Writing is generally agreed to be among the greatest inventions in human history, perhaps the greatest invention, since it made history possible.

You can read more about Irving’s quest to explore the Noah’s Ark myth in “The Ark Before Noah: Decoding the Story of the Flood”: https://geni.us/zU95bVO or learn more about cuneiform writing in “Cuneiform”: https://geni.us/eMPb

Writing seems to have been invented in the late fourth millennium BC in Mesopotamia in the form of wedge-shaped marks pressed into soft clay with a reed stylus: the script known as cuneiform. Through his work on this ancient language, Irving Finkel, has uncovered amazing secrets from over five thousand years ago, including the story behind Noah’s ark.

Irving Finkel is the curator in charge of cuneiform inscriptions on tablets of clay from ancient Mesopotamia at the British Museum, of which the Middle East Department has the largest collection of any modern museum. This work involves reading and translating all sorts of inscriptions, sometimes working on ancient archives to identify manuscripts that belong together, or even join to one another. He is the author of The Ark Before Noah: Decoding the Story of the Flood.

This talk was filmed in The Royal Institution on 18 January 2019.