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What was the shape of Noah’s Ark? For millennia Jewish and Christian clerics, scholars, and academics, as well as others with too much time on their hands, have pondered this question. Artist rendering of the one true shape of Noah’s Ark, scientifically provenILLUSTRATION: JON BERKELEY What makes it tantalizing is the precision of the numbers in Genesis 6 (here, in the King James translation): [13] And God said unto Noah, The end of all flesh is come before me; for the earth is filled with violence through them; and, behold, I will destroy them with the earth. [14] Make thee...

Curator Irving Finkel recounts a magical adventure with The Lewis Chessmen. Content warning: wizard's chess.Irving Finkel and the Chamber of Lewis Chessmen | Curator's Corner | S 2 Ep9September 24, 2017 | The British Museum<

Sometimes it's the doors. To complete a full circuit of the museum more than 3,000 doors need to be opened and closed. Some of these, particularly ones that seal off the major galleries, are cumbersome to shut. But when bolted, they won't open again without a tussle. Except when they do. Take the Sutton Hoo gallery, which houses treasures from an Anglo-Saxon ship, among them a ferocious-looking helmet believed to have been worn by Raedwald, king of the East Angles, in the seventh century. On one occasion a guard bolted the double doors and moved on to the next room,...

...the pillar sat in British Museum for 150 years until Irving Finkel, a curator in the Middle East department, deciphered the Sumerian cuneiform writing on the cylinder this year. As it turns out, the object, now on view in an exhibit called "No Man's Land," was erected to establish a border between the warring city states of Lagash and Umma, located in present-day southern Iraq. According to the museum, the two cities were disputing over a fertile area called Gu'edina or the 'Edge of the Plain.' Around 2400 B.C. Enmetena, king of Lagash, had the pillar erected to stake his...

<p>Darren Aronofsky’s Noah dominated the U.S. box office on its opening weekend and won critical acclaim, but not without controversy. The film, based on the biblical story in Genesis of Noah’s Ark and the Great Flood, arrived amid a deluge of outrage from religious groups. Some Christians fumed at the film’s straying from biblical Scripture. Meanwhile, a host of Muslim-majority countries banned Noah from screening in theaters because representations of Noah, a prophet of God in the Koran, are considered blasphemous. Such images “provoke the feelings of believers and are forbidden in Islam and a clear violation of Islamic law,” read a fatwa issued by Cairo’s al-Azhar University, one of the foremost institutions of Sunni Islam. Egypt has not banned the film, but Indonesia, Qatar, Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates have. “It is important to respect these religions and not show the film,” lectured the main censors of the UAE.</p>

Two of the ancient cities now being destroyed by Islamic State lay buried for 2,500 years, it was only 170 years ago that they began to be dug up and stripped of their treasures. The excavations arguably paved the way for IS to smash what remained - but also ensured that some of the riches of a lost civilisation were saved. In 1872, in a backroom of the British Museum, a man called George Smith spent the darkening days of November bent over a broken clay tablet. It was one of thousands of fragments from recent excavations in northern Iraq,...

'Two of the ancient cities now being destroyed by Islamic State lay buried for 2,500 years, it was only 170 years ago that they began to be dug up and stripped of their treasures. The excavations arguably paved the way for IS to smash what remained - but also ensured that some of the riches of a lost civilisation were saved. In 1872, in a backroom of the British Museum, a man called George Smith spent the darkening days of November bent over a broken clay tablet. It was one of thousands of fragments from recent excavations in northern Iraq,...

The real Noah’s Ark? by Dominic Statham Dr Irving Finkel’s new book in which he claims to have found the original Flood story. Dr Irving Finkel is an Assyriologist at the British Museum in London and an expert in ancient cuneiform scripts. In recent months he has become something of a celebrity, following the publication of his book, The Ark Before Noah: Decoding the Story of the Flood,1 and the Channel 4 documentary, The Real Noah’s Ark.2 The source of this media hype is his recent translation of a small Babylonian tablet, named the Ark Tablet. It is about the...

The new film "Noah" stars Russell Crowe as the man chosen by God to collect pairs of Earth's animals on a massive ark to save them from a global flood. The film, which opened March 28, is sizing up to be a Biblical blockbuster, replete with star power and stunning special effects. But how realistic is it? While many people consider the story of Noah's Ark merely an instructive myth or parable about God's punishment for man's wickedness, others believe that the story is historically accurate. To them, Noah's tale describes events that really happened only a few thousand years...

Last Updated: Friday, 19 March, 2004, 11:06 GMT Did Noah really build an ark? By Jeremy Bowen Presenter, Noah's Ark In the Bible, God tells Noah he has to build an ark and load a pair of every kind of animal before a great flood engulfs the world. It is widely regarded as a myth, but could it actually be true? The story of Noah and his ark is one which sticks in the minds of children and never gets forgotten. God warned Noah - the only good man left in a world full of corruption and violence - to...

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...

Noah’s Ark would have floated even with two of every animal in the world packed inside, scientists have calculated. Although researchers are unsure if all the creatures could have squeezed into the huge boat, they are confident it would have handled the weight of 70,000 creatures without sinking. A group of master’s students from the Department of Physics and Astronomy at Leicester University studied the exact dimensions of the Ark, set out in Genesis 6:13-22. According to The Bible, God instructed Noah to build a boat which was 300 cubits long 50 cubits wide and 30 cubits high—recommending gopher wood...

As Darren Aronofsky and Russell Crowe unveil “Noah” in U.S. cinemas this week, British archaeologist Irving Finkel offers a new perspective on the story with his book “The Ark Before Noah: Decoding the Story of the Flood.” In his book, published in the U.S. by Doubleday, Finkel tells the story of how he managed to get his hands on a cuneiform tablet, which was part of the flood story. As a curator for the British Museum, he relies on members of the public bringing artifacts to him for inspection. He was on duty one afternoon in 1985 when a man...

Dr Irving Finkel In 1985 a man called Douglas Simmonds brought a bag of miscellaneous antiquities to the British Museum for inspection. Dr Irving Finkel, the museum’s assistant keeper of ancient Mesopotamian script, languages and cultures, went through the curiosities and quickly discovered that one of them, a small Babylonian tablet covered in cuneiform (an ancient form of script) was a historical document of great significance. As an expert in Assyriology and cuneiform, Finkel only needed to read the first few lines of this small, craggy tablet to realise that this was a segment of an ancient Mespotamian myth, the...

It was a vast boat that saved two of each animal and a handful of humans from a catastrophic flood. But forget all those images of a long vessel with a pointy bow - the original Noah's Ark, new research suggests, was round. A recently deciphered 4,000-year-old clay tablet from ancient Mesopotamia - modern-day Iraq - reveals striking new details about the roots of the Old Testament tale of Noah....

LONDON — It was a vast boat that saved two of each animal and a handful of humans from a catastrophic flood. But forget all those images of a long vessel with a pointy bow — the original Noah’s Ark, new research suggests, was round. A recently deciphered 4,000-year-old tablet from ancient Mesopotamia — modern-day Iraq — reveals striking new details about the roots of the Old Testament tale of Noah. It tells a similar story, complete with detailed instructions for building a giant round vessel known as a coracle — as well as the key instruction that animals should...

New evidence suggests that Noah's Ark was round, made from reeds and the length of six double-decker buses. For years, archaeologists have scoured the world for factual evidence for the Bible story of Noah's flood, but due to scant documentation, many believe the fable to be an Old Testament myth. Now, however, a new book claims that Noah's Ark was a round coracle and looked very different from its traditional image. In The Ark Before: Decoding the Story of the Flood by Irving Finkel, there are claims that the vessel had two decks with cabins for the animals. British Museum...