By MICHAEL SLOVANOS
THE Daily Mail has reported that the results of ground-penetrating radar at the long-speculated Noah’s Ark site in western Turkey indicate a “Bombshell discovery … which researchers say could prove Biblical story true”.
The rock formation in an area called Durupinar, in the foot hills of Mt Ararat, bordering Armenia and Iran, very roughly matches the shape and cubit dimensions of the biblical Ark, and has for many decades gas been speculated as the fossilised Ark remains.
It has even been officially declared as the Noah’s Ark site by Turkey’s government and is a popular international tourist site. The location is believed to match the account of Genesis 8: “The ark came to rest on the mountains of Ararat.”
However, geologists including those from Creation Ministries International (CMI), an organisation of scientists who support the biblical creation narrative of Genesis, have dismissed the site as fossilized remains, saying it is almost certainly a rock formation.
A report published by CMI in 2021 by Ken Griffith and Darrell K. White proposed an alternative Ark site about seven hours’ drive east of Durupinar, on an unspectacular series of rounded outcrops called Karacadag Mountain or Karaca Dag.
Ellicott’s Bible commentary notes: “If in Genesis 11:2 the Authorised Version is right in saying that the descendants of Noah travelled “from the east” to Shinar, this could not be the Ararat of Armenia (now a major city). Moreover, we are told that the word in, Assyrian means “highland,” and thus may signify any hilly country.”
One of the objections to the Karaca Dag site is that the antiquarian Bishop Humphreys argued that since the Ark settlers came from the east, and since Sumeria was Shinar; therefore, the Ark must lie in the Zagros Mountains east of Iraq.
But the CMI authors say Humphreys assumed that Shinar was Sumeria. “As shown in part I of this paper, there were several locations between the Tigris and Euphrates known by the name Shinar. One of them, Çınar, is (directly) east of this site.”
The Daily Mail story fails to mention this controversy. The Mail has run a number of Ark stories including one last March claiming the CIA knew about the Durupinar site as early as 1957. This in itself raises serious questions about the validity of the Durupinar theory.
The CMI researchers were searching for a potential site of the ancient biblical city Babel in 2019 when they came across a series of discoveries indicating Karaca Dag as a potential Ark landing site.
They believe the site of an old school building is where the Ark rested. The US Air Force used the abandoned school as a temporary barracks in 1967 while they built the radar station on the nearby hilltop. They later demolished the school with explosives.
“We would expect to find the landing site of the Ark near the centre of the oldest post-diluvial distribution of humans and domesticated plants,” the authors wrote. “The site presented in this paper lies upon a mountain between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers at the centre of the Pre-Pottery Neolithic A (PPNA) Culture.
“This mountain, Karaca Dag, is where the genetic ancestor of all domesticated Einkorn wheat was found by the Max Planck Institute. The other seven founder crops of the Neolithic Revolution all have this mountain near the centre of their wild range.”
They also cite an LA Times report remarking how unusual it is that all of the early agriculture crops appear to have been domesticated in the same location: “The researchers reported that the wheat was first cultivated near the Karacadag Mountains in southeastern Turkey, where chickpeas and bitter vetch also originated. Bread wheat—the most valuable single crop in the modern world—grapes and olives were domesticated nearby, as were sheep, pigs, goats and cattle,” the Times reported.
The 1st century historian Josephus and the book of Jubilees both record the tradition that the survivors of the Flood lived atop the mountain for a century before they came down to build Babel. According to Jubilees, Cham (Ham) went with his family to live separately after the nakedness incident and built a village on the south side of the mountain. Griffith and White said they found ancient villages at the south and north ends of the mountain.
The CMI researchers hypothesized that that Ark would have had to contain ballast, in the form of 1-2 metres of gravel, along with other heavy items. Where the ship sat and eventually rotted away (or timbers removed) would leave a large patch of gravel.
The authors believe that the site of the gravel patch became the foundations for the school for shepherd children, said to have been built in 1928 by Attaturk’s government as part of a literacy drive.
“Any ballast is likely to still be there in the footprint of the vessel. We would expect to find a foreign patch of gravel, sand, or stones,” they wrote. They suggest the ship’s northernmost quarter was severed and rolled downhill just far enough to allow access to the interior, which they believe was only accessible from an upper deck door.
“A poorly executed unjacking might have tipped the floor hard enough for the ballast gravel to slide to one side, making the gravel footprint that later became building 3 (see map) narrower than the others.”
One of the major clues was an adjacent stone tomb that appears unscathed, while further away on the slopes of the mountain several geoglyphs appear to mark the site. Two of them appear to contain writing in an unknown script.
The tomb is located on the saddle between the northern two hilltops and has a central stone mastaba, 60 m2, facing the winter solstice at 113.5°. On the north and south sides are trapezoidal additions that make the entire structure resemble a gigantic stone canoe, about 160m in length (figure 11).
“In addition to the geoglyphs there is evidence of ancient human habitation, farming, roads, and terraces on both ends of the mountain, 10 km north and south of the tomb and Ark site,” they state.
“Extrabiblical sources inform us that Noah was buried on top of the mountain near the Ark. St Ephraim lived in both Amida (Diyarbakir) and Edessa (Sanliurfa), adjacent to Karaca Dag. He said that Noah’s tomb was near the Ark site. Hippolytus recorded the tradition that Noah brought the bones of the pre-Flood patriarchs in the Ark and reburied them after the Flood.”
The authors note that buildings 1–3 are certainly not a typical design, and do not have 90° corners. “Unless the architect was insane the shape of the school buildings appears to have been dictated by something that was already there.
“The brick and concrete remains of the school would then approximate for us the previous location of the Ark sections. Soil cores will be required to prove that. We expect soil cores to reveal gravel down to a depth of about 2 m, with remains of the bottom deck below that.
“The wood would probably be gone. However, at minimum there would be a soil horizon stained with tannins, and possible remains of bitumen flakes.”
They also cite Josephus and the Book of Jubilees as indicating that the ‘Arkonauts’ spent about a century on top of the mountains of Ararat before coming down to the plain to build Babel. This suggests that the mountain was low enough to allow agriculture and viticulture on its heights.
“Josephus tells of one and Jubilees tells of three villages near the Ark site that preceded Babel. If these are accurate, then Babel is only the second or fourth oldest settlement in the world.”
The researchers summarize their findings as follows:
- Anthropology—it is the mountain closest to the centre of the PPNA, and the Levantine Neanderthal distribution.
- Biology—the genetic ancestor of all strains of domesticated einkorn wheat is found on this mountain, along with seven other founder crops of the Neolithic revolution.
- Viticulture—the domestication of grapevines occurred on the North side of Karaca Dag.
- Etymology—the old name of the mountain is Masia, Masis, Mashu.
- Linguistics—geoglyphs with writing in an unknown script.
- Geography—the mountain is within the territory of the Kingdom of Urartu from 700 BC.
- Surveying—large geoglyphs, three of which point to the site, one looks like an Ark.
- Archaeology—evidence of human habitation and farming near the site at an elevation currently inhospitable to agriculture.
- Architecture—large stone tomb, roughly shaped like a boat, 160 m long.
- Archaeoastronomy—the tomb is oriented to the winter solstice sunrise.
- Geometry—the tomb, geoglyphs, and grid show knowledge of geometry and 30° angles.
- Geology—river gravel found on site, alien to the mountain.
