Hidden History: Lost Civilizations, Secret Knowledge, and Ancient Mysteries, Brian Haughton [books you need to read .TXT] 📗

in the book of Genesis in the Bible. According to the story, when God saw the corruption in the world, he decided to bring floodwaters to destroy His creation. Of all human life, only the righteous Noah and his family would be allowed to survive. God instructed Noah to construct a huge ark, large enough so that two of every living species on the planet could be accommodated within it. It is said that the rains sent by God

lashed the earth for 40 days and 40 nights, until the entire land surface of the planet was submerged. When the rains finally abated and the floodwaters began to recede, Noah's ark came to ground in the area of Mount Ararat (in modern Turkey). Noah sent out a dove to see if there was anywhere for it to land, but the dove returned. After seven more days, Noah sent it out again, and this time it returned carrying an olive leaf. Waiting another week, the dove was again sent out, and did not return. Noah now knew there was dry land and it was time to leave the ship. After disembarking, Noah offered sacrifice. God approved, and then concluded a covenant with Noah, in which He agreed to never again to flood the Earth because of the sins of mankind, symbolizing his promise with a rainbow in the sky.

The ark itself, according to the Bible, was akin to a huge barge, probably constructed of cypress wood and sealed with bitumen to make it watertight. Genesis only mentions one window, though perhaps there would have been more, and a door set in the side of the ark; the vessel contained a number of rooms spread over three interior decks. The dimensions of the ark were roughly 450 feet in length, 75 feet in width, and 45 feet in height; proportions making it the largest seagoing ship prior to the 20th century, with a displacement similar to that of the Titanic. Its length surpasses that of any other wooden vessel ever built. A much debated question is whether such a ship could possibly have carried two specimens of every species of animal, not to mention how Noah and his family could have collected them all in the first place. The accepted theory today is that if the Noah's Ark story is to be taken literally, then the vessel may have contained kinds instead of species-so rather than every type from the cat family (lions, tigers, and leopards), there were perhaps a male and female representing the whole cat group.

The search for the remains of the elusive ark has been going on for perhaps 2,000 years, and such a find, were it ever made, would be extraordinary

proof for the literal reality of the Bible. Genesis 8:4 states that the ark came to rest on "the mountains of Ararat," which indicates not a particular mountain, but a region. Unfortunately, in the modern era the search for the ark, or arkaeology as it is sometimes called, is peppered with dubious research and outright hoaxes. One of the first claims to have seen the ark in the 20th century came from French explorer Fernand Navarra. In 1955, Navarra apparently climbed more than 2.5 miles up Ararat and discovered hand-hewn wood in a wall of ice. He claimed he was able to remove a sample of the wood, which he brought back down with him. In a further expedition in 1969 he found more wood. The samples of wood from the two expeditions were later submitted to six different laboratories and produced dates from 1,190 to 1,690 years ago. But those dates are far too recent to have any connection with Noah's Ark, even if the material was genuinely found on Ararat. There are, however, serious reasons to doubt this. Navarra has specified several different locations where he was supposed to have discovered the wood, and it has also been suggested, by one of his expedition members and his guides, that he actually bought the wood from natives in town and took it up the mountain himself. Ararat's position on the extremely sensitive Turkish/Soviet (now Armenian) border has limited the number of modern ark-hunting expeditions, although it is becoming increasingly likely that there is little to find up there anyway. Beginning in 1973, former NASA astronaut James Irwin led several expeditions to Mount Ararat, but, as with scores of climbers and explorers before and since, failed to find any evidence of the ark. There is, however, another possibility for the final resting place of the Noah's Ark. The site lies about 19 miles south of the Greater Ararat summit, near the city of Dogubayazit, just over 1.8 miles north of the Iranian border. An aerial photograph taken by a Turkish Air Force pilot in 1959 (while on a NATO mapping mission) revealed a canoe or boat-shaped object sticking out of the rock, 1.19 miles up in the Akyayla mountain region. However, a subsequent expedition to the site in 1960, which included the dynamiting of one side of the supposed ark, discovered no persuasive evidence that the object was not a naturally formed feature. Despite these negative conclusions, adventurer and nurse anaesthetist Ron Wyatt gained a huge amount of publicity in the 1980s and 1990s when he claimed that this geological feature was in fact the true ark. During his first trip to the summit, he managed to discover an impressive-sounding array of artifacts. Among these were stone sea anchors marked with crosses (which he believed were used by Noah to steer the great vessel), iron rivets, washers, and petrified timber belonging to the ark.

The stone anchors have been explained by Armenian archaeologists as pre-Christian Armenian stelae (standing stones) recarved in the Christian period, probably between A.D. 301 and 406. The rock specimens containing Wyatt's so-called petrified wood were later examined by geologists, and no trace whatsoever of wood was found. As for the metal artifacts, they proved

to be naturally occurring pieces of iron oxide. When the site was reexamined