BBC Noah's Ark - The full video

The story of Noah building an ark to save his family and save thousands of animals from a flood which destroys all life on earth is an epic from many people's childhoods. It's a wonderful story, found in the Bible, The Koran and the Torah. But is it in fact, real history? Now the technology exists to examine this well known epic with the eyes of science. We will weigh out the evidence from archaeological finds in Iraq... We will examine the proof that a global flood did cover the whole planet... We'll also create a historically accurate picture of the real Noah: who he was, where he lived and what he might have looked like. The story of Noah is told in the Book of Genesis in the Bible and the Torah. It's set somewhere in the middle-east about 5000 years ago. Noah's family includes his wife, his three sons - Shem, Ham and Japheth, and their brides. Noah stands out as a good person - the only virtuous man left in a world that had become filled with corruption and violence. He is described as a wine-grower, a claim that has an authentic ring to it as wine was grown in the middle east as far back as 3000BC. And this reference also provides a rare insight into Noah's character. After the flood, the Bible says Noah planted the first vineyard. But it also tells us that Noah had a weakness Having made the first wine, the story goes that Noah drank too much of it. In fact, one night this Holy Man collapses naked and drunk. Horrified his sons Ham and Shem cover their father. In the morning, Noah is embarrassed - and perhaps suffering the first ever hangover - he curses the sons who saw him naked. He sound like a flawed and complex man but perhaps that is true of all great men. But Noah was probably a very reliable man, because God gives him a very big mission. The story goes that God warned Noah in a dream that he was going to punish humanity for its sins with a flood that would cover the whole earth. To save Noah and his family God told him to build a boat of wood and to line it with pitch inside and out. He also ordered Noah to give the ark three decks, a roof and a door. But the most surprising of God's instructions was the sheer size of the Ark. The Bible spells it out- in cubits. Traditionally a cubit was the length of a man's forearm - about one and a half feet. The Bible says Noah built an Ark 300 cubits long and 50 cubits wide by 30 high. That's almost as big as modern super tankers and cruise liners like Titanic. Nearly 450 feet long, it would have been a magnificent sight - certainly the biggest boat in the ancient world. quite an achievement for an ordinary man Now the Bible assumes it was possible to build this monster vessel out of wood alone. It's a pretty big assumption. The familiar image from the story books and cartoons of our childhood is of a huge wooden ark with the animals marching inside two by two. But that is a 19TH Century image. It is completely at odds with what could be built in Biblical times. According to Tom Vosmer, an expert on ancient boats, not even 19TH century engineers could have built a 450 ft Ark out of wood alone. They had to use steel frames inside much smaller wooden boats just to keep them afloat. The problem with a 450 foot boat made of wood is that the wood as a material cannot maintain the shape of the boat and the boat would start to distort at sea, and the seams would open up and it would sink. It's a safe bet that the huge Ark would spring hundreds of leaks along the length of its huge hull and sink like a stone. That's not to say Noah didn't build an ark. It's just that it would have been much smaller. Then there's another problem. How could he cram two of every different kind of animal into the ark? At the latest estimate, there are 30 million species on earth. Even with a fleet of Arks, Noah would have struggled to fit them all in. And how would he have gotten the animals on board. Did he personally go and fetch them? Or did they come to him? It is something Noah would have had to consider especially since he had a pressing deadline. Noah had just seven days to find all the animals and get them on board. 30 million species in a week. Noah would have needed to load them at the rate of 50 pairs a second. But if one assumes a more realistic loading rate then it would have taken Noah at least 30 years. It may seem like there's a stark choice: dismiss the story as myth, or appeal to the hand of God. But there may in fact be another explanation. The instruction to load 'all the animals' could have referred only to all the animals in Noah's part of the world. In fact, the Book of Genesis specifies which animals Noah was to load. The same book has a second set of instructions which are much less well known but present an even more realistic scenario. Noah is told to take 'take seven pairs of clean animals'. Clean animals were those considered suitable for ceremonial sacrifices to God. The Books of Leviticus and Deuteronomy specify 10 such species including several types of sheep, antelopes plus cattle, goats and deer. Seven pairs of 10 species That's 140 animals. Then Noah is directed to take a pair of each impure animal and bird. Again, The books of Leviticus and Deuteronomy list 30 or more. They include the pig, the hare, the lizard, the snail and so on. That's a further 60 animals. Then finally, Noah is told to load 'seven pairs of the clean birds - like doves, ducks and cockerels. Adding all that up, Noah had 260 animals. That's child's play compared to 30 million - especially if you discount the elephants, kangaroos and reluctant camels! A smaller Ark and fewer animals - suddenly the Noah story looks more plausible. But the next part of the story may be most far fetched of all. Noah, the Ark, and the animals It's all meaningless without the worst cataclysm in human history - the flood. According to the Bible it rained until the whole world was covered in water. Such a catastrophe should have left evidence all over the planet in the form of uniform marine sediments spread across the earth and the ocean floor. But have geologists found any proof of a devastating global flood? The scientific quest for traces of the Biblical global flood that Noah, his family and the animals in the ark survived actually began more than 150 years ago. But geologist Ian Plimer, after searching across continents sometimes in the most extreme weather conditions has found very little evidence. A great flood would leave a signature. It would be a very very large signature apparent all over the world. There is no such signature. There's no evidence, in fact there is only overwhelming evidence to the contrary. The absence of direct evidence is only one of the problems with the story The whole idea of a global flood flies in the face of what is known about planet earth. To flood the entire planet to the top of the Himalayas would take three times the volume of water in the oceans. It's hard to imagine where such a deluge could come from. The Bible provides some clues. It says it rained for forty days and forty nights - but even non-stop that's not enough. We know how much water we've got in the oceans, we know how much water's in the polar ice caps. We know how much water is in the atmosphere and we know how much water is in the rocks. If we put all of that together, which has happened many times in the geological past, we still do not flood the continents. If rainfall couldn't deliver enough water, what could? The Bible offers one more possibility - 'deep springs'. The Book of Genesis says '' All the springs of the great deep broke through'' Could the great flood have gushed out of the centre of the earth? It's an impossibility to have that much amount of water coming out of springs, fountains or geysers. If all of that water was in the earth and in the crust then well before it had been released as geysers the crust would have been quicksand, you couldn't have walked. Even if the flood had been caused by a miracle Noah, his family and the animals would have faced further problems... The amount of water flooding the surface of the planet would have changed the earth's atmosphere. The atmosphere would have had a huge amount of water vapour dissolved in it, so much so that you would have drowned by breathing. And so much so that atmospheric pressure would have crushed your lungs. Geysers present another potentially fatal problem. They release poisonous gases from deep within the earth's core which probably would have killed everybody, whether or not they were in the Ark. Geysers pump out huge amounts of noxious sulphur rich gasses. Even before the flood you could not have breathed. If nothing on Earth could cause the flood - how about something from space. Like a comet. They contain vast amounts of frozen water. But to flood the entire planet the comet would have to be 1000 miles wide, or as big as Brazil. And if a comet that size hit the earth, not many people would live to worry about a flood. The friction caused by the comet's forced entry into the earth's outer atmosphere and its impact as it struck earth would be equivalent to 12 trillion megatons of TNT - the biggest explosion of all time Comets carry water, they are dirty ice. As they come into the atmosphere, they explode, there are massive shock waves. Massive areas of forest wiped out, huge extinctions of life from a comet The comet's devastating impact would force the temperature of the atmosphere to rise to 12000 degrees Fahrenheit - hotter than the surface of the sun. We would have had no life to go onto an Ark. Noah, his family and all the animals two by two would have been fried to charcoal before the whole flood started End of story? Not quite. According to the Bible, Noah's Ark landed in the mountains of Ararat, today in Eastern Turkey. The earth was revealed at last and the animals disembarked after months below decks to repopulate the world. So are there any remains of the ark? The problem is that the evidence - wood, rots in a matter of centuries. Countless expeditions have been drawn to Mount Ararat seeking to discover the ark's resting place. There are no obvious remains of the ark on the slopes of Mount Ararat This hasn't stopped a thriving tourist industry - pilgrims, ark hunters and locals - convinced that they will find the remains of the Ark somewhere on the mountain. One French expedition in the 50s did in fact find an ancient looking piece of wood 12000 ft up in a glacier. As a geologist, Ian Plimer wanted to find out more. He knew that for the timber to be part of Noah's Ark, it would need to be dated to around 3000BC. When this piece of wood was found it was thought to be the clue, this is what we need to show we have Noah's Ark and so they took the wood to date it and you can date wood by measuring tree rings or by carbon dating. It wasn't old enough. The wood was from the eighth century, 4000 years after Noah's time. But what was the wood doing on the slopes of Ararat? The wood would have been transported there to build a structure - something like a church. There is a booming ark business there now, there was in the past. It certainly didn't come from Noah But just as Ararat was looking like a false trail for ark hunters, this ancient mountain came up with a new twist. In 1949, US Air Force planes photographed the summit of Mt Ararat. Rumours began to spread that they'd spotted a boat structure in the ice. For decades the CIA withheld the pictures. But then through the Freedom of Information Act the CIA finally released the photos in 1995. At first there's nothing in the CIA picture to suggest a boat. But look closely, you can see a huge dark shape sticking out of the ice-cap. It's about 450 feet long - the right length for the Ark. The anomaly has tantalised ark hunters since the pictures were released. But geologists remain unconvinced. It's such a poor quality grainy image that it's very hard to tell whether it's an Ark or chicken entrails. You can see dark shapes anywhere from the air, be they in ice or on the ground. Some of them are ark shaped, others are not. It's not at all convincing from one single poor quality photograph. But hopes were raised again in the year 2000 with new pin-sharp satellite images of the strange shape. This one shows a snow ledge believed by ark hunters to conceal a boat-shaped outline. But for Ian Plimer this is just another of nature's random shapes. Well this is a fabulous photograph Far better resolution than the CIA photograph. However we see nothing spectacular here. All we see is evidence of retreating and advancing ice In fact, all the geological evidence indicates that an ark could not have remained frozen in a glacier for long. The ice is constantly pushing material I down the slopes of Mount Ararat and ultimately taken any ark that might have been there to the bottom. It would have spat it out as all glaciers do, as they move down slope anything they pick up they spit out. Be it rocks, be it Arks. In addition to fragments of wood and photos there are dozens of alleged sightings of the ark. Biblical scholar Lloyd Bailey has made an exhaustive analysis of all the claims and found them to be false. An amazing amount of evidence has been produced by ark searchers in support of the ark having landed there. But photographs are alleged to exist but you can't find them. Newspaper articles of sightings are alleged to exist but they are lost. They want desperately to be able to support the Bible in an age of doubt, in a modern rational age. And that desire is so strong they can rationalise away the overwhelming evidence that there is no boat there and no evidence whatsoever that there ever has been. The traditional Noah story may not pass a rational historical test. But maybe it was never meant to. Biblical scholars - using clues in the language used by the Bible - are agreed that the story of Noah was physically written down in the 6th century BC. The scribes who wrote it were Jewish priests who were in exile in Babylon - today modern Iraq. Maybe they sat down one day to make up a cautionary tale about what happens when people disobey God. But it's said that all stories have some seeds of truth. Maybe the Noah story is an exaggeration, an embellishment of something that really happened. 150 years ago, archaeologists made some extraordinary finds in Iraq. Evidence that would re-write the famous story about Noah and his ark full of animals. In 1851, British archaeologist Sir Henry Layard explored the ruins of the Babylonian library of Ninevah. His finds were a breakthrough - hundreds of clay tablets - of all sizes and shapes. They may have held vital clues about the Noah story. The trouble was, Sir Henry couldn't decipher the ancient Babylonian script. So he packed the tablets and sent them off to London - to the British Museum - to be deciphered by experts. The museum staff had no idea about the sensational information encrypted in the tablets. So they languished in their vaults for years until 1872 when they came to the attention of museum assistant George Smith. Dr Irving Finkel today runs the department in the British Museum where George Smith worked. Smith had a peculiar quality tantamount to genius which meant he could look at a cuneiform tablet and know what it was about, more than anybody else before him and probably anybody else since. And he wasn't a trained phrenologist, he know a bit of Hebrew, he knew a bit of Arabic, he could look things up in the dictionary but he just had this amazing quality that he could look at a bit of clay which to everybody else looks like a dog biscuit and know what the words meant. And he was the person in our Department who read about the flood for the first time. What George Smith discovered among the tablets was an ancient story about a great flood - the Epic of Gilgamesh. It was a breakthrough Smith himself could barely comprehend. The impact on him was something that he could hardly control. He dropped the tablet back into the tray like this, and started to run holding his head and making funny noises and according to the narrative that is recorded he started even to take his clothes off in his agitation because he was the first person after all that time, to read this funny writing and see that there was to all intents and purposes the text that everybody knew from the Bible and it was just too much for him to tolerate, he just nearly went crazy. What seemed to upset him so much were the similarities between the stories of Gilgamesh and Noah ''The great gods decided to make a deluge '' ''Build a boat...'' ''Take into the boat the seed of all living things...'' Irving Finkel has a theory why George Smith behaved so oddly that fateful day. The sheer excitement might have triggered some sort of brain seizure. I was reading something about the history of epilepsy where this phenomenon was described as a particular kind of epilepsy, making this funny noise and trying to disrobe yourself in the agitation of having an epileptic fit of some kind, And it did occur to me to wonder whether shock that hit him, the real shock might not have triggered something of that kind. Since then yet more accounts of the flood story were unearthed in Iraq - confirming that the story first emerged in ancient Mesopotamia - the place where the great Sumerian, Assyrian and Babylonian civilisations were born. The ancient flood stories had different names and were written at different times but they all pointed to a common ancestor composed some 5000 years ago - one original story about a disastrous flood. It is very likely that the biblical story has a Mesopotamian prototype because they are so similar, in both cases the gods have decided to destroy the human race they do so by a great flood, one family survives in a boat, they take on board animals, they disembark and then they repopulate the earth. One of the oldest flood narratives - The epic of Atra-hasis written before the more famous epic of Gilgamesh - was discovered only recently. Alan Millard found it while sifting through the British Museum's backlog of clay tablets. It made him wonder - perhaps the Bible never meant a global deluge. The ancient Hebrew language has one word for land and country and earth and it's easy to suppose that means the whole earth but it certainly need not. And I think that it was a local flood that is described there. The discovery of these older versions of Noah's story raised a tantalising possibility. What if they had been inspired by an actual flood? Not a global deluge, but a regional flood in Mesopotamia? In the 1930s archaeologists returned to Iraq to find out. In 1931, a team of archaeologists led by Leonard Woolley and his wife Katherine were excavating the ruins of the ancient Mesopotamian city of Ur. The Woolleys were a colourful husband and wife team - friends of Lawrence of Arabia - and of Agatha Christie the novelist. They left a detailed record of their finds revealing that they dug five to six thousand years into the past - the right time frame for the Noah story. One day his workmen struck an unusual layer of soil - one that could only have been deposited by water. When the soil was analysed it showed that the silt had been deposited by river water. Now, Mesopotamia suffered regular seasonal floods. But this was a massive layer - something out of the ordinary. In fact, later archaeological excavations of ancient city streets show that five thousand years ago at least three Mesopotamian towns were hit by large river floods. So Leonard Woolley and his wife had hit the jackpot. There had been a massive flood in ancient Mesopotamia after all. It was - conclusive proof - a real story lay behind the Biblical and Babylonian epics In committing the story to writing, the Sumerian scribes may have embellished it with myths and supernatural events. But there are plenty of practical details too, and they are priceless in reconstructing a story that's historically plausible. However, it does mean starting afresh It means setting aside the storybook image of the huge Ark, the global deluge, the number of animals and the landing on Mt Ararat. Above all it means abandoning the familiar Biblical image of Noah, and introducing a very different image of what he might have actually looked like and how he might have lived. Archaeological finds have established that the Noah story may actually have happened in Sumeria - an ancient civilisation in what is now Iraq. The Babylonian accounts say that the story begins in the city of Shuruppak. This was the cradle of civilisation. The Sumerians invented writing, the wheel and accounting. And what is known of Sumerian culture offers the first glimpse of the historical figure behind the flood stories. The most obvious difference is how Noah looked. Forget the man in Biblical robes and imagine instead a Sumerian from head to toe - wearing eye make-up, with a bald head and even a kilt! Then there's what he did for a living. The Epic of Gilgamesh says the Sumerian Noah owned silver and gold. Five thousand years ago, these were the currency of wealthy merchants, suggesting that the Sumerian Noah was not a farmer or a wine grower but a businessman. Instead of an Ark to survive the flood, the Sumerian Noah is more likely to have built a boat to make money - hauling grain, beer and animals. All the big trading centres - like the great city of Ur - lay on the Euphrates. It was cheaper to take cargo on river barges than by overland caravans. The question is how big a barge did this Noah have? The Sumerians used a variety of boats on the Euphrates, from small reed canoes, to wooden ones 20 feet long. But the Babylonian sources agree the flood boat was much bigger than those. There was an obvious incentive for merchants to build the biggest commercial river barge possible. But they would have been limited by the technology available. No remains or inscriptions of large Sumerian boats have been found yet. So instead marine archaeologists have asked how big a boat could the Sumerians have built with the available know how? One simple solution would have been to tie smaller boats together. Marine archaeologist Tom Vosmer believes there are clues to this effect in the Epic of Gilgamesh. It says that the boat was divided in sections. Probably one of the best ways to do it would be to build it in units such as the size of this, and use it as a pontoon in a river barge actually held together, lash them together, with some rope and heavy timbers and then they could build the ark on top of that. And it was probably a system that could have been used on the rivers quite easily. Since the historical Ark was a cargo vessel, it's easy to say what the Sumerian Noah loaded on to his barge. Forget the animals marching two by two and think instead of Noah loading animals, grain and beer for sale. Even for a rich merchant, it's quite an undertaking to mastermind such a big construction. But according to the Babylonian sources, Noah had more than just wealth on his side. They say Noah was the king of the city of Shuruppak, but he wasn't above the law. Failure to deliver his cargo would have meant social and financial ruin for Noah, whether he was king or not. In Sumeria anyone who failed to pay their debts - including kings - was liable to end up as a slave. But how did the flood come into it? The most likely answer is that Noah was caught out by a freak combination of natural events. Parts of the Euphrates were only navigable when river levels were at their peak. That meant Noah would have had to time his departure carefully. That meant waiting for the melt waters. Melting snow from the Armenian mountains increased the flow of the Euphrates in July. Records indicate that only then were the river channels deep enough for large vessels. But there was a risk. If Shuruppak was hit by a freak storm just at the moment that river levels were at their highest, then the peaceful waters of the Euphrates could turn into a raging flood. But the average rainfall in dry years in July was zero. The odds on a catastrophic river flood in Mesopotamia would have been remote about one in every 1000 years. So if it happened it should have been worth writing about The Babylonian tablets say that on the day of the flood, Noah and his family were having a banquet on the barge. Then the weather suddenly began to change for the worse - a freak storm was beginning and a catastrophic flood was on its way. A storm that would threaten Noah's very survival. If a flash flood was big enough to sweep away Noah's ark and put his life in danger it would have began with rainfall of tropical intensity in the mountains where the rivers rise. Mesopotamia isn't in the tropics, but there's evidence that hurricanes and tropical storms could get that far. Some 6000 years ago it was much warmer and wetter and it would be no surprise whatsoever to get a tropical storm. we could have had ten times the rainfall Some of these metereological events are absolutely catastrophic, and these are the sort of events that we record in history - we don't record the normal day to day humdrum If a freak storm coincided with the seasonal snow melt, then the Euphrates could easily have flooded the Mesopotamian plain. The Bible says the storm lasted for an incredible 40 days. The Babylonian tablets say it was 7. But even a single day would have been terrible, life threatening. With much of his cargo left behind or swept away, Noah's barge would have been at the mercy of the raging Euphrates. The following day say the Babylonian tablets, Noah and his family couldn't see land. The flood extended for miles. After the storm, Noah and his family must have longed for the waters to subside, and ground them on the banks of the Euphrates. In fact, their problems had only just begun. All versions of the story agree that they couldn't see land for at least seven days. The Bible concludes that Noah's flood covered the whole world. But there is in fact another explanation. Noah's family would have believed that they were drifting on the flooded Euphrates. They would have been relieved that at the very least the river water meant they wouldn't die of thirst. But the Babylonian versions suggest that the water was salty. Noah's ark, was no longer drifting on the flooded Euphrates If you plot Noah's course from Shuruppak - now in the flooded plain - the currents would have swept his barge downstream into the Persian Gulf! This tallies with the epic of Gilgamesh which says that the he ''looked upon the sea''. There's no telling how long Noah and his family would have stayed marooned in the Persian Gulf. The Bible records more than a year, the Babylonian tablets suggest just a week. Either way - Noah and his family had a big problem: salty water. What would they drink? Without freshwater from rain or river, their only alternative would have been the beer they were carrying for their traders. Beer is actually a good alternative. And we know we had it three and half thousand years ago. They were brewing beer, it's full of nutrients, most important it's sterile and wouldn't suffer from contamination like water might. One of the hallmarks of the Noah story is that the Ark is said to have landed in the mountains of Ararat. But if there was no global flood then it's far more likely that it landed somewhere else altogether. The mountains of Ararat lie to the north of Shuruppak. Swept downriver, the barge would have grounded 500 miles away on the shores of the Persian Gulf. In the Bible once the ark has grounded the story is almost over. But the Babylonian tablets hint that Noah's adventure was far from over There are several puzzling references - one talks of 'the overthrowing of his kingship', another says the flood hero was 'expelled'. All of these references clearly suggest that for some reason, Noah couldn't return to Shuruppak - that even when the flood was over, he was still in mortal danger The most likely explanation is that many of Noah's creditors had survived the deluge, had tracked him down and were now demanding their money back. Under Sumerian law Noah could be forced into slavery to repay his debts. He would have had to flee the country to avoid prosecution. Precisely where the fugitive Noah went is something of a mystery. One of the Babylonian tablets says that Noah went to live in a land called Dilmun. Now that's the Sumerian name for the modern island of Bahrain. Maybe this is where he came to rest. That is where, after the flood was over, the Babylonian Noah was settled by the gods. Apparently it was a pleasant place to be where he could exist without much work and pass the time away as he pleased. If he did end up in Dilmun, then the modern island of Bahrain may have a remarkable secret. Its landscape is dotted with hundreds of thousands of burial mounds. And only a handful of these tombs have been excavated. But many date back to Sumerian times. They are the sort of place a great king would be laid to rest in. In time the memory of a king who survived a flood could have been turned into a great Sumerian legend. It would have been embellished with miraculous and mythological elements. Eventually it would have been written down, copied and recopied by generations of scribes, giving rise to new versions. Two thousand years later, one of those versions, languishing in a library in Babylon could also have come to the attention of the Jewish priests who wrote the Bible. When they first read the story, how could they fail to recognise the lessons it offers. If humankind falls short of God's laws there's a dreadful price to pay. Behind that moral message lies one of the world's great stories. And behind that story we can just glimpse a real man, a real boat, and a real adventure.