Jakarta –
History Noah’s Ark narrated in the Torah, the Bible and the Koran, it inspired a few brave men to scour the slopes of Mount Ararat in and around Armenian Turkey in search of traces of this legendary wooden vessel.
In 1876, for example, British lawyer and politician James Bryce climbed Mount Ararat, where biblical records say the great boat stopped. He claims to have found a piece of wood that looks like a part of a ship.
Developments in technology and science cause stories of the discovery of the more modern Noah’s Ark to occur more frequently. For example, the reports of an ophthalmologist who saw it in a rock formation on a mountain in the 1940s to the claims of an evangelical priest who found petrified wood on a mountaintop in the early 2000s.
But the search for Noah’s Ark has riled academic archaeologists and Bible scholars alike. “No forensic archaeologist has done this,” said National Geographic explorer Jodi Magness, an archaeologist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, of the quest to find evidence of Noah’s Ark.
“Archaeology is not a treasure hunt. It’s not about finding a particular object. It’s a science where we ask research questions that we hope to answer by digging,” he said, quoted by National Geographic.
Different tests
“There appears to be geological evidence that there was a major flood in the Black Sea region about 7,500 years ago,” said National Geographic explorer Eric Cline, an archaeologist at George Washington University.
However, he continued, scientists disagreed on the extent of the event, just as historians at the time disagreed on whether or not accounts of the great flood were inspired by real life. He argues that it seems that the floods were experienced only in different places and times and that these events naturally entered the oral and written knowledge of the world.
To further complicate matters, scholars differ on the exact location of Noah’s Ark according to the Hebrew Bible. The Book says the ark came to rest “above the mountains of Ararat” which was in the ancient kingdom of Urartu, a region that now included Armenia, and parts of eastern Turkey and Iran.
Both Cline and Magness say that even if the ark artifacts have been or will be found, we can never conclusively connect them to historical events.
“We have no way of placing Noah, if he really existed, and the Flood, if there was one, in time and space,” Magness said.
“The only way you can tell is if you have genuine ancient inscriptions, and even then, those inscriptions could be referring to another ark or another flood,” she continued.
Yet these questionable views have not stopped pseudoarchaeological research that upholds the Bible as literal truth.
This research, which archaeologists say is futile, is often compared to adherents of “young Earth creationism,” the belief that, despite evidence to the contrary, the Earth is only thousands of years old.
Audience expectations
Another problem, Cline says, is that the public has unrealistic expectations of the discipline of archeology. Also, popular media focuses more on the feeling of “chasing” the discovery of evidence, rather than providing additional archaeological knowledge.
“We’re not like Indiana Jones. This is a scientific procedure, it’s labor intensive. But what excites us about this procedure may not excite other people,” he said.
In his youth, Cline says, he spent a lot of time and energy trying to disprove the biblical evidence that supposedly enthralled audiences year after year.
Eventually, however, he quit and now focuses his time on his expeditions and translating his research for those willing to accept the results of the scientific process.
“Because most people only believe what they want to believe,” she sighed.
Until now, for more than a century, people have been looking for ships that survived the flash flood. And archaeologists say it’s a stupid task because they think Noah’s Ark impossible to find.
Watch a video “Rare archaeological treasure found in Gaza“
[Gambas:Video 20detik]
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