The tablet’s ark is a huge circular coracle or round boat, 38,750 square feet in dimension and was supposed to be made “like a giant rope basket strengthened with wooden ribs, and waterproofed with bitumen inside and out” – a giant version of a normally tiny boat that was in daily use until the late 20th to ferry people and livestock across rivers.
Dr. Irving Finkel
Ancient Tablet Says ‘Noah’s Ark’ Was Round
Shmarya Rosenberg • FailedMessiah.com
Was Noah’s Ark round?
If a 3,700-year-old Babylonian clay tablet is accurate, it was.
But it was almost certainly never built, a British Museum expert declared – despite holding in his hand instructions on exactly how to construct one.
"I am 107% convinced the ark never existed," Irving Finkel reportedly said. Finkel has written a new book, The Ark Before Noah, about the ancient clay tablet, which was given to him by Douglas Simmons. Simmons’ father Leonard brought the tablet back to England after serving in the Middle East with the RAF in WW2. Finkel is one of the few scholars in the world – if not the only one – who could decipher it.
Finkel is convinced the tablet gives the original version of the story we now know as the biblical Noah’s Ark.
The tablet’s ark is a huge circular coracle or round boat, 38,750 square feet in dimension and was supposed to be made “like a giant rope basket strengthened with wooden ribs, and waterproofed with bitumen inside and out,” the Guardian reported – a giant version of a normally tiny boat that was in daily use until the late 20th to ferry people and livestock across rivers.
A British production company is making a TV documentary based on Finkel’s research – which will reportedly include building the circular ark.
Scholars believe the tablet is but another example of the Biblical authors taking well-known stories of the region and incorporating them into their own text – something that appears to have been a common occurance.
Although ancient tablets pre-dating the Bible that containing stories of the flood have been known to scholars and the West since the late 1800s, Finkel’s tablet is unique because it is reportedly the only such tablet that contains precise instructions on how to build the ark.
Finkel reportedly says the tablet is "one of the most important human documents ever discovered.”
Simmons loaned the tablet to the British Museum in London, where it will be on display next to a tablet from the museum's collection with the earliest map of the world, also from ancient Babylon.
Finkel’s tablet helped explain details of that map, “which shows islands beyond the river marking the edge of the known world, with the text on the back explaining that on one are the remains of the ark,” the paper reported.
Finkel pointed out that ark hunters who comb Mount Ararat and similar locations looking for the remains of the ancient ark of Noah are looking in the wrong place – the map shows the ark landed far beyond Mount Ararat. But no matter, Finkel says – Noah’s Ark and his tablet’s ark never existed anyway.
[Hat Tip: APC.]