So it was 500 years ago that Columbus discovered America. Multiply that by 10 and you get 5,000: That's about how many years ago another famous voyage that changed the course of history is believed to have taken place.
Not that the ship's captain, Noah, was going anywhere special. Mt. Ararat, after all, was hardly a prize to a water-weary traveler. But then, neither was America the gateway to the Orient that Columbus was looking for.Just the same, Noah and his companions on the ark (furry and otherwise) were happy to find dry ground, the sole survivors of a gigantic flood the Bible says destroyed every living thing on Earth.
The flood also gave rise to what many believe to be one of the world's oldest unsolved mysteries: Exactly where did Noah's Ark land? And is there anything left of it?
Enter Ron Wyatt, an American archaeologist who says the mystery is solved. The 59-year-old Nashville native believes the sacred vessel landed in eastern Turkey at a site he discovered 15 years ago.
If the boat-shaped formation is the real McCoy, it may well be the most important archaeological find of the century. The discovery also will have profound implications for millions of religious fund-a-mentalists who will view the find as direct confirmation of the Genesis flood.
Wyatt, himself a fundamentalist, believes God led him to make the discovery."I just stumbled on it when I was out here exploring with my sons," he said.
That was in 1977. Since then scores of archaeologists from a half dozen countries have converged on the site, uncovering evidence of what appears to be an ancient wooden vessel.
This summer Wyatt is back again - for the 33rd time no less - determined to prove his claim to the world. "I'm convinced the ark is there," he said. "My goal now is to convince the others."
With a martyr-like zeal and corresponding disregard for his personal safety, Wyatt is determined to win converts. Since beginning his search for the lost ark, the Indiana Jones look-alike has been shot at by terrorists, kidnapped and jailed as a spy.
Last summer was no exception. Kidnapped by Kurdish guerrillas, Wyatt and four members of his party were held hostage for three weeks. The kidnappers later identified themselves as members of the PKK, or Kurdish Labor Party, an outlawed group fighting for an independent state. "They were just looking for attention," Wyatt shrugged. Harried but unharmed, Wyatt and his team escaped Sept. 21.
Mt. Ararat itself is anything but hospitable. Overlooking the point where the frontiers of Turkey, Iran and the former Soviet republic of Armenia converge, Ararat's 17,000-foot glacier-capped peak rises out of the flat Aras plain like a giant ghost looming over the horizon. Frequent earthquakes and bone-chilling winds make the most intrepid mountain climbers think twice before scaling it. In Turkish the mountain is called Agri Dagi, which means "Mountain of Pain."
Ararat is sacred to the few remaining Armenians in the area, who believe they were the first race of humans to appear after the Great Flood. In 1840 an earthquake and avalanche buried an entire village at the spot where, according to local tradition, Noah built an altar and planted the first vineyard. A monastery there once commemorated St. Jacob, who is said to have tried but failed repeatedly to reach the summit in search of the ark.
Wyatt believes St. Jacob was just looking in the wrong place. "There's no doubt in my mind that we've found the ark," he declared, pointing out a 515-foot-long, boat-shaped formation far below the summit.
The site itself is located on what the locals call "Doomsday Mountain," Mahser Dagi, a 6,300-foot foothill 12 miles south of Ararat's peak. Wyatt notes that the geologic strata upon which the boatlike formation rests is sedimentary, the type left by a flood.
But more intriguing is the formation's size, which Wyatt says matches exactly the biblical dimensions of the ark. He explains that Moses, thought by most scholars to be the author of Genesis, would have used the ancient Egyptian cubit, 20.62 inches, to describe the ark's size. "The Bible says the ark was 300 cubits long," Wyatt said. "If you multiply that by an Egyptian cubit, that's 515 feet."
Near the slope a massive wedge-shaped stone juts out of the ground, a 6-inch hole carved through the top. Wyatt explains how early seafarers used stones like this to anchor their ships. "We've found a dozen of these scattered in a line about 19 miles long from the northwest. I believe Noah dropped these as he prepared to make landfall."
Wyatt rubs his hand over the surface. "See those carvings? They're Byzantine crosses, eight of them. Obviously these were done much later, but each one represents a survivor of the flood - Noah, his wife, and his three sons and their wives."
Wyatt also notes that a village near the ark site is known locally as the Village of Eight. "I've asked the people there how the village got its name and nobody knows." Wyatt believes it refers to the eight survivors.
When Wyatt began his search, he twice sought permission to examine the boatlike object. Both times the Turkish government refused his request. In December 1978, an earthquake opened up a huge crack in the formation, and the following summer the government finally permitted Wyatt to gather soil samples inside.
Galbraith Laboratories in Knoxville analyzed the samples and found distinct differences in the amount of carbon inside the formation compared to samples taken from the surrounding area. Readings from the formation itself revealed significant tracings of petrified wood.
The next step was to survey the site with three types of metal detectors and two subsurface radar systems. Then, in July 1985, terrorists attacked. "Turkish intelligence had warned me that this would be a possibility," Wyatt recalled. "As soon as the attack started, 30 Turkish commandos popped out of nowhere and drove them off with automatic rifles." Before the skirmish was over, three Turkish soldiers and five Iranian terrorists were killed.
Undeterred, Wyatt returned that fall and finished his readings. "We found definable outlines of deck timbers, open chambers and other logical configurations of a very large boat," he said. Wyatt extracted samples of what he described as "decayed and oxidized metal and some partially petrified wood," which he believed was part of a rib timber from the ark.
A radiocarbon analysis at Tennessee's Oak Ridge Laboratories dated the wood at 3740 B.C. Scholars who delve into such matters generally place the flood around 3000 B.C. - give or take a few hundred years - but Wyatt is specific about the date: 2748 B.C. "This means the timbers were about one thousand years old when Noah started building the ark," he said.
Few archaeological expeditions have had as explicit goal as the search for Noah's Ark. Wyatt believes his discovery will lead to converts. "Many people who aren't religious might become religious," he declared.
But others think he's tilting at windmills. Scoffed New York University archaeologist Kenan Erim: "There may be something there, but I doubt it. There's too much of religious fundamentalists taking the Bible as literal record. They assume that everything is exactly as it's described in the Bible."
Phoenix writer Robert Moore is ready to address Wyatt and other "arkeologists" on their own literal terms. An ex-fundamentalist himself, Moore has published several anti-ark treatises in scientific journals. "There simply could not have been an Ark as described in the Bible," he says flatly. Even by grouping similar species together as one kind, the ark would have had to accommodate 3,858,920 animals, he argues. "If the dimensions of the craft as laid out in Genesis are accepted, that is a snug one-quarter cubic foot per beast."
Still, respected archaeologists like Alpay Pasinli, director of the Istanbul Archaeological Museum, believes Wyatt's discovery is legitimate. "I think (Noah's Ark) is there," he declares. "An archaeologist begins by thinking he's going to find something important. Otherwise, he's just a ditchdigger."
Whatever else Wyatt may find to support his claim, he knows he won't convince everyone. "There will be always be skeptics," he sighs. "There are people who still don't believe man walked on the moon."
1992 Chicago Writer's Group
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(Additional information)
Search for vessel has a long history
Ron Wyatt's claimed discovery of Noah's Ark is the latest chapter in a long history of quests for the sacred vessel.
Since the early 19th century scores of "arkeologists," spurred by shepherds' accounts of a boat-shaped structure protruding from Mt. Ararat's glacial cap, have trooped up its icy slopes. A Russian expedition at the turn of the century claimed to have strolled around inside the unfrozen portion of the ark.
In 1948 the discovery of the remains of a petrified ship on the 11,000-foot level of Mt. Ararat was reported from Istanbul. British archaeologists gained Turkey's consent to explore the site, but when Pravda, the official communist newspaper in Moscow, accused them of planning espionage, the Turkish government withdrew its consent.
It wasn't until 1959 that Fernard Navarra, a Frenchman, finally got permission to go up on the mountain. He returned carrying what he declared were timbers from the vessel, a claim later quashed when radiocarbon dating pegged the wood at about 800 A.D.
In the past 20 years some 30 Americans have joined the search, including the late astronaut James Irwin, who made six expeditions to Mt. Ararat. Irwin, one of 12 astronauts to walk on the moon, returned from his Apollo 15 mission in 1971 with a rock he dubbed the "Genesis Rock," estimated to be 4 billion years old.
That discovery made the moon walk a religious experience for him. "I thought the Lord wanted me involved in finding artifacts from the Genesis time that would be more important than the Genesis Rock wefound on the moon," he said. Irwin, who joined Wyatt on two of his expeditions, gave up the search in 1986.
For a while, the San Francisco-based Institute for Creation Research was sending expeditions up the mountain. Led by John Morris, a geological engineer at the University of Oklahoma, the group's expeditions produced two books but no ark.
"If indeed there is a boat," explained Morris, "there is only one way it could have gotten up there. That is through a major global catastrophe that would have restructured the whole surface of the Earth."
Indeed, archaeological evidence suggests that a great flood did occur - at least in that part of the world. In 1929 a British team led by Sir Leonard Woolley conducted an excavation near the ancient city of Ur, north of the Persian Gulf. Woolley discovered a water-laid deposit some 10 feet thick, dating from the 3rd millenium B.C. The layer, Woolley concluded, represented a solid break in time between two civilizations: one from the Stone Age, the other from the Bronze Age.
Other excavations were done west of Mt. Ararat in the flood plains of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. Similar evidence was found indicating that two civilizations had been cut off abruptly from each other.
The archaeologists concluded that not even a period of drought or war could have caused such total abandonment. The only possibility was a flood of waters surging out of the Persian Gulf. Careful scrutiny of the traces left by these waters revealed that they had inundated an area estimated at 393 miles by 100 miles. The date: about 3000 B.C.
- Milton Nieuwsma