Posted on 04/16/2002 12:12:59 PM PDT by Good Tidings Of Great Joy
It may be exactly what millions of people believe that it is. If so, it is the greatest archaeological find in centuries.
Its official name is "The Ararat Anomaly".
An independent correlation of maps of the region with information released in 1995 by the United States Defense Intelligence Agency places the Ararat Anomaly at "approximately 39 42' 10" N 044 16' 30" E at an elevation of approximately 14-15,000 feet and approximately 2.2 KM horizontal distance west of the summit".
It is located by the Ahora Gorge, near the summit of Mt. Ararat, in Turkey. Turkey, in turn, is bordered by the Black Sea and the Mediterranean Sea.
The October 2001 American Journal of Archaeology attested to massive flooding in the region 7,500 years ago, noting that the Black Sea was "abruptly filled by waters from the Mediterranean when the Bosporus was cut by rising world sea levels."
Mt. Ararat itself is of volcanic origin, glaciated and covered with ice and loose rocks. Expeditions, while not impossible, are dangerous due to frequent avalanches. Indeed, an avalanche in 1840 destroyed a 500-year-old monastery, which had in turn preserved many of the artifacts that had been discovered in the area.
The weather is also treacherous. Mt. Ararat is a magnet for thunderstorms. The resulting inclement weather often impedes progress towards the summit. On the other hand, locals say that the storms result in beautiful rainbows.
Kurdish rebels tend to shoot at foreigners seeking to explore Mt. Ararat, a not-unimportant fact which has dissuaded many from pursuing the facts about whatever it is up there.
On June 17, 1949, a United States Air Force plane flew a then-classified aerial photographic mission over Mt. Ararat. The pilot, to his surprise, recorded two images of the Ararat Anomaly — a linear, oddly symmetrical shape approximately 600 feet in length, with roughly 90 feet of that length protruding clearly from out of the snow and ice.
Whatever it was appeared to be damaged.
The pilot also recorded three pictures of a second anomaly, smaller, and similar in shape, nearby. It was speculated that something had been split in half, or more exactly into a 2/3 part and a 1/3 part by one or more of Mt. Ararat´s frequent avalanches. The smaller part may have, according to more recent United States Government satellite images of the Ararat Anomaly, slipped into the Ahora Gorge.
The Ahora Gorge is a full mile wide, and reportedly miles deep. It may hold quite a few answers.
These findings were accentuated by the pictures taken between October of 1999 and the summer of 2000 by the Ikonos 2 Satellite, which resolves images as small as one meter across.
From the 1949 pictures, per the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) analysis thereof released in 1995, there are from the front of the surviving 2/3, now known as the Ararat Anomaly, three giant, prong-like structures, akin to what might be found in an ancient marine vessel. Similar structures were similarly identified in images of the smaller anomaly, the 1/3 of the original that may be lost to the depths of the Ahora Gorge.
Nearby, on Parrot Glacier, French explorer Fernand Navarra found a five-foot long piece of carefully hand-crafted wood.
Published reports confirm that the hand-crafted piece of wood found by Navarra was submitted to the National Museum of Natural History in Paris, France, the Forestry Institute of Research and Experiments of the Ministry of Agriculture in Madrid, Spain and the Department of Anthropology and Prehistoric Studies at the University of Bordeaux in France.
The age of the hand-crafted piece of wood was determined to be in excess of 5,000 years old.
The site where it was found was only a few hundred meters from the site of the 1949 U.S. Air Force pictures.
However, Navarra was unaware of those pictures when he submitted his discovery: those pictures remained classified until 1982. Navarra independently made his discovery in the same area on July 5, 1955.
And then, finally, there is the interesting report of proto-Sumerian pictographs found on a rock from a cave near Mt. Ararat´s Ahora Gorge, as reported in the National Geographic Society's publication, Research & Exploration, Vol. 10, No. 4, 1994, p. 484.
The pictographs refer to the covenant of the bright bow and add "let man and woman go forth and procreate".
The pictographs, collectively, are known as the "Ahora Covenant Inscription".
Notwithstanding all of that... the central question, of course, is whether what has been officially recognized as "The Ararat Anomaly" is — or was — a boat.
More specifically, a very, very ancient boat which set forth thousands of years ago, through torrential rains, into the deepening water of a great deluge, alighting on dry land after forty days and forty nights...
They were not carnivores before the flood.
We don't know how long after the flood it took for them to become carnivores.
We also don't know how many years' worth of food stores were on the ark or whether there was a garden that could be transplanted.
Granted, repopulating the world from a few survivors is a daunting task, but it is made easier if it is properly planned for. And they had the universe's greatest planner.
Shalom.
Unless Ararat, that very active mountain, rose up that far after the flood.
Which would decrease the likelihood that a wooden boat would survive, but I'm skeptical that there is anything on that mountain that would interest anyone but a tourist shark. G-d doesn't tend to leave footprints.
Shalom.
That argument is a non-starter. If Genesis were not a myth but the actual truth you would find it (or variants thereof) in every religion.
Shalom.
It may be possible. I don't remember the math. But considering that light spreads and becomes diminished with the square of the distance travelled it just seems highly unlikely.
Newspaper story, eh? Well, we know that those are always 100% factually accurate. But you may be right. I don't suppose there is anyone on this site who knows for sure.
Shalom.
The most superficially plausible scenario I've seen is the one where there were no mountains at all before the flood, so all the land was flat and easily floodable. The flood convulsion raised all the waters and sank the depths. There's no missing volume.
Among the problems with that idea is the age of the mountains of earth. They should all be the same age if the above scenario is true. They aren't.
The Appalachians are very old and worn down. About the youngest top sediment layer you can find here is the Permian, before there were dinosaurs.
The Himalayas are very young. They contain whale fossils. They're still growing from the plate collision of India and Asia. The mountains of earth have different ages.
The total list of flood geology problems is quite extensive. What a flood does is not what the world looks like.
NO OTHER BOOK HAS BEEN EXAMINED LIKE THE BIBLE HAS, AND NO OTHER BOOK HAS BEEN PROVEN RIGHT ALL THE TIME LIKE THE BIBLE HAS. SURELY YOU KOW THIS, RIGHT?
You know, it doesn't matter what I have to say God said or what anyone else says that God said for that matter. I find He pretty much speaks for himself. We tend to just get in the way
Exodus 3
14 And God said unto Moses, I AM THAT I AM: and he said, Thus shalt thou say unto the children of Israel, I AM hath sent me unto you.
15 And God said moreover unto Moses, Thus shalt thou say unto the children of Israel, the LORD God of your fathers, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob, hath sent me unto you: this is my name for ever, and this is my memorial unto all generations
John 1
1 In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.
2 The same was in the beginning with God.
3 All things were made by him; and without him was not any thing made that was made.
John 3
16 For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.
17 For God sent not his Son into the world to condemn the world; but that the world through him might be saved.
God said all of these things. It's in His Word, not mine. But it was good enough for the Hebrews, good enough for the first century Christians, and believe it or not good enough for the Founders of this nation (of who 52 of 55 were active in their local churches, source M.E. Bradford). But just because you choose not to believe does not invalidate the fact that God is alive and well. This is not Allah, Buddha, Jim Jones, the sacred cow, green M&Ms, or a tree. While God made them all, just as He created You and me, we have free will. God gives us that. Perhaps His second greatest gift. The choice to decide. But understand, your decision one way or another does not effect the very existence of the Almighty and the fact that he flooded the world to destroy evil leaving only Noah and his family
Silly or not, you're talking about the Genesis flood so you should base it on the Genesis story. Genesis establishes that eating meat began after the flood.
I realize that you don't believe in any of Genesis, but you started by basing your argument on the Genesis account, so you should accurately quote that account.
Shalom.
I was responding to the comment that there are variants in every religion. I'm not an expert on every religion ever thought of.
However, the point still stands. The fact that it is a "common myth" is not proof that it never happened. Quite the contrary, it's more evidence that something did happen that is widely believed to be a global flood. It's similar to the question about dragon legends being in many different cultures with different cultural backgrounds. That suggests (doesn't prove) that there may have actually been some creature that spawned the legend of the dragon.
Shalom.
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