A team of scientists has been able to decipher, after years of study, a 3,000-year-old ancient Babylonian inscription that confirms the location of Noah’s Ark on Mount Ararat, in present-day Turkey, thus coinciding with the statements made centuries later in the Bible.
The discovery, reported by international and Turkish media, was made on the basis of studies of the so-called Imago Mundi, a Babylonian tablet from the 7th century BC discovered in 1882 in Iraq and considered to be the oldest map of the world, which shows cuneiform text accompanied by diagrams. It recounts the journey of a traveller who describes what he observes along his route, explaining that he had to travel ‘seven leagues’ to reach a structure that the writing calls a ‘parsiktu’; this term is used in Babylonian texts to refer to boat-shaped structures capable of surviving the ‘Great Flood’, such as the one built by Utnapishtim, a character very similar to the biblical Noah and who appears in the Epic of Gilgamesh.
The tablet indicates that the ancient vessel is at the top of the mountain and gives its dimensions: 155 metres long, 26 metres wide and 16 metres high. ‘The first place it reaches is called ‘Urartu’, and it is drawn on the map. The interesting thing about this is that in the Bible, Noah, in his ark, ran aground on a mountain whose name is Ararat; and Ararat is the Hebrew equivalent of the Assyrian word Urartu. That’s quite an interesting thing to think about, because it shows that the story was the same (as in the Bible),’ said Irving Finkel, an expert on cuneiform writing at the British Museum in London. ‘From the Babylonians‘ point of view, this story was a true fact,’ he said.
The Mesopotamian legend of the ‘Great Flood’ tells of a time when the gods lived alongside humans until one day they decided to wipe out the human race with a massive flood. But the god Eas had mercy and ordered Utnapishtim to build a great ship and put all the known species on board. A storm that lasted 6 days and 6 nights unleashed a great flood until on the 7th day it subsided: it was then that Utnapishtim saw that all humans had perished and the boat was perched on top of a mountain called Nisir, sending out several birds for a week to check if the waters were receding, until a raven did not return.
In the Bible, the story of the global flood is very similar – the bird that does not return in the biblical text is a dove – but the ark that God has Noah build lands on Mount Ararat after a 150-day flood that submerges the entire Earth. In the Qur’an, Noah is also mentioned as one of Allah’s prophets and the story is similar to the biblical account, but the flood – as in the Babylonian legend – does not affect the whole Earth but only certain region; moreover, Noah’s Ark does not carry only his family (except for his wife, who betrayed him), but dozens of other people who believed in him and were also saved; nor does the Islamic tradition show a degeneration after the flood of Noah, who according to Quran remained a man devoted to God all his life.
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Edited and reviewed by:
Pablo Gómez is a specialist in Turkey and has been editor-in-chief of Hispanatolia since 2011. He has been analysing current affairs and geopolitics in Turkey and the surrounding region since 2006.
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