The Mesopotamian tablet was determined to be 4,000 years old, pre-dating the Biblical story of Noah, The Blaze reported.
The tablet describes a huge vessel, two-thirds the size of a soccer field, with high walls and made with enough rope that “stretched out in a line would reach from London to Edinburgh.”
It was put on display on Friday at the British Museum and is not the subject of a book called “The Ark Before Noah.” The museum’s assistant keeper of the Middle East, Irving Finkel called the tablet “one of the most important human documents ever discovered.”
Mr. Finkel received the tablet several years ago from a man who said his father had acquired it in the Middle East. Mr. Finkel wrote in a blog post that the tablet turned out to be “one in a million.”
The tablet describes an ark very similar to Noah’s ark, and would carry two of each animal, the instructions specify a circular vessel, not the traditional rectangular ark.
“It was really a heart-stopping moment—the discovery that the boat was to be a round boat,” Mr. Finkel told Fox News. “That was a real surprise.”
He added that a circular boat would be a “perfect thing,” because it never sinks and is light to carry.
However, Mr. Finkel said that the tablet does not provide evidence supporting the Biblical story of Noah’s ark and theorized that the story was likely passed down from Babylon.
“I’m sure the story of the flood and a boat to rescue life is a Babylonian invention,” he told Fox News.
“I don’t think the ark existed—but a lot of people do. It doesn’t really matter. The Biblical version is a thing of itself and it has a vitality forever.”
