Books by John Curtis

John Curtis is Keeper of Special Middle East Projects at the British Museum and a Fellow of the British Academy. His personal research interests focus on the archaeology and history of Iraq and Iran, c.1000-330 BC. He is the author of a number of books including An Examination of Late Assyrian Metalwork, Ancient Persia, The Oxus Treasure, Forgotten Empire (with Nigel Tallis) and The Horse: From Arabia to Royal Ascot (with Nigel Tallis). 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.