Mount Ararat

Mount Ararat, the traditional resting place of Noah’s Ark, is located in eastern Turkey near the Armenian and Iranian borders. The summit of Mount Ararat is 5,165 meters (16,946 feet) above sea level. Ararat is a dormant volcano; its last eruption was on June 2, 1840. The upper third of the mountain is covered with snow and ice throughout the year. The Turkish name for Mount Ararat is Agri Dagi (mountain of pain). Adjoining Mount Ararat, and 4000 feet lower, is the peak known as Little Ararat.

Classical writers considered Ararat impossible to scale, and the first known ascent was that of Frederic Parrot, a German physician, in 1829. Before the fall of the Soviet Union, Armenia was part of the Russian state, and border conflicts between the Turkish and Soviet authorities often made it impossible for climbers to access the mountain. Armenia has regained its freedom, but continuing disputes with the Turkish government and Turkey's conflicts with local Kurdish tribes have limited further exploration of the Great Peak. If one can gain permission to climb, it is best to start from the Turkish town Dogubayazit on the mountain's south side. The average climber experienced in high altitudes can complete the trek in three days, but it is better to allow four or five days to include exploration of the peak. Late August is the best season for climbing.

Over the years, various groups have explored Ararat, hoping to find remains of Noah's Ark. Josephus, in about 70 AD, and Marco Polo, in about 1300 AD, mentions the Ark's existence on the mountain. Still, their reports are based on others' accounts. The story of Noah's Ark, as told in the Old Testament, is a reworking of an earlier Babylonian myth recorded in the Gilgamesh Epic. The hero of the earlier version is called Utnapishtim. It seems probable that the Babylonian story was based on a devastating flood in the Euphrates River basin and that the Ark in that story was grounded on the slopes of one of the Zagros mountains. According to Old Testament passages, God became so dismayed with the wickedness of the human race that he decided to wipe it out with a cataclysmic flood. Only a man named Noah was to be spared. So God warned Noah to build a boat to house his family and the birds and animals of the earth. Genesis (8:3-4) relates:

And the waters returned from off the earth continually: and after the end of a hundred and fifty days the waters decreased. And the ark rested in the seventh month, on the seventeenth day of the month, upon the mountain of Ararat.

The Bible only mentions Ararat in two other passages (2 Kings 19:37 and Isaac. 37:38), which makes it clear that it speaks of a land and a kingdom. The biblical word that we read as "Ararat" could as well be read as "Urartu" because the text has merely "art," and the proper vowels must be supplied. Urartu was the name of a historical kingdom, but the word also meant "a land far away" and "a place in the north."

There are numerous legends and eyewitness reports of Noah's Ark resting high on Mount Ararat, but no real evidence has been found. Only the loftiest heights of the frozen peak can preserve the Ark, and perhaps explorers will one day find the boat's remains beneath the snow and ice. If the Ark had landed lower on the mountain, it would have disappeared long ago due to the natural decomposition of the wood or because it had been hauled away by treasure hunters or mountain folk searching for firewood.

The Biblical references to a great flood and Noah’s Ark have remarkable parallels in many other archaic myths worldwide. Greek mythology, for example, tells of a hauntingly similar cataclysmic event. Collecting and recording oral traditions from a far earlier time, Hesiod, in the 8th century BC, reports that before the present creation, there were four earlier ages, each of which had been destroyed by geological cataclysms. In the fourth of these previous ages, Prometheus warned Deucalion of an impending flood and told them to fashion a wooden box where he and his wife, Pyrrha, could float above the rising waters. After nine days and nights in the boat, Deucalion came to rest upon the sacred Mount Parnassus in Greece and recreated human beings with the help of Zeus. As the Hebrews looked back to Noah, the ancient Greeks also looked upon Deucalion as the ancestor of their nation and as the founder of many towns and temples.

The idea of a great flood (or floods) that devastated human civilization is not simply the product of the robust imagination of the ancient Hebrews and Greeks. The many different flood myths, embellished and altered over the millennia, may be interpreted and understood as reports of actual events. More than 500 deluge legends are known around the world. In a survey of 86 of these (20 Asiatic, 3 European, 7 African, 46 American, and 10 from Australia and the Pacific), the German geographer and cartographer Richard Andree concluded that 62 were entirely independent of the Mesopotamian and Hebrew accounts. 

Conventional scientific theory attempts to explain these flood myths by referencing the known rise in ocean levels that followed the end of the last ice age and the ice melting between 13,000 and 8000 BC. While it is true that the ocean levels did rise during this period, by as much as 80-200 feet along different coastlines, perhaps the great floods were not only caused by the relatively slow melting of the ice cap.

Modern researchers such as D.S Allan, J.B. Delair, Graham Hancock, Christopher Knight, Robert Lomas, and Rand Flem-Ath have conducted comprehensive studies of the cataclysm myths found around the world and have put forth some surprising – and controversial - theories to explain the extraordinary similarity of those myths. These theories posit two causes for the great floods and their accompanying cataclysms.

One cause, initially suggested by the American professor Charles Hapgood, was the crustal displacement of 9500 BC that rapidly shifted – in a matter of days or weeks - enormous portions of the lithosphere (upon which the slowly moving tectonic plates are situated) and resulted in catastrophic earthquakes, volcanic activity, and abrupt climate change. According to Hapgood, this crustal displacement was caused by the enormous gravitational influences of a cosmic object (probably a fragment of an exploded supernova) as it passed close by the earth in 9500 BC. Certain myths of great antiquity can only be understood by referencing this event.

A second cause is suggested by the cometary impacts of 7460 BC and 3150 BC. The earlier impact event involved seven distinct cometary bodies simultaneously crashing into seven separate ocean locations worldwide. These impacts would have caused massive waves that devastated settlement sites situated upon or near coastal locations. Many ancient myths that report “seven blazing suns speeding through the sky and falling to the earth” may be understood as legendary accounts of these comets. 

The single cometary strike of 3150 BC, impacting the eastern region of the Mediterranean Sea, is probably the event that caused the great floods recorded in the myths of ancient Sumer, Egypt, and Greece. Readers interested in studying the fascinating matter of cometary impacts and their devastating effects on Earth will enjoy the book Uriel’s Machine by Christopher Knight and Robert Lomas. For a detailed discussion of crustal displacement, look at the book Cataclysm: Compelling Evidence of a Cosmic Catastrophe in 9500 BC by J.B. Delair and D.S. Allan.