Irving Finkel | |
---|---|
![]() Finkel in 2015 | |
Born | Irving Leonard Finkel 1951 (age 72–73) |
Nationality | English |
Known for | Discovery of tablet with Great Flood narrative suggesting a coracle-shaped ark, [1] Reconstruction of the Royal Game of Ur [2] |
Spouse | Joanna |
Children | 5 |
Academic background | |
Alma mater | University of Birmingham (PhD) |
Thesis | Ḫulbazizi: ancient Mesopotanian exorcistic incantations (1976) |
Doctoral advisor | Wilfred G. Lambert |
Academic work | |
Discipline | Philology,Assyriology |
Institutions | Oriental Institute (Chicago) British Museum |
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 was born in 1951 to a dentist father and teacher mother,one of five children,and grew up at Palmers Green,North London. [4] [5] He was raised as an Orthodox Jew but became an atheist as a teenager. He earned a PhD in Assyriology from the University of Birmingham under the supervision of Wilfred G. Lambert with a dissertation on Babylonian exorcistic spells against demons. [6]
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 cuneiform tablets. [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 studies the history of board games,and is on the editorial board of Board Game Studies. [12] Among his breakthrough works is the determination of the rules of the Royal Game of Ur. [7] He also owns a replica set of the Lewis chessmen which were used as props in the first Harry Potter film. [13]
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]
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.
Finkel lives in southeast London with his wife Joanna and has five children. [7]
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: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)The Hanging Gardens of Babylon were one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World listed by Hellenic culture. They were described as a remarkable feat of engineering with an ascending series of tiered gardens containing a wide variety of trees, shrubs, and vines, resembling a large green mountain constructed of mud bricks. It was said to have been built in the ancient city of Babylon, near present-day Hillah, Babil province, in Iraq. The Hanging Gardens' name is derived from the Greek word κρεμαστός, which has a broader meaning than the modern English word "hanging" and refers to trees being planted on a raised structure such as a terrace.
In the Hebrew Bible, Amraphel was a king of Shinar in Book of Genesis Chapter 14, who invaded Canaan along with other kings under the leadership of Chedorlaomer, king of Elam. Chedorlaomer's coalition defeated Sodom and the other cities in the Battle of the Vale of Siddim.
Noah's Ark is the boat in the Genesis flood narrative through which God spares Noah, his family, and examples of all the world's animals from a global deluge. The story in Genesis is based on earlier flood myths originating in Mesopotamia, and is repeated, with variations, in the Quran, where the Ark appears as Safinat Nūḥ and al-fulk. The myth of the global flood that destroys all life begins to appear in the Old Babylonian Empire period. The version closest to the biblical story of Noah, as well as its most likely source, is that of Utnapishtim in the Epic of Gilgamesh.
The ark of bulrushes was a container which, according to the episode known as the finding of Moses in the biblical Book of Exodus, carried the infant Moses.
Ziusudra of Shuruppak is listed in the WB-62 Sumerian King List recension as the last king of Sumer prior to the Great Flood. He is subsequently recorded as the hero of the Eridu Genesis and appears in the writings of Berossus as Xisuthros.
Cuneiform is a logo-syllabic writing system that was used to write several languages of the Ancient Near East. The script was in active use from the early Bronze Age until the beginning of the Common Era. Cuneiform scripts are marked by and named for the characteristic wedge-shaped impressions which form their signs. Cuneiform is the earliest known writing system and was originally developed to write the Sumerian language of southern Mesopotamia.
George Smith was a pioneering English Assyriologist who first discovered and translated the Epic of Gilgamesh, one of the oldest-known written works of literature.
The Royal Game of Ur is a two-player strategy race board game of the tables family that was first played in ancient Mesopotamia during the early third millennium BC. The game was popular across the Middle East among people of all social strata, and boards for playing it have been found at locations as far away from Mesopotamia as Crete and Sri Lanka. One board, held by the British Museum, is dated to c. 2600 – c. 2400 BC, making it one of the oldest game boards in the world.
Atra-Hasis is an 18th-century BC Akkadian epic, recorded in various versions on clay tablets, named for its protagonist, Atrahasis. The Atra-Hasis tablets include both a cosmological creation myth and one of three surviving Babylonian flood myths. The name "Atra-Hasis" also appears, as a king of Shuruppak in the times before a flood, on one of the Sumerian King Lists.
The Babylonian Chronicles are a loosely-defined series of about 45 tablets recording major events in Babylonian history.
The Cyrus Cylinder is an ancient clay cylinder, now broken into several pieces, on which is written an Achaemenid royal inscription in Akkadian cuneiform script in the name of the Persian king Cyrus the Great. It dates from the 6th century BC and was discovered in the ruins of the ancient Mesopotamian city of Babylon in 1879. It is currently in the possession of the British Museum. It was created and used as a foundation deposit following the Persian conquest of Babylon in 539 BC, when the Neo-Babylonian Empire was invaded by Cyrus and incorporated into his Persian Empire.
The Gilgamesh flood myth is a flood myth in the Epic of Gilgamesh. It is one of three Mesopotamian Flood Myths alongside the one including in the Eridu Genesis, and an episode from the Atra-Hasis Epic. Many scholars believe that the flood myth was added to Tablet XI in the "standard version" of the Gilgamesh Epic by an editor who used the flood story from the Epic of Atra-Hasis. A short reference to the flood myth is also present in the much older Sumerian Gilgamesh poems, from which the later Babylonian versions drew much of their inspiration and subject matter.
Eridu Genesis, also called the Sumerian Creation Myth, Sumerian Flood Story and the Sumerian Deluge Myth, offers a description of the story surrounding how humanity was created by the gods, how the office of kingship entered human civilization, the circumstances leading to the origins of the first cities, and the global flood.
Wilfred George Lambert FBA was a historian and archaeologist, a specialist in Assyriology and Near Eastern Archaeology.
The Babylonian Map of the World is a Babylonian clay tablet with a schematic world map and two inscriptions written in the Akkadian language. Dated to no earlier than the 9th century BC, it includes a brief and partially lost textual description. The tablet describes the oldest known depiction of the known world. Ever since its discovery there has been controversy on its general interpretation and specific features. Another pictorial fragment, VAT 12772, presents a similar topography from roughly two millennia earlier.
The Dynastic Chronicle, "Chronicle 18" in Grayson's Assyrian and Babylonian Chronicles or the "Babylonian Royal Chronicle" in Glassner’s Mesopotamian Chronicles, is a fragmentary ancient Mesopotamian text extant in at least four known copies. It is actually a bilingual text written in 6 columns, representing a continuation of the Sumerian king list tradition through to the 8th century BC and is an important source for the reconstruction of the historical narrative for certain periods poorly preserved elsewhere.
A kuphar is a type of coracle or round boat traditionally used on the Tigris and Euphrates rivers in ancient and modern Mesopotamia. Its circular shape means that it does not sail well against the current, as it tends to spin, but makes it safe, sturdy and easy to construct. A kuphar is propelled by paddling, rowing or poling.
Stephanie Mary Dalley FSA is a British Assyriologist and scholar of the Ancient Near East. Prior to her retirement, she was a teaching Fellow at the Oriental Institute, Oxford. She is known for her publications of cuneiform texts and her investigation into the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, and her proposal that it was situated in Nineveh, and constructed during Sennacherib's rule.
A one-third scale replica of a Babylonian "ark" was constructed in 2014 based on recently discovered tablets from the Epic of Gilgamesh.
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 [...].