The day God hit reset

In the beginning God created the heaven and the Earth, the seas and the skies, the animals and even mankind. Everything was good. Until man learned of his nakedness, he learned how to take pleasure in the company of woman and soon the new world was populated with those who sinned against God's desire.

God decided that the wicked could no longer be saved so he planned to flood his creation and drown the unrighteous who would not listen to his word. But God did not wish to destroy all of his creation and so sent for our hero to build an ark. And our hero did built a great ark. On this ark was loaded all the beasts and birds needed to repopulate the Earth after the flood. Our hero brought his family aboard and sealed the ark shut.

It rained for many days and many nights, long and deep enough to lift the ark from the ground and float it along in the flood waters. Eventually all wickedness had been drowned and God allowed the flood-waters to recede. Our hero and his ark came to rest on the side of a mountain, in a strange land where the remnants of the ark may still be today. But where exactly is the location that the ark's residents finally came ashore to repopulate the Earth?

It turns out the answer to that question depends on which sacred text you read and which god you believe in. If you believe that the hero of the story is a man named Noah and the world was flooded by the god Yahweh, you would expect to find the ark somewhere around Mt Ararat in Turkey. Alternatively, if your hero is called Nuh and your god Allah, the ark should be located on Mt Judi in Iraq. But if you happen to be one of the Iraqi Mandaeans the resting place of the ark is in Egypt.

In the Greek flood myth, Zeus puts an end to the Bronze age (1500 BCE) by flooding the world. However, the hero Deucalion builds an ark which saves him and his family (but he does not take any animals). The location of his ark has been suggested as Mt Parnassus or Mt Etna. Going back even further (to 2000 BCE), the Sumerian hero Atrahasis is told by the god Enki that another god, Enlil, plans to flood the world to prevent overpopulation. Atrahasis builds an ark to save himself, his family, and his animals from destruction. The landing site of this ark was Bahrain.

With all these arks supposedly floating around it seems surprising that we haven't yet uncovered some archeological trace of any of them. Or have we? Well this week ABC carries the story of a potential ark find on Mt Ararat.



Exciting stuff, unfortunately it turns out to be a fake. Randall Price who was the arkaeologist with the Chinese team has denounced the find saying "In the late summer of 2008 ten Kurdish workers hired by Parasut ... are said to have planted large wood beams taken from an old structure in the Black Sea area ... at the Mt. Ararat site. ... During the summer of 2009 more wood was planted inside a cave at the site. The Chinese team went in the late summer of 2009 (I was there at the time and knew about the hoax) and was shown the cave with the wood and made their film." (Read his full account here.)

Ah well, the arkaeologists will have to keep searching and they've got a lot of ground to cover. According to ancient scriptures, almost every mountain range in, and around, the fertile crescent, the Mediterranean, and Bahrain could have the remains of one ark or another. Good luck!