Irving Finkel Claims Göbekli Tepe Plaquette Is Early Evidence of a Writing System

​Last week, Irving Finkel, the British Museum Assyriologist who made headlines in 2014 when he discovered a cuneiform text describing the Mesopotamian version of Noah’s Ark as round, appeared on Lex Fridman’s podcast and made a controversial claim that a small carved stone found at Göbekli Tepe is evidence that the people who built the site had a writing system. In so doing, Finkel, who is now a contributor to Ancient Aliens, implied that archaeologists are blind to the writing system he sees so easily and that they don’t want to admit that a Mesopotamian-style social organization and set of cultural tools would be necessary to build the enclosures at the site. However, it turns out that Finkel is the one who is blind to archaeologists’ conclusions.

​Here's a bit of what he said:

If you go all the way through the photographs, which the archeologists unwisely put online, you will find in the middle of one color plate with lots of other things, a round green stone like a scarab from Egypt. That’s to say, it has an arched back and a flat bottom. And on the flat bottom, there are hieroglyphic signs carved in the stone. No one said anything about it at all, but it’s clear to me, A, that this was a stamp to ratify, where the carvings of the signs on clay or some other sealing material would leave an impression. It must be that. So this is about 9000 BC.
 
Now when I was a boy at university, my professor said to me that the reason writing evolved in Mesopotamia is because they had complex cities with ziggurats and big buildings and lots of people and they had to organize everything, and so they invented writing to cope with it. Well, if they had to cope with that in Sumer in 3000 BC, they sure as hell had to do it at Göbekli Tepe, because they’ve hardly even begun to finish excavating the sites of Göbekli Tepe. They go on and on like Manchester and Newcastle United.
 
And really, the old rule would be you could not have architecture like that, planned and built according to principle with all the different people. You couldn’t have that without writing in southern Iraq. So how come suddenly then 7,000 years earlier, they do it there? That, and that green stone shows that they had writing. That was an official who sealed this, got the stuff or whatever it was, or it was his dad’s name or whatever it is, got a wiggly snake and a wiggly this. That is pictographic writing. Maybe even as phonetic writing, I don’t know, but it was writing thousands of years before in the south. And that’s what I think it is.

Now, there are a few obvious red flags here. First, assuming that the archaeologists would have hidden the evidence if they had only recognized it and that they are being lazy about excavating seems like the kind of thing Graham Hancock or Jimmy Corsetti would say, not a British Museum scholar. For another, Finkel’s inability to recognize that conclusions change in light of new evidence is similarly dumbfounding. When he asks how it was that “suddenly” people could build large buildings without a central monarchy, he belies his own inability to imagine that new evidence can create exciting new conclusions, upended what professors from half a century ago might have taught their charges.
 
But to the specific point about the specific stone he references, this is the plaquette in question:

​This is one of many similar artifacts, some of which have a grooved edge and others which do not. Archaeologists classify plaquettes with a grooved edge as “shaft straighteners,” used for straightening arrows or spears, though this is disputed and some believe them to be ritual objects representing vulvas. According to archaeological textbooks I consulted, such plaquettes and shaft straighteners, most bearing abstract markings, designs, or small images, have been found in an almost unbroken sequence in the region, dating all the way back to the Epipaleolithic, though the oldest do not have markings. Taking this one plaquette out of context to claim it as uniquely different is highly suspect.
 
As it happens, archaeologists have not refused to speak about this one in particular. The Tepe Telegrams blog about work at the site covered the plaquette in 2016, and made some important notes about it that seem to have escaped Finkel’s notice, since he only looked at a picture and didn’t research it in more detail:

From the left to the right, it shows a snake moving upwards, a stylized human figure (?) with raised arms, and a bird. What makes this small find so interesting, is that the combination of depictions reappears not only in similar (e.g. in Jerf el Ahmar with a fox in place of the human-shape?), but also in completely and nearly identical form twice on another site, Tell Abr´3 in northern Syria…

​Tell Abr´3 dates to around the ninth millennium BCE, which makes it slightly younger than its contemporary, Göbekli Tepe, with which it overlapped in time. Similar plaquettes that also featured iconography from the same constellation of symbols found at Göbekli Tepe—including snakes, scorpions, animals, birds, and insects—have also been found at coeval sites like Jerf el Ahmar and Tell Qaramel.
 
Had Finkel consulted the academic literature, he would have seen that in a 2022 chapter for the Routledge Handbook of Senses in the Ancient Near East, Sarah Kielt Costello already identified these objects, including the specific plaquette from Göbekli Tepe, as a forerunner of Neolithic and later Mesopotamian seals. She also noted that the earliest evidence indicates that such seals were more likely portable or wearable devices with symbolic and ritual uses rather than ones used specifically for sealing with wax or clay, as there are very few surviving examples of impressions until Mesopotamian times. In other words, the economic use of the seals followed from a long prior history of deploying such objects as, basically, portable religious icons.
 
Nevertheless, this seems to be a case where Finkel sees the world through his own specialization and imagined he made a major discovery because he did not consult with experts in a field beyond his own, or, apparently, even Google it.