The Mirthful Assyriologist, the Real Noah's Ark, and the Oldest Writing in the World
Irving Finkel is a delightful, eccentric genius. Enter his world for a captivating glimpse of the secrets embedded within humanity's earliest writing.
Thank you for reading The Garden of Forking Paths. This edition is for all, but if you value my research and writing, consider upgrading to a paid subscription to keep this sustainable; I rely exclusively on your support and it costs less than $1/week. Or, you can support my work by buying my new book, FLUKE, recently named a best book of 2024.
I’m sitting in the hidden inner sanctum of the British Museum, as one of the most interesting men in the world kicks his legs out, strokes his frazzled, footlong cloud-white beard, and twirls slowly in his chair.
His wizard-like appearance matches his ability to conjure wit and whimsy into every sentence, all as he deciphers long-forgotten spells, translates ghost stories, and tries to build the original Noah’s Ark, which, as he’s discovered, predates the Biblical flood story by a thousand years. His craft—derived not from magic but from meticulous research—is a knack for resurrecting the minds of those most distant ancestors, our most ancient relatives.
This peculiar scholar sitting before me is Irving Finkel, a hidden gem of humanity, who spends his days teasing meaning from antediluvian clay as he grapples with some of the biggest questions about human nature and the deepest mysteries of our past. Are our oldest ancestors like us? Is there something universal about humanity that spans thousands upon thousands of years? Or, when we part the mists of time, does something unrecognizably foreign emerge from the oldest surviving records of our species?
Finkel, you see, is an ambassador for those fascinating but too often forgotten people: those humans who first invented how to write.1 And what they left us is one of the richest and most electrifying inheritances imaginable.
I: How to correctly react to an exciting cuneiform tablet
One day in 1985, a man walked into the British museum clutching an array of ancient artifacts that his father had collected during his deployment to the “Near East” during World War II. His name was Douglas Simmonds, and, as Finkel later remembered him, he was a gruff man who possessed “a conspicuously large head housing a large measure of intelligence.”2
Finkel took a look at the collection and one tablet instantly drew his attention. As he describes in his book, it was immediately obvious that it was related to the Babylonian Flood Story, the precursor to the tale of Noah’s Ark. Clearly, this relic was important, but how important would require further scrutiny.
“I explained that it would take many hours to wrestle meaning from the broken signs, but Douglas would not by any means leave his tablet with me. As a matter of fact, he did not even seem to be especially excited at the announcement that his tablet was a Highly Important Document of the Highest Possible Interest and he quite failed to observe that I was wobbly with desire to get on with deciphering it.”3
The tablet left the museum, but Finkel never stopped wondering about it, hoping that Simmonds would someday change his mind. Twenty-four years passed. Then, a stroke of fortune: in 2009, Finkel spotted Simmonds gazing at the Babylonian collection in the museum, cornered him, and convinced him. “Finally alone with the tablet, armed with lamp, lens and freshly sharpened pencil, I got to work on reading it,” Finkel recalls.
Such euphoria of impending discovery is an emotion that has consumed many an Assyriologist before Finkel, but perhaps the most notable parallel is with George Smith, a 19th century predecessor to Finkel who also worked in the British Museum. (Finkel, whether deliberately or not, has mirrored his look impeccably).
In one particularly memorable episode, Smith began working on a tablet that had previously been covered with a thick “lime-like deposit,” which made reading it impossible. After his colleague successfully managed to remove the obscuring deposit, Smith’s astonishment and delight was so intense that he behaved as one should in all such matters. He boldly proclaimed: “I am the first man to read that after more than two thousand years of oblivion!” and then proceeded, in “a great state of excitement,” to undress himself.
(One hundred and fifty years hence, Finkel notes that “all subsequent Assyriologists keep the tactic in reserve just in case they too find something spectacular”).
But Smith had good reason for his agitated excitement. In his illustrious career, he regularly enjoyed that elation of initial discovery, including being the first person to translate the Epic of Gilgamesh.
In 1872, Smith was the first to discover a tablet that told the story of the Flood—easily recognizable from the Book of Genesis. That posed a bit of a problem for the prevailing Christian narrative, as this story was “inscribed on a cuneiform tablet made of clay that had recently been excavated at far-distant Nineveh.” And here was the crucial bit: it had been inscribed more than a thousand years before the Book of Genesis was written.
As Finkel describes, this discovery raised some rather urgent queries for Christians in Victorian Britain. “How could Noah and his Ark possibly have been known and important to the Assyrians of noble Asnapper and the Babylonians of mad, dread Nebuchadnezzar? Worried people over garden fences and in church pews clamoured to have important questions answered.”
Over the last century and a half, an array of tablets refer to this Flood story, which has a few key alterations from the more familiar version that we now call Noah’s Ark. First, in the Babylonian version, the Noah figure is named Atra-Hasis. Second, and more substantively, the rationale for the Flood diverges slightly from the Biblical narrative.
In this version, one senior god decides that Earth, populated with too many humans, has become too noisy. As one tablet records:
“The noise of mankind has become too intense for me / With their uproar I am deprived of sleep.”
The cacophony is sufficiently annoying that he decides it would be better to simply eliminate all life from the planet and sets in motion a plan to do so.4 Another god, thankfully for us, decides that killing everything was a bit extreme, and came up with a rival idea. Why not just flood the Earth but tell one man—Atra-Hasis—to build an ark and rescue some life? This rival plan was adopted and the Flood began.
In 2009, Finkel began to decipher the ancient Babylonian tablet he had longed to get his hands on for the previous twenty-four years. And as he did so— painstakingly translating something written between 1900 and 1700 BC—an unexpected meaning began to emerge.
The text, it turned out, didn’t just relate to the Flood and to the Ark. Instead, as word after word strung together, Finkel experienced one of the most extraordinary revelations of his life.
He was holding an instruction manual: a detailed blueprint for how to build the Ark.
II: The fluke of a peremptorily expiring professor
As a boy, Finkel enthusiastically visited the British Museum. “There was no glass case in the building against which my nose had never been pressed,” he recalls. By the age of nine, he had decided on his future career: he would work in the museum he loved.
In the collection, Finkel was mesmerized most by the Lewis Chessmen, arguably the most beguiling chess set ever made. He yearned to accrue a full set of replicas, but growing up in a household of modest means, a replica Lewis pawn or rook tended to be his gift for every birthday. (By the time Finkel completed his doctorate, he was still several pieces short, so his father completed the set as a graduation gift; Finkel’s childhood obsession is now a familiar one to millions around the world, because his replica set of the Lewis chessmen was used in the “Wizard’s Chess” scene in the first Harry Potter film).
But if the chessmen were an interest, long-dead languages were Finkel’s passion. At the age of eighteen, he went off to study Egyptology at university, under the supervision of one R.T. Rundle Clark. Alas, Clark, who Finkel remembers as “a sedate and well-rounded scholar of cinematic eccentricity” was not to be Finkel’s mentor for the rather unfortunate reason that he abruptly died. Or, as Finkel put it more charmingly, Rundle “delivered but a single introductory lecture before peremptorily expiring.”
Since one couldn’t easily pluck a replacement Egyptologist from a nearby rack of academics, Finkel was called into another professor’s office and encouraged to, in the meantime, try his hand at cuneiform, the ancient writing system of Mesopotamia. He did—and it turned out to be his calling in life. As he writes, with contagious enthusiasm about that freshly discovered passion:
“Cuneiform! The world’s oldest and hardest writing, older by far than any alphabet, written by long-dead Sumerians and Babylonians over more than three thousand years, and as extinct by the time of the Romans as any dinosaur. What a challenge! What an adventure!”
Here is what a cuneiform tablet looks like, an extraordinarily daunting jumble of seemingly indecipherable symbols stretching across the clay:
III: The world’s oldest writing
According to a legend written down around 1800 BC, humanity discovered writing during a “battle of wits” between a king named Emmerkar and his rival. To showcase his intellect and defeat his foe in this battle of wits, Emmerkar invented cuneiform. The rival had to admit defeat: here was something truly magical, a sophisticated mechanism for transmitting complex ideas in clay!
In truth, cuneiform writing began around 3200 BC, so it had been around for about 1,400 years by the time this epic origin tale was spun. The real invention story was far more banal. It was designed to help with bookkeeping, yielding “the unromantic fact,” Finkel writes, “that writing was bestowed on humanity by ancestors of the Inland Revenue Service.”
The basic facts are these: cuneiform is the world’s oldest writing system, not a language. The name means “wedge-shaped.” But before the wedges, it began as a pictographic system, in which symbols were literal representations of concepts. If you wanted to write about a bowl, you simply drew a symbol that looked like a bowl. Over time, however, the system was refined into a series of wedge-like markings, which would allow syllables to be strung together, unlocking the complexity that we now associate with written language.
As Finkel and his colleague Jonathan Taylor explain, the cuneiform system is a bit “like writing ‘&’ instead of ‘a n d’ or ‘ca-at’ instead of 'c a t.’” Over millennia, the evolution of the writing was extraordinary, as can be seen with this shift from the pictographic shape for “head” morphing into a more abstract set of wedges to represent the idea in a more sophisticated and malleable writing format. (All of the below forms represent the sign SAĜ, or “head,” moving from earliest on the left to latest on the right; and as you’ll see in the shift from form 1 to 2 above, around 2000 BC the entire writing system inexplicably rotated 90 degrees counter-clockwise. Why this happened remains a total mystery).
Because cuneiform was a writing system, it could be used flexibly across multiple languages. It was primarily used to write in Sumerian and Akkadian (the latter can be further subdivided into Babylonian and Assyrian dialects). Eventually, Sumerian died out, but Akkadian was an early precursor to surviving languages: Hebrew and Arabic.
Cuneiform emerged in ancient Mesopotamia, which means “between the rivers,” referring specifically to the Tigris and Euphrates. (The same Greek linguistic root gives us hippopotamus, or river horse). This setting is important because it’s the reason why cuneiform emerged as it did—written with reed styluses on clay tablets—and why it survives to the present day.
As Finkel and Taylor note, “reeds and clay had always been freely available in the rivers alongside which Mesopotamian cities grew.” Most of the clay tablets were made from rough river mud, while those destined for libraries would be written on refined clay. Tablets were designed to be used, not stored. “Most fit comfortably into the palm of a hand, and are not very heavy. Ergonomically, they are like mobile phones.”
In the 1840s, a surging interest in these strange, arcane tablets launched countless expeditions from Europe to the Middle East—primarily in modern day Iraq—hoping to discover ancient religious secrets hidden underground, in the land where many sagas from the Bible had unfolded. The writing, rather unhelpfully, does not include breaks between words, just an undivided string of text. A bigger problem was that nobody had a clue how to read them.
Luckily, in 1835, an officer in the British East India company took an interest in a massive carving in Western Iran known today as the Behistun Inscription. Scaling a cliff and clambering across a chasm to reach it, the officer, Henry Rawlinson, copied the entirety of the text. By 1847, he sent it back to England.
The Behistun text, authored by Darius the Great sometime between 522 and 486 BC, etched the same self-aggrandizing words into stone across three different languages. One of those languages was Babylonian—written in cuneiform—and so, by complete fluke, this single surviving inscription provided the key to unlocking a writing code that would have otherwise been impossible to crack.
“To any right thinking individual,” Finkel exclaims, “the decipherment of cuneiform must rank among the great intellectual achievements of humanity and, in my view, should be commemorated on postage stamps and fridge magnets.”
IV: Are our most ancient ancestors just like us?
Finkel, bestowed with an arcane title befitting of the British Museum, is now the *Senior* Assistant Keeper of Ancient Mesopotamian Script, Languages, and Cultures. (“They added the word senior,” he tells me with a hint of whimsical bitterness, “because I’ve been here for quite a long time and they added it to my e-mail without asking me. But what am I going to do, delete it from my e-mail?”).
Sitting across from Finkel in his cluttered museum office, I ask him a question that has long been nagging me: “When you read the ancient cuneiform tablets, and gaze into the minds of people who lived as many as 5,200 years ago, are they like us? Do you see a universality to the human experience?”
Finkel’s answer is unequivocal: “If you took 12 miscellaneous Babylonians and stuck them on a bus in modern Western clothing, they would all have their counterparts in our society.” Or, as he previously wrote, even more eloquently:
“We meet mercenaries, fortune-tellers, priests and prostitutes; cut-throats, mendicants, money-lenders and water-sellers. The great vanished metropolis with its noises and smells, garden luxury at one end and slum shacks at the other, must have been timeless in its daily life and thereby, thanks to its ancient words, almost within our grasp. And those ancient people, writing their tablets, looking at their world, crawling between heaven and earth…like us.”
In some ways, the tablets are charmingly familiar. One trove comes from a school of scribes, where tablet after tablet is preserved with the clumsy writing of long-dead trainees who were trying to mimic the stylus flicks of their mentors, like 20th century schoolchildren copying cursive from a blackboard. Finkel also highlights how tablets sent as letters will sometimes include a familiar line: “I have already sent you my tablet!” the earliest known version of “the check is in the mail!”
The reason for this familiarity, as Finkel notes, is that “we are, for one thing, talking only of the last five thousand years, a mere dollop in Time terms, in which snail processes like evolution or biological development have no measurable part.” Culturally, there are gulfs, but the rest is universal.
Rather than astrology, the Babylonians had omens, often read through the entrails of livestock. “In the insides of a single sheep,” one tablet reads, “I, the king, can find messages for the whole universe.” These omens could be found elsewhere, too, “from spontaneous events, such as a gecko falling from the ceiling into one’s breakfast cereal, or solicited through deliberate procedure, such as releasing caged birds and watching the patterns they made in flight.” Soon, the earliest horoscopes were born.
Similarly, they, like us, entertained themselves with games. Finkel, for his part, is the first human for thousands of years to discover the rules to the oldest board game in the world: the Royal Game of Ur. (The discovery was hiding in plain sight; a key clue lurked in the British Museum on a prominent statue that was exhibited in low light; nobody had previously noticed it because it lay in shadow).
Moreover, they’re not only like us, they also continue to influence our daily lives. Take a look at any clock, any watch, indeed, any circle, and you’ll see the lingering ghosts of ancient Mesopotamia haunting your life. They decided to use a numbering system of 60’s, likely because it was easily subdivided, able to be split up evenly by no fewer than twelve different integers. Minutes, seconds, the 360 degrees of a circle, the 60 degree angles of equilateral triangles, each a holdover from these distant relatives that we rarely consider.
However, the most tantalizing link to that ancient past, the one that he held in his palm back in 2009, was one that acted like a 3,700 year-old IKEA assembly guide for an Ark. And the biggest surprise in the instructions was that the boat was to be round, a coracle.
“Draw out the boat that you will make / On a circular plan / Let her length and breadth be equal / Let her floor area be one field, let her sides be one nindan (high),” the tablet ordered. The Ark was to be enormous: two-thirds the size of a football field, with 20 foot walls, and enough rope to stretch for 300 miles.
The instructions were so detailed, in fact, that Finkel decided it might be a rather good idea to follow them. So, with documentary filmmakers in tow, Finkel travelled to a suitable assembly location based on the necessary materials and other practical concerns, which turned out to be in India.
The end result, scaled down to be feasible, weighed thirty-five tons and leaked, staying afloat only with the help of a modern water pump. (You can watch the documentary trailer here). Finkel’s conclusion: if Atra-Hasis had tried to make the Ark, he probably failed. Or, since Finkel is one of the most quotable men alive, it’s best to relay his words precisely: “I am 107% convinced the ark never existed.”
V: Renewing the contract
As we wind down our conversation in his office, Finkel makes me an offer I can’t refuse: to show me the magnificent Arched Room library in the depths of the British Museum, home to a staggering 130,000 cuneiform tablets. He guides me in to the dazzling repository, and I peer into towering archival stacks arranged in drawers, rack after rack of clay. Gazing around, I bathe in the extraordinary knowledge that I’m surrounded by objects that were created up to 5,200 years ago, or 3,000 years before Cleopatra was born. And I’m speaking to one of the few people in human history—a real-life wizard—who has read them.
Finkel, who has also long studied Mesopotamian ghost stories and written the book on the first ghosts recorded in human history, tells me that the Arched Room is said to be haunted. Having spent so much of his life reading about ancient specters, he laments that he’s never encountered one himself. “It’s terribly annoying, because I’ve never seen a ghost and I’ve always wanted to,” he says, his trademark twinkle in his eye.
Before we part ways, I ask him about his plans for the future, and he tells me that the big boss—the recently appointed director of the British Museum—asked him the same question recently.
“I told him that I would like to re-read all 130,000 of the tablets in the collection,” Finkel explains. “He asked me how long that would take, and I explained that it would probably take about a hundred years.” The new director paused, then replied.
“Well, we must get you a new contract then.”
That, I suspect, would suit Irving Finkel just fine, as he continues to scour wedges in clay to resurrect the secrets of humanity. “When you are tired of tablets,” Finkel explains, “you are tired of life.”
Thank you for reading The Garden of Forking Paths. As you might imagine, these articles take a lot of time to research and write, so if you’d like me to keep at it for you, please consider upgrading to a paid subscription. It costs less than $1/week, or $4/month. Alternatively, you can support my work by buying my new book—FLUKE: Chance, Chaos, and Why Everything We Do Matters—recently named a best book of 2024.
Also, do yourself a favor and watch Finkel describe the oldest map in the world. Fair warning: once you start watching this video, you’ll want to go down a YouTube rabbit hole and watch many more of him. He’s an utterly captivating speaker.
I first met Finkel because we both appeared on the BBC/Netflix series, Cunk on Earth.
The quotes in this piece come from Finkel’s books, or from my interview with him.
I quote Finkel extensively in this piece because he is an incredible writer.
When people on public transport play stupid social media videos without headphones, I have the same reaction as this senior god.
Wonderful article. I've just finished another Masters (this time in Archaeology) and this reminds me of the ceaseless wonders of the past. And our understanding of the past keeps changing - it is often as complex as the future....
I love the diversity of your interests. Utterly fascinating. Thank you.