Searches for Noah's Ark

Searches for Noah's Ark have been made from at least the time of Eusebius (c.275–339 BC) to the present day. Despite many expeditions, no physical proof of the ark has been found. The practice is regarded as pseudoscience and pseudoarchaeology.

Modern organized searches for the ark tend to originate in American evangelical circles. According to Larry Eskridge,

An interesting phenomenon that has arisen within twentieth-century conservative American evangelism – the widespread conviction that the ancient Ark of Noah is embedded in ice high atop Mount Ararat, waiting to be found. It is a story that has combined earnest faith with the lure of adventure, questionable evidence with startling claims. The hunt for the ark, like evangelism itself, is a complex blend of the rational and the supernatural, the modern and the premodern. While it acknowledges a debt to pure faith in a literal reading of the Scriptures and centuries of legend, the conviction that the Ark literally lies on Ararat is a recent one, backed by a largely twentieth-century canon of evidence that includes stories of shadowy eyewitnesses, tales of mysterious missing photographs, rumors of atheistic conspiracy, and pieces of questionable "ark wood" from the mountain. (...) Moreover, it skirts the domain of pop pseudoscience and the paranormal, making the attempt to find the ark the evangelical equivalent of the search for Bigfoot or the Loch Ness monster. In all these ways, it reveals much about evangelical's distrust of mainstream science and the motivations and modus operandi of the scientific elite.

Ark-seeker Richard Carl Bright considers the search for the ark a religious quest, dependent on God's blessing for its success. Bright is also confident that there is a multinational government conspiracy to hide the "truth" about the ark:

I firmly believe that the governments of Turkey, Russia, and the United States know exactly where the ark sits. They suppress the information, but (...) God is in charge. The structure will be revealed in its time. We climb the mountain and search, hoping it is, in fact, God's time as we climb. Use us, O Lord, is our prayer.

According to Genesis 8:4, the Ark came to rest "on the mountains of Ararat." Early commentators such as Josephus, and authorities quoted by him, Berossus, Hieronymus the Egyptian,Mnaseas, and Nicolaus of Damascus, record the tradition that these "mountains of Ararat" are to be found in the region then known as Armenia, roughly corresponding to Eastern Anatolia.

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