The Ark Before Noah: Decoding the Story of the Flood by Irving Finkel$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'T')he story of the ark, and animals 'two by two', is so much older than the Bible: why was the myth appropriated?
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Three distinct Mesopotamian incarnations of the myth have now been identified, one recorded in Sumerian and two in Akkadian. It has become clear that the tale of a universal flood was widespread in Mesopotamia for an entire millennium and a half before the hapless Judaeans, defeated in the early 6th century BC by Nebuchadnezzar, were dragged away from their smoking cities into exile, there to weep beside the rivers of Babylon. Now, courtesy of Irving Finkel, the British Museum's eminence grise

of cuneiform studies, there comes a further clinching piece of evidence: a tablet that actually describes animals entering an ark "two by two". Not only that, but it offers startlingly precise specifications on how best to construct one. An ark, so the tablet instructs us, should properly be circular in shape, have an area of 3,600 metres, and be fashioned out of plant fibre. All those living in the Somerset Levels may wish to take note.
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The Judaeans were not graduate students in some Ivy League college, but the bewildered and embittered victims of superpower aggression.
By plundering the heritage of Babylon, they were at once paying homage to its cultural prestige, and annexing it to their own ends. Just as Christians and Muslims would subsequently transform the biblical figure of Noah into a prefiguring of their own respective theodicies, so the Judaeans transformed the myths of their Babylonian overlords into something that would end up as Jewish.