The attendant on the information desk in the Great Court of the British Museum (BM) raises her eyebrows and smiles knowingly when I tell her I've arranged to meet Irving Finkel, the assistant curator of the Ancient Near East.
He's known as the 'ZZ Top' of the museum world, she tells me, and is notorious for forgetting things. 'He's scatty, like all curators are, their minds are on higher things', she says, before sending me off to his department.
When I get to meet Finkel, after being let into the department's inner sanctum, he says that he is often described as a typical curator. 'I'm told this lots of times. People in the outside world think of museum curators as being dusty with beards and I'm sometimes quite dusty and I do have a beard,' he says.
He uses the phrase 'the outside world' a number of times when talking about people or things outside the BM, a decidedly curatorish habit. His small office is littered with papers, as well as having historic advertisements on the walls and a framed engraving of one of the department's former curators who has an equally impressive beard.
Finkel's own is a handsome brown and white Dickens affair. He hasn't shaved since it started to grow in his teens, and had ambitions for it to reach the floor, but to his disappointment it has stopped growing.
Despite these other-worldly traits, Finkel comes across as someone profoundly engaged with life. His specialism is Mesopotamia, which was located in what is now Iraq, and more particularly cuneiform, the world's first writing system which served the ancient civilisation for 3,000 years.
The BM holds more than 120,000 cuneiform tablets, and one trait he has that also conforms to the curator stereotype is his passion for his museum and his subject.
He is currently giving talks and running workshops on cuneiform as part of a year-long tour of the Queen of the Night, a 4,000-year-old terracotta relief of a Babylonian goddess, which is off to Cardiff this month.
The tour has been very popular: when it was at the Sunderland Museum and Winter Garden it doubled the number of visitors the museum gets during a normal weekend. In the workshops he teaches children how to write their names in cuneiform using plasticine and lolly sticks.
'It is a kind of propaganda campaign to topple the mummies and pharaohs', he says. 'Everybody knows about Ancient Egypt; it's number one and we'll never displace it. But we're always trying to build public knowledge of Mesopotamia.'
Irving Leonard Finkel was born in September 1951 and grew up in Palmers Green, north London. His father was a dentist, his mother a schoolteacher until she went into the 'baby business', which boomed, Finkel being the first of five. He now lives in Dulwich, and has five children of his own, three from his first marriage and two from his current one.
When he was growing up, the family had no car and no television, but the house was full of books and they often went to the BM. His mother told him that he first announced that he wanted to work in the museum when he was four-and-a-half, after he'd been captivated by the 12th century Lewis Chessmen, found in the 19th century on the Outer Hebrides.
His ambition solidified at the age of 15 when, still fascinated by the Lewis pieces, he knocked on the door of the department of Medieval Antiquities and was taken inside by a curator, Michael Taylor, and shown pieces that weren't on display, as well as catalogues and original drawings.
'He was so incredibly encouraging that it crystallised in my head the idea that one could really try to work here', he recalls. He went to Birmingham University to study Egyptology, but the professor died before he started, so he studied cuneiform instead and has never looked back. After a PhD and a three-year spell doing research at the University of Chicago, he got his current job at the BM in 1979.
His interests are wide-ranging, including starting a campaign for a national repository for diaries, of which he has now acquired about 1,000 ('the only form of literature where people tell the truth'), writing children's books - so far he has written five, although all are unpublished - and charting the history of board games.
Board games are now part of his job description and he's persuaded the Indian government, in partnership with the museum, to run an anthropological project to record Indian board games, which are quickly dying out. He has written scholarly papers on the subject, and is co-curating an exhibition in New York about the board games of Asia that will open next month.
But his main work is on cuneiform, and he has a number of big projects on the go. He is working on a book about chronicles of events during the second millennium of Mesopotamian civilisation that are precisely dated by astronomical records. Another project is a book about an archive of early medical texts that he has extracted from shattered tablets.
His work has also meant he has had a lot of contact with Iraqi scholars. During the Saddam Hussein years, his department kept up contact with curators there and at the Museum of Baghdad, so when he heard it had been raided at the end of the war last year it affected him personally and professionally. 'I'd gone to give a paper at a conference in Liverpool.
I was walking back to the station and saw a headline on the newspapers and I was paralysed with shock,' he says. 'It was a colossal disaster. When I came back here we were plunged into a melee of media work and the primary question these journalists asked us was why should it matter so much. It was a serious education to find that in the world that was a legitimate question.'
Of the 40 iconic objects taken from the Baghdad museum, around 30 have been returned, although Finkel doesn't have an exact figure, but thousands of smaller looted objects will probably never be found. Although Finkel went on television saying that the looting was 'easily predictable and could have been stopped', he doesn't subscribe to the conspiracy theories which say that the US government had been influenced by the art market keen to see objects come up for sale.
He puts the tragedy down to ignorance or simple disregard. And though he says he's been told there are a lot of artefacts leaving the country, because of the tightening up of the laws in Britain, none are turning up on the art market here. In truth, he says, no one knows where they end up.
Before the latest Gulf war there had been plans to make reproductions of about 1,000 cuneiform tablets to go to a new centre funded by Hussein, but the project has now been set back. It is still something the museum wants to do, although the experimental copies they made using a new technique in fact did not turn out to be very good.
The British Museum is also committed to loaning the Queen of the Night to the museum in Baghdad, but that will have to wait until the new central authority has been stabilised and the museum has been back on its feet long enough to see that it's safe, Finkel says.
The looting of the museum in Baghdad was one of the most intense periods of Finkel's time at the British Museum, but his work there has inevitably meant he's had contact with the out-of-the-ordinary closer to home, too. One of the most notable occasions was when a man came in to one of the regular identification days the department of the Near East holds, bringing pages and pages of inscriptions in an unknown writing.
Finkel had no idea what they meant so he asked the man to tell him something about how he got them. It turned out the man's aunt had trances and this was the writing she produced while she was in one, at which point Finkel had the delicate job of explaining that, sadly, the writing was indecipherable.
The department still holds the identification days, but during his time at the museum he's seen many changes, some positive, some negative. The roof leaks more than it used to, he says, one member of the department has had to retire early owing to budget cuts, and the acquisitions budget has withered to almost nothing. But the museum is much less formal than it was when he arrived, and he says the moves towards opening up access are 'absolutely the right thing', although he laments the degree to which museums are in thrall to buzzwords such as 'lifelong learning'.
'People don't wake up thinking, "I need to know something new today; I'll go to a museum and read a label." People go to museums to say, "wow, I never knew that". It's informed "wow-ness", but that's not the same as lifelong learning nor a substitute for poor school teaching.'
Despite the fact that the museum needs to 'scrabble around for inadequate money', and that it requires research and exhibitions to dovetail into a single vision more than Finkel would like, he says that he has no plans to move on. In fact, he says the only way he'd leave the BM would be in a coffin.
'The British Museum is unique. There are not many institutions that can state that they are there to serve unborn children, but it really is true here. I would happily have worked in the cloakroom just to get in the building.' mj
He's known as the 'ZZ Top' of the museum world, she tells me, and is notorious for forgetting things. 'He's scatty, like all curators are, their minds are on higher things', she says, before sending me off to his department.
When I get to meet Finkel, after being let into the department's inner sanctum, he says that he is often described as a typical curator. 'I'm told this lots of times. People in the outside world think of museum curators as being dusty with beards and I'm sometimes quite dusty and I do have a beard,' he says.
He uses the phrase 'the outside world' a number of times when talking about people or things outside the BM, a decidedly curatorish habit. His small office is littered with papers, as well as having historic advertisements on the walls and a framed engraving of one of the department's former curators who has an equally impressive beard.
Finkel's own is a handsome brown and white Dickens affair. He hasn't shaved since it started to grow in his teens, and had ambitions for it to reach the floor, but to his disappointment it has stopped growing.
Despite these other-worldly traits, Finkel comes across as someone profoundly engaged with life. His specialism is Mesopotamia, which was located in what is now Iraq, and more particularly cuneiform, the world's first writing system which served the ancient civilisation for 3,000 years.
The BM holds more than 120,000 cuneiform tablets, and one trait he has that also conforms to the curator stereotype is his passion for his museum and his subject.
He is currently giving talks and running workshops on cuneiform as part of a year-long tour of the Queen of the Night, a 4,000-year-old terracotta relief of a Babylonian goddess, which is off to Cardiff this month.
The tour has been very popular: when it was at the Sunderland Museum and Winter Garden it doubled the number of visitors the museum gets during a normal weekend. In the workshops he teaches children how to write their names in cuneiform using plasticine and lolly sticks.
'It is a kind of propaganda campaign to topple the mummies and pharaohs', he says. 'Everybody knows about Ancient Egypt; it's number one and we'll never displace it. But we're always trying to build public knowledge of Mesopotamia.'
Irving Leonard Finkel was born in September 1951 and grew up in Palmers Green, north London. His father was a dentist, his mother a schoolteacher until she went into the 'baby business', which boomed, Finkel being the first of five. He now lives in Dulwich, and has five children of his own, three from his first marriage and two from his current one.
When he was growing up, the family had no car and no television, but the house was full of books and they often went to the BM. His mother told him that he first announced that he wanted to work in the museum when he was four-and-a-half, after he'd been captivated by the 12th century Lewis Chessmen, found in the 19th century on the Outer Hebrides.
His ambition solidified at the age of 15 when, still fascinated by the Lewis pieces, he knocked on the door of the department of Medieval Antiquities and was taken inside by a curator, Michael Taylor, and shown pieces that weren't on display, as well as catalogues and original drawings.
'He was so incredibly encouraging that it crystallised in my head the idea that one could really try to work here', he recalls. He went to Birmingham University to study Egyptology, but the professor died before he started, so he studied cuneiform instead and has never looked back. After a PhD and a three-year spell doing research at the University of Chicago, he got his current job at the BM in 1979.
His interests are wide-ranging, including starting a campaign for a national repository for diaries, of which he has now acquired about 1,000 ('the only form of literature where people tell the truth'), writing children's books - so far he has written five, although all are unpublished - and charting the history of board games.
Board games are now part of his job description and he's persuaded the Indian government, in partnership with the museum, to run an anthropological project to record Indian board games, which are quickly dying out. He has written scholarly papers on the subject, and is co-curating an exhibition in New York about the board games of Asia that will open next month.
But his main work is on cuneiform, and he has a number of big projects on the go. He is working on a book about chronicles of events during the second millennium of Mesopotamian civilisation that are precisely dated by astronomical records. Another project is a book about an archive of early medical texts that he has extracted from shattered tablets.
His work has also meant he has had a lot of contact with Iraqi scholars. During the Saddam Hussein years, his department kept up contact with curators there and at the Museum of Baghdad, so when he heard it had been raided at the end of the war last year it affected him personally and professionally. 'I'd gone to give a paper at a conference in Liverpool.
I was walking back to the station and saw a headline on the newspapers and I was paralysed with shock,' he says. 'It was a colossal disaster. When I came back here we were plunged into a melee of media work and the primary question these journalists asked us was why should it matter so much. It was a serious education to find that in the world that was a legitimate question.'
Of the 40 iconic objects taken from the Baghdad museum, around 30 have been returned, although Finkel doesn't have an exact figure, but thousands of smaller looted objects will probably never be found. Although Finkel went on television saying that the looting was 'easily predictable and could have been stopped', he doesn't subscribe to the conspiracy theories which say that the US government had been influenced by the art market keen to see objects come up for sale.
He puts the tragedy down to ignorance or simple disregard. And though he says he's been told there are a lot of artefacts leaving the country, because of the tightening up of the laws in Britain, none are turning up on the art market here. In truth, he says, no one knows where they end up.
Before the latest Gulf war there had been plans to make reproductions of about 1,000 cuneiform tablets to go to a new centre funded by Hussein, but the project has now been set back. It is still something the museum wants to do, although the experimental copies they made using a new technique in fact did not turn out to be very good.
The British Museum is also committed to loaning the Queen of the Night to the museum in Baghdad, but that will have to wait until the new central authority has been stabilised and the museum has been back on its feet long enough to see that it's safe, Finkel says.
The looting of the museum in Baghdad was one of the most intense periods of Finkel's time at the British Museum, but his work there has inevitably meant he's had contact with the out-of-the-ordinary closer to home, too. One of the most notable occasions was when a man came in to one of the regular identification days the department of the Near East holds, bringing pages and pages of inscriptions in an unknown writing.
Finkel had no idea what they meant so he asked the man to tell him something about how he got them. It turned out the man's aunt had trances and this was the writing she produced while she was in one, at which point Finkel had the delicate job of explaining that, sadly, the writing was indecipherable.
The department still holds the identification days, but during his time at the museum he's seen many changes, some positive, some negative. The roof leaks more than it used to, he says, one member of the department has had to retire early owing to budget cuts, and the acquisitions budget has withered to almost nothing. But the museum is much less formal than it was when he arrived, and he says the moves towards opening up access are 'absolutely the right thing', although he laments the degree to which museums are in thrall to buzzwords such as 'lifelong learning'.
'People don't wake up thinking, "I need to know something new today; I'll go to a museum and read a label." People go to museums to say, "wow, I never knew that". It's informed "wow-ness", but that's not the same as lifelong learning nor a substitute for poor school teaching.'
Despite the fact that the museum needs to 'scrabble around for inadequate money', and that it requires research and exhibitions to dovetail into a single vision more than Finkel would like, he says that he has no plans to move on. In fact, he says the only way he'd leave the BM would be in a coffin.
'The British Museum is unique. There are not many institutions that can state that they are there to serve unborn children, but it really is true here. I would happily have worked in the cloakroom just to get in the building.' mj
