Page 107 - The Secret Museum

AS WE WALKED ACROSS THE great hall, we started chatting. Finkel is very friendly,

kind, interesting and seriously clever. He is one of only a hundred or so people in the
world who can read cuneiform, the oldest form of writing in the world.

He was first shown the basics of how to read the script, when he started at
university and he knew ‘within about 20 minutes this was what I wanted to do for the
rest of my existence’. He learned cuneiform, and later applied to work with it at the
British Museum. He got the job. ‘In that moment, I achieved my life’s ambition.’

Since that day in 1979, he has been working on the world’s largest, most cosmic
jigsaw puzzle, piecing together pieces of cuneiform writing. His domain has been the
Arched Room, a three-tiered room where all 120,000 of the British Museum’s behind

the scenes cuneiform tablets are stored.
On the top two levels are books about cuneiform and the cultures that employed

this form of writing. On the ground level is a long run of tables for cuneiform
scholars to write at. The walls are lined with bookshelves that once stored the
British Library’s Mills and Boon collection. Now they are filled with trays, each one
containing glass-topped boxes. Inside the boxes are clay tablets covered with ancient
cuneiform writing. It looks like an alien script.

Cuneiform script is made up of short, straight lines which go in different
directions. The lines (called wedges) were imprinted in pieces of soft clay with a cut
reed, used like a pen; ‘It looked a bit like a chopstick,’ explained Finkel. Cuneiform

means ‘wedge shaped’, from the Latin cuneus, or wedge. The word doesn’t rhyme
with uniform: you pronounce it ‘cu-neigh-i-form’.

A lot of the clay tablets in Finkel’s domain come from the Royal Library of King
Ashurbanipal, who lived in the sixth century BC. ‘He was king of the world at the
time,’ Finkel told me, ‘a proper Arabian Nights king – harems, exotic foods,
hundreds of servants, chariots.’ But he was also literate, and he loved clay books. He
built his capital in a city called Nineveh (today called Kuyunjik, in Iraq) and, at the
heart of his palace, in the citadel, he created his library.

The library contained spells, myths about gods and heroes, stories of wrestling

with bulls, recipes, astrology, medicine, histories, books on fortune telling, poems,
love letters – and multiple copies of the Epic of Gilgamesh. Until I visited Finkel’s
realm, I hadn’t been aware that the story had come down through the generations to us
written on pieces of baked clay.

The library also housed maps, plans, dictionaries, books of grammar and mundane
tax forms, everyday ‘to do’ lists and legal records. There were a few ‘weirdo’
things, also, Finkel told me. ‘Like what?’ I asked. ‘Well, you know, strange dramas:
there is one about a relationship between a god and his mother-in-law that was

probably performed as a play in Babylon.’
The king ordered every temple in Babylonia, in the south, to give him a copy of
every piece of literature they owned. In some cases, pieces of writing had to be