This morning I completed work on next Thursday's funeral order of service, having written a eulogy and got it approved by the family yesterday. There's nothing more to do except relax and enjoy a family Christmas with no services to take and no sermons to write. It's the first time since 2010, the year I retired and we spent Christmas in Canada with Rachel.
I finally got around to an expedition into town to buy Clare and Christmas present this afternoon. It was very crowded and queues to pay were long, but I got for her just what I wanted.
Grand daughter Jasmine arrived last night in the UK to spend Christmas with her Dad's parents. We didn't think we'd see her this time around, as our ability is travel and bring her to Wales is limited at the moment by my condition and Clare's poor eyesight. John, however is bring her down to stay with us over New Year, and we are delighted to have her for a few days. We'll have her to ourselves as the rest of the family, unfortunately, will leave us just before she arrives.
Tonight the last double episode of 'The Sinner' was on BBC Four, full of tragic twists and turns to the end, all of which revealed that the accused woman was utterly traumatized by being sinned against rather than being 'The Sinner' of the drama's title. It was a very thought provoking subject, and the acting was very good, even if it was harrowing and perhaps needlessly close to being pornographic on times, for my taste. Nevertheless, it retained the interest in both characters and story throughout, in a way that American crime dramas tend not to. Worth watching.
Before it there was a fascinating documentary on More Four called 'The Real Noah's Ark', based on the discovery in Iraq of an ancient cuneiform tablet containing detailed instructions for building a boat big enough to carry people and animals, similar in content to those found in the Genesis story of Noah. Biblical scholars have for the past century recognised the similarities between some of its stories and ones that are part of Babylonian ancient history. This text was used to inform the construction of a giant 13 metre diameter coracle, a large enough to hold and protect a household and its livestock in time of floods. Two meter wide coracles were made and used in early 20th century Mesapotamia, but this tradition has since died out.
The Mesapotamian river plain through which the Euphrates and Tigris rivers run has long been known to be prone to seasonal flooding, and even occasional catastrophically huge ones. Recent archaeological surveys of land have disclosed that the contemporary flood plain is smaller than it was two to three thousand years ago. Ancient Babylon was served by a network of river fed canals, and although now an arid region, was certainly subject to great floods in times past. So there is every good reason to understand that the story of Noah, whoever wrote the biblical version, was borrowed from Babylonian storytellers, and may have been taught to children in schools there at that time.
As an archaeological experiment, a giant coracle was successfully built in South India according to those ancient instructions and sailed on water, as proof of concept. Historical speculation put to the test with projects of this kind provide us with insight into the ingenuity and skill of our ancestors, and show how technically sophisticated their engineering could be without the materials and tools which industrial era people take for granted. It's a salutary lesson from history for a high-tech world.
