviewing a few of the guests that are are a few of
the centers that are at the show for you to get some more insights.
So check it out cosmicsummit dot com. Hey, I want to mention that
our first tour is coming up. It's our Grand Egyptian Tour number five.
It's April twenty eight through May ninth, and I just want to mention this
really quickly. People go, hey, you know what, that's really more
money than I can deal with. Most of these tours are ten grand.
I just saw a competitor posting for twelve thousand. That's ridiculous. That is
totally ridiculous. And I'm very proud of our group and our team at Stabatur,
which is Mohammed Imbrahem and his team. We've been working with him for
a while now. Ours is less than five thousand. You're going, dude,
that's a lot of money. But if you can take a break,
pull a little money out of your savings. This is a spring break.
This is a once in a lifetime tour. I'm not going to I'll be
doing it in twenty twenty five. I'm skipping a year, so this is
the last available time I have because I'm in the middle of writing a bunch
of stuff, a bunch of books and a bunch of articles and a bunch
of research. So twenty twenty five I'm gonna kind of lay low, not
going to go to the East Coast or Europe. I think I might do
one trip to Yucatan, no excuse me, to Guatemala with doctor Ed.
That's going to be November. I think we're still working on in the details,
but that's it for twenty twenty five. So if you want to come
with me and Muhammad, go to Earth Ancients dot Com forward slash Tours.
I speak about it every single week. It is an amazing tour. Everything's
covered, food, beverages, bus, ride, flight, accommodations and hotels
accommodations on the Nile River with a private cruise ship, and that by itself
is worth the price of admission. I mean, great to see you,
great to be with you. This is not to be missed. And like
I said, I'm not gonna be doing it in twenty twenty five. So
if you want more information, go to earth ansients dot com Forward slash Tours,
look for the banner for Egypt. Come out and join us. It
is fabulous. It's a rock bottom price and I don't know if I can
hold it after this year, so consider it. It's fifty percent less than
what most people pay for the tour and we have a blast earth acients dot
com Forward slash Tours. All right, that's it for today. I want
to thank my guest, doctor Irving Finkel, coming to us from the British
Museum in London, England, as always, the team of Gail Tour in
Hollywood, California, and then there is Mark Foster in London, England,
and everyone who makes this thing happen. You guys rock all right, take
care of me well and we will talk to you next time. Studio