(From “Who You Calling A Skeptic?”)( The comments section from this website has some colorful language so be warned. Some people get very emotional when anything religious begins to creep into the realm of fact. I think they are justified given history. I think the fear of religion having any factual credibility has to do with a natural and logical fear of a future tyrant cloaking himself in religion and using it as a warped tool to control the masses, something that our Savior never encouraged and in fact warned against repeatedly.
World domination fears aside, I wanted to post this to discuss the Noah’s Ark archeological finds.
I received an email from a friend today that was very important. I posted the contents and my response below. It is about Noah’s Ark and by reference, the Global Flood, a topic that I researched for several years and turned into a novel titled First Earth that will be coming out as a prequel following the sequel to Second Sight. I hope I said that intelligently.
I left my friend’s name out of the transcript because I didn’t have a chance to ask permission to post his name yet. If you have interest in studying the Flood, two books I found very helpful were Wesley Patten’s ground breaking work “The Biblical Flood and the Ice Epoch” and George Erikson’s equally significant work “Atlantis in America”
Patten’s book has been out of print for some time now. I just saw a used copy available on Amazon.com. I would strongly encourage you to pick up both of these books. Wesley’s theories suffer from having been written in the sixties before we had a good understanding of orbiting celestial bodies. Unfortunately instead of science taking his important concepts and refining them, they appear to have been eagerly silenced. Hopefully George’s book and perhaps mine will help remedy that oversight.
And perhaps one of you out there will uncover the needed “holy grail” of evidence that puts to bed once and for all the question of whether the Biblical Flood was global and factual or just a myth that fifty isolated ancient cultures around the globe somehow created simultaneously.
Here is our conversation today on the subject. My heart felt thanks to my friend for sending me this post. It was a subject I have wanted to touch on.
CHINESE and Turkish evangelical explorers believe they may have found
Noah’s Ark – 4000m up a mountain in Turkey.
The team said it had recovered wooden specimens from a structure on
Mount Ararat in eastern Turkey that carbon dating proved was 4800
years old, around the same time the ark is said to have been afloat.
“It’s not 100 per cent that it is Noah’s Ark but we think it is 99.9
per cent that this is it,” said Yeung Wing-cheung, a Hong Kong
documentary filmmaker and member of the 15-strong team from Noah’s Ark
Ministries International.
The structure had several compartments, some with wooden beams, which
were believed to house animals, he said.
The group of evangelical archaeologists ruled out an established human
settlement on the grounds that one had never been found above 3500m in
the vicinity, Mr Yeung said.
Local Turkish officials would ask the central government in Ankara to
apply for UNESCO World Heritage status so the site could be protected
while a major archaeological dig was conducted, he added.
The biblical story says God decided to flood the earth after seeing
how corrupt it had become, and told Noah to build an ark and fill it
with two of every animal species.
After the flood waters receded, the Bible says, the ark came to rest
on a mountain. Many believe that Mount Ararat, the highest point in
the region, is where the ark and her inhabitants came aground.
Daniel Dare (This is the writer of the piece that my friend forwarded to me)
to (My Friend)
I have gotten a number of Noah’s Ark news pieces over the years. I am not going to claim to be an authority on the subject. If my dating techniques and understanding of the Flood story are accurate then I would place the Global Flood at a much earlier date, prior to 11,000 BC, possibly closer to 26,000 BC.
There have been several ancient ship remains found in the Mount Ararat region. If ancient man was as advanced or even more advanced than present levels of technology, it would be logical that remains of ships would be found on mountain tops if more global catastrophes happened thousands of years after the Flood. The idea that several global catastrophes have happened in the past is supported by the Bible and by ancient historians. Our history seems to be a series of “roller coaster” cultural rises and falls. Our civilization, technology, and knowledge increased over thousands of years and then was slammed back into barbarianism where the survivors had to start over.
I think it is logical to assume that other ships existed before the Global Flood. Noah doesn’t necessarily have to be the only person on the planet who knew how to build a big boat. He apparantly knew how to build a better boat though. It survived the Flood and landed safely on dry land. It wasn’t swallowed up in a swamp or quicksand pit. Did Noah call for a hasty evacuation of the animals as the Ark slowly got sucked into the mud? It would make an interesting movie but the Bible is silent on this possibility. Only boats that were sunk during the Flood would have been encased in mud deposited during the catastrophe. Noah’s Ark stayed put above ground. Ancient myth and folklore talk of people returning to the Ark’s resting place to take pieces of the Ark for souvenirs. I think the Ark landed on the mountainside and was exposed to the weather for a very long time.
I think Noah’s Ark is long gone. I think there are lots of ancient boat remains of advanced design waiting to be found in the mountains and under the oceans. We haven’t found many because I don’t think we have dug deep enough to find them. The boat-like remains trapped in the mud rock of Ararat could be from the time of Noah or could have been built after the Flood. The ships could have been built after civilization recovered as Plato suggests in his writings. These boat-like remains could be ships that were built during the Age that followed the Age of Noah. They may have been sunk and trapped during the second cataclysm known as the “Tilting of the Mill post” that ended the Second Age in (I think) 11,000 BC. The cataclysm according to multiple sources shook the Earth and launched large tidal waves capable of encasing things such as ships in mud rock. Unless I am missing something about how organic things decay, Noah’s ark if it landed in 26,000 BC would have rotted away long before the cataclysm of 11,000 BC.
Noah’s ark, if my math is right, would not have been sitting around on a mountain side waiting to be rolled by tidal waves and encased in the sediments that hide the other ship remains being found today. The Ark would have been dust by then.
All of the above is theory not fact, speculation not prediction. 🙂
JF Althouse
Update 30 April 2010
My colleague Glenn Ritter sent this to me. It sounds like so many people are crawling around Mt. Ararat that the nationals are starting to “Disney” it with fake artifacts. Similar to the crystal skull legend in Guatemala.
I saw this yesterday on Fox News:
http://www.comcast.net/video/evangelical-group-finds-noah-s-ark-/1480996768/Comcast/1480708691/
And it all may not be true:
http://www.wnd.com/index.php?pageId=146941
Some of my thoughts:
The structures pictured in the so called evidence do not appear ancient. I agree with the skeptics that the cobwebs hanging from the timbers are a dead give away that this structure was not originally from the glacier.
The planks are not sealed with tar or any kind of finish for that matter. The structure architecturally looks more like a room in a home or monastary than something that would need to resist dynamic forces on an ocean. If the Kurdish guides tore down a monastery to perpetuate this hoax, I hope they get butted by one of these.
Thank you Glenn!
Undoubtedly the Mt Ararat region will now be overwhelmed by hoards of artifact finders looking for the former floating version of the holy grail. As a word of caution to any eager, but yet novice archeaologist…”not all in life is an Indiana Jones movie”. If fortune befalls you and you happen to find a weathered piece of wood that measures close to 4′ x 8′ and has the faint tracing of the name “Weyerhauser” written on it …there is a real good chance its not the Ark.
That is sadly happening all over the world with the increased interest in archeology. There is a new site in Mexico where three statues resembling Buddha were found hidden inside a Mayan pyramid. The government tried to secure the site but by the time the soldiers got there two of the heads had already been removed for black market sales. We were among the first to view the statues under careful watch by the guards. Amazing find.
Due to massive movements of unchecked water of a global flood, similar locations of craft unlikely as older remains would tend toward fossilization or obliteration. I’ve long been a fan of the frozen barge stories of the 14,000-ft area of Mount Ararat, but have a growing interest in the Wyatt finds in the 6500-ft area 12 miles away on a neighboring peak (Genesis mentions “mountains of Ararat). Carbon dating is reasonably good for about 3500 years as the overlooked increase of Carbon-14 and its rate of increase indicates a time when Carbon-14 would be very low, giving our analysists artificially old age from errant assumptions of equilibrium. An outstanding study of the devastating action of the Flood and its consequences from a scientific perspective is Dr. Walt Brown’s at http://www.creationscience.com.
Thanks David. I was fascinated with the GPR studies done on some of the ship structures encapsulated in mud rock. The structures and detailing have been helpful as I begin work on First Earth, my stab at a fictional account of the global flood.