Irving Finkel

Irving Leonard Finkel
Residence	London
Citizenship	British
Alma mater	University of Birmingham
Known for	Discovery of tablet with Great Flood narrative

Irving Leonard Finkel is a British philologist and Assyriologist. He is currently the Assistant Keeper of Ancient Mesopotamian script, languages and cultures in the Department of the Middle East in the British Museum, where he specialises in cuneiform inscriptions on tablets of clay from ancient Mesopotamia.

Finkel earned a PhD in Assyriology from the University of Birmingham under the supervision of Wilfred G. Lambert with a dissertation on Babylonian exorcistic spells against demons.

Finkel spent three years as a Research Fellow at the University of Chicago Oriental Institute. In 1976 he returned to the UK, and he was appointed as Assistant Keeper in the Department of Western Asiatic Antiquities at the British Museum, where he was (and remains) responsible for curating, reading and translating the museum's collection of around 130,000 cuneiform tablets.

In 2014, Finkel's discovery of a cuneiform tablet that contained a Flood narrative similar to that of the story of Noah's Ark, described in his book The Ark Before Noah, was widely reported in the news media. The ark described in the tablet was circular, essentially a very large coracle or kuphar and made of rope on a wooden frame. The tablet included sufficient details of its dimensions and construction to enable a copy of the ark to be made at about 1/3 scale and successfully floated, as documented in a 2014 TV documentary.

Finkel is an Honorary Member of the Institute of Archaeology and Antiquity of the University of Birmingham and a Council Member of the Anglo-Israel Archaeology Society.

Finkel studies the history of board games, and is on the Editorial Board of Board Game Studies. Among his breakthrough works is the determination of the rules of the Royal Game of Ur.

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