How to write cuneiform with Irving Finkel and @preservethings I Curator's Corner S4 Ep9
Why Hacker News recommends it
Recommended as the best short, funny and approachable introduction to cuneiform on YouTube.
What it is
British Museum curator Irving Finkel teaches how to write cuneiform, with a colleague following along. It is a short, lively introduction to the script.
Recommended by 3 HN commenters across 2 different months, 2023 to 2025.
What Hacker News said
Strong rec shagie · 2023-06 · on “Turn dumb tweets into cuneiform tablets”
If this is interesting... Irving Finkel is the person to look up for cuneiform on Youtube. From the British Museum: Irving Finkel teaches how to write cuneiform [this video] There are many other videos by him, but that's a place to start.
Strong rec nosianu · 2023-06 · on “Turn dumb tweets into cuneiform tablets”
There are many similar ones, but I like this one from The British Museum the most, because of the teacher: "Irving Finkel teaches how to write cuneiform I Curator's Corner Season 4 Episode 8 #CuratorsCorner" Who is he: > Irving Leonard Finkel is a British philologist and Assyriologist. He is the Assistant Keeper of Ancient Mesopotamian script, languages and cultures in the Department of the Middle East in the British Museum, where he specialises in cuneiform inscriptions on tablets of clay from ancient Mesopotamia. It's short enough for an introduction, funny and entertaining, and broad enough, with some sprinkling of information that gives an idea of the complexities of the language too, no
Strong rec Jun8 · 2025-11 · on “Why I'm Learning Sumerian”
If you are interesting anything related to cuneiform writing or ancient Mesopotamian culture , Irving Finkel, a British Museum curator, is a treasure. Here he is teaching how to write cuneiform: [this video] Here is a hilarious talk he gave at Chicago's Oriental Institute on Noah's Ark: [LINK]
Cites pastage · 2025-06 · on “How to Store Data on Paper?”
Bits per [cm²|cm³|kg] is interesting like you get with cuneiform ceramic tablets[1], this one get about 1 word per cm² and cuneiform is crazy dense, I have no real grasp of how sumerian or akkadian words worked. I think it was heavily context based because from some lecture[2] at the British Museum. I have seen people do ceramics where information was stacked in layers and had to be destroyed to extract. The ultimate form of shifting media to preserve and read information. I guess that could done with better resolution with 3D printed Zirconia (0.1 mm³ blobs) so 1Mb /cm³ Edit: this idea of a cold storage is from Footfall by Niven and Pournelle, where information was stored on monoliths where