The Writing in the Stone

Irving Finkel, philologist and Assyriologist, is a spellbinding storyteller and a familiar figure in academic and literary circles. He is the Assistant Keeper of Ancient Mesopotamian script, languages and cultures in the Department of the Middle East in the British Museum, where he reads cuneiform inscriptions on tablets of clay from ancient Mesopotamia. An expert on the history of board games, he is also the author of many children's books as well as the best-selling The Ark Before Noah, which recounts his discovery of a cuneiform tablet that contained a Flood narrative far older than the story of Noah and which led to the recreation of the ark for a 2014 TV documentary.

The landscape of this dark and powerful story is the ancient world of Assyria some 3000 years ago, a time when writing was in the world's oldest script, cuneiform, and the domination of unseen forces firmly in the hands of the state's leading Exorcist.