Irving Finkel on the oldest map of the world

A 6th century B.C. Babylonian clay tablet in the British Museum is the oldest surviving map of the world. It was discovered in Sippar, modern-day southern Iraq, and the world it maps has the Euphrates running down the center with Babylon straddling it. Other Mesopotamian kingdoms, cities and geographical areas are marked, including Assyria, Urartu and the southern marshes at the head of the Persian Gulf. We know it’s a map of the world instead of a local one because it is encircled by a ring labeled the Bitter River, a body of water that in Babylonian cosmology surrounded the known world.

Above the map is a paragraph of cuneiform writing that tells the Babylonian story of creation and describes its human, animal, monstrous and divine inhabitants. It doesn’t directly explain the map itself, however. The much longer inscription on the back does addresses that, although the damaged areas of the tablet make all the text incomplete.

There are eight “nagu” (regions) outlying the double ring of the Bitter River. They are shaped as triangles and may represent mountains like the ones that emerged after the waters of the Great Flood subsided. The reverse side of the tablet is inscribed with eight clearly divided paragraphs that describe the eight nagu as well as constellations. The cuneiform inscription on the back also notes that this map is a copy of a much older version. References to place names indicate that original map cannot have been made before the 9th century B.C.

British Museum scholars have been working on deciphering it ever since it was discovered in 1882, but the missing areas made it challenging. In the 1990s, Edith Horsley, a student in one of curator Dr. Irving Finkel’s night classes came across an interesting clay fragment while volunteering for the museum. She set it aside for Finkel to examine, and as soon as he saw it, he realized it fit into one of the broken gaps in the world map tablet. That fragment proved to be a keystone to figuring out important elements of the map, including the final location of the ark built by Utnapishtim, the Babylonian version of Noah.

Dr. Irving Finkel has made one of his pricelessly entertaining videos about the map, its history, its decipherment and significance. Spoiler: the description on YouTube has the greatest content warning of all time.

* This article was originally published here