The Ark

Long regarded as fanciful by historians, the flood that sent Noah packing and everyone else drowning is very likely to have occurred in the Black Sea basin around 5600 BC.

Transcript

This transcript was typed from a recording of the program. The ABC cannot guarantee its complete accuracy because of the possibility of mishearing and occasional difficulty in identifying speakers.

Ian Wilson has amassed the evidence that will also require a rewriting of the history of civilization.

THEME

Rachael Kohn: Hello. This is The Ark; I'm Rachael Kohn. And today we're all a-sea, the Black Sea in fact, where the Biblical flood probably took place.

Well that's what Ian Wilson's discovered, by trawling through the archaeological evidence in the depths of this unique body of water, narrowly connected to the Mediterranean by the Straits of Bosphorous.

Ian Wilson is a Cambridge-trained historian, living in Queensland, who likes to tackle religious topics that make many historians shudder, like the Turin Shroud, the Life of Jesus and Nostradamus. Now it's the Biblical Flood, but as you'll hear, he doesn't run with the crowd that believes Noah's Ark is atop Mt Ararat.

Well Ian Wilson, considering the number of amateur archaeologists who claim to have found Noah's Ark, your book establishing the historical evidence for the Biblical Flood would put you in some very unusual company. Before I ask you about the actual story of the Flood that you've uncovered, do you think there's evidence of the Ark on Mt Ararat?

Ian Wilson: I'm quite sure that is total baloney. I mean Mt Ararat is very high and you would have to imagine the world covered to thousands of feet of water. And we know, so far as the geological evidence is concerned, that within the time that humans have been human, there has been no world flood of that sort of proportion at all. It would be impossible; all human life would have been exterminated. So that is not part of the picture. What fascinated me was how there was this myth, not only in the Bible but also in so many other cultures as well, of a flood that certainly seemed to the people of the time, of world proportions.

Rachael Kohn: Indeed. Well you begin the story of the Flood with the evidence that a couple of oceanographers in the 1970s gathered in the Black Sea, which then prompted Robert Ballard of 'Titanic' fame to explore the sea floor more fully for himself. What did they find that convinced them of a major flood in the area of the Black Sea?

Ian Wilson: What they found was that they were using probes to dig into the sea bed of the Black Sea, and the Black Sea is saltwater, it's a sea, but what they found when they took core samples from the bed of the Black Sea was that although the upper part of the samples consist of molluscs that were of the saltwater variety that you'd expect, below these all the marine life was of the freshwater variety, indicating that at one time the Black Sea had not been a sea connected up with the Mediterranean, but had been a lake, a freshwater lake. And the question was then, when did this really very major event in the Black Sea very large, happen.

Rachael Kohn: Well that would involve carbon dating I suppose.

Ian Wilson: Carbon dating, and what they found was a very, very clear pattern indeed that all the freshwater organisms they found, they dated before 5600 BC, all the saltwater ones dated after that date, more recent. And also what they found was that there had been a huge cataclysm of all these marine organisms at that time. So they could say there was a very major catastrophe.

And from piecing together other pieces of evidence, what it worked out was that as you may be aware, the Black Sea is divided from the Mediterranean by a strait, which now has water in it, but originally there was land here and what seems to have happened is that the Mediterranean Sea was rising up and burst through. Why was the Mediterranean Sea rising? The answer is the Ice Age around 11000 BC. You have the end of the Ice Age, and it didn't kind of end like that, it sort of sputtered out. But in the course of doing it, what people are really not aware of is that a huge amount of ice that was locked up, certainly over the northern hemisphere, had to go somewhere, and of course it ran off into rivers, which then went into the sea, which raised the world sea levels enormously. And so all over the world in fact, we have effects of this say even here in Australia. You have the sea level rising, so that areas of land that were probably populated have become covered and populations are having to flee.

Rachael Kohn: How rapidly was that water rushing in?

Ian Wilson: Well in the case of the Black Sea, it was a burst. I mean you had the water coming over, and at what appears to have been a kind of natural dyke that was holding the water back, all of a sudden, possibly as the result of earthquake action, because Turkey is very prone to this sort of thing, just simply collapsed, either under the weight of the water or by seismic activity, and then you have a rush. And the two marine biologists, Pitman and Ryan, they say you're talking of a force of many Niagara Falls that would suddenly have been sweeping over, and people in the path of that sort of thing would have been swept away as certainly those near to it.

Rachael Kohn: Now you mentioned the date of those core samples as being from the 6th millennium BC; how close is that to the date usually assigned by tradition to the Biblical Flood?

Ian Wilson: Well it's difficult to know what date you would put to the flood in the Bible. I mean there have been various sort of people who've been fundamentalists over the centuries, who've made calculations and they have in fact put around 3000 BC for the Flood.

What is definite is that certainly in the area of Turkey, civilisation had developed at that stage in a very surprisingly advanced way. People often assume from what they're often told in school and so on, that civilisation developed only in Egypt and Mesopotamia. In fact the archaeological evidence has been around for quite a few years, that Turkey has been the first place to have had advanced cultures, one of the most important of these being one with an unpronounceable name, Catal Huyuk, which is a mound inland in Turkey, and very high up. And that was excavated by an archaeologist called James Mellaart back in the 1950s and Mellaart really was not believed at the time with the amount of evidence he was producing of an advanced township with excellent woodworking producing very, very highly sophisticated frescoes and homes, all sorts of crafts and so on were developed to a high degree of skill, a proper urban community with town planning and so on, fully developed, about 7000 BC to 6000 BC and then all of a sudden you have this culture seemingly kind of disappears.

And what appears to have happened is that in the immediate period before this flood event, as we're now seeing, there was actually a dry period which caused people who were up in these high grounds to actually come down to get fresh water from this lake. The evidence of Catal Huyuk is that it was actually at this one point around 6000 BC, everybody left for reasons that only make sense if there was some form of serious drought and they could no longer survive up in the hills.

So they come down, and you then appear to have a climatic change where suddenly perhaps intense rains, perhaps also this cataclysmic bursting of the dyke, the Mediterranean Sea rushing in. You then have what was a freshwater lake of the Black Sea turned into seawater. The composition of the Black Sea is very, very interesting in itself, because in the lower reaches it is still to this day absolutely lethal from hydrogen sulphide, which seems to have been released from all the plants that were just suddenly inundated by this particular flood.

Rachael Kohn: Now that meant that Robert Ballard when he was going along the sea floor, was able to find some implements of culture, some evidence of a very old culture that normally would not have been there, were it not for this unusual characteristic of the water, which I gather preserved these things?

Ian Wilson: That's right, yes. The first thing was to of course establish whether you could see any signs of settlements down in the depths, and precisely because of this environment, you could not get down the people, you had to send the submersibles that Robert Ballard used with 'Titanic' and so on.

Rachael Kohn: The Black Sea is in fact very, very deep, isn't it?

Ian Wilson: It is very deep, yes, and it goes down quite quickly, and it's at these lower depths that you have this high acid environment. And what he found, they were seeing ancient shorelines and then they began to see remains that could only really be interpreted as of houses, and then they saw bits of debris lying around these houses, which because no people were able to go down, they were actually fished up by remote control. Now some of them, disappointingly, have turned out to be just debris that people chucked over from modern-day boats, but the evidence nevertheless is that here down in these depths of the Black Sea, are the remains of the settlements that were overcome by the Flood.

Rachael Kohn: Now you note that there was some squeamishness in scientific circles at the coincidence of a flood at around the 6th millennium BC which might be the Flood from the Bible; is there actually some resistance in scientific circles to find evidence that might confirm Biblical events?

Ian Wilson: I think people are always wary of these sorts of things. A lot of scientists feel well because we've introduced geology and geology shows there never was a world flood of the kind described in the Bible, that's it.

What we now have is a scenario which is explaining why so many people around the world, and particularly those in the environs of the Black Sea, actually do remember an event which certainly seemed to them at that time, a world flood. And what's interesting about the Bible story is that Noah's Ark is described as being washed up on Mount Ararat, which is in Turkey. Now how do you have a people down in Israel remembering an event which is saying that their ancestor was washed up on a mountain in Turkey? This to me is one of the many pointers to this particular event being the one remembered in the Bible.

That doesn't mean to say that everything that you have in the Bible relating to the story of Noah, you can believe as Gospel truth or anything like that; I'm not a fundamentalist. What I am asking people to do is to respect the Bible story as it enshrining a genuine folk memory of an event that happened as I would say around 5600 BC, in which a lot of people were undoubtedly killed in the cataclysm, others survived by somebody having a boat that they gathered all their livestock and so on in, and then survived to tell the tale, which became the Noah story in the case of the Biblical Israelites, and the people of Mesopotamia also had a very, very similar story indeed. So there appears to have been a common ancestor, whether he was called Noah or what was responsible for this particular story, because he was one person who actually with his family and livestock survived this event.

Rachael Kohn: Well there's so much in your book, particularly about the goddess culture that was pervasive in the region, but you take another step into a pretty wildly sensational area when you float the possibility that the evidence for the Flood may also prove Plato to be right about Atlantis.

Ian Wilson: Well I think you can say 'prove Plato right', all you can say is that Plato's story may be yet another version of the Flood story. You have a story of a culture again being overwhelmed in a great cataclysm.

Now I think by Plato's time the story had become pretty adulterated, but I simply float the possibility in the book that this too may have originated in this one event. Because the Greeks certainly had this story in their folk memory as well, they had the Deucalion story of somebody being overwhelmed by flood and surviving. And so to me this is very important when you have a series of different peoples in different cultures all remembering one event of this kind. Legends and myths, OK, they are often very tall stories, but they usually don't originate out of nothing, something actually a very long time ago usually, caused them to come into being. And to me, what so many of these stories are indicating is that they are memories of this Black Sea event of around 5600 BC.

Rachael Kohn: That's Ian Wilson. For the full story you'll have to read his book, Before the Flood.

THEME

Rachael Kohn: Next on The Ark, join me, Rachael Kohn for 'Herrnhut', Australia's first utopian commune, mixing millenarianism, mysticism and communism. That's Herrnhut next Wednesday on The Ark.

THEME

Guests

Ian Wilson
graduated in Modern History from Magdalen College, Oxford University. He has written many books, co-wrote the script for Silent Witness, the BAFTA award-winning documentary on the Turin Shroud, and his book Jesus: The Evidence was accompanied by a televsion series.

Publications

Title: Before the Flood: Dramatic New Evidence That the Biblical Flood was a Real-Life Event
Author : Ian Wilson
Publisher: Orion, 2001