The date of ‘Noah's Ark’

Abstract

One of the most widely-known narratives contained in Judaeo-Christian literature is that of ‘Noah’s Ark and the Great Flood’. The version best known to most English readers is derived from the translation of Genesis VI-VIII contained in the 1611 King James Version of the Bible and its subsequent revisions. According to this account, near the end of the Biblical Deluge, the Ark rested ‘upon the mountains of Ararat’. From this locality, according to the story, the ancestral stock of all terrestrial life, including mankind, left the Ark with the order that they ‘be fruitful and multiply upon the earth’. The Hebrew word which has been transliterated as Ararat in English texts may have been ultimately derived from an expression meaning ‘highlands’, and apparently referred to a region at the headwaters of the Tigris River which lay within the ancient boundaries of the Urartu of Assyrian records (Mellick, 1962).