Summary: A survey of proposals and evidence for the location of Noah’s ark begins with the popular Mount Ararat view.
two and two, male and female, went into the ark with Noah, as God had commanded Noah. And after seven days the waters of the flood came upon the earth. – Genesis 7:9-10 (ESV)
The Background of Noah’s Ark Research
Today’s Thinker article begins a 2-part series on the search for the location where Noah’s Ark came to rest after the flood of Genesis chapters 7-9. This 2-part series will focus on the proposal favoring Mount Ararat in Turkey. Excerpts will be presented from the podcast series The Hunt for Noah’s Ark with Tim Mahoney and Ted Wright. Look for additional ark-location proposals to be covered in future articles.
A few of the questions to think about on this topic include whether the current mountain called “Ararat” had that name in ancient times or if it only received that name more recently. Have ancient historical accounts preserved some accurate information about the ark and its whereabouts? Are modern reports of wooden structures high up on mountains fake or genuine? Even if they are genuine, are they really the remains of Noah’s ship or some other type of wooden structure? We hope you enjoy this discussion of some of the reasoning and evidence involved in the hunt for one of the Bible’s most significant and dramatic events.
TIM MAHONEY: We’re going to be asking different investigators and scholars about where they think Noah’s ark is. And we’re very excited to have Ted Wright from Epic Archeology, and he’s going to be helping us today unpack an awful lot. And I think this is going to be an amazing talk. You are actually advocating for a traditional Mount Ararat. Is that right, Ted?
TED WRIGHT: That’s correct, yes. The traditional site that’s been kind of known about from scholars and the general public for a couple of hundred years at least, and maybe even before that. Because the text says in Genesis 8:4 that the ark came to rest on the mountains of Ararat.
TIM MAHONEY: Before we get started, could you just tell us a little bit about yourself and Epic Archeology?
TED WRIGHT: Yes. Thank you again for having me on, Tim. And it’s a great honor to be here to discuss this vitally important topic, whether or not people agree or disagree with my view. So Epic Archeology got started in 2017, and the focus of it was really to be a website that shows the historical reliability of the Bible through archeology, sort of like what you guys are doing with Patterns of Evidence.
I have background training in a Christian apologetics. I was trained by Dr. Norman Geisler years ago. I was actually his graduate’s assistant and Dr. Geiser trained me in apologetics and philosophy, but I happened to be an archeologist as well. Epic
Archeology was sort of a natural outflow of my connection between archeology and apologetics. But I’m really interested in doing serious scholarship and actually doing research to show the connection between archeology and the Bible, not only to show the reliability of the text, but also how archeology gives us a deeper understanding of God’s word.
TIM MAHONEY: Why has going and looking for Mount Ararat been intriguing to you personally?
TED WRIGHT: My interest goes back to when I was a kid and I grew up as a believer. I got saved when I was nine years old. Then as I grew older, it was sort of a similar situation that you had. I had questions about the veracity of these stories that I had read about as a kid, and I wanted to know what archeological and historical evidence supported them, not just the ark story, but also the exodus and the conquest and all these other stories. But the story of Noah and the Flood really fascinated me. And of course, as a kid, I watched documentary films with Leonard Nimoy. You remember that series he did, In Search Of? And then in my college years I read a lot of books by Dr. Henry Morris, The Genesis Flood, and then later his son John Morris as well.
An Eyewitness Report From a Difficult Location
TED WRIGHT: In about the year 2010, there were reports that came out; you may remember this, Tim. There was a group of Chinese people who said that they found the remains of Noah’s ark on Mount Ararat. Of course, it went around the world. It went viral. As you know, anybody can make any claim. Archaeology’s not about claims, it’s about testing, and about evidence, and data. And so we just sort of thought that was interesting, and I didn’t know if there was any truth to that.
I’ll just go ahead and tell you the cold hard truth behind the background of what was going on. I was teaching seminary at Southern Evangelical Seminary (SES) at the time. I teach an Old Testament survey and biblical archeology. And Dr. Geisler had taken sort of a backseat to leading the seminary. And the president at the time was Dr. Alex McFarland. And I got a call one afternoon and Alex said, “Hey, I know this is last minute, but there’s this event and one of our other professors can’t go. Would you like to go with me?”
And it turns out it was the Chinese team and they had raw footage that they wanted to show seminary professors. There were like three or four seminary professors: the president of Gordon Conwell, the president of SES, also the president of Reformed Seminary in Charlotte, as well as a couple of museum directors and another professor who was a sort of a New Testament skeptic, Dr. James Tabor from UNC Charlotte. And so we were shown footage, the raw footage from the Chinese team on Mount Ararat claiming that they found this wooden structure and they think it may be Noah’s Ark. It’s a group called NAMI, Noah’s Ark Ministry International. They’re based out of Hong Kong.
And there was a lot of press in the United States, but I think they kind of got a bad rap in this. About a year or so later, it came out in the media that they were faking it, or it was a fake site and all that. And it may be a fake site, but they were taken up there and shown this cave that has wood in it. And not just wood, I mean it’s like rooms and I mean, it’s amazing footage. They said at the outset, the Chinese team from NAMI, that they were not scholars, they were not archeologists or scientists, and they wanted to show us the footage so that we as Americans and Europeans could put together a team to go do the scientific investigation. That is how it all got started with me.
And Tim, it’s interesting that we couldn’t find hardly anybody who wanted to even go look at it. Even if you don’t agree, at least go check it out. Archaeology is about verifying eyewitness accounts and things like this. So finally, after we went back and forth, there were several organizations that were created. And of course, as you know, archeology is very expensive and this is not like any other site in the world. You have a lot of amazing sites in Israel like Megiddo, Lachish and Jericho. These are all amazing sites, but Mount Ararat is just under 17,000 feet tall.
TED WRIGHT: And this location is not easy to get to. I mean, you have to literally climb for three days just to get to the site. It was really difficult. So basically, how do you excavate a site or research a site that’s at 14,000 feet elevation? There is now a scholarly team in place and there has been for the last seven years or so. I’m now a research associate at Andrews University, which is now under the leadership of Dr. Randall Younker. I am part of their sort of loose affiliation, but I am speaking on my own today as me, as an independent scholar. So I don’t speak for Dr. Younker or for Andrews, but I can tell you that Dr. Younker and some of the other scholars involved are probably going to publish some of their results in the future. And I’ve sort of been sort of grandfathered in as an independent scholar. It’s just been incredible to see sort of how this all puts together.
But to actually do the scholarship, you have to do it through the correct government institutions in Turkey. And it is not easy as an American getting a permit to do archeological work in Turkey. It’s not easy at all.
Initially we went to the Chinese site. And unfortunately in the past years, it has now been partially buried in ice and snow. We can’t get down into the area proper to do the proper analysis. But I can share that wood fragments have been discovered in and around the area, but the wood is not very old. It’s maybe 300 years old. As far as direct evidence today, we don’t have any direct evidence today that that is the mountain. But there’s other historical arguments I think that really point to Mount Ararat being the more probable candidate today of the mountains that are out there.
TIM MAHONEY: Then this Chinese location, is that the same location you’re interested in, or is it just the same mountain that you’re interested in?
TED WRIGHT: Initially that location was the focal point of our investigation. Since that time, we have now broadened out the research to a much broader circle. So it’s not that we’re not interested in the site, it’s just that we come to a dead end at that site. And now we’re casting a broader net, and we’re looking at that mountain and what other aspects historically and archeologically might point to that mountain as being the likely mountain that the ark came to rest on.
I don’t know if you know this, Tim, but astronaut Jim Irwin actually years ago climbed it. And a friend of mine told me he read Jim Irwin’s book on it and Irwin said that it’s easier to walk on the moon than it is to walk on Ararat. One of the things that I’ve taken away and after having been to a couple of the sites we’re investigating, and they’re really high up and they’re really in difficult terrain, is that if, let’s say for the sake of argument someone was going to fake a site. To me, the location of where it is today would make it highly unlikely that someone could carry that much wood in that elaborative manner to place it under a glacier.
To me, it just stretches credibility that somebody could do that. It would be more of a miracle that someone built it, but I guess it’s possible that people could do that. But we’re interested in the broader historical question and now we’re looking at other areas that might point to it being the mountain.
Seaworthy Dimensions
TIM MAHONEY: There were very specific instructions about the size of the ark, the uniqueness of it, the fact that it had these chambers inside it where animals would be housed to save them from the flood.
TED WRIGHT: Interestingly, when you look at the Biblical dimensions given for the ark, it was about 450 feet long, 75 feet wide, and 50 feet high. And one of the earlier texts that many people may be aware of is the Epic of Gilgamesh, and the Gilgamesh ark actually is a round ark. Whereas the Biblical ark is more of a rectangle.
Many years ago, I believe it was Dr. Henry Morris of Institute for Creation Research and some of the scholars that were researching the dimensions of the ark, they built a scale replica model of the ark and they put it in a tank where they test Navy ships. Based on their analysis, the Biblical ark was one of the most stable vessels that they had ever tested. I think the researcher said that it could ride over a hundred foot wave without capsizing. And inside of the ark, it had three decks – upper, middle, and lower. And of course, these decks were essentially designed to fit two of every kind of animal as God commanded Noah to put in the ark, and his family to save. And they were in the ark for about a year.
Historical Accounts Related to Ararat
TIM MAHONEY: The Bible says, ‘God remembered Noah and all the beasts and all the livestock that were with him in the ark and God made a wind blow over the earth and the waters subsided and the fountains of the deep and the windows of heaven were closed. The rain from the heavens were restrained and the waters receded from the earth continually. At the end of 150 days, the waters had abated. And in the seventh month, on the 17th day of the month, the ark came to rest on the mountains of Ararat.’ So what’s interesting is, is Ararat one mountain or is it a range of mountains?
TED WRIGHT: This is a question that we have really explored, specifically Dr. Randy Younker who published an article on this a couple of years ago called The Case for Ağrı Dağı as Biblical Mount Ararat. And I can just repeat some of the research that Dr. Younker has done on this.
When you dive into ancient Near Eastern history, the word Ararat itself comes from an Acadian word, which means Urartu. Urartu is something called an exonym. An exonym is a name that other people give to a particular geographical area. So I’ll give you an example of an exonym. So we call the area Japan, we call it Japan, but the people that live on the Japanese island call it Nippon. The ancient Egyptians, they didn’t call Egypt Egypt. That was a Greek name. The Egyptians called it Kemit, K-M-T, which means the black land. So Uratu is a name that specifically referred to a geographical region. So the question is, what geographical area does the land of Urartu refer to?
TED WRIGHT: Dr. Younker goes on to say that the boundaries of Urartu were not static, but rather they changed through time. So the earlier version of Urartu was very limited in area, the archeology and the history points to that area as being north of Lake Van in the Armenian Highlands, which is exactly where Mount Ararat is located. Whereas later references to Urartu, after the ninth century BC, included a larger area.
The smaller area of Urartu, the earlier understanding of that, would be from anywhere between the 13th and 15th century BC. So that would approximate the time of Moses. So when Moses is writing the Pentateuch and he’s writing that the ark came to rest on the mountains of Urartu, the earlier date actually limits where the land of Urartu can be (northeast of Lake Van in Turkey) and also limits the mountains that it could be. That means it’s got to be either Mount Ararat – Ağrı Dağı, or some other mountain in that area.
TIM MAHONEY: There’s another candidate for the Ark’s resting place called Mount Cudi, as well as another proposed site in Iran called Mount Suleiman.
TED WRIGHT: To me, Mount Cudi or Judi, two different names for the same mountain, is a fascinating site, but the fact of the matter is that it’s outside the area for the earliest designations of the land of Urartu. Then there’s the one in Iran, and there’s actually another one in Iraq, Mount Nisir – all of these mountains actually are important in ancient geography, but they’re not the earliest designations [as ark landing sites]. In fact, Mount Cudi was first identified by a Greek geographer by the name of Berossus who was writing in the third century BC. Berossus was a priest actually in Babylon, and this is about the time of Alexander the Great. This was picked up later by Josephus, who then also says that this is the landing place of the ark.
As we said earlier, Mount Judi [southwest of Lake Van] is outside the area of the earlier designation of Urartu, which would’ve been during the time when Moses is writing the Pentateuch, presumably in the 15th century BC. If we hold to an early date of the composition of the Pentateuch, then this would naturally exclude Mount Judi.
One other thing that I have not mentioned yet, although it’s sort of in the background and independent of this, and independent of that mountain. There was a 10-year study that was conducted by multiple universities, but the two main research universities that were involved in this study were Harvard and the University of Vienna in Austria. And what they were trying to figure out were the origins of the paleo-Indo-European people. So it was a very massive 10-year decade-long study that involved multiple disciplines.
The area of focus was essentially where did all the people of Europe and Asia originate from? And they looked at three main areas. They looked at linguistics, they looked at pottery or ceramics, and they looked at genetics. And after that 10-year study, it focused in the area around eastern Turkey where Mount Ararat is located. This is what we’d expect to find if the earth was destroyed by a flood and humans had to repopulate the earth after the flood. Archeologically and anthropologically, you would expect that the earliest human occupation and spread, and where agriculture spread out, it’s all focused there in southern and eastern Turkey. In fact, along the southern border of Turkey, you have some of the oldest archeological sites in the world, sites like Göbekli Tepe and Karahan Tepe.
These are very, very old sites that are probably right after the flood, post-flood sites. That’s a whole nother rabbit trail for Göbekli Tepe. The point is that southern Anatolia has now become the new hotbed for researching proto-history or prehistory. And this is from secular scholars. These are not even from Christian scholars. They’re looking at this as all humans have come from southern Turkey, which is not surprising to us.
Warnings From Jesus and Paul
TIM MAHONEY: So why is this significant, Ted?
TED WRIGHT: I think it’s significant, Tim, because the story of the flood, it is a story that is very, I think, very important in the Scripture. Jesus said in Matthew 24, “As it was in the days of Noah, so shall I be in the days of the coming of the Son of Man.” Again, no one knows the day of the hour, but God did say that he’s not going to flood the earth again, but he did say he’s going to destroy the world with fire. So perhaps this is a story that we need to look at and evaluate kind of where we’re going in the culture and where the world’s going. And remember that as Peter reminded his readers in two Peter chapter three that in the last days there will be scoffers coming and they’re going to laugh and they’re going to mock and they’re going to say, “Well, where is Christ’s coming – he said he’s going to come again?”
And then Peter says something very interesting. He says, “But they deliberately forget that God destroyed the world with the flood.” And I think that it’s good to be reminded, even if we don’t agree about the location of Noah’s Ark or whether or not it still exists, but as a Christian who believes in God’s word, I think that we can’t just sweep under the rug the story of the flood. It is a story of grace because Noah found grace in the eyes of the Lord. As Genesis 8:1 says, “God remembered Noah.” And just like God remembered Noah and God remembered the promise that he gave to him to never flood the earth again. God also made a promise. Christ made a promise that he is going to return and he’s going to come again. It’s good to be reminded that the stories that Christ talks about, they truly did happen exactly as the Scripture states. So there’s something that we can learn today about these stories.
Conclusion
We hope you have enjoyed hearing some of the evidence related to the location of Noah’s ark. Stay tuned next time for Part 2, which will include eyewitness reports of ark-like structures on Mount Ararat. Will any of these lead to the discovery of one of God’s greatest acts in history? Until then, keep thinking!
TOP PHOTO: Noah’s Ark on Mount Ararat (1570) by Flemish painter Simon de Myle. (Simon de Myle, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons)
