A small piece of wood is kept in the residence of the Armenian Catholicos in Etchmiadzin, which is one of the main relics of the monastery. According to legend, this is a piece of the covering of Noah's ark, once given to the monastery by a monk who climbed the slopes of Ararat in the time of Gregory the Illuminator.
In 1876, Lord Bryce, during an expedition to Ararat, discovered on one of the mountain ledges (at an altitude of thirteen thousand feet) a large piece of processed wood. The lord cut a small sample from it as a souvenir.
Later, several expeditions in search of the Ark visited the area, but in 1974 the Turkish authorities completely closed access to the Ararat region and prohibited any expeditions.
The enduring myth of the Flood is the myth of all mankind. It is common among the peoples of Europe, Asia, North and South America. Today, there is no longer any doubt about the fact that the consciousness of the peoples of the entire planet in ancient times was shaken by a single global catastrophe.
Scientists have expressed many different hypotheses and assumptions, but they all agree on one thing: in the amazing coincidence of the legends about the Flood, which were born at a distance of thousands of kilometers from each other, on different continents, among different peoples. All of them are based on the story of how a certain person, wishing to save the living creatures on the planet, built a huge ship, on which he gathered people and animals - "each creature - a pair."
One of the ancient myths about the flood is considered the myth of Atum - Egyptian Noah. He was the local god of the city of Helipolis, located in the Nile Delta. In one of the legends, an angry Atum threatens to destroy everything he created and turn the world into a water element. Subsequently, the worship of Atum was supplanted by the god Ra, and the myth of the flood appeared with the participation of the god Ra. He also decided to punish the human race and for this he called for the help of the goddesses Hator and Sokhmet. The goddesses destroyed people with such fury that the heart of the god Ra trembled, but it was already impossible to stop them. To save the Earth, the god Ra filled everything … with beer, and the goddesses who were carried away by him forgot about the judgment.
Flood legends most often arose among peoples living in coastal regions. For example, the ancient Greek myth tells that “Zeus decided to destroy the human race and send a worldwide flood for his crimes. Deucalion, on the advice of Prometheus, built a ship on which he and Pyrrha, the only people, escaped. On the ninth day, Deucalion's ship stopped at the summit of Parnassus.
Old Irish gods "Bit with his wife Birren and household members during the flood boarded a ship and escaped from the shores of a large island."
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The ancient Indian epic "Mahabharata" tells about the progenitor of people Manu, "who saved from death and helped grow a wonderful fish, for which she thanked him with advice. In the year predicted by the fish, Manu built a ship, climbed on it, and when the flood began, the fish sailed, attached a rope with the ship to its horn and headed to the northern mountain.
One of the most poetic stories about the flood is contained in the Bible: “And the water on the earth was greatly strengthened, so that all the high mountains that are under the whole sky were covered; the water rose fifteen cubits above them, and the mountains were covered. And all flesh that moved on the earth, and birds, and cattle, and beasts, and all the creeping things that crawled on the earth, and all people, lost their life; everything on dry land that had the breath of the spirit of life in its nostrils died”(Genesis 7: 19-22).
God spoke to Noah, the most righteous of all people who lived then:
“Make yourself an ark of gopher wood; make compartments in the ark, and pitch it inside and out with pitch. And make it this way: the length of the ark is three hundred cubits; its breadth is fifty cubits, and its height is thirty cubits. And make a hole in the ark, and bring it at the top of the cubit, and make the door to the ark on its side; make in it the lower, second and third [dwellings].
And behold, I will bring a flood of water on the earth to destroy all flesh, in which is the spirit of life, under heaven; everything on earth will lose its life.
But with you I will establish My covenant, and you will enter the ark, you, and your sons, and your wife, and your sons' wives with you.
Bring also into the ark of all animals, and of all flesh, in pairs, so that they may remain alive with you; male and female, let them be (Genesis 6: 14-19).
The record on clay Chaldean tablets of the 21st century BC fully coincides with the biblical story of Noah's ark. The description of the construction of a wooden ship, its wandering in the sea waters, coincides, equally Noah and the Assyrian Utnapishtim release birds to detect the fall of the water level.
The famous English historian and ethnographer J. J. Fraser devoted the largest chapter of his book "Folklore in the Old Testament" to the study of legends about the Great Flood among different nations. So, for example, the Indians living at Cape Cabo Frio have the following legend.
“There lived a skilled sorcerer and wizard Tamanduare. The great god Tupi revealed to him that a great flood would soon come, which would flood the whole earth, even tall trees and mountains. Only one peak will rise above the water, and on it is a large tree with fruits like coconuts. On this tree, the wizard and his family can be saved at the appropriate time. Tamanduare immediately hastened to leave with his family to the top of that mountain. And when they found themselves here in complete safety, it began to rain, which kept pouring and pouring. The water covered the entire earth, flooded the mountain and even washed away the top of it. Then the man and his family climbed onto the palm tree and remained on its branches all the time while the flood lasted, feeding on the fruits of the tree. After the water subsided, they descended from the tree and were so fertile that over time they re-populated the world devastated by the flood.
Similar legends exist among the Indians of North and Central America, as well as among the aborigines of Australia and Oceania. JJ Frazer concludes his research on the Great Flood with a chapter in which he tries to clarify the origins of such legends. In it, he notes that the reasons for the origin of the legends about the flood have not yet been clarified. The answer to the question: "How did people everywhere have the confidence that once, at one time or another, the earth (or at least all of its inhabited part) was flooded with a flood, from which almost the entire human race died?" - never received. This question was previously answered that such a catastrophe actually took place, that a detailed and authentic description of it is contained in the "Book of Genesis" and that many legends spread among people are nothing more than more or less imperfect,a vague and distorting memory of that terrible cataclysm.
It is difficult (perhaps even impossible) to establish precisely the causes of this tragedy in the history of mankind. There are many of the most daring hypotheses on this topic, which sometimes seem just crazy. Here is the fall of a giant meteorite into the ocean, which raised a giant wave across the globe. Here is the meeting of our planet with an icy comet that upset the Earth's water balance. Here is also a super-powerful volcanic explosion of a planetary scale, which raised a grandiose tsunami …
In 1922-1929, the English scientist Leonard Woolley carried out archaeological excavations in northwestern Iraq, near the ruins of the ancient city of Ur. One day, the workers came across a dump of broken bricks and fragments of pottery. Experience told the scientist that city dumps usually remain in the same place from generation to generation, and Woolley ordered the workers to dig a well in this place to the maximum depth.
Further excavations showed that he was right. At this place many centuries ago there really was a city dump. As they moved into the depths of the earth, the workers constantly bumped into different cultural layers, but the real discovery awaited Woolley when the workers dug down to 14 meters deep. In this layer, the remains of incomprehensible burials were found. The city cemetery they discovered was so ancient that even the Sumerians, whose historical evidence Woolley used during his excavations, did not point to it. The graves were located one above the other two, three, and in some places six floors. This is how the tombs of the early kings of the Sumerian city-state of Ur were discovered with priceless treasures of gold and precious stones.
But Woolley didn't stop there. He seemed to feel that there could be other cultural layers under this burial.
Again the workers took up shovels and picks. And soon they discovered another city dump, the age of which indicated that Woolley stumbled upon the oldest period in the history of the city of Ur. The workers did not stop there either. They began to dig further until they reached a silty layer, which indicated that five to nine thousand years ago, these places were either swampy, or a powerful river flowed through them. The silty layer was about two and a half meters thick and remained, apparently, after the waters disappeared.
However, no remnants of human activity were found in it, which allowed Woolley to conclude that the silty layer was sudden. By its structure, this silty layer was markedly different from other layers - the periods of the Paleolithic and Neolithic, Bronze and Iron ages. What could it be? Flash flood? But is it possible at such a depth?
Digging through this muddy layer, the workers again discovered traces of human life: fragments of bricks, pottery, soot. These and other finds belonged to the ancient and distinctive culture of the people, in many respects different from the Sumerians. The appearance of a silty layer between two cultural layers could be explained by one thing - a sudden flood, which could not be an ordinary natural phenomenon. A layer of silt with a thickness of two and a half meters could arise between two historical periods only as a result of a terrible catastrophe, after which the water stood for a long time and its depth was not less than eight meters. This water flooded the territory of the entire Mesopotamia - all villages and cities, with the exception of those that were on the heights. It was this flood that the Sumerian chronicles reported.
Later, the French explorer Mortilier called this silty layer hiatus, that is, break. According to him, such a muddy deposition occurred as a result of a sharp natural cataclysm, when the land suddenly went to the bottom of the sea or ocean. Such silty layers are found practically throughout Europe. According to the assumptions of some scientists, this silty layer is direct evidence of the Great Flood, which suddenly arose and, apparently, also suddenly subsided.
Consequently, a gigantic natural disaster, which brought with it huge waves and a long-lasting rain, could well have hit the Earth many thousands of years ago, destroying people and animals.
The date of the flood was helped to establish the Shanidar Cave in northern Iraq, which lies at an altitude of 750 meters above sea level. In the 1950s, American scientists excavated here, and the results of these excavations were simply stunning. The layers of earth raised in the cave made it possible to clarify the history of the entire earthly civilization over a hundred thousand years. The cave turned out to be over a thousand square meters in area and up to fifteen meters high. In the past, it was inhabited, as evidenced by the soot remaining from the fires on the ceiling. Skeletons of people were also found in the layers of the earth. The earth was removed layer by layer, with a total thickness of fifteen meters, and all ages of the exposed layers were determined. So it was established that about ten thousand years BC, a catastrophe occurred on Earth, which caused a huge wall of water that flooded such a high-located cave.
The legend of the Flood haunts not only researchers and human scientists. An interesting version was put forward by I. G. Petrichko from the city of Obninsk, which was published in the magazine "Vokrug Sveta" (No. 7 for 1993). According to his theory, the axis of rotation of our planet oscillates around a certain middle position, like a rotating top oscillates. Many millennia ago, when the solar system was younger, such oscillatory processes were much more active. About 22 thousand years ago, our Earth was located in space so that it rotated around its own axis, as if lying on its side. This situation should have led to a semi-tropical climate at the poles of the planet. At the same time, in the equatorial region, the incidentally incident rays of the Sun could not heat the Earth's surface intensively enough,to melt the glaciers that accumulate there at least from time to time. And these glaciers grew until their mass reached a certain critical value.
This criticality was that the gravitational field of the Moon led to the fact that once the Earth "tumbled", that is, changed the position of its axis of rotation in space. As a result of this “somersault”, the weather conditions on our planet have changed. Antarctica, once a fertile land, began to be covered with ice. But the glaciers of the equator, caught in the hot rays of the sun, began to melt quickly. Plots of land previously inhabited by people ended up on the seabed, while the Great Glaciation began on others. Information about such changes (in particular, the legend of the Flood) has come down to our time.
Disputes about the causes of the Great Flood, the time of its onset and end are still ongoing, and there is no end in sight. And according to the calculations of scientists, our planet will make the next "somersault" no earlier than in two billion years.
HUNDRED GREAT DISASTERS. N. A. Ionina, M. N. Kubeev