Noah's Ark: Encyclopedia II - Noah's Ark - The search for Noah's Ark

Noah's Ark - The search for Noah's Ark

From Eusebius' time to the modern day, the physical Noah's Ark has held a fascination for Christians - although not for Jews and Muslims, who seem to have felt far less impelled to seek out the remains. In the 4th century Faustus of Byzantium was apparently the first to use the name "Ararat" to refer to a specific mountain, rather than a region, where the Ark could still be seen. Recorded visits, however, are few - the Byzantine emperor Heraclius is said to have made the trip in the 7th century, but less well-connected pilgrims had to brave uninhabited wastes, rugged terrain, snowfields, glaciers, blizzards, and, in the more hospitable areas, brigands, wars, and ever-suspicious Ottoman officials. Not until the 19th century was the region settled enough, and Westerners welcome enough, for exploration by well-heeled Ark-seekers to begin in earnest. In 1829 Dr. Freidrich Parrott, who had made an ascent of Greater Ararat, wrote in his Journey to Ararat 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 preservation (sic), no human being is allowed to approach it." In 1876 James Bryce, historian, statesman, diplomat, Professor of Civil Law at Oxford, and explorer, climbed above the treeline and found a slab of hand-hewn timber, four feet long and five inches thick, which he identified as being from the Ark.[22] In 1883 the Nieuwe Rotterdamsche Courant, the Chicago Tribune, the New York Herald, the New York World, the New York Times, The Watchtower and the British Prophetic Messenger, all reported that Turkish commissioners investigating avalanches had seen the Ark. In 1916-1917 Tsar Nicholas II sent an expedition to find the Ark, but the attempt was cut short by the Russian Revolution.[23]

Attempts to find the Ark continued through the 20th century, and by the beginning of the 21st century, two main candidates for exploration had emerged: the so-called Ararat anomaly near the main summit of Ararat (an "anomaly" in that it shows on satellite images as a dark blemish on the snow and ice of the peak), and the quite separate site at Durupinar near Dogubayazit, 18 miles south of the Greater Ararat summit. The Durupinar site was heavily promoted by adventurer and former nurse-anesthetist Ron Wyatt in the 1980s and 1990s, and consists of a large boat-shaped formation jutting out of the earth and rock. It has the advantage over the Great Ararat site of being approachable - while hardly a major tourist attraction, it receives a steady stream of visitors, and the local authorities have renamed a nearby mountain "Mount Cudi" to assert the connection with the Islamic tradition of the resting place of the Ark (and making it one of at least five Mount Cudis in the Middle East). [24] Geologists have identified the Durupinar site as a natural formation.[25] The "Ararat anomaly" remains unexplored: in 2004 Honolulu-based businessman Daniel McGivern announced he would finance a $900,000 expedition to the peak in July that year [26], but was refused permission by the Turkish authorities, as the summit is inside a restricted military zone; the McGivern expedition was subsequently labelled a "stunt" 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.[27]

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "The search for Noah's Ark", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki