Noah's Ark and the Flood
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Hello, Tristan Hughes here, and just quickly before we dive into this episode, I wanted to ask you a favour. If you enjoy The Ancients, and I really hope that you do, it would be so wonderful if you would vote for us in the Listener's Choice Award at this year's Podcast Awards. You can do so simply by going to the website britishpodcastawards.com forward slash voting. There's a link in the episode description too. Now, enough of all that, let's get on with today's edition of The Ancients.

The animals went in two by two into the great ark as Noah and his family prepared for the flood. It's the ancients on history hit. I'm Tristan Hughes, your host. And in today's episode, we are kickstarting a new miniseries this June all about the Old Testament, exploring stories, people, objects and kingdoms central to the Hebrew Bible's narrative and the influences behind them.

To begin the series, we're better than with one of the most well-known narratives in the Old Testament and a suggestion from our ancients listener, Anna.

My name is Anna from the Netherlands and I'm a huge fan of the podcast. I've been following the ancients for the last two years and I absolutely love it. Some months ago I was listening to the episode with Sophus Helle about the epic of Gilgamesh and I decided to read the book he wrote. When I came across the section that Uttanapishti does a story about the flood, I found the similarities absolutely striking with the story of the flood from the Bible. The large boat, our ark, the many animals on board, the dove that was sent out to find land again and the link to the rainbow. So

I was wondering, what is the background of the flood myth? Is there any archaeological truth to this myth? And what is its link to the Bible? The story of the flood in the book of Genesis is of course where God conjured up a great flood to kill off all of humanity for their wicked behaviour, except for the righteous Noah, whom God ordered to construct a massive boat called an ark and to fill it with two of every animal.

When the flood came, Noah, his family and the animals survived on board the ark until the waters subsided and God sent a rainbow, vowing never to flood the world again. That's the story in a nutshell. It's well known. But did you know that this narrative has much older roots than the Hebrew Bible and was in fact borrowed and adapted from a much older Mesopotamian tradition? Think people like the Sumerians.

So in this episode, we are going to explore the origins of the famous Noah and the Flood narrative by delving into the story of the flood in Mesopotamian mythology and how it ultimately inspired the biblical account. Who was their version of Noah? What did they do with the animals? And perhaps most intriguingly of all, what was the shape and design of this great ark? That detail will amaze you.

To explain all, I headed to the British Museum to interview the living legend at the forefront of this research, none other than Dr Irving Finkel, a man who has taken the world of Assyriology by storm and is a fan favourite wherever he goes. It was a real pleasure to interview Irving on this topic and I really do hope you enjoy. So without further ado, here's Irving.

Irving, it is a pleasure to have you on the podcast today. I am delighted to be here. And the story of Noah and the flood is one of the most iconic from the Bible, from the Old Testament, but the origins of this story stretches much further back to Mesopotamia. This is very true and a point well worth discussing and amplifying. Now, of course, it's risky in the modern world to say everybody knows such and such a thing. But

But with the story of Noah and the ark, it's probably fairly safe to make such a sweeping statement

because it's not only embedded in the Bible, but it is central to parts of the Quran, and it's central to Judaism, Islam, and Christianity. And it more or less has gone all around the world and never stopped doing. So it's the sort of thing that if you say, you know the story of Noah and the Ark, people don't normally say what or no or who wrote it or something like that.

So we can start with this premise that it is a very basic and familiar kind of narrative. So most people hear it in church or read it in the Bible for themselves, the biblical account, which is rather succinct, it's rather dramatic, and it encapsulates the basic principle that mankind as a species was deemed by the Almighty to be full of sin and beyond, really, repair.

So the idea came to wipe out the human race and, of course, everything else with it by means of a flood. And I suppose the plan was that when it was all over, something more, should we say, obliging and of higher moral quality might be created in the place of man. He doesn't say that, but I assume that was the principle. So the idea was to send a flood, which would obliterate everything. And at the last minute,

there was a kind of hesitation, and the hesitation involved the selection of this character called Noah and his wife and two or three kids who were going to build an ark, which everybody knows, and the male and female of the known species in that world would go on board so that when the waters came and everything was disappeared from view, apart from the whales, of course, who carried on enjoying themselves,

they could start enthusiastically breeding once they disembarked after the waters had receded and start all over again.

So Noah was the man who had this tremendous responsibility. And it's a story that when you hear it as a child, it's very appealing. It's got a lot of immediate ideas. For example, all the animals going up the gangplank into a boat is a rather appealing thing. And you wonder how many they were and what happened with the big ones and the little ones and how many were there and all those sorts of questions. But what is most significant about it is that in

In a way, it encapsulates, and it was meant to encapsulate, some very simple principle that man in the face of God was nothing and was not so much a plaything, but something which could be very brutally dealt with by an unforgiving deity and replaced by something else, which is a kind of makes-you-think thing.

And one of the interesting parts about the story in the Bible is that a sign was given, the rainbow was chosen, so that now it's all over and we've all survived and we can carry on. It won't happen again. This was the point that this was a symbol from above.

That meant there would never be such a ghastly event in the world again. Of course, people have tried to say that about disastrous things that have happened in between and ever since, and they'll never happen again. And what they always do, of course, is to happen again as soon as possible. But in this case, it seems to have worked by and large.

Anyway, we've got this story, and it's easy to imagine them all in the boat, and some of them being seasick and hoping it'll all be over. And in the Bible, you remember that the idea was that when the rain stopped and they were, as it were, bouncing around on the surface of the great sea, that when the water started to go down, they could be aware of it, and that when the boat landed on something, they'd be aware of it before they opened the door, because you didn't want any disasters. And

Actually, everybody knows that Noah released three birds, one after the other. And the first one came back and the second one came back with a leaf and the third day didn't come back at all. And so he knew that the trees were above the water and the birds now had somewhere real to live and they wouldn't be seeing them again. And that was a kind of highly symbolic thing.

So one of the things about it, it is so central to three of the main monothelistic religions of the world. And people know it and it's part of their conscious mind and their subconscious mind and their references to it all over the place. It underpins many things.

without really wondering, so to speak, where it came from. Because traditionally, you weren't supposed to ask about where things in the Bible came from, in the sense of like literary history. It was written by a very austere, very elevated being. And that was that.

And until the middle of the 19th century, although scholars had looked at the Bible and sometimes thought maybe this narrative derives from such and such a thing, or that narrative reflects such and such a thing from an outer sphere of the world,

Something happened in the field of Assyriology, which is what I work on, reading cuneiform inscriptions. A tablet was discovered in the British Museum, which, as luck would have it, recounted this basic story about the Noah figure, the boat figure, all the animals, the flood, and the bleating of the birds, and landing on a mountain, all the things that we know from the Bible, in Babylonian cuneiform writing.

on a piece of clay written in the 7th century BC. So this tablet was discovered by a man called George Smith, who was a very talented, almost a genius level, reader of this peculiar script at the early period. He had an instinct for

understanding and grasping meaning. He never went off in the wrong way or got duped into misunderstanding. He had a tremendous sense of what was right and what was true and intellectual clarity. He was a very talented person.

And this George Smith was the person who read this tablet for the first time. And actually, he didn't know then, but it's part of the very famous Gilgamesh story of the great hero of Babylonian culture. Exactly. Well, I mean, it's actually one episode in a very dramatic Hollywood kind of series of events.

But he didn't know that then. He just read the narrative. And his astonishment was such that he dropped this tablet that he was reading on the desk in the department where scholars were sat with their inscriptions. He was so astonished.

to read because he could read fluently. And the salient points that matched the outline of the story in the Bible were in the same order. They were locked in the same sequence. And I wouldn't say it was a translation out of the Hebrew or the Latin or the English, but it was jolly close. And he must have been utterly flabbergasted.

because nobody had any inkling at the time that there was a pre-biblical version of this narrative. And however you look at it, it's pretty difficult not to think that this Mesopotamian tablet from Nineveh was a pre-version of the Bible.

Now, you're probably going to say to me, well, how do we know that? Well, how do we know that, Irving? Well, the thing is, nobody really knows about when the Bible was written. We can't answer that question, even if you're not a

full of faith and a cleric or a religious person who wants to believe everything at face value, even if you don't do that, nobody really knows because the crucial thing about the Bible, it is obvious when you look at it, that it's a composite of different sorts of things. And some of the things are historical records.

And some of them are folk stories about tribal heroes. And some of them are things like mythology and all kinds of other stuff, too. And nobody had really started to disentangle specifically what might lie behind a specific part. So what we had here straight away was proof that

that this story was known to the Babylonians at least by the 7th century BC and by implication a lot earlier before that, and it had to be put next to the biblical text. And whether you could say that one was earlier than the other is a very tricky thing, as Smith was the first to point out, because it's possible you could argue that the text was written down in the 7th century BC in Hebrew.

or less about the same time as the one from Assyria. So who knows which is the older and which preceded?

Well, this was a knotty and more or less unsettled issue for quite a long time, to the point that nobody anymore really thought about it. The parallels between the Gilgamesh account of the flood and the one in the Hebrew Bible were well known and often talked about, and people like to, in fact, demonstrate how clearly the two texts are interlocked.

but nobody was ever really prepared to put their neck on the line about which one came first. Of course, this is a respectable matter. And the thing that happened to me, I mean, I had an experience with this flood story out of the blue, which I didn't for a minute anticipate. And at the time, I had no idea what it was going to do to my entire life, which settled this question once and for all.

Now, the thing is, in the British Museum, we have a very large collection of these cuneiform tablets. They're made of clay. They're written in Sumerian or in Babylonian, and they cover more than 3,000 years of time. So the language changes and forms are different, but by and large, like with English, you can read old English and you can understand it if you know modern English. It's a bit of a similar situation.

Now, among these 130,000 tablets, there's all sorts of things to do with daily life and statecraft and medicine and magic and astronomy and astrology and lexicography and mathematics and divination and all other sorts of things, as well as letters and business documents and the whole caboodle. In fact, they use writing more or less for the same range of things that we do.

before the invention of the dread keyboard. So that's the situation. And among those tablets, maybe a couple of hundred which are to do with mythology of one kind or another, stories about gods and goddesses and narratives of...

what they got up to and how naughty they could be, and things to do with cult practices and religious observation, and all manner of texts. The broader the categories, the more the texts come in. But straightforward literary mythology, like, for example, the Gilgamesh story or the creation epic, things like that, we have tablets which give a large part of, although not the whole of, the original compositions.

So the story of Gilgamesh, which is really quite a marvellous thing, is in the end 12 tablets long. And the flood story that George Smith read for the first time is from the 12th tablet of the whole thing. So there's 11 other tablets before, which is really something also to be read with interest. And the thing is this.

One day when I was on duty in the museum and the principle was that the British Museum is supported to some extent by taxpayers and the staff are supposed to be at the disposal of the public to answer questions and identify things and give information on demand, which we always did with a lot of pleasure and excitement.

and the consequence of this was that people more than they do now used to bring objects into the museum for identification by one or other of the curators depending which department

And it could be all sorts of things, a photograph album or collection of old postcards from the Middle East. It could be a cylinder seal or some pottery or a dagger or things from archaeology proper and all number of things in between. And sometimes it would be one small thing and sometimes a whole lot of stuff. So it was rather an adventure for us because it meant you saw things you hadn't seen before. And it was always fun talking to people about their treasures. So one day somebody brought in a whole batch of stuff

one of which was a cuneiform tablet.

And of course, I picked that up first because the other things were lamps and figurines and I don't know what. But a bit of writing is a bit of writing. And this turned out immediately to be identifiable as a piece of Babylonian writing to do with the flood and to do with the ark. But it was clear instantly by looking at it that it was about a thousand years older than the one from Nineveh.

So, forgive me just being in Joe Bloggs here, but on a cuneiform over 3,000 years it's in use. So how can you tell just by looking at this writing on this small clay tablet that that tablet was from, let's say, 700 years or 800 years after one from Nineveh?

Well, the way it works is this. The script in its very early days was pictographic. So if you're talking about a bird, you draw the silhouette of a bird kind of thing. And there was a big shift from when you did a picture drawing, not only for what it looked like, but also the sound it created in your mind. And once they had the idea that pictures could write sound, then the script very rapidly evolved to the point that there were enough signs that

to write all the sounds you would need, basically. That's what happened. And so the original drawing side of each sign gradually disappeared as it was streamlined and as it was adapted for pressing with a stylus into clay, the graphic quality, which was very clear at the outset, began to gradually diminish.

And so you have a script which the signs and what they mean and how they function remain more or less the same. But over the period of 3,000 years, the style of the arrangement of the wedges which make up the signs, the length of them, the angle of them, the number of them sometimes gradually, gradually changes. It's not streamlining necessarily. There's no proof that it got simpler like with ancient Egyptian, which it definitely did.

So you can tell if you have a tablet that it was written in about 3000 BC or 2000 BC or 1000 BC immediately because the changes are at those intervals quite serious. And if you have one that's 2000 BC and one that's 1950 BC, then you really have to know the nuances of the distinction of the sign form so that you can say, well,

I'd be surprised if this was as old as 2000 BC. It might be closer to 1800 because this and this. And you can make a kind of judgment, although it's very hard to quantify and qualify in a scientific way. It's more or less a matter of experience.

So when this tablet came in, I could see immediately it was of the period of about 1800 BC. So this is the time when Hammurabi was king of Babylon, roughly speaking, and with the great law code. And it's one of the easy-to-identify periods in Mesopotamian history. And this tablet was written in about that period. And somebody might say, well, you say it's 1800. I would think it's probably more 1700 or maybe 1650. But it's a matter of

taste and judgment and experience because there is no tool which would be a complete photographic sign list of all the signs in all the periods from tablets. So you can, ah, look, this is clearly one like that. There's no such guide. And of course, it's not that easy anyway. People don't always write the same sign twice on a tablet identically.

And this is not at all surprising, because if you read a letter written by somebody in manuscript, they start off neatly. But by the time they're down at the bottom of the page, they've accelerated. The writing is more careless. They don't necessarily spell things the same way. They don't do the Gs the same way. So it's not black and white, concrete sort of thing. So it's all a matter of judgment. But I'm sure that if I show that tablet, the original tablet which came into the BM to a room full of Assyriologists,

Nobody would argue that it wasn't in or around 1700 BC, and the distinction would be trivial in comparison with the span of time. So the point about it is, whenever the Bible was written down, and whatever lay behind it,

This document is about a thousand years older than the first evidence we have for the biblical story. So that will never alter, really. I mean, we never know what might be discovered in the future. You never know many things. But on the basis of present knowledge, you have the appearance of the biblical text, which starts the another thing all through the world.

And before that, we have actually more than one bit of cuneiform which comes with it. But this one is about 1700 BC, so a very long time before. And it shows that the story was alive and vital and active, so to speak, a millennium before. So then this puts the thing from Nineveh into a slightly different status because Ashurbanipal, who was the king, you remember in Nineveh?

He was an all-round chap. I always think it's rather impressive. He was a hunter, so to speak. He was a good general. He was a soldier. And he was a fine scholar of cuneiform. He was taught by a very good teacher when he was a boy. And he could read fluently. And he had a great love of inscriptions, of textual tradition, of obscure stuff and explanations for them and scholarship.

and this bore fruit in more than one way, but the most important was that he conceived of the idea of bringing under basically one roof in Nineveh

examples of all the written traditional lore, that's to say knowledge and literature, from preceding ages from Mesopotamia. So this is a fantastic thing. So they collected and they collected and they took things from libraries and they copied things and people sent things in. And the whole idea was that if it was written down somewhere, we had a copy. And what he didn't know was how marvellous that was going to be for us.

because the scribes who wrote tablets for King Ashurbanipal were the best calligraphers in the country. They had the most exquisite handwriting, and they hardly ever made mistakes. And the tablets were found, although they'd been in a fire, in surprisingly wonderful condition at Ninive when they were excavated. So we got, so to speak, a state-of-the-art library of

BBC English, so to speak, Assyrian script, you know, standard, beautiful script that everybody could read. So it was a gift like anything. And that's how Assyriologists broke through the incomprehensible appearance of the script one way or another to the point that Smith could read the Gilgamesh epic very reliably, considering it was 1872, exclusively.

And elsewhere too. And gradually people started to learn it. They taught it in universities. And now it's a sort of thing. So that's a marvellous story in itself. Hey, folks, since you're a fan of history, you clearly want to understand how we've ended up with the world that we have. Well, I'd like to tell you about my show. It's called Dan Snow's History Hit. And on that show, you get a daily dose of history and the stories that really explain just about everything that's ever happened.

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Irving, take me back to when you see this new tablet, which you found absolutely extraordinary, the so-called Ark tablet. Let's pick up the story there, because talk me through the tablet itself and the key figures that it mentions that makes you realise quite quickly that this is a part of the Flood story. Yes. Well, it was an adventure, never-to-be-forgotten moment, I have to say, when this thing came in, because the person who brought the stuff poured water

a load of objects onto the table and I picked up the tablet straight away. And I could read the first four or five lines straight off because they come from the period in the flood story of very great significance, because it's the stage when the gods, like in the Old Testament,

the local gods of Mesopotamia had decided to obliterate mankind. And they did it by having a meeting in Parliament, and they voted on it, and they agreed that they were going to obliterate mankind one way or another. There were different techniques. And the flood was the last technique. And they were going to bring a flood

And that will be the end of it all. And in the Babylonian story, the kind of reason that's given by the writer is that it was so noisy, what with all the people and animals, to the point that the gods couldn't sleep uninterrupted. They got fed up with it.

I always liken it to when you're in a deck chair on the beach and other people's children are playing noisily and there's a transistor radio sort of thing. It's a bit like that feeling. And one of the gods, one of the main gods of the top three, a god called Enki, who was a god of wisdom and magic and had a sense of humour, he decided this was not a good plan. So what he did was to pick on a human being

I don't know how he chose this human being. We know under the name of Atram Chassis, which means exceedingly wise. So he picked on Atram Chassis.

And he told him what was going to happen to tear down your house and use the materials and build a boat and take on board male and female of all livestock. And then there'll be this flood and you alone will survive and you have to take responsibility, get the animals on board and eventually, of course, become king of the world when the waters went down.

So he appeared to Atrahasis and told him about this. And so he got down to it immediately. It's a bit of a shock, probably, because I don't know who he was. But it doesn't say he was a king. It doesn't actually say anything about him, except he was called exceedingly wise.

That's interesting. So it doesn't actually talk about his family, because in the Noah story, he has a wife and children. But in this one, it doesn't talk about that. No, but he does have sons. We know that. But we don't know who he was. And there's a funny thing about this thing, because Enki picked him out to build this boat. And it's pretty obvious from the description that Atrahasis was not a boatbuilder.

because if it had been a boat builder, it would have been redundant, because what he did was to tell him all the information needed to build the right sort of boat. And it was the shape and the size and the dimensions and the materials that he would need. He listed them one by one and told him all about it. So he had a kind of

plan how to build yes what do you need and how to build so he can't have been about building because he would have said halfway through the conversation yeah I know I know I mean just tell me how big it is and I'll arrange everything it wasn't like that so he laid all this information down and that's what's written on this tablet

So what came into my hands was this speech from Enki to Atrahasis, and the speech that one said to the other in so many words, and the fact that we suddenly had a kind of blueprint for the conception of the Ark at the beginning of the second millennium in Mesopotamian circles. I mean, it's something you would never expect.

because there's a little bit of a description in the later George Smith text about the ark, but not enough to imagine how it was built. But here is a quite different thing. So I imagine Atrahasis must have been very good at something else to be given this job. Anyway, he grinned and bore it.

And he went ahead and built the boat. But the most shocking thing that... I mean, I didn't drop the tablet on the table a la George Smith because it's been done already. I mean, you don't want to make it happen in this kind of thing. The thing about it was that the boat was round. Round. Round. I mean, this is an extraordinary thing because...

The cadium is perfectly clear and they even express it that its width and length are the same, which is a funny thing for a circle. But if you imagine this, if you draw a square on a piece of paper and then you fit a circle inside so it touches the four lines just in the middle, so it fits right inside the square, that is the conception.

And this is not just a fanciful way of explaining that, because we have some school texts from about this period, 1700 or so, with geometric exercises on, where the teacher has written on the tablet drawings of different geometrical designs with questions underneath in Sumerian for the boys to answer.

So there's a drawing on this tablet of exactly that, a circle fitting inside a square. And when you see that original drawing, you understand how you could describe a circle as being the same lengthways and widthways, because normally you would never think of that in a million years. So it's a funny thing. Anyway, it's a round boat. So I'm sitting here reading this thing at this very desk, scratching my head. It's a round boat. What the hell is a round boat? But I suddenly remembered that there are round boats.

And these round boats are river boats. And the Babylonians who had this story, they lived on the Euphrates and Tigris rivers. That was their main lifeblood, their main form of communication. And it's clear that the round boat that we know from earlier communities in Britain, in Ireland and Wales and Scotland, they still have them on the rivers. They're called coracles. C-O-R-A-C-L-E-S-C.

And they are the most amazing invention because they're always put together from materials which are freely available. And once they're finished, they never sink.

They might tip you over, you might drown, but they don't sink because they've got a nice curvy bottom and they're difficult to steer. You have to have a pole a bit like a punt. And if you get into a current, you could be in trouble. And in Iraq, where, of course, all this Mesopotamian stuff originally played out,

They had coracles on the rivers until the last century. When they had bridges across the rivers, they weren't so necessary. But they used to be there buzzing all over the place like taxis outside a railway station.

And the traditional style of making these coracles, what is absolutely astonishing about it, is it's unchanged, say in 1920 AD, from what it had been in the 18th century BC. In other words, people who lived by these rivers and knew what they wanted, they followed the same system of building a boat, which is you take a kind of rope made from the stuff that grows around the palm tree trunk,

And you twist it and twist it and twist it and intertwist it until you have a thick rope, which is immensely tough. And you lay it out on the ground in a circle. And as you come back to the beginning, you put it on top of the first row and then the second row. And you make a kind of great floppy basket.

of this material, which is not heavy, but very, very strong. And then what they have to do is they had to have ribs to fit inside the basket so it wasn't floppy. And then everything is tied together. So the rows are tied together and they're tied to the ribs. So you have like a waste paper basket, if I may put it that way, where the wood's inside. And then you get bitumen, which is carcinogenic carcinogenics.

but it's the world's best waterproofing material you could ever imagine. And it came out of the earth in Mesopotamia. There was a place where it came out in a bubbling spring like spring water.

And you take it, it's very pungent smelling, and you apply it to the surface you need to waterproof. And when it's dry and hard, it's impermeable. So that's what they did. They stirred up all this bitumen and they applied it with a kind of roller inside and out, and then you get a waterproof boat. So if you have a normal Iraqi coracle,

There'd be plenty of room for the guy who owned it with the pole. It might be his cousin, might be his mother-in-law and a couple of sheep, and that would be it. And you'd be on one side of the river, and what he would do, knowing the currents, is to drift across the river without going too far downstream. And they were past masters at it.

There's evidence, photographic evidence and record evidence of these things still in practical use in the early part of the 20th century. They never changed a thing. And the reason is that if you make a boat like that and you finish it properly and you look after it, it will last forever. It never needs to be altered or changed or developed. It was a perfect invention.

And what is such a satisfactory thing is I found this book where a British boat historian had gone around the world, seeing people who live by the sides of rivers, building their local equivalents, some outriggers, some with sails. And he was in Iraq and he recorded in real detail, bit by bit, the process by which a coracle builder starts and finishes his coracles.

I once made a really convincing slide where you have the instructions from the Babylonian in the 18th century BC or whatever and the instructions from 1920 side by side and they are practically speaking the same process so this never happened before with

that somebody in my field has found a case of this kind, where they are so intimately connected one to the other by passage of time. And also, there's another ironic twist, because the boat specialist who wrote this volume had a very terse style of

of writing. He was a Scotsman, and he wrote very concentrated language. And when I first read it, I didn't understand what he was talking about. And there were two places where I understood what the English written by this man meant, because I knew what the Babylonian equivalent meant

And one of the things I discovered when I was working on that was that people in Wales and Ireland and Scotland, they all claim they invented the coracle. It's a national thing. I don't doubt that there are special days when they celebrate. National Coracle Day. I think so. The thing is, what really happened is it came because of the Romans, because the Romans must have seen coracles in action.

And when you have a seagoing boat, when they can't come right in, you can go out in a small boat for offloading stuff like that. And the Romans must have taken one look at those coracles and thought, they're really useful. And so they took some Iraqis bodily to Britain because the tombstones were found somewhere in Newcastle about these poor blokes who were brought here to build coracles for the Romans. And because they froze to death,

They probably had very thin limbs and thin cotton clothes and probably were put to work straight away and they all succumbed.

So, of course, once this thing happened, I wrote a book about it for Hodder. The Ark Before Noah. That was one good thing, but some surprising things happened. They decided they wanted to make a documentary film about this marvellous thing. You have the recipe for a boat. You could build it. Why don't we build it? So it's got a long story short. We did. Blink Films, they were called. And they did it in India, in Kerala.

They couldn't go to Iraq. It was impossible to go to Iraq. So what they did is they found a part of India which is Iraq-looking as possible. And it had the same trees and the same this and that. And what they did is they basically followed the information from the Babylonian tablet and from this account closely. What they couldn't do is to build the thing full-sized.

because it was about half the size of a football pitch I was going to ask you the next question what is the scale what is the actual size it's a gigantic thing and they made one about a third of the original size because they said that the weight of it wouldn't support its own self it would be impossible because you have to have these ribs that curve up from the top down to the bottom to support the bars that's what they did that's what they made so

So they worked out the largest size they could make it to scale that would be functional. And it was, and it was bitumen and everything. But one of the remarkable things was that the measurements given in the Babylonian tablet turned out to be, so to speak, accurate. So in other words, when the god Enki gives all this information, how much of this and how much of that,

You might think it was the sort of round figures that you get in stories, like 100-league boots and all this sort of thing. But in fact, the numbers were rather specific. And it turned out that when that story was written and the divine source of knowledge provided the figures and dimensions that were required to make a functional coracle, what they did was take the true measurements of a normal coracle and expand them in proportion.

So as it were, you could do it if you could do it, if you see what I mean. That's a very remarkable thing. So it wasn't just the biggest coracle in the world and we make it up. So somehow or other, it had been incorporated into the mythological text

proper data. I was astonished. They knew what would be involved, quantities of this and the bitumen and the size. They knew that, and they just expanded it, given the fact it had to be the biggest one in the world. And it makes a lot of sense. And many things about that story make a lot of sense. Because if you really wanted to have a floating walnut with all life in it,

You couldn't do better than have a coracle because it doesn't have to go anywhere. It's not got a prow and a stern. All it does is float. And that's what was necessary. So there's a kind of beautiful simplicity about it.

And I'm always hoping that a bit more of this story will come to light. The tablet I got access to, it had 60 lines of text. And this is not accidental, because Babylonian mathematics is predicated on a sexagesimal structure. They always count in sixties, as we count in decimals. That's how they did it. And mathematicians I know have all said that it's more flexible, it's actually a very sensible structure.

But I've always had enough trouble with decimals. I didn't pursue this idea. So the fact that this tablet has 60 lines on it is not by any means coincidental. And the second thing is, it's different from all other kinds of mythological narratives.

Because, for example, if you read it in the Gilgamesh epic, it says, oh, Gilgamesh opened his mouth and said as follows to Enkidu, diddly-diddly-diddly-doo. And then Enkidu opened his mouth and said to Gilgamesh, diddly-diddly-diddly-doo. There's a lot of repetition, isn't there? Yeah, yeah, yeah. And the reason is, well, it's probably explicable, but the tablet that I had, I published, is

They have dialogue between people and there's none of that at all. It's just somebody speaks, another person speaks, stuff like that. So I have an idea that it was a 60-line section of a longer narrative which was used in performance, that the people had their parts, so to speak, and that some of the parts were written with the idea that if you had this story and God said, you've got to build this boat for all the animals...

and it's in front of your peer group and farmers and boatmen, and someone's going to say, well, how big was it? They're all going to be parties. How big was this thing anyway? Who's going to make a thing like that? So then what it does is it gives you the stuff which answers the questions.

So I think it's tailored to the sort of audience in front of whom it was actually performed. And the last line is, he says to the major wheelwright who used to work for him at Assis when he goes through, he says, when I've gone through, seal the door behind me. So there was a door and that had to be bitumened over, otherwise the water... So it's the last minute, bang, before the flood comes.

So this is a 60-line episode. So I think the one before must have been about the dialogue. Of the gods, yes. Deciding what to do, yes. Yeah. And then Enkidu goes and tells Atrahasis. They get in. And the next one must be... The flood itself and the journey and all that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'll tell you something I'll never forgive myself for. When this book came out, I was interviewed by...

live on television in France about it. And when I went over there, the guy said, I don't suppose you can do it in French. Nobody from your country can ever do it in French. I said, right. So I did. And I did my best. It was a bit embarrassing. But the thing was, I didn't make the joke I should have made.

because I explained about where the story finishes and that Atrahasis went through the door and the wheelwright sealed the door. And what I should have said is saying, après moi, le deluge. And it never occurred to me. It's the one time you could use that quotation perfectly. You can use it here. We can understand it. We can use it. But there, it would have gone over huge.

Round of applause and everything. So I reckon that this is, I mean, people say they didn't have pockets in Mesopotamia. They always say that, but I don't believe a word of it because any idiot would invent the pocket. It's a pocket size pocket.

section of a bigger story. And I reckon that if they were, for example, an itinerant group that went from village to village or place to place, they might be there for three nights and do the story in three goes or something like that. And this is one of the bits of script, so to speak. So it sounds like we have various versions of the flood story from Mesopotamia, like the Gilgamesh one. You don't have Atrahasis, but you have Utnapishtim, don't you? Yes. In Gilgamesh,

The Noah person is called Utnapishtim, which means something like, I sought out my life or something like that. It's a very strange name, really. Anyway, he's the equivalent of the old Babylonian Atra Hasis. And Napishtim is at the end of the world and Gilgamesh goes to visit. And there are many courses for reflection.

One of them is that the distribution of the flood narrative is partly due to the force of the main religions where it's important, but also to missionaries, because missionaries went to places where people had their own religions and interfered with them, and they taught their poor innocent children to read and write when they didn't want to. And they very often did it with stories and

and often things from the Bible, where the flood story is a jolly good one. So I think in addition to the direct spread of what people call holy, so to speak, in various formats, there's also this other thing, so that sometimes flood stories appear in the most unexpected places, and thank goodness, me. And then they say, well, of course, obviously the flood did cover the whole world, because even here they know about it, whereas in fact it's probably some...

150 years after some disappointed woman who became a missionary and went out to teach the heathen that told them the story. And it gets taken over and rewritten and rewritten and rewritten. So this is one thing. The second thing is that if you look at the flood story down a microscope the other way around, what it is, is one bloke has 24 hours to save the world. That's it, right? And this is a motif that Hollywood have never grown out of.

If you think how many films there are where one bloke, you know, it's aliens, it's things come out of the sea, atom bombs, whatever it is, it's only you who can do it. And it's essentially this narrative. And I think that is probably something to do with its success as a literary format, because it's used to encapsulate

seen in the Bible and before that noise in Mesopotamia, so to speak. It's a teaching thing. It's an instructive thing. It's just remember your ants under the sky. By the way, when the Babylonians give the impression that it was noise which brought down their downfall, it's actually more subtle than that. Because when the flood's over and they sort everything out, they institute in the world death.

They bring in death. And in the first round of creation, they never thought of it. So this is the problem, that nobody died. So it got noisier and noisier and noisier. So they brought in barren women and disease and all these things so that the species would die in due course. And so when they say noise, the clamor is because...

Population decreasing kind of thing, yes. Be quiet, yeah. It's an interesting idea. I've only got a couple more questions on this. First off, I want to bring us back then to the whole narrative in the Bible with Noah and the ark and the flood and all of that. And from what you've told about the ark and the story of these figures in Mesopotamia, and that comes first, the big question is, do we know much about the transition, how it goes from Mesopotamia to becoming this key story in the Bible?

Well, I think I have an idea about it. I don't know whether anybody else will agree with me. But in my book, I answer this question in detail because we know that Nebuchadnezzar in the 6th century... King of Babylon. King of Babylon.

after trouble went there and thwacked them good and proper and the king well they ended up having to go from Jerusalem to Babylon to begin the years of misery in the Babylonian world and

and the temple was destroyed and everything and so they went to Babylon and they had to live in Babylon but this is a central part of the biblical narrative the so-called Babylon exile the Babylonian exile yes and according to the Bible everybody sat around weeping all day and bringing out their handkerchiefs and having another sniff but in fact what actually happened is they settled in and they found walks of life and when the 70 years had gone by and they were allowed to go home not all of them wanted to in fact most of them probably stayed there but

But that's neither here nor there. What is important is what's in the book of Daniel. Because right at the beginning of the book of Daniel, which is partly in Hebrew and partly in Aramaic, it's a funny mixture, you have this situation that the Judeans, the people from Jerusalem, the exiles, so to speak, who were in Babylon...

Nebuchadnezzar ordered his major domo to select out from the youth of these Judeans who were refugees, or however you like to call them, living in the city of Babylon and probably outside in the country, to select a hand-picked group of young Japs who were good physical shape, clever, wise, and everything, and teach them the law and language of the Babylonians. And one of them is Daniel himself. We are told in Holy Writ that

that the king himself suggested that the intelligentsia of this group of people were put through a process where they were indoctrinated with Mesopotamian ideas. And no one's ever really written about it until I decided to write about it, because the Babylonians spoke Babylonian and also Aramaic, and Judeans spoke Hebrew and Aramaic.

And six years of this training, what it means is they weren't going to teach them Aramaic because they knew it, and they weren't going to teach them Hebrew because they were going to teach them Babylonian so they could become judges and administrators under the court and not rebellious. Because if they suddenly found out the great literary heritage of this country and that country and all the things that had happened and they were part of a scribal tradition,

They wouldn't start fermenting rebellion and trying to be free and all this kind of stuff. There's very clever handpicked job. So they learned to read cuneiform writing and speak the Babylonian language. And it says they become magistrates and lawyers in the kingdom. So this policy is quite clear in its function. But the thing is this, we have tablets from schools that

of this period with curricular material on, which if they were taught in this way by a Babylonian teacher to learn cuneiform writing in the Babylonian tongue, they would have used. And among these tablets is to do one part of the Gilgamesh epic. So we can see that when they studied in class, one of the things they would have read if they were reading that story, the flood story in the Babylonian language, because it's so interesting.

So this means that when they graduated and they went out into their world, they knew this story themselves. And this is one part of the principle. The second part of the principle is, if you look at the Bible detachedly, not as a religious work, but as a historical work, one of the interesting things about it is its overall structure is to explain what happened to the Judeans and why.

And I think that when the temple and the focus of their religious identity and state identity was destroyed at home and they were isolated refugees in this new committee, it became very important for the people who were the elders of that community and responsible for it to keep it alive. Because

they wouldn't have looked any different from the Babylonians. You couldn't have told Judeans on the street, and they all wore the same clothes, and they all spoke Aramaic. And before you knew where you are, they can vanish into the great mass. It's not like they stood out on the underground or something like that. They were all one and the same. And the interesting thing is that when the Assyrians took the others to Assyria 100 years before, they disappear from history completely.

So I think the Babylonians, I mean, they were their cousins. When the Babylonians were there, they decided to write down what had happened to them from the beginning to explain it all. And if you look at the Bible from that point of view, that's exactly what it does. It's remarkable. So you have the bit all about so-and-so begat so-and-so begat so-and-so, which people sometimes read out in the church or in the synagogue as if it's philosophy. It's a phone book.

And that list of people who begat, who begat, who begat is a list of who constituted the Judeans. And the reason is this, that if you had three lusty sons and they were all going to the well, falling in love with Babylonian girls or vice versa, you want to keep an eye on that because otherwise your stock would be depleted and you would disappear from sight. And I think this is it. So they were charged with writing an account of their own history.

So they had historical records of some kind, like chronicles and so forth, and kings. They had those things, and all that was incorporated. They had philosophical proverbs and things like that. But at the beginning, there was a big hole.

And when they were writing about after creation, what happened, you have Moses and the bull rushes and you have the flood story. When there's a Moses and the bull rushes, that story when the baby's in the little boat, that's in the Bible, of course, but there's also a Babylonian forerunner to that story and the flood. And I think they read these stories as part of this training. And ultimately, when the great composition was to be put together about where we all came from and why, these stories were recycled.

in their place after creation, before the kingly periods, to fill in the gap. And then you have the bit about the patriarchs, which they all wrote about on camels, and they lived like the Bedouin in the desert, and they had their traditions about that. So they're all plonked in. And I think that's what it really is. It's a historical account.

And there was a shortfall at the beginning of the volume, so to speak. And that's why they took these stories and they recycled them to have a different message. So the literary thing, the five minutes to save the world, irresistible narrative. And then they thought, well, this is to do with good behavior, which they thought was so crucial. And they reworked it in their own fashion and

for the benefit of future even the three birds thing that's the other thing we're talking about at the beginning there are three birds also in the battle of the universe and that's the clincher and when george smith first announced this there were lots of intelligent worthy people in the audience

He didn't like this at all, but I think when he talked about the three birds on the one hand and the three birds on the other hand, they just about gave up. In fact, a lot of clergymen got very miserable about it. But then they discovered that the ark in the Babylonian thing is described as a square.

And they said, well, you've got a boat that's a square. This is rubbish. So they tried to throw out the whole of this uncomfortable Babylonian thing on those grounds. And because in the Bible, it's a sort of coffin shape. In the Assyrian George Smith, it's a square. And the reason it's a square is because that thing we were talking about before when he explained that the circle is that which fits within the square. And that's the bit that came through. Right.

That's the bit that came through. So they didn't believe Smith after that. He died young. And seriologists working on flood stories, you've got two options. You can die young and become very famous, or you can keep going. I decided for the latter.

Well, I think you're still very famous at the same time, Irving, I must admit. But it's interesting, isn't it, how the Ark in the Bible, we don't think of a rounded boat or a square. You do think of that almost kind of coffin-like shape. So it shows how, even though they embrace that belief, which is already there in Babylonia and so on and so forth, they kind of change the message so it's about good behaviour. But they also adapted certain parts of the story to make the Noah story that so many of us know so well today. That's exactly right. That is exactly right.

What fun it all is. But very quickly, because I've used so much of your time and I don't want to keep you for too long. If we go to the origins of the origins almost, because we've explored the origins of the whole Noah story, but with a Mesopotamian version of the flood myth, do we know what might have inspired this whole myth in itself? Well, that's a very important question. And I believe that the flood story is at home in Mesopotamia because of this.

They're riverine communities, the Euphrates and Tigris, which come down from the far north and water the land.

and fertility comes for the crops, and everything's marvellous. But there are disadvantages when you're dependent upon water of this kind. Sometimes there isn't any, and sometimes there's flooding. And there's lots of evidence of floods throughout Mesopotamian sources at different times and different periods, so that flooding was a feature of life in ancient Iraq, whereas it wasn't in ancient Jerusalem. That you can be sure of. So the thing is...

Geologists have ideas and clergymen have ideas. But I think the thing is this, in my view, the story as it ended up in the Bible is a consequence of what must have been a kind of tsunami. And I think it must have been a freak kind of flood in remote times where everything in Mesopotamia was washed down to the Persian Gulf. And the only things which survived would be boats.

if that. And it was a massive destruction, I think, not the whole world, but their world, simply. It must be something like that, because afterwards, it was never forgotten. And it became, in Mesopotamian terms, a horizon. So when they're talking about early things, it's either before the flood or after the flood.

as their horizon for reference. And that shows it's embedded in their psychology. So I think that ultimately, what is reflected in that story is a real, utter water disaster. It might be that people said, you don't go to bed now, the flood will come, you know, the bogeyman or something like that. And I think the story of the destruction in the Atrahasis and the Gilgamesh story, using this flood thing,

is a kind of magic to make sure that never happened again. Because in one of the versions of this flood, they have a rainbow in Babylonia. So I think that this was their kind of way of ensuring that whatever happened, once there was a last minute rescue by one of the gods, it would never happen again, anything so terrible. And that seems to me at home in the Mesopotamian idea that they had a lurking neurosis and

lurking fear that one day something would happen again. And this magic myth was to make sure it never, ever did. Well, Irving, last but certainly not least, you have written this very popular book all about your work around this and the whole story that you've recounted over the past hour. It is called? It's called The Ark Before Noah. And it came out in hardback. And then it came out in paperback. And the advantage of the paperback is it's not so expensive. And secondly, it's

I was able to write another chapter about how we built the boat in India, or they built the boat in India, which was a tremendous experience. And it's all in there. So long train journey, long bath, just the sort of thing. I had a lot of fun with it. And I read a book for children also called The Lifeboat That Saved the World. And I had this idea. We know that Atrahasis had three boys. So this story is written by the youngest boy.

who's called Very Quick. He's sort of very intelligent. What a name. And he sees Enki coming to talk to his father and it's all written from his point of view and the artist did marvellous drawings and it was published. So that was an adventure. Irving, this has been absolutely fantastic. Thank you so much for taking the time to come back on the podcast. It's a big pleasure for me.

Well, there you go. There was Dr Irving Finkel talking all the things the flood and the ark before Noah and how the Mesopotamian world inspired the creation, the origins in the story of Noah and the flood. I hope you enjoyed today's episode. It is the first

of our new mini-series exploring Old Testament stories, people, objects and kingdoms that we're going to be doing all throughout June. So stay tuned, we've got some great episodes lined up for you. Last thing from me, wherever you're listening to The Ancients, whether that be on Apple Podcasts or Spotify or elsewhere, you know what I'm going to say. Make sure that you are subscribed, that you are following The Ancients so that you don't miss out when we release new episodes twice every week. But that's enough from me and I will see you in the next episode.

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