The writing is on the tablets
PERHAPS WE should start with the beard, because it never seems to end.
Or perhaps we should start with the fact that Irving Finkel is one of the world’s leading experts on the ancient Middle East. He’s also the first scholar featured in Jewniversity Corner not to have a university base.
His home is the British Museum, for which he is a curator — the official title is assistant keeper. His geographical area of expertise is Mesopotamia, with boundaries that roughly mirror the borders of modern-day Iraq. His historical period of expertise runs from around 3500 BCE to the first century CE. His academic expertise is philology — he examines the development of, and the relationship between, languages, and translates what is written in them. His raw materials are an astonishingly rich resource — 130,000 pieces of clay held at the Museum.
Mesopotamia is where writing began, and clay was the surface on which it was written. Dried or baked, endless thousands of these ancient clay tablets have survived until today. The script is called cuneiform. It was originally developed for the Sumerian language, but later was used to write another language, also equally extinct, Akkadian. But Akkadian has links with various Semitic languages — speakers of modern Hebrew will recognise some of its sounds and words.
Dr Finkel has examined each of the 130,000 pieces in the British Museum, with varying degrees of scrutiny, several times. “When I got the keys to the museum it was like a child given the key to the sweet shop”. His research has produced many books including one about a cuneiform tablet from around 1800 BCE, which contains an early version of the Flood Story with instructions to build the Babylonian Ark in advance of the Bible’s account of Noah.
He is also known for having deciphered the rules of the Royal Game of Ur. This is a two-person strategy game that only survived in anything like its original form in the tiny Jewish population of Cochin in SW India. Thanks to Irving Finkel, the game is now, once again, being played in Iraq.
His distinctive readings of cuneiform often follow the idea that people then, 4000 years ago or more, were rather like people now. That is to say, a sensitive reading of ancient texts has to recognise that an ancient writer might be using irony, or sarcasm, might be trying to charm or impress somebody, might even be making a joke.
Irving Finkel was born in Palmers Green into an Orthodox family. His grandparents were from modern day Russia and Ukraine. His father was a dental surgeon. One evening the local synagogue showed a film about the liberation of Belsen. A teenage Irving was taken to see it and lost his belief in God instantly. When he married out, there were terrible tensions. “I’m an out-and-out Jewish atheist, but I’m Jewish from head to foot and especially around the middle”. He’s proud of what he calls the “staggering” Jewish intellectual contribution.
As for his beard, I assumed it was a Jewish-y thing. It’s wild — imagine if Karl Marx’s beard went on strike. But I’m disappointed to discover its non-cultural origins.
He had no facial hair at school and very little at university. “I thought I was going to be a weird freak”. So when he was 23 and it began to grow, he never shaved again.
One final thing about Dr Finkel. An enduring passion is The Great Diary Project. He’s trying to rescue as many unwanted diaries as possible — for use by future historians and sociologists. Jewish diaries are under-represented in the collection. So if you have, or know of, unwanted diaries you can donate them to the collection at www. thegreatdiaryproject.co.uk