Evidence Suggests Noah's Ark Flood Existed, Says Robert Ballard,
Archaeologist Who Found Titanic
Meredith Bennett-Smith ("The Huffington Post," December 11, 2012)
Robert Ballard, one of the world's most famous underwater explorers, has
set his sights on proving the existence of one of the Bible's most well known
stories.
In an interview with ABC's Christiane Amanpour the archaeologist who
discovered the Titanic discussed his findings from his search in Turkey for
evidence of a civilization swept away by a monstrous ancient flood.
"We went in there to look for the flood," Ballard said. "Not just a slow
moving, advancing rise of sea level, but a really big flood that then
stayed... The land that went under stayed under."
Many have claimed to have discovered evidence of Noah's Ark, the huge ship
that Noah filled with two of each creature [ the Bible also says seven
pairs of each animal ] to repopulate the planet following God's devastating
flood. But in the 1990s, geologists William Ryan and Walter Pitman gathered
compelling evidence that showed a flood--if not an ark--may have occurred in
the Middle East region about 7,500 years ago, PBS reports.
The theory, the Guardian reports, is that a rising Mediterranean Sea pushed
a channel through what is now the Bosphorus, submerging the original
shoreline of the Black Sea in a deluge flowing at about 200 times the volume
of
Niagara Falls and extending out for 100,000 square miles.
Ballard has been exploring this theory for more than a decade, National
Geographic reports, first discovering evidence of a submerged ancient
shoreline in 1999. At that point, Ballard was still not convinced this was a
biblical flood, according to the Guardian. Last year, his team found a vessel
and
one of its crew members in the Black Sea, according to ABC.
Ballard is using advanced robotic technology to travel back nearly 12,000
years to a time when much of the Earth was covered in ice, ABC reports. If
and when this ice started to melt, massive floods may have surged through
parts of the globe, wreaking havoc on anything and anyone in its way.
With an impressive track record (besides the Titanic, Ballard also found
the wreck of the battleship, Bismarck, and a U.S. fleet lost off Guadalcanal
in the Pacific) and plenty of confidence, Ballard remains unfazed by
critics. He plans on returning to Turkey next summer.
The story of Noah and his ark is a building block of Genesis, in the Old
Testament. It is similar in some respects to the Babylonian epic of
Gilgamesh, according to National Geographic, and the ancient Greeks, Romans
and
Native Americans all have their own variations on legendary flood stories.
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Note :
The Noah story, written in its current form as found in the Bible, only
dates to ca.1000 BC at the earliest, and may not have been included until
several centuries later. In any case, the Biblical story is clearly patterned
on Mesopotamian originals which date to some time in the 2000s BC. There are
three known versions. In them the names of "Noah" are either Utnapishtim
or Ziusudra. "Noah's Ark," if it exists, would actually be Ziusudra's ark,
or Utnapishtim's. The Great Flood was caused by Enlil, a name which became
Ellil in some parts of the Semitic world, hence El in the Hebrew Bible and,
Allah. But in one of the ancient stories it is the Goddess Ishtar who
causes the Flood, just as she was responsible for the destruction of Sodom in
another story of that time.
--
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