Myth or Reality? Hunting for the REAL Noah's Ark (S4) | History's Greatest Mysteries

turkey 1959. Army Captain ilhan durupanar flies an aerial reconnaissance mission for NATO Captain to rubenar is there to take photographs from his plane in order to map a remote area in the Turkish Highlands a few years prior there had been three large earthquakes that altered the terrain so the government wants updated images the flight is routine until he spots something strange he's flying over basically the middle of nowhere when he sees a startling and unusual formation amongst the Rocks below which of course he photographs when the film is developed the captain is surprised to see what appears to be the remains of a large ship far inland and 6 500 feet above sea level what in the world would a boat be doing way up there he doesn't know it yet but he may just have stumbled onto the answer some people think of a great biblical mystery that has been out there for thousands of years the mystery of Noah's Ark the story of Noah's Ark is told in the biblical Book of Genesis after God creates the universe and Mankind begins with Adam and Eve they go on to populate the Earth ten Generations later Noah's born according to Genesis during Noah's time God loses faith in humanity humankind become evil and sinful and God sees all this and is very very displeased by it and he essentially decides to sort of hit the reset button he's going to wipe out all living things that he has created and start afresh God spares Noah and his family on one condition he must build an ark and stock it with pairs of every animal on earth so the ark is a giant ship that's designed to survive this cataclysmic flood that's about to cover the Earth God gives Noah extremely detailed instructions on how to build this Ark how many floors it should have how many rooms what type of wood to use and even its exact dimensions 515 feet long 86 feet wide and 51 feet tall according to the Book of Genesis the flood lasted for 40 days and 40 nights eventually as the waters receded back into the Earth the ark came to rest on the Mountains of Ararat and actually there is a mountain today called Mount Ararat it's a huge peak in turkey and drupanar's aerial photo is taken just a few miles south of them for centuries religious Scholars and historians view the story of the great flood as a metaphor a warning that God punishes sin but curiously the flood is also mentioned in both the Torah and the Quran could these photos be proof that Noah's tale is in fact true photos create real kind of Firestorm of controversy and Explorer super excited because if these photos actually show Noah's Ark then they can prove that everything was written in Bible about this whole event is actually true right this is a historical event that actually happened see there are two things researchers can look for now the boat itself is one of them but another Avenue to explore is looking for evidence of a giant flood large-scale natural disasters leave traces behind that can last thousands of years and interestingly enough research has found that a massive flood May indeed have taken place and it happened right near where duropanar's photograph was taken in Turkey in 1997 a team of geologists geophysicists and oceanographers led by a couple of Americans William Ryan and Walter Pittman analyzed the area around the Black Sea and they find evidence for what they call the black seed Deluge and at the bottom of the salt water Black Sea they find remains of freshwater animals dating back to around five or six thousand BC and soil samples and Bedrock tests also proved that this once was a freshwater lake and then it changed very quickly so the theory runs that about 8 000 years ago there was a huge Glacier and suddenly that Glacier collapses it causes this massive upsurge of the Mediterranean Sea that floods all the surrounding areas including what's now the Black Sea every day the equivalent of 200 Niagara Falls worth of water floods in and this goes on for 300 days straight Madness the existing freshwater lake that will become the Black Sea it gets bigger and deeper at the rate of one mile a day if you lived in this region in just a matter of hours your home could be at the bottom of the sea the flood was actually the size of Colorado before receding it could have affected thousands upon thousands of people according to the study's authors any survivors could possibly have passed the flood Story down through the generations in 1985 the long hunt for Noah's Ark takes a sudden turn when a 4 000 year old clay tablet is discovered in the Attic of a British Air Force veteran it takes many years to translate but some believe it could finally solve the mystery of where the Bible's great flood took place and where the ark itself landed in the 1980s in England a man by the name of Leonard Simmons passes away humans had led a really interesting life so he had been at Royal Air Force officer and as such he traveled a lot around the world around the Mediterranean Basin and he had collected on his travels a lot of different artifacts which he brought back to England with him Simmons son Douglas would like to know what some of these things are so every so often he'll take one and bring it to the British museum One Day in 1985 he arrives with a tiny clay tablet maybe four inches high not very big it's covered front and back in cuneiform script the writing of ancient Mesopotamia Simmons meets with Dr Irvin Finkel who is Chief curator for near Eastern artifacts at the British Museum and when Finkel starts working with this text he is apparently really amazed Finkel knows that every single scratch on this tablet is gold his eyes scan the first line and he's almost drowning in excitement at this point because here in this tiny tablet is an account of a devastating flood Finkel asks Simmons if he can keep the tablet to fully translated but Simmons declines Finkel really wants a crack at this tablet because he's devoted his life to the study of these cuneiform writings and he knows that this is something special finkel's department at the British museum includes over 130 000 of these clay cuneiform tablets most of which were Unearthed in 1852 in Iraq ancient Mesopotamians used cuneiform essentially to kind of keep track of things like provisioning how many ducks were needed for a feast things like that but they also wrote down at least one exciting historical Tale one of my favorites the Epic of Gilgamesh the poem recounts The exploits of King Gilgamesh who ruled in ancient Mesopotamia an area near modern day Iraq The Story begins with a great flood that is sent by the gods that basically wipes out everything most scholars believe that the Epic of Gilgamesh was written between three and four thousand years ago and it plays out almost identically to the story of Noah's Ark but it's important to remember that this story was written a thousand if not more years before the story of Noah's Ark so the big question that we have is was there one original event or were there lots of different floods or different flood stories in the Epic Gilgamesh and Immortal Man by the name of utna pistim rounds up various animals and brings them with him into an ark together they survived this catastrophic flood utnapistem's boat comes to rest on a mountain called Mountain mush and this story is so similar to the story of Noah's Ark that many scholars believe that the story of Noah's Ark is a direct descendant of the story of utnapistam and the Epic of Gilgamesh ultimately we have to think what is the point of this story why do so many different cultures tell different variants of this kind of flood story because it makes the same point all of them it tells us that again as a species what we do best is survive I'm pretty sure that at many points in history a group of human beings put their heads together and figured out a way to endure a massive flood it happened in 2004 in Indonesia it happened in 2005 after Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans and it certainly happened five thousand years ago inspiring a story that we still tell to this day

Channel: HISTORY

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Keywords: history, history channel, history shows, history channel shows, the history channel, documentary history channel, history documentary, documentary, history channel full episodes, documentaries, history channel documentaries, The Search for Noah's Ark, season 4, episode 13, history's greatest mysteries, watch history's greatest mysteries, history's greatest mysteries full episodes, history's greatest mysteries scenes, history's greatest mysteries clips

Id: tXPrkKA0vw8

Length: 10min 1sec (601 seconds)

Published: Fri May 12 2023