A Chinese-Turkish group of explorers have announced their discovery of Noah’s Ark, 4,000 metres up a mountain in eastern Turkey. The team, named Noah’s Ark Ministries International (NAMI), claim to have taken photographic and physical evidence of the remains on Mount Ararat, near the Turkish-Armenian border.
The ‘evangelical explorers’ even say they have carbon-dated the ‘ark’ to around 4,800 years, bringing it in line with most historians’ views on the Biblical flood story. The group, comprising 15 adventurers from Hong Kong and Turkey, have also shown reporters wooden fragments, rope and nails they claim to have brought from the wreckage.
Local officials will ask the Turkish government in Ankara to apply for UNESCO World Heritage status for the site, so it can be excavated further. NAMI member Yeung Wing-Cheung is confident his team have finally cracked one of the Bible’s biggest mysteries. “It’s not 100 percent that it is Noah’s Ark, but we think it is 99.9 percent that this is it,” he says.
Dutch expert Gerrit Aalten is also upbeat about the discovery. “The significance of this find is that for the first time inhistory the discovery of Noahs Ark is well documented and revealed to the worldwide community,” he says. “Theres a tremendous amount of solid evidence that the structure found on Mount Ararat in Eastern Turkey is the legendary Ark of Noah.”
The whereabouts of Noah’s Ark is one of Biblical archaeology’s greatest conundrums. Noah famously built his ark to accommodate two of every animal, to escape a worldwide flood caused by God after having seen how corrupt humans had become. The Bible then says the ark came to rest on a mountain, of which Ararat is the region’s largest.
This isn’t the first time someone has claimed the discovery of the ark on Mount Ararat. American archaeologist Ron Wyatt found a boat-shaped object stretching across the region in 1987, that was promptly labelled a national park by Ankara. Check out this video of the discovery: