Ensign Morituri

Note to mods: If you consider this message to be spam, please treat accordingly and accept my apology in advance.

I work for a documentary film company and I was just made a producer for a series on myths and legends. The pilot episode will focus on two things: the search for the Holy Grail and the search for Noah's ark. The general idea is that we find our very own "Indiana Jones" for each segment--ie: someone who is actively researching/searching for these things--and then follow them on their explorations.

Now, I've already bitten my tongue several times on the whole Noah's ark issue and I've started to do some research on the web, in search of my "Indiana Jones" character.

I've come across a couple of professors named William Ryan and Walter Pitman, who posit that the whole flood mythology is based on the flooding of the Black Sea. Sounds reasonable and National Geographic seems to be involved in their work, which is promising. The problem is that everyone else who has written about the "actual" ark seems to be affiliated with groups like ICR and myjesus.com. I really have no desire to turn this show into a platform for these folks (though my director may have different thoughts on the matter).

I know that any search for an actual boat presupposes a literal interpretation of the Bible, but perhaps someone here knows of some anthropologist or archeologist who regards the Noah's ark story through a different lens than the Biblical literalists. In other words, maybe a theory exists that a sea-faring culture held an annual ritual in which animals were loaded onto a boat and sent out to sea as a sacrifice...something (anything) like that.

As much as I'd like to take a trip out to Turkey and Armenia to see Ararat, I'd rather not do so in the company of Duane Gish and friends. (They creep me out, to be honest).

So basically, anything that might draw my director's attention away from the literalists would be very much appreciated.

Thank you, biblical critics and archeology experts!

Sincerely,

Paul Compton

p.s. - any thoughts on the Grail legend would be appreciated as well. I'm brooding way too much on the damn boat at the moment.

Toto

The people who think there was a great flood behind the flood myths are probably not searching for an actual ark, but you could contact them. Maybe for the right price they would start a search.

If you have to go with the ICR folks, you could at least make fun of them.

A Los Angeles freethinker named George Jammal created a hoax where he claimed to have found a piece of the ark, which was actually some old lumber that he doctored up with teriyaki sauce in his kitchen.

(edited to add reference and fix spelling):
<a href="http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/ark-hoax/jammal.html" target="_blank">http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/ark-hoax/jammal.html</a> )

As for anyone actually looking for the holy grail . . .

[ August 20, 2002: Message edited by: Toto ]</p>

Kosh

Rather than look for a non-existent boat from a fictional story, why don't you have them explore the fictional story itself? DO a comparison between Genesis and the Epic of Gilgamesh, etc, and show how the Israelites borrowed that story.... IIRC, The Enuma Elish even has a cool tablet you can show.....

<a href="http://www-relg-studies.scu.edu/netcours/hb/sess4/gilgames.htm" target="_blank">Epic of Gilgamesh</a>

CX

I would have to agree with the others who have posted thus far. Anyone looking for an actual ark is simply not living in the real world. A more interesting and factual subject would be mesopotamian flood mythology which was was prevalent well before the Hebrew version of the story existed. Current ANE scholars view the Mesopotamian river basin as the cradle of sendentary civilizations. A fact of life in that region of the world is the cyclic flooding of the the Tigris and Euphrates river. This could provide a kernel of historicity to otherwise fanciful tales like that of Utnapishtim in the Babylonian Epic of Gilgamesh. A flooding of the rivers would have seemed global in scale to the primitive inhabitants of Mesopotamia.

As for the two scholars studying the flooding of the Black Sea. It is an interesting theory with much to support it, but it is still controversial. And in any case their ideas have nothing to do whatever with finding Noah's Ark, but rather finding a plausible source for middle eastern flood myths.

Good luck.

Ensign Morituri

Thank you everyone for your insights into this issue. The whole saving grace is that my director wants to do something fresh with these stories, so hopefully he won't be at all interested in doing yet another documentary about petrified wood and ark shapes on Ararat.

Hopefully, I can angle the story away from searching for a boatload of animals to an investigation of the sources of the flood myths.

In terms of the Grail legend, I hope I can interest my boss in the Rennes-le-Chateau story. I'd love to visit France.

sentinel00

When it comes time to produce your series on DVD, contact me!

MortalWombat

Regarding the black sea flood being the inspiration for Noah's flood, I don't understand why a flood that occurred thousands of years before any written flood accounts, and hundreds (if not thousands) of miles away from the places where these myths are written down would be a better explanation for the origination of a flood myth than the fact that the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers (which are located precisely in the area where the flood myths originate) are prone to flooding.

Marduk

"Regarding the black sea flood being the inspiration for Noah's flood, I don't understand why a flood that occurred thousands of years before any written flood accounts, and hundreds (if not thousands) of miles away from the places where these myths are written down would be a better explanation for the origination of a flood myth than the fact that the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers (which are located precisely in the area where the flood myths originate) are prone to flooding."


The story goes that these people who lived where the flood occured moved to Mesopotamia bringing their oral history with them. There is some evidense for this in the form of clay pottery, which appears at the right time and is different than the type normally found in the Mesopotamian area. The next step is to dive into the Black Sea and cinch it by finding this same type of pottery.

Answerer

If I'm not wrong, the flood only occurred in some specific regions, says like Middle East, instead of the entire world. In addition, the flood don't happen at the date which the Bible described.

MortalWombat

But the more simple explanation, which doesn't require that these people keep an oral tradition for a few thousand years until they write it down, is that they live in a area that is prone to flooding.