Is Noah's Ark hidden in Mount Ararat?

 

Many people and organisations have gone to Mount Ararat on expeditions, but no conclusive findings have been released, writes Joe Nam  

 

It was a disaster of epic proportions around 4,800 years ago, somewhere in the Middle East. According to the Bible, God was angry with mankind and was about to destroy the world. But he wanted to spare one man and his family — Noah.

 

“Then the Lord saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth...and He was sorry that He had made man on the earth...so the Lord said, ‘I will destroy man whom I have created from the face of the earth, both man and beast, creeping things and birds of the air...but Noah found grace in the eyes of the Lord (Genesis 6:5-8).”  

 

The Bible says God then instructed Noah to build an ark from gopher wood, giving him the technical details. It was a gigantic ship with a lot of capacity. The ship was finally finished and God instructed Noah to take with him to the wooden vessel, birds and animal species of every kind. The anticipated flood then came.

 

The gates of the oceans were broken and it rained for 40 days. Water covered the whole world, including the highest mountains and destroyed every creature on the surface of the earth. Only Noah, his family and the animal and bird species in the ship, survived.  

 

“And the waters prevailed on the earth for 150 days.. Then God remembered Noah and every living thing and all the animals that were in the ark...and God made a wind to pass over the earth and the waters subsided...

 

Then the ark rested on the seventh day of the seventh month, on the mountains of Ararat.”  The Bible says Noah opened the ark afterwards, released the animals and birds that were with him and came down to start a new lineage of humankind upon the earth. 

 

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In 2012, over 4,800 years later, I am aboard a Turkish Airlines plane flying east from Istanbul, Turkey, to the Caspian Sea City of Baku, in Azerbaijan. I had told the pilot that I would like to see Mount Ararat, but then dozed off.

 

He kept his word and announced through the sound system as we approached Ararat. I was woken in time to see, from a high altitude, the beautiful snow-capped Mount Ararat towering to the skies. I gazed at Ararat Peak wondering: Is Noah’s Ark, one of the secrets of the ancient world, in the glacier of this mountain?

 

Noah’s Ark, believed to be in Mount Ararat at the border region of Turkey and Armenia, has been the subject of much theorising. Numerous expeditions to the Ararat area have been made to try and establish the facts. 

 

 

On a hot summer day in 1916, a Russian pilot flying over Ararat, according to a report, spotted something at 14,000 feet on Mount Ararat that looked like a huge submarine craft.

 

His report was verified through another flight and word reached Czar Nicolas II of Russia, who dispatched a scientific expedition of 150 army engineers and specialists to climb Ararat to ascertain the facts. They reportedly found the ark and took measurements and specimens.

 

Documents proving scientifically that the ark existed were reportedly given to a Russian officer to deliver to the Czar in Moscow, but the city was engulfed in revolution when he arrived. He was reportedly shot and the documents he carried fell into the hands of Leon Trotsky, a Bolshevik revolutionary leader and have not been seen since then. 

 

 

Oral tradition has it that in ancient times, Roman scholars, medieval travellers and Ottoman soldiers reported spotting a mythical ship on top of Mount Ararat. 

 

Syrian and Armenian tradition of the early centuries, had a tradition of the ark landing around Mount Ararat. According to the 1st Century Jewish-Roman historian, Flavius Josephus, the ship was visible and was being torn down by the elements and the local population.

 

He is quoted to have written: “A portion of the vessel still survives...on the mountains...and persons carry off pieces of it, which they use as talismans for good luck.”

 

In 1829, Dr. Friedrich Parrot, who had made an ascent of Ararat range of mountains, wrote in his journal Journey to Ararat that “all the Armenians are firmly persuaded that Noah’s Ark remains to this very day on the top of Mount Ararat, and that, in order to preserve it, no human being is allowed to approach it.” 

 

In1876, James Bryce, a statesman, diplomat, explorer, and professor of civil law at Oxford, climbed the mountain and found a slab of hand-hewn timber, four-feet long and five inches thick, which he identified as being from the ark. In 1883, the ‘British Prophetic Messenger’ and others reported that Turkish commissioners investigating avalanches had seen the ark. 

 

In 1949, Aaron J. Smith, dean of the People’s Bible College in the US, led an unsuccessful expedition to locate the ark. Former astronaut James Irwin led two expeditions to Ararat in the 1980s, but found no tangible evidence of the ark. “I have done all I possibly can,” he said, “but the ark continues to elude us.”

 

In 1955, French explorer Fernand Navarra reportedly found a five-foot wooden beam on Mount Ararat, some 40 feet under glacier. 

 

The Forestry Institute of Research and Experiments of the Ministry of Agriculture in Spain certified the wood to be about 5,000 years old. Navarra’s guide later claimed that the French explorer bought the beam from a nearby village and carried it up the mountain. 

 

Searches since the mid-20th Century have been largely supported by evangelical churches and sustained by on-going popular interest. 

 

In 2004, Honolulu-based businessman Daniel McGivern announced he would finance a $900,000 (about sh23.4b) expedition to the peak of Greater Ararat in July 2004 to investigate the ‘Ararat anomaly’. 

 

He had previously paid for commercial satellite images of the site. 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 denounced 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.

 

 

It is believed that authentic satellite images of the ark taken in 1974 when the glacier had melted due to a particularly hot summer, is in the possession of Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in the US. The Kremlin also reportedly has actual images taken in 1945, but remain classified because their release would validate the Bible and discredit communism and atheism.  

 

Controversy about Noah’s Ark, just like the ark of the Covenant, continues to pre-occupy archaeologists, scientists, historians, explorers and even countries alike. 

 

The Ark of the Covenant, a box container made with acacia wood and overlaid with pure gold in which Moses reportedly put the stone tablets containing the 10 commandments received from God in Mount Sinai, is said to be hidden in a secret chamber below the Al Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem.

 

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In 2007, a joint Turkish-Hong Kong expedition, including members of Noah’s Ark Ministries International, announced they had found an unusual cave with fossilised wooden walls on Mount Ararat. 

 

“It is not 100% that it is Noah’s Ark, but we think it is 99.9%,” Yeung Wing-Cheung, a filmmaker accompanying the expedition, said. 

 

In 2010, Noah’s Ark Ministries International released videos of their discovery of the wood structures. The Ministry reported that carbon dating back suggests the wood they found in Ararat Mountain is approximately 4,800 years old. 

 

But Randall Price, a partner with Noah’s Ark Ministries International from early 2008 to the summer of 2008, stated that the discovery was probably the result of a hoax, perpetrated by 10 Kurdish workers hired by the Turkish guide used by the Chinese, who planted large wood beams taken from an old structure near the Black Sea at the cave site. In a response to Price, Noah’s Ark Ministries International stated that they had terminated co-operation with Price in early October 2008, and that he had never been in the location of the wooden structure they identified.

 

They say they asked for the opinion of Muhsin Bulut, the director of Cultural Ministries, Agri Province, who responded that secretly transporting such an amount of timber to the strictly monitored area and planting a large wood structure at an altitude of 4,000 metres would have been impossible. 

 

Gerrit Aalten, a Dutch researcher of Ark lore, who was enlisted to evaluate the team’s findings, however, says there is a tremendous amount of evidence that this structure is the Ark of Noah. 

 

At the end of April 2010, it was reported that Turkey’s culture minister ordered a probe into how Noah’s Ark Ministries brought its pieces of wood samples from Turkey to China.

 

Noah’s Ark Ministries International, on the other hand, says the Turkish government nonetheless plans to apply to the United Nations to put the Noah’s Ark discovery site on the UNESCO World Heritage list, a designation given to places of special cultural or physical significance.

 

But according to UNESCO spokesperson Roni Amelan, the agency has not received any formal requests from Turkey regarding Ararat and any relic on the mountain.