Not only that, but it offers startlingly precise specifications on how best to construct one. Now, courtesy of Irving Finkel, the British Museum's eminence grise of cuneiform studies, there comes a further clinching piece of evidence: a tablet that actually describes animals entering an ark "two by two". It has become clear that the tale of a universal flood was widespread in Mesopotamia for an entire millennium and a half before the hapless Judaeans, defeated in the early 6th century BC by Nebuchadnezzar, were dragged away from their smoking cities into exile, there to weep beside the rivers of Babylon. Three distinct Mesopotamian incarnations of the myth have now been identified, one recorded in Sumerian and two in Akkadian. Over the years, cuneiform flood tablets have continued to turn up. "I believe," as Gladstone observed with studied ambivalence, "we shall be permitted to know a great deal more than our forefathers in respect of the early history of mankind."Īnd so it has proved. Everybody listening to him understood that a thrilling – and, to the devout, faintly alarming – vista of research had been opened up. When Smith presented his discovery at a public meeting shortly afterwards, both Gladstone, then prime minister, and the Archbishop of Canterbury were in the audience. His excitement, to the Christian elite of Victorian Britain, appeared only mildly overstated. So overwhelmed was he by the implications of his find that he immediately leapt to his feet, ran around the room, and started taking off his clothes. It was there in 1872 that George Smith, a self-taught Assyriologist working among the thousands of ancient clay tablets brought back to Bloomsbury from Iraq, made a sensational discovery: a version of the flood story written in cuneiform. This first became apparent a century and a half ago, in a room above the secretary's office in the British Museum. "We didn't really deviate from the Bible," Franklin has boasted, "despite the six-armed angels."īut was the story of the flood original to the Bible at all? We know that it was not. Even Hollywood producers like to insist that their elaborations of Genesis are true to the original narrative. Expeditions continue to be made to the slopes of Mount Ararat, in a perennially optimistic quest for the Ark's remains.
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Bishop Ussher, in the 17th century, calculated that the flood had taken place in 2349 BC. The rabbis laid claim to secret information that Noah had been kept so busy feeding the animals in his care that he didn't get to bed for a year. Unsurprisingly then, people have always been keen to fill them in. A s Scott Franklin, producer of the forthcoming Russell Crowe epic Noah, has correctly pointed out, the story of the flood "is a very short section of the Bible with a lot of gaps".