The Lewis Chessmen and What Happened to Them

Wednesday 7th September 2022

Irving Finkel

This lecture will be a personal look at the twelfth-century ivory Lewis Chessmen, which have bewitched the lecturer for some fifty-five years.

Irving Finkel is a British philologist and Assyriologist working at the British Museum, where he specialises in cuneiform inscriptions on tablets of clay from ancient Mesopotamia. He also studies the history of board games and, in a breakthrough work, determined the rules of the Royal Game of Ur, played in ancient Mesopotamia in the third century BC. He founded the Great Diary Project in 2007, a project to preserve the diaries of ordinary people. He has written several works of fiction for children, including The Princess Who Wouldn’t Come Home and Swizzle de Brax and the Blungaphone.