Noah's Ark may have been round and not pointed

Despite popular belief that Noah's Ark was a long vessel with a pointy bow, a new study suggests that the original shape of the vessel was actually round.

A recently deciphered 4,000-year-old clay tablet from ancient Mesopotamia-modern-day Iraq-reveals 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," Fox News reported.

The tablet went on display at the British Museum on Friday, 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 turned out, Finkel said Friday, to be "one of the most important human documents ever discovered."

Finkel said a round boat makes sense. Coracles were widely used as river taxis in ancient Iraq and are perfectly designed to bob along on raging floodwaters.