William de Rimpel

My friend Irving Finkel at the British Museum, who's this wonderful character who looks like, he's straight out of a kind of Arthurian epic.

He's like some Merlin emerged from some cave holding Excalibur, except that he holds these wonderful tablets.

And they're in this incredibly fancy room with the back of the British Museum where these gorgeous Victorian bookshelves specially built for cuneiform tablets are.

Mm-hmm.

And they're all lined up there.

Eric, these are actually the best evidence we have for what's going on in this troubled region, which the Egyptians call it Canaan.

Is that the Egyptian word for the region?

And you casually dropped Jerusalem.

Will you quickly tell us, sorry, I interrupted you, but to your answer, add what's going on in Jerusalem and who's living there.

And tell us about the Canaanites just for a second.

Who are these guys?

These are the indigenous people who are a mixture of all sorts.

They don't call themselves Canaanites.

They think of themselves as the citizens of individual cities.

But they're caught between these great powers.

You've got the Assyrians, you've got the Hittites to the north, and then you've got the Egyptians to the south.

And this is a kind of no man's land of city-states that are too weak to mount enormous invasions of anywhere, but can only squabble with each other.

And they come back and forward, don't they?

You've got some Canaanite gods who get taken on by the Egyptians.

And so give us the world that he upends, how it's completely open.