Irving Finkel

‘It's enthralling stuff, mixing the scholarly with the accessible and placing storytelling right at the heart of the human experience.’ - History Revealed ‘A fascinating journey’ - Yorkshire Post ‘Marvellous... Finkel is an expert in Mesopotamian cultures at the British Museum, and is one of the most clever, and nicest, of people it has ever been my pleasure to encounter......

In The Ark Before Noah, British Museum expert Dr Irving Finkel reveals how decoding the symbols on a 4,000-year-old piece of clay enables a radical new interpretation of the Noah's Ark myth. A world authority on the period, Dr Finkel's enthralling real-life detective story began with a most remarkable event at the British Museum—the arrival one day in 2008 of...

Cuneiform script on tablets of clay is, as far as we know, the oldest form of writing in the world. The choice of clay as a writing medium in ancient Mesopotamia meant that records of all kinds could survive down to modern times, preserving fascinating documents from ancient civilisation, written by a variety of people and societies. From reading these...