Finkel is a fascinating character and a very engaging reader; usually the author reading their own work is a terrible decision, here I could imagine no one else. The book gives you a state of the cuneiform writing system, an overview of the civilizations that used it, before getting into the meat of the title and describing the many tablets and versions of the flood myth that predate the Bible. The real surprise is seeing how detailed an account it is, given the staccato and formulaic languages used. Finkel describes instructions so literal and detailed (given the era) it's hard not to come away thinking there's a real event somewhere along the route of this story. ( )

Strange mix of a book. I really liked the ancient near-East history. I was interested in the cuneiform, and the description of what it's like to spend your life decoding ancient tablets. I was not at all interested in how much bitumen is needed to waterproof a coracle. ( )

The title undersells the book! It contains the most convincing theory about how the bible came about. Even though it's mostly about Babylonian history. ( )

Deep within the British Museum is the Arched Room, a soaring vaulted hall lined with shelves of cubbyholes. This is where the cuneiform tablets are kept and it feels rather like the Holy of Holies. I’ve only been once, but that single visit impressed me mightily: not just the architecture, but the hushed air of industry as scholars and students sat hunched over at the central line of desks, working away at deciphering these ancient fragments. Tablets might be business letters, court records or poetry. It’s an ongoing detective story and my brilliant Assyriologist colleagues never know what they’re going to turn up. In this book, the irrepressible Irving Finkel tells the story of the most exciting recent discovery, when a member of the public brought in a cuneiform tablet which offered fascinating new evidence about the story of the Ark and the Great Flood...

For the full review, please see my blog:
https://theidlewoman.net/2018/03/28/the-ark-before-noah-irving-finkel/ ( )

4.5 out of 5 stars.

Finkel is a cuneiform scholar at the British Museum who came across a small, 60 line tablet that discusses the building of Noah's Ark. He finds that it is one of the oldest and fits it into the other ark story tablets in interesting ways. It also has outstanding and distinct features. For instance, instead of the ark being an almond-shaped reed boat, or the unlikely cube of the Gilgamesh story, or the (incorrectly assumed) rectangular box of Genesis, this is a circular reed ark. This circular reed ark is similar to a boat that fell out of use in Iraq in the 20th century called a coracle, or a guffa/quffa in Arabic, which would have been called quppu in Akkadian (quppu→quffa→guffa). Interesting too is a line in the ark that Finkel translates as "two by two" as in the animals went in two by two.

Interesting all around, although, of course, Finkel does not believe there was a flood or a Noah character or an ark. For him, it was just a mythological story. He believes too that he knows how the stories were transmitted from the Mesopotamians to the Jewish Bible. This blinds him to an interesting oddity he mentions as an interesting oddity. On page 186 he mentions that an ark text he calls the Old Babylonian Atrahasis mentions that Atrahasis (one of the Noah characters) is told to bring "clean" animals on board in his list of animals. Finkel is puzzled: "The category of 'clean', too, cannot pass without comment, for the notion of clean and unclean animals did not exist in ancient Mesopotamia as it does in the Bible." For Finkel this is a puzzle. Why would an old Mesopotamian tablet mention "clean animals" if they didn't have them? Well, the Bible has them. What Finkel doesn't assume, because his preconceptions run against it, is that perhaps the original story had clean and unclean animals and the Bible story and the Mesopotamian stories descend from a common source, NOT that the biblical source descends from a Mesopotamian source.

Just a thought.

This is an interesting and well-written book. It is well-referenced, with a nice bibliography. It lacks footnotes/endnotes, but it has those silly new page notes at the end of the book. It has nice illustrations and a raft of appendices. There are a lot of good facts, ideas, and suppositions here for the scholar of the Ancient Near East, for the biblical scholar, and the Christian. (Or for any mix of the three.) ( )

Written by an enthusiastic specialist who tells the story of his translation of a cunieform tablet acquired by the British Museum that provides detailed instructions on how to build an Ark (which he calls the Ark Tablet).
The book teases out as much as possible from this 60 line tablet and in the process you learn much. I had previously read the Bible Ark story and I had also read Gilgamesh, but had not particularly focused on the Ark story in it. What this book succeeds in doing is looking at the various Mesopotamian stories that survive on cuneiform tablets, and suggesting how it came about that the Bible Ark story came into the Western World so effectively.
The author advises that the Mesopotamian Flood Story surfaces in three distinct cuneiform incarnations, one in Sumerian, two in Akkadian. These are the Sumerian Flood Story, and major narrative episodes within the Atrahasis Epic and the Epic of Gilgamesh respectively.
The most interesting and rewarding part of the book is Finkel's analysis of these stories, adding what can be gleaned from the Ark Tablet. What I came to appreciate was that small parts of these stories are found on cunieform tablets over a long period of time (more than one thousand years) and the underlying theme of the Ark story was modified over time, as it was retold for different audiences.
At some stage this will mean that i want to read a good book about how it is thought that the Bible was written, as Finkel's chapter about how the Mesopotamian Ark story was incorporated into Judaism, Christianity and Islam is fascinating.
Finkel includes photos and descriptions of reed boat building in 19th and early 20th century Iraq to help illustrate his arguments and these are very interesting. Finkel also includes delightful quotes at the beginning of his chapters.

Near the beginning the author notes that the book is strongly dependent on ancient inscriptions and what they have to tell us. Most of them are written in the said cuneiform, the world’s oldest kind of writing. The author therefore not only says what "we know" ie his interpretation, but also explains how we know it, and tries to make it clear when some word or line is persistently obscure, or open to more than one interpretation. I did not agree with all his interpretations, but this is more to do with him running with an interpretation that is favourable to his overall argument, whereas I considered the evidence that he presented inconclusive, rather than positively disagreeing with his interpretation.

Overall, a very stimulating and enlightening book about a very specialised area of history. ( )

Yeoman work, scholarly opinion, great story, well told. ( )