Hidden History: Lost Civilizations, Secret Knowledge, and Ancient Mysteries by Brian Haughton (beginner reading books for adults txt) 📕

In 1993, CBS in America aired a documentary made by Sun International Pictures entitled The Incredible Discovery of Noah's Ark. In this program, George Jammal, an Israeli actor living in Long Beach, California, claimed to possess a piece of ancient timber from Noah's Ark. The show was apparently watched by 40 million viewers, who naturally assumed that it was a serious documentary about the biblical Noah's Ark. Later, Jammal admitted that the story was a complete hoax and that he had never even been to Turkey. The ancient timber, which the researchers on the documentary had never even bothered to have tested, was actually a piece of wood taken from the railroad tracks near his workplace in Long Beach. More recently, Daniel McGivern of the Hawaii Christian Coalition, claimed to have discovered the ark on satellite pictures of Mount Ararat. He stated that he was "98 percent sure" that it was the ark, and one image even showed the actual beams of wood on the vessel.

In 2004, McGivern announced a much publicized $900,000 expedition to Ararat, to take place that July, to prove that the Ararat anomaly, as the image has become known, is actually Noah's Ark. McGivern was subsequently refused permission to enter the area by the Turkish government as the summit of Ararat is inside a restricted military zone. But some suspected that this proposed expedition had not been genuine anyway. The choice of Ahmet Ali Arslan, an English professor at Seljuk University in Turkey, as expedition leader, caused many searchers for the ark to become suspicious. Arslan had previously been involved in the hoax documantary aired by CBS in 1993, and has also been accused of faking photographs of the ark. Many now consider McGivern's abortive $900,000 expedition to have been a publicity stunt. Nevertheless, despite the numerous hoaxes and exaggerations surrounding the subject, and the repeated failures to find any physical evidence of the Ark, many still believe the story of Noah's Ark is the literal truth, and that one day its remains will be located in the region of Ararat.

The legend of a great flood and a specially chosen hero who lives through it to bring new life to the world is not confined to the Bible. The story has parallels in many mythologies of the ancient world, and shares numerous features with accounts in Assyro- Babylonian mythology in particular. The best known of these is the Epic of Gilgamesh, a story originating from Babylon, but in its most complete version preserved on clay tablets from the collection of the seventh century B.C. Assyrian king named Ashurbanipal. The earliest Sumerian (from southern Mesopotamia) modern day versions of the epic date back to the third dynasty of Ur (2100 B.c.-2000 B.c.). The tale tells of Ellil, chief of the gods, who is about to destroy mankind with a flood. A man named Utnapishtim is warned by the god Ea (the god of water) of this forthcoming deluge and instructed to pull down his reed dwelling and construct a great boat or ark to save himself. He is to fill this ark with his

family and representatives of each species of animal. After a ferocious seven-day storm and 12 days floating around on the floodwaters, the ship comes to ground on Mount Nisir. Waiting seven days, Utnapishtim releases a dove which comes back, then a swallow, which also returns, and finally sends out a raven, which does not come back. Utnapishtim then makes a sacrifice to the god Ea and he and his wife are granted immortality. The similarities with the biblical flood story are plainly obvious, but is there any archaeological evidence that such a world flood actually took place at some time in the remote past?

The Deluge by Gustave Dore.

There is certainly a considerable amount of evidence for prehistoric flooding in Mesopotamia, an area that included parts of modern day Iraq, Turkey, and Syria. (For example, at the site of Ur, on the Persian Gulf, in southern Mesopotamia.) In his 1999 book Noah's Ark and the Ziusudra Epic: Sumerian Origins of the Flood Myth, Robert M. Best cites a six-day flood on the Euphrates River around 2900 B.c. as an explanation of the biblical deluge. His ingenious theory is that Noah was actually a historical person called Ziusudra, a king/priest of the Sumerian city-state Shuruppak. He suggests that Ziusudra and his family were swept down the Euphrates River into the Persian Gulf on a kind of commercial river barge. They were then set adrift for almost a year before eventually grounding in an estuary near the mouth of the river. This particular flood has been archaeologically confirmed, but again, it was a local river flood, not a global inundation.

Another flood theory has been put forward by Walter Pitman and William Ryan, two geologists at Columbia University in New York. In their book, Noah's Flood, published in 2000, Pitman and Ryan claim that the biblical account of Noah's flood is based on a cataclysmic flooding of the Black Sea, which took place in the early Neolithic period, about 5600 B.c. The Black Sea,

then a freshwater lake, was flooded when the level of the Mediterranean Sea rose at the end of the last ice age, and millions of gallons of its waters poured through the narrow Bosporus Strait. The Black Sea rapidly filled and overflowed into large parts of the surrounding area. It has been estimated that the low-lying land around the lake would have vanished at the incredible rate of about a mile per day. At the time of this great catastrophe there would have been a considerable agricultural population inhabiting the area, who would have had to flee for their lives as a result of this great deluge. Such a cataclysmic occurrence would certainly have etched itself into people's memory, and would subsequently have been handed down from generation to generation, probably with various mythical elements being added over time,