An elephant spoke to himself and said, ‘Among the wild creatures of the god Shakkan there is no one who can defecate like me.’ The sipidiqar-bird answered, ‘And yet, I, in my own proportion, I can defecate like you.’
Since the sky was sealed off from the Ark’s inhabitants day and night there would have been darkness but the Rabbis explained that Noah hung up precious stones which shone like the noonday sun. The rounding up of all the animals, with their fodder, had been handled by a team of angels, while the hand-picked animals behaved in an exemplary manner and did not go in for reproduction while on board. Noah never slept for he was up the whole time feeding the inmates. Another thing: while the loading was going on, imposing lions guarded the gangplank to prevent the wicked from sneaking on board, which reminds me of the lions at the back door of the British Museum, which, however, are there to discourage visitors from leaving.
The Berossus Ark
Berossus, as we have seen in Chapter 5, gives no description of the boat beyond its dimensions:
He (Xisuthros) did not disobey, but got a boat built, five stades long and two stades wide …
Patai writes that its length was ‘five stadia or furlongs – about 1,000 yards – and its breadth was two stadia – about 400 yards’. In the Armenian version of Eusebius’s Chronicles, which is based on Berossus, the length of the ship is given as fifteen furlongs, that is, nearly two miles.
The Ark in the Koran
Nuh’s [Noah] lifeboat Ark had no special name, but is referred to as safina, the common word for boat, Sura 54:3 describing it as ‘a thing of boards and nails’. There is no Koranic counterpart to the details of building the Ark or its appearance, although Abd Allah ibn Abbas, a contemporary of Muhammad, wrote that when Noah was in doubt as to what shape to make the Ark Allah revealed to him that it was to be shaped like a bird’s belly and fashioned of teak wood. In Islam, too, there was much later discussion and analysis of the story and its implications by the religious authorities. Abdallah ibn Umar al-Baidawi, writing in the thirteenth century, explains that in the first of its three levels wild and domesticated animals were lodged, in the second the human beings, and in the third the birds. On every plank was the name of a prophet. Three missing planks, symbolising three prophets, were brought from Egypt by Og, son of Anak, the only one of the giants permitted to survive the Flood, and the body of Adam was carried in the middle to divide the men from the women. There was a tradition that Noah had to say, In the Name of Allah! when he wished the Ark to move, and the same when he wished it to stand still.
An abundance of shapes, then. But we must return to the primary model. First, we must build our coracle.
English ladies on tour by coracle in the 1880s, but not entirely relaxed.
(picture acknowledgement 7.15)
8
Building the Arks
There’s nothing … absolutely nothing …
half so much worth doing
as simply messing around in boats.
Kenneth Grahame
1. Building Atra-hasīs’s Ark in the Ark Tablet
Building Noah’s Ark as depicted by a 17th century Flemish painter
(picture acknowledgement 8.1)
The life-preserving ark is central to the story of the Flood in any telling and we have established that what the hero Atra-hasīs had to build was a giant coracle. Before the arrival of the Ark Tablet all we really knew about constructing an ark in ancient Mesopotamia came from the famous description in the eleventh tablet of the Gilgamesh Epic. Hard facts for the boat-builder have accordingly been all too sparse and we have had to wait until now for the vital statistics of shape, size and dimensions, as well as everything to do with the crucial matter of waterproofing. The information that has now become available could be turned into a printed set of specifications sufficient for any would-be ark-builder today.
It has been an adventure, struggling forward within the forest of wedges in this precious document, especially where the tablet is sorely damaged on the reverse, but it is remarkable how so much can be extracted from Atra-hasīs’s laconic accounts. Businesslike data comes in lines 6–33 and 57–8, which cover the various stages of the work in the order in which they were carried out. The information comes as a series of ‘reports’ from Atra-hasīs, submitted to Enki as the work progressed; it is now our chance to look over his shoulder.
Requirements, Enki to Atra-hasīs:
6–9: Overall design and size
10–12: Materials and their quantities for the hull
Progress reports, Atra-hasīs to Enki:
13–14: Fitting the internal framework
15–17: Setting up the deck and building the cabins
18–20: Calculating the bitumen needed for waterproofing
21–5: Loading the kilns and preparing the bitumen
26–7: Adding the temper to the mix
28–9: Bituminising of the interior
30–33: Caulking the exterior
57–8: Exterior finishing – sealing the outer coat
The cuneiform content we have to work with, leaving aside the difficulty of reading the broken lines, is put across in a very compact fashion and does not quite emerge as an easy ‘user’s manual’. We have to interpret each line as if we were coracle-builders ourselves, an approach thankfully made easier by the traditional method of building a Mesopotamian coracle having not changed since antiquity. We can see this from an informative description of constructing a contemporary Iraqi quffa published in the 1930s by the boat historian and expert James Hornell. Today such information would be irretrievable: the Iraqi coracle is extinct and the riverside makers and boatmen who once proliferated have vanished. Side by side with this precious account come late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century photographs of Tigris coracle-builders at work employing the same techniques, which can also help the enquirer today.
Hornell’s coracle testimony has been utterly indispensable for this book; in fact it is hard to convey without headline phraseology exactly what it has contributed. There are several stages involved in coracle production and our boat historian has recorded these in full. With them as a guide it has been possible not just to read and translate the Akkadian description – as one would normally do – but to grasp what the cuneiform really means in terms of building a functional coracle. What is more, the content and measures of the cuneiform specifications are, amazingly, demonstrably based on realistic and practical data. Hornell’s description has both facilitated and confirmed interpretation of the construction technique, dimensions and order of procedure set out in the Ark Tablet.
The Ark Tablet, remember, with all this accumulated boat-building experience wrapped up in clay – was written the best part of four thousand years before Hornell recorded his own account.
The very oldest coracle-makers perfected a technique that was passed on for uncounted generations to follow, using the same locally available raw materials. Such a long history is inspiring, but not surprising, for there is every reason that the coracle – which can hardly be improved on as a practical design – should have remained unchanged in structure and use. But it is one thing to claim the likelihood of such longevity and quite another to be able to demonstrate it and, on top of that, benefit from it directly.
Writing this chapter, I might add, has been an assault course challenge for me. I have found it perfectly possible to get through life as a wedge-reader without being a boat person or functionally numerate, but both shortcomings were soon highlighted by having to deal with Atra-hasīs’s work problems. My one personal experience with boats occurred on holiday when I was about twelve, on a canal at Hythe, canoeing with my sister Angela. She was at the front; I had power and steering responsibilities from the back. Finding that we were dangerously close to the bank I swung my paddle up and over my sister’s head in order to correct our course, but, miscalculating substantially, thwacked her on the side of the head with the flat of the blade. This immediately knocked her unconscious; she slid d
own into the bottom of the canoe, understandably relinquishing her own paddle, which promptly drifted off behind us, while we somehow spurted forward out into mid-stream, later to be ignominiously rescued and resuscitated by adults in a passing rowing-boat. For me that was enough. As for mathematics, successive teachers suggested in school reports that I be sedated into oblivion before lessons. Until I learned about counting, right up to sixty, in cuneiform I always found this working horizon from Mary Norton comforting:
‘Your grandfather could count and write down the numbers up to – what was it, Pod?’
‘Fifty-seven,’ said Pod.
‘There,’ said Homily, ‘fifty-seven! And your father can count, as you know, Arrietty; he can count and write down the numbers, on and on, as far as it goes. How far does it go, Pod?’
‘Close on a thousand,’ said Pod.
The Borrowers, Vol. I
This Ark-building chapter is divided into two sections. The first explains the stages of the Ark Tablet’s building instructions in the light of the Hornell report, and makes full use of the results of the calculations, which are given in Appendix 3. The second investigates and compares the much less detailed account of the same activity in the eleventh tablet of the Gilgamesh Epic, with specific attention to disinterring the Old Babylonian tradition that lies behind it to throw light on how the present ‘classic’ text evolved. Appendix 3 thus covers all the technical matter, mensuration, procedures and calculations that are raised by this remarkable cuneiform document and that lead to the results presented in the first section. I could say that this section has been worked out and presented in partnership with my friend Mark Wilson but actually I just asked him a few stupid questions and this is the result. To admit that the methods were beyond me is unnecessary.
Building Atra-hasīs’s Ark
“Let her floor area be one ‘field’ [continued Enki],
“let her sides be one nindan (high).”
Ark Tablet: 9
In the Ark Tablet, we see that Enki has placed an order for a truly giant coracle. It works out to be the size of a Babylonian ‘field’, what we would call an acre, surrounded by high walls. In our terms, utilising all the evidence from Mesopotamian mathematical sources and terms of measurement, the coracle’s floor-area comes out at 3,600 m2. This is about half the size of a soccer pitch (roughly 7,000 m2), while the walls, at about six metres, would effectively inhibit an upright male giraffe from looking over at us.
ARK TABLET: ROPE
Atra-hasīs’s coracle was to be made of rope, coiled into a gigantic basket. This rope was made of palm fibre, and vast quantities of it were going to be needed, as reflected in Enki’s mollifying remarks:
“You saw kannu ropes and ašlu ropes/rushes for [a coracle before!]
Let someone (else) twist the fronds and palm-fibre for you!
It will surely need 14,430 (sūtu)!”
Ark Tablet: 10–12
Here we turn without delay to James Hornell:
Hornell’s Section 1
In construction a quffa is just a huge lidless basket, strengthened within by innumerable ribs radiating from around the centre of the floor. The type of basketry employed is of that widely distributed kind termed coiled basketry. In this system the arrangement is that of a continuous and flattened spiral. Formed of a stout cylindrical core of parallel lengths of some fibrous material – grass or straw generally – bound by parcelling or whipping into a rope-like cylinder. By concentric coiling of this ‘filled rope’, the shape required is gradually built up. The parcelling consists of a narrow ribbon of strips split off from date-palm leaflets, wound in an open spiral around the core filling. As this proceeds the upper part of the coil immediately below is caught in by the lacing material being threaded through a hole made by a stout needle or other piercing instrument; this securely ties together the successive coils. The method is similar to that in use throughout Africa in the making of innumerable varieties of baskets and mats. The gunwale consists of a bundle of numerous withies, usually of willow, forming a stout cylindrical hoop attached to the uppermost and last-formed coil by closely set series of coir lashings.
Atra-hasīs’s kannu and ašlu in the Ark Tablet line 10 correspond to Hornell’s beaten palm-fibre and date-palm parcelling.
Consider the god Enki’s remarks, ‘developed’ a little:
You know about these coracles, surely, they’re everywhere …
Let someone else do the work; I know you have other things to do …
Why don’t I just tell you how much you are going to need and save you the trouble of working it out … ?
The raw material from which the rope is to be twisted and wrapped is palm fronds, for the Akkadian verb patālu means ‘to twist’, ‘to plait’, and the derived noun pitiltu denotes ‘palm fibre’. An unrelated Old Babylonian tablet from the city of Ur mentions no fewer than 186 labourers employed to make this kind of rope out of palm-fibre and palm-leaf. A century or so earlier a harassed bookkeeper totted up in another text ‘no less than 276 talents (8.28 tons) of palm-fibre rope … and 34 talents (1.02 tons) of palm-leaf rope’, raising the question as to what a shipyard would do with almost 10 tons of palm-fibre and palm-leaf rope of cord, as Dan Potts put it. To me this can only mean mass coracle production.
By Enki’s calculations they were going to need 14,430 sūtu measures of rope to coil the body of the Ark. This statement proves to be quite remarkable for two reasons. One is the actual way in which the total is recorded, the other the calculation that produces the total.
To me at least, 14,430 is a big number. It is written ‘4 × 3,600 + 30’ = 14,400 + 30. In other words four ‘3,600’ signs are used to make up the main total, followed by the sign for 30 and the same ‘3,600’ system quantifies the wooden stanchions in line 15 and the waterproofing bitumen in lines 21–2.
The number 3,600 is written with the old Sumerian ŠÁR sign and, as a number word, borrowed into Babylonian and pronounced šar. This ŠÁR is an important cuneiform sign. In shape and meaning it conveys enclosure and completeness, for originally it was a circle, so it was used to express ideas like ‘totality’ or the ‘entire inhabited world’ as well as the large number 3,600.
When it occurs in literary texts šár = 3,600 is conventionally understood as no more than a conveniently large round number. This is evident when a well-wisher writes in a letter, ‘may the Sun God for my sake keep you well for 3,600 years’, or a battle-flushed Assyrian king claims to have ‘blinded 4 × 3,600 survivors’. Assyriologists therefore often translate šár as ‘myriad’, as conveying the right sort of mythological size and feel, although of course the Greek decimal myriad literally means ‘10,000’, whereas Mesopotamians naturally thought in sixties, one ŠÁR being 60 × 60. What is truly surprising in the Ark Tablet calculations is that this sign 3,600 does not function just as a large round number but is to be taken literally.
To anyone familiar with Seven League Boots or the Hundred Acre Wood this statement, especially in a literary composition, will cause surprise, while any Assyriologist who knows the sign in texts such as the Sumerian King List or Gilgamesh XI will raise more than one quizzical eyebrow. Indeed, the conclusion takes a bit of swallowing, and it took a bit of swallowing for me too. All I can say is that, having finally deciphered Atra-hasīs’s big cuneiform numbers in the Ark Tablet, I had a strong hunch that they were not just fantasy totals and should at least be afforded the opportunity to speak for themselves. The principal reason for this was the added ‘+ 30’ after the 14,400. What was that? A joke? Enki putting over the equivalent of ‘a million and four?’ That interpretation, in context, seemed out of the question, leaving no other plausible conclusion than that the extra 30 was needed to reach a real total, meaning that the number totals had to be taken seriously. It was at that moment that things got alarming: a mathematician was needed, happily forthcoming in the person of Mark Wilson. The consequence was to establish and confirm that the numbers in Atra-hasīs’s work reports have to be t
aken seriously: real data and proper calculation have been injected into the Atra-hasīs story. Furthermore, the underlying Babylonian measurement, which is not mentioned in the text, has to be the sūtu, which we need to know in order to understand the numbers.
We can support this clearly with Enki’s calculation of the volume of necessary rope, having established:
1. Total surface area = coracle base + coracle walls + coracle roof. To sort this out, as I need hardly mention, requires a spot of Pappas’s Centroid Theorem, closely followed by a dose of Ramanujan’s Approximation.
2. The thickness of the rope. In the Ark Tablet we are not told about rope thickness, which suggests that it must be of a standard width for making coracles. A handful of old black and white photographs of Iraqi coracles are sufficiently in focus to suggest that traditional coracle rope was approximately of one finger thickness. As one ubānu, ‘finger’, was a standard Babylonian measure, we take this to be the thickness of Atra-hasīs’s rope. This choice will be confirmed in a later calculation concerning the thickness of the coracle’s bitumen coating.
The display of mathematical liveliness in Appendix 3 shows what has to be assayed to reach the result. Here we only need the answer, expressed in Babylonian sūtū measures:
The Ark Before Noah Page 15
