Proms Extra: Cuneiform 07082017
Arts & Ideas
BBC
4.2 • 599 Ratings
🗓️ 8 August 2017
⏱️ 41 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
A pre-Prom audience at Imperial College in London listens in as Shaidha Bari talks to Assyriologist Irving Finkel about cuneiform; how the script survived, what it tells us about life in the cities of Ur, Ninevah and Babylon and the way some of the most memorable stories ever told travelled from culture to culture. On the fare demonic puns, a four thousand year old joke, why the Ark might have been round and just how painful life was for Sumerian school chidren.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome back to the home of the oxymoron. Evil genius. He asked the newspaper to print his obituary early so he'd enjoy it. That's like hiding at your own funeral. Yeah, a big, great gig. I'm Russell Kane. Join me to weigh in on whether the biggest players in history are more evil or genius. Becoming that rich, I'd say that is some level of genius. It also helps that it's a long time ago, right? |
| 0:23.3 | It's like the podcast version of telling your kids the ice cream van plays music |
| 0:27.0 | when it's out of ice cream. |
| 0:28.8 | Listen to evil genius on BBC sounds. |
| 0:32.0 | I'm Shahida Barry. |
| 0:32.9 | Thank you for downloading this podcast from BBC Radio 3's Proms Extra. |
| 0:37.3 | This is the BBC. |
| 0:45.0 | Just 400 years ago, an Italian composer, author and inveterate explorer Pietro de la Valle |
| 0:52.0 | became the first European to identify Babylon as a real historical city. |
| 0:57.8 | As he traveled south from Baghdad through Mesopotamia, the land of the two rivers, legends, |
| 1:03.1 | and Bible stories came to life in the ruined mudbrick mounds rising out of the desert. |
| 1:09.7 | After Babylon came Nineveh, and then, er. |
| 1:13.5 | There amidst the ruins of ancient civilization, |
| 1:16.0 | he spotted, collected, and logged home to Europe |
| 1:19.1 | a number of small clay tablets, each one inscribed |
| 1:22.9 | with intriguing wedge-shaped markings. |
| 1:26.5 | A few decades later, the decorative wedge-shaped markings were given the name |
| 1:30.3 | Cuneiform. |
| 1:31.3 | Cuneiform meaning, well, wedge-shaped. |
| 1:34.3 | As time went on and more and more Europeans travelled eastwards, returning home their |
| 1:39.3 | pockets, bulging with these mysterious clay tablets covered in wedge-shaped markings, an idea began to dawn. |
| 1:47.0 | Maybe, just maybe, the wedges weren't just decorative. |
... |
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