Irving Finkel, Assistant Keeper of Mesopotamian script, languages, and cultures
Jun 22 2020 14:01
Figure 1: Flood tablet from Gilgamesh from the library of Asurbanipal K.3375 in the british museum (image by CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.)
Irving Finkel is a delight. Assistant Keeper of Ancient Mesopotamian script, languages and cultures at the British Mueseum; I first encountered him teaching Tom Scott and Matt Gray to write cuneiform with popsicle sticks. A couple of nights ago I watched his lecture at the Royal Institution, magnificently Flanders and Swan: Sumerian a language, not a code - see this beautiful text - see this reconstruction of the ark of the flood - a Babylonian story before it was a biblical - discussed in his book - reconstructed from the description given in the tablet - a complete language, first developed so that unpleasant people could have an accounting of the goods produced by the unhappy people whom they taxed, but in time adapted to express epics and love poems.
Naturally I decided I must immediately drop everything and learn Sumerian (and Akkadian - Babylonian and Assyrian - and the complete diachronic development of cuneiform sign-systems) - resources are abundantly available on-line start here. There are 130,000 artifiacts in the museum says Finkel, mostly unread and scholars are needed to transcribe and interpret them. The CLTK does not yet have Sumerian. Oh how I would like to contribute!