An eminent authority on the history of Mesopotamia told me that he
considered the deluge to have been a purely local catastrophe in the
flat land of Babylonia. The Arabs use the same word alternately for
mountain or desert. If such a use has come down from long ago the
extraordinary statements in Genesis vii. 20: "Fifteen cubits upward did
the waters prevail; and the mountains were covered," may be easily
reconciled. It has always seemed to me that mountains which were covered
by 24 feet of water must have looked very insignificant even in the flat
land of Chaldea. If, however, the word "desert" will serve equally well
for the word "mountain" we have an account of a flood that could easily
destroy the "world" of Mesopotamia. The annual flood from which the
nomadic inhabitants were used to escaping (as they do now by moving up
to the higher ground) became a wide-spread inundation till the highest
"desert" was covered and the population drowned.

The Biblical account of the Ark suggests to any dweller in Mesopotamia
that it was a gigantic mahaila. The pitching inside and out is still
practised in putting together some of the Euphrates boats, and the
method of making a goufa, covering it on both sides with bitumen, has a
strong family likeness to the method of boat-building used in those
primitive times.

The Jew, however, was always a typical landlubber, and one would expect
a specification for the building of a ship would lack nautical details.
Not so, however, the Assyrian tablet relating to the Ark. It was, we are
told, a true ship. It was decked in. It was well caulked in all its
seams. It was handed over to a pilot. It was navigated in proper style.
"I steered about the sea. The corpses drifted about like logs. I opened
a port-hole.... I steered over countries which were now a terrible sea."