What did Noah’s Ark look like? Pretty conventional, right? Pointy ends, wide at the sides? Not according to a new discovery by a British researcher who received access to ancient tablets that had been held by the son on a World War II British airman. It was round, as in a circle: A large — very large — life raft!
Theunias Bates of AOL’s Sphere blog has the details, here. Below is an exerpt.
This ship shape discovery was made by Irving Finkel, an expert in ancient Mesopotamia (now Iraq) at London’s British Museum. While translating a 3,700-year-old clay tablet inscribed with Babylonian cuneiform script — passed to the museum by the son of a British Air Force man, who picked it up while serving in the Middle East during World War II — he spotted an “extremely exciting” reference to the ark’s “circular design.” This was a revelation, says Finkel, not only because he’d never thought of the ark as round, but because this was the first-ever ancient description of the ark’s shape. Neither the Bible nor other Babylonian documents featuring the great flood offered any guidance of that sort.
The usual depictions of Noah’s ark, like this one from the 13th century, are all wrong, according to a newly translated Babylonian tablet.
“When you see paintings of Noah’s ark, it always has a prow and a stern, and it’s an ocean-going vessel that could get you from A to B,” says Finkel. “But the poet who wrote this version conceived the ark as a giant coracle, which have steep sides and a rounded bottom.” These highly stable boats, he notes, were used to float goods and animals from one side of the Euphrates and Tigris rivers to the other, and are still sometimes used in Iraq today.
New research from a recently studied ancient tablet suggests Noah’s Ark was round, like a super-sized life raft. Which is what it was.
