In September 2026, a drill bit shattered 5 m under a boat-shaped hill in eastern Turkey.
It had hit something harder than limestone.
A few days later, a small robot with a camera was lowered down the bore hole 12 m into the hill.
Its builders had named it gopher.
[music] The name was a joke with a source.
In the book of Genesis, Noah is told to build the ark [music] of gopher wood.
It is the only time that word appears in the whole Hebrew Bible.
And to this day, no one knows for certain [music] what tree it means.
Yet, the robot was going down to look for it.
The hill is called Durupanar.
[music] It lies about 30 km south of Mount Ararat, the snow-covered volcano on the border of Turkey, Armenia, and Iran.
Online, it has been called Noah’s ark for more than 60 years.
And the argument usually goes like this.
The Bible says the ark landed on Mount Ararat.
[music] The hill lies in the shadow of Mount Ararat.
And the hill is exactly [music] 300 cubits long.
The length Genesis gives for the ark.
Every part of that argument [music] can be checked against a written source.
And when you check it, something strange happens.
The oldest texts about the flood do not agree on the mountain.
A Babylonian tablet puts the boat on a mountain called Neimosh.
A Babylonian priest writing in Greek puts it in the mountains of the Cordans.
A Jewish historian [music] of the first century gives two more names.
A Greek city in western [music] Turkey claimed it for itself.
And the Quran gives another.
The Bible itself [music] does not name a mountain at all, and not one of them describes a boat-shaped hill.
So, where did the oldest sources say the [music] ark came to rest?
What did they say the boat looked like?
How long was it, and what was it made of?
And how did a muddy hill [music] in eastern Turkey become the answer?
We’re going to go source by source.
From the clay tablets of Babylon to the robot camera of 2026.
The texts, the museum numbers, and the dates [music] are on screen so you can check every one of them.
Chapter 1, the mountains of Ararat.
What does Genesis actually say?
The flood story in Genesis takes up chapters 6 to9.
[music] The landing is a single verse.
Chapter 8:4.
And the ark rested in the seventh month [music] on the 17th day of the month upon the mountains of Ararat.
Read it in Hebrew.
And the first surprise is in the grammar.
The word for mountains is plural, [music] not a mountain.
Mountains in a place called Ararat.
In the Bible, Ararat is the name of a country.
It appears three more times.
And every time it is [music] a land, not a peak.
In the second book of Kings, two sons of the Assyrian king Sinakrib murder their father and escape into the land of Ararat.
The prophet Isaiah tells the same story in the same words.
Older English Bibles [music] even translate it as the land of Armenia and Jeremiah summoning the nations to war against Babylon calls on the kingdoms of Ararat, Mini, and Ashkanes.
The country is also known from outside [music] the Bible.
Assyrian royal inscriptions from the 13th century BC onward talk about a land in the northern mountains called Uruatri and later Oratu.
And here’s the surprise.
Written without vowels the way Hebrew was written, Oratu and Ararat are the same name.
By the 9th century BC, Oratu had become a kingdom with its capital [music] at Tushba on a great rock above Lake Van in what is now eastern Turkey.
Its first kings carved their inscriptions in cunia form in the Assyrian language and then in their own.
The Aardians were engineers.
They [music] built fortresses on the ridges, temples to their god Haldi, and canals that still carry water today.
They were famous for their bronze work, helmets, shields, belts, and cauldrons decorated with lions, bulls, and winged spirits.
Pieces of it are in museums around the world, including the Metropolitan Museum in New York.
For three centuries, Oratu was the great rival of Assyria, the mountain kingdom on the northern edge of the known world.
We even have an Assyrian description of those mountains, and it is surprisingly vivid.
In 714 BC, the Assyrian king Sargon II invaded Oratu and wrote a long report about it as a letter to his god Asher.
The tablet is in the Louvre under the number AO5,372.
[music] It describes mountains covered in forests so thick that the sun could not get through, peaks that reached the clouds, and roads so steep that his soldiers had to cut paths with bronze [music] axi.
At the end of the campaign, Sargon plundered the great temple of the Oratian god Haldi at Mosasir and listed the loot item by item.
For an Assyrian, the land of Aratu was the high country, the roof [music] of the world.
It is exactly the place a storyteller would send a boat that had floated above the mountains.
So what does Genesis actually say when it says the mountains of Ararat?
The most natural reading is the mountains of Aratu, the highlands north of Assyria between Lake Van, Lake Ormia, and the Araxis River.
A whole region hundreds of kilometers across.
That is how the earliest translators read it.
The Greek Bible, the Septuagent, [music] simply keeps the name the mountains of Ararat.
The Latin Bible of Jerome in the book of Kings turns the land of Ararat into the land of the Armenians.
But the single peak we call Mount Ararat today, the 5,000 meter volcan is a different matter.
In Armenian, it is Moses.
In Turkish, it is Ardan.
It carries the name of the whole region.
And as we’ll see, it got that name many centuries [music] after Genesis was written.
So here’s the first modern claim.
And it is not in the sources that Genesis puts the ark on Mount Ararat.
Its words are the mountains of Ararat.
A region, any mountain in the highlands of Aratu [music] would fit the verse.
So would a ridge, a plateau, or a valley between mountains.
There is one more detail in the verses, and later readers would lean on it.
The ark comes to rest in the seventh month, but the tops of the mountains are not seen until the 10th.
If the ark ran a ground before any peak [music] appeared above the water, readers reasoned it must have grounded on the highest mountain of all.
Genesis never draws that conclusion.
But it is the argument that many centuries later would carry the ark to the top of the highest peak in the region.
That is also where Genesis stops.
It does not say which mountain.
It does not say anyone ever found the ark.
It does not even say the ark survived.
Noah comes out, builds an altar, plants a vineyard, and the boat is never mentioned again.
Everything we will hear about its remains [music] comes from later writers.
And to find the oldest landing place of all, we have to go back before Genesis.
Chapter 2, Mount Neimush.
Where did the older flood stories land?
Genesis is [music] not the oldest flood story as we saw in our episode before Genesis.
The Babylonians were telling one on clay many centuries [music] earlier and their boats come to rest on a mountain too.
The best known version is on the 11th tablet of the epic [music] of Gilgamesh in the British Museum under the number K375.
[music] It was copied for the library of the Assyrian king Asherbani Paul in Nineveh in the [music] 7th century BC.
The flood hero Utnap Pishtam tells Gilgamesh what [music] happened when the storm ended.
In Andrew George’s translation, on Mount Neimos, the boat ran [music] a ground.
Mount Neimush held the boat fast, allowing no motion.
For 6 days, the mountain holds it.
On the seventh, he sends out a dove.
For a long time, the name was read as Nier.
A better reading of the Cunapform signs gave Nemo, but either way, it is not [music] an Aratu.
Scholars place Mount Nemo in the Zagros Mountains east of the Tigris.
In what is now [music] the Kurdistan region of Iraq, hundreds of kilometers southeast of Lake Van, the Babylonians imagined [music] the water carrying the boat out of their flat river plane to the first high mountains they knew.
The wall of the Zagros on their own eastern horizon.
So the older flood stories land the boat in the Zagros, not in the mountains of Ararat.
The boat they imagined is different too.
But Napistam’s boat is a perfect cube.
Its floor covers one eeku about 3,600 square me.
Its walls rise 10 rods 120 cubits and inside it has seven levels.
He seals it with bumin pouring the black pitch into a kiln [music] to melt it.
The old Babylonian epic of Atraasus copied by a junior scribe around 1635 [music] BC adds a roof built like the roof of the deep and has the hero seal the [music] door with bummen and cut the boat’s mooring rope as the storm arrives.
But the lines where the boat comes to rest are broken off.
And an older tablet from about 1750 BC [music] describes something else again.
In 2014, Irving Fininkle of the British Museum published it as the ark tablet.
It is the size of a mobile phone and it contains the building [music] instructions.
In this version, the boat is round, a giant caracle of woven rope coated inside and out with bumin with a floor of one field and walls one rod high.
It is the same kind of round boat that people on the Tigris and the Euphrates were still using in the 20th century.
[music] They called it a gofa.
The oldest flood story of all.
The Sumerian tablet from Nepur.
Now in Philadelphia under the number CBS [music] 10,673 does not survive at the landing.
The surviving lines end with the heroes given life like a god and settled in the land of Dilman where the sun rises.
No mountain is left on the clay.
And none of these tablets says the boat survived.
Like Genesis, they leave it where it landed [music] and move on.
The sacrifice, the gods gathering like flies around the smoke, the hero [music] granted eternal life.
The idea that pieces of the ark could still be visited comes from a Babylonian priest named [music] Barasus who wrote a history of Babylon in Greek around 280 BC for the Macedonian kings who now ruled the east.
His book is lost.
We know it only through quotations [music] by later writers.
In those quotations, his flood hero is called Zutras, a Greek spelling of Zeus Sudra.
[music] His boat is enormous, five stads long and two wide, about a kilometer by 400 m, several times longer than the largest wooden [music] ships ever built.
But his ending is different.
When the waters go down, Ziss disappears with his wife.
And a voice from the sky tells the other survivors [music] to go back to Babylonia and dig up the writings he had buried before the flood at Sapar, the city of the son god.
In the Babylonian telling, “What survived the flood was not only a family, it was a library.”
And then comes a sentence that [music] would shape the next 2,000 years.
It is preserved by the Jewish historian Josephus.
It is said there is still some part of this ship in Armenia at the mountain of the cordans and that some people carry off pieces of the bumin which they take away and use chiefly as amulets.
The cordans or gordans were the people of the mountains south of lake van along the upper tigris.
Greek and Roman writers called their country Gordiani or corduini.
So by the 3rd century BC there were already two landing places on the map.
The Babylonian Neimosh in the Zagros and a mountain of the Cordans [music] where pilgrims scraped black pitch off a boat and wore it for protection.
Neither of them is the volcano we call Ararat.
That name would come much later.
Chapter 3, the place of descent, who said the ark could still be seen.
Josephus [music] wrote his Jewish antiquities in Rome around 93 AD.
When he reaches the flood, he does something unusual for an ancient historian.
He lists his witnesses.
After Genesis, he quotes Barasus.
Then he adds what the Armenians themselves said.
They call the place where Noah came out of the ark the place of descent.
In Greek, the Apoeterians for the ark being saved in that place.
Its remains are shown there by the inhabitants to this day.
Then he quotes Nicolas of Damascus, the court historian of King Herod.
There is a great mountain in Armenia over Minius called Baris upon which it is reported that many who fled at the time of the deluge were saved and that one who was carried in an ark came on shore upon the top of it and that the remains of the timber were a great while preserved.
Baris in Greek means a boat.
The mountain is named after the story and he is not done.
Hieronomous the Egyptian who wrote a history of Phoenicia mentions it too.
Josephus says, “And so do Nusas and a great many more.”
Josephus wanted his Roman readers to know that the flood was not just a Jewish story.
Everyone he tells them remembers it.
Notice what Josephus does not say.
He does not say he saw the ark or that anyone he knew did.
He says that others said remains could still be seen.
That is how almost every ancient report about the ark works.
A place, a local tradition, and a writer far away who records it.
And the traditions kept multiplying.
The most surprising one is in western Turkey, more than a thousand kilometers from Aratu.
The city of Apamia in Friia had a second name, Kibitas.
In Greek, kibitas means a chest or a box, and it is the same word the Greek Bible uses for Noah’s ark.
In the 3rd century AD, from the reign of Septimius Severus to the middle of the century, Apamia struck bronze coins that show exactly that.
A box floating on the waves with a man and a woman inside, a raven perched on the lid, and a dove flying in with a branch in its beak.
Beside it, the same two figures stand on dry land, raising their hands, and on the box in Greek letters, a name, Noah.
One of these coins struck under the emperor Philip the Arab is in the British Museum.
Its registration number is on screen.
The coins were not an accident.
A Greek poem from the same centuries, part of the collection known as the Cibiline Oracles, places the arks landing on a tall mountain in Friia at the springs of the river Marcus which rose right at Apamia.
For the people of Apamia, the ark had come to rest in their own hills, and they put it on their money.
Christian writers inherited the confusion.
Around 180 AD, [music] Theophilus, Bishop of Antioch, wrote that the remains of the ark could still be seen in the Arabian mountains.
A generation later, the chronographer Julius Ariccanis wrote that the ark settled on the mountains of Ararat, which he placed in Partha, but that some said they were at Seleni in Friia.
The old name of Apamia.
Each writer knew a different mountain and each one was sure.
Meanwhile, in the east, something stranger was happening.
The translations of Genesis themselves were changing.
The Aramaic paraphrase known as Targum Ankalos and the Syriak Bible, the Pashida, do not say the mountains of Ararat.
They say the mountains of Cardu, the Cordian mountains of Barasus.
In the 4th century, the bishop Epipanius wrote that the remains of the ark were still shown in the land of the Cardans.
And in the seventh century, the Quran gave the landing a single name in a single verse, the 44th of the chapter called Hud.
And it was said, “Oh earth, swallow your water and oh sky with hope.”
And the water subsided, and the matter was accomplished, and the ship came to rest on [music] Aljudy.
Aljudy, surprisingly, is still on the map.
It is Judy Da, a mountain range above the town of [music] Gizra on the Tigris, close to where Turkey, Syria, and Iraq meet today.
It stands in the old land of the Cordans.
So for centuries, Jewish, Christian, and Muslim traditions in the region pointed to the same range.
In the 12th century, the Jewish traveler Benjamin of Tudela passed through Jizra and wrote that the place where Noah’s ark rested was four miles away and that the caiff Umar had taken the ark from the summit and made a mosque out of it.
And the Armenians had their own great tradition.
A fifth century Armenian history attributed to Fostus of Bzantium tells of Jacob, bishop of Nissibus, who set out to climb the mountain of the ark.
Again and again he tried and each time he fell asleep exhausted until an angel told him to stop climbing and gave him a piece of the ark.
A fragment of wood presented as that relic is still kept today at Etchmiadzen, the mother church of the Armenians.
So by the end of antiquity, the written sources had put the ark on at least five mountains.
Neimos in the Zagros, the Cordian mountains above the Tigris, Baris over Minius, a mountain in Friia and Aljudi before the Middle Ages.
Not one of them is clearly the volcano that carries the name Ararat today.
But first, the sources have something to say about the boat itself.
Chapter 4, 300 cubits.
What did the sources say [music] the ark looked like?
Genesis is precise about the boat.
Chapter 6 [music] in the King James version.
Make thee an ark of gopher wood.
Rooms shalt thou make in the [music] ark, and shalt pitch it within and without with pitch.
And this is the fashion which thou shalt make it of.
The length of the ark shall be 300 cubits, the breadth of it 50 cubits, and the height of it 30 cubits.
Then a window, a door in the side, and three decks.
Even the words for the inside are strange.
The Hebrew for rooms, kim, literally means nests, as if the ark were a giant bird [music] cage of compartments.
Some scholars think it was originally a different word, kanim reads, which would make the ark a reedboat sealed with pitch like the boats of the Iraqi marshes.
The word for the windowed soar is just as uncertain.
It may be a window, a roof opening, or simply a source of light.
Start with the wood.
The Hebrew is gopher and it appears nowhere else.
Nobody knows what it means and the ancient translators did not know either.
You can watch them guess.
The Septuagent turns it into squared timbers.
The Latin Vulgate makes it plained wood.
Modern scholars have suggested cyprress pine or a copying error for another word.
The King James Bible simply carried the Hebrew word over into English.
And that is how gopher wood and a robot called gopher got their names.
The pitch is clearer.
The Hebrew word is kofhepher and it matches the acadian word kupru.
Bumin the same substance utnapishum melts in his kiln and the same black coating on the round boat of the ark tablet.
Bumin seeps naturally out of the ground in a rock and the Babylonians sealed their boats and baskets with it.
It is also, if Barasus is right, what the pilgrims scraped off the remains.
Then the size, 300 cubits by 50×30.
A cubit is the length of a forearm from the elbow to the tip of the middle finger.
And that is the problem.
Forearms differ.
And so did the cubits of the ancient world.
In Egypt, the royal cubit was about 52 1/2 cm.
You can still see it marked out in fingers and palms on the cubit rods in the Egyptian museum of Tin like the rod of Amanopee, overseer of the graineries of the Pharaoh under the number C6,347.
The common cubit of the ancient near east was shorter around 45.
And for the kingdom of Judah, we have a direct measurement.
In 1880, boys playing in a water tunnel under Jerusalem, found an inscription carved into its wall, now in the Istanbul Archaeology Museums.
It describes the moment two teams of diggers cutting through the rock from opposite ends, heard each other’s voices through the rock and broke through to meet.
And it gives the length of the tunnel, 1,200 cubits.
Most scholars date it to the time of King Hezekiah around 700 BC.
The tunnel has been measured.
It is about 533 m long.
Divide one by the other and the cubit of Jerusalem comes out at about 44 cm.
So the ark of Genesis measured in the cubit of the kingdom where Genesis was written down is about 133 m long.
In the Egyptian royal cubit, it is about 157.
And the hill at Duropanar is 157 m long.
Here’s the second modern claim and it rests on a choice the sources never make that duropanar is exactly 300 cubits long.
It is but only if you pick one of the long royal cubits like the royal cubit of Egypt in the cubit of Jerusalem, the kingdom where Genesis was written down.
The hill is about 24 m too long and with several cubits to choose from and hundreds of streamlined hills in the mountains of eastern Turkey.
One of them was always going to fit one of the numbers.
And notice what is missing from every ancient description.
None of them describes the shape the hill has.
A tapered teardrop like the hull of a ship.
Genesis gives a long box six times as long as it is wide.
Its word for the ark tea is the same word used for the basket in which the baby Moses floats on the Nile.
Gilgamesh gives a cube.
The ark tablet gives a circle.
Barasus gives a vessel a kilometer long.
So the sources say the ark looked like a box, a cube or a circle.
The whole shape comes from modern ships, not from any ancient text.
So when did a volcano and then a hill get the ark?
Chapter 5.
The mountain that became Ararat.
When did the volcano become Mount Ararat?
Somewhere in the middle ages, the tradition moved north.
For the Armenians, the mountain of the ark became Masus.
The great double volcano above the plane of the Araxis, a plane their own historians called Iraat.
The region’s name and the mountain story met [music] and the volcano became Mount Ararat.
Today it stands just inside Turkey, but it dominates the skyline of Yeravon.
And the coat of arms of the Republic [music] of Armenia shows Mount Ararat with Noah’s ark resting on its summit.
European travelers repeated it.
Marco Polo at the end of the 13th century wrote that in the heart of greater Armenia there is a very high mountain on which Noah’s ark is said to have rested and that the snow near its summit never melts so no one can climb it.
For centuries the summit was considered impossible to reach and in local belief forbidden.
The ark was up there and God did not allow anyone to see it.
In 1701, the French botonist Joseph Tornfor tried to climb it, collecting plants as he went and turned back in the snow, exhausted.
Armenian tradition, he was told, held that the ark was still up there.
Then on the 9th of October 1829, a German professor from the University of Dorpot, Friedrich Parrot, and an Armenian deacon named Katurovian [music] reached the top.
They found ice and snow and planted across.
But 11 years later in 1840, an earthquake brought down part of the mountains northeastern slope.
The landslide buried the village of Akuri and the monastery of St.
Hako, which local tradition said marked the place where Noah planted [music] his vineyard.
Both disappeared in a single day.
The modern ark hunt started in the 20th century, and it was looking for wood.
In 1950, a French explorer [music] named Feran Navara came down from the ice high on the mountain with a piece of handtoled timber which he said came from a structure under the ice.
[music] He wrote a book about it and the wood became famous.
But when it was later radiocarbon dated by several laboratories, most of the results came back at around the 8th century AD.
Here’s the third modern claim and no ancient text supports it either.
That wood from Noah’s ark has been found on Mount Ararat.
The best known wood from the mountain is about 1,300 years old.
It is closer in age to the travelers of the Middle Ages than to any date anyone has ever proposed for the flood.
Then came the photographs.
[music] In 1949, American reconnaissance flights photographed the northwestern corner of the Summit Plateau.
And decades later, when the images [music] were released in the 1990s, a dark shape in the ice became known as the Ararat anomaly.
The release [music] came after a researcher, Porcher Taylor, spent years asking for the files.
[music] Commercial satellites photographed the same spot again in the early 2000s, but most analysts who studied those images read it as a ridge of rock under ice and snow.
[music] In the 1980s, even an Apollo astronaut, James Irwin, who had walked on the moon, led expeditions up the mountain to look for the ark.
He found nothing and was badly injured in a fall.
So, by the middle of the 20th century, every search pointed at one mountain, the one the oldest sources never name.
And in 1959, attention moved 30 km south to a hill no tradition had ever pointed to.
What would the machines find there?
Chapter 6.
A boat in the mud.
What did the machines find?
In 1959, a Turkish army [music] captain named Ilhan Duruponar was reviewing aerial photographs taken [music] for a NATO mapping project and noticed a shape in a valley south of Ararat, pointed at one end, rounded at the other, streamlined like a hull.
In 1960, Life magazine printed the photograph under the headline, “Noah’s Ark, and an expedition went to the hill with explosives.”
They dug for two days.
They set off charges in the middle of the shape.
They found soil and rock.
Their conclusion was one sentence, nothing of archaeological interest.
In 1977, an American nurse, anesthetist, and am explorer named Ron Wyatt visited the hill and made it his life’s work.
Over the next 20 years, [music] he would also claim to have found the Ark of the Covenant and the chariot wheels of Pharaoh’s army at the bottom of the Red Sea.
He called the raised lines across the formation ribs, the dark stones petrified [music] timbers, and his metal detector readings iron rivets.
In 1985, he was joined by a former merchant seaman, David Fassold, who measured the shape at 515 ft and announced the number that has followed the hill ever since, 300 Egyptian royal cubits.
In 1988, Fold returned with John Balgardner, a geoysicist from Lowe’s Alamos who believed in the biblical flood.
They drilled, the cores came up as soil, clay, and broken rock.
But Balgardner who had wanted the ark to be there concluded that it was not.
Then Fold did something very few people in this story have done.
He changed his mind in public.
In 1996 he co-wrote a paper with the geologist [music] Lawrence Collins in the journal of geocscience education under the title bogus Noah’s Ark from Turkey exposed as a common geologic structure.
The hill, they explained, is a mudflow, wet earth and rock that slid [music] down the slope and wrapped around an outcrop of bedrock, then eroded into a streamlined shape.
The ribs are layers of rock.
The iron is natural to the volcanic rocks of the region.
The petrified wood under a microscope was stone.
In 1997, under oath in an Australian court, Fold called his old ark claims absolute nonsense.
He died the following year.
20 years later, a new team arrived.
Noah’s Ark Scans, an American group led by Andrew Jones, working with Turkish University from 2019.
They mapped the hill with ground penetrating radar and electrical resistivity and reported straight lines and right angles under the surface, which they interpreted as a corridor and chambers.
In 2023, a Turkish university announced that about 30 rock and soil samples from the site contained clay, marine deposits, and the remains of sea creatures, which it dated to between 5,500 and 3,000 BC.
But radar and resistivity sea contrasts in the ground.
A boundary between wet clay and dry rock looks like a line, and two boundaries can meet at an angle.
And this part of Turkey lay under the sea for much of its geological past.
The limestone in the hill is made of marine shells.
Marine material in a hill of marine rock is not a surprise.
Then in September 2026, they drilled with a permit from the Turkish government and a professor from Seas Jumhuri at university directing the Turkish side of the work.
[music] They sank holes inside the outline and to their credit control holes outside it.
The deepest [music] reaching 18 m.
Inside the cores brought up soil, sediment, layers rich in organic matter, and several cavities, one of them holding mud and water.
The team reported that no bedrock was reached inside the shape.
In one hole at 4 to 5 m, the bit hit a layer harder than limestone and broke.
Jones raised petrified wood as one possibility, but in the same statement said it could be a rock in the debris, that nothing had been identified as wood, and that nothing had been dated.
Then came Gopher, a small tracked robot built [music] to fit down a boar hole and named as we saw for the gopher wood of Genesis.
On its second descent, [music] it reached 12 m and the team released the footage.
Walls of compacted mud and gravel, water at the bottom, no planks, no beams, no surfaces meeting at right angles.
The samples have gone to laboratories, and the team expects results next spring.
In its latest update this October, the professor directing the Turkish side said even the radar’s corridors could have a geological explanation, and the team plans a wider hole next season to recover the broken bit and whatever stopped it.
Until then, every claim about wood inside the hill is a claim about a radar plot.
So, what did the machines find?
Earth, mud, water, and one hard layer.
What the sources actually say?
So, where did the ark land?
Here is the answer the oldest sources give about where the ark came to rest.
If you let them speak [music] in order, Genesis puts the ark on the mountains of Ararat, the highlands of Aratu, [music] and names no peak.
The Babylonian tablets put it on Mount Neimosh in the Zagros, Barasus and later the Aramaic and Syriak Bibles put it in the mountains of the Cordans above the Tigris and the Quran on Aljudi in the same range.
Nicicoaus of Damascus puts it on a mountain called Baris and the Greeks of Apamia in their own friian hills.
The volcano we call Mount Ararat enters the story in the middle ages and the hill at Durapinar in 1959.
That makes sense for people who lived on a flat river plane.
In southern Iraq, the only place a boat could ever come to rest above the water was the mountains on the edge of the sky.
So, the sources do not point to Duropenar.
They do not point to any one place because they do not agree with each other.
What they share is a direction.
Almost every one of them puts the ark in the mountains that rise above the flood plane on the mountain wall that the people telling the story could see on their own horizon.
And as the story traveled north, its mountain traveled with it.
From the Zagros to the Tigris to Lake Van to the volcano, something else is missing from every one of them.
No ancient source describes the remains themselves.
No measurement taken on the mountain, no drawing, no object anyone can examine today except a relic of wood in an Armenian treasury and pieces of black pitch worn as amulets 2,000 years ago and long since lost.
Every report is a report about a place never about a boat and the hill itself.
The oldest sources describe a box, a cube, a circle and a vessel a kilometer long sealed with bummen.
None of them describes a hull.
The 300 cubits fit the hill only in the cubit of Egypt.
And 67 years of explosives, drills, radar, and a robot have brought up the same thing every time.
Earth, rock, and water.
And there is one thing the sources still don’t explain.
It is the word itself.
The robot that went down the bore hole carried the name of the one material in the story that no ancient translator could identify.
Gopher wood appears once in one verse and never again.
The Greeks guessed squared timber.
The Romans guessed plained wood.
We have the ark’s length, its breadth, and its height down to the cubit.
And we still don’t know what it was made of.
So where would you put the landing?
Neimush, Judy, Erarat, or nowhere at all.
And which source surprised you most?
Tell me in the comments.
I read them and the best corrections get pinned.
If you like answers built from the sources themselves, a like and a subscribe help these episodes reach the people who enjoy them.
And if you want the flood story from the clay tablets, our episode before Genesis is on screen now.
This was tablet and stone, what the oldest sources actually say.
