would have expected that because
if you read your Bible you will
see that Noah’s Ark was a sort of oblong
wooden thing. So you have this very
different, deeply established conception
floating about in people’s minds and so
this boat comes across as a shock. It was a
bewildering thing for a decipherer because,
if you read the words on the tablet, you
think: ‘what is this?’Were coracles common during
the time the tablet was written?
In ancient times, and in fact right up to the
middle of the 19th Century AD, coracles
were used in Iraq in huge numbers, and
there are photographs from the 1920s
where you can see a whole cluster of them
by the side of the river. They functioned a
bit like taxis. So if you wanted to cross the
river, with a couple of sheep and your two
daughters, you’d hire a coracle and the guy
would get you across to the other side. And
the thing about the coracle is that it is light,
buoyant and thoroughly waterproof – to all
intents and purposes it is unsinkable. Those
are the qualities that Noah’s Ark required.
It needed to be buoyant, but didn’t have to
go anywhere – as opposed to a boat with
a bow and a stern, which could go on a
specific voyage. All it had to do was bob
around like a cork on the surface, until
eventually the water went down. But what
is peculiar and even more unexpected is
that the tablet gives all the measurements,
the quantities of the rope, the amount of
bitumen, and how it was built. Also, thewere swept away, down to the gulf, and
knowledge of this was a deep-seated factor
in their psychology.
The story itself went through myth-
ological development. I think that the
presence of what you might call the
technical information, which looks as if it
was a prescription for someone to go home
and build one, was not that at all. As far as I
understand it, the narrative of the floods- the anger of the gods, that last-minute
rescue, the flood itself and the final revivi-
fication of the world – must have been in
the purview of itinerant storytellers for a
very long time. It’s a classic, major strain
of their mythology. We can tell from
cuneiform literature that these stories
circulated in that way before writing.
So why is the information so
detailed?
My idea is that you have this narrative, with
the divine intervention and the boat, being
a central part of a very gripping story which
is told to audiences who were primarily
boatmen, fisherman and coracle builders.
You might have a marvellous storyteller
who could hypnotise a village with all of
this ‘Bruce Willis’ drama, and then acts the
part of the god with a thunderous voice and
says: ‘You will build this boat’. If he just said
to these people ‘build the biggest boat you
ever saw’, his listeners are going to say ‘Well,
what does it look like?’ Once you had this
question of ‘what does it look like?’ and
‘how big was it?’, it became a kind of itch
for the storyteller and the audience.
I have the feeling there was a curiosity
engendered about this. And it was probably
solved in the following way: there could
have been a schoolmaster who had half a
dozen boys who were literate in the kind
of calculations that professional scribes had
to do, like how many bricks in a wall and
so forth. At one point the schoolmaster
said ‘Everybody knows the ark is a round
coracle, and let’s say its surface area is
3,600m^2 and its walls are 6m high. How
much rope do you need, if the rope is an
inch thick?’ This is exactly the sort of thing
that we find on mathematical tablets; the
sort of thing that scribes had to work out.
The exact amount of rope needed was
specified. In profile, a coracle is a bit like
a doughnut, and if you have a plan of a
doughnut with the height of the walls and
the rope’s thickness, you can work out how
much rope you need.
What is interesting is that in the version
on the tablet found in 1872, which ismeasurements that are quoted – which are
very large indeed – are accurate.So is this tablet instructions for
a reader, or is it a description of
something that actually happened?
Well, that is an extremely pertinent
question. It is not obvious. As I see it,
the flood story has its inception in reality
inasmuch as the landscape of Iraq is fed
by the great rivers and has always been
vulnerable to flooding. There’s lots of
historical evidence for floods. I think the
basic position is that the landscape of Iraq,
or Mesopotamia, was subjected to a kind
of tsunami a very long time ago in its
remote past. Perhaps the bulk of the villagesA tablet inscribed with the story of the flood and
ark from the 7th Century BCPHOTO: REX, HODDER & STOUGHTON X4A coracle being built in Iraq in the 1920s; they were used to taxi people and goods across riversA tablet inscribed with the story of the flood and
ark from the 7th Century BCARCHAEOLOGY