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c o n t r i b u t o r s This month’s pulpit is written by Frances Wilson. She is the author of The Ballad of Dorothy Wordsworth and is currently writing a book about Thomas De Quincey. John Adamson’s most recent book is The Noble Revolt: The Overthrow of Charles I (Phoenix), which won the Samuel Pepys Award and the Latham Medal for History. Charles Allen is currently working on a biography of Brian Houghton Hodgson, the ‘father of Himalayan studies’. Simon Baker is a freelance reviewer. Memphis Barker is assistant editor of The Independent’s comment section, Independent Voices. Christopher Bray’s cultural history of 1965, the year today began, will be out from Simon & Schuster in the spring. Piers Brendon is working on a book about Winston Churchill and the animal kingdom. Jerry Brotton is the author of A History of the World in Twelve Maps (Penguin). Michael Burleigh’s most recent book is Small Wars, Faraway Places: The Genesis of the Modern World 1945–65. Richard Canning is completing a biography of Ronald Firbank. His most recent publication is an edition of Firbank’s Vainglory for Penguin Classics (2012). David Collard is a writer and researcher. Felipe Fernández-Armesto is the William P Reynolds Professor of History at Notre Dame. Our America: A Hispanic History of the United States is published this month. Laura Gallagher is a freelance writer. David Gelber is treasurer of the Society for Court Studies. John Gray’s most recent book is The Silence of Animals: On Progress and Other Modern Myths (Penguin). Matthew Green is working on a book on British veterans battling PTSD called Aftershock. James Hall is the author of two books on Michelangelo and, most recently, The Sinister Side: How Left–Right Symbolism Shaped Western Art. Tanya Harrod’s The Last Sane Man: Michael Cardew, Modern Pots, Colonialism and the Counterculture was awarded the 2013 James Tait Black Prize for biography. William Anthony Hay is a historian at Mississippi State University. He is completing a biography of the second Earl of Liverpool, prime minister from 1812 to 1827. Simon Heffer’s High Minds is available from all fine booksellers. He is researching a sequel, covering the years 1880 to 1914. Ben Hutchinson is Professor of European Literature at the University of Kent. His recent books include Modernism and Style (2011). Kevin Jackson’s monograph on Nosferatu was published in November, as was his Kindle Single Darwin’s Odyssey: The Voyage of the Beagle. Maya Jaggi’s cultural journalism and criticism gained her an honorary doctorate from the Open University in 2012. She is a judge of this year’s International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. Paul Johnson has recently written a short life of Mozart. Stuart Kelly is the author of The Book of Lost Books and Scott-Land: The Man Who Invented a Nation. He judged the Man Booker Prize in 2013 and is the programme director of the Glasgow Book Festival. Roger Kimball is the editor of the New Criterion. Alexander Maitland has written biographies of John Hanning Speke, Freya Stark and Wilfred Thesiger. Jessica Mann’s latest book is Dead Woman Walking (The Cornovia Press). Allan Massie’s new novel, Cold Winter in Bordeaux, is published by Quartet this month. Jonathan McAloon has written for the TLS, The Spectator and the New Statesman. Keith Miller works for the Daily Telegraph. Jonathan Mirsky was an academic whose main research was on the Tang dynasty (618–906), the one before Huizong’s. His last position was East Asia Editor of The Times. Leslie Mitchell is Emeritus Fellow at University College, Oxford. His interests lie in the high politics of the 18th century. David Nirenberg’s most recent book is Anti-Judaism: The History of a Way of Thinking. His Neighboring Faiths: Christianity, Islam, and Judaism, Medieval and Modern will be published this spring. Richard Overy’s The Bombing War: Europe 1939–1945 was published in September. Lucy Popescu is the author of The Good Tourist (Arcadia Books). Bernard Porter is Emeritus Professor of Modern History at Newcastle University, but lives in Stockholm for half the year. Chris Riddell recently won the 2013 Costa Children’s Book Award. Lucian Robinson is a freelance writer. Ian Sansom’s most recent book is The Norfolk Mystery (Fourth Estate). Anne Sebba is writing about Paris through women’s eyes from 1939 to 1949. Charles Shaar Murray’s biographies of John Lee Hooker and Jimi Hendrix are published by Canongate. Frances Spalding’s two most recent books are John Piper, Myfanwy Piper: Lives in Art (OUP) and Prunella Clough: regions unmapped (Lund Humphries). D J Taylor’s The Windsor Faction was published in September by Chatto. Martin Vander Weyer is business editor of The Spectator and the author of a biography of the 1920s fraudster Gerard Lee Bevan. Francesca Wade is a freelance writer living in London. Literary Review | f e b r u a r y 2 0 1 4 4
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h i s t o r y f e l i p e f e r n á n de z - a rme s t o Narrative Arks The Ark Before Noah: Decoding the Story of the Flood By Irving Finkel (Hodder & Stoughton 421pp £25) Among the British Museum’s prodigious collection of cuneiform tablets and fragments, strangely parallel experiences befell two scholars. First, in the 1870s, George Smith identified two prebiblical 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. Less demonstratively, over a hundred years later in 1985, Irving Finkel was ‘more than taken aback’ when he discovered a fragment of one of the earliest versions of the flood story among bric-a-brac gathered by an English airman in Iraq during the Second World War. Finkel, like Smith, has a beard worthy of a Victorian or perhaps a biblical patriarch. His book explores even stranger parallels between Noah and the much earlier Mesopotamian ark builders. Finkel’s find, which dates from at least 1,200 years before the earliest supposed recording of the Noah story, contains two stunning revelations for biblical studies. Astonishingly, it includes a phrase (about the animals entering the ark) plausibly translatable as ‘two by two’. So one of the striking features of the Bible story unanticipated in previously discovered Mesopotamian fragments turns out to be traceable to the same culture of origin. Moreover, Finkel’s text refers to ‘clean’ animals – and therefore, by implication, to a distinction from ‘unclean’ ones. As far as I am aware, this is the first evidence that this Jewish form of fastidiousness was prefigured in earlier foibles or scruples. Three conclusions are irresistible. First, that the flood story generated extraordinarily tenacious traditions. Second, that the tale probably originated in a world of real observation in ancient Mesopotamia, where vast, destructive floods were frequent, and not – as archaeological sensationalists have claimed – in some supposed folk memory of the effects of global warming after the Younger Dryas (or the ‘Big Freeze’, a period of cold climatic conditions some 12,000 years ago). Finally, Finkel’s tablet strengthens the already persuasive case that the Bible version derives from Mesopotamian archetypes. Finkel regards the issue as definitively resolved. Sceptics will wriggle their way round his evidence by clinging Coracles in use, Iraq, 1920s to the possibility of a fusion of Mesopotamian and Hebrew stories of independent origins; but I think reasonable critics will aver that he is right. 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. He also clears up a puzzle in the flood story that forms part of Gilgamesh, where the gods seem to ordain an obviously unwieldy square ark; a round shape, like a square, is as broad as it is long and really the Gilgamesh scribe intended a circle (or was perhaps himself deceived into squaring it). With a vivid eye for what life was like in the Euphrates valley 4,000 years and more ago, Finkel argues – riskily but plausibly – that his tablet represents a fragment from the script or record of a dramatised version of the story for court performance, and that the arithmetical precision of the calculations involved in determining the ark’s dimensions and assembling the materials for its construction derives from ancient Mesopotamian schoolroom exercises. There are other remarkable scholarly insights to admire. Finkel argues convincingly that the British Museum’s famous Babylonian world map contains an allusion to the resting place of the ark. His image of Sennacherib, the Assyrian king from 704 to 681 BC, engaged in the first hunt for relics of the foundered vessel is brilliant. Finkel is almost as revelatory about himself as he is about the Bible text and the early history of civilisation. We see him wandering around the Study Room at the Museum, poking readers in the ribs and questioning them impishly about how he can help with their work. He complements his Victorian beard with Edwardian, or at least Wodehousian, humour. His only personal experience with boats, he assures us, occurred when he misdirected a paddle and ‘thwacked’ his sister Angela. The flood story ‘would make a corking opera’. The lions who guard the back doors of the British Museum, Finkel quips, are there to keep visitors in. He ‘could say’ that the arithmetical sections of the book, which tried his competence, relied ‘on partnership with my friend Mark Wilson but actually I just asked him a few stupid questions’. Some readers will jib, but I enjoyed most of these jolly frivolities. Sedulous editing might have streamlined the book, which repetitions and irrelevant f e b r u a r y 2 0 1 4 | Literary Review 5

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c o n t r i b u t o r s

This month’s pulpit is written by Frances Wilson. She is the author of The Ballad of Dorothy Wordsworth and is currently writing a book about Thomas De Quincey. John Adamson’s most recent book is The Noble Revolt: The Overthrow of Charles I (Phoenix), which won the Samuel Pepys Award and the Latham Medal for History. Charles Allen is currently working on a biography of Brian Houghton Hodgson, the ‘father of Himalayan studies’. Simon Baker is a freelance reviewer. Memphis Barker is assistant editor of The Independent’s comment section, Independent Voices. Christopher Bray’s cultural history of 1965, the year today began, will be out from Simon & Schuster in the spring. Piers Brendon is working on a book about Winston Churchill and the animal kingdom. Jerry Brotton is the author of A History of the World in Twelve Maps (Penguin). Michael Burleigh’s most recent book is Small Wars, Faraway Places: The Genesis of the Modern World 1945–65. Richard Canning is completing a biography of Ronald Firbank. His most recent publication is an edition of Firbank’s Vainglory for Penguin Classics (2012). David Collard is a writer and researcher. Felipe Fernández-Armesto is the William P Reynolds Professor of History at Notre Dame. Our America: A Hispanic History of the United States is published this month. Laura Gallagher is a freelance writer. David Gelber is treasurer of the Society for Court Studies. John Gray’s most recent book is The Silence of Animals: On Progress and Other Modern Myths (Penguin). Matthew Green is working on a book on British veterans battling PTSD called Aftershock. James Hall is the author of two books on Michelangelo and, most recently, The Sinister Side: How Left–Right Symbolism Shaped Western Art.

Tanya Harrod’s The Last Sane Man: Michael Cardew, Modern Pots, Colonialism and the Counterculture was awarded the 2013 James Tait Black Prize for biography. William Anthony Hay is a historian at Mississippi State University. He is completing a biography of the second Earl of Liverpool, prime minister from 1812 to 1827. Simon Heffer’s High Minds is available from all fine booksellers. He is researching a sequel, covering the years 1880 to 1914. Ben Hutchinson is Professor of European Literature at the University of Kent. His recent books include Modernism and Style (2011). Kevin Jackson’s monograph on Nosferatu was published in November, as was his Kindle Single Darwin’s Odyssey: The Voyage of the Beagle. Maya Jaggi’s cultural journalism and criticism gained her an honorary doctorate from the Open University in 2012. She is a judge of this year’s International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. Paul Johnson has recently written a short life of Mozart. Stuart Kelly is the author of The Book of Lost Books and Scott-Land: The Man Who Invented a Nation. He judged the Man Booker Prize in 2013 and is the programme director of the Glasgow Book Festival. Roger Kimball is the editor of the New Criterion. Alexander Maitland has written biographies of John Hanning Speke, Freya Stark and Wilfred Thesiger. Jessica Mann’s latest book is Dead Woman Walking (The Cornovia Press).

Allan Massie’s new novel, Cold Winter in Bordeaux, is published by Quartet this month. Jonathan McAloon has written for the TLS, The Spectator and the New Statesman. Keith Miller works for the Daily Telegraph. Jonathan Mirsky was an academic whose main research was on the Tang dynasty (618–906), the one before Huizong’s. His last position was East Asia Editor of The Times. Leslie Mitchell is Emeritus Fellow at University College, Oxford. His interests lie in the high politics of the 18th century. David Nirenberg’s most recent book is Anti-Judaism: The History of a Way of Thinking. His Neighboring Faiths: Christianity, Islam, and Judaism, Medieval and Modern will be published this spring. Richard Overy’s The Bombing War: Europe 1939–1945 was published in September. Lucy Popescu is the author of The Good Tourist (Arcadia Books). Bernard Porter is Emeritus Professor of Modern History at Newcastle University, but lives in Stockholm for half the year. Chris Riddell recently won the 2013 Costa Children’s Book Award. Lucian Robinson is a freelance writer. Ian Sansom’s most recent book is The Norfolk Mystery (Fourth Estate). Anne Sebba is writing about Paris through women’s eyes from 1939 to 1949. Charles Shaar Murray’s biographies of John Lee Hooker and Jimi Hendrix are published by Canongate. Frances Spalding’s two most recent books are John Piper, Myfanwy Piper: Lives in Art (OUP) and Prunella Clough: regions unmapped (Lund Humphries). D J Taylor’s The Windsor Faction was published in September by Chatto. Martin Vander Weyer is business editor of The Spectator and the author of a biography of the 1920s fraudster Gerard Lee Bevan. Francesca Wade is a freelance writer living in London.

Literary Review | f e b r u a r y 2 0 1 4 4

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