Noah's Ark ark could contain all the animals in the world, argued that Moses, the traditional author of the book of Genesis, had been brought up in Egypt and would therefore have used the larger Egyptian cubit. He also fixed the shape of the ark as a truncated pyramid, square at its base, and tapering to a square peak one cubit on a side; it was not until the 12th century that it came to be thought of as a rectangular box with a sloping roof. Early Christian artists depicted Noah standing in a small box on the waves, symbolizing God saving
Generations of Noah traced their ancestry; in William of Malmesbury's version of this genealogy (c. 1120), Sceaf is instead made a descendant of "Strephius", the fourth son born aboard the Ark ("Gesta Regnum Anglorum"). An early Arabic work known as "Kitab al-Magall" "Book of Rolls" (part of Clementine literature) mentions "Bouniter", the fourth son of Noah, born after the flood, who allegedly invented astronomy and instructed Nimrod. Variants of this story with often similar names for Noah's fourth son are also found in the c. fifth century Ge'ez work "Conflict of Adam and Eve with Satan" ("Barvin"), the c. sixth century Syriac book