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A terrifying downpour. For 40 days and 40 nights, it rains without stopping. Every living thing is washed from the face of the earth. Only wise Noah is saved. His family and some animals, two of every kind. They all take refuge on
Exploring the global flood myths, Noah's Ark, and archaeological efforts to find evidence of a worldwide catastrophe.
Key Takeaways
- Flood myths are nearly universal across diverse cultures, suggesting a shared ancient memory or archetype.
- The biblical ark's described size and capacity pose significant practical questions, often addressed symbolically by theologians.
- The Epic of Gilgamesh contains one of the earliest known flood narratives predating the Bible.
- Despite many searches, no definitive archaeological evidence of Noah's Ark has been found.
- Modern scientific theories like the Black Sea flood offer plausible explanations for regional catastrophic floods inspiring myths.
What the video covers
- The video examines the biblical story of Noah's Ark and the global flood described in Genesis.
- It discusses the logistical challenges of fitting all animal species on the ark and theological interpretations of the ark's dimensions.
- The flood myth is shown to be common across many ancient cultures worldwide, raising questions about a possible real global catastrophe.
- The earliest flood story from the Epic of Gilgamesh is presented as a parallel to the biblical narrative.
- The video touches on the search for Noah's Ark, including historical expeditions and findings on Mount Ararat.
- It introduces the Black Sea flood theory as a modern scientific hypothesis for a regional catastrophic flood event.
- The video also briefly diverges to mention modern technology like Hisense RGB Mini LED TVs as an analogy for evolving perspectives.
- The story of the flood is linked to the origins of modern archaeological science through exploration and excavation.
- The video highlights the symbolic and literal interpretations of the flood story throughout history.
- It concludes by questioning the reality behind flood myths and their enduring presence in human culture.
Chapters
- 00:00Introduction to the Flood and Noah's Ark Story
- 01:35Global Flood Myths and Their Cultural Significance
- 02:48The Ark's Dimensions and Theological Interpretations
- 03:59Modern Technology Interlude: Hisense RGB Mini LED TV
- 06:49Landing of the Ark and Biblical Details
- 07:58The Epic of Gilgamesh Flood Narrative
- 09:02Variations of Flood Myths Across Cultures
- 12:13Archaeological Searches for Noah's Ark
- 16:55The Black Sea Flood Theory and Modern Perspectives
Full Transcript — Download SRT & Markdown
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a ship 135 meters long and 20.5 meters wide. This is roughly what it looks like. The ark drifts on the waves for a whole year. Then the water recedes.
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Noah and the others disembark to populate the empty earth. The story is well-known, fascinating, and absolutely unrealistic. But can you imagine how many animals had to be stuffed into that tub? And there couldn't have been a flood that drowned the entire Earth.
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It’s just a legend of ancient Judeans, ancient Sumerians, ancient Greeks, ancient Chinese, indigenous peoples of North and South America, and the tribes of Tierra del Fuego. It is easier to list the tribes that did not have a
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flood myth. They mostly live in Central Africa. And here is the mystery: why do peoples living on completely different continents, in different cultures, have the same myth, and such a strange one at that? Could we assume that humanity
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once survived a real global catastrophe? Why have stories of sunken kingdoms and cities captured the minds of entire generations? And how did the search for Noah's Ark give birth to modern archaeological science? Today we will talk about how the whole world drowned.
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Fortunately, not entirely. Well, the canonical biblical story of the flood is outlined mainly in chapters six, seven, and eight of the book of Genesis. Several centuries had passed since the expulsion from Paradise. People began to multiply on the earth, but
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their moral character left much to be desired. Then God regretted that He had created them at all and decided to reboot the human race. Only Noah, a righteous and blameless man who remained faithful to God, was destined to survive. Amnesty was also granted to
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Noah's wife, his sons, and their wives. God commanded Noah to build an ark, a large rectangular vessel that could accommodate him and his kin, as well as all land animals, birds, and reptiles.
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Of the clean animals in the religious sense, seven pairs were taken; of the unclean, a pair was taken. How many were there in total and how did they all fit on board? Just think of the giraffes alone. A pair of elephants,
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for instance, also had to be fitted in. If you have questions right now, you are not alone. Theologians and mystics were very concerned about the question of the floating menagerie. Counting these animals was one of their favorite exercises. For example, in 1675, the
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monk and scholar Athanasius Kircher published an entire treatise with detailed geometric calculations and plans of who was placed where. Beavers, for example, were on the lower deck.
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Along with crocodiles, hedgehogs, and monkeys. Kircher made a clever move. He stated that there were about a hundred species on the ark, and the rest appeared after the flood. He excluded frogs, for instance. According to his version, they originated by themselves
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from the mud. In any case, in the biblical version, Noah received instructions directly from God, and they were quite detailed. The ark was to be made of gopher wood. What is that? Interpreters have no consensus. This word does not appear anywhere else in
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the Bible. Sometimes it is said to be cypress or cedar. Sometimes it is said the word resonates with the Hebrew word for resin, meaning some kind of resinous coniferous tree. And further on in the book of Genesis, God
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commanded to coat the vessel with pitch inside and out. From this mysterious wood, Noah had to build an ark 300 cubits long, 50 cubits wide, and 30 cubits high. How much is that? The cubit is a measure of length, the
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distance from the elbow to the tip of the outstretched middle finger. It varied across different eras and among different peoples. Well, everyone's arms are different, as is their average height, but we can roughly estimate it at 45 cm. It turns out that the length
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of the ark was 135 meters. The width was 22.5 meters, and the height was 13.5 meters. Is that enough to house every living creature in pairs, and also take enough supplies? No. But some theologians of the early centuries of
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Christianity believed that the meaning of these figures was purely symbolic. For example, 300 cubits points to the perfection of the Trinity, and 50 is seven sevens plus one, pointing to the one God. All these instructions are, frankly, vague, and to see something in
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them, one needs to put in quite a bit of effort. But the first centuries of Christianity are one thing, and our days are quite another. A sharp image is something without which we can no longer imagine our lives. But even here
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, there is room for development. For example, the Hisense brand presents a TV with RGB Mini LED backlighting technology. Unlike standard Mini LED, the LEDs feature red, green, and blue subpixels, each of which can be controlled independently. This makes it
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possible to achieve a wider color gamut and high peak brightness. As a result, color reproduction reaches a new level, and even a familiar picture in your favorite movies can be perceived in a new way. Thus, the Hisense U9N TV
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boasts a peak brightness of up to 5,000 nits and an anti-reflective coating that helps maintain image clarity even in bright light. And the viewing experience is complemented by an audio system tuned by the renowned French company DALI. The Hisense RGB Mini LED
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line offers models with diagonals from 55 to 116 inches. These TVs will fit organically into any ark. But let's return to history. Be that as it may, Noah, along with his family and the entire world's menagerie, took shelter
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in the ark. The flood came. The water rose above the highest mountains, covering the entire earth. And everyone except the inhabitants of the ark drowned. After 150 days of the catastrophe, the water began to recede.
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According to the Book of Genesis, the ark landed on the mountains of Ararat, which is to say, in the region of the ancient state of Urartu. Later tradition associated this location with Mount Ararat. Today, this is the territory of Turkey. On the first day
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of the tenth month, the tops of all the mountains became visible. At that moment, Noah began releasing birds to see if any land had appeared above the water. The raven returned with nothing, but the dove brought back an olive leaf
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on its second flight. The third time it did not return at all, and that is how Noah knew the danger had passed. The passengers left the ark, and a rainbow appeared in the sky as a sign of a
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promise that no more such disasters were planned. Well, we have covered the biblical story, but there are other versions in the myths of different cultures, and they are all strangely similar to each other. The earliest known story of the flooding of the
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Earth is an excerpt from the Epic of Gilgamesh. It is a Sumerian epic, the earliest known literary work in human history. It was written in Mesopotamia, the fertile land between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, 1800 years before our
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era. And it survived mainly through the retelling of the subsequent Babylonian culture. Gilgamesh is a giant king who experienced many adventures and losses.
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That is a topic for a separate episode, but right now we are interested in the flood. In one of the poems, Gilgamesh finds himself on an island where the immortal man Utnapishtim lives.
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According to legend, one day the supreme god Enlil decided to destroy humanity. He gathered the other gods and told them about the vile and deceitful nature of humans. The gods were horrified and agreed that something had to be done about it. It
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was decided to flood the earth, but Enki, the god of wisdom and art, took pity on the people. He went to Utnapishtim, known for his piety, and strongly recommended that he build a cube-shaped ship. Utnapishtim did just that. Moreover, in addition to his
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family and various animals, he loaded skilled craftsmen onto the ship. After landing on a mountain
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lawlessness. As an apology, Enlil granted the hero and his wife immortality and placed them on a paradise island, from which new people descended. And the very name Utnapishtim translates as "he who found life for long ages." The story of the
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Greek flood is very reminiscent of the biblical one. The Greeks counted as many as three floods. The so-called Ogygian flood, the Deucalion flood, and the Dardanus flood. The first, naturally, came from the direction of King Ogyges. Almost no information
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about it has reached us. We only know that, according to legend, the disaster happened in the earliest times, and only King Ogyges and his family survived. The second flood, in which the wise King Deucalion survived, unfolded according to the classic
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pattern. Zeus, ruler of the gods, was disappointed in humanity and decided to destroy it. Well, it's understandable, the method is standard: drown them. But in Greece, there lived King Deucalion, son of the titan Prometheus, the very same who stole fire from the gods and
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gifted it to people. Prometheus, in general, sympathized with humans. He appeared to his son and ordered him to build a large wooden chest. Deucalion and his wife Pyrrha climbed inside the box. And just then, a storm began that
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lasted for 9 days and 9 nights. Well, the rest is clear. The chest came to rest on the summit of Mount Parnassus.
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The royal couple stepped out, prayed to the gods, and set about repopulating humanity. There are two amusing details in the Greek myth. Well, firstly, Deucalion did not save any animals. The box was rather small, after all.
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Secondly, the practical Greeks believed that humanity could not be reborn from a single pair, so they explained the new multiplication of people like this: the royal couple began throwing stones over their shoulders. The stones thrown by Deucalion became men, and the stones
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thrown by Pyrrha became women. Things were a bit more complicated with Dardanus. He once lived at the foot of a mountain that, as a result of the flood, turned into the island of Samothrace. From there, he sailed on an
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air-filled leather skin to Asia Minor, where he founded a city of the same name. It was believed that Hector and Aeneas, heroes of the Trojan War, were his descendants. In any case, the strait in the area where all this took
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place is what we now know as the Dardanelles. One could list variations of the flood in different cultures endlessly. It is easier to say who does not have them. The Japanese, for example—in the 19th century, Japanese nationalists even tried to turn this
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fact to their advantage. They claimed that the flood happened but did not affect Japan because it was closest to the heavens at that time. In the Indian story, a fish warns about the flood.
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During the disaster, this fish tows a ship with Manu, the seven sages, and plant seeds to the mountain peaks. The Thai believed that the progenitor of humanity floated in a drum along with his sister. The Vietnamese believed the
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flood was caused by animals that humans had mistreated. But two brothers escaped destruction on a raft. How they later repopulated humanity is not entirely clear. In some versions, they are helped by the daughter of the sun, which, of course, makes the task a bit
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easier. The Chinese have many versions regarding the flood. People there successfully save themselves in boats, wooden boxes, and hollowed-out gourds.
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In general, the flood is almost the most popular mythological plot. Could it be that there is some reality behind it? What if, in the deep past, people truly survived a global catastrophe?
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This idea has occupied scholars throughout all time. In Europe, of course, they relied on the Bible. Until the 15th century, it was considered the primary scientific source in all fields . Friends, a very short announcement.
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On August 29th, the last Saturday of this summer, we are traditionally hosting our magazine festival, "Chtivy Fest." What is it, if you haven't been?
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Very briefly. This is the music stage with top artists. This is the dialogue zone, where I interview interesting people. This is the gastronomic zone with various cafes and restaurants, where you can eat and drink. And the pop culture zone, where stand-up comedy
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will take place. You can find the full lineup and buy festival tickets via the link in the description. Actually, archaeology as a science largely emerged thanks to scientists 'attempts to confirm the Bible. The great British archaeologist Charles Leonard Woolley
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dedicated almost his entire career to excavations in Mesopotamia. Woolley was looking for traces of the Babylonian captivity of the Jews described in the Bible. And along the way, he found traces of the Sumerian civilization. In Egypt, while searching for traces of
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the Egyptian captivity, he discovered the remains of the Hittite civilization . Woolley's methods are considered amateurish today, but for his time, he was an innovator. Woolley suggested that the layer of river sediments he discovered in Ur could be a trace of a
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historical flood that the Sumerians survived. The Tigris and Euphrates overflowed. The catastrophe remained in the memory of the Sumerians and the memory of subsequent civilizations, including the Babylonian one. And in Babylon, this story was adopted by the Jews they had enslaved. It wasn't just
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the British who looked for traces of the flood. In 1829, an expedition led by Johann Parrot, a Russified German from the Russian Empire, ascended Ararat. Ivan Yegorovich Parrot, as he was called in Russia, was, of course, looking for Noah's Ark on Ararat.
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Parrot became the first known conqueror of Ararat, reached the summit, conducted measurements and meteorological observations, but found no traces of Noah. This did not stop other researchers. They decided that Parrot simply hadn't searched well enough. Expeditions followed one after
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another. British explorer James Bryce conquered the legendary mountain in 1876. Above the tree line, Bryce discovered fragments of processed wood.
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Of course, he immediately declared that he had found the remains of the ark. Later, he admitted that the origin of this wood could be anything, not necessarily biblical, but added just in case that no one is obligated to
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disprove the relics of their people. Ararat has been conquered many times. The search for the ark did not cease.
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One of the most interesting people who searched for traces of Noah was American astronaut James Irwin. In 1971 , during his space flight on Apollo 15, Irwin experienced a religious revelation. Upon returning to Earth, the astronaut resigned from NASA and
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founded the Christian organization High Flight. There, he began collecting donations for an expedition to Turkey.
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Irwin only reached Ararat by 1982. He fell off the cliffs there and was badly injured, but he didn't give up his attempts until 1987. High Flight, by the way, still exists today. The biblical ark was never found. Let's
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assume the Bible is not entirely correct, and the story of Noah can be understood as a metaphor in a spiritual sense. But how can we explain such a prevalence of the idea of a global flood in other cultures that had never
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seen the Bible before contact with Europeans? What about the ancient Greeks or ancient Chinese? There is a theory about much deeper roots of the flood myth. About 20,000 years ago, the last glacial period reached its peak, and then the glaciers gradually began
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to melt. By the beginning of the Holocene epoch, roughly 11,700 years ago, the ice age ended. During this time, the global sea level rose by approximately 120 meters. Coastal settlements ended up being flooded. The water, of course, rose gradually, but
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perhaps not everywhere. Landscapes vary , and in some regions, flooding could have happened quickly and catastrophically. According to very rough estimates, no more than 1 million people inhabited the planet at that time. Thus, our common ancestors acquired memories of the catastrophe.
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And they carried them forward. Since the end of the 1990s, another theory has gained popularity. A group of Russian, American, and French researchers put forward the so-called Black Sea flood theory. According to their version, about 7,000 years ago,
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the Black Sea was not a sea. It was a huge freshwater lake, disconnected from the world's oceans. Farmers and fishermen lived along its shores. Then, for some reason, the rock formations in the area of the modern Bosphorus Strait
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collapsed, and a torrent of water from the Mediterranean Sea rushed into the lake, 400 times more powerful than Niagara Falls. This continued for 2 years at 50 cubic kilometers of water per day. Judging by geological data, confirmed in 2002 by a French
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expedition, more than 100,000 square kilometers of coastline were flooded and turned into marshes during those 2 years. The coastal population was forced to flee to Europe, the Balkans, and possibly the Middle East. The canonical biblical version states that
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God will no longer destroy all living things, and people, in return, pledge to behave well. But, actually, everything there is not as unambiguous as it might seem. The Gospel of Matthew , for example, hints at a new flood in
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the days of the Second Coming. They say the global sea level has been rising lately. But that is just by the way.
Topics:Noah's ArkGlobal floodFlood mythsEpic of GilgameshArchaeologyMount AraratBlack Sea flood theoryBiblical storiesAncient civilizationsMythology
