In 1985 Douglas Simmonds, a man of few words and the son of a Royal Air Force (RAF) pilot with a penchant for collecting antiquities, walked into the British Museum with a handful of items from his father’s collection packed into a plastic bag. Dr Irving Finkel, now assistant keeper at the museum’s Middle Eastern department, was the curator who examined the objects at the time. As soon as he chanced upon one of them — a clay tablet the size of a mobile phone, dating back to around BC 1800 — he recognised that it had something to do with the story or legend of the Flood: an integral part of Mesopotamian mythology, and subsequently of many religions across the world. “Wall Wall! Reed, wall! Reed Wall, That you may live forever! Destroy Your House, build a boat; spurn property and save a life.” Thus began the 60-line tablet, written in cuneiform script — Mesopotamian writing so old it predates any form of alphabet.
Around a third of the inscription on the tablet was damaged and unclear. He placed the tablet in a drawer in his office and examined it for over a decade, whenever he got the chance. Then, word by word, he began to unravel the more complex parts of the text. Some of the discoveries left him astounded: far from being a simple rendering of a classic story, the tablet was in the form of a dialogue between the god Enki and an unwitting hero, Atra Hasis. It contained detailed, mathematical instructions on how to build a boat that would save mankind. But this boat was not shaped like the ark we think of today: it was round and bore a clear resemblance to the coracles built in modern-day Iraq (old Mesopotamia) as late as the 1930s and ’40s. Another phrase left him even more astonished: “2 by 2” was how the wild animals were meant to board the boat. This seemed a clear link to the story of Noah and the ark. “I almost fainted when I looked that word up in the dictionary and found what it meant,” says Finkel, in his office, tucked in a corner of the British Library.
For Finkel, whose study of cuneiform writing at university had left him with a lifelong interest in Mesopotamian literature and history, the conclusions were clear: “The presence of the story in the Bible and Koran is undoubtedly a borrowing from the Mesopotamian world that preceded it.” Earlier this year, Finkel published
He believes that once in the history of Mesopotamia there was a hugely destructive flood far exceeding the routine flooding from the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. “I think this was never forgotten and was often referred to and became a part of the culture,” he says. “The myth of the rescue, as I see it, was the answer to their psychological fear that if nature lost control, one of the gods would come along to rescue the core of life.”
The tablet itself was likely to be a memory aide, perhaps for a travelling storyteller or pair of storytellers. In river communities, elaborate mathematically valid details might be needed to win over an audience with boatbuilding experience. “It would have been imperative for the people who recounted this story to have this kind of data.”
When the suggestion to build a boat based on the tablet’s instructions came from a documentary company, Finkel leaped at the opportunity. “What is miraculous for me is to have a 4,000-year-old set of instructions that can be followed to produce an object that is functioning. I don’t know another instance of it,” he says.
And so began the complex process of creating an ancient boat based on an ancient text. With the help of a mathematician, three Oman-based boat builders experienced in building ancient boats from original materials (without glue or nails), the process began. They decided against building a full-sized one, which would have occupied half a football pitch. As Finkel writes in his book, this boat would have been so high that a giraffe would have struggled to peek over its side. So the team opted to scale down and, using the same proportions, build a boat roughly a fifth of the original.
Given the political and security risks, building the craft in Iraq wasn’t really an option. The obvious alternative was Kerala, with its ancient boat-building traditions and ready supply of essential materials such as the reeds and bitumen specified in the instructions. Besides that, many of the experienced workers and boatyard managers who worked alongside the team of boat-building experts in Oman were from Kerala.
Earlier this year, it took 60 to 70 workers four months to build the boat. Many challenges slowed the pace of work: the bitumen used didn’t prove as watertight as everyone had hoped, and at points, water had to be pumped out and the structure re-patched. But in March it was finally there: a miniature replica, weighing 35 tonnes, of the circular craft described in the ancient tablet.
The boat now sits on a small canal off Lake Vembanad. Bitumen waterproofing problems have led to it gradually taking in water. Sheikh Nasser of Kuwait, who runs a museum in Kuwait and has a home in Kerala, is set to take over the boat and all the required maintenance.
Whatever its future, to Finkel its significance is tremendous. “It proved the validity that this wasn’t just the stuff of fantasy but there is some kind of reality underpinning it,” he says.
He recalls with palpable enthusiasm the time spent in Kerala with the workforce, who kept their pledge of keeping the building a secret. “It was the most collaborative, collegiate thing ever, and a real exciting experiment in boat-building history. It was such an adventure. Daft people like me who work on inscriptions don’t normally have a whisper of an opportunity like this…”
Belying his white beard and formal academic credentials, Finkel exudes the passion, vigour and boyish enthusiasm of an adventurer on the track of new treasures.