Dr Irving Finkel In 1985 a man called Douglas Simmonds brought a bag of miscellaneous antiquities to the British Museum for inspection. Dr Irving Finkel, the museum’s assistant keeper of ancient Mesopotamian script, languages and cultures, went through the curiosities and quickly discovered that one of them, a small Babylonian tablet covered in cuneiform (an ancient form of script) was a historical document of great significance. As an expert in Assyriology and cuneiform, Finkel only needed to read the first few lines of this small, craggy tablet to realise that this was a segment of an ancient Mespotamian myth, the...