Up until the 18th century, it was commonly accepted that the biblical story of the flood was an accurate report of historical events. Over the years, however, as scientific knowledge has expanded, most people have come to see the biblical flood narrative as symbolic, rather than factual.
But although science tells us the creation story described in the bible doesn’t fully match up with what we know of the world, even the most ardent sceptics have to deal with a fact that makes some people believe that Noah’s Ark is still out there to be found.
Photograph by Mike Peel., CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons; Image via PixaBay
In the biblical flood narrative, after the rains have ended and the waters began to subside, Noah landed his Ark on the “mountains of Ararat,” where, after releasing both a raven and a dove, he finally opened the giant vessel’s hatches and released the rest of the animals he had stowed there. From the mountain’s slopes, the animals then spread out throughout the empty earth and, along with Noah and his offspring, repopulated it.
But while the question of whether Noah’s Ark truly landed on Ararat remains open, one thing is fact: Mount Ararat is real, and the people who live near it have claimed it is the final resting place of the ark, for centuries. It is there that, in 2009, an expedition was headed with the hopes of discovering archeological traces of the biblical story.
But they were not the first.
Mount Ararat can be found in the extreme east of Turkey, close to the country’s Iranian and Armenian borders. The highest peak in Turkey, it is the principal national symbol of Armenia, and is considered to be sacred by the Armenians, who view it is a holy mountain.
Standing at a towering 5,137 meters (16,854 ft), Ararat is one of the 50 most prominent peaks in the world, and boasts perpetual snow, year-round – a fact which has meant that, despite legends of the Ark landing somewhere on its slopes, it has remained largely unexplored over the years. The first recorded ascent to its summit only took place in 1829, even though people have been trying to reach its peak since at least the middle ages.
Due to its legendary status, many have attempted to scale it and find the Ark – but until recently, no one had found much of value.
Perhaps the most famous person to have explored Ararat in antiquity was Marco Polo, who describes the mountain in his famous book, The Travels of Marco Polo.
But while claims that the Ark was on Mount Ararat “for all to see” have been made for nearly two millennia, exploration of the mountain began in earnest only in the 19th century.
In 1829, Dr. Friedrich Parrot, who had climbed the mountain, wrote that "all the Armenians are firmly persuaded that Noah's Ark remains to this very day on the top of Ararat, and that, in order to preserve it, no human being is allowed to approach it."
Nearly fifty years later, another explorer by the name of James Bryce would make a discovery that would echo throughout the world.
In 1876, James Bryce, a Professor of Civil Law at Oxford, who also worked as a historian, statesman, diplomat and explorer, began to scale Mount Ararat on a fact-finding mission.
While he didn’t manage to reach the top, he did manage to climb up past the tree line, and it was there, on the cold, desolate slope, that he found something that would shake the research community to its very core.
As Bryce climbed up Mount Ararat, he looked to his sides and saw nothing but rocks and boulders around him. But as he continued to ascend, suddenly, something caught his attention. A shape he had hoped to see, but didn’t dare believe he would find.
There, among there rocks, where it was too cold and hard for anything to grow, he found an ancient wooden beam. It was too big and heavy to have just been carried there, and no one had ascended the mountain in years. Bryce concluded that it could be nothing else but a part of the Ark, and upon his return to England, his finding would herald in a new age of expeditions to the mountain. But it was only in 2009 that anything of interest would truly be found.
Bryce’s discovery was exciting – but it by no means proved that the Ark had actually been found.
Over the years, many explorers have claimed that they had found the Ark – or evidence of it – and were later proven wrong. But while most expeditions simply failed to provide acceptable evidence, one prolonged, ongoing expedition would, for a while, convince the world that the Ark had finally been found in its entirety.
In the 1960s, a man by the name of Ron Wyatt saw a photo of a site 18 miles south of Mount Ararat’s peak, which bore an uncanny resemblance to the structure of a boat.
In the biblical account of the Flood and Noah’s Ark, it is said that Noah’s Ark’s final resting place was in the mountains of Ararat. There is, however, only one Mount Ararat in the world – how is this reconciled?
While many people believe that the Ark does indeed rest on Mount Ararat’s peak, some biblical scholars hold that Ararat was the entire region in which the modern-day Mount Ararat resides, and that the Ark could have been put down in any one of the many peaks in the mountainous ranges in the area.
One such peak, 18 miles south of Mount Ararat, is known as the Durupinar site – and when you look at it, it’s impossible to deny that both its shape and size match what we believe the Ark looked like.
It was Ron Wyatt’s intention to prove that it was, in fact, the Ark.
In 1985, Wyatt was joined by David Fasold, who was a former United States Merchant Marine Officer and salvage expert, as well as geophysicist John Baumgardner. As soon as Fasold saw the site, he exclaimed that it was, to his eyes, a shipwreck. Using controversial technology known as a “frequency generator,” Fasold and the team claimed that their scans revealed a regular internal structure and measured the length of the formation as 538 ft (164 m), close to the 300 cubits (157 m, 515 ft) of the Noah's Ark in the Bible if the Ancient Egyptian cubit of 20.6 inches (0.52 m) is used.
But it was another, much more tangible discovery that really got them excited.
As they scanned the countryside for additional evidence, Wyatt and Fasold made an interesting discovery; ancient stones with big holes carved in them. Fasold posited that these were drogues – a type of anchor large ships deploy to this day during storms to help with stability and maintaining course in the face of strong winds and swift currents.
Due to their extremely ancient origins, and since the stones were found many miles from any large body of water, Fasold concluded they must have belonged to the Ark. But despite this exciting find, soon his theory would be punctured.
But what could make anyone believe that Noah's Ark was ever real?
