[The Australian Panther]

Tempted to get into it about the legend.
But, what has always amused me about pictorial depictions of Noah's Ark is the totally inappropriate animals depicted.
I think the visual traditions must have started in the Victorian timers. The animals are almost always African,
So the lineup on page 13 - [2 by 2] is all African except for Camels and one chicken. Page 15 has two polar bears and two moose- which must have been uncomfortable for them - and two kangaroos. And one dog. Page 17 has 5 ducks and 4 chickens. Also two horses and I'm pretty sure Horses weren't known in the middle east at that time. They were introduced much later by a people known as the HYKSOS.
The artist is making wry editorial comment I think, by some of his depictions. On page 19 we have a cat eyeing off two mice, two dogs chasing two rabbits, two foxes eyeing off two geese and Noah apparently throwing up his hands in horror!
Page 23 - two Walrus, two Bison and two Vultures!
Page 25 - two Dinosaurs. (which had to be left behind) and page 27 a list of animals which refused to go in, had to be left behind and of course went extinct. The artists editorial comment is shown by the addition of two unicorns and two pink elephants.
OH, he was having fun! There are little gags in corners in all the illustrations .
My reaction to page 37?
After 40 days, can you imagine the smell?
Page 47 is interesting because he has apparently depicted people from many races and cultures.

Link to the book: Story of Noah's Ark

[Robb_K]

Tempted to get into it about the legend.
But, what has always amused me about pictorial depictions of Noah's Ark is the totally inappropriate animals depicted.
I think the visual traditions must have started in the Victorian timers. The animals are almost always African,
So the lineup on page 13 - [2 by 2] is all African except for Camels and one chicken. Page 15 has two polar bears and two moose- which must have been uncomfortable for them - and two kangaroos. And one dog. Page 17 has 5 ducks and 4 chickens. Also two horses and I'm pretty sure Horses weren't known in the middle east at that time. They were introduced much later by a people known as the HYKSOS.

NO ONE can ever know the TRUE story, because even the earliest written version that will ever be found will be, at least, a word-of-mouth, passed down legend, a few thousand years later than the original real-life event that spawned it (likely the end of the great glacial melt, at the end of The Earth's last Ice Age, which caused the breakthrough of the rising Mediterranean waters into The Black Sea Basin around 5600 BCE. Irving Finkel's theories on the reed ark that Utnapishtim could have used is appropriate for exploring the possibility of what might have been the situation of what spawned the legend carried through the generations by word of mouth down to the Pre-Sumerians at the mouth of The Persian Gulf. But, I rather think that the original event was the experience of a farmer dwelling in a village near the northern shore of The Black Sea (when it was a large freshwater lake) just before The Bosporus breakthrough, who put in his family, and one breeding pair of each of his domesticated farm animals (and perhaps one or two breeding pairs of non-dangerous wild animals (deer?)), and who was forced to migrate to a new place to live, because their land ended up at the bottom of a new ocean sea. His descendants likely eventually ended up in Northern Mesopotamia a few hundred years later, and the legend was carried south to the mouth of Persian Gulf along with other north Mesopotamian culture, after farming had been developed and refined there, and was carried south by migrants there, who mixed with the other elements of the eventual Pre-Sumerians, who had migrated to southern Mesopotamia from southern Iran, Pakistan, and northwestern India. Naturally, the original story was exaggerated greatly over the almost 3,000 years of word-of-mouth storytelling, before it was first written down many hundreds of miles away from the location of its occurrence, in a land of vastly different climate and physical features, with very different indigenous animal life than that of The Black Sea Basin's northern shore.

[The Australian Panther]

Robb,
I think your trajectory of the migration of the Semetic peoples is pretty logical and accurate.
However there definitely was a substantial flood in the area spoken of in the Bible at a much later date.
Woolley's Excavations (of UR)
http://www.ur-online.org/about/woolleys-excavations/

In the digging season from 1928 to 1929, after Woolley had excavated part of the cemetery to a depth of 10 to 13 meters, Woolley decided to dig below the floor levels of the excavated burials. He made a startling discovery: a thick layer of water-laid silt indicative of flooding on top of a layer containing characteristic black-painted pottery of the Ubaid period, the earliest phase of occupation on the southern Mesopotamian floodplain. What did this mean? In some of his publications Woolley connected this deep layer of silt to the Biblical flood, which may also be alluded to in the Sumerian King List. 

My underestanding is that subsequent investigation indicated that at the time pinpointed there was a flood that inudated most of what is now Iraq, since that flood evidence can be found at that level elsewhere. But it is not universal.
We need to remember that we think of 'The world' as the planet, but in the past that concept would have just referred to the known world for those people at that time and place. So a flood so overwhelming that it was remembered for generations by the survivors and one that wiped out the substantial civilization that existed previously, so that everything had to be rebuilt from scratch.
But I believe that the point of the flood story is that like everything in the Bible, it's there for teaching purposes, to inculcate ethics and morals and relationship with God, rather than to be interpreted strictly in a literal sense.
This book is a creative work, like everything posted on CB+ and should be accepted as such. Nice to have a discussion about the subject matter, but not essential.
cheers!             

[Robb_K]

Robb,
I think your trajectory of the migration of the Semetic peoples is pretty logical and accurate.
However there definitely was a substantial flood in the area spoken of in the Bible at a much later date.
Woolley's Excavations (of UR)
http://www.ur-online.org/about/woolleys-excavations/

In the digging season from 1928 to 1929, after Woolley had excavated part of the cemetery to a depth of 10 to 13 meters, Woolley decided to dig below the floor levels of the excavated burials. He made a startling discovery: a thick layer of water-laid silt indicative of flooding on top of a layer containing characteristic black-painted pottery of the Ubaid period, the earliest phase of occupation on the southern Mesopotamian floodplain. What did this mean? In some of his publications Woolley connected this deep layer of silt to the Biblical flood, which may also be alluded to in the Sumerian King List. 

My underestanding is that subsequent investigation indicated that at the time pinpointed there was a flood that inudated most of what is now Iraq, since that flood evidence can be found at that level elsewhere. But it is not universal.
We need to remember that we think of 'The world' as the planet, but in the past that concept would have just referred to the known world for those people at that time and place. So a flood so overwhelming that it was remembered for generations by the survivors and one that wiped out the substantial civilization that existed previously, so that everything had to be rebuilt from scratch.
But I believe that the point of the flood story is that like everything in the Bible, it's there for teaching purposes, to inculcate ethics and morals and relationship with God, rather than to be interpreted strictly in a literal sense.
This book is a creative work, like everything posted on CB+ and should be accepted as such. Nice to have a discussion about the subject matter, but not essential.
cheers!           

I knew about the periodic catastrophic floods that destroyed much of the man-made known"World' of The Tigris/Euphrates Valley during the Chalcolithic Period.  But, I also know that legends built up over thousands of years of verbal recounting, tend to blend in with similar stories from other sources. The Sumerians, who wrote "The Epic of Gilgamesh", just as The Ubadians of southern Mesopotamia, were a mixture of northern Mesopotamians (mixture of Semites and other peoples (some of whom migrated there from the north), who, after becoming overpopulated after farming techniques had been progressing so well, had their excess migrating southward, while others were migrating westward from southern Iran, and northwestwards from The Indus and Sarasvati valleys, who also had flood myths from the same rising ocean event, and continued melting of glacial period ice.  After the disparate peoples amalgamated into The Al Ubaid Civilisation in Sumer, the new, single people, likely developed a new "flood story" which was a blending of all the original legends into one.  One of my major reasons for believing that The Black Sea Flood was a major contributor to that tradition is that the so-called "Pre-Sumerian Script" characters that look very like the Pre-Cuneiform Hieroglyph-type drawings that appear very similar to Sumerian Cuneiform characters, were found on the western shores of The Black Sea, and date back to The Calcolithic Period.  A natural path for immigrants from The Black Sea flood to migrate is southward, and coming from The Caucasus area, through Armenia and down into northern Mesopotamia is a closer route than staying in the mountains, and following The Zagros chain southeastwards, and arriving in southern Mesopotamia.  Also, the climate in northern Mesopotamia was significantly wetter then, than it is now, while southern Mesopotamia (Sumer) was already dessicating into steppland, semi-desert, and an impenetrable marshland near the delta of the two rivers.  So, I believe that The Northern Mesopotamians brought "The Whole World was covered with water" element, and "The Ark landed on The Mountains of Ararat" elements of "The Great Flood Story" to the blending with the other immigrant peoples' flood stories, which, eventually ended up in The Sumerians' "Epic of Gilgamesh", and later, adopted by The Hebrews during Patriarchal times, when they dwelled in Aram Nachraim (area of Harran, Edessa, and Urkesh(Valley of The Khabur River)), in northeastern Syria 2,000-1600 BCE (before migrating southward with The Hyksos to Phoenicia, and Palestine). Those legends handed down by word of mouth, stayed with all The Western Semites, and were later incorporated into The Bible, after The Temple in Jerusalem was destroyed, and The Judahites' educated and political elite were taken captive to Babylonia (where they got their traditional legend corroborated by The Sumerian Gilgamesh story (likely from the same original source)).  It doesn't seem likely to me that The Judahite educated elite (Rabbis) could learn of the Mesopotamian flood story from The Babylonian Archives, and think that would be a good tool to get a religious point across to their own people, to help them keep their identity as a distinct people, IF their people didn't already have a great flood story in their tradition.

I agree with you that The Hebrew Bible's "stories" were written by their authors with ulterior motives in mind, rather than just to recount events in its people's and The World's history.  And it should be read by modern people, and especially historians in that light.  But I also think that if examined in the context of what current historians, language historians, archaeologists, and DNA scientists are constantly discovering, we can get much better insight into why and how historical events occurred, and why civilisation developed the way it did.

Of course everything we surmise will always be just theories, but, the more evidence to which we get exposed, the more likely we are, on the whole, moving at least, a little closer towards what actually happened.

In any case, we see in this children's book, the personal interpretation of the author's memory of that Bible story, knowing that most artists would have their own, unique interpretation.  I, myself, despite knowing of the 7 pairs of "clean" animal species and only 2 of "unclean, would have only drawn two pairs for each, as drawing 7 pairs would result in too much clutter, and add too much work!