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 pin heads 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 finle and I'm a curator in the British museum in the Middle East apartment and welcome to my [Music] corner 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 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 the it's not complete there 's stuff missing here there's stuff missing the re and it also looks like elephants have danced a pter over the surface CU many of the signs are damaged or squashed but nevertheless this piece of K for inscription is a remarkable thing this is the oldest map of the world in the world it has two sides this is the or obverse and this is the back or the reverse and the reverse consists of lots of lines