Noah's Ark

Genesis gives specifications. The vessel is of gopher wood, made with compartments, sealed with pitch inside and out, three hundred cubits long, fifty wide and thirty high, with three decks, a single door in the side, and an opening at the top whose Hebrew term is uncertain and is translated as a window or as a source of light. The proportions are those of a chest rather than a ship: it has no rudder, no sail and no means of steering, because it is not going anywhere but up. The Quran tells the same account in several places, adds the son who refused to embark and drowned, and names the resting place as al-Judi rather than the mountains of Ararat.

The Mesopotamian versions are older and are close enough that the relationship is not in dispute. Atrahasis and the eleventh tablet of the Gilgamesh epic both have a man warned by a god to build a vessel, load it with his family, his craftsmen and animals, ride out a flood sent by the gods, and send out birds to test for land. The vessels differ: Utnapishtim builds a cube, and a cuneiform tablet published in recent decades describes a large round coracle of coiled rope, waterproofed with bitumen, which is a real Mesopotamian boat type built at an unreal size.

The comparison of these accounts is where most scholarship on the subject actually happens.

Expeditions to Mount Ararat in eastern Turkey have been mounted since the nineteenth century and have continued at intervals ever since, producing photographs of ice formations, accounts of sightings, timber samples and periodic announcements. None has been accepted. Where wood has been recovered and dated, the dates have come out in recent centuries rather than in antiquity.

The other recurring candidate is the Durupinar formation, a boat-shaped feature in the hills of Agri province, promoted since it was noticed from the air in the late 1950s. Geologists who have examined it describe it as a natural formation produced by mudflow around a resistant core, and the dimensions that attracted attention are a coincidence of shape rather than a hull.

Two general difficulties stand behind every specific failure. Wood does not survive four and a half thousand years exposed on a mountain, so the search is looking for something the environment does not preserve. And the identification of the landing place is itself uncertain: Genesis says the mountains of Ararat, which is a region and not a peak, the identification with the modern Mount Ararat is later, and the Quran names a different mountain entirely.

The atlas holds the vessel as narrative, records identification claims as claims made and not accepted, and points to the older accounts the story stands alongside.