Join Irving Finkel as he divulges the secrets of the Royal Game of Ur and the hidden world of ancient Mesopotamia. This unusual and unpredictable talk begins with ancient board games, but could end with a lesson in cuneiform or even a brief spell of Babylonian magic…
Irving Finkel, philologist and Assyriologist, is a spellbinding storyteller and a familiar figure in academic and literary circles. He is the Assistant Keeper of Ancient Mesopotamian script, languages and cultures in the Department of the Middle East in the British Museum, where he reads cuneiform inscriptions on tablets of clay from ancient Mesopotamia. An expert on the history of board games, he is also the author of the recently crowdfunded The Writing in the Stone, as well as the best-selling The Ark Before Noah, which recounts his discovery of a cuneiform tablet that contained a Flood narrative far older than the story of Noah and which led to the recreation of the ark for a 2014 TV documentary.
To purchase your ticket (£15), please click here – admission without a ticket in advance is not possible on this occasion.