MOUNT ARARAT | 2006-08-12
My comment below is illustrated by the fight over Mount Ararat. Mount Ararat is on the SHORE of the Black Sea. Recent discoveries show that the Black Sea was formed in a great flood about 5600 B.C. That was when agriculture began to spread, you know, the agriculture they invented inthe Middle East.
Now how did both the fundamentalists AND the acadmics react when these facts were first discussed?
They blew a gasket:
"Initial resistance came from those who looked for more detailed correlation with the Book of Genesis (see Noah's Ark and Mount Ararat) "
When history shows there WAS a Great Flood and the boat could easily have ended up at Mount Ararat, you would think fundamentalists would cheer it on.
No way, Jose. The flood was nowhere NEAR the Middle East, from whence all blessings must flow or Jehovah will be upset. The ACTUAL origin of history is almost certainly right up there, in the very place Indo-Europeans came from. History began when we were flooded out of our original, fertile homeland, far bigger than the Fertile Cresent.
The flood is mentioned in a LOT of ancient histories. That is also about the time ATLANTIS went down.
It was an almost unimaginable event. The entire area of the black sea, the size of a European country, was flooded in a matter of DAYS, if not LESS. In fact, it was bigger than it is today before the water stopped rocking. The area where Istanbu is today had a tiny and shrinking piece of land linking it to Euope, and that tiny bit of land was protecting the giant, fertile valley which is now the Black Sea from the Mediterranean.
One day, I mean, ONE DAY, the sea wall started to break. As soon as it started, the sea wall, which had been gnawed at by the Sea completely collapsed. A wall of water five hundred feet high, give or take a few, came roaring over the entire area. It was one of a number of these in history in different places, and it made a tsunami look like a ripple. It was probably moving at about a hundred miles per hour, so the whole homeland of Indo-Europeans was flooded out in a day.
Very, very, VERY few got out alive.
It is quite likely that one tiny group of survivors ended up on Mount Ararat. Those were OUR ancestors.
Initial resistance came from those who looked for more detailed correlation with the Book of Genesis (see Noah's Ark and Mount Ararat)
History
The Black Sea region is thought to have been the original homeland (Urheimat) of "Proto-Indo-European", (PIE) the progenitor of the Indo-European language family, by some scholars. Others move the heartland further east towards the Caspian Sea. In 1997, William Ryan and Water Pitman from Columbia University published evidence that a massive flood through the Bosporus occurred about 5600 BC. Glacial meltwater had turned the Black and Caspian Seas into vast freshwater lakes, while sea levels remained lower. As the glaciers retreated, rivers emptying into the Black Sea reduced their volume and the water levels lowered. Then, about 5600 BC, as sea levels rose, the Mediterranean spilled over a rocky sill at the Bosphorus. Ryan and Pitman wrote:
"Ten cubic miles [42 km³] of water poured through each day, two hundred times what flows over Niagara Falls. ... The Bosporus flume roared and surged at full spate for at least three hundred days."
The event flooded 60,000 mile² (155,000 km²) of land, and significantly expanded the Black Sea shoreline to the north and east. The Black Sea's water level raised many hundreds of feet, and it was transformed from a fresh-water landlocked lake into a salt water sea connected to the ocean. The displacement of early agricultural peoples has been linked with the rapid spread of agriculture north and west into Europe. It has been popularly suggested that the survivors' memory of this event was the source of the legend for Noah's Flood. Initial resistance came from those who looked for more detailed correlation with the Book of Genesis (see Noah's Ark and Mount Ararat)