Dr. Irving Finkel on The Great Flood

I wasn't even going to read this story (yawn...another flood story...) until Irving Finkel's name caught my eye.  He's the real deal.  I first became familiar with his name many years ago in connection with my study of ancient board games.



^{The Ark Tablet in the hands of its decipherer, Dr Irving Finkel (Benjamin McMahon)}                                        

From The Telegraph Online

Irving Finkel: reader of the lost Ark

Tom Chivers meets the man who deciphered a 4,000-year-old blueprint – for the original Noah’s Ark

By Tom Chivers

7:00AM GMT 19 Jan 2014

 

Four thousand years ago, a millennium and a half before the first Jewish scholars put pen to parchment on the Book of Genesis, a scribe in what is now Iraq carved the story of a great flood on to a clay tablet, in the strange and beautiful script known as cuneiform. The story told of how a god came and warned a great man to build a boat, and to take his family on that boat, and two animals of every kind, because the world was to be cleansed with a flood.

 

About 30 years ago, one Douglas Simmonds wandered in to the British Museum, and handed the tablet to a man called Irving Finkel, who immediately recognised it as one of the most important archaeological finds of recent years. Dr Finkel, an Assyriologist or student of the civilisations of ancient Mesopotamia, begged Simmonds to leave it with him, but he would do no such thing. It took him until 2009 to convince Simmonds to let him have it; when he did, what he discovered was a piece of the flood story – the Assyrian story of the Ark, centuries before Noah.

More on the Great Flood of biblical and other ancient myths - see possibly related post on the "Garden of Eden" I did a day or two ago. 

From Canada.com
Massive Canadian melt may have triggered flood of biblical proportions
By Randy Boswell, Postmedia News December 10, 2010

A British researcher has published a startling new theory that the remains of untold ancient settlements from a 100,000-year stretch of human history were submerged by the rapidly rising waters of the Persian Gulf around 6,000 BC — the result, in all likelihood, of a catastrophic, planetwide flood triggered in Canada.

There's a consensus among scientists that the collapse of a kilometres-high glacial dam at the end of the last ice age caused a massive outflow of meltwater into the Arctic or North Atlantic Ocean near Hudson Bay, generating a sharp rise in sea levels around the world and profoundly altering the Earth's climate.

Some scientists have even speculated that ancient myths about great floods — culminating in the biblical story of Noah's Ark — were inspired by the worldwide deluge.

But the new theory, advanced in the latest issue of the journal Current Anthropology by University of Birmingham archeologist Jeffrey Rose, offers the clearest picture yet of what may have been lost at the Middle East nexus of human civilization when Canada's super-sized Lake Agassiz — a remnant of which is today's Lake Winnipeg — suddenly burst its banks 8,000 years ago.

The resulting rise of the Indian Ocean flooded a Great Britain-sized expanse of the Arabian Peninsula that had previously been above water and was almost certainly inhabited by ancient peoples for as long as 100 millennia, Rose stated.  The rising water created the present-day Persian Gulf and drowned shorelines around the peninsula, along the northeast coast of Africa and elsewhere around the world.

And the flooding of those lands, Rose argued, would have submerged extensive archeological evidence of key moments in the evolution of the human race, of the initial stages of their eastward migration out of Africa, and of the cultural developments leading to the early civilizations of the Middle East.  Rose stated in a summary of the study that recent archeological discoveries along the Persian Gulf coast show relatively advanced cultures with no apparent precursor settlements to explain how they attained their level of cultural sophistication.

"These settlements boast well-built, permanent stone houses, long-distance trade networks, elaborately decorated pottery, domesticated animals, and even evidence for one of the oldest boats in the world," Rose noted.

"Perhaps it is no coincidence that the founding of such remarkably well-developed communities along the shoreline corresponds with the flooding of the Persian Gulf basin around 8,000 years ago," he added. "These new colonists may have come from the heart of the Gulf, displaced by rising water levels that plunged the once fertile landscape beneath the waters of the Indian Ocean."

In an email to Postmedia News from Oman, Rose said further research into the precise timing and nature of the flood-triggering event that created the Persian Gulf is "an integral part of the puzzle."

He also referenced groundbreaking studies by University of Manitoba geologist James Teller, whose reconstructions of the colossal drainage of ancient Agassiz — the meltwater basin that once covered most of Central Canada, and held a volume equivalent to 15 Lake Superiors — have initiated a wave of new research on outburst impacts ranging from global climate cooling to the origins of agriculture in southern Europe.

"There is now a critical mass of evidence to indicate that some significant flooding event greatly impacted an indigenous group that had been living within the (Persian Gulf) basin," Rose said. "Whether this was a gradual process over a few thousand years, or, as Teller suggested, happened relatively quickly due to a (meltwater outburst) in the North Atlantic at 8,200 years before present, is one of the questions to be addressed going forward."

As early as 2004, Teller was tentatively linking the 6,000 BC Canadian gusher to flooding in the Persian Gulf region and the ancient flood story in the Epic of Gilgamesh, which scholars see as a possible model for the later biblical account of Noah's flood.

"Who knows how well the Epic of Gilgamesh or the Bible is really reflecting the real world," Teller told Postmedia News at the time. "But the floor of the Persian Gulf is really, really flat in the middle. And like dumping a cup of water on a table — or even a thimbleful — it will rush across the tabletop to the far end."

Rose, referring to recent archeological finds in Oman and Yemen, said there is now evidence suggesting a human presence in the southern part of the Arabian Peninsula as early as 100,000 years ago.  He noted that such a discovery "alters our understanding of human emergence and cultural evolution in the ancient Near East."  These and other findings, the summary stated, indicate that "vital pieces of the human evolutionary puzzle may be hidden in the depths of the Persian Gulf."

© Copyright (c) Postmedia News

The Great Flood Myth

A follow-up to my Monday post "Good Stories Never Die," about the Great Flood. Information from Barbara Walker's The Woman's Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets: Flood The biblical flood story, the "deluge," was a late offshoot of a cycle of flood myths known everywhere in the ancient world. Thousands of years before the Bible was written, an ark was built by Sumerian Ziusudra. In Akkad, the flood hero's name was Atrakhasis. In Babylon he was Uta-Napishtim, the only mortal to become immortal. In Greece he was Deucalion, who repopulated the earth after the waters subsided, with the help of his wife Pyrrha and the advice of the Great Goddess of the waters, Themis. In Armenia, the hero was Xisuthros - a corruption of Sumerian Ziusudra - whose ark landed on Mount Ararat.(1) According to the original Chaldean account, the flood hero was told by his god, "Build a vessel and finish it. By a deluge I will destroy substance and life. Cause thou to go up into the vessel the substance of all that has life." Technical instructions followed: the ark was to be 600 cubits long by 60 wide, with three times 3600 measures of asphalt on its exterior and the same amount inside. Three times 3600 porters brought chests of provisions, of which 3600 chests were for the hero's immediate family, while "the mariners divided among themselves twice three thousand six hundred chests."(2) It seems that Noah's ark was much smaller than earlier heroic proportions. [Cubit: From Latin cubitum, "elbow"; the length of an average hand and forearm from the tip of the middle finger to the elbow (about 18-21 inches).] As long ago as 1872, George Smith translated the Twelve Tablets of Creation from Ashurbanipal's library, and discovered he earlier version of the flood myth.(3) [Ashurbanipal - King of Assyria c. 669-630 BC., military leader and statesman. He collected at Nineveh a large library of cuneiform texts, rediscovered by archaeologists in the 19th century A.D.] Among the details that religious orthodoxy took care to suppress was the point that the god who caused the flood was disobedient to the Great Mother, who didn't want her earthly children drowned. Mother Ishtar severely punished the disobedient god by cursing him with her "great lightnings." She set her magic rainbow in the heavens to block his access to offerings on earthly altars, "since rashly he caused the flood-storm, and handed over my people to destruction."(4) Old Testament writers copied other details of the ancient flood myth but could not allow their god to be punished by the Great Whore of Babylon, as if he were a naughty child sent to bed without supper by an angry mother. Thus, they transformed Ishtar's rainbow barrier into a "sign of the covenant" voluntarily set in the heavens by God himself (Genesis 9:13). The Tigris-Euphrates valley was subject to disastrous floods. One especially was long remembered: geologists have linked it with the volcanic cataclysm that blew apart the island of Thera (Santorin) and destroyed Cretan civilization. When Sir Leonard Woolley was excavating the site of Ur, he found the track of a mighty flood - a layer of clay, without artifacts, eight feet thick.(5) [Holy crap!] Such a flood may have been identified with the watery Chaos that all Indo-European peoples believed would swallow up the world at the end of its cycle, and out of which a new world would be reborn in the womb of the Formless Mother.(6) The ark and its freight represented seeds of life passing through the period of Chaos from the destruction of one universe to the birth of the next. Even in the Bible, the "birth" was heralded by the Goddess's yonic dove (Genesis 8:12). Gnostic literature preserved the older view of the flood-causing God as an evil destroyer of humanity, and the Goddess as its preserver. Because people refused to worship him alone, jealous Jehovah sent the flood to wipe out all life. Fortunately the Goddess opposed him, "and Noah and his family were saved in the ark by means of the sprinkling of light that proceeded from her, and through it the world was gain filled with humankind."(7) This Gnostic interpretation had both Babylonian and Hellenic roots. Greeks said the primal sea-mother Themis gave Deucalion and his wife occult knowledge ("light") of how to create human being from stones, "the bones of their Mother," i.e., of the earth. (8) Raising up living people from stones or bones was a popular miracle. Jesus mentioned it, and Ezekiel's God claimed to have done it in the valley bones (Ezekiel 37). Notes: (1) Graves, G.M. 1, 142; Hooke, M.E.M., 130. (2) Lethaby, 239. (3) Ceram, 314. (4) Assyr. & Bab. Lit., 357; Epic of Gilgamesh, 112. (5) Ceram, 353. (6) Avalon, 233. (7) Pagels, 55. (8) Graves, G.M. 1, 139.