Was Noah's Ark real? In "Debunking Myths: The Truth About NOAH's Ark", a live episode of Why The Big Secret hosted by Roderick Martin, Billy Carson argues that Genesis retells a much older Mesopotamian story, that the oldest surviving instructions describe a round rope-and-bitumen coracle rather than a wooden ship, and that the Sunday-school version with two of every animal survives only because people "want to believe in fairy tales". The episode works through Atrahasis, Gilgamesh and the Book of Enoch, the ark's dimensions in Genesis 6, the Babylonian Ark Tablet published by the British Museum's Irving Finkel, and Carson's reading of the Emerald Tablets.
The topic matters because the flood is one of the most widely told stories on Earth and the clearest case of a biblical narrative with older, datable parallels in cuneiform. Whether those parallels are borrowed myth, shared memory of a real catastrophe or evidence of instruction from non-human beings is exactly where Carson and mainstream Assyriology part ways.
What the video covers
Three older flood stories (from about 6:00)
Martin opens with three other accounts. In the Atrahasis epic, humans are created by Enki and the mother goddess Mami to do the work of the gods; Enlil, irritated by human noise, sends plague, then famine, then a flood, while Enki warns Atrahasis, whose name means "exceedingly wise". In the Epic of Gilgamesh, Utnapishtim is warned in a dream, builds a boat, grounds on a mountain and releases a dove, a swallow and a raven. In the Book of Enoch, the flood cleanses an Earth corrupted after the Watchers father the Nephilim. The same skeleton appears in each, Martin notes, as it does in Greek, Hindu, Chinese, Norse and Aztec flood stories.
How big was the ark (from about 18:00)
Genesis 6:15 gives 300 by 50 by 30 cubits, roughly 450 by 75 by 45 feet. Martin sets that against the Titanic, 882 feet long, 92 feet wide, steel-hulled and rated for 3,547 people, and against the popular figure of 50,000 animals and two million insects aboard a wooden vessel crewed by eight people. He shows the Ark Encounter in Kentucky, a full-scale replica whose researchers put the count nearer 7,000. He ends by asking who built it, and why Genesis says only eight souls were saved if Noah had helpers.
Fairy tales, the Emerald Tablets and the caves (from about 33:00)
Carson joins half an hour in and states his position plainly: the story as taught never happened. Two lions or two giraffes cannot repopulate a species, so the reading fails on biology, and people hold on to it because they want a rescue narrative instead of the work of making a good life here. For the true history he points to the Emerald Tablets, which he covers in his Compendium, and the Epic of Gilgamesh. He describes the opening of the tablets as temples rising out of mud after water had covered the land, with survivors emerging from caves, and says "we're talking about a global flood". The Bible itself, he adds, preserves survivors outside the ark, kings who hid in caves and Nephilim who lived on.
Gilgamesh, the made companion and Ziusudra (from about 38:00)
In Carson's telling, Enlil sends Gilgamesh into the wilderness and fashions him a companion, a made man imbued with knowledge, which Carson compares to artificial intelligence. The two search for Ziusudra, whom Carson identifies with Utnapishtim and the biblical Noah, one figure under two names. He states that this account was written in the Emerald Tablets 4,400 years before the Bible existed.
The Ark Tablet and the round ark (from about 39:00)
Carson holds up the tablet he says carries the original instructions, and the shape is a disc, not a ship. Asked whether it could have been a craft, he answers that at the least it was "a DNA bank". He reads the text as Enki instructing his son, a man of mixed human and Anunnaki parentage. He connects this to the account of Noah's birth with bright skin and light eyes, unlike everyone around him, so that Enki claims him. The instruction, in his reading, is to gather the livestock, plants and seed Noah had cultivated locally, not two of every creature on the planet.
Albino or giant, and who wrote the tablets (from about 44:00)
Asked whether Noah was a Nephilim, Carson says he was not a giant but an albino, and that the Anunnaki came in every complexion found on Earth. He ties this to Thoth's mixed crew in the Emerald Tablets, who rebuild Khem after the flood and spread out to found civilisations, leaving a genetic marker on the people they ruled, his gloss on "let us make man in our image". On the sources, his argument is practical: cuneiform on wet clay was slow, hard work and nobody spent months carving fiction, so "they wrote what they were told and they wrote what they saw".
Enoch, and the Finkel report (from about 50:00 and 57:00)
With a one-volume edition of the Books of Enoch on the desk, Carson argues Enoch was left out of the Bible because he is plainly conversing with beings from elsewhere and his departure was a planned journey with them, not a mystical ascension. He then reads a news report on the Ark Tablet: 3,700-year-old instructions for a round boat of 3,600 square metres, built like a giant rope basket sealed with bitumen, a design used on Iraqi rivers into the twentieth century, with Finkel's remark that he is "107 per cent" convinced the ark never existed. Carson's takeaway is that the Babylonians scaled up a boat they already knew, that the text is older than Genesis, and that the biblical version is therefore a fallacy. Martin's verdict is a flat no.
Heaven as a state of mind, old souls and the programme (from about 1:00:00)
The last half hour leaves the ark. Carson argues that "heaven and hell is a state of mind", answers a question on reincarnation with the conservation of energy and the child prodigy as an old soul, cites a sealed-flask experiment against evolution, and invokes James Gates's adinkra codes to argue that the universe is a running programme.
Key takeaways
The Genesis flood has older cuneiform parallels in Atrahasis, the Ziusudra story and Gilgamesh Tablet XI, which Carson treats as the originals.
The Babylonian Ark Tablet, published by Irving Finkel in 2014, describes a round coracle of rope and bitumen, not the rectangular wooden ship of Genesis.
Carson's reading is that the hero gathered local livestock, seed and plants, a DNA bank, rather than two of every species.
He argues that Nephilim and other survivors came through the flood.
Mainstream scholars agree the Mesopotamian versions are older but date them roughly a thousand years before Genesis, not 4,400, and do not accept the Emerald Tablets as an ancient source.
Billy Carson's reading
Carson's position matches the wider case he makes in The Compendium of the Emerald Tablets: the Hebrew scriptures inherited and simplified a Mesopotamian record of real events involving the Anunnaki, and the flood hero was a man of partly Anunnaki descent who received direct instruction from Enki. The god who decrees the flood and the god who leaks the warning are the brothers whose rivalry runs through the Sumerian corpus, covered in Enki and Enlil. For Carson the round ark is the decisive detail: if the oldest instructions describe a coracle built from materials Babylonians already used, then the rectangular ark, the worldwide animal census and the drowning of everyone outside it are later additions, and the honest reading is a local, instructed survival operation that preserved seed stock and breeding animals. He reads cuneiform as reportage rather than literature, and he argues the Bible was edited rather than merely mistaken: the omission of Enoch, the loss of Noah's strange birth and the disappearance of the round boat all point, in his view, to editors removing material that made the "gods" too obviously physical. His fuller argument on the Watchers is in The Book of Enoch explained.
What mainstream scholarship says
Assyriologists agree with Carson on the central point: the Genesis flood has Mesopotamian antecedents. The Sumerian Ziusudra story survives in a copy of about 1600 BCE, Atrahasis in copies of the seventeenth century BCE, and the Standard Babylonian Gilgamesh, whose Tablet XI George Smith read in 1872, was compiled toward the end of the second millennium BCE. Genesis in its present form is generally dated to the first millennium BCE and read as a reworking of that tradition, so the gap is about a thousand years, not 4,400. The Emerald Tablets of Thoth were published by Maurice Doreal in 1939, and the medieval Tabula Smaragdina behind the name is a short alchemical text with no flood narrative, so scholars do not treat them as an ancient source.
The Ark Tablet, published in Finkel's The Ark Before Noah (2014), is a privately owned tablet of about 1750 BCE brought to the British Museum for study in 1985 and exhibited there in 2014, not a new discovery that year. It does give Atra-hasis instructions from Enki for a round coracle of coiled rope sealed with bitumen, about 3,600 square metres in floor area. Two details cut against Carson's reading. The same tablet has the line about wild animals entering "two by two", the earliest known occurrence of the phrase, so the animal census is not a biblical invention. And Gilgamesh Tablet XI describes a boat with equal sides, not a disc, so the tradition did not agree on the shape. Finkel's own conclusion is that the story is a story.
Several other claims do not match the texts. In Gilgamesh, Enkidu is made from clay by the goddess Aruru at the plea of the people of Uruk, and Gilgamesh seeks Utnapishtim on his own initiative after Enkidu's death; no version has Enlil send him or makes Enkidu a machine. Noah's luminous birth is told in 1 Enoch 106 and the Genesis Apocryphon from Qumran, not in Genesis. Genesis 7:21-23 says everything outside the ark died; the case for post-flood Nephilim rests on Genesis 6:4 and Numbers 13:33, and the kings hiding in caves come from Isaiah 2:19 and Revelation 6:15, which are judgement passages. The sealed-flask story runs against Pasteur's experiments of the 1860s, evolution remains the consensus of biology, and Gates's error-correcting codes, named after Akan adinkra symbols from Ghana rather than the Dogon, are a feature of supersymmetry equations, not proof the universe is software.
Watch, read and go deeper
The cuneiform sources are covered in The Epic of Gilgamesh explained and The Atrahasis epic explained, which give the flood tablet, the Igigi revolt and the creation of humans that Martin summarises. For the giants question held over for the follow-up episode, read Who were the Nephilim. Everything on the site about Sumer and the Anunnaki is gathered on the Anunnaki and Sumer hub, and Roderick Martin's show is on 4BK TV at Why The Big Secret.
Frequently asked questions
Was Noah's Ark real?
There is no archaeological or geological evidence for a global flood or the ark, and claimed remains on Mount Ararat have not held up to examination. Scholars read Genesis as part of a Mesopotamian flood tradition about a thousand years older. Billy Carson agrees the biblical version is not literal but argues the older tablets record a real, instructed survival event.
What is the Ark Tablet?
The Ark Tablet is a palm-sized Babylonian cuneiform tablet of about 1750 BCE, published by Irving Finkel in The Ark Before Noah (2014). In it Enki tells Atra-hasis to build a round coracle of coiled rope sealed with bitumen, about 3,600 square metres in floor area. It is the oldest known text in which animals board two by two.
Is the Epic of Gilgamesh older than the Bible?
Yes. The Gilgamesh flood story, and the older Atrahasis and Ziusudra versions, were written between the seventeenth and twelfth centuries BCE, while the Genesis flood narrative is dated by most scholars to the first millennium BCE. The shared details, the warning, the boat, the birds and the sacrifice afterward, are why scholars see Genesis as drawing on that tradition.
Who was Ziusudra?
Ziusudra is the Sumerian flood hero, the king of Shuruppak who is warned by Enki, survives the deluge in a boat and is granted eternal life. Atrahasis and Utnapishtim are the Akkadian versions of the same figure, and Carson identifies all three with the biblical Noah.
Sources mentioned
Carson and Martin draw on Genesis 6 and 7, the Atrahasis epic, the Epic of Gilgamesh, the Book of Enoch, the Emerald Tablets of Thoth as presented in Carson's Compendium of the Emerald Tablets, the Babylonian Ark Tablet as published by Irving Finkel in The Ark Before Noah, the Ark Encounter in Kentucky and the physicist S. James Gates Jr. on adinkra codes. Standard references are Andrew George's translation of The Epic of Gilgamesh, Stephanie Dalley's Myths from Mesopotamia, which includes Atrahasis, and the Nickelsburg and VanderKam translation of 1 Enoch.
