Irving Leonard Finkel (born 1951) is an English 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.[3]
Finkel spent three years as a Research Fellow at the University of Chicago Oriental Institute. In 1976 he returned to the UK, and was appointed Assistant Keeper in the Department of Western Asiatic Antiquities at the British Museum, where he was (and remains) responsible for curating, reading and translating the museum's collection of around 130,000 cuneiformtablets.[7]
In 2014, Finkel's study of a cuneiform tablet that contained a flood narrative[8] similar to that of the story of Noah's Ark, described in his book The Ark Before Noah, was widely reported in the news media.[9][10] The ark described in the tablet was circular, essentially a very large coracle or kuphar and made of rope on a wooden frame. The tablet included sufficient details of its dimensions and construction to enable a copy of the ark to be made at about 1/3 scale, as documented in a 2014 TV documentary Secrets of Noah's Ark that aired as an episode of PBS's NOVA series.[11] The reconstructed ark was floated with partial success given that the bitumen used as sealant for the vessel walls immediately succumbed to leaks and a gasoline powered pump had to continuously be used to pump out water.
Finkel founded the Great Diary Project, a project to preserve the diaries of ordinary people. In association with the Bishopsgate Institute, Finkel has helped to archive over 2,000 personal diaries. In 2014, the V&A Museum of Childhood held an exhibition of the diaries of children written between 1813 and 1996.[14]
Literary
Finkel has written a number of works of fiction for children.[15]
He appeared in the 2014 memoir The Boy in the Book by Nathan Penlington.
Personal life
Finkel lives in southeast London with his wife Joanna and has five children.[7]
Selected publications
Academic
——— (2021). The First Ghosts: Most Ancient of Legacies. Hodder & Stoughton.
———; Taylor, Jonathan (2015). Cuneiform: Ancient Scripts. J. Paul Getty Museum.
——— (2014). The Ark Before Noah: Decoding the Story of the Flood. Hodder & Stoughton. ISBN978-1444757057.
———, ed. (2008). Ancient Board Games in Perspective: Papers from the 1990 British Museum colloquium with additional contributions. London: British Museum.[16]
———; Geller, M.J., eds. (2007). The Wellcome Conference on Babylonian Medicine. Styx.
———. "Report on the Sidon Cuneiform tablet". Archaeology & History in Lebanon. 24 (Autumn 2006): 114–20.
——— (2005). "Documents of the Physician and Magician". In Spar, I.; Lambert, W.G. (eds.). Cuneiform Inscriptions in the Metropolitan Museum. New York. pp. 155–76.{{cite encyclopedia}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)
——— (2005). "Explanatory Commentary on a List of Materia Medica". In Spar, I.; Lambert, W.G. (eds.). Cuneiform Inscriptions in the Metropolitan Museum. New York. pp. 279–83.{{cite encyclopedia}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)
——— (2003). "Pachisi in Arab Garb". Board Games Studies. 5: 65–78.
———; Reade, J.E. (2002). "On some inscribed Babylonian alabastra". Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society. 12 (1): 31–46.
^Deciphering the world's oldest rule book, Curator's Corner, British Museum, 23 November 2015, 03:55, And I have to say, I feel guilty now when I think about it because I made my poor sister Angela play this game endlessly with me to see how the rules worked, on the basis [...].
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