Irving Finkel
Cuneiform: Writing and Literature

Irving Finkel - Cuneiform: Writing and Literature

- [Trudy] Well, good evening everyone, and welcome, from a very depressed and gloomy Britain. It’s very, very good to have this kind of presentation tonight. I’m absolutely delighted to welcome a new lecturer to Lockdown University, Irving Finkel. And his specialty is Cuneiform Writing and Literature. He’s the Assistant Keeper at the British Museum in the Middle Eastern Department. He reads, curates, and translates Mesopotamian cuneiform tablets. He’s a specialist in Babylonian magic and medicine literature, and also the board games of antiquity, which I find absolutely fascinating. He’s the founder of something called the Great Diary Project, which rescues manuscript diaries for the future. Maybe that’s something, if we have time, Irving, you could tell us about. He writes books for adults and for children. One of his most intriguing titles is The Ark Before Noah, and The First Ghosts. So welcome, Irving, and over to you.

• [Irving] Lovely, thank you very much. Good. Well, this is my title, Cuneiform Writing and Literature. And I’m a curator in the British Museum, as it’s also written there in unambiguous script. People often think that people who work in museums are dull and boring, and what they do is dull and boring. So I hope we can address this illusion as we go forward. So, sorry, the first slide, the first picture, shows you a cuneiform tablet. It’s about the size of what used to be regarded as a pack of cigarettes. It’s made of clay. And the signs are impressed in the surface of the clay. They read from left to right, down all the way from the top to the bottom, and then the other side as well. So this is a kind of writing that people don’t often bump into, but it runs contemporaneously with Egyptian hieroglyphs, and it’s a lot more interesting than that. Well, the stuff I’m going to talk about comes from ancient Iraq, what the Greeks called Mesopotamia, between the Euphrates and Tigris rivers. And this friendly map shows you the white area, which is where we’ll be concentrating. You have neighbours like Saudi Arabia, Syria, and Iran. But it’s ancient Iraq where the Sumerians, and the Babylonians after them, and many other ancient populations lived. And they use this kind of writing in their daily lives, and we have a great deal of it at our disposal today. So cuneiform tablets, like the one you saw, grow in the ground like potatoes. Or to put it in a more scientific way, the landscape of Iraq, and other countries of the Middle East, was often dotted along the horizon with small, like, artificial, modest mountains against the sky, like the one in this, hot and dusty looking picture.

And these mounds, which are called tell mounds, are where people lived, often for millennia after millennia. And when they are excavated, tablets are often found inside rooms and buildings, and have been waiting all this time for archaeologists to harvest them, and hopefully put them in the hands of people who can read them responsibly. So this writing has very few points in contact with anything like modern writing, except the subject matter. And we will come to that in a moment. So the clay, which was utilised, was taken from the banks of those same rivers, the Euphrates and Tigris, which is a very rich, suitable clay for pottery, and many other uses. And it turned out to provide a very sound writing support system for the sort of script that was impressed into the surface. So you have to think of this early writing as nothing like writing with a Biro, but pressing, as you’ll see, miscellaneous shapes into a prepared piece of clay, which would then hold the impressions, and allow somebody else to run their eye over it, and recall the sounds of the language which are expressed. So this is the first kind of writing known to archaeology. The first evidence is before 3500 BC. It’s a very long time ago indeed. And we don’t have all the steps at the beginning clear, but we have a fair idea.

So the clay material, which was often made in a piece, like in that first picture, that would fit comfortably into the hand, the left hand. And the writing was done with a reed, such as you see in this Iraqi picture with a bird. One of those reeds cut across is the writing stick, like a chopstick. And all you need to be a scribe is to have your clay and to have your writing tool, and to know thousands and thousands of different signs. So everybody knows, of course, about how language is supposed to begin with pictures, and then become. I mean, writing begin with pictures, and become real, grown up writing. Well, in the case of Mesopotamia, this is true. The earliest signs we have from before 3000 BC are pictures of the kind that children at the age of about three or four spontaneously produce themselves, where a simple outline captures the whole of the identity of the point. So you can see on the blue sheet, the left hand column, the signs for fish, and foot, and sun, and so forth, are of this childlike design or pattern. And if you look across, you will see that the signs change their orientation. They lie down, and then they end up being written with kind of wedges, different angles. The wedges bit is the real cuneiform bit, where they reduced what were pictures, curvy pictures, and so forth, into straight lines that could be done with the impressing writing tool. So if you look at the sign for orchard, that was a kind of picture that anyone would understand.

Then it goes, changes its orientation, then it gets a bit more fancy. And eventually, the thing is produced with that sign on the right, where there are 3, 6, 8, 9, 3, 6, 7, 8, 10. 10 individual strokes of the stylus to produce that complicated sign, which means orchard. So the thing is this, if you have a writing system which depicts things by what they look like, it’s quite good. If you want to leave a message for the milkman to say three bottles and a kiss, then he will understand. But if you want to write a message that says, “The last three bottles you bought were mouldy. There were things swimming in it. We want our money back or we’ll take you to court.” You can’t really do that with pictures. And what happened was, in Mesopotamia, you have a period of time when things were purely pictographic with that limited scope. And then they evolved in such a way that somebody, some really clever person, came up with this idea that you could draw a picture of something for of what it looked like. Which could either mean what it looked like, or the sound of the word it meant. For example, the word for fish in Sumerian is pronounced like this, ha. And so you would draw a fish, meaning a fish. But if you wanted a word, write a word with ha in it, like Happy Christmas, the first label would be written with a fish for the ha. So there was a kind of jump from very childlike, simple pictograms, or pictographic signs, into signs that gradually were able to record meanings and sounds. And that gave the human race a tool, whereby things could be, language could be, reduced to an intelligible sequence of signs.

And another person who’s, I, as I said, ran over it like a needle in a gramophone would bring out the sounds, and then the words of the language would be in their ear. So if you look on the left, there’s a little close up from a big old tablet of the early period. And you can see a sign for barley, which is very recognisable, and some numbers. Well, this sign for barley, in Sumerian, was pronounced like this, sheh, as if it were s-h-e-h. So that was the Sumerian word for barley. So you read it as barley, that’s simple. But if you wanted to write a word in which sheh existed as a syllable. Like, say, shepherd, that sort of thing in English. Then you could use that sheh sign, not to mean anything to do with barley at all. Merely to write the syllable. And in my opinion, the idea of using a picture sign for its sound, and what that led to, is the real giant leap for mankind. Because it meant, all of a sudden, that real writing was possible. And grammar, and literature, and encyclopaedias, and everything we take for granted, was allowed to come into existence by this incredibly significant matter. So when you wrote a cuneiform tablet, you held it in your left hand. And your writing stick, as you can see in this drawing, in your right. And impressed, as you can see, at different angles, the tip to produce vertical, and horizontal, or diagonal marks. And each of the signs consisted of different arrangements of horizontal, vertical, and diagonal marks. And there were several thousand of them. So you had to work hard at school. So as this writing system moved away from pictures to a tool where messages could be recorded, and language could be preserved, they made use of one or two interesting things. For example, what’s called the Rebus system.

So in English, you could write the word belief in the sense of Credo, a religious Credo. Drawing a bee, and drawing a leaf, where the person would innocently read the two words together, and then grasp that it was nothing to do with bees or leaves, it was the noun belief. That is called rebus writing. And the other thing was that once they had these marvellous ideas of sounds alone, they wrote words in syllables. So, for example, a Sumerian who went to the British Museum would have assigned mu, and ze, and um. And that’s how he would write the word museum. And you would squeeze them together into one single word. An interesting thought for reflection is raised by the picture on the right, because the parallel between that electronic device, and the real kind of writing, which we all love so much, called cuneiform, is remarkable. But it’s not only the the size, the angle, and the use of a stylus. But it is also the point that people who rely on these things for communication, thereby sacrifice any kind of knowledge of grammar or vocabulary, and reduce themselves to a hundred simple syllabic grunts, which they express with things, like B4 or L8R. Really clever things, instead of using language properly. So we have a kind of reversal of the right thing to do, which is to learn new vocabulary, and to read proper books, and express yourself in the wonder of your own language without this kind of B4, L8R, and all the other nonsense. But when you put the two together, it is very suggestive. So we have two kinds of language in these early writings.

One is Sumerian, this is a Sumerian man. He’s a priest staring up at the gods with his large eyes and large ears. He spoke Sumerian, which is not related to any modern language at all. And then this is an Akkadian scribe from a wall painting, writing a clay tablet with his stick. He spoke Akkadian, which is a Semitic language, like modern Hebrew, Arabic, Ethiopic, Syriac, Aramaic, that group of languages. Akkadian is a sister language, and even though it’s extinct like Sumerian, it is closely related. So when the first decipherments were made, and they realised that these words were Semitic. Ah! Then the light came on in their minds, and they were able to identify nouns, and verbs, and grammatical particles, on analogy, with living Akkadian, living Semitic languages. But Sumerian might as well come from the moon. It’s very different to anything any normal person would ever have encountered. So we have to get through a lot of stuff. When you went to school, you were about six. And when you went to school, there were only boys, really.

And you had to learn all the signs. And then when you learn the signs, you had to learn exercises, and write things out by hearing. Now on the left, you see two photographs of the same thing, front and back. So what you did when you got to a certain stage, you were taught by an older pupil. And the ball of clay was given to you in your hand. And you rolled it round, and you made it nice and flat, with a round side and a flat side. And the older pupil wrote the lines, the four lines, in the upper photograph. First, as a model, they come from a proverb. Then you scrutinise this. If you are a seven year old, and you are supposed to become a scribe when you grew up, you scrutinised this, and copied it out from memory on the back. And you can see, even if you’ve never seen one of these before, that the one above is very neat. The lines are more or less parallel, and the wedges hang from it like washing. But the stuff at the bottom is all over the place, and obviously not very good quality. Now they had a very interesting, and rather constructive approach, to teaching the difficulty of cuneiform writing to boys at school. In Mesopotamia, they employed what’s known as the stick. And the teachers used to beat children, or boys, who didn’t do their work properly.

So there was every reason to concentrate. And what I’m showing you on the right, here, is something which is very significant in bringing this world, which may, at first, sight, or second sight, looks like it also comes from the moon, as representing a form of humanity where we can share experience and understand. Because this photograph in the middle is from a round tablet, and you can see in the bottom left-hand corner, the curve, ‘cause it’s so close up you can’t see the whole profile. So this is a caricature of a teacher by a school boy. And I imagine it’s a boy who’d been set about with a stick and was smarting. And so he turned over his round tablet and drew this thing. And if you look at the bottom, you can see there’s a very prim little mouth, like a Victorian school marm, and lots of hairs shooting out of his weaselly nostrils. And this is, undoubtedly, the oldest known caricature in the world. And it’s preserved on a piece of clay, very ephemeral. But this is the thing about this wonderful clay material, because if it’s not actually destroyed, or thrown in the river, in the ground, it lasts forever. And whenever there’s an excavation, tablets are founded in the British Museum. We have about 130,000 of them, with all things to do with mankind. And the important thing is that, although it looks so bizarre and different, the people inside are like us.

And here, you can see a rebellious boy drawing this and probably passing it around the room until the teacher wanted to know what on earth you were up to. So that’s one thing. Another human thing that we can identify with is exemplified by these documents. So on the left, you have four little Sumerian tablets from about 2000 BC. And each one represents the delivery to a temple, of material, which was due. For example, livestock, or something like that. And it says two sheep, four goats, brought to the temple by Mr So-and-So. Received by Mr So-and-So. And then the date, by month, year, and year name. Day, month, and year, I mean, sorry. All written there carefully. Perfect, good example. So that anyone who was going to come and check would be able to command that all things have been done properly. And, boy, did they check. Because at the end of the month, some miserable Sumerian clerk had to have buckets and baskets full of these small things, and put all the material in multi-column tablets, like this, to account for the month, and then add them up at the end.

So this is, I’m afraid to say, a very early example of the use of writing. It’s depressing, because one likes to think they wrote poetry, and love songs, and stories about the gods, and all that kind of lovely stuff, philosophical preaches on history. But actually, the mainstream was devoted to the early incarnation of the inland revenue. And any of the people who do that kind of work, if they saw one of these tablets, their hearts would glow in appreciation, because that’s what it is. Some people would say a blight on mankind is a debatable matter. Excuse me. So you have seen a few bits of cuneiform. So when you went to school, when you had a fluency in writing, you would leave school and earn your keep writing letters, for example, or business documents, or contracts. And sometimes I think they sat at the city gate, rather like described in Kim in India. And the scribe would be there on a low stool, and if somebody needed a document, he would take dictation and produce it. So the one on the left is a letter, and it starts off to Mr. So-and-So, “Speak!” thus says Mr So-and-so. Because an important merchant wouldn’t write his own tablets. He’d have his scribe. “Okay, tell that guy this, this and this,” then it’ll be delivered. And then the other guy, who was also very important, his scribe would read to him the message. That’s how a correspondence was conducted. And on the right you see, a marvellous example of a tablet from about 1650 BC. So the tablet is actually upside down, inside its envelope. And it was found, very helpfully, broken, with the thing still inside, as if prepared for a microscope slide, because it illustrates very perfectly, in this situation, that an important document will be written out in full. And then, in a rather dexterous fashion, it will be wrapped in the same clay all around. So the top is broken off here.

A complete envelope. And then the same inscription will be written all over the outside. And then people who were concerned, witnesses and so forth, would seal the document, and ratify it with their cylinder, which was carved with their name. And you can see on the left hand side, some smooth patches of clay, which were the effect of rolling a cylinder seal, to say, “I was there, I act as witness.” So with all these sorts of documents, the administrative docs, there’s a strong abiding sense of getting the tablets, orderly information, in the same place every time. Getting their numbers right, spelling everything right. They were very well emphatically trained. So this tablet may look to you a bit rough and ready, but, in fact, it’s a rather fine piece of work. So we have lots of correspondence, and most of it is to do with people in the same town buying and selling things, and lending money, and rent for orchards. And there were lots and lots of stuff. And there were judges. And in the Babylonian towns, under kings like Hammurabi, who had to adjudicate when there were disputes about water rights, and inheritance, and things like that. It was a very familiar matter that there were claimants, one against the other, and there were people who were supposed to sort it out, who took a long time. I’m probably required a little bit of this and that, now, again, to encourage them.

So those are what you might call normal, everyday letters. But we also have some very extraordinary international letters. So this is a cuneiform tablet, which was found, not in Mesopotamia, not in Iraq, but in Egypt. And it was found in the chancery of Amarna. The city where Amenhotep III decided that all the gods were nonsense and the sun god was it. And he tried to change the whole of Egyptian culture into sun worshipers, and it didn’t outlast his reign. But when he became King, Pharaoh, he had a huge empire across the Middle East. Now, because he was so concerned with religious matters and reforming the temples, when it came to organising the empire and keeping an eye on things, he’d rather let things go hang. And what happened was, that the governors, or petty kings, of different countries. What we would call different countries, from Syria, Lebanon, and Jordan, and Israel, who were under the hegemony of the Egyptian Pharaoh, would write letters saying, “What was going on here?” You know, “Come and police the district. We can’t go anywhere.” And there are lots of letters like this. And there’s one, or two, which are really wonderful.

So this letter here is written by a king called Tushratta. And Tushratta was king of the Mitanni people in Syria. M-I-T-A, double N, I. The Mitanni. And they had their own language, the Mitannis. Now the thing was, that this King Tushratta had a daughter, who undoubtedly was very beautiful. And she’d been given to the Egyptian Pharaoh as one of his wives. So Tushratta thought this was diplomatically a sound move to get his own daughter into the bed of the Pharaoh, and prosecuted this with enthusiasm. But what he did not do was to take the precaution of getting the bride price first. So Tushratta, having handed over the girl, had the difficult matter of writing to the Pharaoh to say,“ Ahem. Your majesty, what about the, ahem, money?” And that’s what this letter is like. So it starts off with the usual Amarna style flattery. “May my Lord flourish. May my Lord’s mother-in-law flourish. May his herds flourish, his cattle, and sheep.” And all this kind of stuff. “May the sun beam down on his very footprint.” And so forth, and so forth. Then there’s a ruling across, and here’s now. “By the way, about the money.” And he writes in a fairly polite, but straightforward system to his court scribe. So he’s talking. Follow this carefully, 'cause it’s an amazing thing. He speaks the Mitanni language. So he walks up and down the court say, “I want to tell that guy, I’m not scared of him. I’m going to go.” And then the scribe who, of course, understands Mitanni, but also knows cuneiform because that’s his job, gets the gist of the letter, ignores all the threats, and puts it into formal Babylonian, so that he doesn’t provoke an international problem.

So when he’s finished the letter, a runner takes it from Amarna. From Mitanni in Syria, to Amarna, Egypt. Where the Pharaoh, lounging on his throne, gets the bad news from somebody, there’s a letter from Syria. So it’s brought in, and the Egyptian scribe, who knows Babylonian, will read out, in his head, the Babylonian, and put it into Egyptian. So this is a slightly leaky thing for international secrets. And you can imagine that there might have been times when the scribes who handle this information, one to the other, were possessed of things that perhaps they shouldn’t really know. Anyway, in this case, it’s pretty obvious that nothing happened. But I think, really, the bloke in charge of the chancery thought, “We better hang on to this letter, because it’s going to come back and bite us in the bum.” So, in order to file it in a retrievable way, he wrote at the bottom in ink, in hieratic Egyptian, what it’s about. So here we have a document in cuneiform writing, and Egyptian writing, in the 14th century BC, on one important letter. I think that is a world class miraculous thing. So sometimes people wrote on stone, because, like the famous expression, “Is it written in stone?” In Mesopotamia, if it was written in stone, it really would last forever, even if clay often did.

And they had to imitate when they carved on stone, the doctus, the script, which is characteristically impressed into the clay. And they did that in a very skillful way. So on the right you can see, a stone inscription, very useful on a dig if you find such a thing. Because the archaeologists often don’t know the name of the city, or the name of the temple, or the name of the God, Or anything at all, because all they’ve got is pots. And if there’s an inscription like this. Well, well. Then the epigrapher comes into his own. “I’m able to tell you all you need to know.” And sometimes they have these Mesopotamian cones. They’re a kind of characteristic thing, where you write on the shaft who you are, and the great job you’ve done building this palace. And then it’s pushed into the wall, so only the head is visible. And it’s there as a message for the future in case everything collapses, and some later king wants to know who built the decrepit temple. So this is Ashurbanipal, king of the world, and the subject of one of our greatest exhibitions. And I hope everybody, at least those who are listening in England, if there are any, went to see this exhibition, 'cause it was a corker. So this is Ashurbanipal, who is a major league, conquering emperor type. Good soldier, good this, and that. And also, at the same time, a great scholar of cuneiform. Very rare combination.

And Ashurbanipal had this idea in his mind to bring under one roof, all the traditional writings on clay tablets from his own period, and before, as far back as possible. Because these things survive, as I said, in the ground. And sometimes they were not even in the ground. They were still available. And there were libraries in Babylonia, and libraries elsewhere. And he sent agents to bring to him a bit of all the sources that he could get his hands on. And there was a special chamber where the best calligraphers in the country wrote perfect copies in nice Assyrian handwriting for the king. So we put this on the wall in the exhibition, just to give people an idea of what a cuneiform library looks like. And it’s such a richness, because the writing is perfect. We can read it like newspaper when it’s not damaged And we couldn’t put 'em all out, 'cause there’s more than 25,000 of them. But we put some out. And when people saw it, and went round the corner, and beheld this wall of tablets, they gasped. And they went “Ooh and ahh.” And, of course, for a curator, that is all you could ask. So this is one of the chancellor-made copies of a tablet for Ashurbanipal’s Royal Library. And I put it on the screen, because it’s the very famous story about the flood in the Gilgamesh epic.

So it’s one of our best known sources. It’s the oldest high literature, the story of Gilgamesh, Homeric kind of king and hero, and so forth, and so forth. But the important thing to focus on, on this slide, is my claim that this is calligraphy of a high order, because you can see the beauty of the script, the way it flows so beautifully. There are no mistakes. There are no corrections. And you can tell that the person who wrote that has a strong sense of calligraphy and beauty about his work. So there are lots of other things. I can’t show you everything. We’d be here for hours and hours, which I’d quite like to do. But I’m going to show you a couple of highlights on this slide here. On the left is a piece of the Code of Hammurabi in the Louvre. Now, most, many people have heard of Hammurabi. He wrote this law code on a big, big pillar of diorite. Now the thing is, he had a special kind of writing for monumental inscriptions. Because when he wrote his private correspondence, it was in a normal, relaxed handwriting. But when you had something which was to last forever, and was very important, a state thing, then the signs were written in this special writing. Now, the interesting thing about it is this, that Nebuchadnezzar II, in sixth century BC, in Babylon, king of Babylon, when he had his state documents cut, like bricks, for example. He did not do it in his contemporary writing, but he copied the ancient monumental script of Hammurabi, which was a thousand years older.

So this is quite an interesting thing to observe, that he wanted to present his own contemporary building inscriptions of, “I am the King. I’m marvellous, look at me,” type inscriptions in very old-fashioned smart writing. And I think this is very interesting and suggestive, because, you know, if you are trapped in Oxford at tea time, and you are very hot and thirsty, and you want to go and have some cream cakes, and so forth. You are often subconsciously wafted through the door of something which says, over to Linthorpe, ye olde tea shopee, as if it was from the time of Chaucer. Because the mind says, “If they’d be making teas, teacakes, for 500 years, they probably know how to do it by now. So they’re probably rather good.” And it has this effect on you of stability, reaching back in the past. And on a serious state level, this is what happened with Great King Nebuchadnezzar, who rebuilt Babylon, and the Great Ziggurat, and the walls, and, of course, the hanging gardens. A very big deal, indeed. All of his bricks, every 20 or so, were stamped with an inscription in this writing, “I am Nebuchadnezzar, so watch out.” Now, we started off with some picture signs at the inception of writing, in about 3500. Now, in front of you here, there are two pieces of tablet, where if you look carefully, you will see a column of these pictographic kind of things, where the curvy shapes and little details are drawn in. You can see they are pictures of things. And juxtaposed next to them is the modern cuneiform sign which evolved from it. So they’ve made a list of, not all the signs, a large number of signs, with their very earliest form, and next to it, their contemporary form.

I’ll tell you one, which you might. No, never mind. The remarkable thing about this is. if you think of it, detachedly, that you have such a literate society with three and a half thousand years of writing. And in the end of the first millennium, they knew how their own writing had developed, how it had evolved. And they collected enough ancient things, in their terms, to make this encyclopaedia of all the old things, and next to them, the brand new ones. So this is quite a remarkable achievement, intellectually. There’s no parallel from any other ancient society that they did such a thing. And they did it partly for love of learning. Partly because they thought the oldest writings were the most important, and the most revealing. And also, sometimes the king wanted to write things, not in the script, monumental script of Hammurabi, but something even older from before the flood. So they could write an inscription for the king that looked as if it was there before the flood overwhelmed the earth and the ark was built. So, bit of drama, you know, the Cyrus Cylinder, I hope, which was found in the walls of Babylon when Cyrus conquered that after the reign of Nabonidus, the end of the Babylonians. The Persians arrived, and King Kurus Cyrus was king of the world, and his centre was Babylon. And this cylinder, which was so important and so famous.

Supposed to be the first charter of human rights, which, of course, it isn’t. It was loaned recently to Iran, because they have a big interest in Iran, both in the text, and trying to suppress its implications, because it’s supposed to do with the freedom of humanity. Anyway, they borrowed it, and there were thousands of people going flash, flash, as if it was Princess Diana, and a lot of fuss was made. But we got it back in the end. So this was the Cyrus Cylinder, on one of its world conquering tours. And we all had a big sigh of relief when it came back through the front door of the British Museum. So, a few other odd things to show you while I’ve got you. Firstly, in ancient Mesopotamia, people spent a lot of time, scientists and so forth, spent a lot of time trying to predict the future. They had an idea that there were ominous events that were either spontaneous, that could be observed, or that could be generated by doing certain things for a result. And that the God Shamash, who was in charge of justice and administration of many aspects of the universe, was perfectly prepared to use the liver of a sheep as a writing board, and leave a message on the surface of the liver. So this is a Babylonian conception. And what happened was that when the King had a big decision to be made, they would pick from the herd, such a quadruped in very good shape. It will be slit open, lying on its back, and the liver taken out, steaming hot, and so forth. And the diviner would scrutinise the surface. The main texture, the gallbladder, the other parts of it, the different lobes.

All the different things. He knew, very well indeed, what he had to look at, because funny marks, or lesions, or coloured protuberances, or anything like that deemed extremely significant. And if there was a question about when do we go to war? So a liver reading was taken. He would scrutinise, in the order of priority, which he knew was the correct one, in order to work out whether, say, it should be Tuesday or Thursday, and then tell the King. Very risky business, of course, if it backfired. And they had to accumulate a very substantial amount of knowledge. And this is a model of a sheep’s liver made of clay. Baked clay, in fact. Where, if you look, you can see the surface is divided up into ruled squares with holes in. And this was to teach young diviners, one particular kind of thing to expect in a new liver. Because if you have those things that bore through a liver, those parasitical things, they leave holes and lesions in the surface. And if you found liver with one of these holes in it, from this is a teaching thing, with all of them having a hole. But, of course, you wouldn’t have that normally. Then they would learn the associated information and make a judgement . And what is interesting about this liver, not only this tidily arranged presentation of the data, which is complex, but also the fact that the predictions are correlated with a hole. So, for example, it says, if there’s a hole in such, and such, the caudate lobe.

Then a messenger will betray his master’s secrets to the enemy. Things like that. And so, each of the predictions stimulated to the Babylonian’s mind by a lesion, had something to do with, like, Alice went down the hole. That sort of idea. All kinds of versions of it. And it’s amazing that this teaching model survives. It’s so exact. And the thing at the bottom is a fish made of bronze, and it’s in Paris. And the thing about it is, it has on it, it says “If a fish is missing one of its fins,” which this does, “then the King will defeat the enemy of Elam in battle.” This is in Iran. So that’s the thing, that fish is lacking a fin. And so, this is such an interesting little window, because somebody dredged such a deformed fish out of the canal, and was taken to the temple. The priest, “Oh, my goodness, me, this is very significant!” And then, say, the next morning, the King wins in battle against Elam. So they, “Ah, well this is it! You find one of this sort of thing, that’s what it means.” So what they did is, they made, clearly, a cast in clay of this fish’s cadaver, and then they broke it in half, and they filled it, or they made a hole in it, and they filled it with bronze, which would then swell out. But they’d written on the side of the fish in clay, before they did this, the omen in question. So that when it was cast, you had a replica of the original deformed fish, and the omen went with it.

And this must have been sent to the palace in Nineveh. Or maybe it was the one in Babylon. Where this sort of material was collected for the future. Rather grotesque, but very scientific in its way. So there are lots of treasures in the British Museum, and some of them are really gasp inducing. But this is the so-called map of the world. And there are lovely, lovely things to say about it. I’ll just tell you 73. One of them is that the circle of bitter water surrounds our world is called the Bitter River. And those circles were drawn with a compass, 'cause you can see the hole in the middle. So the Babylonians invented a pair of compasses. Next thing is the river that goes north to south is the Euphrates. And Babylon is there, is named. And the towns of Mesopotamia, in circles, are named. And then there are mountains off the edge. Now the thing is this, there’s only one of these maps, and people talk about it with baited breath, because it’s so precious, and so delicate, and it’s so miraculous. Which, of course, it is. It’s all of those things. But in its day, it wasn’t. And this map is designed to explain who lives on the mountains off the edge of the world. You can see the triangles, I hope, who lives there, and the monsters, and dead kings, and all sorts of people. So it’s a kind of cosmological map predicated on the middle bit, which is where we live. Now, in classical sources, in Greek and Roman sources, here’s a Latin map of the world. You see, it’s surrounded by a Mare, like the one from Babylon. And you see, in the middle, there’s a thing like the letter T, which goes across and goes down from the middle, where this is exactly what’s on the map from Babylon.

Except it’s the other way up, because what they think is a T is actually an upside down T in the original. And classicists call this the T and O map, oblivious of the fact that it is absolutely certainly modelled on a Babylonian forerunner. It can be no doubt about it. So this is, really, an exciting thing that such a complex design, complex drawing, could be transmitted that way into the Greek world. Another quick, marvellous thing. A list of gods. 'Cause in Mesopotamia, they had hundreds of gods, and hundreds of goddesses. But about the time of Nebuchadnezzar, there were a few theologians who thought this was a bit daft. So Marduk was the big shot deity. So this tablet here is a list of important gods, all of whom are described as Marduk, with such, and such, a responsibility. Like the god Ea, is only Marduk with regard to wisdom, or something like that. Or another one is only to do with agriculture. So they had this they had this transparent frozen fossil, in which the intellectual proposition that all the gods that we’ve taken for granted, for centuries and millennia, are but one aspect of a central deity. Which, of course, is the fundamental principle of monotheism. And this comes in this instrument looking tablet from Babylon is very, very full of suggestions. Well, we have musical instruments. I can’t talk about all that. We have instruments like this. We know how to tune them. We have marvellous things like that. Whole other lecture.

We have board games like this. This is the Game of Ur. The thing up on the top of the left is the rules for this game, so we know how to play it. And even Tutankhamun played it. And we know how Tutankhamun played it. How’d you like that? And then this tablet in the middle, which begins, “My city, Holy Babylon, mountain of obsidian, within it there have come to be.” And then the scribe has listed all the games of boys, and all the games of girls. Now you might think that he’s daft, but this is a prayer to Inanna, who, it says, plays with mankind like pieces on a board. And it’s a speculation that you find later in the world. But the most interesting thing, we’ve got nothing to do with Assyriology, except he has everything to do with Assyriology, is that in that tablet, boys and girls games, there are about 70. And this famous painting by Breughel, which has all the boys and girls games you can possibly think of, has about 87. So this raises to me, two very interesting things. One, is that normal human society can only support, at the maximum, however many you can think up about, say, 85-ish, or whatever, games. They’re not hundreds and hundreds of them, because both of these things are supposed to be all. And the second thing is, that probably, all the scenes depicted on this painting are mentioned in this tablet, where they are written out in cuneiform. And we can’t identify most of them, because the words are very unusual, and they’re very peculiar, and they’re obviously just names. And names don’t necessarily mean what we want them to mean.

But if it will be possible to sort it out, then this tablet will be illustrated and explained by the same, preferably, but same thing in European historical terms, because the things they do is with dice, and setting fire to people, and cutting the heads off dolls, and playing with hoops, and all the other boyish things that people enjoy so much at school. Absolutely the same thing. So an important matter is this, that Babylonians counted in sixties. Never forget this, because if anybody says to you, museums that have things to do with Mesopotamia are wasting their time. And people who talk about this stuff are wasting their time. It’s not true. One very useful thing is this. They counted, not like we do in tens, but in sixties. So a single upright wedge, you can see in the top left hand corner, is number one And two together is number two. And three together is number three. And so forth, up till 10, when you have one at an angle. And then you can have two at an angle, three as, and so forth. Then you go all the way up to 60. So this is what’s known as sexagesimal counting. An important thing. Now look at this, one of the world’s most unattractive slides. This is a very, very late third century BC tablet with the first and last visibilities of the planet Mercury over a long period of time. The times are recorded in columns of numbers. Columns of numbers. And it is the fruit of many, many, many people’s observations, all put together in this encyclopaedic document.

One, two, looked below. That most unpleasing fragment of Greek papyrus, which I’m presenting to you there, is something in itself equally miraculous, because that’s only part of it. But the whole has on it, a sequence of numbers, which comes from that tablet. It overlaps with that tablet. And it doesn’t mean that the Greek necessarily copied this actual document, because in the university in Babylon, there were surely other examples. But what it means is this, that a Greek in Babylon was on good terms with his counterparts in the astronomical world, in Babylon, who handed over to him their tablets of learning. And he then copied them out using Greek letters for the numbers, because the numbers in the whole of the sequence are so idiosyncratic that they can only be explained in this way. That is a Greek in Babylon transcribing astronomical knowledge into papyrus in ink. And this happened just about the time when cuneiform was beginning to disappear, and alphabetic writing of Persian, and Greek, and Arabic, and so forth, was going to supplant it. It was still holding on, but not for long. But the Greeks, who were very good at theorising, had no data, so they knew about the Babylonian. So off they went to study there. And they obviously welcomed them with open arms, and said, “Kid, help yourself. Just look at this.” Which is what they did. And this is the most amazing thing you’ll ever see in your life. And if you are not feeling faint, and in need of a glass of cold water, I’ll be disappointed. This is the backside of a tablet, which is a school tablet from about 200 BC. So the cuneiform is on the other side, as you know.

But on this side, what do we have? Well, it comes from a dictionary. And it’s a dictionary in which Sumerian words, the oldest language, and their Babylonian equivalence, or Akkadian equivalence, as I called it before, same thing, are equated. So, for example, one line, one in green, is that the Sumerian word pa-lal means canal, is the same word as the Babylonian or Akkadian, a-tap-pi. It’s a lexical text. And in fact, there’s lots of vocabulary to do with river administration, and dams, and dredging. Lots and lots of vocabulary. And this is the first simple word that Sumerian pa-lal is a-tap-pi in Akkadian. And the scribe has written in his own Greek script, transcriptions of these barbaric words in an attempt to master them. So when he’s writing pa-lal, he writes pha-lal in Greek. Well, there’s no pha in Sumerian, or in Babylonian. But to his ear, whatever he heard in this amazing sound bite, he heard pha-la, and that’s how he spelled it. And the Babylonian a-tap=pi, he heard as athaph, where there’s no th in Greek, or pha in Greek. But to his ear, a-tap-pi, which is how we read it, sounded like athaph. So, probably, at that time, the Babylonian that we know from its old spelling was pronounced like that. It’s like having a kind of telephone, when you line straight into our classroom, where we hear these words for ourselves. So this is an extraordinary thing. And the most marvellous thing about it is, sorry. The most marvellous thing about it is we know that the Greeks borrowed material from Mesopotamia. We know they were welcomed in Mesopotamia. There was a sharing of knowledge. There was no copyright, or we want money, or anything of that kind of rubbish. Astronomers from Greece were obviously welcomed by the astronomers in Babylon. They threw everything over.

They copied out what they wanted and they went home. And when they went home, all the documents were in sexagesimal script, sexagesimal counting. So that is why we have 60 seconds in a minute, and 60 minutes in an hour, and 360 degrees in a circle. Which comes in a linear descent from Greece, which comes in a linear descent from Babylon, which comes in a linear descent from Sumer. Which means that anybody who still has a real watch with numbers on, instead of one of the modern ludicrous type watches, is, in fact, maintaining this direct link to the oldest writing in the world, and this great culture. Which, really, I could talk to you for hours, because there are so many marvellous things. But the most important thing is, if anybody ever tells you that museums are a waste of time, or these dead things are a waste of time, the best thing to do with the side edge of your hand, is chop them in the Adam’s apple and walk past. Thank you.

• [Host] Thanks, Irving. That was amazing. We have quite a few questions from the audience, so we’ll just jump into them.

Q&A and Comments:

Q: Our first question is, what about the intonation in talking and writing?

A: - [Irving] All right. That’s a very good question. So we have the two languages, Sumerian and Akkadian. Now, Sumerian will be a shut book, except this, that we have bilinguals, in which the Sumerian was translated into Akkadian by people who knew it. So this is very, very fortunate. And often there are a dictionaries with lists of Sumerian words and their Akkadian equivalent. And very often, these special dictionaries have little signs to explain the pronunciation of the Sumerian. So it all worked in a backward kind of way, because when the script was first, first deciphered, it was done because Babylonian text was realised to be a translation of a text in Old Persian. And one of the things about it was, rather like the Rosetta Stone, it had the names of kings, and kings before them, and kings before them, in the Persian. And it said things like, Darius was the King, Great King, son of the Great King. And they realised, very quickly, that there was a lump in the cuneiform, which was completely unintelligible, which corresponded to this repetitive pattern. And so they got the first syllables, like with Cleopatra. And they found that this must be da, ri, and so forth. And so, when they had a few, they started to look at everything. And then they had an idea here. And then they realised that Akkadian was Semitic. That meant they had all the dictionaries of all those languages.

One of the clinchers where they found the word narum, which means nahar, which means river. And when they discovered the word narum in Akkadian meant river, they knew for certain they had a Semitic language. So using the dictionaries for, as an aid, and the fact that the scribes often wrote the same words in a different way, gradually, gradually, they worked out what the signs meant. And each brick in the wall was a kind of beam of light. And sooner, or by about 1850, 1855, cuneiform could be read very fluently. And it’s lucky that there were such clever people who worked on it, 'cause it was a very difficult proposition. So the other thing is, it’s a good question, it’s a really big question, but also, sometimes in Babylonian, we have the transcription of foreign names in cuneiform. And so, you know, they knew that Sennacherib in the Bible was called Sin-ahhe-eriba in Hebrew, and then they realised that Sin-ahhe-eriba was the Hebrew version of Sennacherib. And that locked in, and they had those signs. But gradually, gradually, it was a real tour de force of the intellect. So now it means that we know what it sounds like, in this respect. I think Babylonian conversation between, comfortably, of merchants, would sound a bit like a conversation heard through the door, if you were in Aleppo, thinking about going to buy a carpet, that the Akkadian is not as guttural as Arabic.

But politely fluent Arabic would be sounds, like, imagine quite a lot like Babylonian, in a native speaker’s presentation. Sumerian is much more difficult, because it’s a different family altogether. And they had mmm sounds, like in Tibetan. But they had, probably, more than one mmm, and more than one other kind of problem. And the writing is often very incomplete. And so, we have a good idea about Sumerian, but this, the test is this. If we are in a room together, and a Babylonian came in, and I had a crack at conversation, the Babylonian would probably look at me, and sit down, and clap his hands to his head, and probably start laughing. But, eventually, between us, there’d be a bit of manipulation here and there. And, eventually, he would tweak that it was supposed to be Babylonian, and we’d go from there. But if Sumerian chap came, and we tried with that, I don’t know what would happen. I just have no idea. But it might be three years before anybody tweaked, “Oh, I see.” Something like that. But it’s not likely to happen.

Q - [Host] Thank you. Someone is asking, were only upper class boys educated in cuneiform?

A - [Irving] I think yes. Scribes, certainly ran in families. Many different times, there were powerful merchants who had their own accountants. So there’s always some cousin, or somebody, who could do all the accounts, and write all the stuff. So they had a vested interest in it. So that was one party. And then all the professions, like being a doctor, an exorcist, a diviner, or a court chancellor, or so to speak. Anything he worked for, the King, and state matters, they all had to be literary. And it’s almost entirely boys. There’s only a scant evidence for girls going to learn. And I think there were two stages. That you got reading, and you learned the script. So if the teacher read out something, you could put it into cuneiform, that would be the test. So then you go off to earn a living, so to speak. But if they were really bright kids, or kids who came from astronomer families, or where they were expected to go into the profession, as well as being writers, they would, I think, do a sort of PhD, where they would move from facility, in the writing, in general, to a mastery of all the important literature. And I think it’s very probable. See, the backbone of it all was these lexical texts where words were listed in a rational order. Sometimes Sumerian equated to Akkadian, sometimes other things as well. And all the signs were listed. I think they learned everything by heart. The people who were really going to be proper, real scribes, they learned everything by heart. They had it where they needed it. Of course, if you were a very able intellectual scribe, there’d always be a job for you in the palace. Especially with somewhere like Ashurbanipal, who was very interested in all these things, and liked nothing more than to sit down with a couple of scholars, and debate the meaning of some omen, which is obscure, and some other person had written, maybe this word means this. And then they’d have a kind of argy bargy about it with great pleasure. So they had this kind of upper class, intellectual scribe. And then people who, as I say, went to the city gate, and did writing for a few pennies, or pack of cigarettes, so to speak, for people who needed it.

Q - [Host] Thank you. How, and when, was cuneiform deciphered?

A - [Irving] Well, it was deciphered in about 1845, a bit, because I said on the basis of this inscription, where you had your own Persian, Royal Persian inscription, in Persian, next to a Babylonian translation. And when they could read the Persian, they knew what the whole Babylonian had to say. And then by using, as I said, the trick of identifying names that gave them some syllables, and it showed them that the writing was syllabic. And then it showed them, with a bit of luck, that, eventually, that it was Semitic. So with those two things, there were half a dozen people who made contributions. The most important was an Irish clergyman called Edward Hincks, who was a real genius. There were some very clever people, but he was a real genius. And he was the person who really understood that the same sign could have many more than one kinds of use, which is a nasty characteristic of cuneiform. But he saw it. So his is the name, Edward Hincks. It should be on fridge magnets, in my opinion.

Q - [Host] Thank you. Back to the question of literacy. Could any women read and write?

A - [Irving] No. As far as we understand it, very small minority of persons could write properly. So, unless you were one of the families where this was necessary. I mean, people who were farmers, and sailors, and low class merchants, and worked on the rivers, and who were in the army, and all those sorts of people, for sure couldn’t read. Probably couldn’t read their own name. And then there were the highly educated classes, whose knowledge was derived from documents from an earlier period. So they had to be able to read everything and understand it. And there’s been dispute about whether the kings themselves could read cuneiform. And I’ll tell you why. Because Ashurbanipal, that great librarian, wrote on the end of his tablets he had a column for, and it said, “Unlike the kings who went before me, I can read and write cuneiform.” So Assyriologists who are gullible, and sometimes rather non discerning species, believed him. So they thought that Ashurbanipal was the first king to be able to read cuneiform, and was boasting about it.

But, of course, it’s absurd if someone says, “I was the first to do it.” The first thing you realise, of course, they weren’t the first to do it. And, of course, they weren’t the first to do it. So somebody like Sennacherib, who was also king of the world, and ruled an empire. And had many wives, and many sons, and had to have his finger on many pulses, it’s quite impossible to believe he couldn’t read and write. It’s utterly impossible. Now there’s a kind of mystique about it, 'cause if you decide to do Assyriology, if you, in fact, if you all decide to give up your present life pattern and go into learning Assyriology, there are different things you have to master in the modern world. You have to learn all the signs and all their uses. And then you have to learn the language. But there are different things, 'cause you, you know, if you learn French language, that’s all there is to it. You don’t have to learn a funny writing system. With Babylonian, you have to learn both. Now, in antiquity, nobody had to learn the language, 'cause they’d learned it with their mother’s milk. And Sennacherib was, no doubt, a very fluent exponent of the Babylonian tongue. So all you have to do is learn the signs.

And if you are ruling the universe, you would have to know how to read your name. You have to learn how to read the inscriptions, because you have every reason to do it. And, of course, they weren’t stupid. And if I can do it, well, then they can do it. So I’m quite sure that the kings always could read. I mean, after all, imagine you are in the palace, and these foreign ambassadors come. And they’re in trouble with the Assyrian king, because they’re a bit behind on their gold and silver payments. And, you know, a bit nervous. And to make conversations, one of them says to Sennacherib, “Oh, what does this say? I wish we could read this.” And Sennacherib said, “Well, don’t ask me. I have no idea.” What kind of king would he look? He would, of course, be able to read it. So it’s a lot of nonsense talked about it. But the mass of the population had nothing to do with writing. And the more affluent, or the more powerful members of that group, who couldn’t do writing, would get a scribe to do it for them. It was that sort of situation.

Q - [Host] Thank you. And how many people in the world today can read cuneiform?

A - [Irving] Well, this is a jolly difficult question. When I was a student, which was quite a long time ago, I used to think there maybe were 200. There might be quite a lot more now. But actually, I mean, I don’t like to sound like a complete jerk, but reading cuneiform, if you’re going to read cuneiform, you’ve got to do nothing else for about 20 years. And then you can read cuneiform. I mean, I think a lot of people learn a bit. And they read a bit at college, or they’ve done something. But the real test is you put a cuneiform tablet in front of somebody, which can be of any date, over a three and a half thousand year period. And you say, “What does it say?” And if you can translate it, or do a good shot at it. Well, at least get the bulk of it out. Then you can say you can read cuneiform. So I don’t know how many people who, if you subjected them to that austere test, would pass. And how many would pass with flying colours? I have no idea. All I do know, which is the most important answer to this question, is there are not enough of them? Because the discipline of Assyriology is, relatively speaking, in its infancy. There are so many thousands of documents still to be read. There must be millions of documents in the ground, which one day will come to light. And it’s a branch of the humanities, which is full of drama, and excitement, money, glamour, fast cars, women. Everything you could ever ask. It’s just a fantastic career being an Assyriologist. And therefore, I cannot understand why we don’t have more kids doing it at university. But in Britain, they’ve almost closed down all the departments that teach this sort of thing, because it’s a waste of money. So we have to fight. So if you have kids milling about, not knowing what to do with their lives, have a word in their ear. Everything would be different.

Q - [Host] Someone is asking how numbers were written.

A - [Irving] Well, didn’t you see the slide of it? That one I showed a little picture, which had one vertical wedge, is one and two together is two. And then I can probably find it, if you would like. It’s easier to, I don’t know if I can do that now. Is it possible? No, probably not. Well, they wrote in 60s, so they had to have signs for the numbers 1 to 60. And they just use a vertical wedge for the number 1, up to the number 9. And then they had a diagonal wedge for 10. So if you wanted to write 11, you do one diagonal and one vertical. And go on like that. So 21 will be two diagonals, and so forth, and a vertical. They used the 60 base, where the upright wedge was 1 and 60 for everything. That’s how it came into Greek, as I said, about the 60 seconds. But also, lots of mathematicians have told me that to have a base 60 is more flexible, in some ways, than the base 10, which everybody uses, probably because we all have 10 fingers.

Q - [Host] Thank you. And how do you know what the words sounded like?

A - [Irving] We know when they found out how the syllables worked, for example, they found out the words were spelt with syllables. So, for example, quite early on, they discovered that there was a place on the bricks of Nebuchadnezzar called ba-bi-lon. They wrote ba-bi-lon. And that was Babylon. So it was found in Babylon, and it was a building in Babylon. And instead of writing it in a funny complex way, sometimes they write Bab-ilu. So that was a fantastic thing, because that showed everything was right. That ba-bi-lou had been properly understood, and that the way they transcribed things was proper. So lots of things like that happened. And the way it became clear was, when you had a word, like, for example, the word for earth in Akkadian is ersetu. It’s a female noun, ersetu. And this was early discovered. The word samu meant heaven, and ersetu meant earth.

In Hebrew, shamayim means heaven, and erets means earth. So when you know these basic words in Hebrew, and you see that it clinches the matter, it shows the consonants are parallel. And each one of these small things made a kind of iron bridge for the understanding of how the script works. So now, we know what almost all the sounds, all the signs sounded like. Some of them had other special sounds that were very unusual. But it’s pretty much an open book to us. And the people that we were talking about who can reconnect from, competently, if you have this wonderful tablet of Gilgamesh from the library, in that beautiful calligraphy could, should, be able to read it at sight like newspaper, because it’s so clear. So it’s a remarkable thing that in 1830, that no one could read a word. And when Layard found the first tablets, everybody thought they were writing, but they didn’t know which way up they went. And then this concatenation of brilliant minds cracked it, broke it wide open, and these voices from the clay came out. Kings, and queens, and princesses, and merchants, and prostitutes, and slobs, and crooks, and all the other things, all came out of the clay in this marvellous, this dead tongue, which was suddenly still alive. So, very exciting thing.

Q - [Host] Thank you. Someone’s asking if the scribes wrote the contract, and acted in a secretarial role, was it the case that the merchants were illiterate, or could they check the documents that inventories they would sign off on?

A - [Irving] Good question. If you were a big scale merchant who dealt with caravans to across the world, and organised all this stuff, for sure, they could read and write. For sure. I think when you got to a portly stage when you were in charge, and there were lots of sons and nephews running around doing everything, you didn’t do your own writing. Because, well, you know, you didn’t. It’s like people don’t drive their own cars. They have a chauffeur at a certain level. It’s something like that. I think it wouldn’t be de rigeur for certain people to do their own writing. Although they could in a pinch if they needed to. The other thing about cuneiform writing is, to write with a stylus, that stick, on clay, in such a way that the lines are straight, and the signs are the same height, and everything, is fantastically difficult. And I’m often experimenting with it. And these scribes were trained in such a way that their hand was wonderful. And I think it’s probable, that if you didn’t write for 20 years, you get rusty, in the sort of bicycle way. So I think, probably, in a big family where writing was necessary for commercial purposes, there’d be two or three young chaps who would do it. And as they made their own families, and got bigger, and moved away, they’d probably delegate in the same fashion. But I think your point about checking is very much appreciated, because, I think, any culture where inventories of bills, and everything like that were taken so seriously, there’s no way that the head of the firm would just take people’s words. “You’d just let me look at that, will you, for a moment? I’d just like to. Yes, I, hmm? What about this here?” Kind of thing. I’m quite sure that must have happened from a position of knowledge.

• [Trudy] I’m going to jump in here, because Irving, you’ve been absolutely superb. And all I can say is we’ve been going through about two and a half years on Lockdown University. This is one of the most fascinating lectures we’ve ever had. And all I can say is come back as soon as possible. I’ll be on the phone to you. So thanks a million.

• [Irving] We’ll meet tomorrow evening. Okay?

• [Trudy] Hmm?

• [Irving] We’ll meet tomorrow evening at the same time then. Fine.

• [Trudy] Definitely. I’ll phone you.

• [Irving] How lovely. All right.

• [Trudy] Thank you. Thanks a million.

• [Irving] Bye-bye.

• [Trudy] Thanks, Lauren. God bless everyone.

• [Irving] Bye-bye. Bye-bye.