With modern power tools it took over 300 man-years of labor to build each of the Ark 'replicas'.
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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...
For a thorough history of the efforts to find the Ark of Noah on the Mountain of Ararat, see “Noah’s Ark: Fact or Fable” by Violet Cummings. By the way, according to all of the witnesses quoted in this book, the Ark is NOT on the side of the mountain. Excellent research placed in historical perspective, with short bios of some of the key players and witnesses.
With modern power tools it took over 300 man-years of labor to build each of the Ark 'replicas'.
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