Full Moon over Noah's Ark

by Rick Antonson

  When I shall have gone into the boat,

  Caulk the frame of her door!

  By examining the writing approach, colloquialisms, and style, as well as the clay construct of the actual tablet, Finkel dated it between 1900 and 1700 BCE, the Old Babylonian Period. This dating changed what had been previously believed to be the earliest known version of the Epic of Atrahasis, 1635 BCE. Thus, with the new discovery, this story’s written record predates the written Biblical telling of Noah’s Ark by over a thousand years. That said, these various flood stories share the same motivation: an upset deity. They are all about epic high waters and a similar escape plan. Their individual tales about saving the world gracefully align—sequential versions working off of the same story, modified as it was retold and finally written down.

  Constructing a life-size replica of the round ark that Atrahasis was instructed to build, according to descriptions in the Ark Tablet, proved difficult. This “to-scale” coracle is perhaps one-fifth the size. Boat craftsmen in Kerala, India, took four months to build it. Photo © Kuni Takahashi.

  Discussing the vast flood plain that was Mesopotamia, Finkel told Tom Chivers of England’s Telegraph newspaper: “There must have been a heritage memory of the destructive power of flood water, based on various terrible floods. And the people who survived would have been people in boats.”

  Finkel’s assertion is that this tablet records an earlier version of a “story of the flood passed from Babylonian cuneiform to alphabetic Hebrew and [that] came to be incorporated within the text of the Book of Genesis.” Given the shared source materials, the tablet would have informed later flood narratives. The British Museum designated this discovery as “The Ark Tablet,” equal in stature with the “Flood Tablet” that related the Epic of Gilgamesh. Together, these tablets and their flood-ark-survival stories, with their respective heroes Atrahasis and Utnapishtim, give Noah and his ark story (whether in the Torah, the Bible, or the Qur’an) enlightening precursors. Finkel accentuates the lineage when he writes, “Comparison of the Hebrew text with Gilgamesh XI highlights such a close and multi-point relationship between the accounts that the dependence of one upon the other is unavoidable.”

  “Zafer, can you help me stay a night or two in a village near Ararat after our climb?” My thought was to have time alone with those who spoke as little of my language as I did of theirs.

  “It could happen. I will speak with Ahmet.”

  “Who is Ahmet?”

  “He is mountain guide. Like partner to me.”

  “I would also like to see Paraşut’s ice cave.” Amy’s lead hadn’t panned out; I hadn’t received any response from Paraşut to the email I’d sent. I’d tried his phone number from the hotel but so far hadn’t been able to contact him.

  “Do you wish to explore rumors or do you wish to climb?” Zafer asked.

  “I am here to summit,” I said, as much to bolster my conviction as to answer Zafer’s question.

  Zafer changed the subject. “You join long list of adventurers on Ararat.” He cared deeply about his mountain and all who had climbed it. “We now have third century of men to summit since first success of Parrot. Women too. I guide many, like Patricia.” He steered my interest away from Paraşut. “This year Europeans … Americans and Chinese. Russians.” Zafer paused after the last nation’s reference. “That is history repeating. Early Ararat team success was Russia. Military man Khodzko.”

  * * *

  In July 1850, topographer Iosif Khodzko, a colonel in the Russian army, reached the summit of Mount Ararat. A distinguishing feature of Khodzko’s expedition was that sixty soldiers attempted the apex, emphasizing collective responsibility and teamwork, tenets of mountain trekking that remain valid for all who set an ambitious foot on the mountain.

  Having begun their journey on a clear sky morning, by afternoon wind and hail slowed them and “a dense fog swallowed up the peak.” That evening in base camp, at 10,580 feet, an electrical storm exploded upon them “with a blinding flash and green, red, and white side effects.”

  The next day, eventually compromised by exhaustion that “forbade another step,” they established Camp II at 16,520 feet, where nasty weather forced the expedition to bivouac for three days in a tent village clinging to the mountainside. As the blowing snow eased, members of the outfit worked their way to the crest, where the crew set up precision equipment for use by Khodzko and his compatriot Peter Sharoyan to survey and record meteorological data. The two men stayed near the peak for five windswept days, taking shelter in a snow cave walled with carpets.

  The colonel ordered the construction of a seven-foot-high snow monument with a bronze plaque recording the expedition’s achievement and acknowledging the group effort. Khodzko’s outfit’s approach to mountaineering was the paragon of preparedness, with its focus on the teamwork required to achieve their aims. Zafer’s stated philosophy was in Khodzko’s lineage.

  Our visit ended. As he made to leave, Zafer said, “We are level with the money, Rick. Enjoy your evening. I put note for Nicholas and Patricia about time tomorrow. They laugh easy. Him, in his sixties. Her you can’t tell. I think both lift weights. They are together. They share a room, so are together in that way too. Let’s do departure at eight o’clock in morning.”

  “And the rest of our team?”

  Zafer’s chest rose as his mind rattled through a list. He exhaled check marks: “You have new friends. Ian here tonight on ferry. He’s first by train, from Ankara to Tatvan. He has the experience of skill. Charles, I will later become certain when his flight is tomorrow. Amy thinks he is more walker than hiker, more hiker than climber, but will have exercised legs. Tomorrow afternoon, different flight is Goran. We think he’s most fit of group.”

  I wondered what Zafer would say about my six foot frame, disheveled hair, and non-lean body from three months ago if I weren’t present: “Rick? I saw his photo and hope he arrives in better shape than he appears. His face looks lived in. Probably a salad dodger. Does he know how high this mountain is?”

  I accompanied Zafer to the hotel entrance. He had conveyed the challenge that Ararat presented. He did not want to be on the mountain with anyone who felt differently, and I trusted him more as a result. Thinking of the Iraq introduction letter in my pack, I asked, “Zafer, do you read Farsi?”

  “No.”

  After he left, I went for a workout in the hotel’s little fitness room. I felt unsettled. Pre-climb misgivings. So many things could go amiss—the team was not yet assembled, the weather was iffy, my glimpsing a full moon on our ascent remained uncertain. The only thing I could ensure was my own readiness. At least I had met the man who would guide us to the summit. Now he needed to muster our expedition.

  That evening, the hotel’s outdoor patio was busy. I spotted the last dinner table for two near a railing overlooking Lake Van. I tipped up the chair opposite mine so that I would be left alone to make field notes. Ten minutes into the calm, a burly man walked over and pulled the leaning chair away from its perch. “Looks like you want to be left alone, too,” he said and sat down. “This is only quiet-looking seat. Hope you don’t mind if I be quiet with you.” He set a thick book down on the table.

  For half an hour he was hunched over the book wrapped in plain paper, never speaking except to respond to the hovering waiter, and then saying only that he didn’t need anything. He kept his self-imposed silence as I doodled in a notebook and read.

  Little bugs flew about and dotted the pool in tiny splashes, as would the occasional drizzle of rain. They smeared on my paper as I wrote. The waiter gestured like a boxer, fighting them off from around our table. They paraded on the tablecloth. I wished for a wind to scatter them.

  Two tossed green salads arrived at our table, unordered. It was an indication that the hotel staff didn’t set aside tables for idlers; we were expected to order or leave.

  “It’s wine-o’clock,” smirked the man pretending to check his watch. That broke our silence. We each asked for a glass
of red wine, and I added on spaghetti with meatballs as a carb-build up afterthought. He duplicated the order.

  Marzban was an industrialist from Iran, in Van for two days of “trading” as he put it. His girth nearly outdid the chair. In compensation, some of his weight rested on his elbows, which were braced by the table. He ate that way, his left hand dipping his fork to the plate and raising it to his mouth, the elbow rotating but not lifting.

  “What trading do you do?” I asked.

  “There is much to trade. My country exports natural gas. Pipelines need parts. Turkey exports machinery we need and tobacco we don’t. They make better electrical and steel things.”

  Why didn’t I know this? I thought, thinking back to gaps in my pre-flight research.

  “We have oil to share, at profit.”

  That I knew.

  He talked about long-term business needing assurances. “Iran is not giving anyone confidence.” Turkey courted its own “reputation for distrust,” he said. “You have dinner tonight in a land Kurds claim is theirs. Armenians say is for them. Turkish will kill to keep. Along with deaths we have always made trade. If economy gets good, maybe people stop dreaming of borders.”

  Marzban sipped from his glass and tongued the drink around in his mouth, squinting as he swallowed. “Even wine here has the aftertaste of gunpowder.”

  As if to remedy such bitterness, the waiter brought two coffees and a serving of warm honeycomb.

  SEVEN

  TAKING TEA WITH VAN CATS

  “For (the expedition) team to work properly there needs to be a clear sense of a shared goal and a willingness on the part of all members to muck in for the common good.”

  —Mick Conefrey, The Adventurer’s Handbook: Life Lessons from History’s Great Explorers

  At eight in the morning I arrived at the second-floor landing of the staircase to see a couple lock up their room. They had daypacks at the ready. The man’s teeth leapt out of a narrow face made lean by age, apparent fitness, and perhaps adversity.

  “Might one of you be Patricia?” I asked, looking first at this mountain man. I turned to his partner.

  The woman beside him was every inch the fashion-fitness instructor that Zafer had implied her to be: arms that could lift a hefty pack onto shoulders broad enough to carry it, and calves that could power a laden body up a steep hillside. A large block of blonde hair swept away from her forehead. She poked the man’s ribs, saying, “You can be Patricia if you want. But just on this trip where nobody knows you.”

  He replied to me. “It’s Nico.”

  His chin nudged the top of Patricia’s pulled-back hair. He wore high-rimmed glasses and a bright red T-shirt at home on his tanned body. “Zaffy told us another climber was here. You Rick?”

  “Yup. Zafer should be downstairs right now.”

  Down in the lobby, our guide swung a chained car key around his middle finger, clutching it to a stop when he saw us.

  “Zaffy,” Nico said, using a nickname that never stuck. “The best-looking Turk.”

  Zafer made a “follow me” motion with his hand as it closed over the key. He hopped into the driver’s seat of a white van, talking as he went. “No rush, but we should get going. Heading east first thing. Fortress. Almost at Iran border, where I need to get gas.”

  Nico and Patricia took the seat behind the driver’s. I sat in the front beside Zafer. “Got a map?” I asked him.

  He tapped his forehead. “In here.”

  “Got one,” Nico said from behind. He unfolded a large sheet, closed part of it and smoothed out the area where the city of Van appeared.

  South from Lake Van, Zafer drove toward the Çavuştepe fortress. “You must walk through this, as no one else there this morning,” he explained. “We go early, for you. It’s very old.”

  The road rose with the hills as we left Van’s suburbs. It remained paved until we swung off on a further incline toward piles of fallen stones. Among the rubble were the bricks of a partially excavated, partially restored building that would have once been considered unassailable. Now it was abandoned, defeated by time.

  Below us was a small village, all that remained of a once-thriving farm culture that fed the residents of the fortress. Its flat-roofed homes were finished with stucco, long faded.

  “Çavuştepe,” Zafer announced. “Once imposing. Now not.” He parked by a sign showing the archeologist’s floor plans of the fortress’s original footprint, and we disembarked.

  Nico scaled a slanted wall and peered through a window from which men might have fired arrows at assaulting forces or watched the farmers toil below. He was not impressed.

  “We can go now,” he called out to Zafer.

  “You should visit the Necropolis,” Zafer replied. “It is part of the museum where the dead live.”

  “I think no,” Nico said on behalf of us all.

  But the village’s cemetery intrigued me. “Who is buried there?” I asked.

  “Part of it is where murdered people are buried from 1915 encounters. And later,” Zafer said. “It was when Armenians had Van. It was under their control. You use word siege?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “It was a massacre,” Nico said. “Russians with Armenians occupied Van. Many people were murdered. Always we hear of Turks killing Armenians, but it happened both ways.”

  It felt impossible to overlook this region’s long-held grudges and constant retribution. I had encountered it enough times already to realize that nothing numbs history.

  “It is one thousand years of seesaw, I think is word,” Zafer said. “But thousand years is too long to remember details. Much long thinking becomes legend. So we remember last one hundred years. That is tragedy for Armenia, yes. Also for Turkey. Kurdish too.”

  He began to hum. Soon there were words in his song. As we walked toward the minibus, he said, “Song is after village name where fighting started between Turks and Kurds.” He sang another verse. “Oramar.” He let the song go. “Kurdish won.”

  Back in our vehicle he announced to the others what he had told me yesterday. “You should go see Noah’s Ark site. If not today, go when you are back in Van from Ararat. Near.”

  “I thought the Ark was on Ararat,” Patricia said good-humoredly but sarcastically. Zafer would have none of it.

  “If you read history, early texts say boat landed in ‘Mountains of Ararat,’” he said. “Not on Ararat. Ararat is range of mountains. Ark landed near Mount Ararat. Not on. I can show you exactly where.”

  “I’m going,” I said.

  “Do you know the name of Noah’s wife?” Patricia again, goading.

  “Noah’s wife is not named in Qur’an,” said Zafer. “She not named in Hebrew Torah. Not Bible either. No name.”

  “It was Joan of Ark,” Patricia said.

  Zafer laughed lightly, and I was relieved, not knowing how he might respond.

  Nico chimed in. “How high the Ark must have floated to be above the tallest of mountains!” That elicited the setup line he clearly wanted when Patricia replied, “Higher than Everest.” Nico filled in the blanks. “Wouldn’t that mean a lack of oxygen for the animals and people on board?” He looked at Zafer, mischief in his eyes.

  “And the penguins came from …?”

  “Nico,” scolded Patricia. “Enough.”

  Admonished, Nico instead asked Zafer, “Are you Muslim?”

  “I was born Muslim. Now Christian. I choose my way.”

  The banter of my new travel companions, all three of them, struck me as amusing until the topic changed from the Ark to religion; Zafer had firmly secured his belief in Noah’s voyage, and we needed to respect our host and let the jocularity rest. Ararat is a land of journeys, I thought, the mountain itself a symbol of man’s perpetual search for answers.

  Zafer remained silent. Patricia, turning serious, asked him, “Do you really believe in Noah’s Ark?”

  “This has been happen,” Zafer replied. “My opinion. A flood not over the entire worl
d. Qur’an says it was local flood.”11

  Patricia persisted. “You believe Noah lived?”

  “Yes. He gave us ground back.”

  “You really believe he had an Ark?”

  “There is no proof it isn’t true.”

  Noah’s Ark on Mount Ararat, by Dutch painter Simon de Myle, circa 1570 CE. In his book Great Ascents: A Narrative History of Mountaineering, Eric Newby described Noah as “the shipwrecked sailor with an embarrassing cargo, an involuntary man of the mountains—one of the few to descend from a detached peak without having climbed it.”

  * * *

  Two twentieth-century advocates for the reality of Noah’s Ark, realtor Eryl Cummings and theologian John Montgomery, stand out for their foundational research work. Cummings’ wife, Violet, was the author of Noah’s Ark: Fact or Fable? That was a book I’d had resting unopened on my shelf for years and only referenced when this trip was coming together. The Cummings and Montgomery focus was on registering “Ark sightings,” and their incomparable assembly of newspaper clippings and historic writings relating to the Mountain of the Ark was a first. They collected names and dates, archiving data from disparate sources in half a dozen languages. The Cummingses’ compendium of individually modest pieces, when filed and sorted, became the go-to archive of Mount Ararat’s ark-related information.

  Their archival approach began by chance. In 1945, a guest at the Cummingses’ home read a magazine article about the White Russian aviator Vladimir Roskovitsky. The story had been around since 1916, on the eve of the Russian Revolution. Roskovitsky, posted twenty-five miles northwest of Mount Ararat, was regularly dispatched on reconnaissance flights that took him near or around the mountain. After one sortie he returned convinced that he had seen a boat-shaped object on Ararat partially covered by ice and snow, perhaps a retreating glacier. He’d taken photographs of this geological fold, filed a report, and awaited direction from his superiors. The military hierarchy worked this precious find all the way to Czar Nicholas. In response, two groups of soldiers were dispatched to Ararat to determine whether this boat-shaped object might be Noah’s Ark.