The Ark Tablet: Building the Boat in Babylon

A clay tablet about the size of a mobile phone, with sixty lines of Old Babylonian cuneiform, was written in Babylonia around 1900–1700 BCE. After the Second World War an RAF serviceman, Leonard Simmons, brought it home to Britain among other objects he had picked up in the Middle East. His son Douglas later brought it to Irving Finkel, the British Museum's curator of cuneiform, who worked on it from 2009. (Accounts differ on when Finkel first saw it: see the evidence section.) It tells part of the flood story, and it stops to say how to build the boat: how much rope, what ribs, how much bitumen. The boat it describes is not the long ark of Bible pictures. It is round: a giant coracle, the round river boat of Mesopotamia, scaled up far beyond any real one. Finkel has called the tablet "one of the most important human documents ever discovered."

From a serviceman's souvenirs to the British Museum

• Leonard Simmons served with the RAF and came home after the Second World War with a small collection of antiquities. His son Douglas Simmons inherited them and brought the tablet to Finkel. Accounts give two dates. Historia magazine and the Jewish Chronicle both say Douglas first brought it to the British Museum in 1985, and Historia says he took it away again. The Jewish Chronicle says he left it with Finkel only in 2009, as do many 2014 news reports. (The family name is spelled "Simmonds" in some accounts.)
• Finkel worked on the text for several years and published it in January 2014, when the tablet went on display at the British Museum on loan. The tablet is privately owned, so it has no British Museum collection record; Finkel's book The Ark Before Noah publishes a photograph, the text and his translation, and is the edition this entry follows. This entry does not say where the tablet is shown today.
• It was shown beside the Babylonian Map of the World, a clay tablet whose text describes islands beyond the ocean at the edge of the known world. Finkel's reading of that text says that on one of them are the remains of the ark.

What the tablet says

• The warning. As in the other Babylonian flood stories, the god Enki (Ea) speaks to the reed wall of the house of Atrahasis, "exceedingly wise", and Atrahasis overhears. He is told to pull down his house, build a boat, give up his possessions and save life.
• The shape. In Finkel's translation: "Draw out the boat that you will make on a circular plan; let her length and breadth be equal." The round boat is the Mesopotamian coracle, a basket of rope and reed sealed with bitumen, a type of boat that was still used on the rivers of Iraq in the twentieth century. The tablet does not invent a new kind of boat. It takes one its hearers knew and makes it enormous.
• The size. The base is to cover about 3,600 square metres, roughly half a football pitch, a circle some 70 metres across.
• The build. The hull is to be made of coiled palm-fibre rope in stated quantities, strengthened with wooden ribs, and waterproofed inside and out with two kinds of bitumen. The quantities are the point: this is a flood story told for people who knew how boats were made.
• The animals. In the damaged closing lines the wild animals of the steppe go aboard "two by two". It is the earliest known appearance of the detail now attached to Noah's ark.

Building it

In 2014 a television team had a round boat built to Finkel's reading of the tablet, by boatbuilders in Kerala, India, for a documentary (shown in the United States as the NOVA programme Secrets of Noah's Ark). It was scaled down: about 40 feet across, a fifth of the tablet's size by the documentary's own count, though some accounts say a third. It floated, but water came in through its seams from the moment it was launched, and the crew had to plug the gaps and set pumps working. The documentary's own conclusion is that the team never managed to reproduce Babylonian bitumen, but that the structure was sound. The test shows that the boat type works at that size. It does not show whether the full-size boat the tablet describes would have worked. This entry tells the build the same way as this archive's Flood chapter (ch01), which follows the same sources.

What the tablet is, and is not

Finkel's own view is a sceptic's. He has said he is "107% convinced the ark never existed." He reads the tablet's practical detail as a storyteller's skill: a narrator, speaking to people who built and caulked boats, gave them the convincing details they were able to judge. On that reading the tablet is not a record of a real ship. It is evidence of how a sacred story was kept alive, generation after generation, by people who retold it for their own audience. Its date in the Old Babylonian period and its hero, Atrahasis, place it in the same stream as the Atrahasis epic, from which the flood in Gilgamesh (the Flood Tablet, V89) was later adapted.

Symbology and sacred encoding

The circle. The epic's cube stands like a building, and the ark of Genesis is a long vessel. The coracle has no front and no back. It does not need to sail anywhere: it only has to rise with the water and stay afloat. One reading of the shape, offered here as interpretation, is that survival in this telling is not a voyage but staying afloat until the water goes down.

The building list as sacred text. In this telling, the boat that saves life is not only commanded by a god; it is measured, supplied and built by human hands to a specification. The Mesopotamian flood stories keep answering the question "but how would it work?" The tablet's rope counts and bitumen measures are part of its story, not a side note to it.

Connections

The Flood (ch01) and Mesopotamia (ch03). Compare the Flood Tablet (V89), the same story as epic poetry, written down about a thousand years later, and the Cyrus Cylinder (V35), another Babylonian clay text that Finkel edited.

From The Divine Archives · https://getconexto.com/vault/ark-tablet.html