Where do these flood stories4 and their various iterations come from? It is not just the religious connotations that are confounding. There is a huge mystery here, one not easily explainable, and it is tethered to the mountain I had decided to climb. So of course that sent me in search of more massive flood suppositions from the region.
Although enchanted by mythology and legends, I would not classify myself as religious. I would not consider many of the stories and history as told in the Torah, the Bible, or the Qur’an to be taken literally. But notwithstanding the circumstantial improbabilities, the story of Noah and his ark has captivated many people for a very long time, and the more I looked into the history of Ararat and the search for the Ark, the more intrigued I became.
For centuries, many who climbed on Mount Ararat were driven by the search for Noah’s Ark, in the firm belief it lay waiting for discovery. Consider the dictates of seventeenth-century Irish bishop Rev. James Ussher. Ussher’s 1650 book, Annals of the Old Testament, Deduced from the First Origins of the World, determined beyond a reasonable doubt (for the bishop’s era, and followers, done mathematically and relatively rationally based on the “begat” generations provided) that Earth was created on a Sunday—October 22, to be precise—in 4004 BCE. Ussher’s work-up, which in many ways simply reinforced common belief at the time, was that the Earth was no more than 6,000 years old. From that weekend in 4004 BCE to the Great Flood of Noah was, by Ussher’s reckoning, 1,656 years, and further, Noah’s craft came to land on Ararat on Wednesday, May 5, 2348 BCE. When the term “dinosaur” was first coined in the early 1840s, a popular theological explanation emerged of “age built in”5 to the earth at creation, furthering fanciful notions of dinosaurs and man coexisting, as though “God put bones in stones” to be found later by geologists.
Over the centuries, there have been numerous announcements claiming to have found remnants of the Ark on Mount Ararat. Archbishop and encyclopedist Isidore of Seville, back in the seventh century, stated, “Even to this day wood remains of it are to be seen.” The fact is that none of the numerous sightings or findings have ever been substantiated through the scientific method or corroborated by independent specialists. This, however, has done nothing to stifle a common acceptance that these stories or relics are actual proof of the Ark’s existence.
I emailed Amy, asking whether she knew an Ararat mountain guide named Paraşut whom I’d seen mentioned over the course of my research. “A website claims that he’s found an ice cave with frozen wood and other relics,” I explained. “That interests me. Do you think I might ramble around a couple of days with him?” The chance to climb in an ice cave, even if the alleged wooden contents were dubious, was alluring.
Her reply was circumspect. “He is … yes, a guide. The finding of beams … hmmm … in a cave at thirteen thousand feet on Mount Ararat … however …” She stopped there. “I will give you an email address. You can ask for his phone number.”
The doubter’s direction of my mind was reinforced, although having myself replaced rotting wood beams in a log cabin, I relished the possibility of confronting that skepticism directly, to stand in an ice cave and ask the guide about the doubtful durability of a wet, wooden structure surviving thousands of years.
Cuneiform is an alphabet with hundreds of consonants, a syllabic system with shapes such as this tablet's information on apportioning a supply of beer. Without punctuation, paragraph breaks, or sentence structure as we know it, words simply follow one another. This form of writing was invented in Sumeria between 3300 and 3100 BCE. It is thought to have begun with symbols impressed on clay, denoting livestock and numbers for inventory. It was never a spoken language. Photo © The Trustees of the British Museum. All rights reserved.
Riffling through research books in search of the earlier flood accounts, oral and written, I found more details about one that had an immediate impact on my travel plans. It related the aforementioned older-than-Noah story recounted in the Mesopotamian narrative from what is colloquially known as the “Flood Tablet”: the eleventh chapter from the Epic of Gilgamesh. Onto this tablet the story was pressed into clay with cuneiform characters around 2000 BCE. This powerful account continued to be retold over time and engraved onto newly shaped clay tablets, keeping the story alive in written form, though with inevitable variations during the copying process. A vast collection of these tablets was stored in the ancient Library of Nineveh, near present-day Mosul in Iraq. But with Nineveh’s destruction by the Medes in 612 BCE, and the later arrival of Babylonians, thousands of intact tablets were shattered into tens of thousands of fragments and buried for centuries. Some were carted off.
The Flood Tablet is thought to have been among the archaeological treasures discovered by an Englishman, Austen Henry Layard, in the 1840s during excavations alongside the man who has been called “the first archaeologist born and raised in the Middle East,” Hormuzd Rassam. Layard and Rassam appear to have transferred that tablet, not knowing what exactly it was or the secret it held, along with other holdings from the ancient library’s ruins, to the British Museum in London. And given the difficulty of deciphering cuneiform, it was over twenty-five years before anyone was able to find out what it said.
It was in 1872 that Assyriologist George Smith—“an intellectual pick-lock,” according to his friend Archibald Sayce—deciphered that particular tablet at the museum, with striking results. The story he discovered shocked the British public: an ark and flood narrative that antedated the timelines of the Biblical account. Smith was cast as both scholarly and blasphemous for revealing a story about a world-drowning outburst, a survivor’s boatload of migrating family and animals, all with a protagonist not named Noah, but, instead, Utnapishtim.
Could I possibly visit Nineveh where this work of literature had been rediscovered, and learn more about the tablet? I contacted the British Museum, seeking information on their current archeological activities in the vicinity. A brusque reply: “We’d not be permitted to travel there, even under military protection. Obviously, neither should you put yourself in harm’s way.” The ruins of the Library of Nineveh are across the Tigris River from the city of Mosul, a no-go area in northern Iraq at the time and, sadly, in the foreseeable future.
The “Flood Tablet” (shown front view, at full size: 5.5 inches tall [15 cm] by 5 inches [13 cm] wide). The language used in ancient Assyria and Babylonia was Akkadian, and from it comes the Epic of Gilgamesh. The epic’s eleventh chapter was discovered during explorations in the mid-1800s undertaken in the ruins of the library of King Ashurbanipal, at Nineveh. Later deciphered at the British Museum, the tablet tells a flood story similar to that of Noah’s Ark in the Hebrew texts and Christian Bible, although written earlier and with a hero named Utnapishtim. Photo © The Trustees of the British Museum. All rights reserved.
While strife with ISIS in Syria and Iraq had not begun at the time of my travels, I nevertheless found an instructive caution about travel in Iraq on the Lonely Planet website, from a writer who had crossed into Iraq from Turkey. After getting an entry visa at the border near Dohuk and staying one night, he advised: “Just don’t tell your relatives in advance if you’re going to try this.” Never one to be dissuaded so easily, I connived to get into Iraq and updated the roughed-out itinerary of my trip to Mount Ararat, hoping that after my climb on the mountain I could make my way to Turkey’s border with Iraq. And possibly cross over.
Seeing an image of the Flood Tablet with its, to me, indecipherable cuneiform characters piqued my inquisitiveness. I’d recently encountered instant eye fatigue brought on by pondering those angled symbols at length. The characters form one of the first writing structures, initiated between 3300 and 3100 BCE. These slanted and tilted figures developed as the Sumerian script. Earlier in this same year I was a delegate to an international summit concerning sport and tourism and peace. There were forty people from around the world attending the daylong gathering and I was seated next to an Olympian from Iran. He had with him a replica of
the Cyrus Cylinder, an ancient clay piece about nine inches (23 centimeters) long and four inches (10 centimeters) wide. He spoke about it with pride and vision, calling it “the first declaration of human rights,” and told the assembly it was written in 539 BCE.
British Museum archeologists discovered the Cyrus Cylinder in 1879, during excavations in what was then the Ottoman Empire. Cyrus appears in the Hebrew Bible. He was a Zoroastrian, a member of the first monotheistic religion, established in Iran 3,500 years ago by the Prophet Zoroaster. Under Cyrus the Great, Persia became “tolerant of all faiths.”
The Olympian told us that Cyrus was the founder of Persia, today’s Iran, and that his “message of religious tolerance is needed today.” After the assembly adjourned the Olympian gifted the cylinder to me. I have it in my home. It is a quality reproduction and the complexity of its marks is mesmerizing. I planned to visit the British Museum and see the original of the Cyrus Cylinder—and the original of the Flood Tablet—on my return route from Mount Ararat.
A few days before leaving for Turkey, I visited my neighborhood pharmacy for medicine that would prevent mountain sickness. To avoid altitude illness, I had been told to begin taking it four days before my ascent, and to continue throughout the entire climb, finishing two days after I was off the mountain.
“Where are you going with this?” the pharmacist asked me as he rang up my purchase.
“Mount Ararat. Eastern Turkey,” I replied, embarrassingly pleased that he’d asked.
What would turn out to be a pivotal part of my journey wasn’t the pharmacist’s response, but the reply I heard behind me, from another customer in line: “You’ll love it there. It’s beautiful.”
I turned around to see a young man smiling. “Really, beautiful.”
“You’ve been there?” I said. “To Ararat?”
“Not there,” he said, “but close. My family is from northern Iraq. Kurdistan. Erbil. My dad was home to visit his brothers and parents four months ago.”
“Iraq?” I felt the universe colluding in my favor. “Mind if I wait while you finish up here and ask you some questions?”
He nodded happily and introduced himself. “My name is Andam.”
I paid for my prescription and waited near the door while he made his purchase. A wash of ideas came over me. We left the store and walked away together as I peppered him with questions.
“Erbil is safe,” he said. “It’s where my uncles, my cousins live. My grandfather too.”
“Do you think I could get there?” I asked.
“You should phone my dad,” he offered.
The next morning I phoned Taha, Andam’s father, who was expecting my call. He suggested that, since I was about to leave town, we meet that evening. So it was that, two nights before departing, I met Taha Jabbar at his favorite coffee shop. He was quick to smile and captivated me with his storytelling, accented with a raspy voice.
“I think you’ll be safe,” he said. “Stay near Erbil. Do not go to Mosul. Do not go to Kirkuk. Not secure. Erbil, now, is calm. It is Kurdish land. We are Kurds,” he informed me, seeming unsure that I understood his meaning.
The broader concept of Kurdistan as its own country flows together with the mountain I was going to climb. Mount Ararat, formally on the border of Turkey and Armenia, is also considered the northern corner of a country that does not technically exist, of what some believe should be a united Kurdistan nation, expanding out of Iraq to include a touch of Syria’s northeast, a long, narrow portion of Iran, and an eastern section of Turkey. Together, many Kurds hope, this area would one day form a sovereign nation, along the lines once envisioned by the Western forces. The United States and others encouraged the concept of an autonomous Kurdistan after World War I, through the Treaty of Sèvres in 1920. But Turkey outmaneuvered those plans at the time (abetted by certain Western powers6), and the result has been ongoing insurgent fighting, where contested realms are seldom safe.
Because of this, I wondered about Erbil and the long-fought-over northern reaches of Iraq actually being secure. Taha cautioned me not to travel overland through disputed territory in far eastern Turkey, which I had looked into as a possible bus route from Van to Iraq. But he did not discourage me from finding another way to get to Iraq. After half an hour, our cups were empty and our conversation finished. We shook hands and said our farewells. I left with a safe fear.
As I walked home through dark streets, I knew late night would bring the closing sliver of the old moon. Soon I would begin two weeks of travel toward my hoped-for sight of a full moon over Mount Ararat.
I reached our townhouse and fifteen minutes later the phone rang.
“Rick, it’s Taha. I’ve been thinking. I trust you. I will give you a letter to introduce you to my family in Iraq. On the envelope I will write a note with their phone numbers. If you can get into Iraq, show the envelope to a taxi driver. He will phone them. They will meet you and help you find a hotel. Probably they will take you for a meal.”
I didn’t know what to say.
“Rick? Is it OK?”
“Taha,” I said, overwhelmed by his generosity, “I’ve no idea if I can get into Iraq. If I do, I’ll owe the experience to you.”
We met again the following morning, the day before I was to leave, at a schoolyard up the street from where I live. Taha’s wife, Gulie, was with him; Sean, my youngest son, was with me. It occurred to me that this might be a final character check by each of us.
“Can you read this?” Taha asked, handing me an envelope with a beautiful—and, to me, incomprehensible—style of cursive Arabic or Persian script, written from right to left, flowing as smooth as a horizon of sand dunes. I thought it was written in Farsi at first, which it was not; I am habitually travel-hampered by early assumptions, and this would prove to be another mistake. Among all the conjoined words, the only characters I recognized were those I took to be the promised telephone numbers. The envelope was sealed.
Taha Jabbar at 19 years old in 1974 as a member of the Peshmerga, who battle to this day for Kurdish independence. After fighting Saddam Hussein’s forces decades ago, he led his pregnant wife Gulie and their two year-old Andam (whom I’d meet as an adult at a pharmacy 72 hours before my departure) on a rugged mountain escape. They hid by day and climbed by night, ever so dangerously traveling from Iraq to Iran and eventually out of the Middle East to a new life in North America. This photograph conveys a man characterized by resilience, tenacity, and confidence and, I believe, integrity. His was a handshake I needed to trust.
Taha and Gulie laughed at something she’d said in a language I’d never heard before. He explained: “In Kurdish, she says that you will love our family. You must go.”
“I do hope to see Iraq,” I said, reaching for his hand.
“Say hello to my father for me,” he said, a tear cornering his eye.
“And to my sister,” said Gulie.
“And to my brother,” Taha added. “He’s married to her sister.”
A chance encounter in a pharmacy had opened up a new path for me. Would I ever be able to make it into Iraq to take them up on their offer?
From my own family, the reactions to my desire to visit Iraq were slightly less enthusiastic.
Sean: “Get me a message if you’re going in. I’ll alert an embassy. Just in case.”
My oldest son, Brent, thinking one of us would find a way to decipher the information within the envelope, or at the least that those words should be kept on record, emailed: “I’ve steamed open the envelope, pdf’d the two-page letter and pdf’d the note on the front. I emailed you and Sean and Janice copies.” His actions eased my guilty conscience. Under the reasonable guise of safety and despite my inclination to trust this person I had only recently met, I wanted to know what the letter said. But Taha’s private message to his family remained respectfully hidden behind a script unreadable to us.
My wife, Janice: “You’re what? You’re going into Iraq carrying a letter that you can’t read, from someo
ne you don’t know, and showing it to border guards and taxi drivers?”
Me: “Right, OK. I won’t show it to the border guards. And before I get there I’ll find someone to tell me what it says.”
Though I was leaving behind my cell phone, I promised to try and send an email to the three of them if I thought I might get into Iraq. It would say, “I’m going south.” At least, that was the plan.
So it was that I embarked on an odyssey to Mount Ararat with hopes for travels not only in Turkey but possibly Iraq and Iran or Armenia, as well as to return home via the British Museum in London. After decades of procrastination, I was finally on my way to the forbidden mountain, and beyond.
Map of the region highlighted on this book's introductory Locator Map (page viii), featuring Turkey, Iraq, Iran, and Armenia, the countries within which the author traveled. This map also forms the reference base of subsequent maps in the book.
1 In 275 BCE, the Babylonian historian Berossos wrote of the Ark that it was “still seen in Kurdish Mountains of Armenia,” bolstering his claim by noting, “The people scrape off the bitumen (from the ark), carry it away and make use of it.”
2 The word genocide did not exist until World War II. Learning of the Holocaust, Winston Churchill said, “We are in the presence of a crime without a name.” In August 1939, Adolph Hitler had asked, “Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?” Polish lawyer Raphael Lemkin’s research into the 1915 Armenian Massacre was about to give that crime a name. He conflated a Greek term for “birth” with one for “massacre,” creating the term “genocide.” The 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide entrenched its use for “acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group.”
Full Moon over Noah's Ark Page 3
