Getting Dressed: Dr Irving Finkel
The British Museum’s Irving Finkel loves suits and never shaves
Dr Irving Finkel, 69, is Assistant Keeper of Ancient Mesopotamian script, languages, and cultures in the Department of the Middle East at the British Museum.
That means he’s the custodian of thousands of cuneiform tablets in the museum. He is one of the few scholars in the world who can read cuneiform script.
It was a small clay tablet brought into the museum by an ordinary punter in the 1980s that, deciphered by Finkel, revealed the original story of Noah’s flood. The only previous version of the tale, apart from the one in the Old Testament, had been found on a 7th-century-bc tablet in the museum. It shook Victorian Christian England because no one knew which had come first – the Flood Tablet (as it is known) or the story in the Bible.
Finkel’s version dates from a thousand years earlier and leaves no doubt. His tablet gave such precise measurements for building the ‘Ark’ – an enormous, round coracle – that he had a scale model made and floated – all related in his book, The Ark Before Noah. His new book, The First Ghosts, is a history of ghosts.
Finkel says Britain is full of unread cuneiform tablets: ‘Every British soldier who fought in Mesopotamia in the First World War brought one back as a souvenir.’
He is also an expert on board games, from the 2,500-year-old Royal Game of Ur to the present day. He has played guitar in a blues band and, with a colleague, Dr Polly North, looks after a collection of more than 11,000 diaries.
He needs Oldie help here. Any reader who has inherited a diary and doesn’t know what to do with it, please look at The Great Diary Project website. Only politicians’ diaries are not accepted by the Project. As a boy, Finkel was intrigued by different writing systems. He thought about studying Chinese but decided to go for Ancient Egyptian at Birmingham University. Fate intervened – after only one lesson, his teacher died and the only other option available was cuneiform, with the brilliant Professor Wilfred Lambert. ‘By the end of the very first session, I knew that this was going to be my whole life.’ After staying on to do a PHD (his thesis was on magic spells), Finkel went to the Oriental Institute at the University of Chicago – ‘a hotbed of genius brains’ – where he studied (and played in a band) for four years, before being offered a job by the British Museum. The ancient tablets Finkel deciphers and lectures on are very often concerned with the early trade in textiles clothes and even fashion; they reveal a fad for the colour purple. But clothes have always been a bit of a bugbear for Finkel, since the time he was mortified to be the last boy to wear long trousers at school. He grew up in north London, surrounded by women (his mother and three sisters). He later married Joanna, a Polish paper conservator he met at the Museum (Head of Paper Conservation now). Shopping often involved being taken by one of them to a menswear shop where he would stand ‘like a two-year-old while she
spoke over my head to the salespeople saying, “What he needs is…”.’
And then one day, on a break from the Museum, he found himself walking past a men’s tailors, Walker Slater, in Covent Garden. He had just been asked to go to the States on a fellowship and needed decent clothes for his lectures.
He went in on his own (his emphasis) and had himself measured for a suit. It was such a pleasurable experience that he ordered a second and is now thinking of ‘laying down a small cellar of them, so I always have one or two to hand’.
Finkel has NEVER shaved. At university, while fellow students had to razor away black stubble every day, Finkel’s facial hair refused to grow – something he found so unmanly and traumatic that, when it did, he decided never to cut it. He used to wear his black hair shoulder-length ‘like King Charles’ (as in Charles II). Since it went white, he prefers to put it in a ponytail, using one of his daughter’s ‘hair things’.
In early December, lorry drivers frequently slow down and yell, ‘WOTCHA, SANTA!’ at him, and children treat him with awe. At other times of the year, most people think he looks like the archetypical British Museum curator – which suits his plan. ‘My intention is never to leave the Museum,’ he says.