build 'Noah's ark'
Noah's ark was never built, still less crash landed on Mount
Ararat, a British Museum expert has declared – despite
holding in his hand 3,700-year-old instructions on exactly
how to construct one.
Irving Finkel with the cuneiform clay tablet at the British Museum [Credit: Sang Tan/AP]
"I am 107% convinced the ark never existed," Irving Finkel
said. His discoveries, since a member of the public brought a
battered clay tablet with 60 lines of neat cuneiform text to
Finkel – one of the few people in the world who could read
them – are outlined in a new book, The Ark Before Noah.
While every child's toy and biblical illustration – and the
latest film version, due for release later this month and
starring Russell Crowe as Noah – shows a big pointy-ended
wooden boat, the Babylonian tablet gives what Finkel is
convinced is the original version of the story. The ark is a
huge circular coracle, 3,600 square metres in dimension
or two-thirds the size of a football pitch, made like a giant
rope basket strengthened with wooden ribs, and
waterproofed with bitumen inside and out. This was a giant
version of a craft which the Babylonians knew very well,
Finkel pointed out, in daily use up to the late 20th century to
transport people and animals across rivers. Its people-and-
animal-carrying abilities will soon be put to the test: the
production company Blink is making a Channel 4
documentary based on his research, including building a
circular ark. The tablet gives a version of the ark story
far older than the biblical accounts, and Finkel
believes the explanation of how "holy writ appears on this
piece of Weetabix", is that the writers of the Bible drew on
ancient accounts encountered by Hebrew scholars during the
Babylonian exile.
The Ark Before Noah: Decoding the Story of the Flood by Irving Finkel, Hodder & Stoughton
just man to build a boat and save himself, his family, and all
the animals, clearly older than the Bible story, were first
found in the Middle East in the 19th century. They caused
both consternation and wild excitement, including an
expedition to find the broken part of one tablet in a
mountain of shattered clay fragments. However, the tablet
studied by Finkel is unique, the only one with precise
instructions on how to build the ark – and the crucial detail
that it should be circular. He believes the data on its exact
dimensions, the two kinds of bitumen, and the precise
amount of rope needed, are evidence not that the vessel
once existed, but of a storyteller adding convincing details
for an audience that knew all about boat-building. The tablet
was brought to him on a museum open day by Douglas
Simmons, whose father, Leonard, brought it back to England
in a tea-chest full of curios, after wartime service in the
Middle East with the RAF. When the Guardian originally
broke the story of its discovery, Simmons said his father had
once showed his treasures to some academics, and was
bitterly disappointed when they were dismissed as rubbish.
He suspects the tablet was either bought for pennies in a
bazaar or literally picked up. Finkel describes the clay tab
let as "one of the most important human documents ever discovered", and his conclusions will send ripples into the world of creationism and among ark hunters, where many believe in the literal truth of the Bible account, and innumerable expeditions have been mounted to try to find the remains of the ark. The clay tablet is going on display at the British Museum, loaned by Simmons, beside a tablet from the museum's collection with the earliest map of the world, as seen from ancient Babylon. The flood tablet helped explain details of the map, which shows islands beyond the river marking the edge of the known world, with the text on the back explaining that on one are the remains of the ark. Finkel said that not only did the ark never exist, but ark hunters were looking in the wrong place – the map shows the ark in the direction of, but far beyond the mountain range later known as Ararat.
Author: Maev Kennedy | Source: The Guardian [January 24, 2014]
Read more at: http://archaeologynewsnetwork.blogspot.it/2014/01/babylonian-tablet-describes-how-to.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed:+TheArchaeologyNewsNetwork+(The+Archaeology+News+Network)#.UukGNz0uLs0
Follow us: @ArchaeoNewsNet on Twitter | groups/thearchaeologynewsnetwork/ on Facebook
