Irving Finkel

And every time somebody built a coracle and they didn't do the waterproofing right...

Yeah.

You know what will happen?

You'll be out on the river and that will be your lot, you know.

I think so.

I think it was a... There's a certain amount of evidence that in Mesopotamian society, people talk about the time before the flood and after the flood.

And it's like when I was a boy, people used to talk about before the war, we used to... And now we...

We do this.

It's a kind of cataclysmic cut across history, which provides a ruler.

So things are either before it or after it.

Because there's a king list, for example, where they wrote down the names of all the kings all the way back to the beginning, including kings before the flood.

They knew about that.

They have their names and their great regnal years or thousands of years.

Fascinating.

I would say negligible, because I regard it as a literary matter, which is not predicated on the existence of flood in people's minds.

But I do believe that the story in Mesopotamia owes its inception to a disastrous flood, but nothing global, nothing that touched America or China or Birmingham.

So I don't have any sympathy with that.

But people have drilled a cause.

I'm not interested in all that stuff.

It's a literary topos of great potency, of irresistible potency, because everybody identifies with the idea of being in bed, and someone knocks on the door and says, get up, you've got to build a boat, and this is what you're going to need, and you've got to get on with it, sunshine, or we're all sunk.