---
product_id: 4154603
title: "The Ark Before Noah: Decoding the Story of the Flood Hardcover – Deckle Edge, March 25, 2014"
brand: "irving finkel"
price: "E£ 9553"
currency: EGP
in_stock: false
reviews_count: 8
url: https://www.desertcart.com.eg/products/4154603-the-ark-before-noah-decoding-the-story-of-the-flood
store_origin: EG
region: Egypt
---

# The Ark Before Noah: Decoding the Story of the Flood Hardcover – Deckle Edge, March 25, 2014

**Brand:** irving finkel
**Price:** E£ 9553
**Availability:** ❌ Out of Stock

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- **What is this?** The Ark Before Noah: Decoding the Story of the Flood Hardcover – Deckle Edge, March 25, 2014 by irving finkel
- **How much does it cost?** E£ 9553 with free shipping
- **Is it available?** Currently out of stock
- **Where can I buy it?** [www.desertcart.com.eg](https://www.desertcart.com.eg/products/4154603-the-ark-before-noah-decoding-the-story-of-the-flood)

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## Customer Reviews

### ⭐⭐⭐⭐ 







  
  
    A Purely Literary Analysis
  

*by R***Z on Reviewed in the United States on February 21, 2020*

This book accomplishes what it sets out to achieve.  The story is fascinating; the writing is scholarly, learned, and weighty, but it is done with a light touch and is fully accessible.  The problem (I should say, my problem) is that the subtitle is very misleading.  "Decoding the Story of the Flood" is an overstatement.The author is an expert on ancient Mesopotamia at the British Museum.  He works with cuneiform tablets.  This work is very 'literary'; he characterizes it (appropriately) as "philology".  Once upon a time English Ph.D. students had philology requirements as part of their programs.  This meant such courses as Beowulf, Old English and the History of the Language.  This meant bibliography (physical as well as descriptive) and it meant paleography and graphology.  This was the hyper-scholarly side of 'literary' study, not like literary 'criticism' or literary history.  At one point the author reminisces about the giants in his field and notes that they came equipped with Latin, Greek, Hebrew, Arabic, Coptic, Ethiopic, Syriac and Aramaic "before they even looked at Babylonian" (p. 39).Note that this sort of work is language-driven.  When the story of the flood is examined the materials used are literary texts, not, e.g., oceanographic, anthropological, archaeological or historical materials/evidence.  The only (brief) historical excursus in this book is a fascinating, speculative passage on the possible impact of the Babylonian Captivity on the creation of the Hebrew Bible.The impetus behind the study is the author's extensive study of a single cuneiform tablet concerned with the construction of the ark.  Interestingly, this ark is circular.  It is a coracle, a very common form of nautical vehicle in this part of the world, i.e., contemporary Iraq.  From this single tablet the author expands his examination to include other ancient texts (particularly the Gilgamesh text) and studies the pieces of the puzzle which they contribute.We never, however, really leave that bubble.  We do not learn whether or not there actually was a great flood, when it occurred, where it occurred, whether or not the landing on Mt. Ararat is historically plausible.  Within the texts examined there are other possible mountain sites and they are identified on a map and studied closely within the literary texts themselves, but we never go beyond the texts.The 'outside world' if it might be so described is represented by an actual building of an ark of the sort described in the central tablet.  It is far smaller than the original, by necessity.  It was also built in India, where the bitumen used for sealing was of far poorer quality than that available in Iraq.  This is all very interesting, but it is far less interesting (to me) than the larger story.One version of the larger story, e.g., is William Ryan and Walter Pitman's book, NOAH'S FLOOD: THE NEW SCIENTIFIC DISCOVERIES ABOUT THE EVENT THAT CHANGED HISTORY (1998).  Ryan and Pitman (Columbia U. oceanographers and marine geologists) study the Black Sea and argue that the Black Sea was once the Black Lake.  Approximately 7,600 years ago the glaciers melted, the oceans rose and the Mediterranean plunged through the Bosporus Strait.  This occurred over a period of months and the sound would have been horrific—sufficient to launch a panoply of tales and legends.  The point is proven by the existence of now-lost settlements beneath the Black Sea and the existence of fresh water mollusks below the Sea and salt water mollusks above.  Negotiating the Strait is traditionally very, very difficult—a problem solved by suspending weights below ships so that the cross-current problem is ameliorated.This book, which appeared 16 years prior to THE ARK BEFORE NOAH, does not appear in the latter's bibliography.  This was profoundly disappointing to me.  I expected THE ARK BEFORE NOAH to complement Ryan and Pitman's argument or at least address it, but the larger questions concerning the Flood are totally avoided (unless they are represented literarily within existing texts).What was interesting was the author's introduction to cuneiform writing (with many helpful illustrations) and the literary analysis which he was able to provide.  I wanted and expected much more.  This may be 'my problem' but potential readers should be aware of the circumscribed subject matter of the book.  The historicity of the bible is of enormous importance.  It is (to me) the central question here.  The physical evidence represented by cuneiform tablets is interesting to the extent that it bears on larger questions.  Those are not addressed here.

### ⭐⭐⭐ 







  
  
    Interesting, discoveries,/concept. explains much. Can have some more tedious reading sections.
  

*by G***K on Reviewed in the United States on October 24, 2022*

I had seen the video that they shot as a documentary on the construction of the coracle ark and I was fascinated with the discoveries of the ark tablet and the other flood stories. The book delves much deeper into all the details of this amazing tablet that was discovered. I did enjoy the deep dive and the details but I almost felt this book could have been half the thickness it was. I suppose that because the reading and translation of cuneiform is almost experiencing it's second death (Dr. Finkel might be one of the handful of those who can read it anymore) that it was good he included such an extensive section on just describing the languages and the writing. However, it was kind of difficult to slog through that part to get to the main topic. But I do highly recommend people check out this subject either online or via this book. His hypotheses of how these stories were incorporated into the biblical ones of Genesis (after the fact) while the Jews were in captivity in Babylon really seems very very likely. Explains a lot actually!

### ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ 







  
  
    Eminently readable and refreshingly personal account.
  

*by J***R on Reviewed in the United States on April 30, 2014*

Reading "The Ark Before Noah" makes you feel like you're in a comfortable armchair in a book-lined study. There's a brandy snifter in your hand, and you're listening to one of the most charming raconteurs you can imagine. He's spinning a yarn so compellingly and amusingly that, almost against your will, you're becoming interested in a topic about which you'd never before cared. The vast majority of humankind has no clue what cuneiform writing is. But the man in the comfy chair opposite yours, Dr. Irving Finkel, Assistant Keeper of Ancient Mesopotamian Scripts at the British Museum, would like to change that.Ostensibly, this book is about a millennia-old slab of clay with some wedge-shaped writing on it and what it reveals: a Primordial Flood story unlike any other. As Finkel informs us, there are plenty of other Babylonian cuneiform tablets in the British Museum and elsewhere with bits and pieces of Flood narratives (twelve, if memory serves). But this one was unique. Not only does it give precise instructions and dimensions for building a giant round boat (surprising enough in and of itself), it also contained the phrase "the animals entered the ark two by two"--a phrasing not found in any other Babylonian Flood narratives, but one which DOES occur in the Hebrew Bible.Now, were this book only about this tablet, it would be fascinating enough. But "The Ark Before Noah" is much more than that. "The Ark Before Noah" is a love story, an account of the lifelong romance between Dr. Finkel and cuneiform writing.Not only is it the oldest form of human writing known of, it's also, as Dr. Finkel informs us, far and away the most fun--a cryptographical challenge for the nimblest of brains. Woven through the story of the Ark Tablet is a chatty, witty, humane, and at times very funny memoir of a life spent deciphering these baffling indentations in once-wet mud. It's also a marvelous introductory history to the discipline of Assyriology itself.But it goes beyond that. One of Dr. Finkel's many gifts is to be able to see behind the inscriptions, and recognize the very human people who made them. The millennia between us and them notwithstanding, they were, he points out, people precisely like us. They struggled with the same dilemmas, had the same worries and concerns, and felt the same emotions. And, using our shared humanity across the millennia as a point of departure, he asks some much larger questions about the Bible: who wrote it? When? Why? And why would its anonymous writers or compilers, forcibly exiled in Babylon, have included stories cribbed from their pagan oppressors in their own holy book?Dr. Finkel has pulled off a rare feat: a lucidly scholarly, readable, personal, and personable book about a subject which, in the hands of the wrong writer, would be as boring as watching paint dry--but which, in his telling, becomes mesmerizing.

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