The Ark before Noah
In his lecture, “The Ark before Noah,” British Museum expert Dr. Irving Finkel reveals how decoding the symbols on a 4,000 year old piece of clay enabled a radical new interpretation of the Noah’s Ark story. A world authority on the period, Dr. Finkel’s real-life detective story began with a remarkable event at the British Museum: the arrival one day in 2008 of a single, modest-sized Babylonian cuneiform tablet brought in by a member of the public. Such palm-sized clay rectangles were used by the Babylonians to create the first documents, and this particular tablet proved to be of quite extraordinary importance. Not only does it date from about 1850 B.C., but it is a copy of the Babylonian Story of the Flood, a story from ancient Mesopotamia revealing, among other things, instructions for constructing a large boat. Dr. Finkel will also describe the further series of discoveries which allowed him to decode the Flood story in ways which offer unanticipated revelations. The lecture will also describe how a replica of the boat, following the ancient instructions, was built in India—the subject of the documentary film The Real Noah’s Ark.
The lecture will take place at the University of North Florida, Building 51, on Saturday, March 25, 2017. It will begin at 12:00 PM, and is free and open to the public. Dr. Finkel will be giving a Norton Lecture, named for Charles Eliot Norton, the founder and first President of the Archaeological Institute of America and former Professor of the History of Art at Harvard University. The Norton Lectureship is part of the AIA’s National Lecture Program.