Irving Finkel: The man history made

Darwin, Dumbledore, Engels, Gandalf, Santa. Like the men he is often nicknamed after, the 65-year-old leaves an indelible mark on his audiences. More famous writers and polymaths have attended the ZEE Jaipur Literature Festival (JLF), but few kindle the degree of warmth Irving Finkel does. The ID tag around his neck swings as he prances on stage, firing cannonballs of history into an audience as mesmerised with his untamed hair and beard as they are with tidbits on ancient board games.

"Pachisi is a grand invention by your country. Which a big company reproduced during the British Raj," explains the author of Ancient Board Games.

Just as delegates lean in and take the bait of a slight pause, Finkel shocks them by what seems, at that moment, like a sonic boom.

"BUT THE ENGLISH tore the rule book and created an alternative requiring not the slightest response of the soul. They took the good out of that game, repackaging and importing it to India as stupid, anodyne Ludo."

The audience, spanning from schoolchildren to the elderly, is rapt with attention.

"Now I see Indians playing Ludo, totally OBLIVIOUS about the damn good game their forefathers played," Finkel stresses, waving his arms about. There's a plea in his eyes.

"Agar yeh humein history padhate toh kitna achcha hota," whispers a schoolgirl to a vociferously-nodding friend.

Rocking the boat
He's on the editorial board of Board Game Studies, but Finkel is better known as the British Museum's eminence grise on all things cuneiform, the oldest script known to humankind. For almost 40 years, he has read, translated and preserved 1,30,000 clay tablets that once called Sumerian, Akkadian, Babylonian and Assyrian empires in Mesopotamia (modern-day Iraq, Kuwait and Syria) – the cradle of civilisation – home.

This makes Finkel privy to revelations that irk custodians of Abrahamic faiths – for some of these are origins of the fabled flood myth. Mesopotamia had not one, but three flood stories that predate the biblical version by a millennium: the epics of Gilgamesh, Atrahasis and Ziusudra.

"The most painstaking to decipher was the one I wrote the book about," he says in a post-session interview, referring to the palm-sized clay tablet that birthed The Ark Before Noah: Decoding the Story of the Flood. This tantalising goldmine of information not only describes animals being taken onto a coracle in pairs, but has specific instructions for building the whopping 3600sqm contraption.

The tablet, damaged on the reverse, has no duplicate or parallel, so Finkel painstakingly squeezed the most out of every syllable and wedge. "Fascinating details lay in damaged parts, but I got bits about animals going 2x2 – which is in the Old Testament. This had never been discovered," he says headily.

Irving Finkel's childlike gusto, coupled with animated skull sessions on the wonders of cuneiform, can border on comical. But it's the kind of delivery one wishes more academicians would adopt. Too caught up in the gravitas of their discoveries or theories, they often forget that history can be as much a joy ride as it can the equivalent of watching paint dry. Finkel makes you want to trash the future in favour of the past. More so when he regales with tales of Mesopotamian medicine and magic – subjects of his Ph.D thesis.

"They had spells, pharmacopeia and oil applications for fever, stomachaches and sores. And pregnancy tests too. Records dating to first millennium BC show women urinated on a barley shoot to see if it sprouted. If it did, it meant they were pregnant..."

"...and yes, the tests were remarkably accurate," he says, a twinkle in his eye.

Dear diary
In 2012, London's Bishopsgate Institute installed The Great Diary Project. And with that, another feather was added to the cap of Irving Finkel, Assyriologist, philologist and author: that of a diary rescuer. The genesis of this story is as fantastical as the origin myths he researches for a living.

"A second-hand goods dealer once came to me with a 76-volume collection that belonged to Godfrey Williams, a British soldier serving in the Northwest Frontier Province," he shares. "I study inscriptions over 4000 years old, so I'm used to the idea of documents looking like they have nothing inside."

On reading Williams' compendium, it dawned on Finkel that diaries, rarely considered standalone historical resources, open windows other texts cannot. He collected nearly 2,000 diaries before approaching Stefan Dickers, Library and Archives Manager at Bishopsgate. The project, whose patrons include Stephen Fry, English actor Michael Palin and politician Boris Johnson, now has 6,000 diaries – many of them contributions.

"Official history often has an agenda, whether unconscious or deliberate. But diaries have in them truths recorded without filters," he says. "Details like cost of living, how society functioned... and most importantly, what people felt."

Patterns of migration
Finkel's love for board games and personal diaries are symbiotic, feeding off his need to know what the ancients did for leisure. At 11, he read about the 4,600-year-old Royal Game of Ur and never looked back. Today, he's a go-to on the Mesopotamian game, as well as other forgotten ones.

The Royal Game of Ur was believed to be dethroned by backgammon. That is, until Finkel chanced upon an Indian connection he relishes talking about.

"I'd heard about anthropologists documenting the lives of Cochin or Pardesi Jews settled in a north Jerusalem kibbutz. There was mention of a game they played that dovetailed to rules on a clay tablet dating to 177BC" he recounts.

This tablet comprised the world's oldest set of game rules, for the Royal Game of Ur. On visiting a resident, Ruby Daniel, Finkel unwrapped the gift of a lifetime: the discovery that a 'dead' game is kept alive by Cochin Jews in the form of Aasha.

"Which means they came to India from Babylon after being exiled by Nebuchadnezzar," he exclaims. "This game, Aasha, is a living tradition. Migrants taught it to their children and grandchildren, making it a point to never forget."

The story of The Royal Game of Ur, Senet, and even chaupat and chess is the story of how games leapfrogged borders, mutating into versions that defied time. Board games, Finkel stresses, are as much pointers of human progress as technology. Which is why, during the ancient board game session at JLF, he put forward a request:

"Will somebody here please preserve and curate Indian games?"