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.

Miscellany - on Wednesday Night!

Oy - you should see my hair.  You now how when you get sick your hair gets all weird looking and your mouth gets yucky?  That's me right now.  But before I wash my hair and clean out my mouth and go to bed (already scarfed down two time-release gel caps that are supposed to let me get to sleep and relieve my symptoms, we'll see) - I wanted to bring you these few stories I found interesting.

Wed Apr 28, 2010 2:49 pm EDT

China stripped of 2000 gymnastics medal for underage athlete
By Chris Chase
This story made me laugh.  The Olympic Committee strips China of the 2000 Team Bronze medals in Women's Gymnastics.  What?  When it was so fricking obvious that at least two little girls on the 2008 team were under-age. I mean, come on, they didn't have the start of breasts!  Sixteen year old girls have at least the start of breasts!  It was clear those girls weren't anywhere near 16, despite what their lying phoney papers said (attested to by the Chinese government, as if we're supposed to believe anything IT says). Ridiculous, just ridiculous.  Evidently 2008 medals earned by the cheating Chinese are sancrosanct, so they decided (finally) to pull the 2000 Women's GynasticsTeam Bronze medals instead. 

I can't believe this - a DUH story if ever there was one.  Why is this even news?
Illegal immigrants plan to leave over Ariz. law
By AMANDA LEE MYERS, Associated Press Writer
– 2 hrs 5 mins ago
Of course they're leaving - but don't count on the illegal aliens going back to home sweet home - they're not wanted in Mexico.  Nope - they will instead move to neighboring states that don't have laws against them, like Wisconsin, which seems to be teeming with illegals.  I swear half of Milwaukee's population is now illegals - you can tell by how filthy their neighborhoods are (I go through them five days a week on the bus to and from work so I see it every day). They don't seem to understand the concept of garbage cans and trash collection - not that they care.  They don't care enough to learn to speak English, why should they care about sanitation laws?  They throw all of their garbage, including food and used Pampers, into the gutters and yards.  In the few cases where the yards are clean and not filled with junked up cars, the Mexican colors they paint their houses (bright blues and oranges) are a give-away.  And then there is the ever-present Latino grafitti to add the finishing touches to what used to be neighborhoods filled with working-class descendants of Germans and Poles.  Oh, and don't forget to duck when you hear the gunfire. I grew up in one of the neighborhoods that has now been overrun with "Latinos."  It is no longer safe.  Reports of gang violence and nightly shootings. Yeah, call me a racist - guess I am.  I don't want the illegals here, either. 

Somebody is giving the Republicans really really bad advice.  A few weeks ago they held up a bill to extend unemployment benefit aid to the states; some of the Republican representatives actually claimed that it was unemployment insurance benefits that was assisting people is remaining unemployed, thus extending the Great Recession (I read this in The Wall Street Journal, which should be ashamed of itself for publishing such obvious drek). Obviously the dudes have no concept of what it means to try and live on approximately one-fifth of their regular income each month (if I made one-fifth of their income, I'd be on easy street).  Now they've been holding up action on banking reform.  Oh my - after the latest Congressional sub-committee testimony by the dudes who raped America while getting rich and laughed while doing it has been plastered all over the news.  So now they've decided they're going to play marbles after all - a day late and a dollar short (hope you like those mixed metaphors).  Like I said, really really bad advice.
GOP abandons blockade of banking regulation bill
By JIM KUHNHENN, Associated Press Writer
– Wed Apr 28, 7:52 pm ET
 
And, tee hee hee, from The Christian Science Monitor, "Noah's Ark discovered. Again."

By Benjamin Radford, LiveScience's Bad Science Columnist / April 28, 2010
A Chinese Christian filmmaker is the latest in a long line of religiously funded expeditions claiming to have found the final resting place of Noah's Ark on Turkey's Mount Ararat.

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.

Good Stories Never Die

Well, knock me over with a feather - Noah's Ark is in the news once again! It only goes to show that a really great story never dies. No wonder Moses appropriated it from the Babylonians. From Guardian.co.uk Relic reveals Noah's ark was circular • Newly translated tablet gives building instructions • Amateur historian's find was almost overlooked Maev Kennedy guardian.co.uk, Friday 1 January 2010 22.35 GMT That they processed aboard the enormous floating wildlife collection two-by-two is well known. Less familiar, however, is the possibility that the animals Noah shepherded on to his ark then went round and round inside. According to newly translated instructions inscribed in ancient Babylonian on a clay tablet telling the story of the ark, the vessel that saved one virtuous man, his family and the animals from god's watery wrath was not the pointy-prowed craft of popular imagination but rather a giant circular reed raft. The now battered tablet, aged about 3,700 years, was found somewhere in the Middle East by Leonard Simmons, a largely self-educated Londoner who indulged his passion for history while serving in the RAF from 1945 to 1948. The relic was passed to his son Douglas, who took it to one of the few people in the world who could read it as easily as the back of a cornflakes box; he gave it to Irving Finkel, a British Museum expert, who translated its 60 lines of neat cuneiform script. There are dozens of ancient tablets that have been found which describe the flood story but Finkel says this one is the first to describe the vessel's shape. "In all the images ever made people assumed the ark was, in effect, an ocean-going boat, with a pointed stem and stern for riding the waves – so that is how they portrayed it," said Finkel. "But the ark didn't have to go anywhere, it just had to float, and the instructions are for a type of craft which they knew very well. It's still sometimes used in Iran and Iraq today, a type of round coracle which they would have known exactly how to use to transport animals across a river or floods." Finkel's research throws light on the familiar Mesopotamian story, which became the account in Genesis, in the Old Testament, of Noah and the ark that saved his menagerie from the waters which drowned every other living thing on earth. In his translation, the god who has decided to spare one just man speaks to Atram-Hasis, a Sumerian king who lived before the flood and who is the Noah figure in earlier versions of the ark story. "Wall, wall! Reed wall, reed wall! Atram-Hasis, pay heed to my advice, that you may live forever! Destroy your house, build a boat; despise possessions And save life! Draw out the boat that you will built with a circular design; Let its length and breadth be the same." The tablet goes on to command the use of plaited palm fibre, waterproofed with bitumen, before the construction of cabins for the people and wild animals. It ends with the dramatic command of Atram-Hasis to the unfortunate boat builder whom he leaves behind to meet his fate, about sealing up the door once everyone else is safely inside: "When I shall have gone into the boat, Caulk the frame of the door!" Fortunes were spent in the 19th century by biblical archaeology enthusiasts in hunts for evidence of Noah's flood. The Mesopotamian flood myth was incorporated into the great poetic epic Gilgamesh, and Finkel, curator of the recent British Museum exhibition on ancient Babylon, believes that it was during the Babylonian captivity that the exiled Jews learned the story, brought it home with them, and incorporated it into the Old Testament. Despite its unique status, Simmons' tablet – which has been dated to around 1,700 BC and is only a few centuries younger than the oldest known account – was very nearly overlooked. "When my dad eventually came home, he shipped a whole tea chest of this kind of stuff home – seals, tablets, bits of pottery," said Douglas. "He would have picked them up in bazaars, or when people knew he was interested in this sort of thing, they would have brought them to him and earned a few bob." Simmons senior became a scenery worker at the BBC, but kept up his love of history, and was very disappointed when academics dismissed treasures of his as commonplace and worthless. His son took the tablet to a British Museum open day, where Finkel "took one look at it and nearly fell off his chair" with excitement. "It is the most extraordinary thing," Simmons said of the tablet. "You hold it in your hand, and you instantly get a feeling that you are directly connected to a very ancient past – and it gives you a shiver down your spine." Raiders of the lost ark The human fascination with the flood and the whereabouts of the ark shows few signs of subsiding. The story has travelled down the centuries from the ancient Babylonians and continues to fascinate in the 21st century. Countless expeditions have travelled to Mount Ararat in Turkey, where Noah's ark is said to have come to rest, but scientific proof of its existence has yet to be found. Recent efforts to find it have been led by creationists, who are keen to exhibit it as evidence of the literal truth of the Bible. "If the flood of Noah indeed wiped out the entire human race and its civilization, as the Bible teaches, then the ark constitutes the one remaining major link to the pre-flood world," says John D Morris of the Institute for Creation Research. "No significant artefact could ever be of greater antiquity or importance." In the Victorian era some became obsessed with the ark story. George Smith – the lowly British museum assistant who, in 1872, deciphered the Flood Tablet which is inscribed with the Assyrian version of the Noah's ark tale – could apparently not contain his excitement at his discovery. According to the museum's archives: "He jumped up and rushed about the room in a great state of excitement and to the astonishment of those present began to undress himself."