The Noahs ark and why it didn't happen

[Confused Ape]

There's a much earlier version of the flood story from Babylon. Another tablet came to light with information about the Babylonian version of the ark. This article about it is on the British Museum website.

Was the ark round? A Babylonian description discovered

When the gods decided to wipe out mankind with a flood, the god Enki, who had a sense of humour, leaked the news to a man called Atra-hasis, the ‘Babylonian Noah,’ who was to build the Ark. Atra-hasis’s Ark, however was round. To my knowledge, no one has ever thought of that possibility. The new tablet also describes the materials and the measurements to build it: quantities of palm-fibre rope, wooden ribs and bathfuls of hot bitumen to waterproof the finished vessel. The result was a traditional coracle, but the largest the world had ever dreamed of, with an area of 3,600 sq. metres (equivalent to two-thirds the area of a football pitch), and six-metre high walls. The amount of rope prescribed, stretched out in a line, would reach from London to Edinburgh!

To anyone who has the typical image learnt from children’s toys and book illustrations in mind, a round Ark is bizarre at first, but, on reflection, the idea makes sense. A waterproofed coracle would never sink and being round isn’t a problem – it never had to go anywhere: all it had to do was float and keep the contents safe: a cosmic lifeboat. Palm-and-pitch coracles had been seen on the Euphrates and Tigris rivers since time immemorial: they were still a common sight on Iraq’s great waterways in the 1950s.

If the flood had really happened you'd think that future generations would have

1: Agreed on the name of their ancestor who built it and not called him Atra-hasis or Utnapishtim (in the Epic Of Gilgamesh) or Noah in the Bible.

2: Remembered what shape the ark was so there weren't two different designs for it.