The concept of spreading rumours or fake news is no alien to us but how did it all began in the first place?
One of the earliest examples of fake news has been found by a Cambridge academic in a 3,000-year-old clay tablet, which tells the Babylonian story of Noah and the Ark.
As per University researcher Dr. Martin Worthington, the words scribbled on the tablet by the Babylonian God Ea was a concept to trick people to build an Ark. Notably, this was the same Ark (Ship) that Ea used to save himself, his family, and two of every kind of animal from a flood.
The script in the tablet when translated, as per Worthington, reads that Babylonian Noah, fake promised his people that food will rain from the sky if they help him build the ark.
Notably, people were not able to understand the message because Ea used a sequence of sounds that can be understood in radically different ways, like English ‘ice cream’ and ‘I scream’.
In the end, the Ark was build and he, with the aforementioned, survived the flood while everyone else drowned.
Read more at The Telegraph