THE TRUE STORY?
The 1750BC Babylonian tablet with a cuneiform
description of an arkTheThe 1750BC Babylonian tablet with a cuneiform 1750BC Babylonian tablet with a cuneiformmmE
ven those who didn’t make it to
Sunday school know what Noah’s
Ark looked like. And now a new
Hollywood take, Noah, is compounding the
myth. It was a long, pointy wooden ship with
a large house built on the top, right? Well, no.
At least if the British Museum’s Middle East
expert Irving Finkel is correct in his new book
The Ark Before Noah. After painstakingly
translating an ancient version of the great flood
story found on a clay cuneiform tablet, Finkel
discovered a set of instructions on how to build
the ark. This was a spectacular find in itself, but
the story gets even more intriguing: the craft
described is round.People know the flood story of Noah
and the animals, but this tablet
predates the Bible, doesn’t it?
We’ve known that the Babylonians also had
a version of the flood story since a curator
at the British Museum found it inscribed
on another clay tablet in 1872. At the time
it caused a great furore among theologians,
Christians and Jews who knew their Bible.
One of the most disturbing things for them
was that the parallels between this 1872
discovery and the Hebrew text of the Bible
were so close that it was difficult not to believe
that the two narratives were connected in
a literary sense. In the time since 1872, a
sprinkling of other clay tablets of different
periods have come to light, some big pieces,
some only fragments. It culminated in this
new one, which was written in about 1750BC,
making it one of the oldest known.Other than its age, what’s so special
about this particular tablet?
The central point of this tablet is the realisation
that the boat the Babylonians conceived of
was a round coracle. I don’t think anybody