The thought of an hour or so being lectured on the earliest writings in the archaeological record on a Wednesday afternoon in Swindon may conjure up any number of images. Most of them including words such as dusty, academic and under attended. Well, thank the deities we have Irving Finkel and the Festival of Literature! And I don’t use that exclamation mark lightly.
Even with such a niche topic to work with, that of Cuneiform, the ancient Mesopotamian script of choice, which he is at pains to emphasise pre-dates the more famous and fashionable Egyptian hieroglyphs, Finkel is able to deliver an explosive talk. He certainly lives up to your expectations of what an academic should look like but even as he is setting the scene for his topic’s jumping off point you realise that this is not the dry and chalk dust-strewn stuff that lesser orators might have stuck you with.
I’m sure even the most enthusiastic archaeologist or history buff in attendance will still have found much that is new in his talk. Even if you are aware of how the language evolved from being a symbolic record keeping system to a fluid and pliable language able to carry subtle meaning or aware of how it then went on to influence Egyptian, Aramaic, Hebrew, Greek and everything that came afterwards, including all modern languages, there is still a lot of information to be added and absorbed. The fact that he can, not only deliver a talk that is factual but also engaging, humorous and filled with asides, anecdotes and a wonderful line in self-deprecation is obviously the secret to his success as a speaker.
He is at turns poetic, descriptive and evocative, loud, brusque and slightly sweary. Feet are stamped, lecterns are slapped and the Inland Revenue is savagely invoked. He wanders between high levels of information and popularist accessibility, academic reassurances and street talk…his ability to move from Byronic to moronic and back again is breath taking. History, it would seem, is back on the menu.
