The Noah's Ark

Noah's Ark (Hebrew: תיבת נח, Tevat Noach; Arabic: سفينة نوح, Safina Nuh) is a large vessel featuring in the mythologies of Abrahamic religions. Narratives that include the Ark are found in the Hebrew Bible (Book of Genesis chapters 6 through 9) and the Qur'an (Suras 11 and 71).

The Genesis narrative tells how God, grieved by the wickedness of mankind, decides to destroy the corrupted world. However, "Noah found grace in the eyes of the LORD", so God instructs Noah to build the Ark and take on board his family and representatives of the animals and birds. The flood rises to cover the Earth, but at its height "God remembered Noah", the waters abate, and dry land appears. The story ends with Noah offering an animal sacrifice and entering into a covenant with God. God regrets the flood, and promises never to do it again, displaying a rainbow as a guarantee.

The story has been subject to extensive elaborations in Judaism, Christianity and Islam, ranging from hypothetical solutions to practical problems (e.g. waste disposal and the problem of lighting the interior), through to theological interpretations (e.g. the Ark as the precursor of the Church in offering salvation to mankind). By the 19th century, the discoveries of geologists, archaeologists and biblical scholars had led most scientists and many Christians to abandon a literal interpretation of the Ark story, but Biblical literalists today continue to take the Ark as test-case for their understanding of the Bible, and explore the region of the mountains of Ararat, where Genesis says Noah's Ark came to rest.

Searches for Noah's Ark

Biblical literalists feel that finding the Ark would validate their views on a whole range of matters, from geology to evolution. "If the flood of Noah indeed wiped out the entire human race and its civilization, as the Bible teaches, then the Ark constitutes the one remaining major link to the pre-flood World. No significant artifact could ever be of greater antiquity or importance... [with] tremendous potential impact on the creation-evolution (including theistic evolution) controversy." Non-Fundamentalist Christians typically believe the discovery of the Ark is unimportant to the historicity of the Genesis flood narrative, and that the Ark cannot be found as it would have long since been destroyed by weather or recycled for other projects. Searches have concentrated on Mount Ararat in Turkey itself, although Genesis actually refers only to the mountains of Ararat; the Durupinar site, near but not on Ararat, and much more accessible, attracted attention in the 1980s and 1990s.

Critical evaluation

Seaworthiness
Biblical literalist websites seem to agree that the Ark was approximately 450 feet (137 m) long. This is considerably larger than the schooner Wyoming, at 329 feet (100.28 metres) the largest timber-hulled vessel built in modern times. The Wyoming and similar ships of her class suffered chronic leaking, warping, and hull separation due to hogging and sagging, despite reinforcement with iron bracing. "The construction and use histories of these [i.e. modern timber-hulled] ships indicated that they were already pushing or had exceeded the practical limits for the size of wooden ships". In response to the claim that the Ark had to be seaworthy, literalist websites cite various studies which, in their view, indicate that Noah's Ark was seaworthy, including a paper from the Korea Association of Creation Research demonstrating that the dimensions, shape, and structural materials of the Ark are realistic and that the Ark 'had a superior level of safety in high winds and waves compared with the other hull forms studied'. In this regard, some literalist apologists cite the Chinese Ming Dynasty 'Treasure ships', or 'baochuan' (the largest of which are claimed to be 400 to 600 ft long), as examples of large seagoing wooden vessels, however, the actual size of these ships is disputed,[57][58] and one explanation for their size is that the largest treasure ships were merely used by the Emperor and imperial bureaucrats to travel along the relatively calm Yangtze river. Other authors have proposed that the Flood was merely a local phenomenon confined to Mesopotamia and hence the Ark would not have needed to survive wave action on a worldwide ocean. For example, historian Robert Best wrote a book proposing the theory that Noah was originally a historical king of Shuruppak named Ziusudra, who would have reigned c. 2900 BC, and that the "Ark" was a beer, livestock and grain barge on the Euphrates River.

Practicality
Could the Ark have been constructed from timber as described in the Genesis narrative, and still support its own weight? Were the technology and materials available to Noah to make the Ark's construction possible? Ark-believers claim that there is ample evidence for ancient timber vessels comparable in size and construction to the Ark. Sir Walter Raleigh was among the first to argue that the Ark was smaller than the Syracusia, a cargo ship built in the 3rd century BC during the reign of Hiero II of Syracuse (180 feet in length), and the giant warship Tessarakonteres built by Ptolemy IV Philopater. The Tessarakonteres (420 feet long, and recognized as a historical vessel by standard historical authorities), remained a common point of comparison to the Ark throughout the 19th century among Flood-apologists, naval historians, nautical engineers, and scientific journals. Other ancient ships commonly used as points of comparison by modern Ark apologists are the giant obelisk barge of Hatshepsut (206-311 ft), the Thalamegos (377 ft), Caligula's Giant Ship (341 ft), and Caligula's Nemi Ships (229 ft), the historicity of which is accepted by standard historical authorities.

Capacity and logistics
According to Ark dimensions commonly accepted by Biblical literalists, the Ark would have had a gross volume of about 1.5 million cubic feet (40,000 m³), a displacement a little less than half that of the Titanic at about 22,000 tons, and total floor space of around 100,000 square feet (9,300 m²). The question of whether it could have carried two (or more) specimens of the various species (including those now extinct), plus food and fresh water, is a matter of much debate, even bitter dispute, between Biblical literalists and their opponents. While some Biblical literalists hold that the Ark could have held all known species, a more common position today is that the Ark contained "kinds" rather than species—for instance, a male and female of the cat "kind" rather than representatives of tigers, lions, cougars, etc. The many questions associated with a Biblical literalist interpretation include whether eight humans could have cared for the animals while also sailing the Ark, how the special dietary needs of some of the more exotic animals could have been catered for, how the creatures could have been prevented from preying on each other, questions of lighting, ventilation, and temperature control, hibernation, the survival and germination of seeds, the position of freshwater and saltwater fish, the question of what the animals would have eaten immediately after leaving the Ark, how they travelled (or were gathered) from all over the world to board the Ark and how they could have returned to their far-flung habitats across the Earth's bare, flood-devastated terrain, and how two or a few members of a species could have provided enough genetic variation to avoid inbreeding and reconstitute a healthy population. Numerous Biblical literalist websites, while claiming that none of these problems is insurmountable, give varying answers on how to resolve them.

To see the video of The Noah's Ark, follow this link :
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=4949167294351290441