Tag Archives: Noah

Is this the ‘City of Noah’?

Amaic

After 20 years of research, a modern-day explorer recently made an adventurous solo incursion in to remote southeastern Turkey searching for the facts and remains of Noah and his Ark. Reminiscent of a 19th century explorer, Dr. Charles Willis traversed a region kept in turmoil by renegade local terrorist groups. Here Willis believes he located and photographed for the first time the tomb of Noah.

A veteran explorer to the region and a neuropsychiatrist by trade, Willis has led four expeditions up Mt. Ararat, the traditional site of the landing of Noah’s Ark. Yet, the results of his investigation on that mountain, as well as years of research into historical sources, suggested to him that Ararat is not the mountain of Noah or the Ark.

Furthermore, Willis does not believe the Ark is even intact. Noting the great time period since the event, the harsh topography, geology and meteorology of the region, and the Ark being a natural source of building material for generations, Willis does not expect to find any major portions still intact. Furthermore, despite all the reports of sightings, none have been substantiated by later exploration/investigation. “Those who continue to look for the Ark on Ararat are looking in the wrong place for the wrong thing,” Willis said.

His research suggests the mountain known today as Mt. Cudi is the best candidate for the Ark landing and the subsequent settlement of Noah and his family. Here, too, he believes Noah died and was buried. Called by different names over the years, including Mt. Ararat, Mt. Judi, Mt. Nisir, Mt. Nipir and Mt. Lubar, it is neither as high as Ararat nor as snow covered and treacherous most of the year. It was on this mountain’s Ark plateau in 1953, a few miles from the site Willis believes is Noah’s tomb, the German professor Friedrich Bender discovered pieces of wood he believed came from Noah’s Ark. The samples carbon-dated to 4500 B.C.

The Ark is not the real focus of Willis’ exploration. Evidence of Noah and his family in their post-Flood community is where Willis is concentrating. The structure he is looking for is the tomb of Father Noah, as Willis likes to refer to the ancient mariner. “After all,” Willis said, “the whole human race comes from Noah by way of his three sons – so is the Father of us all.”

Modern local tradition places the grave of Noah on the southern slope of Mt. Cudi. In 1911, British explorer Gertrude Bell recorded the location of Noah’s tomb on the mountain. She wrote “I ought to have completed the pilgrimage by visiting his (Noah’s) grave, but it lay far down upon the southern slopes of Judi Dagh. “In addition, the ancient “BOOK OF JUBILEES” states “Noah slept with his fathers and was buried on Mt. Lubar in the Land of Ararat” (10:13-17). One of the region’s major cities lies just north of the mountain, Sirnak. “Sirnak,” Willis noted, comes from Sehr-i-Nuh or “city of Noah.”

His recent trip to Mt. Cudi included traveling alone, staying in a local village and befriending its chief, sleeping under armed guards and carrying an AK-47, a gift from the village chief, for protection. From his accommodations in the village, Willis could see the ruins of Heshton (“Village Of The Eight”?) site of the first Noahic village according to local tradition. The site identified as Noah’s tomb is in a solitary location on a gentle slope of the mountain’s south side. It is overgrown and undisturbed. Cut out of solid rock as a horizontal cave, it has a facade of built stone.

Inside the tomb, Willis believes he may find texts from the early post-Flood period. But his real hope is to find some antediluvian written material. “I know that most scholars do not believe that man wrote that early, but there are ancient references to pre-Flood texts,” he said. “It seems reasonable Noah would have taken into the Ark any pre-Flood archives available to him. That would be the real find from Noah’s Ark.”

In conjunction with the Ancient World Foundation, Willis intends to mount a multidisciplinary campaign to the site of Noah’s tomb in the near future. He hopes his team of geologists, archaeologists, anthropologists and linguists will be able to study the area, excavate the tomb, examine remains and decipher ancient texts.

Taken from:

Dr. Charles D. Willis, Ancient World Foundation
http://www.ancientworldfoundation.org/tombofnoah.htm
 

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1 . 08 . 2008
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Supplement to ‘Just How Global Was the Great Flood’?

Amaic

Preface

Today (06/Feb/07) a friend handed me what is turning out to be an unusual book, entitled Who Was Adam?, which I am keen to read right through considering that I have just embarked upon this Supplement to my Flood article; an article in which Adam figures so prominently. This book was written by an E. K. Victor Pearce, who became an honours graduate in Anthropology, after his having received theological training at the London College of Divinity. He also specialised at Oxford in prehistoric archaeology. Who Was Adam? is quite ‘unusual’ for various reasons. For instance, whilst the author appears to be an evolutionary anthropologist, and an apparent admirer of Teilhard de Chardin, no less, he writes surprisingly on p. 13: “One is still asked “Do you believe we descended from monkeys?” The questioner is surprised at the answer, “No anthropologist now believes this”.” Pearce has also accepted that the eleven toledôt (toledoth) divisions in the Book of Genesis constitute the true structure of that book. Moreover, he includes in his discussion mention of the research of Professor Yahuda, seeing his Egyptian evidence in Genesis as an indication of Moses’ involvement. At this stage in my reading of Pearce’s book I had to check the date of its publication, thinking that the author must have read the Wiseman/Yahuda synthesis that certain colleagues and I have publicised in recent decades. But this edition (second paperback, The Paternoster Press) was dated too early for that: 1976. I had not even read Wiseman or Yahuda back then.    
Again Pearce, like me in my Flood article, has attempted to locate Adam in a Stone Age context. However, whereas I would place Adam right at the beginning, without his being preceded by a whole host of hominids over hundreds of millennia, Pearce has his Adam arising after what he calls the ‘Old Stone Age’, as the first ‘New Stone Age’ (or Neolithic) man (ibid.):


“… at the end of the sixth age-day [sic] of Gen. 1:26-30, we have Old Stone Age Man with his agricultural revolution in the “Garden of Eden” 10,000 years B.C. This is followed by surprising New Stone Age City developments of Catal Hüyük in Turkey, and Jericho, 8000 to 5000 B.C. [sic]“.

Pearce has also, as I too have done, attempted to align early Genesis and the Flood to the Stone Ages and an ancient Mesopotamian archaeology. Thus, for him, Chalcolithic would correspond with the metal-working of the Cain-ites. Though Pearce does not appear to have argued any specific connection between Cain-ite names and cities of southern Mesopotamia (e.g. Irad = Eridu), which was a most important feature of my archaeological

reconstruction. Thus he continues (ibid.):

“… the Chalcolithic period is referred to

in [Genesis] 4:22, when native copper and iron are used 5000 B.C. [sic], long before the Bronze Age. Then we have the Flood of Genesis 6-9, between 5000 and 4000 B.C. [sic]. The Flood is followed by a new centre of urban civilization. This is the period of the Bronze Age cities of S. Mesopotamian flood valleys, 3500 B.C. [sic], with ziggurats like the Tower of Babel. Sumer and Uruk of archaeology, and Shinar of Gen. 10-11, correlate here. In addition to the chronological alignment between Genesis and science we also have the geographical agreement. The plateau heights of Turkey and Iran  before the flood, give place in the story to the alluvial mud-flats of S. Mesopotamia  after the flood”.


Pearce has presumed that the Book of Genesis is indicating that pre-Flood cities were built on the heights (p. 80). But Jericho, a city of the plains, was definitely not, as he also has to acknowledge here, saying “with the exception of Jericho”.
Pearce’s book is quite idiosyncratic, then, inasmuch as a scientist/historian of his type of evolutionary persuasion does not tend to favour, as he does, either the toledôt thesis or the historical reality of the early biblical patriarchs.

I give here some quotes from Pearce’s book, relevant to the above:

On the toledôt (p. 19): “The eleven toledoths are thus the framework into which Genesis is fitted and are the true literary structure of Genesis …”.
On Wiseman (ibid.): “the characteristic of the toledoth is not dependent upon our acceptance of P. J. Wiseman’s theory, however, although his theory is worthy of consideration …”.
On Yahuda (p. 21): “… Professor A. S. Yahuda … concludes that the patriarchs brought the stories from Mesopotamia (hence the Sumerian words) and Moses incorporated them in his records, which contained Egyptian words …”.
On Teilhard. Pearce admittedly gives the Jesuit priest only qualified approval (p. 10): “For many theologians who are showing interest in anthropology through the works of Teilhard de Chardin, I have endeavoured to show the limitation he suffered because of the position of science at the time of his writing, without detracting from his positive contributions”. (He repeats this theme on pp. 12, 117, 118, 119, 121, 125).
On Adam: “Thus Genesis 1 is a general introduction to the creation of man, both Old and New Stone Age, late in the sixth age-day, but it is left to the second toledoth to enlarge upon the appearance finally of the New Stone Age. … The third toledoth is a good summary of this development (Gen. 5:1-5 RSV). This man named Adam … a New Stone Age farmer of about 10,000-12,000 years ago”.


In many ways, Pearce had the right idea: to align early Genesis with the palaeontologico/archaeological data. But he has followed the typically linear view of the arrangement of time scales (to be discussed further in the Introduction on the next page, and in subsequent pages), which has, in my opinion, prevented him from arriving

at the proper Stone Age, and archaeological, alignments for early Genesis.
Introduction

Whereas conventionally-minded (often evolutionary-minded) geologists, palaeontologists and historians tend to adhere rigidly to an ‘Indian file’, or ‘chest-of-drawers’, kind of linear arrangement (see p. 33 of Flood article) – with little or no overlap of their neat, linear compartments – revisionists on the other hand have found that such an arrangement does not always reflect the testimony of the received data, and hence can be quite artificial. In this Supplement I shall be discussing this situation in relation to the three sets of ‘Ages’ with which my Flood article was concerned, namely:


A.     The Geological Ages;
B.     The Stone Ages; and
C.     The Archaeological Ages.

I must make it clear though that my Flood article was not an attempt at a full-scale revision of these Ages (A-C), but was intended to bring into alignment only what phases of A-C I considered to pertain to early Genesis, from Adam to the Flood.


Points of Co-ordination

Two great incidents in Old Testament history, (i) the Flood, and (ii) the Exodus, with the subsequent Conquest of Palestine (i and ii occurring approximately a millennium apart), marvellously enable us, I believe, to draw together and properly co-ordinate certain ‘Ages’ of A-C above that scientists and chronologists of a linear persuasion have wrongly imagined – due to a lack of proper co-ordination points – to have been quite distantly separated in time. In my Flood article I have used the catastrophic event of the Genesis Flood to try to knit together A-C (in part). This Supplement will be an attempt to summarise these time convergences from my article and place these into easily read charts, so that one may quickly be able to

contrast the standard linear time system with my revised version.
These revised charts (see pp. 7, 11 & 13) are only rudimentary at this stage and will need further development.
Firstly, the conventional sequence for A-C is basically as follows (all dates are BC and are most approximate):

Chart 1 (Conventional Arrangement)
A: Geological Ages

Date
 3000 Million Plus
 600 Million
 500 Million
 450 Million
 400 Million
 350 Million
 310 Million
 280 Million
 220 Million
 180 Million
 130 Million
 60 Million
 1 Million
 Era
 Proterozoic/
 Archaeozoic
 Palaeozoic
 Mesozoic
 Cenozoic
 Period
 Cambrian
 Ordovician
 Silurian
 Devonian
 Mississippian
 Pennsylvanian
 Permean
 Triassic
 Jurassic
 Cretaceous
 Eocene
 Oligocene
 Miocene
 Pliocene
 Pleistocene
 Evolving Life
 Algae/Bacteria
 Molluscs, Sponges
 Jelly Fish
 Insects, Mosses
 Sharks, Ferns
 Amphibians
 Reptiles, Coal
 Reptiles
 Dinosaurs, Conifers
 Flowering, Birds
 Primates, Mammals
 Monkeys
 Apes
 Hominids
 Man


B: Stone Ages

Date
 2-1500,000 Million

90,000

40-38,000

17,000-8500

8300-6000

6000-5000

4500

3500

 Period
 Palaeolithic
 (Lower)
 (Middle)
 (Upper)
 Mesolithic/Epi-Palaeolithic
 Neolithic
 (Early)
 (Late)
 Chalcolithic

(Ubaidian)

 Culture
 Acheulean
 Mousterian

Aurignacian

Kebaran

Natufian

( Black Sea Flood)

Eridu Ware

Ghassulian

Beersheba

Activity

Scavengers & Gatherers

Hunters & Gatherers

Farmers, Hunters & Gatherers, Herding

Agriculture, Crops

Orchard, Mixed farming

Copper, Ivory

5
C: Archaeological Ages

Date

6000

5500

5000

4000
 3500

2900

2750

2650-2350

 Period
 Chalcolithic

Ancient Bronze

Historic
 Early Bronze Age/Early Dynastic
 (1A-C)
 (II)
 (III)

[Middle Bronze Age
 Late Bronze Age
 Iron age
 –
 Not Relevant to this study]

 Culture

Hassuna,

Samarra ,

Halaf

Eridu (Ubaid I)

Ubaid
 Uruk Period

Jemdet Nasr

Sumerian Civilization

Uruk I

Canaanite and Egyptian cities

 Activity

City Building

Use of copper

First temples

First seals

Wide use of brick

Temples , houses of increasing size

Urbanization

Expanding trade

City states

Fortified towns


Now, turning to my Flood article, I shall use the data arranged there to attempt to build a new version of Chart 1 (A-C), as Chart 2 (A-C) (revised charts to be found on pp. 7, 11 & 13).  

A: Geological Ages
(p. 14):

“… the antediluvian civilization already sat above six miles of sedimentary rock – the latter in turn layered above a Precambrian basement”. 

(p. 26):
“Pleistocene and Holocene [our age] changes in world climate … were … responsible for wide fluctuations in the level of the Gulf waters …”.
(p. 27):
After the Fall … a harsher environment may have set in … glaciation (an Ice Age).
(p. 39):

… man is thought to have entered the Egyptian part of the Nile Valley also during the Acheulean period (which is conventionally classified as Lower-Middle Palaeolithic):
“… [Acheulean] was the last stage in a process of development that can be traced back to the remains discovered near the rock temple at Abu Simbel [in Nubia], the earliest of which probably date to the end of the Lower Pleistocene, about 700,000 BC. From the end of the Oldowan period onwards (i.e. throughout the Acheulean), there was a continuous human presence in the Egyptian and Nubian sections of the Nile valley, from Cairo to Thebes and Adaima”.

(pp. 40-41):
“… the Palaeolithic phase for Palestine has the following three standard subdivisions:

(a)     The Lower Palaeolithic – Acheulean.
(b)     The Middle Palaeolithic – Mousterian.
(c)     The Upper Palaeolithic – Aurignacian”.

[Osgood] … though will … challenge this linear view, referring to “the possible horizontal contemporaneity of at least the last two of these cultures, the Mousterian and the Aurignacian”. But the more interesting point that Dr. Osgood makes is that of the need … for radically re-locating the Acheulean phase, and its characteristic hand-axe, downwards … from the early Stone Age to the early post-Flood period …:
“There is strong evidence for a very wet climate in The Middle East and for left-over basins of water over many areas of the Middle East in the early days which the biblical model would allow to be called post-Flood, but which the evolutionary model would call the stone age. ….
… [east Jordan] … the stratification in the north, west, and south trenches reflects the existence of a Pleistocene pluvial lake that shrank until a widespread marsh formed during the Early Neolithic”.

(p. 41):
 … Grimal has the Acheulean culture following a pluvial period, though he dates the Acheulean somewhat later than does Osgood, to Middle Palaeolithic …:


The evidence suggests a starting point for Egyptian prehistory at the end of the Abbassia Pluvial period in the Middle Palaeolithic (c. 120,000-90,000 BC).
The Naqada I and II phases in Egypt , whose cultures are, respectively, Amratian and Gerzean, are conventionally assigned to the Chalcolithic stage of the Stone Ages. But Osgood … appears to re-assign Naqada I and II to the same wet phase of the Acheulean culture, when large trees were growing in every part of the Nile Valley ….
Chart 2 (Revised Arrangement)

A: Geological Ages

Date
 4000

2750

2300

2100-2000

 Era
 [Palaeozoic
 Mesozoic
 Cenozoic]
 Palaeolithic
 Mesolithic
 Neolithic
 Chalcolithic
 Palaeolithic
 Mesolithic
 Neolithic
 Chalcolithic
 (Ghassul IV)
 Period

Cambrian

6 miles of sedimentary rock

Genesis Riverine System
 The Fall
 [Ordovician
 Silurian
 Devonian
 Mississippian
 Pennsylvanian
 Permean
 Triassic
 Jurassic
 Cretaceous]
 [Eocene
 Oligocene
 Miocene
 Pliocene
 Pleistocene]
 The Flood
 [Lower Pleistocene
 Oldowan]
 Abbassia Pluvial
 Acheulean
 Naqada I (Amratian)
 Naqada II (Gerzean)
 ( Upper Palaeolithic )
 Mousterian
 Aurignacian
 Cush/Nimrod
 Babel
Abram (Abraham)

 Life/Climate

Plants, Animals, Reptiles

Man

Ice Ages

( Jericho spring dries up)

City

Building (especially in S. Mesopotamia )

Development of Metals

Temple building

( Black Sea Flood)

Destruction of local life

Wet climate

Forestation (invention & use of hand axes)

City Building

Ur III


B: Stone Ages
(p. 7):

… I fully accept … Osgood’s compelling Abram/En-gedi-Chalcolithic/(Ghassul IV) synchronization … I also agree with D. Rohl’s view  … that Abram was contemporaneous with the mighty Ur III dynasty in Mesopotamia. … Osgood has also argued for Jericho Neolithic to have been contemporaneous with the above-mentioned Ghassul-Chalcolithic phase …. 

(p. 8):

  • … the eventual cultural evolution (beyond Palaeolithic) from Mesolithic to Neolithic must not be confined entirely to post-diluvian times … having its origins at least in antediluvian times, primarily with Cain, likely the first city builder (Genesis 4:17) – hence Neolithic? – and with Cain’s descendants, all in southern Mesopotamia , who became more and more ‘civilized’, technologically speaking (Chalcolithic),
    • … culminating in the vibrant Chalcolithic mid-late Ubaid period (still antediluvian), at Eridu, Uruk and Ur in southern Mesopotamia, that absorbed the Hassuna, Samarra and Halaf cultures in the north, and beyond Iraq – this archaeological phase perhaps corresponding with the likes of the highly ‘civilized’, polygamous Lamech and his sons before the Flood (Neolithic/Chalcolithic?).

    … then interrupted by the Great Flood.

  • But that, soon afterwards, Mesopotamian civilization in particular (cf. Genesis 11:2) was resumed … especially by Nimrod, the empire builder …; Nimrod’s phase representing the imperial Uruk I and Jemdet Nasr archaeological civilizations in southern Mesopotamia (c. 3000-2900 BC, conventional dating).
  • That finally, after Babel , there occurred the Dispersion primarily westwards, shown archaeologically most especially by the Jemdet Nasr expansion (c. 2900 BC, conventional dating), leading to the Early Bronze Age/Early Dynastic phase.

(p. 24):

Ø      Adam (Palaeolithic)
Palaeolithic, the text books tell us, entirely fills the geological period called Pleistocene (part of the Quaternary period of the Palaeozoic era).
(p. 27):
Even the perennial Jericho spring dried up in Mesolithic times, necessitating a long-time abandonment of that ancient site.
(p. 28):
 By the time that Adam’s sons had reached maturity, there were, recorded, features of human living that a palaeontologist might perhaps associate with Mesolithic (or Epipalaeolithic) man. I refer to the basic cultivation of crops, cultic religion and simple animal husbandry. But still largely a hunting-gathering culture. The fertile site of Jericho , a spring-fed oasis, is considered to be the most ancient cultivated site on earth (its first level of occupation being Me Continue reading →

19 . 05 . 2008
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