Irving Finkel

And the gods couldn't sleep after lunch sort of thing.

So they decided they would write them out and create something quieter that worked harder.

So this was the basic mechanism, and they had different ways of doing it.

The most effective one was they were going to send a flood to wipe them all out.

And one of the gods, the number three in the triumvirate, thought this was a deplorable idea, so he took it upon himself to warn this person called Atrahasis, who lived in Mesopotamia.

to build a boat to rescue life when the waters came.

And in it, he told him the shape of it and the materials he would need and how much he would need of the materials so he could do it safely.

And in the 60 lines of the tablet, all this stuff was there.

It was like a blueprint to build this boat.

And it was extraordinary because it was round, the boat.

And everybody who knew their Bible, the ark's a coffin-shaped kind of affair, and nobody thought of it being a round boat.

And the fact is that round boats weren't used in Mesopotamia on the rivers, coracles, that's to say, because for transporting things, and they would never sink, they were very

And so in this story, it was decided it was going to be a giant coracle, a really, really big one that would never sink.

And the male and female animals could go in, and Atrahasis' wife and his three sons and so forth could go in, and everything would be there, and it would float on the water.

And when it came down, they said, we'll start all over again.

So it's got very many points in common with the description of the flood in Genesis.

And of course, so did the one in Gilgamesh.

So in 1872, there was a seriologist in the British Museum called George Smith.

And he was a very, very talented reader.

And in 1872, he discovered that one of the tablets from the Nineveh library we were talking about before had on it a passage which ran in parallel with Gilgamesh about the waters coming and the boat.