Irving Finkel

You have two weeks to build the ark.

So the clock goes tick, tick, tick, tick, tick.

and about a third of the films that come out of Hollywood are the world's going to be demolished by aliens, and you've got 24 hours to think of a cure.

Tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick.

So that narrative is irresistible, that one man can save the world, if he's lucky, in time, from disaster.

So it starts off with Utnapishtim, and it goes on to Noah, and then it goes on to Hollywood.

No, I don't think so.

I think it's a literary construction out of the reality that people who did survive were on boats.

I mean, they had boats for sure.

And you might wake up in the Persian Gulf and never know what happened.

But, you know, it's a literary moral principle teaching narrative.

And look, missionaries take it all around the world.

That's the other thing.

See, this is the mystery of it, that you have flood stories everywhere, and some of them are from meddlesome missionaries who have all these innocent little kids sitting on benches, and I'm going to tell you a story, like that.

So it moves into this consciousness, then it gets recycled, and it gets recycled.

So this is one thing.

And then also, there probably are spontaneous ideas, because it's not so complicated or so amazing that independently people would have such a narrative, after all.

You know, like the Great River in China floods and everybody gets... So that's not at all surprising.

But what was so shocking for George Smith...

who was such a clever person, is to read for the first time on this tablet from Nineveh, long before the one that I discovered came to light, about the three birds being released, one after the other.