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As we wind down our conversation in his office, Finkel makes me an offer I can"™t refuse: to show me the magnificent Arched Room library in the depths of the British Museum, home to a staggering 130,000 cuneiform tablets. He guides me in to the dazzling repository, and I peer into towering archival stacks arranged in drawers, rack after rack of clay. Gazing around, I bathe in the extraordinary knowledge that I"™m surrounded by objects that were created up to 5,200 years ago, or 3,000 years before Cleopatra was born. And I"™m speaking to one of the few people in human history"”a real-life wizard"”who has read them.

Sitting across from Finkel in his cluttered museum office, I ask him a question that has long been nagging me: "When you read the ancient cuneiform tablets, and gaze into the minds of people who lived as many as 5,200 years ago, are they like us? Do you see a universality to the human experience?"

Finkel"™s answer is unequivocal: "If you took 12 miscellaneous Babylonians and stuck them on a bus in modern Western clothing, they would all have their counterparts in our society." Or, as he previously wrote, even more eloquently:

"We meet mercenaries, fortune-tellers, priests and prostitutes; cut-throats, mendicants, money-lenders and water-sellers. The great vanished metropolis with its noises and smells, garden luxury at one end and slum shacks at the other, must have been timeless in its daily life and thereby, thanks to its ancient words, almost within our grasp. And those ancient people, writing their tablets, looking at their world, crawling between heaven and earth"¦like us."

[...] The reason for this familiarity, as Finkel notes, is that "we are, for one thing, talking only of the last five thousand years, a mere dollop in Time terms, in which snail processes like evolution or biological development have no measurable part." Culturally, there are gulfs, but the rest is universal.

[...] Similarly, they, like us, entertained themselves with games. Finkel, for his part, is the first human for thousands of years to discover the rules to the oldest board game in the world: the Royal Game of Ur. (The discovery was hiding in plain sight; a key clue lurked in the British Museum on a prominent statue that was exhibited in low light; nobody had previously noticed it because it lay in shadow).

Moreover, they"™re not only like us, they also continue to influence our daily lives. Take a look at any clock, any watch, indeed, any circle, and you"™ll see the lingering ghosts of ancient Mesopotamia haunting your life. They decided to use a numbering system of 60"™s, likely because it was easily subdivided, able to be split up evenly by no fewer than twelve different integers. Minutes, seconds, the 360 degrees of a circle, the 60 degree angles of equilateral triangles, each a holdover from these distant relatives that we rarely consider.

However, the most tantalizing link to that ancient past, the one that he held in his palm back in 2009, was one that acted like a 3,700 year-old IKEA assembly guide for an Ark. And the biggest surprise in the instructions was that the boat was to be round, a coracle.

In this version, one senior god decides that Earth, populated with too many humans, has become too noisy. As one tablet records: "The noise of mankind has become too intense for me / With their uproar I am deprived of sleep." The cacophony is sufficiently annoying that he decides it would be better to simply eliminate all life from the planet and sets in motion a plan to do so.