Topic Guide
What Is Flood myths?
Flood myths is a subject covered in depth across 1 podcast episode in our database. Below you'll find key concepts, expert insights, and the top episodes to listen to — all distilled from hours of conversation by leading experts.
Key Concepts in Flood myths
Cuneiform script
Cuneiform is a complex, wedge-shaped syllabic writing system that originated in Mesopotamia around 3500 BC. It evolved from pictographic signs to represent sounds and was used to record languages like Sumerian, Akkadian, and Babylonian for nearly four millennia. Finkel describes its significance as a 'gigantic step' in human intellect, enabling the recording of language, literature, and complex societal records.
Lexicography in ancient mesopotamia
Lexicography refers to the systematic standardization and cataloging of writing signs and their meanings. Finkel highlights that early in the third millennium BC, Mesopotamian scholars invented this discipline to control the exponential growth of cuneiform signs, ensuring they were retrievable, teachable, and consistent across generations. This rigor was crucial for cuneiform's longevity and legibility even across millennia.
Bisutun inscription
The Bisutun Inscription is a trilingual inscription carved on a mountain face by King Darius in Old Persian, Elamite, and Babylonian. It was instrumental in the decipherment of cuneiform in the 19th century, serving a similar role to the Rosetta Stone. Scholars used the deciphered Old Persian text to unlock the other two, providing the key to understanding ancient Mesopotamian languages.
The ark tablet
This ancient Babylonian clay tablet, dating to 1700 BC and deciphered by Irving Finkel, contains a flood narrative that predates the biblical story of Noah by at least a thousand years. It describes a god warning a man named Atra-Hasis to build a giant round coracle to save life from a catastrophic flood. The tablet's details, including the release of birds, suggest a direct literary dependence between this Mesopotamian account and the later biblical version.
Royal game of ur
The Royal Game of Ur is a 20-square board game, dating to about 2600 BC, found in royal graves at Ur and later across the ancient Middle East. It was an extremely popular race game played for nearly 3,000 years, balancing chance (dice) and strategy (piece movement). Irving Finkel reconstructed its rules from a later cuneiform tablet, revealing it as a sophisticated form of ancient 'time pass' akin to modern backgammon.
What Experts Say About Flood myths
- 1.Writing, first evidenced around 3500 BC in Mesopotamia, likely originated much earlier as a visual communication system, evolving from pictographs to syllabic cuneiform to encode sound and language, a process Finkel believes was far more intuitive than traditionally assumed.
- 2.Cuneiform, a complex, wedge-shaped syllabic writing system, endured for nearly four millennia due to its flexibility, the scribal class's control over knowledge, and early pioneers' rigorous standardization efforts, including the invention of lexicography around the third millennium BC.
- 3.The decipherment of cuneiform was significantly aided by trilingual inscriptions like the Bisutun Inscription, which allowed scholars to leverage knowledge of Old Persian to crack Babylonian and Elamite, although Finkel attributes much of the critical insight to Edward Hincks over Henry Rawlinson.
- 4.Irving Finkel posits that the vast majority of ancient written records, particularly those on perishable materials, are lost, rendering current archeological findings mere 'raindrops' compared to a 'waterfall' of human knowledge, and that existing major discoveries, like Ashurbanipal's library, are likely incomplete or skewed by historical events.
- 5.The Ark Tablet, a 1700 BC Babylonian clay tablet deciphered by Finkel, reveals a flood narrative predating the biblical Noah story by a millennium, featuring a giant round coracle designed to save life from a divine flood triggered by humanity's 'noise' (overpopulation), suggesting literary dependence between the Mesopotamian and later biblical accounts.
- 6.The ancient Royal Game of Ur, a board game dating back to 2600 BC, was incredibly widespread across the ancient world for 3,000 years, functioning as a 'time pass' that balanced chance and strategy, similar to modern backgammon, and whose rules Finkel helped reconstruct from a later cuneiform tablet.