When I say the word cuneiform, what comes to mind?

If you're like me, the answer is not much.

But my guest today, Irving Finkel, is trying to change that.

He's a curator in the Department of the Middle East at the British Museum,

where he's worked for over 45 years.

He's responsible for the museum's collection of roughly 130,000 clay tablets engraved with

Cuneiform, the oldest writing system in the world.

Once you give up six or seven years of your life to learn Cuneiform, everything changes.

Your daily life is full of throb and excitement, money,

women, cars, everything you could ever ask for. It's just the most fantastic career, and nobody does

it, apart from a few decrepit nerds like myself. Welcome to people I mostlyire with Steve Levitt.

Is there anything useful that we can learn from these writings from thousands of years ago?

That's what I hope to find out today.

But first, I asked Irving for a crash course on Cuneoform.

As far as we know, Cuneiform writing is the oldest writing that appeared on the face of the globe.

At least it is the oldest one we know about.

And the landscape in which it appeared is ancient Iraq, what the Greeks called Mesopotamia.

And Mesopotamia, of course, means between the rivers,

because the landscape has the Euphrates and Tigris rivers,

which characterises the heartland.

And that is where, archaeologically speaking, we find the first evidence for writing.

So cuneiform is something that most normal civilised people have no encounter with in the course of their lives.

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