Irving Finkel

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 Finkel was born in 1951 to a dentist father and teacher mother one of five children and grew up at Palmers Green North London 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 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 museums collection of around 130000 cuneiform tablets In 2014 Finkels study of a cuneiform tablet that contained a flood narrative8 similar to that of the story of Noahs Ark described in his book The Ark Before Noah was widely reported in the news mediaThe 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 13 scale as documented in a 2014 TV documentary Secrets of Noahs Ark that aired as an episode of PBSs NOVA series11 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