With Russell Crowe steering Hollywood’s latest version of the Noah’s Ark tale into theaters this week, what better time than to pose some philosophical questions. Such as why didn’t the leopards eat the cows? Or what genius invited the mosquitos on board?
Those mysteries may be forever unanswerable, but a new book by British Museum curator Irving Finkel seeks to find the provenance of the ark tale — and the “real” Noah. He points to the flood stories of the Sumerian and Babylonian civilizations of Mesopotamia thousands of years earlier. And Finkel’s got the unearthed tablets to prove it.
The biggest reveal in Finkel’s book: The ark was round. No bow and stern or house in the middle. Think more like the circular survival raft with high sides that Tom Hanks flopped around in after the plane crash in “Cast Away.” Except woven with reeds like a giant basket and sealed with bitumen (ancient asphalt) for waterproofing.
With the caveat that its conclusions are made from translations of ancient cuneiform languages engraved onto tablets, many of which are faded, cracked or even missing large sections, “The Ark Before Noah” purports to answer these age-old puzzlers:
Was there really a great flood?
Finkel says not in the biblical sense of a world covered in water. However, as Mesopotamia was a land between the Tigres and Euphrates rivers, its people were dependent upon those rivers for life as well as subject to — and no doubt preoccupied by — the ravages of flooding. In other words, in polytheistic Babylon, if the gods wished it, the riverfolk were doomed. Thus flood myths involving capricious gods were common.
Who was the ‘real’ Noah?
Finkel notes that of all the spoken tales, three Mesopotamian flood stories were worthy of being chiseled into stone. Two early “proto-Noahs” include wise men named Ziusudra and Utnapishti, but the hero upon which Finkel’s book focuses is Atra-hasis, an ordinary guy much like the biblical Noah.
Unlike the singular God of the Book of Genesis that delivers a great deluge as punishment for man’s evils, in the Atra-hasis story it is one particularly ill-tempered god, Enlil, who set out to exterminate the people because: “The noise of mankind has become too intense for me, With their uproar I am deprived of sleep.”
Granted, the Babylonian word rigmu, “noise,” could mean more generally “poor behavior,” but Finkel stands by his translation and drolly quips that Enlil’s aggravation at mankind makes the author think of “old people in deck chairs after lunch on the beach annoyed by other people’s children and radios.”
How to build an ark?
The author’s big splash with this book, at least among archeologists (or even “Ark-eologists” as those who search for remnants of Noah’s vessel are called), is the revelation of an artifact Finkel has named the “Ark Tablet” and which he claims are directions to building an ark.
No bigger than an early cellphone and consisting of 60 lines, the Ark Tablet was written in the Old Babylonian period of broadly 1900-1700 BC. Scientific consensus puts the Torah’s Noah tale between 538-332 BC. Finkel flatly states the “cuneiform flood literature is by a millennium the older of the two, however one dates the biblical text.”
The Ark Tablet narrative quotes verbatim conversations between the kindly god Ea and our heroic captain, Atra-hasis. It begins:
“Wall, wall! Reed wall, reed wall! Atra-hasis, pay heed to my advice, That you may live for ever! Destroy your house, build a boat; Spurn property and save life! Draw out the boat that you will make On a circular plan; Let her length and breadth be equal.”
Circular riverboats, known as coracles, were common in ancient times — just as they are today in the marshes of Iraq or even in India or Tibet. Atra-hasis’ coracle would be the world’s largest ever built, roughly 75 yards in diameter. Being round, a coracle is especially difficult to capsize. And although there is no rudder, if the earth were covered with water, why would you have any need to steer it?
Presuming Finkel’s translations to be accurate — and he is the assistant keeper of Mesopotamian script, languages and cultures at the British Museum, after all — then the book makes a convincing case for Atra-hasis as being the original Noah and inspiration for the biblical tale.
Finkel’s final “ah-ha!” moment is his discovery, after countless hours spent peering through a magnifying glass, of ancient symbols that describe Atra-hasis’ animals as boarding the ark “two by two.” With that, he concludes, this legend is the oldest and most likely source of what became the biblical Noah flood tale.