Shadowing Practice: Controversial theory about Göbekli Tepe | Irving Finkel and Lex Fridman - Learn English Speaking with Video
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Do you think it's possible we might find much, much older cuneiform-type tablets?
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Or pictographic-type tablets, but before the cuneiform and the drawing type.
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And I'll tell you why.
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Because there's this marvelous site in Turkey called Göbekli Tepe.
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Do you know about Göbekli Tepe?
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Well, everybody knows about the buildings and the architecture and the skull.
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Everybody knows about it.
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If you go all the way through the photographs, which the archaeologists unwisely put online,
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you will find in the middle of one colour plate with lots of other things, a round green stone like a scarab from Egypt.
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That's to say, it has an arched back and a flat bottom.
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And on the flat bottom, there are hieroglyphic signs carved in the stone.
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No one said anything about it at all.
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But it's clear to me, A, that this was a stamp
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to ratify where the carvings of the signs on clay or some other sealing material would leave an impression.
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It must be that.
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So this is about 9000 BC.
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Now, when I was a boy at university, my professor said to me that the reason writing evolved in Mesopotamia
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because they had complex cities with ziggurats and big buildings and lots of people and they had to organize everything.
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And so they invented writing to cope with it.
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Well, if they had to cope with that in Sumer in 3000 BC, they sure as hell had to do it at Gebekli Tepe
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because they hardly even begun to finish excavating the sites of Gebekli Tepe.
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They go on and on like Manchester and Newcastle United.
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And really, the old rule would be you could not have architecture like that,
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that planned and built according to principle with all the different people.
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You couldn't have that without writing in southern Iraq.
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So how come suddenly, 7,000 years earlier, they do it there?
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And that green stone shows that they had writing.
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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.
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That is pictographic writing.
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Maybe even as phonetic, I don't know, but it was writing thousands of years before in the South.
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And that's what I think it is.
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People came with metal or precious stones from Anatolia.
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They knew that in the South they had lots and lots of stuff.
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They wanted to trade.
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They had to communicate.
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And it's basically like having a cigarette with an X through the middle.
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Everybody in the world knows what that means they don't know what the word for cigarette is in this language, or cancer, or filter, or tobacco.
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It doesn't matter.
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That's pictographic writing.
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We still use it.
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And it's above all kinds of mess.
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And I think that was the pervading system, because I honestly believe that the people at this time were not stupid.
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They weren't gorillas.
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They weren't less advanced than we are.
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They were probably indistinguishable from what we are.
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So you have merchants and wanderers and people who say, let's go down the river and see where We end up and people were looking for money, looking for women, looking for everything.
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But that's surely how it was.
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But if you look at those Gobekli buildings with a skeptical eye, how it could be.
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I mean, the finish of it is astonishing.
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The structure of it, the vision of it.
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So the workforce and the tools and the organization, you know, what do they do?
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It with a megaphone, your breakfast and all that kind of thing.
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No way.
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No way.
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So that's a really controversial statement.
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It is really controversial.
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At the time of Gubekli Tepe, they may have been already a writing system.
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There was.
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Because the thing is about it, that it's a seal to ratify.
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It's not just a squiggle on a pot and you can say, oh, that's just a piece of debt.
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This is a finished thing with a flat surface.
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You press it down.
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So you have some contract.
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You have some building arrangement, some paying for these bricks, whatever it was.
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And the official person had to squash it down.
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And it leaves the impression.
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I mean, I'm a great believer in Sherlock Holmes as a teaching system for intelligence and rationality and logic and thinking.
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I read those stories a million times when I was a kid.
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And the thing about them, one of the things which impresses me most of all, was this point quoted by Holmes,
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not original to him, that it is theoretically possible to infer the Niagara Falls from a raindrop.
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That's a powerful statement.
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It's a powerful statement.
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Well, that seal from Gobekli Tepe is a raindrop from which I infer writing.
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And it's perfectly possible they all wrote on flat leaves, carved through, and in many parts of the world, that's what happens.
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So, for example, in the Indus Valley, people write the most abject nonsense about the Indus Valley writing system.
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But all we have is seals, basically.
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So they are also for ratification purposes.
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And they have the name of the owner in three or four or maybe five signs.
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and it's probably me son of my dad or milkman
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or whatever it is and it's obvious it's obvious
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that they had writing on a perishable material they can't just have had inscribed stone seals
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and many parts of india today write on palm leaf why should it be any different
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so people think you know well just because it's now it wouldn't be then but actually that argument is utterly utterly fallacious,
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because the process of evolution is stymied, left, right, and center, by inertia.
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Inertia is nearly as strong as evolution.
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And this is something that the people who talk about progress and ideas have no idea about.
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First of all, your whole line of work, you're making me realize, is a kind of like Sherlock Holmes type of process.
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The deciphering of the language, archaeology, of taking those pieces of evidence and trying to reconstruct a vision of that world.
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And now you're making me realize
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that even all the cuneiform tablets we have is just a raindrop compared to the waterfall of thousands of years of humans.
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We have a lot, but it's nothing in comparison with what existed.
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But not only that, see, we don't have to decipher anymore.
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We can read Akkadian or Babylonian Sumerian pretty well fluently.
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That's not a problem.
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So the information which you can get from these sources, especially three millennia of sources, is very, very substantial.
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Very substantial.
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But it means that Assyriologists have the inbuilt idea that what we have is something like all there ever was, which is absurd.
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For example, there's a period called the Earth-free period, where people lived in city-states.
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They wrote very small account tablets by the thousand, and there were two or three major cities where this is the way they lived.
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People had to bring tithes and offerings, and everything was recorded by what I always refer to and people sympathize with as the ancestors of the inland revenue.
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Because everything had to be written down so that some schmuck could check it and fill out the ledger, and some other schmuck above him could okay it so there was no funny business or no mistakes.
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Now, the thing is, there are thousands of those tablets written in about 2100 to 2000 BC.
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Thousands of them, about the size of a box of matches.
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So people like to generalize about the Sumerians at this time of the world.
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But they probably all came out of two rooms.
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Because they were dumped when they were no longer needed in some kind of room.
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The archaeologists in the 19th century came down on these, and then all the locals came and they dug them up and they sold them all over the place, and they've gone all over the world, thousands and thousands of them,
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out of probably two storage rooms, which is not a whole culture, or a whole country, or their whole history, or their belief systems.
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So our view of it is slewed by the nature of the material.
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Sometimes the material is opulent and benevolent, but not always.
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And sometimes the people who work with slewed material don't even realize how slewed it is.
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I mean, you know, it's quite remarkable.
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So you, in all your time of studying cuneiform tablets, do you sometimes, late at night, get a glimpse of the waterfall?
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Can you imagine?
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Yes, I can imagine.
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I can imagine easily.
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Because once in a while, a library is discovered.
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In the 1850s, at Nineveh, which was the Assyrian capital, there was a fat king, king of the world, called Ashurbanipal.
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And he had a fantastic library.
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And he promoted it.
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He impounded tablets.
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He had them brought in.
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He wanted all the pervading knowledge, and all knowledge from before, under one roof.
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It was a kind of like Alexandria thing.
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So he was a trained scholar, and this is what he did.
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And they found it in the 19th century.
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They dug it up, Layard and those people.
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So what did they find?
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They found the tablets higgledy-piggledy all over the floor of a huge room in the corridors and everything, and lots of them broken, and lots of them burned.
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So, ever since then, until really quite recently, Assyriologists have spent all their people who work on these Nineveh tablets, all the time joining the bits together.
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And you have the story about Gilgamesh, and the goddess who falls in love with him in the garden, and she wants to seduce him, and dot, dot, dot, you can't find the bit.
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So you look for another bit, and you look for another bit.
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And gradually, they piece together the literature.
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And the assumption has always been that if you put them all together again, you'll have the whole library.
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But it's the absolute opposite.
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Because what happened was that the Babylonians in the south, in my opinion, they worked hand in glove with the Elamites from Iran.
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They had a pincer movement, and they beat Assyria.
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They conquered Assyria.
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They ran through the capital, and they set fire to everything, pinched all the women, and took all the jewelry and all the gold.
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And people say that in a fit of peak they destroyed the library
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but they wouldn't destroy the library because it was the giant brain from
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which the assyrians ran a world empire
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and it had all the knowledge in the world they destroyed
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that they spoke the same language they had the same writing
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system they'd have taken them all safely home cart after cart after cart
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and i think what's left there is duplicates and broken things the things that got drops and everything.
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And that's what everyone thinks is it.
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So this is also a controversial point.
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You just knocked off.
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It's starting trouble.
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It's common sense.
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You're going to get both of us canceled today.
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But you see the thing.
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You see the thing.
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It's predicated on the assumption that what we have is only what there was.
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And this is such a fallacy.
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It needs to be attacked left, right, and center.
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Thank you.
About This Lesson
In this lesson, learners will engage with a fascinating discussion surrounding Göbekli Tepe, an archaeological site in Turkey. By practicing the concepts presented in the transcript, students will enhance their English speaking skills, particularly their ability to articulate complex ideas and historical concepts. This lesson focuses on improving English pronunciation and fluency through a unique approach to understanding ancient civilizations and their advancements in communication. Utilizing the shadowing technique, learners will replicate the speech patterns and intonations of the speakers, making it a dynamic part of their IELTS speaking practice and overall English speaking practice.
Key Vocabulary & Phrases
- Göbekli Tepe - an ancient archaeological site in Turkey, considered one of the world's oldest religious structures.
- Cuneiform - one of the earliest systems of writing, developed by the Sumerians around 3000 BC.
- Pictographic - a form of writing that uses pictures to represent words or concepts.
- Architecture - the art or practice of designing and constructing buildings.
- Hieroglyphic - a formal writing system used in ancient Egypt, composed of pictorial symbols.
- Seal - a device used to make an impression on a surface, often indicating authenticity or ownership.
- Trade - the act of buying, selling, or exchanging goods and services.
- Merchants - individuals involved in the trading of goods, often as part of a larger economic system.
Practice Tips
To maximize the benefits of this lesson, utilize the shadowing technique with the video transcript to enhance your English pronunciation. Start by listening to a small segment of the audio, pausing after each sentence. Attempt to mimic the speaker’s intonation, rhythm, and pronunciation before proceeding to the next segment. Pay special attention to the inflection and emphasis on key vocabulary like Göbekli Tepe and cuneiform.
Given the insightful yet complex nature of the topic, don’t hesitate to rewind and replay sections to ensure comprehension. Practice regularly not just with this video but incorporating other texts and audio. This variety will aid in reinforcing your ability to articulate similar ideas clearly, which will be especially beneficial for IELTS speaking practice. The goal is to be able to convey intricate thoughts as effectively as the speakers themselves, contributing significantly to your overall English speaking practice.
What is the Shadowing Technique?
Shadowing is a science-backed language learning technique originally developed for professional interpreter training and popularized by polyglot Dr. Alexander Arguelles. The method is simple but powerful: you listen to native English audio and immediately repeat it out loud — like a shadow following the speaker with just a 1–2 second delay. Unlike passive listening or grammar drills, shadowing forces your brain and mouth muscles to simultaneously process and reproduce real speech patterns. Research shows it significantly improves pronunciation accuracy, intonation, rhythm, connected speech, listening comprehension, and speaking fluency — making it one of the most effective methods for IELTS Speaking preparation and real-world English communication.