According to a Babylonian tablet from 4,000 years ago, Noah's ark was round
Noah's ark was the great vessel that saved a pair of animals for every living species and a handful of humans from a catastrophic flood. But forget the images of the long hull with the pointed ends: the original Noah's Ark was round!
The decipherment of a 4,000-year-old clay tablet from ancient Mesopotamia revealed surprising details about the origins of the biblical story of Noah.
The tablet tells a story similar to that in the Bible, complete with detailed instructions for building a giant round ship, similar to a 'coracle' and with the key instruction to save the animals 'two by two'.
The is on display at the British Museum, whose curator, Irving Finkel, was the author of the translation of the cuneiform text, collecting his conclusions in a book entitled The Ark Before Noah.
Finkel came into possession of it a couple of years ago, when a man, Douglas Simmonds, showed him a damaged clay tablet that his father had purchased in the Middle East after World War II. It was light brown, about the size of a cell phone, and covered in cuneiform characters.
“We finally realized that this is one of the most important human documents ever discovered,” said Finkel, who sports a long gray beard, a ponytail and the enthusiasm of a boy. “It was truly a heart-stopping moment to discover that the flood boat was supposed to be round. It was a real surprise."
According to the scholar, a round boat makes perfect sense: “It's a perfect thing,” explains Finkel. “It is light to transport and potentially unsinkable.” Furthermore, coracles were widely used in Mesopotamia as river taxis and are perfectly capable of dealing with the fury of the water.
The tablet reports the instructions given by a Mesopotamian god for the construction of the gigantic vessel the size of two thirds of a football field, built with wooden planks, reinforced with rope and covered with bitumen. The result is a traditional coracle, but the largest the world has ever imagined. The surface area of the vessel would have been approximately 3600 m2, with a height of 6 meters. The amount of rope required would cover the distance between London and Edinburgh!
Certainly such a vessel could not have gone anywhere. On the other hand, all it had to do was float and keep its contents safe: practically a cosmic lifeboat!
However, to verify whether the craft is truly buoyant, Finkel formed a team with the aim of building a small-scale version of the Ark, meticulously following the instructions on the tablet. Finkel was aware that his discovery could cause confusion among believers in the biblical story. However, it has been known since the 19th century that there are stories much older than the one contained in the Bible where they speak of a great flood, of the instructions given by God to a righteous man to build a boat and save himself, his family and all the animals. The story of the flood occurs in Mesopotamian writings such as the Epic of Gilgamesh.
Yet, the tablet translated by Finkel, in addition to being far older than the biblical stories, is the only one to contain detailed instructions on its construction. The scholar believes that the Jews borrowed the story of the flood during the Babylonian exile of the 6th century BC.
The work on the tablet also led to some challenging questions: what is the true origin of the flood story? How did he get from cuneiform to biblical Hebrew? How did cuneiform really work?
