Steve Levitt (host)Irving FinkelMorgan LeveyJane Goodall
Key insights
Cuneiform emerged around 3500 BC in Mesopotamia by evolving from simple pictographs into syllabic signs, because pictures alone could not express complex statements.
Finkel explains that early pictographic signs could convey concrete requests (three drawn milk bottles for three bottles of milk) but not complaints or abstractions (a bottle arrived moldy with a worm in it). Scribes solved this by repurposing picture-signs for the sounds they represented, producing roughly a thousand signs that could record syllables and, eventually, any sentence in Sumerian or Babylonian.
origins-of-writing
Writing likely arose independently multiple times rather than diffusing from one original invention, because the underlying idea, using marks to encode sound and meaning, is not a large cognitive leap.
Finkel rejects the 'single node' theory of writing's origin. He argues that given a population of people with varying intelligence and visualization ability, some individuals in any sufficiently organized society would independently arrive at the idea, much as a young child suddenly grasps that a sound reliably maps to a word like 'cake.'
origins-of-writing
Egyptian hieroglyphics most likely arose as a derivative reaction to already-established cuneiform writing, not as a fully independent invention.
Finkel argues that despite Egyptian nationalist claims of priority, the near-simultaneous emergence of hieroglyphics alongside a Mesopotamian system already in wide administrative use is more plausibly explained by contact, merchants, travelers, or diplomats encountering cuneiform and returning home determined to have a writing system of their own, even without remembering exactly how it worked.
origins-of-writing
The economists' textbook claim that writing began as a tax and record-keeping tool checks out: Sumerian bookkeeping tablets from the Ur III period (circa 2100 BC) show meticulous, largely accurate accounting of goods like sheep and wool.
Finkel confirms that alongside the earliest script, the Sumerians (who counted in base 60, not base 10) rapidly developed numeration and bookkeeping practices essentially indistinguishable from an accountant's ledger, complete with dated, sealed receipts and month-end summed totals, well before hymns or literature appear in the record.
origins-of-writing
Cuneiform's 19th-century decipherment succeeded because scholars found a Rosetta-Stone-like trilingual inscription where one of the three languages, Old Persian, was still linguistically alive.
At Bisotun in Iran, King Darius carved the same royal proclamation in Old Persian, Babylonian, and Elamite cuneiform. Because Old Persian survived in related living languages, scholars decoded its repeating patterns (recognizing recurring royal-title phrases), then used that key to crack the far harder Babylonian script and discover it belonged to the Semitic language family, related to Hebrew, Arabic, and Aramaic.
decipherment-and-discovery
The British Museum's George Smith had what Finkel calls an epileptic reaction upon first reading the flood story on a cuneiform tablet in the 1870s, because no one in his deeply Bible-literate era imagined the story could predate scripture.
Smith was reading a tablet from Nineveh's King's Library when he recognized the ark narrative (Utnapishtim releasing birds to test for dry land), dropped the tablet, ran around the room, and began undressing. Finkel attributes the extreme reaction to the total absence of any prior suspicion that the biblical flood story had a much older non-biblical source.
decipherment-and-discovery
A private individual walking a family heirloom tablet into the museum for identification, rather than a formal excavation, produced the field's biggest recent find: a flood tablet a thousand years older than Smith's, containing the god's precise boat-building instructions.
Finkel notes only about 350 tablets have surfaced this way, one at a time from private owners, since he joined the museum in 1979, mostly unremarkable bookkeeping records brought back as First World War souvenirs from Iraq. This particular one, from the old Babylonian period, contained the god Enki's opening instructions to Atrahasis (the Babylonian Noah) and proved to be an exceptionally complete, previously unknown version of the flood story.
decipherment-and-discovery
The newly deciphered tablet specifies that Noah's ark was round, a coracle-style boat, and the dimensions were structurally plausible enough that a television production actually tried to build it, though only at roughly a third of full scale.
Coracles, round basket-hulled boats waterproofed with bitumen, were common on the Tigris and Euphrates into the 20th century and prized for being nearly unsinkable; Finkel found the god's instructions gave precise measurements and rope-length proportions consistent with real coracle construction. At the tablet's full specified size, about two-thirds the size of a football pitch, boat-reconstruction experts determined the bitumen-coated basket hull would collapse under its own weight, so the production scaled it down and successfully launched it on a lake in Kerala, India, for the PBS NOVA documentary.
flood-myth-and-biblical-precedent
Differences in narrative style between the two flood tablets suggest the story passed through an oral, performed tradition before being fixed in writing.
Finkel observes that Babylonian mythological texts typically frame every line of dialogue with a formula like 'So-and-so opened his mouth and spoke,' but his tablet's god-to-Atrahasis instructions lack that framing and read like a direct, unmediated speech. He theorizes traveling storytellers performing the flood myth with different voices, prompted by audience questions like 'how big was the boat?', developed and inserted the specific technical details that later got fixed into this tablet's text.
flood-myth-and-biblical-precedent
The Hebrew Bible's flood narrative is not an independent revelation but a repurposing of a pre-existing Babylonian story, with the moral framing changed from divine annoyance to divine judgment of sin.
Finkel argues the generic 'one man, one boat, race against time' plot demonstrably originates in Mesopotamia (Babylonian gods flood the world because humans are too noisy) roughly a thousand years before it appears reworked in Genesis, where the motive becomes sin and punishment, and then again in the Quran's Nuh story. He frames this as evidence that no plot is ever invented from nothing, all literature builds on what came before.
flood-myth-and-biblical-precedent
Publishing scholarship that reframes a biblical story as derivative can provoke real hostility from religious readers, though Finkel treats it as an occupational hazard rather than a deterrent.
After The Ark Before Noah was published, Finkel received letters from American readers, including a Southern clergyman, calling for him to be tarred and feathered or excommunicated for undermining the Old Testament. He notes it didn't trouble him personally, in part because he is Jewish, and maintains that establishing a pre-biblical source doesn't erase the story's power, only its claim to originality.
flood-myth-and-biblical-precedent
Levitt describes the death of a long-sought guest, Jane Goodall, and a prior on-air moment where she said she was untroubled by the prospect of dying, as reshaping how he processed the news of her passing.
It took producer Morgan Levey about two years to book Goodall, who then did the October 2022 interview despite having Covid because she felt committed to keeping the date. Levitt recalls asking her directly about death; her answer, that dying is either nothing or a further adventure worth discovering, left him feeling she was at peace, which he says changed how he felt on hearing of her death at 91 rather than producing ordinary sorrow.
academic-life-and-serendipity
Books referenced
The Ark Before Noah: Decoding the Story of the Flood - Irving Finkel - Finkel's book about the old Babylonian flood tablet he deciphered, which describes Noah's ark as round; published after his translation drew both acclaim and hostile mail from religious readers.
Media referenced
The Secrets of Noah's Ark - show - PBS NOVA episode (season 42, episode 12) documenting the attempt to build a scaled replica of the round coracle-style ark from Finkel's tablet in Kerala, India.
Companies
British Museum - Where Finkel has worked as curator in the Department of the Middle East since 1979, overseeing roughly 130,000 cuneiform clay tablets, including the two flood tablets discussed.
Freakonomics Radio Network - Parent network for People I (Mostly) Admire, also producing Freakonomics Radio and The Economics of Everyday Things.
Techniques and frameworks
Cuneiform decipherment via the Behistun (Bisotun) trilingual inscription - 19th-century scholars used a cliff inscription in Iran carved in Old Persian, Babylonian, and Elamite cuneiform side by side; since Old Persian was still a living language family, they cracked its repetitive royal-title patterns first and used that to bootstrap decipherment of the far more complex Babylonian script, revealing it as a Semitic language related to Hebrew and Arabic.
Signs-as-syllables writing system - Finkel describes how Mesopotamian scribes evolved from simple pictographs (unable to express complex or abstract statements) into roughly a thousand cuneiform signs that captured spoken syllables, each carrying multiple possible sounds and meanings that a reader has to mentally test against neighboring signs until they resolve into a real word.
Summary
Steve Levitt talks with Irving Finkel, curator of the British Museum's roughly 130,000-tablet cuneiform collection, about the origins and decipherment of the world's oldest writing system. Finkel traces cuneiform's evolution from simple pictographs, adequate for concrete requests like ordering milk bottles but useless for complaints or abstractions, into roughly a thousand syllabic signs capable of recording any spoken sentence in Sumerian or Babylonian. He rejects the idea that writing was invented once and diffused outward, arguing instead that the underlying idea, using marks to encode sound, was accessible enough that multiple societies likely arrived at it independently, and that Egyptian hieroglyphics most plausibly emerged as a reaction to an already-established cuneiform system rather than a wholly separate invention. He also confirms the economists' favorite origin story: the earliest surviving Sumerian tablets are overwhelmingly meticulous bookkeeping and tax records, not literature.
The conversation then turns to decipherment. Nineteenth-century scholars cracked cuneiform using a trilingual royal inscription at Bisotun in Iran, carved by King Darius in Old Persian, Babylonian, and Elamite. Because Old Persian was still linguistically alive, scholars used its recognizable repeating phrases to bootstrap a reading, then applied that key to unlock the far more complex Babylonian script, revealing it as a Semitic language related to Hebrew and Arabic. Finkel then recounts George Smith's famous 1870s discovery of the flood story on a tablet from Nineveh, a moment so unexpected in a Bible-literate era that Smith reportedly had what Finkel diagnoses as an epileptic episode, dropping the tablet, running around the room, and undressing.
Finkel's own parallel discovery anchors the episode's centerpiece: a private individual brought in a family heirloom tablet, one of roughly 350 such walk-in finds since 1979, that turned out to be a thousand years older than Smith's and contained an unusually complete version of the flood narrative. Its most striking detail is that the god Enki instructs Atrahasis (the Babylonian Noah) to build a round boat, a coracle, with dimensions that turned out to be structurally plausible for real coracle construction. That plausibility led a television production to actually attempt building a scaled replica in Kerala, India, for a PBS NOVA documentary, though boat-reconstruction experts had to scale it down to roughly a third of the tablet's specified size since a full-scale bitumen-coated basket hull would have collapsed under its own weight. Finkel also notices a textual clue, missing narrative framing phrases in his tablet compared to standard mythological convention, that suggests the story passed through an oral, audience-shaped performance tradition (with details like boat dimensions possibly added in response to listeners' questions) before being fixed in writing.
The episode closes on the story's larger significance and its costs. Finkel argues plainly that the biblical flood narrative derives from this older Babylonian tradition, with the moral reframed from divine irritation at noisy humans to divine punishment for sin, and situates this within a broader claim that no story plot is ever invented from nothing. Publishing that argument in his book The Ark Before Noah drew genuine hostility, including letters calling for him to be tarred and feathered, which he treats as an occupational hazard rather than something that shakes his conclusions.
In the closing listener-question segment, producer Morgan Levey asks Levitt to reflect on Jane Goodall, a long-pursued guest who died recently at 91. Levitt recounts how she kept their 2022 interview despite having Covid, and recalls asking her directly whether she feared dying; her answer, that death is either nothing or a further adventure, left him with a sense of her being at peace that reshaped how he processed the news of her death.
Notable Quotes
"Once you give up six or seven years of your life to learn cuneiform, everything changes... It's just the most fantastic career, and nobody does it apart from a few decrepit nerds like myself." - Irving Finkel
"I don't believe that there's any ever one invention of writing." - Irving Finkel
"This wasn't an attempt! It was a highly successful procedure!" - Irving Finkel
"Nobody ever invents a new plot ever. It's impossible. And all literature is predicated on and develops and builds what exists before." - Irving Finkel
"When you die, there's either nothing, which is fine, or there's something, which I happen to believe. And if there is something beyond our death, then I cannot think of a greater adventure than finding out what that something is." - Jane Goodall