It was fascinating.
Digest version (spoiler alert) ...
Academic at British Museum with big beard deciphered Babylonian tablet and discovered origin of biblical flood story - even has the "animals two by two".
Unlike the bible the Babylonian story describes a boat that doesn't defy physics. It was circular!
The Euphrates and Tigris flooded all the time and these large coracles might actually have been built as community lifeboats.
The program had one built 12m diameter using the instructions from the ancient tablet and it worked beautifully.
Bible writers got the story during the exile in Babylon and turned it into the ridiculous Noah version.
There were a couple of things that made me laugh watching that program:
The boats that the ark was based on were called "Guffers" and the narrator kept saying the name with such deadly seriousness. I gave a puerile snicker every time.
The other thing was that the bearded academic was called Irving. "In his quest to discover more about the Babylonians Irving has come to Berlin". Irving Berlin??? Again the narrator didn't even give a hint of a smile. He must have been a robot.
The things that interested me were:
The program wasnt trying to prove the biblical ark \ flood story at all (despite the misleading program title). Instead it was trying to prove that local flooding was behind this Babylonian story and that the bible had clearly stolen and adapted it.
The flood story and ark instructions the program was working from predated the bible by a 1,000 years and *wasn't* the epic of Gilgamesh.
All in all, I was expecting ridiculousness but didn't quite get it. It was actually rather good.
