My name is Irving Finkel.
I'm a very lucky person because I decided when I was about nine years old
that I wanted to work in the British Museum.
And about the same time,
I also decided that I wanted to study a really difficult ancient language.
I intended to learn Egyptian hieroglyphs.
And when I got to university, we only had one lecture from this Egyptologist,
who died the following day.
And the professor said Egyptologists don't grow on trees,
but there is somebody else in this department that teaches an ancient language,
and he teaches Babylonian cuneiform.
This ancient script is the oldest kind of writing,
and it transfixed me from the very moment I first began.
The inscriptions have been found in Iraq, cuneiform inscriptions for quite a long time.
In this museum we have one hundred and thirty thousand pieces of clay with this writing
on.
George Smith is a bit of a hero of mine,
actually he is a hero of most Assyriologists
because he turned out to have an absolute genius for understanding cuneiform almost
at sight.
Smith who had been taking these bits of crumbling biscuits
and fitting them together to reconstruct a text
suddenly found eventually that he had lines of cuneiform,
which when he read them suddenly revealed to him the situation of the world destroyed
by a flood
and a heroic person like Noah, only with a different name
told by the God to build an ark or a boat to rescue life in it,
which is what he did.
When it came to the actual description of the ark,
this large piece of tablet does tell us something about the ark itself
but unfortunately the lines are not complete.
"It says the ark you are to build ... be equal ..."
And then it's broken.
However, there's no need to despair.
Once in a while, manna from heaven falls just when you need it.
This tablet as far as I am concerned might as well be made of gold
because every line in it is like gold dust.
I don't want to be violent but I have to tell you
that I exposed this tablet to a kind of violence
that's to say it's a psychological squeezing.
I felt with this, that one couldn't give up
until being convinced that there was no more to be got out of it.
Ok, so what have we got here?
We already knew the basic outline of the story
and quite a lot of the detail,
but in this case we are presented with quite a lot of direct and new information.
At the beginning of the story Attra -Hasis was quite unaware,
that he was going to suddenly be pole vaulted into the central position as the saviour of
the world.
From heaven the message comes that there's going to be a flood
and the ark has to be built.
Instead of just saying make a boat and leaving it up to Atra-Hasis himself,
He says the boat that you are to make, etserti kippati,
that you draw with the design of a circle.
Well, the fact that the text is so unambiguously clear
and so unexpected means that the reader who encounters this message is simply flabbergasted
because as I see it the ark is one of the most familiar iconic things in the whole world
and I don't think anybody ever had the idea that it might be a round boat.
And as you wade through this funny script,
syllable by syllable, it hits you in a way that you cannot deny
that this was the idea, it was a round boat.
You know what is really remarkable is that with this inscription
translated into modern English, you could build this thing,
you could faithfully follow these dimensions in every detail
because the people who did it knew what they were doing.