L'Arca di Noè era rotonda - Noah's ark was circular

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Secondo una tavoletta Babilonese di 4000 anni fa l’arca di Noè era rotonda

Babylonian tablet shows how Noah's ark could have been constructed

Relic reveals Noah's ark was circular

Secondo una tavoletta Babilonese di 4000 anni fa l’arca di Noè era rotonda

http://www.antikitera.net/news.asp?ID=12994

Clicca per ingrandiretempo di lettura previsto 3 min. circa

L'arca di Noè è stata la grande imbarcazione che ha messo in salvo una coppia di animali per ogni specie vivente e una manciata di esseri umani da una catastrofica alluvione. Ma dimenticate le immagini del lungo scafo con le estremità appuntite: l'Arca di Noè originale era rotonda!

La recente decifrazione di una tavoletta di argilla proveniente dall'antica Mesopotamia di 4 mila anni fa rivela nuovi sorprendenti dettagli sulle origini del racconto biblico di Noè.

La tavoletta narra una storia simile a quella riportata nella Bibbia, completa di istruzioni dettagliate per la costruzione di una nave rotonda gigante, simile a una 'coracle' e con l'indicazione chiave di salvare gli animali 'a due a due'.

La tavoletta è da venerdì scorso in esposizione presso il British Museum, il cui curatore, Irving Finkel, è stato autore della traduzione del testo cuneiforme, raccogliendo le sue conclusioni in un libro dal titolo The Ark Before Noah.

Finkel ne è entrato in possesso un paio di anni fa, quando un uomo, Douglas Simmonds, gli ha mostrato una tavoletta danneggiata di argilla che suo padre aveva acquistato in Medio Oriente dopo la seconda guerra mondiale. Era marrone chiaro, delle dimensioni simili a quelle di un telefono cellulare e ricoperta di caratteri cuneiforme.

"Alla fine abbiamo capito che si tratta di uno dei più importanti documento umani mai scoperti", ha detto Finkel, che sfoggia una lunga barba grigia, una coda di cavallo e l'entusiasmo di un ragazzo. "E' stato davvero un momento da infarto scoprire che la barca del diluvio doveva essere rotonda. E' stata una vera sorpresa".

Secondo lo studioso, una barca rotonda ha perfettamente senso: "E' una cosa perfetta", spiega Finkel. "E' leggera da trasportare e potenzialmente inaffondabile". Inoltre, le coracli sono state ampiamente utilizzate in Mesopotamia come taxi fluviali e sono perfettamente in grado di affrontare la furia dell'acqua.

La tavoletta riporta le istruzioni fornite da parte di un dio mesopotamico per la costruzione della gigantesca imbarcazione dalle dimensioni pari a due terzi di un campo da calcio, costruita con tavole di legno, rinforzata con corda e rivestita di bitume. Il risultato è una coracle tradizionale, ma la più grande che il mondo avesse mai immaginato.

Come scrive lo stesso Finkel sul blog del British Museum, la superficie dell'imbarcazione sarebbe stata pari a circa 3600 m², con un'altezza pari a 6 metri. La quantità di corda richiesta riuscirebbe a coprire la distanza tra Londra e Edimburgo!

Certamente un'imbarcazione del genere non sarebbe potuta andare da nessuna parte. D'altra parte, tutto quello che doveva fare era galleggiare e mantenere al sicuro il suo contenuto: praticamente una scialuppa di salvataggio cosmica!

Ad ogni modo, per verificare se l'imbarcazione è realmente capace di galleggiare, Finkel ha formato una squadra con l'obiettivo di realizzare una versione in scala ridotta dell'Arca, seguendo meticolosamente le istruzioni riportate sulla tavoletta. L'impresa sarà mostrata in un film documentario che verrà trasmesso entro la fine del 2014 su Channel 4.

Finkel è consapevole che la sua scoperta potrebbe portare sconcerto tra i credenti nella storia biblica. Tuttavia, è noto fin dal 19° secolo che esistono racconti molto più antichi di quello contenuto nella Bibbia dove si parla di una grande inondazione, delle indicazioni date da dio a un uomo giusto per costruire una barca e salvare se stesso, la sua famiglia e tutti gli animali. La storia dell'alluvione ricorre negli scritti mesopotamici come l'Epopea di Gilgamesh.

Eppure, la tavoletta tradotta da Finkel, oltre ad essere di gran lunga più antica dei racconti biblici, è l'unica a contenere istruzioni dettagliare sulla sua costruzione. Lo studioso ritiene che gli ebrei abbiano mutuato la storia del diluvio durante l'esilio babilonese del 6° secolo a.C.

Il lavoro sulla tavoletta, inoltre, ha portato ad alcune domande impegnative: qual è la vera origine del racconto del diluvio? Come ha fatto a passare del cuneiforme all'ebraico biblico? Come funzionava davvero il cuneiforme? Insomma, la nuova scoperta ha dato man forte all'entusiasmo di Finkel che avrà di che studiare per i prossimi anni.

Babylonian tablet shows how Noah's ark could have been constructed

http://www.theguardian.com/culture/2014/jan/24/babylonian-tablet-noah-ark-constructed-british-museum

Noah's ark was never built, still less crash landed on Mount Ararat, a British Museum expert has declared – despite holding in his hand 3,700-year-old instructions on exactly how to construct one.

"I am 107% convinced the ark never existed," Irving Finkel said. His discoveries, since a member of the public brought a battered clay tablet with 60 lines of neat cuneiform text to Finkel – one of the few people in the world who could read them – are outlined in a new book, The Ark Before Noah.

While every child's toy and biblical illustration – and the latest film version, due for release later this month and starring Russell Crowe as Noah – shows a big pointy-ended wooden boat, the Babylonian tablet gives what Finkel is convinced is the original version of the story.

The ark is a huge circular coracle, 3,600 square metres in dimension or two-thirds the size of a football pitch, made like a giant rope basket strengthened with wooden ribs, and waterproofed with bitumen inside and out. This was a giant version of a craft which the Babylonians knew very well, Finkel pointed out, in daily use up to the late 20th century to transport people and animals across rivers.

Its people-and-animal-carrying abilities will soon be put to the test: the production company Blink is making a Channel 4 documentary based on his research, including building a circular ark.

The tablet gives a version of the ark story far older than the biblical accounts, and Finkel believes the explanation of how "holy writ appears on this piece of Weetabix", is that the writers of the Bible drew on ancient accounts encountered by Hebrew scholars during the Babylonian exile.

Texts about a great flood and the order by God to the one just man to build a boat and save himself, his family, and all the animals, clearly older than the Bible story, were first found in the Middle East in the 19th century. They caused both consternation and wild excitement, including an expedition to find the broken part of one tablet in a mountain of shattered clay fragments.

However, the tablet studied by Finkel is unique, the only one with precise instructions on how to build the ark – and the crucial detail that it should be circular. He believes the data on its exact dimensions, the two kinds of bitumen, and the precise amount of rope needed, are evidence not that the vessel once existed, but of a storyteller adding convincing details for an audience that knew all about boat-building.

The tablet was brought to him on a museum open day by Douglas Simmons, whose father, Leonard, brought it back to England in a tea-chest full of curios, after wartime service in the Middle East with the RAF.

When the Guardian originally broke the story of its discovery, Simmons said his father had once showed his treasures to some academics, and was bitterly disappointed when they were dismissed as rubbish. He suspects the tablet was either bought for pennies in a bazaar or literally picked up.

Finkel describes the clay tablet as "one of the most important human documents ever discovered", and his conclusions will send ripples into the world of creationism and among ark hunters, where many believe in the literal truth of the Bible account, and innumerable expeditions have been mounted to try to find the remains of the ark.

The clay tablet is going on display at the British Museum, loaned by Simmons, beside a tablet from the museum's collection with the earliest map of the world, as seen from ancient Babylon. The flood tablet helped explain details of the map, which shows islands beyond the river marking the edge of the known world, with the text on the back explaining that on one are the remains of the ark.

Finkel said that not only did the ark never exist, but ark hunters were looking in the wrong place – the map shows the ark in the direction of, but far beyond the mountain range later known as Ararat.

Relic reveals Noah's ark was circular

http://www.theguardian.com/uk/2010/jan/01/noahs-ark-was-circular

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."