The instructions for the ark, as built by Noah in the Bible, produce a long, cuboid barge with a pitched roof – something like this…

“So why,” asks Irving Finkel, senior Assyriologist at the British Museum, “contrary to all that detail, does every child’s Bible have this image in it – which is the profile of a Mesopotamian circular coracle – [as described in the Babylonian cuneiform tablets]? Where has that cultural memory come from?”

ESCAPING FROM EDEN probes the ancient mythologies of Genesis and its counterparts around the world and reaches some startling conclusions. Read more…