Searches for Noah's Ark

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Mount Ararat (39°42′N, 44°17′E), satellite image — a stratovolcano, 5,137 meters (16,854 ft) above sea level, prominence 3,611 meters, believed to have erupted within the last 10,000 years. The main peak is at the centre of the image.

From at least the time of Eusebius (c. 275 – 339 AD) to the present day, the search for the physical remains of Noah's Ark has held a fascination for Christians. Although Jews and Muslims share a religious tradition that includes Noah's Ark, adherents of these faiths have not been as interested in searching for physical evidence of this supposed relic.

1 Background
2 Locating the mountains of Ararat
3 Later searches
- 3.1 June 2006 expedition
4 Eyewitness accounts
5 Hoaxes
6 Further reading
7 See also
8 External links
9 Notes and references

[edit] Background

Noah's Ark is the huge vessel described in the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament book of Genesis and the Qur'an, through which the Hebrew God saved Noah, together with the other seven members of his family, 8 believers from his people, plus representatives of all the species of animals and birds, from a cataclysmic flood with which he wished to exterminate all other life on Earth. It is described as 300 cubits long, or approximately 450 feet (137 m) - considerably longer than any wooden vessel ever built in historical times.^[1] According to Genesis 8:4 the Ark came to rest "in the mountains of Ararat," though in the Qur'an the landing place is said to be Al-Judi ^[2].

The motivation of the searchers is summed up in this quotation from the Institute for Creation Research: "If the flood of Noah indeed wiped out the entire human race and its civilization, as the Bible teaches, then the Ark constitutes the one remaining major link to the pre-flood World. No significant artifact could ever be of greater antiquity or importance.... [with] tremendous potential impact on the creation-evolution (including theistic evolution) controversy."^[3] The writer might equally have added the implications for geology, cosmology, and almost every other branch of modern science.

The search has been largely American, supported by evangelical and millenarian churches, and sustained by ongoing popular interest expressed through faith-based magazines and lecture tours, videos, occasional television specials, and more recently the Internet.

[edit] Locating the mountains of Ararat

Ark searchers have had little to guide them to the Ark beyond the Genesis mention of the "mountains of Ararat." By the middle of the 19th century, archaeologists had identified a 1st millennium BC kingdom and region of Urartu, contemporaneous with the Assyrian empire and the early kingdoms of Judah and Israel, and located in the mountains of present-day Armenia and eastern Turkey.

The Byzantine emperor Heraclius is said to have made the trip in the 7th century.

Marco Polo (1254-1324) wrote in his book The Travels of Marco Polo that:

In the heart of Greater Armenia is a very high mountain shaped like a cube (or cup), on which Noah's ark is said to have rested, whence it is called the Mountain of Noah's Ark. It [the mountain] is so broad and long that it takes more than two days to go around it. On the summit the snow lies so deep all the year round that no one can ever climb it; this snow never entirely melts, but new snow is for ever falling on the old, so that the level rises.

[edit] Later searches

A road sign along the Silk Road in Turkey with the words Nuh'un Gemisi, or "Noah's Ship," pointing the way to the Durupınar site and away from Mount Ararat.

Not until the 19th century was the region settled enough, and Westerners welcome enough, for exploration by well-heeled Ark-seekers to begin in earnest. In 1829 Dr. Freidrich Parrott, who had made an ascent of Greater Ararat, wrote in his Journey to Ararat that "all the Armenians are firmly persuaded that Noah's Ark remains to this very day on the top of Ararat, and that, in order to preservation [sic], no human being is allowed to approach it."^[4] In 1876 James Bryce, historian, statesman, diplomat, explorer, and Professor of Civil Law at Oxford, climbed above the tree line and found a slab of hand-hewn timber, four feet long and five inches thick, which he identified as being from the Ark.^[5] In 1883 the British Prophetic Messenger and others reported that Turkish commissioners investigating avalanches had seen the Ark.^[6]

Activity fell off in the 20th century. In the Cold War Ararat found itself on the highly sensitive Turkish/Soviet border and in the midst of Kurdish separatist activities, so that explorers were likely to find themselves in extremely hazardous situations. Former astronaut James Irwin led two expeditions to Ararat in the 1980s, was kidnapped once, and like others found no tangible evidence of the Ark. "I've done all I possibly can," he said, "but the Ark continues to elude us."^[7]

In 2001 the Turkish government re-opened Mount Ararat to climbers. However, the government requires a climbing permit and the use of a certified Turkish trekking guide. It takes approximately two months to obtain climbing permission.

By the beginning of the 21st century two main candidates for exploration had emerged: the so-called Ararat anomaly near the main summit of Ararat (an "anomaly" in that it shows on aerial and satellite images as a dark blemish on the snow and ice of the peak), and the separate site at Durupınar near Dogubayazit, 18 miles south of the Greater Ararat summit. The Durupınar site was heavily promoted by adventurer and former nurse-anaesthetist Ron Wyatt in the 1980s and 1990s, and consists of a large boat-shaped formation jutting out of the earth and rock. It has the advantage over the Great Ararat site of being approachable—while hardly a major tourist attraction, it receives a steady stream of visitors, and the local authorities claimed that a nearby mountain is called "Mount Cudi" (or Judi), making it one of about five Mount Judis in the land of Kurdistan. Some geologists have identified the Durupınar site as a natural formation,^[8] but Wyatt's Ark Discovery Institute continues to champion its claims.^[9]

In 2004 Honolulu-based businessman Daniel McGivern announced he would finance a $900,000 expedition to the peak of Greater Ararat in July that year to investigate the "Ararat anomaly"—he had previously paid for commercial satellite images of the site.^[10] After much initial fanfare he was refused permission by the Turkish authorities, as the summit is inside a restricted military zone. The expedition was subsequently labelled a "stunt" by National Geographic News, which pointed out that the expedition leader, a Turkish academic named Ahmet Ali Arslan, had previously been accused of faking photographs of the Ark.^[11]

[edit] June 2006 expedition

In June 2006, Bob Cornuke of the Bible Archeology Search and Exploration Institute took a team of 14 American "business, law, and ministry leaders" to Iran to visit a site in the Alborz Mountains purported to be a possible resting place of the Ark. The team did not include any archaeologists or geologists among its members.

The team claimed to have discovered an "object" 13,000 feet above sea level, which had the appearance of blackened petrified wooden beams, and was "about the size of a small aircraft carrier" (400 ft long), and supposedly consistent with the dimensions provided in Genesis of 300 cubits by 50 cubits.^[12] The team also claimed to have found fossilised sea creatures inside the petrified wood, and in the immediate vicinity of the site.^[13] One member of the team claimed that 'a Houston lab used by the Smithsonian' tested some beams and confirmed they were petrified wood containing fossilised sea animals,^[14] but the name of the laboratory was not given. No one outside the expedition has offered independent confirmation, and apart from a few purported beams, no photographic images of this supposed Ark in its entirety have been made available (though short video segments have been made available^[15]). The team's consensus on the "object" is not absolute; Reg Lyle, another expedition member, described the find as appearing to be "a basalt dike". ^[13]

It is the official position of the BASE Institute that Iran was the logical resting place of the Ark.^[16] Their website does not definitely claim the object to be the Ark, but concludes that it is "a candidate". ^[17]

[edit] Eyewitness accounts

A number of individuals have reported seeing Noah's ark and even exploring it, either at the Ararat anomaly or at an alternative site on the mountain, the Ahora Gorge^[18]. The best known include:

In 1970 an Armenian, Georgie Hagopian^[19], claimed to have visited the Ark twice around 1908/1910 (1902 in another version) with his uncle. Hagopian claimed that he had climbed up onto the Ark and walked along its roof, and that many of his young friends had also claimed to have seen it. The online archive of the old USENET newsgroup talk.origins^[20] notes that "[t]he apparent ease of getting to the ark conflicts with the accounts of other explorers,"^[21] details given by Hagopian, including the size of his Ark and disposition of openings, conflict both with other reports and with the account given in the Book of Genesis. The exact size is not known, only the proportions. A cubit was from the elbow to tip of the finger, and not an exact length.

Ed Davis,^[22] a US army sergeant based at Hamadan in Iran during World War II, reported that he had climbed Mt. Ararat with his driver's family in 1943. After three day's climbing, the group camped 100 feet above the Ark, and was able to look down into it but not to approach closely. According to Davis's description it had broken into two pieces, which had drifted some distance apart via glaciers. Its description roughly matched Hagopian's, at least, judging by Elfred Lee's paintings. Lee also interviewed Ed Davis, and created a painting based on Davis's descriptions. The structures in the paintings appear to match. ^[23]

David Duckworth, ^[24] allegedly a volunteer with the Smithsonian, claimed to have seen photographs of the Ark and crates of artifacts being unloaded from a National Geographic expedition in 1968.

[edit] Hoaxes

A number of hoaxes have attended the search for the physical remains of Noah's Ark (note that this article addresses only modern-era incidents, and not the earlier, pre-modern Christian, Jewish and Islamic traditions which grew up around the Ark story).

According to a story widely disseminated on the Internet, Nicholas II of Russia sent an expedition to Mount Ararat in 1917-1918 to investigate the Ark. The fact that Nicholas abdicated during the February Revolution at the beginning of March 1917 (Gregorian calendar) makes the whole story unlikely. A few sources, apparently noticing this, put the date of the expedition at 1916, ("the Russian imperial air force ... is supposed to have sent 150 men up Mount Ararat in 1916 to explore a large object said to be as long as a city block," reads one), but even in 1916 the Russians were engaged in an increasingly desperate struggle with Germany on the Eastern Front, and it is unlikely that men and aircraft could have been spared for the adventure. No records of such an expedition have ever come to light. ^[25]

On April 1, 1933, the Kölnische Illustrierte Zeitung of Cologne published a story about an expedition sponsored by a Mrs. Putrid Lousey and including a "Prof. Mud" from "the Royal Yalevard University" in Massachusetts, the other "Prof. Stoneass". The story was accompanied by pictures including what looked like a giant boat on a mountainside, and also flintlock weapons, presumably for the explorers' protection in the wilderness, even though they could be seen to lack the necessary flints. On April 8 the paper admitted the article had been an April Fools Day hoax. Nevertheless, a refugee publication called Rubez adapted and published the story. In turn, a White Russian refugee publication called Mech Gedeona ("Sword of Gideon"), ran a Russian-language version. The names became garbled in transliteration, but the same pictures were reprinted each time. In 1972 the Mech Gedeona article came into the hands of Charles Willis of Fresno, California, who provided it to two Ark-search enthusiasts, Eryl Cummings and his wife. John Bradley, another Ark searcher, quickly provided them with the original German text, but even after this the Cummingses pursued for nearly four more months the possibility that the joke names were mistranscriptions into German rather than a hoax.^[26] (The idea that the specific association of the Ark with Mount Ararat - rather than the more general "mountains of Ararat" mentioned in Genesis - began with the Cologne paper's hoax, is widely disseminated on the Web, but is a misconception - the idea is far older, as demonstrated by the many medieval paintings of the subject).

In 1955 French explorer Fernand Navarra reportedly found a 5-foot wooden beam on Mount Ararat some 40 feet under the Parrot Glacier on the northwest slope and well above the treeline. The Forestry Institute of Research and Experiments of the Ministry of Agriculture in Spain certified the wood to be about 5,000 years old. A claim that is disputed by Radio Carbon dating -- two labs have dated the 1969 samples, one at 650 C.E. +/- 50 years, the other at 630 C.E. +/- 95 years.^[27] Navarra's guide later claimed the French explorer bought the beam from a nearby village and carried it up the mountain.^[25]

In 1977, a documentary called "In Search of Noah's Ark" aired on numerous television stations, claiming that the Ark had been found on Mt. Ararat; it was based on a book of the same title by David Balsiger and continues to be taken seriously by some in the Ark-search community, though is widely regarded as another hoax. This production is not to be confused with an episode from the third season of "In Search of... Noah's Flood" (1979) narrated by Leonard Nimoy.

In 1993 CBS aired a highly sensationalized special entitled "The Incredible Discovery of Noah's Ark,", which contained a long section devoted to the claims of George Jammal, who showed what he called "sacred wood from the ark". Jammal's story of a dramatic mountain expedition which allegedly took the life of "his Polish friend Vladimir" was actually a deliberate hoax, and Jammal - who was really an actor - later revealed that his "sacred wood" was wood taken from railroad tracks in Long Beach, California, and hardened by cooking with various sauces in an oven. ^[28]