BBC_Knowledge_2014-06_Asia_100p

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