Ancient Babylonian tablet reveals that Noah’s ark was rounded in shape

Irving Finkel is the curator from central casting. Battered clothes, bushy white beard, little circular glasses, boundless enthusiasm. From a distance, he looks about 100, but as he sprints across the British Museum’s Great Court to offer the warmest of handshakes – he is 10 minutes late for our meeting – you realise he is much younger.

In reality, he is 62 going on 12, since a lifetime spent examining the clay tablets of ancient Mesopotamia has left him seemingly unaffected by the cares of the workaday world.

“The man who is tired of tablets is tired of life,” he announces in his delightful new book, The Ark Before Noah, which sets out to demonstrate that the biblical flood narrative was derived from stories that had been embedded in Sumerian and Babylonian society and literature for thousands of years.

The book revolves around a clay tablet dating from about 1800BC with 60 lines of cuneiform (the tiny, wedge-shaped script on the tablets), which relate to part of the flood story. Finkel first encountered this “Ark tablet” almost 30 years ago when a member of the public brought it to show him.

He has spent the past 20 years translating the text and putting it in the context of other flood literature and is now ready to unveil it to the world. This is in the form of his book and a Channel 4 documentary, due to be shown in August, which is building the ark to the specifications on Finkel’s tablet to see if it floats.

Finkel’s bombshell – and the point of the Channel 4 programme – is that he reckons the original ark was round. “The fact that the ark was round is the headline finding,” he says. “It’s something nobody in the world had anticipated because everybody knows what Noah’s ark looked like.” All those pictures of oblong, multi-decked boats that look like neat country cottages will have to be redrawn.

The mobile phone-sized ark tablet is housed in a posh-looking red box with “Instructions on the Building of the Ark” written on it. Finkel takes the tablet out of the box and lets me hold it – a chance to commune with the ghosts of ancient Mesopotamia. I manage not to drop it. As well as casting new light on the shape of the original ark, it also contains the first written allusion to the animals “going in two by two”. In the book, he describes unearthing this reference on the broken, weathered tablet with its worn-out wedges as his “biggest shock in 44 years of grappling with difficult lines in cuneiform tablets … I nearly fell off my chair.” He is good at conveying the excitement of academic discoveries, a television natural.

He could have written up his findings in an academic tome that would have pleased his peers, but he has instead produced a digressive, amusing, personal book for the general reader, a book that is willing to ask big questions – such as how did the Babylonian ark story find its way into the Bible? – and make the odd educated guess.

“There’s very little in existence that helps people with this subject. Mostly we’re orientated to make it seem forbidding and difficult.”

The first draft was written in what he calls a “very defensive” way. “In the world of scholarship,” he says, “you don’t make a statement without supporting it with footnotes and references to German periodicals.”

“When I first wrote the book I did it feeling that all my colleagues were going to read it and they’d be saying [puts on whispery academic voice] ‘I rather doubt …’ But when I wrote the second draft, I suddenly had this brilliant idea that I would forget my colleagues existed and write for everybody else, which was very liberating. It meant I could speak with my real voice.” In the book, Finkel explains his own route into Assyriology and his continuing love affair with the subject. He had wanted to be a curator at the British Museum from the age of nine and was overjoyed when he joined in 1979. But how will those colleagues react? “I don’t know,” he admits. “They’ll probably all gang up against me at conferences and throw fruit.”

Finkel wears several academic hats. As well as being in charge of the museum’s 130,000 clay tablets, he looks after its collection of board games and has made it a personal crusade to preserve old diaries, launching the Great Diary Project to “provide a permanent home for unwanted diaries of any date or kind”.

What links Mesopotamian inscriptions and the humdrum diaries of elderly ladies from Carshalton? “I had this sudden epiphany that diaries were like clay tablets,” he says. In 4,000 years time, the shopping lists of elderly ladies in Surrey will be pored over with fascination.

Finkel sees his mission as rescuing artefacts of the past – clay tablets, obscure Indian board games, the diaries of ordinary people – before they are swept away, a latter-day Noah constructing a cultural ark. A round one of course.

Rare Physical Evidence Of Roman Crucifixion Found In 1,900 Year Old English Skeleton

Archaeologists in Cambridgeshire, U.K., have discovered what may be the best-preserved physical evidence of crucifixion—a 1,900-year-old skeleton with a two-inch iron nail driven through his heel.

Originally unearthed by a team from Albion Archaeology during excavations in the village of Fenstanton in 2017, the remains date to between A.D. 130 to 337.

The findings from the dig are published in the new issue of British Archaeology magazine.

“This is an extraordinarily important find because it is only the second discovery of a crucifixion victim from Roman times,” John Granger Cook, a professor at LaGrange College in Georgia and the author of Crucifixion in the Mediterranean World, told the Independent.

He estimates that the Romans used crucifixion, which kills its victims through asphyxiation, to execute only about 100,000 to 150,000 people before Emperor Constantine outlawed the practice in A.D. 337 after converting to Christianity.

As a particularly drawn-out and gruesome means of capital punishment, crucifixion is believed to have been reserved for enslaved people and enemies of the state.

Most victims were likely secured by rope, rather than nails, and would probably not have received formal burials, making it difficult to find physical evidence of their cause of death.

The deceased found in Fenstanton would have been a 25-to-35-year-old man measuring about 5 foot 7, reports the Guardian. His foot was nailed down to keep him from writhing around during his last moments, while existing injuries to his legs suggest he was kept enslaved and shackled prior to his death.

He was buried with a timber structure, perhaps the bier on which he was executed.

Only four other examples of the remains of possible crucifixion victims, including ones from Gavello, Italy, and Mendes, Egypt, have been identified; this skeleton is the first to be found in northern Europe.

Construction workers in Jerusalem found the only other one featuring a nail in 1968, but the body was not intact, and thus is not fully accepted as firm evidence of crucifixion in archaeological circles.

“It’s essentially the first time that we’ve found physical evidence for this practice of crucifixion during an archaeological excavation,” dig leader David Ingham, of Albion Archaeology, told the Daily Mail.

“You just don’t find this. We have written evidence, but we almost never find physical evidence.”

Excavations in Fenstanton have turned up 48 ancient graves, as well as ceramics and and a horse-shaped copper alloy brooch decorated with enamel.

The village lies along an ancient Roman road called the Via Devana, between Cambridge and Godmanchester.