Noah’s Ark Blueprints Found—4,000-Year-Old Detailed Instructions
‘One of the most important human documents ever discovered’
Irving Finkel, British Museum curator and
author of “The Ark Before Noah,” has found a 4,000-year-old tablet that
describes the materials and measurements for building Noah’s Ark.
It also describes the Ark in a way never before conceived by archaeologists—as round.
Finkel writes in a museum blog post of
his discovery. He was at a press conference to promote his book, when
Douglas Simmonds approached him with a tablet given to him by his
father. His father had picked up some artifacts from Egypt and China
after the war in the late 1940s.
The tablet “turned out to be one in a million,” said
Finkel. Dating from 1750 B.C., it tells the Babylonian “Story of the
Flood.” The Babylonian story, and its similarities to the story
recounted in the Book of Genesis, were already known, but this table
“has startling new contents,” Finkel said.
He lists off some of the materials a God told the
Babylonian Noah to use for his ark: “Quantities of palm-fibre rope,
wooden ribs and bathfuls of hot bitumen to waterproof the finished
vessel … The amount of rope prescribed, stretched out in a line, would
reach from London to Edinburgh!”
The ark would have had an area of about 2.2 miles squared
(3.6 kilometers squared)—about the size of one and a half football
fields—with walls 20 feet high.
The aspect of the description that most stunned Finkel,
however, is that the ark was round. He said: “To my knowledge, no one
has ever thought of that possibility.”
Labels: Archaeology, Heritage
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