The Babylonian Map of the World with Irving Finkel | Curator’s Corner S9 Ep5

In The British Museum, we have objects of all sizes.

Some pinheads, and some gigantic, and everything in between.

And once in a while, one of the very smallest things

turns out to have information in it

which is totally unexpected.

My name is Irving Finkel

and I’m a curator in The British Museum in the Middle East Department

and welcome to my corner.

Curator's Corner with Irving Finkel So what we have here

is a clay tablet.

As a matter of fact, it is not a real clay tablet

it is a replica

because the real clay tablet has to be on exhibition all the time

and also it's very delicate

we couldn't wave it around in front of the screen

and say "look at this, look at that"

that would be terribly irresponsible.

So but we can use this

replica

for demonstration purposes with impunity.

The ancient Mesopotamians

Sumerians, Babylonians, all those people

they wrote on clay, that was their natural activity

and clay tablets which have impressions of writing on

are pretty good, they're pretty stable

you can handle them

you can't play football with them

but they're pretty reliable

but what happens in antiquity

is there are wars, and buildings collapse

and fires, and disasters

and people die and they go away

and other people come and trample on things

and when archaeologists find them

it is not often that an ancient inscription on a piece of clay

comes to light in perfect condition.

So this tablet

you can easily see that it isn't complete

there's stuff missing here there's stuff missing there