Irving Finkel

Now, also, in 2007, There was an event at the British Museum.

It was a weekend of, I can't even remember the exact topic name that was given, but it was a weekend of ancient Sumerian material that was organized by Dianne Volkstein and Irving Finkel.

He's on the staff of the British Museum in the section of Near Eastern Antiquities.

Hmm.

I got to see that in the British Museum.

Props to Irving Finkel.

Love Irving Finkel.

He's the head curator there.

Love him.

In the 1990s, that triangle in the top upper right had not been identified as part of this tablet and was sitting in the wrong drawer somewhere.

And a woman that was an intern found it.

And when they were able to place it, Irving Finkel literally lost it.

Some people don't know who George Smith is, Andrew George.

Some people know who Irving Finkel is, but George Smith, Andrew George and Samuel Noah Kramer most times don't get it, get into the subject.

And that's because they talk about more what I talk about.

When I say what I talk about is what I'm sharing from what I read from them in the academia side, because I understand what people will consider pseudoscience when they play Zachariah Sitchin in.

Uh, we have some top speakers coming every year.

We've got a whole bunch of them, Robin Heath, Irving Finkel, uh, a whole bunch of people coming.

Um, some, we have some top archeologists joining us as well.

And we also do f- a few days of tours around the conference, and it's also online as well.

have more to say about that.

And so that's when Irving Finkel, who was a British Museum curator with the perfect name for a British Museum curator, Irving Finkel, he enters the scene.

Now, he's apparently quite a character.

He's got his huge white beard and bushy eyebrows, all these things that you knew exactly when I said his name was Irving.

And for about 100 years, British museum experts failed to translate it, especially because it didn't read like literature or laws or other common styles of writing.

And then around 1980, a curator and a seriologist named Irving Finkel detected little similarities between the cuneiform on the tablet and other scraps of rules for games on other Babylonian finds.

And he proceeded to translate our only old complete rules for the Royal Game of Ur into And the rules are complete enough that some people in modern Iraq have revived the game and made like new boards and pieces and they play that exact game.

Whoa.