Irving Finkel Gilgamesh

Irving Finkel, is an Assyriologist and curator of cuneiform inscriptions on ancient Mesopotamian clay tablets, at the British Museum. He is also a gem; a lucid, sceptical and passionate orator. He entertained his audience, who listened transfixed, with explanations and stories about the twelve clay tablets upon which the oldest known written epic was inscribed. He told us the greatest leap forward that man has ever taken was to create graphic symbols for sounds and that this technology was probably created for tax purposes! It was also used to write the story of the great Sumerian King, Gilgamesh. The kernel of the story is that ‘once there was a king of great quality, and everybody was sad when he died’, so sad it seems that people followed him into the grave, into the death pits. We might ask why the civilised Sumerian’s allowed this to happen? Dr Finkel’s hunch is that it was spontaneous at first, but that thereafter the practice may have been repeated. We were told inscriptions have the quality of oral literature which, for me, begs the enticing question of whether they are faithful to or a deviation from the most prevalent oral versions. This question was not fully answered, although Dr Finkel remarked that it is certainly a mark of the literature’s greatness that it allows for many varied interpretations today. The inscriptions were translated by Finkel’s predecessor, George Smith, and came to the attention of the nation because they contain an account of the ‘great flood’. Such was the excitement at the discovery of this sister story to the Bible’s ‘flood’ tale that the Prime Minister himself sat at a public reading of the tablets. Dr Finkel’s engaging talk has convinced me of the antics of Gilgamesh. Buy a translation, read it to your loved ones, then take them to the British Museum to see the tablets!

Brighton Dome, Founders Room, 12 May 2013

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