BRITISH MUSEUM: PROTOTYPE FOR NOAH'S ARK WAS ROUND

January 25, 2014

BY JILL LAWLESS

ASSOCIATED PRESS

LONDON (AP) -- It was a vast boat that saved two of each animal and a handful of humans from a catastrophic flood.

But forget all those images of a long vessel with a pointy bow - the original Noah's Ark, new research suggests, was round.

A recently deciphered 4,000-year-old clay tablet from ancient Mesopotamia - modern-day Iraq - reveals striking new details about the roots of the Old Testament tale of Noah. It tells a similar story, complete with detailed instructions for building a giant round vessel known as a coracle - as well as the key instruction that animals should enter "two by two."

The tablet went on display at the British Museum on Friday, and soon engineers will follow the ancient instructions to see whether the vessel could actually have sailed.

It's also the subject of a new book, "The Ark Before Noah," by Irving Finkel, the museum's assistant keeper of the Middle East and the man who translated the tablet.

Finkel got hold of it a few years ago, when a man brought in a damaged tablet his father had acquired in the Middle East after World War II. It was light brown, about the size of a mobile phone and covered in the jagged cuneiform script of the ancient Mesopotamians.

It turned out, Finkel said Friday, to be "one of the most important human documents ever discovered."

"It was really a heart-stopping moment - the discovery that the boat was to be a round boat," said Finkel, who sports a long gray beard, a ponytail and boundless enthusiasm for his subject. "That was a real surprise."

And yet, Finkel said, a round boat makes sense. Coracles were widely used as river taxis in ancient Iraq and are perfectly designed to bob along on raging floodwaters.

"It's a perfect thing," Finkel said. "It never sinks, it's light to carry."

Other experts said Finkel wasn't simply indulging in book-promotion hype. David Owen, professor of ancient Near Eastern studies at Cornell University, said the British Museum curator had made "an extraordinary discovery."

Elizabeth Stone, an expert on the antiquities of ancient Mesopotamia at New York's Stony Brook University, said it made sense that ancient Mesopotamians would depict their mythological ark as round.

"People are going to envision the boat however people envision boats where they are," she said. "Coracles are not unusual things to have had in Mesopotamia."

The tablet records a Mesopotamian god's instructions for building a giant vessel - two-thirds the size of a soccer field in area - made of rope, reinforced with wooden ribs and coated in bitumen.

Finkel said that on paper (or stone) the boat-building orders appear sound, but he doesn't yet know whether it would have floated. A television documentary due to be broadcast later this year will follow attempts to build the ark according to the ancient manual.

The flood story recurs in later Mesopotamian writings including the "Epic of Gilgamesh." These versions lack the technical instructions - cut out, Finkel believes, because they got in the way of the storytelling.

"It would be like a Bond movie where instead of having this great sexy red car that comes on, somebody starts to tell you about how many horsepower it's got and the pressure of the tires and the capacity of the boot (trunk)," he said. "No one cares about that. They want the car chase."

Finkel is aware his discovery may cause consternation among believers in the Biblical story. When 19th-century British Museum scholars first learned from cuneiform tablets that the Babylonians had a flood myth, they were disturbed by its striking similarities to the story of Noah.

"Already in 1872 people were writing about it in a worried way - What does it mean that Holy Writ appears on this piece of Weetabix?" he joked, referring to a cereal similar in shape to the tablet.

Finkel has no doubts.

"I'm sure the story of the flood and a boat to rescue life is a Babylonian invention," he said.

He believes the tale was likely passed on to the Jews during their exile in Babylon in the 6th century B.C. And he doesn't think the tablet provides evidence the ark described in the Bible existed. He said it's more likely that a devastating real flood made its way into folk memory, and has remained there ever since.

"I don't think the ark existed - but a lot of people do," he said. "It doesn't really matter. The Biblical version is a thing of itself and it has a vitality forever.

"The idea that floods are caused by sin is happily still alive among us," he added, pointing out a local councilor in England who made headlines recently for saying Britain's recent storms were caused by the legalization of gay marriage.

"Had I known it, it would have gone in the preface of the book," Finkel said.

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January 25, 2014

I guess the researchers forgot to actually read the story, since the exact size is explicitly stated in the story itself.

In sports terms, it was a little longer than a football field, and a third the width of the football field.

And it was as high as 3 basketball hoops.

January 25, 2014

Recognizing how ancient history was passed down through the generations before being reduced to written form, it is not at all surprising that many cultures have a flood story that destroyed life with a divine rescue plan conveyed to someone in the past lineage of that people group. With all of mankind descendants of the one we call Noah each culture traces back to a common ancestor and history. With the scattering of the people over subsequent generations with little or no opportunity to collaborate or even compare stories, accuracy would naturally suffer. The elements in common tend to confirm a flood event over which divine providence watched and provided a means of rescue. Isn't that the most important part?

January 25, 2014

fccool said:

Quote:

I guess the researchers forgot to actually read the story, since the exact size is explicitly stated in the story itself.

In Genesis 6:15ff, the Hebrew language states that the boat was to be 300 cubits long and 50 cubits wide and 30 cubits high. The Hebrew does not give the measurements in feet/yards/meters as those measurements did not exist in the time of Noah.

As a matter of fact, no one today knows the conversion factor to convert the cubits in the time of Noah into feet/yards/meters today. The reason for that is that no one today knows the size of the cubit in the time of Noah. All statements today related to the size of the cubit are using a size that is speculative and modern. In the beginning of the modern cubit, the size of the cubit varied.

Some will say that the variation known in the modern cubit is not enough to be significant. O.K. But, we do not know that the modern cubit, so-called, is any where close to the size of the cubit in the time of Noah.

Yes, the Bible does give the size of the Ark that Noah built. But it does not give it in a manner that tells us its size.

What it does is tell us the relative ratio of the width to the length. To maritime engineers, that is an important figure.

January 25, 2014

The following is all taken from Wikipedia, but I am putting it in my own words:

The earliest known reference to the cubit comes from Egypt and the Step Pyramid of Djoser and dates to about 2700 BC. This cubit is called the Royal Cubit. However, the measured size of the Cubit Rods used for measurements vary and are slightly over 20 inches in length.

NOTE: There is no evidence to relate the size of these measurement rods to a standard in the time of Noah.

During the same time period, the Sumerian cubit was about the same size, but slightly smaller.

The so-called Biblical cubit is even smaller than the above. It is measured at about 18 inches.

In other places and times the cubit was measured at the length of a male forearm. NOTE: As males differ in size, the did not give a standardized length.

Other measurements existed in India, Thailand and other places.

One might say that we are quibbling about a very few inches. Not really. All of our known measurements for a cubit are many hundreds of years after the time of Noah and we know nothing about the time of Noah.

January 26, 2014

What I find interesting is the assumption that the Biblical story was borrowed from the Babylonian flood stories.

January 26, 2014

Good point Gerry.

January 26, 2014

It seems a fair assumption, given the amount by which the Babylonian version predates the Hebrew one. Even the cosmology seen in the creation and flood stories (and much of the rest of the OT) is distinctly Babylonian. One may not have been "stolen" from the other in the modern sense, but these are clearly older ideas that have strongly common roots and are best understood through the context of their culture.

http://biologos.org/blog/saturday-sermon-the-flood

http://biologos.org/blog/series/the-flood-not-global-barely-local-mostly-theological

http://www.examiner.com/article/what-do-...e-story-of-noah

http://biologos.org/blog/genesis-1-and-a-babylonian-creation-story

(Not about the flood, but relevant to the idea of how this process works)