Free Republic

It was a vast boat that saved two of each animal and a handful of humans from a catastrophic flood. But forget all those images of a long vessel with a pointy bow - the original Noah's Ark, new research suggests, was round. A recently deciphered 4,000-year-old clay tablet from ancient Mesopotamia - modern-day Iraq - reveals striking new details about the roots of the Old Testament tale of Noah....

LONDON — It was a vast boat that saved two of each animal and a handful of humans from a catastrophic flood. But forget all those images of a long vessel with a pointy bow — the original Noah’s Ark, new research suggests, was round. A recently deciphered 4,000-year-old tablet from ancient Mesopotamia — modern-day Iraq — reveals striking new details about the roots of the Old Testament tale of Noah. It tells a similar story, complete with detailed instructions for building a giant round vessel known as a coracle — as well as the key instruction that animals should...

New evidence suggests that Noah's Ark was round, made from reeds and the length of six double-decker buses. For years, archaeologists have scoured the world for factual evidence for the Bible story of Noah's flood, but due to scant documentation, many believe the fable to be an Old Testament myth. Now, however, a new book claims that Noah's Ark was a round coracle and looked very different from its traditional image. In The Ark Before: Decoding the Story of the Flood by Irving Finkel, there are claims that the vessel had two decks with cabins for the animals. British Museum...