From: alanf@tekig6.PEN.TEK.COM (Alan M Feuerbacher)
Newsgroups: talk.religion.misc
Subject: Re: Ark-athon
Date: 26 Sep 92 17:22:25 GMT
Organization: Tektronix, Inc., Beaverton,  OR.

In article <lc60qnINN9vq@news.bbn.com> ncramer@labs-n.bbn.com (Nichael Cramer) writes:
>allenroy@rigel.cs.pdx.edu (callen roy) invites us to something called:
>>ARK-athon II  and ARK EXPO
>> January 29,30 and 31, 1993, Monarch Motor Hotel, Portland, Oregon
>
>Which, not suprisingly, will discuss:
>>Noah's Ark, Did it exist?   Does it still exist?
>
>This conference will offer:
>>Tantalizing stories that the Ark hides in the ice cap of Mt. Ararat...
>and 
>> ... items of interest having to do with
>>Noah's Ark, Mount Ararat, and the search for the Ark ...
>
>Now, this point has been made before, but it is worth pointing out (yet
>again): "Mount Ararat" has nothing to do with story of Noah's Ark.
>
>In particular, in the Bible the Ark is decribed as coming to rest in the
>mountainous region of the _area_ of Ararat (for example the KJV gives "the
>mountains of Ararat" --note the plural).  Furthermore the term Ararat is
>used repeatedly through out the Hebrew Bible, but _only_ as the name of a
>large geographic area.  It is never used as a specific location, let alone
>as the name of a mountain.
>
>Furthermore, the mountain now known as Ararat has been known by that name
>only for the last few hundred years; certainly not before the 13th or 14th
>century. 
>
>Earth-shattering?  Perhaps not.  But it is indicative of the level of
>knowledge of the participants and organizers of this event that they can't
>get straight so simple and basic a fact as this.


The best two debunking accounts of finding Noah's ark on Mount Ararat
I know of are:

    Howard M. Teeple, _The Noah's Ark Nonsense_, Religion  and Ethics
    Institute, Inc., Evanston, Illinois, 1978.

    Lloyd R. Bailey, _Where Is Noah's Ark?_, Abingdon, Nashville,
    Tennessee, 1978.

Here is the summary from _Where Is Noah's Ark?_

   Where have our investigations led thus far?  Are the
   remains of Noah's ark still hidden beneath the snows
   of "Mount Ararat"--Agri Dagi--in modern Turkey?  If
   not, what is there on the mountain that excites pre-
   sent-day ark-searchers?

   We have examined the accounts of the ancient wit-
   nesses--and found there are none prior to the
   eleventh/twelfth century A.D.....  Unquestionably gen-
   uine photographs of a boat-shaped object that is not a
   natural rock formation--if any ever existed--are not
   available at present....  Eye-witness reports have
   turned out to be unreliable, since they contradict
   each other in major details....  That leaves the ques-
   tion of the wood which has been brought down from the
   mountain, reportedly dating from the time of the bib-
   lical flood....

   Whatever its origin, the twelve-hundred-year-old wood
   that Navarra recovered is a significant archaeological
   find, and it deserves further investigation in order
   to determine more precisely when, by whom, and why it
   was placed in such an unlikely spot....

   What might it have been, if not Noah's ark?  Until
   there is further investigation, certainty in this mat-
   ter is impossible.  In the meanwhile, several plausi-
   ble conjectures have been, or may be, offered.

   1.  A chapel, perhaps to commemorate the ark's sup-
   posed landing site.  We know definitely of two reli-
   gious structures further down the mountain--the
   Monastery of St. James...., located at 6,350 feet....,
   and the Chapel of St.  Gregory, situated at 8,300
   feet....  They seem to have been founded around the
   ninth to the eleventh century, and they were destroyed
   in the earthquake of 1840.  While an additional chapel
   at the 13,000 to 14,000-foot snow line, where Navarra
   found his wood, would be more difficult to build, it
   is well to remember that the Byzantines, at roughly
   the same time, were erecting chapels at far more dif-
   ficult spots--for example, on the jagged rock peaks of
   islands in the Aegean Sea.

   2.  A replica of the ark, constructed some time after
   Agri Dagi came to be regarded by the local population
   as the landing place.  "The industrious monks of the
   monastery, wishing to further their own livelihood by
   the tourist trade, may have built something up on the
   mountain that with great difficulty could be seen and
   shown to be the `Ark' "--so wrote the respected
   American archaeolo- gist, G. Ernest Wright.  This
   explanation would seem to rely upon the hearsay
   eye-witness accounts that there is a _boat-shaped_
   structure on the mountain....

   3.  A replica of the house which, says tradition, Noah
   built on the mountain after disembarking from the ark.
   The French Dominican Jordanus reports, in the four-
   teenth century:  "In a certain part of the mountain is
   a dwelling which Noah is said to have built on leaving
   the ark."  But since he goes on to talk of the vine
   which Noah planted, placed by tradition near the vil-
   lage of Ahora on the lower elevations of the mountain,
   it is not at all clear that he understood the "house"
   to be near the snow line.

   4.  A hut for the use of hermits or climbers on the
   mountain.  Several of these are reported by the Dutch-
   man Jans Struys in the seventeenth century....

   5.  Timbers carried up the mountain by recent ark
   searchers....

   [It has been estimated that] "Navarra's sample came
   from a tree about five feet in diameter with a height
   of about 150 feet."  _If so,_ then the total age of
   the tree would be about 250 years....

   _If_ the radiocarbon tests were conducted from speci-
   mens at the center of the heartwood, then (using the
   Teddington [radiocarbon lab] test results as an illus-
   tration....)  the tree began to grow about the year
   780 A.D. +-90.  Adding 254 years, it would have been
   felled about the year 1034 A.D. +-90.  Only after that
   date could the structure on the mountain have been
   erected.  This early eleventh century date would seem
   to agree very well with other relevant data:  (a)  the
   two chapels erected lower down on the mountain about
   the eleventh century;  (b)  the earliest literary evi-
   dence that Agri Dagi was regarded as the ark's landing
   place only after the eleventh/twelfth century.

   It is curious that the wood was found precisely at the
   elevation that marks the upper limit possible for con-
   struction.  It is thus at the precise height, and from
   the exact time period, which we would expect for an
   ark replica, Noah's house replica, or chapel on the
   mountain.  And since the perpetual snow line fluctu-
   ates slightly from season to season, depending upon
   the intensity of the previous summers and winters, it
   is not unlikely that a structure erected just beneath
   the line would later become encased in ice and snow.

   I might add that the eleventh century also corresponded
to a so-called climatic optimum.  Vikings settled and
thrived in Greenland before the cold of the Little Ice Age
froze them out.  From about 1200 until the mid-1800s, world
climate was colder than at any time since the last deglacia-
tion.

Alan Feuerbacher
alanf@atlas.pen.tek.com
Newsgroups: talk.religion.misc,alt.atheism