Irving Finkel

Finkel was born in 1951 and read Assyriology at the University of Birmingham under Professor W. G. Lambert.⁠[1]

He then spent three years as a research fellow at the University of Chicago’s Oriental Institute, assisting Professor Miguel Civil.⁠[1]

In 1979 he was appointed an assistant keeper at the British Museum, in what is now the Middle East Department.⁠[1]

He is the curator in charge of the museum’s Mesopotamian cuneiform tablets, which at some 130,000 pieces form the largest such collection of any modern museum; the work involves reading and translating inscriptions and identifying manuscripts in ancient archives that belong together or join.⁠[2]

He specializes in medical and magical works in Akkadian and is particularly interested in esoteric inscriptions concerning ancient thought and speculation.⁠[3]

In the 1980s he reconstructed the rules of the Royal Game of Ur from two incomplete descriptions on clay tablets, one written by the Babylonian scribe Itti-Marduk-balāṭu in 177 BCE; Guinness World Records accordingly lists it as the oldest board game whose rules are known.⁠[4]

He has long been interested in the history of board games worldwide, particularly the preservation of traditional games in non-Western societies.⁠[5]

In 1985 a member of the public brought antiquities inherited from his father to the British Museum for identification; one cuneiform tablet proved to be a copy of the Babylonian Flood Story, and Finkel recalls that the owner then took it away again.⁠[6]

He has been responsible for exhibitions inside and outside the museum, including Asian Games: The Art of Conquest at the Asia Society in New York in 2004.⁠[3]

In 2007 he and Polly North launched the Great Diary Project to rescue, archive and make public the unpublished diaries of ordinary people; in 2009 it found a permanent home at the Bishopsgate Institute, and it holds more than 20,000 diaries, describing itself as the largest of its kind in Europe.⁠[7]

The project says his interest in diaries was kindled by the chance purchase of one ordinary man’s long run of diaries, after which he committed himself to collecting as many diaries by ordinary people as he could.⁠[8]

Babylon: Myth and Reality, organized by the British Museum with the Louvre and other institutions, ran from November 13, 2008, to March 15, 2009; he and Michael Seymour edited the catalogue.⁠[9]

The Cyrus Cylinder had been regarded as a unique foundation deposit; in January 2010 he found two clay tablets in the British Museum’s collection inscribed with extracts from its text and concluded that it had been copied and circulated more widely than realized.⁠[10]

On March 7, 2013, I.B. Tauris published The Cyrus Cylinder, a volume he edited.⁠[11]

In 2014 Hodder & Stoughton published his book The Ark Before Noah; he said he did not believe the Ark existed and that Judeans taken to Babylon by Nebuchadnezzar II incorporated Babylonian mythology, giving the stories a new moral dimension. He describes himself as a “Jewish atheist.”⁠[12]

The tablet at the center of the book dates from about 1850 BC and is a copy of the Babylonian Story of the Flood that includes instructions for building a large boat to survive a flood.⁠[13]

From it he concluded that the ark was circular, like a giant version of the round coracles of the Mesopotamian marshes, made of coiled palm rope, supported by wooden ribs and waterproofed with bitumen.⁠[6]

Channel 4’s one-off documentary The Real Noah’s Ark followed him and a team of archaeological boat builders as they built a round ark from the tablet’s instructions to test whether it would float.⁠[14]

It aired on September 14, 2014; WMG at the University of Warwick used X-ray micro-CT and 3D laser scanning to help him read previously undecipherable characters, confirming that the vessel was round.⁠[15]

For International Tabletop Day 2017 the British Museum released a video of him playing the Royal Game of Ur against YouTuber Tom Scott.⁠[16]

The First Ghosts: Most Ancient of Legacies, published in 2021, draws on Sumerian, Babylonian and Assyrian tablets to trace the earliest ghost stories and practical advice on living with ghosts and getting rid of them; he reads the audiobook himself.⁠[17]

In October 2024 the British Museum released a video in which he explains the Babylonian Map of the World tablet, whose inscriptions refer to the resting place of the Flood ark.⁠[18]

In May 2025 SBL Press published Babylonian Chronographic Texts from the Hellenistic Period, which he wrote with R. J. van der Spek, Reinhard Pirngruber and Kathryn Stevens, an edition of Akkadian chronographic texts from the fourth to the first centuries BCE.⁠[19]

On December 12, 2025, he appeared on episode 487 of the Lex FridmanLex FridmanLex Fridman is a Soviet-born, US-raised computer scientist and podcast host who works as an MIT research scientist on human-AI interaction and autonomous driving. His Lex Fridman Podcast is known for hours-long conversations with guests including heads of state and technology leaders.Open the full entry Podcast, discussing the origins of human language, cuneiform and its decipherment, a controversial theory about Göbekli Tepe, ghosts, ancient flood stories, Noah’s Ark, the Royal Game of Ur and the British Museum.⁠[20]

On the podcast he suggested that an incised stone plaquette from Göbekli Tepe may have been a stamp and thus a form of writing; archaeologist Jens Notroff, a member of the site’s excavation project, responded that such plaquettes had been discussed for about 20 years and that, while part of a communication system, they did not yet show symbols with phonetic values.⁠[21]

British Museum: Official website: https://www.britishmuseum.org/ (opens in a new window)⁠[20]

Great Diary Project: Official website: https://thegreatdiaryproject.co.uk/ (opens in a new window)⁠[20]