3 BCE = Before Common Era, CE = Common Era, secular terms replacing the Gregorian Calendar’s BC (Before Christ) and AD (Anno Domini—In the Year of Our Lord).
4 At the core of any flood hypothesis is the provocative question: Did a devastating, wide-ranging deluge ever occur in or near the Mesopotamia region, inundating the land and killing inhabitants? Geological surveys say that isolated and localized floods occurred—although such studies clarify the comparatively modest scope and scale of such events. On the matter of an enormous flood, if one did occur, speculation regarding its cause abounds. Included is a chaos of swelling waters brought about by another planet passing too near the earth with a gravitational pull influencing giant tides; a massive asteroid or comet with an Earth-altering slam that tilted the water flow of oceans; or the intense ice age melt inducing the Tigris and Euphrates rivers to back up, overflow, and overwhelm both the landscape and collective memory.
5 Contemporary Orthodox creationist beliefs are a product of the Protestant Reformation, emerging long after the advent of Christianity. Journalist Douglas Todd, writing in October 2014, quotes that “43 percent of Americans (16 percent of Britons, 24 percent of Canadians, by way of further examples) accept the creationist teaching that the earth is less than 10,000 years old, which means they reject the established scientific view the universe began roughly 13.82 billion years ago.” He references that “roughly 60 percent of the world’s Muslims are creationists.” Pope Francis, at the Pontifical Academy of Sciences in 2014, cautioned, “When we read about Creation in Genesis, we run the risk of imagining God was a magician, with a magic wand able to do everything.”
6 With high concentrations of Kurds in the newly established (1920) mandates (French over Syria and British over Iraq), the French and British also declined to cede territory to the Kurds. In 1923 the earlier pledge to grant Kurds their own country was annulled by the Treaty of Lausanne, wherein the modern borders of Turkey, Syria, Iraq, Greece, Bulgaria, Egypt, and Sudan were established and a Kurdistan was not. Oil was “officially” discovered in the Kurdish portions of the new Iraq later in 1923.
TWO
THE BOSPORUS STRAIT
“The question is, was there a mother of all floods? … We went in there [the Black Sea] to look for the flood … Not just a slow moving, advancing rise of sea level, but a really big flood that then stayed … The land that went under stayed under.”
—Robert Ballard, Institute for Exploration, Sea Research Foundation, Inc.
I arrived late in the night, and Istanbul’s Atatürk Airport greeted me with a cavernous yawn. The airport hotel was more welcoming: the front desk clerk poured his newly registered guest a glass of wine before locking up the liquor cabinet for the night.
I awoke in the morning impatient; there was much to do. Janice would arrive that evening on a flight from London. Together we’d take a connecting flight to Cappadocia to have a few vacation days before I left alone by train, eastbound toward Mount Ararat, and she returned to work in England. I skipped breakfast and ran out of the hotel to hail a taxi. Hopping in the back seat, I started instructing the driver in rapid English. He calmed me: “Slowly. Slowly. Please.”
“I need to buy a train ticket,” I explained—more slowly, I hoped.
“Sirkeci Istasyonu,” he said. “Train station,” he interpreted.
As we walked up the station stairs, the striking oriental rotunda, contrasting with the long reach of the functional terminal’s expanse, gave the impression that competing architects had had a hand in designing it, which I later found out was not the case. The imposing building certainly deserved a look-round; it was, after all, until 1977, the terminus for the Orient Express. But the taxi driver hustled me into a ticket line and waited until the agent nodded in our direction.
The driver’s request in Turkish was clear even to me, beginning with, “He wishes to board a train from …” He halted and looked at me. We’d not talked about where I was going, but his presumption hung in the air; I was a westerner and heading further into Europe.
“Cappadocia to Lake Van,” I said.
I felt his immediate hesitation. Looking at the agent and at the national map, this clearly meant a train service called the Van Gölü Express, which ran from Ankara to the city of Tatvan on Lake Van, far in the east of the country, where it connected with a ferry service that carries the train’s passengers across the lake to the city of Van, on the opposite shore.
Hearing the agent’s reply, the driver turned to me. “Yes, he says, there is no train.”
“Well, there is a train,” I said. “I know that.”
“Yes, it is true,” he revised. “There is a train. But not from here.”
“I don’t want it from here. I would like to board near Cappadocia, perhaps Kayseri, and have my ticket through to Van.”
The taxi driver again turned to the clerk, who had gone back to looking down at the counter, wishing we had left. From their exchange I was told: “Yes, you can do that, but not buy ticket here. Must go to station different—Haydarpaşa railway station. I will drive us there. It is across the strait, on Asia side of Istanbul. You are heading from Europe Turkey into Asia Turkey, across bridge.”
Back in the taxi, we began to talk. I told him it was my first visit to Istanbul and that I was here for only one day. He asked, “You go back to hotel later?”
“Yes, eventually.”
“Then we go by ferry boat. It is a prettier way. You see Istanbul better.” I soon realized he’d just booked himself a return fare. As we drove the streets, the driver encouraged me to visit the Blue Mosque, built in the early 1600s and identified by the colored tiles lining the walls of its interior, which he pointed out as we passed. He was adamant that his home city compelled a visit of at least several days, which would include tours of the Tokapi Palace and the Grand Bazaar. He steered toward the E-5 Karayolu, which would take us over the bridge across the strait and eventually to Istanbul’s other major train station.
The driver’s name was Toygar, and he asked about my plans for traveling in eastern Turkey. Hearing my reply that I would spend time in Van, he became a travel adviser. “They are Kurds there, too. Different. Language, food, all is different. As if other country. But it is ours, still. All Turkey.”
“You should today take boat tour on Bosporus.” This was something I could not do as part of my limited stay in Istanbul. Toygar knew that so he encouraged a return visit, implying that all real travelers visiting Turkey stuck to Istanbul, and insinuated that I was lacking as an adventurer because I was skipping it. “There is much less in east. Your stay here would be superior.”
As we crossed a long bridge, Toygar shifted his tour guide persona to that of a history buff. “This is the Istanbul Strait. Very famous. Also called Bosporus Strait. One side, us now when going onto bridge, is Europe. In moment, on other side of bridge we will be in Asia. Marvel place, this.” I passed over the threshold.
He asked specifically where my travels would take me. On hearing “Mount Ararat,” he used instead its Turkish name. “Agri Dagh? No train to there.”
“Yes, but a train will get me near there. To Tatvan,” I replied, sensing a chance to nudge him into conversation about Agri Dagh’s legend. He stepped into it, though it took a minute.
Raising an eyebrow to his rearview mirror, he asked, “Noah’s flood?”
Toygar offered a narrative twist on the mountain and myth. “The great flood came through here,” he said, motioning to the waters below the bridge. “Through Bosporus. You know?”
I knew, but not much. There is a hypothesis7 that around 5600 BCE, the force of the waters of the Bosporus, then an inlet restrained by an isthmus of bedrock at its northern reach, burst the natural dam, cascading a flood of Mediterranean saltwater (its waters becoming the Aegean Sea and moving through the Dardanelles Strait into the Sea of Marmara) through the Bosporus Strait into the then existing body of freshwater and creating what is today’s Black Sea. Such a catastrophe would hav
e generated a flood of Biblical proportions.
Soon Toygar’s taxi neared the double-spire-fronted terminal of Haydarpaşa Station8 and we parked. Haydarpaşa has graced Istanbul’s Kadiköy neighborhood since 1872, though the neoclassical building we approached came from expansion and replacement in the early 1900s. Toygar accompanied me to the terminal, not waiting to be asked for his help. A more amenable commercial agent nodded as I spoke in English while Toygar hastened to explain the ticket requirement in Turkish. I stopped speaking; neither of them were listening to me.
“Yes, you can get ticket on Van Gölü Express, but not all the way to Tatvan,” said Toygar.
“But I want a ticket all the way!” I protested.
“Then no ticket.”
I was close to a train journey I’d scouted online before leaving home, had read was reliable, and was much looking forward to taking, for I’d heard it covered beautiful country. I pleaded with my eyes, but it was not to be.
“Repairs,” said Toygar. “The train ran yesterday, it will tomorrow. Other days, it runs too. But date you want, it is not. It has repairs that day.” I watched him argue with the clerk, hoping that he was advocating for my travel preferences, although he might have been arguing local politics or ordering lunch, for all I knew. Whatever the case, the two men were not agreeing. Neither one liked the other very much.
“You will get to Tatvan,” Toygar said with more confidence than I felt after hearing their terse words. “Possibly over switched transportation, to bus.” I passed the money to the clerk. He handed me a train ticket.
My ordeal wasn’t over. “Toygar, there is also the Trans-Asia Express. I need a ticket to take me from Van, a month from now, to Tehran.”
The man behind the counter smiled for the first time. “Trans-Asya Ekspresi,” he uttered. I think his enjoyment came from making a full interpretation of the request.
I was sure he said “güvenilmez.” It was a word I’d concentrated on during my drives between work and home, listening to Turkish language lessons in my car. It meant “unreliable.” Along with greetings and place names, güvenilmez was a word I had prepared myself to encounter in eastern Turkey.
Toygar confirmed. “He can sell you ticket for Iran. But the Trans-Asya Ekspresi he says is unreliable.”
“I’ll take the chance.”
Having the two different train tickets in hand, I could sense my journey before me. I would make my way by the Van Gölü Express as far as allowed, ride the bus to Tatvan, and take a ferry from there further into eastern Turkey. Arriving in Van, I would attempt to summit Mount Ararat out of nearby Doğubeyazit, then fill an uncommitted two weeks with spur-of-the-moment travels in Kurdish lands. I would make every effort to spend time in Iraq if possible, later returning to the city of Van, and board the Trans Asya Ekspresi into Iran. This plan offered me ample unstructured time. If Iraq failed to come about, Armenia was the fallback. Eventually, I’d fly out of Tehran to London and keep an appointment with Dr. Jonathan Taylor, Assistant Keeper of Cuneiform Collections in the British Museum’s Department of the Middle East, to share some of whatever I learned and, I hoped, get some answers to my evolving questions regarding early oral and written stories about massive flooding anywhere near the Ararat region.
Toygar slowed near a trinket stand at the station’s exit and put his palm behind an eye symbol on a flock of key rings. “The influence of evil eye is fact,” he said. “That was stated by Muhammad. Be careful. Know when it is looking at you.”
His concern for my spiritual risks passed. “I will take you on the ferry boat across the river. You should touch this history water.”
I boarded as a foot passenger while Toygar waited in his taxi. Looking over the railings at the docile waters of the Bosporus Strait, I thought back to what Toygar had said about the Great Flood. I tried to imagine that the flow of water below our boat into the Black Sea was, millennia ago, blocked miles north from here by a solid wall of rock and earth forming the northern end of what we might, in hindsight, name the Bosporus inlet. On the other side of that natural dam, perhaps appropriately referenced as the Bosporus isthmus, was a landlocked freshwater lake. Circa 5600 BCE, new water from melting ice at the end of the most recent ice age would have been substantial enough to raise sea levels around the world by an astonishing 300 feet (90 meters). Those rising oceans included the Mediterranean Sea, which fed into the Bosporus inlet, whose immense box canyon offered a dead end for the increasing volume of water. The strength of this blockade would eventually have proven untenable, given the buildup of pressure.
The mounting waters would have first swelled over the Bosporus’s northern barrier, the isthmus, like rising water would overflow the edge of a sink. Eventually, however, the flow’s unrelenting exertion would have collapsed the land obstacle and advanced over it, causing erosion of its base, and flooded into the freshwater lake. The inundated area, in effect a lesser Black Sea, would have swelled to more than seven hundred miles (1,125 kilometers) across, with a new depth of over seven thousand feet (2,130 meters), becoming what is known today as the much larger Black Sea. The aftermath of the surge would have left the waters of the previous Bosporus inlet flowing freely between the Mediterranean Sea and the Black Sea, having created the newly formed Bosporus Strait.
The flooding of the Black Sea. Illustration of one flood hypothesis. Top: At the height of the most recent glaciation (15000 BCE), North America’s landmass northward from today’s Seattle and Vancouver was covered in ice; the sites of New York and Toronto were buried beneath half a mile of frozen water. New Guinea was land-linked to Australia, as was Japan to Asia. The Bering Sea was solid ice. A land bridge connected the British Isles to a Europe covered by an ice cap that spread over unborn cities such as Berlin and Edinburgh. As the ice sheet retreated and melted into the oceans, it is estimated that sea levels rose nearly three hundred feet by 5600 BCE. Lower left: An inlet of rising seawaters pressed against a land barrier, here called the “Bosporus isthmus,” where Istanbul is located today. Lower right: Inundation by seawaters destroyed the land barrier, creating the Bosporus Strait. Floodwaters made the lesser Black Sea into the larger Black Sea.
In European Istanbul late that afternoon, I visited a restaurant Toygar had recommended and ate an early dinner while overlooking the Bosporus. I wondered about his reference to the epic flood. As a Muslim, Toygar would have been familiar with the coverage of Nûh’s flood, as recounted in the Qur’an:
And it moved on with them amid waves like mountains.
Or in the Hebrew texts:
then burst all the well-springs of the great Ocean
and the sluices of the heavens opened up.
Explorer/scientists and Columbia University professors William Ryan and Walter Pittman have hypothesized that the torrent over and through the Bosporus isthmus would have been the equivalent volume to “two hundred times the flow of the Niagara Falls” cascading each day, for three hundred days, swelling the Black Sea (also known as the Upper Sea or Western Great Sea). In the late 1990s Ryan and Pitman furthered their research, looking for evidence that such a cataclysmic event could have occurred. It has been said that explorers need the courage to lose sight of shore if they are to see the world with new eyes. So they began oceanographic studies, eventually resulting in findings that were staggering in their implications, and far from the shore of conventional thinking. Encouraged by the Turkish government and watched over by a permitting but suspicious Russia, they drilled core samples in the Black Sea’s seabed, discovering fossils of freshwater shell species—a startling indication of a onetime freshwater preserve. Further dredging and research unearthed radiocarbon-dated fossils from 7,500 to 15,500 years ago.
Then came a more astonishing find: sonar probes indicated pristine beaches at a depth of 550 feet, an anomaly that was interpreted in many different ways. An early hypothesis was that if the Black Sea had at one time been a freshwater lake, it could have been populated by settlements of croppers, herders and fishers alon
g its shores.
Underwater archaeologist Robert Ballard, well known for discovering the wreck of the Titanic in 1985, explored this idea under the auspices of the National Geographic Society. His work in 1999 and 2000 found human-crafted artifacts along the sunken shoreline, and, not surprisingly, his submersible’s photography found evidence of human settlement near those beaches, hundreds of feet below the surface of the Black Sea.
While the hypothesis is not irrefutable fact, here is one conclusion the evidence allows: a widespread flood occurred here thousands of years ago, one that forever changed the composition of the Black Sea’s water and rapidly expanded the surrounding shoreline. At the time of the flood, not everyone in the lesser Black Sea settlements would have been able to flee the soaring rise of water around their lake. Many of those on the southern and eastern shores would have attempted an eastward getaway toward the then-unnamed mountains of Ararat and the as yet to be established Mesopotamia (“the land between two rivers”—eventually known as the Tigris and Euphrates), and would have found themselves faced with more flooding from the rising waters pushed up them from the then yet to be named Persian Gulf.
Every story of escape would have been individual, every survivor a hero. Nightmare getaways and apocalyptic scenarios would be recounted wherever refuge was found, told by the lucky ones. Stories would emerge wherever they finally rested in communities, untold numbers settling in Mesopotamia, which rose to prominence between 5000 and 3500 BCE.
The many survivor stories would be verbally anthologized, distilled to a few apocryphal, epiphany-laden examples and carrying themes of despairing gods, warning, punishment, and sole survivors. Successive generations might learn of this spectacular incident through accounts now known as “Babylonian (or Assyrian or Mesopotamian or Sumerian) flood stories,” shown to exist at least by 3100 BCE. These oral testimonies would first be formally recorded when writing was invented, 2600 years after the Bosporus breakthrough and the flooding of the Black Sea.
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