Summary: The 2nd and final part in the case for Mount Ararat northeast of Lake Van being the place where Noah’s ark landed.
And it came to pass in the six hundredth and first year, in the first month, the first day of the month, the waters were dried up from off the earth: and Noah removed the covering of the ark, and looked, and, behold, the face of the ground was dry. – Genesis 8:13 (KJV)
The Flood Account in Genesis
This week we conclude our 2-part series on the Mount Ararat proposal for the location of Noah’s ark. You can check out Part 1, which features excerpts from our podcast series with Ted Wright from Epic Archaeology. Look for future installments where we will present the cases for additional proposals for the location of Noah’s ark, some of which have already begun on the podcast.
This week’s article features eyewitness reports of large wooden objects on the slopes of Ararat, as well as intriguing evidence from early Mesopotamian sources. Now, let’s get to the discussion.
TIM MAHONEY: Ted, just for people who don’t know, could you summarize what the Biblical narrative says about Noah’s flood and why it came?
TED WRIGHT: Sure thing. So essentially when the flood narrative starts out, it says, when the sons of God saw the daughters of men were beautiful, they took wives for themselves and men began to multiply on the face of the earth and there was evil and violence everywhere. And God, of course, was very hurt and sad. In fact, the text says he repented that he had made man upon the earth. He essentially was going to flood the entire earth with water.
And so he warned Noah and his family to build an ark and to escape the judgment that God was going to bring up on the earth. And what’s interesting is that in Genesis chapter eight, that whole entire flood sort of pericope in the text, other scholars have figured out that the flood narrative is actually a chiasm. And the chiasm is sort of a Hebrew literary structure that puts emphasis in a particular area.
And most conservative scholars believe Genesis was written primarily by Moses, early. And it was written to the Israelites before they were about to enter the Promised Land. But the text in the Genesis flood account, of course Noah built the ark and pitched it just like God said. But it all focuses in Genesis chapter eight, verse one, which says, “And God remembered Noah.” God remembered Noah. And the point, theologically, I think, is that just like God remembered Noah, and didn’t forget Noah, God was not going to forget the Israelites. He’s the same God yesterday, today, and forever. And God destroyed the earth with a flood, and Noah and his family of eight people were saved.
Mount Ararat in the Gilgamesh Epic
TIM MAHONEY: Could you explain the meaning of Mount Mashu in the Gilgamesh Epic, and how that seems to fit nicely with Mount Ararat?
TED WRIGHT: Yes. I’m so glad you asked that question because this is a story that has fascinated me for many years. And I was really delighted when I learned that one of the oldest adventure stories in the Mesopotamian world, the Gilgamesh Epic, actually has a flood story almost identical to the Biblical story with some small variations.
TED WRIGHT: And in the flood story of the Gilgamesh Epic, in tablet 11, Gilgamesh’s best friend dies and Gilgamesh is very sad. He has this sort of cathartic moment where he wants to go find the meaning of life. And in the beginning of Tablet 11 Gilgamesh goes to a far off land in the north. And remember, Gilgamesh is in the city of Uruk in southern Mesopotamia, and he goes to the north in this area and he climbs to meet this man named Utnapishtim, who is the Sumerian or the Acadian version of Noah. And this man lives on a mountain in the far area of the north at the headwaters of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers.
And the name of the mountain is Mashu, which without getting into the weeds on this, Mashu could mean “mountains,” but most authoritative scholars in the Gilgamesh Epic, in particular, Andrew George, translates Mashu as meaning “twin peak.” So it’s a big peak and a small peak. And the only mountain candidate that matches the description of Mashu is Ağrı Dağı [Mount Ararat], because Mount Ararat is actually a twin volcanic peak. If you actually see a picture or a profile of Mount Ararat, there’s greater Ararat and lesser Ararat. So there is a twin peak. It matches it remarkably.
TIM MAHONEY: Those are the interesting kinds of clues that you’ve got to look for. So the Gilgamesh Epic is telling you to look for a mount with a twin peak?
An Early Map of Ararat
TED WRIGHT: That’s right. And it even gets better. Many years ago in the British Museum, there’s an artifact that came out of some of the discoveries that were found in the 19th century that had been there in the museum for years. One of them was one of the oldest maps of the world. In fact, if you look at any book on ancient maps, it’s going to include this map. It’s an ancient map of Babylon. On the flip side of the map, it’s a circular map that actually has the Euphrates river running through it. And it has around this circle of the map, it actually has these little mountain peaks. And the area just to the northwest where Turkey is today was missing for many years.
Well, a student-volunteer actually found the missing piece of that area in the map while working in the basement of the British Museum to catalog artifacts. And she said, “I think this might be the missing piece to the Babylonian map.” Sure enough, they went into the museum and they opened up the case and they stuck this thing in the spot and it fit perfectly. It fits so well that he said they couldn’t even hardly get it out. They had to get the curators to get it out and they glued it back in and it fits perfectly.
TED WRIGHT: But the amazing thing is that when you flip it over and it tells you what it is. It is the mountain that Gilgamesh goes to. It’s the mountain that the ark came to rest on and it says “the mountain of Ararat” – Urartu. And this is really early. So all the early historical information points to Urartu, or the earlier version of Ararat. In fact, Irving Finkel himself, who wrote a book called The Ark Before Noah, he actually believes that the Babylonian map that contains the uniform piece is actually referring not to Judi, but to actually Mount Ararat in Eastern Turkey.
TIM MAHONEY: That’s absolutely fascinating.
Eyewitness Reports
TED WRIGHT: Another thing we’re looking at are eyewitness reports in the past century. I’ve taught archeology for a little over 20 years. And one of the things, as you teach, of course, you begin to see patterns, and certain things in archeology. And I like to try to simplify things for my students. And so for those listening, one of the things that I teach is that archeology and history are based on what we call primary sources. And you have three basic primary sources. You have eyewitnesses, you have historical records or historical inscriptions, and you have archeological evidence.
For eyewitnesses, obviously, you want early eyewitness accounts, and you want multiple eyewitness accounts, and then you want archeological evidence. As far as locating any particular area on Mount Ararat we are now looking at eyewitness accounts where people have said that they have seen wood on Mount Ararat, or Ağrı Dağı, at the traditional site.
Throughout history, there have been quite a few. The most famous one goes back to 1902 and 1904, George Hagopian, who was an Armenian living in the US. He declared that he visited the ark twice when he was a child with his uncle and even wrote down a physical description of what it looked like. And there doesn’t seem to be any evidence that Hagopian was making this up. One of the areas we’re looking at is some of the places that Hagopian said he saw the wood.
TIM MAHONEY: Are you suggesting that there’s a part of the ark that was just the remnants, or was it something where they could see the shape of the ark?
TED WRIGHT: According to Hagopian, he could see a very large section of it. It had broken in half and it was partially covered in ice, and he could see the three decks and a ladder. One of the guys drew what Hagopian told him, and it had three decks and the wood was extremely hard, very dark colored, very almost black in color. This is also the testimony of other countless eyewitnesses beginning in the 20th century. There’s even some that go all the way back to the 1830s.
In 1916, there was a Russian lieutenant by the name of Zabolotsky who saw the ark from an airplane. In 1943, Ed Davis, who was a US Army sergeant, was led to the ark, or the remains of what they were told was the ark. In 1943 another Air Force sergeant saw the structure when he was actually flying over Mount Ararat on two occasions, one in 1943 and the other one in 1945.
In 1948, there was a Kurdish farmer who saw a prow of a ship sticking out of the ice. In 1950, a US Air Force high altitude U2 pilot that was flying over Turkey and flew over Mount Ararat. They were doing a reconnaissance mission and as he was flying over at about 4,300 meters or so, and there was an object. Literally, he says an object that was very odd to its surroundings, very likely a manmade structure protruding six to eight meters from a glacier. The object was very dark, long, rectangular, and had some damage. He concluded that it had to be Noah’s ark.
So we’re not saying that they’re right, but we’re saying that these are eyewitnesses that as an archeologist, I’m curious as to what this might be. If in fact this thing does still exist, we’d like to find it. If it’s wood, we’d like to see what kind of wood it is. We’re looking at other areas as well.
TIM MAHONEY: Are all those locations in the same valley, or on the same slope?
TED WRIGHT: A lot of the guys that I’m working with on this are trying to go through these eyewitness accounts to figure that out. You have to remember, a lot of these guys are not professional geographers except for the pilots. I mean, they can give a GPS position. When you live in that area, and I’ve been there many times now, you can see certain areas. If you live on the southern side of the mountain, there’s a thing called the Red Gorge. And on the northern side there’s the Ahora Gorge, which was formed, I believe, in 1844. There was a major earthquake that happened. So we know those areas. And so there have been sightings in both the northern facing side and the southern facing side as well.
And it could be that in 1844, let’s say for the sake of argument the ark did come to rest on Mount Ararat, during that earthquake it may have broken the thing in half. Part of it went down one side, part of it went on the other side, which may explain why there’s been multiple eyewitness sightings of it on the mountain. Sort of like looking for a needle in a haystack.
The Pattern and the Geological Challenge
TIM MAHONEY: So give me the pattern.
TED WRIGHT: All scholars who study the Gilgamesh epic, like Andrew George and Stephanie Dolly and all the great British scholars believe that it is written very early. And it’s very likely the Gilgamesh story sort of like the Iliad and the Odyssey by Homer, although Homer wrote it down in its current version, was likely based in an oral tradition that was likely spread around over the generations. And so in the same way, the flood story was also based in oral tradition that was eventually recorded in the Gilgamesh epic. So it’s really, really early. And what they have retained is this very early memory of where the ark came to rest in the area of eastern Turkey, just north of Lake Van in the Armenian Highlands.
Another piece of the evidence is, of course, the early designation of the land of Aurartu historically refers to a much more restricted area that is around Mount Ararat today. And then of course we have the eyewitness accounts as well [of ark-like structures on the mountain]. We believe that this is actually a pattern of evidence that points to it as being the possible mountain.
TIM MAHONEY: I know there’s some criticism. How could the ark have survived this long if it could have survived at all due to some of its past volcanic and glacial activity in this area? So how would you respond to that?
TED WRIGHT: I have the same question myself. It is a fact that Mount Ararat is a strata volcano. And it is a fact that there have been eruptions throughout its history, but there is early geological evidence. There’s an earlier mountain and a later mountain, and somehow or another, if the ark was lodged in an area that was not affected by the volcanic activity… And I understand we got many friends that I highly respect and love and they’re just great guys and they’re really great scholars. And I know that there’s been sort of a shift that’s taken place in the past several years among Young-Earth creation geologists and that they place the post-flood boundary in a geological boundary called the Cretaceous Tertiary Boundary, KT Boundary it’s called. And Mount Ararat wasn’t formed until later, but it is a super complex mountain and it may not actually be fully understood how it formed.
So we don’t want to rule it out just purely based on the geological criticism of it. And so the current reigning theory [among Biblical scholars] is that Mount Ararat cannot be it. But for many, many years, in fact, in the 20th century, there have been some really brilliant scholars like Dr. John Morris, who was a trained geologist who held that this was the right mountain. Another scholar wasn’t a geologist, but was a great theologian, Dr. John Warwick Montgomery, I believe in 1972, actually climbed Ararat. And his book on it has some great quotations from geologists about it. One of the things that they found is that it may contain pillow lava, which is formed under the water.
So it’s possible that the volcanism of the mountain pushed the ark up during the flood. The verdict is still out on the geology. In fact, on our team, we actually have a geologist and not just a geologist, but we have a volcanologist who studies volcanoes and his area of expertise is in underwater subterranean volcanoes. We are hoping to, in the future, do some original geological work on Mount Ararat to answer these questions.
TIM MAHONEY: I’ll share that I believe that someday I’m going to be making a movie about Noah’s ark. And if any listeners are out there and would like to see that happen and want to help us with donations, that would be fantastic. Why don’t you tell us a little bit about where people can learn more about you?
TED WRIGHT: The website is epicarcheology.org. Just look it up online. We are also on Facebook. Get on Facebook and type in epic archeology. We post archeology articles, artifacts, certain things that are relevant to biblical archeology and try to be encouraging to believers to show that there’s really amazing evidence for the Bible archeologically.
TIM MAHONEY: Again, thank you for being a part of this, and God bless you.
TED WRIGHT: Thank you, Tim. What an honor to be here.
Conclusion
Whether remains of the ark still exist or not, the serious search for its remains helps us to think critically, adds context to the Biblical account, and helps us ground the narrative in reality. Stay tuned for other views about the location of the ark in the months ahead. Until then, keep thinking!
TOP PHOTO: Ağrı Dağı (Mount Ararat) showing the Greater and Lesser peaks. (credit: Սէրուժ Ուրիշեան (Serouj Ourishian), CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons)
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