Irving Finkel

Overview

Irving Finkel is a British Assyriologist and a curator in the British Museum's Department of the Middle East, where he has worked since 1976 and is responsible for the museum's collection of cuneiform tablets. He is among the small number of specialists able to read the Babylonian and Sumerian tablets on which much of Mesopotamian history depends, and he is cited in discussions of the flood tradition for his reading of two objects: the Ark Tablet, and the Babylonian Map of the World.

Academic Career

Finkel took a doctorate in Assyriology at the University of Birmingham in 1976, working on Babylonian exorcistic texts under Wilfred G. Lambert, and joined the British Museum in the same year. Besides the flood material, his published work covers Babylonian medicine and magic, the history of board games, and the reading of tablets brought in to the museum by the public.

The Reading of the Map

The claim this material turns on is his reading of the fourth outer region on the Babylonian Map of the World. The tablet's damaged reverse describes a distant region holding something "as thick as a parsiktu-measure", and Finkel's argument is that the parsiktu appears in Babylonian literature only as a specification for the ark of Utnapishtim, the flood survivor of the Mesopotamian tradition. On that reading, the scribes who drew the map placed the flood vessel in a region beyond the encircling ocean in the direction of Urartu, the region the Hebrew text calls the mountains of Ararat. It is a specialist inference from a broken text, argued by one scholar, and the tablet itself names neither the ark nor Ararat.

Position on the Flood

Finkel does not hold that the flood of the biblical account took place, and he does not present his work as support for it. In The Ark Before Noah (2014) he argues that the flood story is Mesopotamian in origin and that its literary form passed from Babylonian tradition into the book of Genesis, and he has said that he does not believe the vessel described on the tablet was ever built. His argument about the map is a claim about what Babylonian scribes recorded and believed. It is separable from the question of whether the events happened, and it is not his testimony that they did.