The ABC kindly reports yet another discovery of Noah's Ark on Mt Ararat - the mountain must be littered with arks, judging by the frequency with which they are discovered (with or without 'fossilised' animal dung and animal feed left over from the epic voyage.
This time a "group of Chinese and Turkish evangelical explorers" from Noah's Ark Ministries International believes they've found the genuine article: "It's not 100 per cent that it is Noah's Ark but we think it is 99.9 per cent that this is it".
Perhaps faith isn't enough, especially when asking people to praise the Lord and pass the contribution, so the intrepid explorers are reported as saying that they recovered wooden specimens that 'carbon dating proved was 4,800 years old, around the same time the ark is said to have been afloat'. The structure - ie what's left of the Ark - is reported as having "several compartments, some with wooden beams, which were believed to house animals".
Why stop there? Local Turkish officials will reportedly ask Ankara to apply for UNESCO World Heritage status "so the site can be protected while a major archaeological dig is conducted". The national government is more likely to declare the location as a national park and license a tourist facility, in the way that it has handled other discoveries in regions where there's lots of poverty and minority groups are unhappy with repression by the state.
As a sceptic I wonder whether we can't have too many genuine Arks (the Lord in His generosity may have salted Mt Ararat and other locations with multiple arks to edify the faithful and delight intrepid explorers or publishers), in the same way that there were cartloads of bits of timber from The True Cross, holy Nails from ditto, thorns from the Crown of Thorns, sundry sponges, vials of holy blood and at least four foreskins from the Son of God.
The late Ronald Eldon Wyatt, complete with Indiana Jones hat, modestly claimed to have found the Ark of the Covenant in a tunnel at Jerusalem (complete with a sample of the dried blood of Jesus), gold-plated chariot wheels from the Red Sea crossing, the site of the Golden Calf apostasy, Sodom and Gomorrah, the Tower of Babel and so forth. Readers of this post, pious or otherwise, can draw their own conclusions.
I discount the announcement made to me, several years ago, by an Australian correspondent who had discovered that Mt Ararat in Victoria was the mountain and that if the pure of heart would give him some cash (presumably to buy a spade or two) he would be able to quickly disinter The Ark - slightly weather-beaten (as you'd expect after a millennium or two among the kangaroos and gumtrees) but otherwise in full working order.
I confess instead to a certain fondness for Athanasius Kircher's 1675 speculations about the Ark, with images of his illustrations and inventories featured in 'Athanasius Kircher (1602-1680) on Noah's Ark: Baroque 'Intelligent Design' Theory' by Olaf Breidbach & Michael Ghiselin in 57(36) Proceedings of the California Academy of Sciences, 4th Series (2006) 991-1002 [PDF]. The latter unfortunately doesn't provide Kircher's famous description of the Katzenklavier, a fictive musical instrument that comprised a line of cats whose tails would be hit, pulled or pricked when a keyboard was struck. Not a nice way to make music and less melodious than the Duetto buffo di due gatti attributed to Gioachino Rossini.
