Doctor Irving Finkel holds a 3770 year old tablet containing god Enki’s conversation with Sumerian king Atram-Hasis (Noah’s figure in earlier versions of flood story) and instructions on how to build an ark for him. Noah’s ark was first described as round boat with diameter of 220ft.
Irving Finkel, an english Philologist and Assyriologist. He is Assistant Keeper of Ancient Mesopotamian script, languages and cultures in Department of Middle East in British Museum, where he specialises in cuneiform inscriptions on tablets of clay from ancient Mesopotamia. Irving Finkel is the curator from central casting, where he is in charge of museum’s 130,000 clay tablets, he looks after its collection of board games and has made it a personal crusade to preserve old diaries. Since a lifetime spent examining clay tablets of ancient Mesopotamia has left him seemingly unaffected by the cares of the workaday world. He has spent 20 years investigating one that challenges the story of Noah and the flood…
“The man who is tired of tablets is tired of life,” he announces in his delightful new book, The Ark Before Noah, which sets out to demonstrate that the biblical flood narrative was derived from stories that had been embedded in Sumerian and Babylonian society and literature for thousands of years. The book revolves around a clay tablet dating from about 1800 BC with 60 lines of cuneiform (tiny, wedge-shaped script on tablets), which relate part of the flood story. Finkel first encountered this “Ark tablet” almost 30 years ago when a member of the public brought it to show him. He has spent past 20 years translating the text and putting it in the context of other flood literature, and is now ready to unveil it to the world. This is in the form of his book and a Channel 4 documentary, shows building the ark to specifications on Finkel’s tablet to see if it floats.
Finkel’s bombshell and the point of the Channel 4 programme – is that he reckons original ark was round. “The fact that the ark was round is the headline finding,” he says. “It’s something nobody in the world had anticipated because everybody knows what Noah’s ark looked like.” All those pictures of oblong, multi-decked boats that look like neat country cottages will have to be redrawn.
The mobile phone-sized ark tablet is housed in a posh-looking red box with “Instructions on the Building of the Ark” written on it. Finkel takes tablet out of the box and lets me hold it – a chance to commune with the ghosts of ancient Mesopotamia. I manage not to drop it. As well as casting new light on the shape of the original ark, it also contains the first written allusion to the animals “going in two by two”. In book, he describes unearthing this reference on the broken, weathered tablet with its worn-out wedges as his “biggest shock in 44 years of grappling with difficult lines in cuneiform tablets … I nearly fell off my chair.” He is good at conveying the excitement of academic discoveries, a television natural.
He could have written up his findings in an academic tome that would have pleased his peers, but he has instead produced a digressive, amusing, personal book for the general reader, a book that is willing to ask big questions – such as how did Babylonian ark story find its way into the Bible? – and make the odd educated guess. “There’s very little in existence that helps people with this subject. Mostly we’re orientated to make it seem forbidding and difficult.”
“When I first wrote the book I did it feeling that all my colleagues were going to read it and they’d be saying [puts on whispery academic voice] ‘I rather doubt …’ But when I wrote the second draft, I suddenly had this brilliant idea that I would forget my colleagues existed and write for everybody else, which was very liberating. It meant I could speak with my real voice.” In the book, Finkel explains his own route into Assyriology and his continuing love affair with the subject.
British Museum
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