Noah's precedents

It seems the Literary Review website does not allow for an easy way to get to its past month's on line articles.   But I've found the link to a review from last month's page of a book called "The Ark Before Noah - Decoding the Story of the Flood."

I liked this part, as an example of an unusual academic reaction to a discovery:

...in the 1870s, George Smith identified two pre-biblical accounts of a hero divinely commissioned to build an ark and so save the denizens of the world from a cosmic flood. Reading The Epic of Gilgamesh for the first time 'after more than 2,000 years of oblivion', he rushed around, tearing off his clothes in a state of ecstasy resembling St Francis's embrace of his vocation.

I've never read much about the Epic of Gilgamesh, although I have a distinct memory that after he made True Stories, David Byrne was supposed to have said he thought it could be a good source for his next movie.  (I hope I didn't dream that!)    But further down in the Literary Review article, it's noted:

...the biggest difference the Hebrew version makes is to the moral framework of the myth: in Mesopotamian accounts, gods unleash the flood capriciously, or for no declared reason, or to eliminate a distractingly, irritatingly 'noisy' world that is becoming uncontrollably overpopulated. The Jews' God, by contrast, acted justly, to punish evildoers and spare the only righteous man.

 But the most interesting thing is that the earlier version of the ark was not boat shaped:

In the course of his investigation Finkel sheds much light on philological and literary problems of ancient Mesopotamian cultures, but one revelation dwarfs all others: in the earliest surviving description, the ark was round. The text is unambiguous on this point and includes detailed instructions for building a giant coracle out of more than 300 kilometres of coiled palm fibres, strengthening the structure with wooden ribs and decking, and coating everything in a waterproof mixture of pitch and lard. Finkel's painstaking and lively investigation of coracle-weaving traditions on the Euphrates makes the concept intelligible.

 Update:  this profile of the author appeared in Fairfax in February (actually, it's from the Daily Telegraph, I see), and it adds some detail that the round ark was not all that big:

''It was a coracle,'' says Finkel: a kind of round boat of rope around a wood frame. ''Half the people in Mesopotamia were professional boat people, so when someone told them this story, and said, imagine the biggest boat you ever saw, they must have asked: what did it look like?'' What is incredible is that the tablet has detailed instructions on how to build this enormous coracle, 21 metres across, 5.5 metres high, even down to the length of rope required.