Irving Finkel: The Ark Before Noah (2014)•
Dr Irving Finkel (1951- )Irving Finkel: The Ark Before Noah (2014)
[Hato Hone / St. John Opportunity Shop, Wairau Park - 2/5/24]:
Irving Finkel. The Ark Before Noah: Decoding the Story of the Flood. Nan A. Talese / Doubleday. New York: Random House LLC, 2014.
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The Ark and Its Ilk
The other day I was in one of my usual settings, snouting around an Op Shop, when I spotted a rather handsome-looking hardback in their "Religious" section. Now normally I pass over such books, having had an overdose of such stuff in my childhood.
My mother was (and is) a fundamentalist Christian, so all of us kids were brought up on books with titles such as From Witchcraft to Christ or Miracle on the River Kwai or The Late, Great Planet Earth. What's more, this particular book - the one pictured above - looked disconcertingly like it came from a particularly egregious subgenre, books about Noah's Ark:
You wouldn't believe how many such books there are. Every Tom and Dick and Harry has apparently climbed Mt. Ararat by now and brought back either a couple of planks from the Ark itself, or else some very convincing explanations of why their most vital photographs went missing at the last minute ...
I remember once, in a rebellious moment, remarking to my mother that some prominent scientist had referred to the story of Noah's Ark as a "zoological impossibility." Not so, it would appear. She promptly lent me a book about precisely this issue by an equally prominent - in her eyes, at least - Creation scientist, where the whole conundrum was convincingly explained.
It seems that the animals did all walk in two by two, as tradition has it (those that could walk, at any rate), but that they were then magically anaesthetised by God, thus allowing the doughty crew of the S.S. Ark to manhandle them into stalls, stacked one on top of the other in some cases - thus conveniently getting round both the problem of how to feed them and how to muck out all the waste they would otherwise have produced during the voyage!
After all, fresh from creating the heavens and the earth, can you seriously doubt God's ability to accomplish such a feat?
But there seemed to be something just a little different about Dr Irving Finkel's book. For a start, there were quite a lot of cuneiform inscriptions included inside, along with translations into Akkadian and Sumerian, which is not really standard for the the 'Ark on Ararat' tomes. Also, the blurb at the back mentioned that he worked at the British Museum as Assistant Keeper of Ancient Mesopotamian script, languages and cultures. Mind you, that certainly doesn't prove that he's not a lunatic, but it's at least some indication that he might know what he's talking about ...
In any case, I decided to give it a go. The book, a library discard, was priced at two dollars, so what did I have to lose?
Does it hurt that Finkel himself looks like a rather kindlier version of James Murray, the first editor of the Oxford English Dictionary? I don't think so ...
I should add that I do have a particular interest in ancient writing systems: Mesopotamian cuneiform and Egyptian hieroglyphics in particular. This dates back some forty years, when I'd decided to cast my net as widely as possible in the first year of my BA.
You did eight year-long papers at Auckland Uni in those days, so I signed up for one in Anthropology, two in Italian, one in Roman history (plus an elective in Latin), two in Egyptian (language and history), and two in Akkadian (language and history). Phew!
After the first week, it became apparent to me that while I might be able to manage moving from a modern language such as Italian to an ancient one such as Egyptian each week, I didn't feel that I could handle learning two such ancient languages at the same time, each with its own complex writing system to memorise. I accordingly decided to dump Akkadian, and signed up for two Eng. Lit. papers instead.
Somewhat unexpectedly - as I'd intended all along to go in for history rather than literary studies - I liked the English papers far more than my dry-as-dust lectures in Roman history. Egyptian was a gas, and Anthropology fascinating, but it was English and Italian that I eventually chose to major in.
I suppose, parenthetically, I've gone into all this autobiographical detail in order to explain why I still think first-year university students should have some time to choose their main area of interest before being shoehorned into some particular degree programme. That certainly wouldn't have worked for me.
However, I've always felt a slight sense of disappointment about missing the chance to learn cuneiform. Mind you, I still sense something a little arid about the cultures of the Land Between the Two Rivers - whereas (for me at least) the Egyptians always seem to have more of a festive air about them, despite their admitted tendency to record the same tedious victories with piles of corpses as a result of His Majesty's activities somewhere-or-other. Clearly that's not all they were interested in writing about:
As a result, I suppose I was pre-programmed to be interested in a book such as Finkel's. Reading it has reminded me just how difficult such studies can be, however, so I doubt I'll be taking up cuneiform again in any foreseeable future. I do regret not having been able to pursue Egyptian for a second year, though. I was just beginning to be able to make it out, and already had a goodly number of phrases and symbols under my belt.
Sir Alan Gardiner. Egyptian Grammar: Being an Introduction to the Study of Hieroglyphics. 1927. 3rd ed. 1957. Oxford: Griffith Institute, Ashmolean Museum, 1982.
Oddly enough, precisely the opposite appears to have happened to Irving Finkel. Having turned up to his first university class with a copy of Gardiner's Egyptian Grammar under his arm - the same textbook we used in our own classes, just a few years later - he was told that the lecturer was indisposed, and was instead offered tuition in cuneiform just down the hall. The rest, it would appear, is history.
In 1872, George Smith, an assistant at the British Museum, translated the [Flood tablet] from the seventh-century B.C Akkadian. Reportedly, he exclaimed, "I am the first man to read that after more than two thousand years of oblivion".What Wikipedia doesn't mention (though Dr Finkel does) is that Smith then started to strip off his clothes as he danced around the table.Wikipedia: Gilgamesh flood myth
Why all this excitement, you may ask? Well, because it was the first indication of an ancient flood tradition alternative to the account in the Bible.
Depending on your ideological starting position, you can either take this as an indication that there actually was a great flood at some point in the flood, and that therefore the Biblical story is true. Or, that the Bible story was copied from the Mesopotamian one (which appears to have been composed at least 1,000 years before the Book of Genesis) and thus as confirmation that there were anterior sources for at least some of the narratives preserved by Hebrew tradition.
In other words, despite the fascinating nature of Smith's discovery, it doesn't really affect the status quo as far as belief systems go.
The significance of Irving Finkel's own discovery - the subject of his book - is that this much smaller cuneiform tablet (pictured above) contains a version of a flood tradition significantly older even than that included in the Epic of Gilgamesh, and - crucially - that it actually gives fairly precise instructions on how to build an ark. It also appears to confirm the "two by two" detail which survived into the Biblical account but which goes unmentioned in Gilgamesh.
So how do you build an ark large enough to contain all the fauna of the Mesopotamian flood plain? Well, you weave a giant coracle out of rope and bitumen, and build a series of layers of shelving inside. Don't take my word for it, though: here are Finkel and his merry men inside the 1/5th-scale Ark replica they managed to construct while filming a documentary in Iraq:
Unfortunately this particular Ark started to leak before it had got very far. The bitumen proved an unsatisfactory sealant, so if Utnapishtim or King Ziusudra or whoever this proto-Noah turned out to be had actually built a vessel on the scale envisaged by the tablet, it seems likely that the whole lot of them would have drowned. Nevertheless, rope-woven coracles such as these were used on the Tigris and the Euphrates for 3,000-odd years, so it's possible that the modern Ark-builders may have missed some of the wrinkles essential for success.
It must have been great fun for these latter-day Thor Heyerdahls and Tim Severins playing mud-pies by the riverbank, though.
There's a certain sort of book which begins by positing an unlikely hypothesis, then making a series of almost equally unlikely deductions from that hypothesis, and then concluding with a statement more-or-less to the effect that "So now we've established that ... [whatever the infinitely tenuous end-point of this series of leaps of faith may be], we can go on to postulate ... [something even less likely]."
One classic example of this is The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail, which I read many years ago before there was all that kerfuffle about whether or not it was plagiarised by Dan Brown in his even more successful Da Vinci Code.
The authors postulate that Mary Magdalene - or her descendants - travelled to the South of France after the death of Christ. And there is indeed a folk-tradition to that effect. There's also one that Pontius Pilate was born and brought up as a Scottish Borderer, and another that Jesus Christ visited England as a young man in the company of his "uncle" Joseph of Arimathea. This last is the story William Blake is alluding to in his poem "Jerusalem":
And did those feet in ancient timeWho knows? Maybe they did.
Walk upon England's mountains green
Similarly, maybe Mary Magdalene did move to the South of France in her later years: she wouldn't be the first tax exile to do so. But there's no real reason to suppose so.
If we set all these doubts to one side for the moment, our authors tell us, though, and assume that she did, might it not be that she was pregnant at the time? And that this (completely hypothetical, remember) child may have been sired by Jesus himself, or (here's the master stroke) might have been thought by the locals to be Jesus's son?
Well, yes, anything's possible: but there's no actual evidence for any of this, remember.
But just bear with us a bit longer, they say. What if the mother of this holy child came eventually to be referred to as the "Sangreal" - or Holy Grail - as she was the vessel by which this holiness was passed down? Yep, getting a bit strained here, but while it's about as likely as the child coming to be known as "Mickey Mouse" as a result of his protuberant ears, and thus giving rise to the rodentine legend which would eventually give rise - through the prophet Disney - to the Mousketeer movement, it's hard to claim that it's actually impossible.
And given the fact that the word "Sangreal" can (at least theoretically) be read either as "Holy Grail" or "Royal Blood" [Sang Real], might it not be that the race of French kings known as the Merovingians might actually have been descended from this hypothetical child of a hypothetical mother?
Well, again, yes - but there's absolutely no proof to verify it beyond a few bits of bookish wordplay, whereas there are many, many reasons to doubt the antiquity of the term "Sangreal", let alone the post-Ascension travels of Mary Magdalene and/or her descendants from her alleged marriage to Jesus Christ (what was to stop them all staying in Magdala, one is forced to enquire?)
This kind of speculation might seem quite laughable if it weren't that books of this sort, with tendentious hypotheses argued in an evidential vaccuum by cynically opportunistic authors, fly off the shelves. As Robert McCrum remarked, à propos of The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail:
There is something called historical evidence – there is something called the historical method – and if you look around the shelves of bookshops there is a lot of history being published, and people mistake this type of history for the real thing. These kinds of books do appeal to an enormous audience who believe them to be 'history', but actually they aren't history, they are a kind of parody of history. Alas, though, I think that one has to say that this is the direction that history is going today ...
Just look at the absurd nonsense asserted by "alternative historian" Graham Hancock, for instance - most recently in his Netflix series Ancient Apocalypse. He goes to great lengths to try to conceal, for the first couple of episodes, that it's just the same old Atlantis bullshit hashed over by every dimwit since Ignatius Donnelly.
Hancock is astute enough to mix in bits of actual archaeology from time to time, but his basic premise that "mainstream archaeology" is in a huge conspiracy to deny the clear truths that he's dredged up can't conceal the fact that his "proofs" have a tendency to dry up the moment they're examined dispassionately.
And then there's that celebrated exponent of the "Chinese invented everything" hypothesis, Gavin Manzies. The immense success of his initial foray into the field, pictured above, has emboldened him subsequently to postulate Chinese fleets exploring Antarctica, pulling up in Italy in time to spark the Renaissance, and generally influencing everything except sliced bread and nuclear fission (though given a bit more time, I think it'll turn out that the great Ming fleet had portable toasters and atomic propulsion, too).
The curious paradox of this ever-growing class of faux history books is that bona fide pieces of archaeological investigation can now easily be mistaken for these "space aliens stole my rabbit" quickie reads. What's more, it's difficult to avoid the conclusion that some unscrupulous publishers actually disguise the former as garish New Age titles in order to promote sales.
Certainly that would appear to be the case with Irving Finkel's The Ark Before Noah: Decoding the Story of the Flood. I had to leaf through it for quite a while before concluding that it had an air of legitimacy, and was not just another one of those "Ark on Ararat" books mentioned above.
If it hadn't been for the fact that I had a precisely similar experience with Michael D. Coe's Breaking the Maya Code, which I bought from the throw-out pile in the Auckland Central Library - I assume because their de-accessioning librarians mistook it for one of the numerous sensationalist accounts of the Maya-predicted Apocalypse scheduled for 2012 - I might well not have taken a punt on it.
Coe's book turned out to be an exemplary, well-written piece of linguistic scholarship about the mind-numbingly difficult decipherment of that seemingly impenetrable system of signs, the Maya glyphs. Finkel's book isn't quite in that class, but it's still a fine piece of narrative history, firmly based in the conventions of evidence-based hypotheses.
It's a shame that it's becoming increasingly difficult for people to tell the difference between these and the kinds of books written by pseudo-historians such as Graham Hancock, Gavin Menzies, Immanuel Velikovsky, and Erich von Däniken.
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Archaeology
- Adkins, Lesley. Empires of the Plain: Henry Rawlinson and the Lost languages of Babylon. London: HarperCollins Publishers, 2003.
- Ceram, C. W. Gods, Graves & Scholars: The Story of Archaeology. 1949. Trans. E. B. Garside & Sophie Wilkins. 1951. A Pelican Book. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1974.
- Ceram, C. W. Narrow Pass, Black Mountain: The Discovery of the Hittite Empire. 1955. Trans. Richard & Clara Winston. London: Victor Gollancz Limited / Sidgwick and Jackson Limited, 1956.
- Cummings, Violet M. Noah's Ark: Fable or Fact? 1973. Spire Books. Old Tappan, New Jersey: Fleming H. Revell Company, 1975.
- Gurney, O. R. The Hittites. 1952. A Pelican Book. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972.
- Kitchen, K. A. Suppiluliuma and the Amarna Pharaohs: A Study in Relative Chronology. Liverpool Monographs in Archaeology and Oriental Studies. Ed. H. W. Fairman. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1962.
- Kramer, Samuel Noah. History Begins at Sumer: Thirty-seven “Firsts” in Man’s Recorded History. 1956. New York: Doubleday Anchor Books, 1959.
- Roux, Georges. Ancient Iraq. 1964. A Pelican Book. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976.
- Silverberg, Robert, ed. Great Adventures in Archaeology: From Belzoni to Woolley. 1964. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985.
- Woolley, Sir Leonard. Ur of the Chaldees: A Record of Seven Years of Excavation. 1929. A Pelican Book. 1938. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1952.
- Woolley, Sir Leonard. Digging Up the Past. 1930. A Pelican Book. 1937. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1959.
- Dalley, Stephanie, trans. Myths from Mesopotamia: Creation, The Flood, Gilgamesh, and Others. 1989. The World’s Classics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991.
- Finkel, Irving. The Ark Before Noah: Decoding the Story of the Flood. Nan A. Talese / Doubleday. New York: Random House LLC, 2014.
- Gardner, John & John Maier, with Richard A. Henshaw, trans. Gilgamesh: Translated from the Sîn-leqi-unninni version. New York: Vintage Books, 1985.
- George, Andrew, trans. The Epic of Gilgamesh: The Babylonian Epic Poem and Other Texts in Akkadian and Sumerian. 1999. Penguin Classics. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2003.
- McNeil, William H., & Jean W. Sedlar, ed. The Ancient Near East. Readings in World History. 2 vols. New York: Oxford University Press, 1968.
- Pritchard, James, ed. Ancient Near Eastern Texts Relating to the Old Testament. 1950. 2nd ed. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1955.
- Sandars, N. K., trans. The Epic of Gilgamesh. 1960. Rev. ed. 1972. Penguin Classics. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973.
- Sandars, N. K., trans. Poems of Heaven and Hell from Ancient Mesopotamia. Penguin Classics. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971.
- Silverberg, Robert. Gilgamesh the King. New York: Arbor House, 1984.
- Silverberg, Robert. To the Land of the Living. 1990. VGSF. London: Victor Gollancz Ltd., 1990.
- Wolkstein, Diane, & Samuel Noah Kramer. Inanna, Queen of Heaven and Earth: Her Stories and Hymns from Sumer. Art compiled by Elizabeth Williams-Forte. New York: Harper & Row, 1983.
Literature
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- category - Archaeology & Ancient History: Mesopotamian Literature
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