The Gordyene-Karduchi-Cudi (Kudi) Mountains of Noahs Ark

Was Noah's Ark ROUND? 3,700-year-old clay tablet reveals giant boat was made out of reeds and bitumen

* Dr Irving Finkel has translated cuneiform text on an 3,700-old clay tablet
* The ancient script details the Mesopotamian story of Noah's Ark
* The text also contains instructions on how to build an ark to escape a flood
* But its describes the craft as being a round 220-ft diameter coracle
* The design is very different to the popular imagining of a traditional ship

It was a vast boat that saved two of each animal and a handful of humans from a catastrophic flood.

But a controlversial new theory claims that in fact, Noah's Ark was round - and made of reeds.

a leading academic claims a recently deciphered 4,000-year-old tablet from ancient Mesopotamia reveals the striking new details about the roots of the Old Testament tale of Noah.

It tells a similar story, complete with detailed instructions for building a giant round vessel known as a coracle — as well as the key instruction that animals should enter 'two by two.'

The tablet went on display at the British Museum today, and soon engineers will follow the ancient instructions to see whether the vessel could actually have sailed.

It's also the subject of a new book, "The Ark Before Noah," by Irving Finkel, the museum's assistant keeper of the Middle East and the man who translated the tablet.

Finkel got hold of it a few years ago, when a man brought in a damaged tablet his father had acquired in the Middle East after World War II.

It was light brown, about the size of a mobile phone and covered in the jagged cuneiform script of the ancient Mesopotamians.

'It was really a heart-stopping moment — the discovery that the boat was to be a round boat,' said Finkel, who sports a long gray beard, a ponytail and boundless enthusiasm for his subject.