IRVING FINKEL is an expert of the ancient Middle
East at the British Museum and the author of The Ark
Before Noah
They rapidly came to the conclusion that if
you made the boat to full size as described
on the tablet, which is about half the size
of a football pitch, it wouldn’t work. It
would simply be so huge that the structure
wouldn’t function. They reduced this size
to the maximum scale that would work by
using the tablet inscription and traditional
building methods. I think it’s somewhere
between a third and half of the size.
So it’s unlikely that any of the
Babylonians actually tried to build
this boat?
I don’t think anybody tried to build this
thing to scale in antiquity. I think you
have a mythological theme of the ark that
people normally accept without a lot of
analysis. However, in the world of those
living alongside boats, people might be a
little bit more interested in the details than
elsewhere. This led to the formalisation
of it, but I don’t think the audiences
would ever to say to themselves, ‘let’s
have a go at it’. They wanted something
satisfactory conceptually.
Is it possible that anyone like
Noah, or at least a Noah-like
character ever existed?
In the Bible, it’s clear that there was
nothing but wickedness in the world and
a single person, Noah, stood out as being
the saviour. In the Babylonian world, the
much longer, the actual details about the
components needed to build the ark are
boiled down to a minimum. But I can’t
help but think that there was also a time
during a build-up to the flood and the
construction of an ark, when the design was
actually full of specs that would have been
very interesting to a coracle-builder. But as
the story moved into perhaps more urban
circumstances, and certainly into the capital
of the Assyrian empire, nobody wanted to
hear about all that stuff so it was squashed
out of the story.
Could this super-large coracle
have held several people and
several animals?
A coracle that I’ve found in photographs
has about 30 people on it, so you can build
quite a big one. There’s a documentary film
being made in which specialists on ancient
boats are trying to build this thing on the
basis of the ancient inscription. They have
the materials and craftsmen to work with
them, and they used computer modelling
to consider size, strain and weight bearing.
flood came because the human race was
noisy, rather than sinful, and the gods
were discomforted and irritated by the
racket. That’s a whole different framework,
psychologically and poetically.
It’s a matter of taste whether you feel you
need to retain a conception of Noah as a
guy with sandals and a beard and a good
sailor’s gait, or whether you take the story to
be a symbolic representation of the frailty of
the human race in the face of God. It’s about
how the forces of nature and God’s will can
obliterate everything, and how sometimes
a single man suffices to avert the wrath of
God. That is a very powerful religious and
philosophic precept, the potency of which
has nothing to do with whether Noah was
once in the world. When you know there
was an equivalent to Noah a thousand years
earlier, then it becomes even less important
to establish. To me, the crucial thing is the
potency of the story, and its unforgettable
influence on the reader, which existed in
Babylonia and was adopted into the Bible
with a different message.
Hollywood explores the belief
with a blockbuster starring
Russell Crowe (foreground).
Irving Finkel believes the ark was a round coracle