Irving L. FinkelReseñas

This is arguably the best horror story I have ever read. The setting and culture of the tale are, needless to say, absolutely accurate. It is also one of the most artistically produced, beautiful books I have seen in many years.

Finkel is a fascinating character and a very engaging reader; usually the author reading their own work is a terrible decision, here I could imagine no one else. The book gives you a state of the cuneiform writing system, an overview of the civilizations that used it, before getting into the meat of the title and describing the many tablets and versions of the flood myth that predate the Bible. The real surprise is seeing how detailed an account it is, given the staccato and formulaic languages used. Finkel describes instructions so literal and detailed (given the era) it's hard not to come away thinking there's a real event somewhere along the route of this story.

Strange mix of a book. I really liked the ancient near-East history. I was interested in the cuneiform, and the description of what it's like to spend your life decoding ancient tablets. I was not at all interested in how much bitumen is needed to waterproof a coracle.

Unusual book about cuneiform writing. Short and illustrated with photographs of cuneiform writing mostly from the British Museum. It turns out that archaeologists have uncovered an extraordinary variety of cuneiform examples, from student exercises to forgeries to official statues, covering about 2000 years. Over that time, the forms and style of the writing changed. Most likely, as with fossil finds, a whole lot of these tablets haven't been examined yet and there is more in the writing on these tablets yet to be discovered.½

Drily witty retelling, for children, of the Gilgamesh epic. Every illustration in the book is taken from an artifact in the British Museum. The names of many of the important characters have been written out, by the author, in cuneiform. Pretty neat.½

The title undersells the book! It contains the most convincing theory about how the bible came about. Even though it's mostly about Babylonian history.

A great book, a pity it is so hard to find.

> Babelio : https://www.babelio.com/livres/Finkel-LArche-avant-Noe/710366

> L'ARCHE AVANT NOÉ, par Irving Finkel (JC Lattès, 2015, Broché, 350 pages). — Tout le monde connaît l’histoire de l’Arche de Noé et du Déluge telle qu’elle est racontée dans la Genèse. Depuis les années 1870, on sait qu’une autre histoire, similaire mais beaucoup plus ancienne, existait déjà depuis des siècles dans l’antique Babylone. Mais celle-ci demeurait nimbée de mystère. Conservateur au British Museum et spécialiste international de la Mésopotamie ancienne, Irving Finkel s’est retrouvé plongé dans une enquête policière inédite lorsqu’un visiteur lui a apporté au musée la mystérieuse tablette qu’il avait héritée de son père.
Cette dernière ne présente pas seulement une nouvelle version du récit diluvien babylonien : l’auteur antique y décrit aussi la taille et la forme d’une Arche tout à fait inattendue, et livre les caractéristiques détaillées de sa construction.
On découvrira ainsi le lieu où les Babyloniens croyaient que l’Arche avait accosté ainsi qu’une nouvelle explication de l’introduction de cette histoire dans le texte de la Bible.
L'Arche avant Noé, Les véritables origines de l'histoire du Déluge nous entraîne dans une authentique exploration, du monde fascinant des écritures antiques.
—Johnny Gimenez (Culturebox)

A great modern day fable on what might have happened if a psychopath in ancient Mesopotamia was left with no choice but to kill everyone who knew about an accidental message from the gods in the hopes of gaining glory and taking the place of his king.

This is a short story, not a novel by any means. And it took about an hour and a half to read. The story glosses over large swathes of time and plenty of details that would be important to a detailed plot and character development. The way it reads brings to mind Aesop fables or Grimm's tales, rather than a modern fiction story, and would work very well as spoken word.

While not an amazing work of fiction, it is definitely a fun read and worth the few hours it takes to read. And the kickstarter hardcover release is also an amazing work of art, story aside.

I've thoroughly enjoyed Finkel's previous novels, The Princess Who Wouldn't Come Home, and The Last Resort Library, but this is a very different kettle of fish. I was excited to hear that he'd written a story based on his knowledge of ancient Assyria, especially because I recently read and loved his Ark Before Noah history book. The result, however, is rather unsettling: very bleak and dark, with scenes of extreme violence, and a plot which only really makes sense when you've read the afterword. The Exorcist, a powerful priest-diviner at the court of King Ashurbanipal, finds his authority threatened by a mysterious fragment of text that he can't decipher. To make matters more alarming, it has been written in stone rather than in clay - an impossible feat, which proves that it must be a divine message from the gods. Thirsty for power, the Exorcist will stop at nothing to hide his ignorance - and to find the source of this remarkable artefact, in the hope of discovering further messages from the gods.

Now, while I found the story itself rather unpleasant (and perhaps that simply comes down to the fact that there isn't a single character one can really get behind), I did like the way that Finkel conveys the enormous power of cuneiform script - its complexity and the many different levels of meaning that could be encoded within a text as the writer and reader became more advanced. And I was interested by the way that he makes demons and gods a very present and active part of Mesopotamian life, just as people at the time believed they were. But ultimately I found it a rather cold book, perhaps more of an academic thought experiment than the warm and engaging novels Finkel has written before. I'll be very interested to see what other people make of it.½

Deep within the British Museum is the Arched Room, a soaring vaulted hall lined with shelves of cubbyholes. This is where the cuneiform tablets are kept and it feels rather like the Holy of Holies. I’ve only been once, but that single visit impressed me mightily: not just the architecture, but the hushed air of industry as scholars and students sat hunched over at the central line of desks, working away at deciphering these ancient fragments. Tablets might be business letters, court records or poetry. It’s an ongoing detective story and my brilliant Assyriologist colleagues never know what they’re going to turn up. In this book, the irrepressible Irving Finkel tells the story of the most exciting recent discovery, when a member of the public brought in a cuneiform tablet which offered fascinating new evidence about the story of the Ark and the Great Flood...

For the full review, please see my blog:
https://theidlewoman.net/2018/03/28/the-ark-before-noah-irving-finkel/

4.5 out of 5 stars.

Finkel is a cuneiform scholar at the British Museum who came across a small, 60 line tablet that discusses the building of Noah's Ark. He finds that it is one of the oldest and fits it into the other ark story tablets in interesting ways. It also has outstanding and distinct features. For instance, instead of the ark being an almond-shaped reed boat, or the unlikely cube of the Gilgamesh story, or the (incorrectly assumed) rectangular box of Genesis, this is a circular reed ark. This circular reed ark is similar to a boat that fell out of use in Iraq in the 20th century called a coracle, or a guffa/quffa in Arabic, which would have been called quppu in Akkadian (quppu→quffa→guffa). Interesting too is a line in the ark that Finkel translates as "two by two" as in the animals went in two by two.

Interesting all around, although, of course, Finkel does not believe there was a flood or a Noah character or an ark. For him, it was just a mythological story. He believes too that he knows how the stories were transmitted from the Mesopotamians to the Jewish Bible. This blinds him to an interesting oddity he mentions as an interesting oddity. On page 186 he mentions that an ark text he calls the Old Babylonian Atrahasis mentions that Atrahasis (one of the Noah characters) is told to bring "clean" animals on board in his list of animals. Finkel is puzzled: "The category of 'clean', too, cannot pass without comment, for the notion of clean and unclean animals did not exist in ancient Mesopotamia as it does in the Bible." For Finkel this is a puzzle. Why would an old Mesopotamian tablet mention "clean animals" if they didn't have them? Well, the Bible has them. What Finkel doesn't assume, because his preconceptions run against it, is that perhaps the original story had clean and unclean animals and the Bible story and the Mesopotamian stories descend from a common source, NOT that the biblical source descends from a Mesopotamian source.

Just a thought.

This is an interesting and well-written book. It is well-referenced, with a nice bibliography. It lacks footnotes/endnotes, but it has those silly new page notes at the end of the book. It has nice illustrations and a raft of appendices. There are a lot of good facts, ideas, and suppositions here for the scholar of the Ancient Near East, for the biblical scholar, and the Christian. (Or for any mix of the three.)½

Delightful. Pure, warm-hearted, gentle whimsy: a fairytale for grown-ups (and perhaps older children if we have to share it with them). For more details, take a look at my blog:

https://theidlewoman.net/2016/06/20/the-princess-who-wouldnt-come-home-irving-fi...

Written by an enthusiastic specialist who tells the story of his translation of a cunieform tablet acquired by the British Museum that provides detailed instructions on how to build an Ark (which he calls the Ark Tablet).
The book teases out as much as possible from this 60 line tablet and in the process you learn much. I had previously read the Bible Ark story and I had also read Gilgamesh, but had not particularly focused on the Ark story in it. What this book succeeds in doing is looking at the various Mesopotamian stories that survive on cuneiform tablets, and suggesting how it came about that the Bible Ark story came into the Western World so effectively.
The author advises that the Mesopotamian Flood Story surfaces in three distinct cuneiform incarnations, one in Sumerian, two in Akkadian. These are the Sumerian Flood Story, and major narrative episodes within the Atrahasis Epic and the Epic of Gilgamesh respectively.
The most interesting and rewarding part of the book is Finkel's analysis of these stories, adding what can be gleaned from the Ark Tablet. What I came to appreciate was that small parts of these stories are found on cunieform tablets over a long period of time (more than one thousand years) and the underlying theme of the Ark story was modified over time, as it was retold for different audiences.
At some stage this will mean that i want to read a good book about how it is thought that the Bible was written, as Finkel's chapter about how the Mesopotamian Ark story was incorporated into Judaism, Christianity and Islam is fascinating.
Finkel includes photos and descriptions of reed boat building in 19th and early 20th century Iraq to help illustrate his arguments and these are very interesting. Finkel also includes delightful quotes at the beginning of his chapters.

Near the beginning the author notes that the book is strongly dependent on ancient inscriptions and what they have to tell us. Most of them are written in the said cuneiform, the world’s oldest kind of writing. The author therefore not only says what "we know" ie his interpretation, but also explains how we know it, and tries to make it clear when some word or line is persistently obscure, or open to more than one interpretation. I did not agree with all his interpretations, but this is more to do with him running with an interpretation that is favourable to his overall argument, whereas I considered the evidence that he presented inconclusive, rather than positively disagreeing with his interpretation.

Overall, a very stimulating and enlightening book about a very specialised area of history.

Accesible richly illustrated summary of the cuneiform writing system(s), taking examples from the British Museum's extensive collections. As well as explaining the writing system itself, it delves into what it tells us of the lives of those who used it and their preoccupations over the 3000 or so years it was in use, and made me want to learn more about their civilisations.

Yeoman work, scholarly opinion, great story, well told.½

British Museum catalogue to accompany the Babylon: Myth and Reality exhibition. Lots of lavish photos of the items on display plus descriptions and a number of essays giving context for the artefacts displayed. Subjects of essays cover the city, the dynasty, life and letters, history and legend, Babylon's wonders of the world, the fall of Babylon and the legacy.

And which library is this modelled upon? There are lots of recognizable things here about libraries and librarians and how they do things. However, the whole does not add up to the sum of the parts.