The Ark Before Noah Review & Extract

Mind Body & Soul Ezine Book Review: The Ark Before Noah - Decoding the Story of the Flood by Irving Finkel. Available also as an ebook. 

There are many stories of a flood where humans and animals are saved in a boat by god’s grace. Many are  described in this book, the Hebrew, Gilgamesh, the Koran and others. But here we have a very special story of The Ark Tablet, told by Londoner, Irving Finkel PhD in Assyriology with a thesis in Babylonian Exorcist spells, a Curator at the prestigious British Museum and a world specialist in the ancient Mesopotamian language. When the oldest map in the world, 2,600 years old, is depicted on a clay tablet, and had a missing corner; Irving Finkel found the missing piece - on his birthday! 

The Ark Tablet is about the size of a mobile phone, and Irving Finkel deciphered the cuneiform letters that revealed a marvellous story of the original flood story, upon which the story of zonal is based. It describes the Ark in detail, its specifications, its circular design, and that it is made of rope over a wooden and bitumen frame. A drawing was placed on the ground, the annimals went in two by two, and there is a description of where it eventually came to rest. Bearing in mind that the author had many extraordinary discoveries in his work life at the BM, this story is the most exciting. We have the Genesis story of the Biblical Ark, and many others from around the world, and now we have this one, thanks to a strange character who walked one day into the British Museum’s Mesopotamian Cuneiform Department.  The cuneiform tablets reveal the complexity of life in the Akkadian times, the ghost stories, spells, medical and philosophical ideas, the godhead, and other marvellous revelations from the land where civilisation developed. Gilgamesh is quoted, as we follow words that are thousands of years old, and go back to the rescue of Moses in a floating basket. 

Extract: “How to instructions, such as the way to stain stones to look expensive, how to dye cloth to undercut foreign imports, build a water clock for the diviners, or even play a board game. And that reminds me of what can happen in a museum. The Sumerians did have a board game, the so-called royal game of Ur, for which the type series of boards and equipment from about 2600 BC had been discovered in a cemetery. The classic board game lasted in the ancient Middle East for a good 3000 years, but in 177BC, just before it went out of fashion, a well-known Babylonian astronomer wrote down the rules. His tablet had arrived at the British Museum in 1879, and for years lived in its box on the shelf in a tablet cupboard virtually opposite my desk. No one had ever deciphered the inscription, which made it at first interesting, and after while utterly compelling. 

     “I discovered (a 99% perspiration job) the game behind the rules of the old Sumerian game. Here playing squares ran up the middle of the board to signs of the zodiac and the pieces were the planets moving through them. I started hunting through the literature to find all the known archaeological examples, but in the heady first days after this break through, my colleague Dominique Collon came into my room one morning and she said she discovered the Royal game of Ur downstairs in one of our exhibits. Naturally, I put this down to a defence of satire, but she took me by the ear lobe and frogmarched me down the staircase to a pair of human headed bulls sculptures ground floor. She pointed triumphantly at the left bull and switched on the torch that she was carrying to play the light across the one marble plinth on which the bull was standing. The angle threw into sharp relief the scratched grid for the Royal game of Ur which no one had ever noticed since the arrival of the sculptures in the 1850s. The 20 square design was unmistakable. A technical enquiry had come in from America and she became the first ever person to spot the graffiti game board, which she could hardly failed to do after all my look at this droning on about the subject. 

     “The sculptures had originally been set up in a major public gateway with a great arch vaulting between them. It’s not hard to imagine guards on the plinth whiling time away, out of the eye of the sergeant at arms with pebbles and dice which could be swept away at a moment’s notice, like fly gambler surprised by a police constable in a modern street market. A second Assyrian bull, directly opposite, showed a much more worn board of the same type. Then Julian Read, on a flying visit to the Louvre the following weekend, found the grid for the game on one of their bulls, and eventually a colleague from Iraq reported an excavated bull that had also a scratch board game in the equivalent spot.”

Brilliant! Recommended. Review by Wendy Stokes https://wendystokes.co.uk