S. C. Compton

 

While studying ancient navigational channels in the eastern Nile Delta for another project, I happened into a couple of fascinating discoveries that transformed my understanding of the Exodus and Red Sea–crossing stories from the Bible. With the Exodus: Gods and Kings movie debuting, it seems like a good time to post this publicly. Much of it was already included in chapter 12 of Exodus Lost:

One of humanity’s greatest but least known engineering feats was an ancient canal that crossed the Egyptian desert from the Red Sea to the Mediterranean, roughly the same trajectory as the modern Suez Canal. Its waterway was 230 feet wide!¹ To either side, the fill from its excavation was heaped into defensive ramparts running its entire length. This created a double border wall with a massive central moat, which contemporary art shows stocked with crocodiles and a papyrus describes as heavily patrolled by watchmen.² William H. Shea demonstrated that this was what the Egyptians had called the “Wall of the Ruler,” a combination navigational canal and border wall first proposed as a barrier against Canaanite invasion and immigration circa 2100 bc by Pharaoh Akhtoy III and finally completed by Amenemhet I circa 1960 bc.³

700 years after the Wall of the Ruler’s completion, a relief at Karnak shows Seti I returning victoriously to Egypt over this border canal via a bridge within a fort (see Fig. 1). This great wall would then almost certainly have been in use during the reign of his son Ramses II, who is widely thought to have been the pharaoh of the Exodus.

This great fortified canal/wall guarded the eastern boarder; a second canal/wall, the Tumilat Canal, lay to the south; and the Pelusiac branch of the Nile blocked the way to the west and north (see Fig. 2). With families in tow, no boats, and massive barriers on all sides, the Israelites escaping from the city of Pi-Ramesse would have been completely boxed in and doomed to be cut down or re-enslaved. In Exodus 14:3, Pharaoh concludes: “They are entangled in the land, the wilderness hath shut them in.”

Moses was told by God to avoid the northern route directly to Canaan (the heavily fortified road traveled by Seti I in the relief) but instead head southeast “toward the Red Sea” (Exodus 13:17-18). They traveled until they hit “the edge” or “border” “of the wilderness” (Exodus 13:20) at a site generally thought to be in the Wadi Tumilat. Upon hitting this border they changed course, turning again toward the Red Sea. The “border” that they hit in this area would have been the Tumilat Canal, which explains why they were forced to turn.

They were next told to camp before the sea at Pi-hahiroth, which Strong’s Exhaustive Concordance translates as “mouth of the gorges.” The word that is translated “gorges” here actually comes from a root meaning “to bore” (in the sense of making a hole) and was normally used for manmade excavations. So they camped before the sea at the “mouth of the (manmade) gorges.”

Figure 1. Seti I returns across the Egyptian border from a military campaign in Canaan with captives (and trophy heads). Awating him across the 230-foot wide border canal known as the “Wall of the Ruler,” the Egyptians cheer his victorious return. The labelled place markers filling the background make this one of the world’s oldest maps.

This a fitting description of the local geography at the time. For the mouth of the Tumilat Canal and that of the Wall of the Ruler both opened into what is now Lake Timsah, “Crocodile Lake.” And there is good reason to believe that this was part of the Red Sea at the time. The ancient geographers asserted that the Red Sea reached as far as Heroopolis, which puts it at Timsah.⁴ The brilliant engineer Linant de Bellefonds explored the topography of the Isthmus of Suez and studied its ancient canals extensively, before modern machinery, farming, roads, and urban expansion had a chance to bury or destroy them. He was the first to discover the remains of the Wall of the Ruler and become so inspired by it that he championed, engineered, and oversaw the construction of a modern remake, the Suez Canal. From his surveys of the geology of the isthmus, he reached the same conclusion as the records of ancient geographers, that the Red Sea had reached Lake Timsah.⁵ (Linant also single-handedly saved Egypt’s Great Pyramids from the fate of many other monuments. For Muhammed Ali Pasha, the Ottoman viceroy over Egypt, ordered him to dismantle the Great Pyramids and use their pre-quarried stone blocks to build the Suez Canal. Linant only spared them by convincing the Pasha that quarrying fresh stone could be done less expensively.) This explains why the original Wall of the Ruler only ran as far south as Timsah. Not until Darius circa 500 bc did the accumulation of silt and sand necessitate a southern extension of the canals from Timsah to the receding banks of the Red Sea.

On reaching the Red Sea, the Israelites could go no further and protested being led to die in this desert trap. But the Bible says that overnight the waters of the Red Sea receded, and they were able to walk across on dry land.

The Egyptians pursued in war chariots, but as they traversed the exposed sea bed in the night, their wheels sunk, stuck, and even broke off. Egyptian war chariots each carried a driver and an archer on only two narrow wooden wheels. This minimal surface area in contact with the ground was ideal for reducing friction and increasing speed in dry conditions but would have been extremely ill suited to the crossing of a wet newly exposed seafloor.

PARTING THE RED SEA

The popular image of the sea rising into great cliffs on either side of Charlton Heston is based on Exodus 14:22, “and the Israelites went through the sea on the dry ground, with a wall of water on their right and on their left.” The novel behavior of this water has been variously attributed to an earthquake, a tsunami, hurricane-force winds, an extraordinary displacement of tectonic plates (as in James Cameron’s documentary on the subject), and even as the warm, saline waters of the Red Sea somehow suddenly freezing into vertical walls of ice. At the other extreme of the passionately polarized world of Biblical scholarship, skeptics dismiss the entire narrative as an ahistorical myth.

But this is where understanding the geography and terminology of the day revolutionizes the story. At that time, the “wall of water” on the one side was the 230-foot wide, crocodile filled, rampart-lined canal, known as the “Wall of the Ruler,” which left them trapped and feeling that the situation was hopeless. On the other side was the second border “wall” that we now call the Tumilat Canal. (As in Egyptian, such aquatic boundaries could also be called “walls” in Biblical Hebrew, e.g., Nahum 3:8.) At the tip of the Red Sea, at the “mouths of the (manmade) gorges,” the Israelites passed through the sweet spot between the two walls of water, the only weak link in hundreds of miles of water walls, ramparts, and guards. Here on the active seashore, tides and waves came in and eroded the ramparts, then receded lowering their natural barrier (helped that night by a divine wind). Here the Israelites slipped the trap “with a wall of water on their right and on their left.”

NAPOLEON’S RHYME

As Twain put it, “History doesn’t repeat itself, but sometimes it rhymes.” When Napoleon Bonaparte passed through the Suez during his conquest of Egypt, he inadvertently reenacted this event, though farther south at the current tip of the Red Sea. Setting out from Suez for a day trip to the “Wells of Moses” (where the Israelites were said to have drunk following the Exodus) his expeditionary party easily crossed the Red Sea “on dry land” at low tide.

Figure 2. The eastern Nile Delta showing canals that linked the seas three thousand years before the the modern Suez Canal (the straight north-south line one third in from the right). Lined with defensive ramparts, they also served as border walls, trapping the Israelites in their flight from Pi-Ramesse during the Exodus.

Figure 3. The topography of Lake Timsah before the construction of the modern Suez Canal indicates the presence at low water levels of a broad path nearly spanning the width of the lake. At higher water levels, as in the previous map, this was covered, and it has remained so since the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869.

But on their return, the sun had set and the tide came in, briefly forcing their horses to swim as the French clung to their necks. Fortunately, they were not encumbered with chariots. The eye-witness Bourienne quoted Napoleon, “I nearly perished in the same manner as Pharaoh did. This would certainly have furnished all the Christian preachers with a magnificent test against me.”⁶

Circa 1800 bc, Sinuhe, fearing for his life following the mysterious murder of the pharaoh he served, fled Egypt by an escape route strikingly similar to that of the Israelites. After running into the Wall of the Ruler and hiding in a bush all day from the guards, he traveled by night to a body of salt water where he escaped to the east and made his way to Canaan. Naville identified the location of that body of water as what is now Lake Timsah.⁷

A later papyrus (Anastasi V) documents the flight of two slaves who escaped from Pi-Ramesse during the reign of Seti II (the successor of Merenptah) and made their way in a single day to Pithom and then out of the country to the east. This route, too, is nearly identical to that of the Israelites and suggests a crossing at or near Timsah some 600 years later, circa 1200 bc.⁸ This tip of the Red Sea seems to have been the chief vulnerability in Egypt’s heavily fortified eastern border.

(I have been asked to address the theory that Yam Suph, the Biblical word traditionally translated “Red Sea,” actually referred to some other body of water. I Kings 9:26 makes clear that Yam Suph was the Hebrew name for the body of water that we call the “Red Sea.” However, I have appended a fuller discussion as an endnote.⁹)

WHY IS THIS NIGHT DIFFERENT . . . ?

The date and time for the first Passover were said to have been dictated to Moses by God Himself. It was to begin at dusk on the 14^th day of a month that began on the day of the first new moon after the barley ripened. So important was this month, that God commanded that it be the start of all future years (Exodus 12:2). For centuries afterward, Rabbis observed the barley and began the new year (and this month of Nisan) on the first new moon after it ripened. Depending on when this occurred, years could have 12 or 13 months. But why was this distinctive timing so crucial?

Prior to the construction of the two Aswan Dams, the Nile followed an annual cycle, rising from June through early October. It then returned to its banks, leaving behind the rich, damp soil in which the Egyptians planted their crops. As the crops grew, the Nile fell lower and lower until May.

In terms of this annual cycle, the timing of the first Passover falls near the Nile’s lowest level of the year. (The ripening grain signaled the end of the growing season, after which the Nile would rise and flood again.) Since the Tumilat Canal was fed from the Nile, its output into the northern tip of the Red Sea would have been drastically reduced at this time. So they departed for the Red Sea when water levels were at their lowest point of the year.

FULL MOON SYZYGY

Moses was then directed by God to begin Passover at dusk on the 14^th day of this crucial month. And the Exodus was to launch urgently the following morning, the 15^th day of the month. Since the month had begun on the new moon, its full moon would fall on the 14^th or 15^th day. The Exodus was thus to occur on (or within one day of) the full moon. Why?

Low tides reach their lowest extent twice a month on the new and full moons when the gravitational pull of the Earth, Sun, and Moon are all aligned (known as syzygy). Of these two times, full moon would clearly be the most advantageous in terms of visibility for a hazardous nocturnal escape across a temporarily exposed sea bed.

It was precisely on the unique intersection of the lowest points of the annual and monthly hydrological cycles, at the very lowest water level of the year, that the crossing of the Red Sea took place.

Not only are low tides at their lowest on the full moon, but the high tide is at its highest, and tidal currents are at their strongest. Thus, when the tide came back in, it did so with a vengeance. A battalion of charioteers strapped into heavy armor and physically exhausted (from the day’s pursuit across the desert followed by the struggle to free mired and broken vehicles) would have had great difficulty swimming and, as working-class desert-dwellers, were unlikely to know how.

Figure 4. 18th Dynasty Egyptian chariot in the Museo Archeologico, Florence, Italy. Courtesy of Philip Rickerby.

Although this event took place more than 4,000 years ago, it remains relevant today, still celebrated by millions of descendants of that ancient Exodus every year on the 14th day of the month Nisan, on the night of the full moon. Easter was originally celebrated on the same day (the Lord’s Supper having been a Passover Seder and the crucifixion having coincided with the Exodus) and is still called “Passover” in most European languages. Its timing was deliberately divorced from the Jewish calendar in 325 ad by the Council of Nicaea, but Easter still pivots on that same full moon, now falling on the first Sunday after the first full moon after the vernal equinox.

NOTES

^{1. A. Sneh, T. Weissbrod, and I Perath, “Evidence for an Ancient Egyptian Frontier Canal,” American Scientist 63 (1975): 542-48.↩}

^{2. Ibid., 37.↩}

^{3. William H. Shea, “A Date for the Recently Discovered Eastern Canal of Egypt,” Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research, No. 226 (April, 1977): 35.↩}

^{4. The Classical geographers describe the Red Sea as reaching as far north as Heroopolis (Pi-Atum or Pithom), indicating that it reached Lake Timsah (cf. Pliny Natural History 6.165, Strabo 16.769, Agathemeros). They even referred to the Gulf of Suez as the Heroopolitan Gulf. This would explain why the early canals terminated at this lake. And it explains why Darius found it necessary to add a new leg to the ancient canal system circa 500 bc, to rejoin Lake Timsah to the receding coast of the Red Sea. ↩}

^{5. Linant de Bellefonds, Mémoires sur les principaux travaux d’utilité publique exécutés en Egypte depuis les temps de la plus haute antiquité jusqu’à nos jours (Paris: Librairie Scientifique et Maritime, 1872-1873), 195-97.↩}

^{6. Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne, The Memoirs of Napoleon, 1799, Volume 3; (Kessinger Publishing, 2004), 20.↩}

^{7. Edouard Naville, The store-city of Pithom and the Route of the Exodus (London: The Offices of the Egypt Exploration Fund, 1903), 26.↩}

^{8. Papyrus Anastasi V, 19:2-20:6; Kenneth Anderson Kitchen, Ramesside Inscriptions, Translated and Annotated Notes and Comments (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1999), 109: Sir Alan H. Gardiner, Late-Egyptian Miscellanies (Brussels, 1937), 66-7; Ricardo Augusto Caminos, Late- Egyptian Miscellanies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1954), 254.↩}

^{9. The word yam comes from a root meaning “to roar” and was used 278 times in the Bible to refer to the sea, most frequently the Mediterranean. Linguistically, Hebrew is classified as a Canaanite language, and within the other languages of that group it is also clear that Yam was the word for “sea,” and was even personified as Yam, the great god of the sea. It does not refer to a shallow marsh or inland lake as has been proposed. Suph may mean “reeds,” “seaweed” (as in Jonah 2:5), or “end” (Strong’s 5486). The latter meaning of “End Sea” parallels an Egyptian and Greek term for the Red Sea (Maurice Copisarow, “The Ancient Egyptian, Greek and Hebrew Concept of the Red Sea,” Vetus Testamentum XII (1962), 3.) Moreover, I Kings 9:26 explicitly confirms that Yam Suph is the Hebrew term for the body of water that we call the “Red Sea.” And, in translating the Bible from Hebrew into Greek in the 3rd century BC, 70 of the best Greek and Hebrew scholars of the ancient world recognized Yam Suph as the Hebrew term for this body of water and consistently translated it as such.↩}

 

 

     Taking the first ever photos of the structure that for millennia was said to hold the Ark of Noah (or Nuh or Utnapishtim) brings with it responsibilities. And my initial efforts didn’t do it justice.¹ So I’ve gone back through my photos, tagged any potential overlap, and fashioned a simple panorama:

      So what are we looking at here? The ancient Babylonians report cutting off pieces of the Ark to use as magical amulets.² The Assyrian emperor Sennacherib climbed this mountain in 699 BC and was said to have had idols carved from the Ark.³ In 537 AD, the Christian emperor Justinian allegedly used its wood for the doors of his great cathedral, the Hagia Sophia. And in the seventh century, Caliph Umar “took the Ark from the two mountains and made it into a mosque.”⁴ Even after the exposed portions had been stripped away, pilgrims came annually for centuries, digging up relics of the Ark as part of a religious festival: “On descending the mountain they bring with them some remains of the Ark, which, according to their assertion, is still deeply buried in the earth.”⁵

      What remains now is a ship-shaped depression, visible on satellite photos, but unfortunately trapped for decades in an active conflict zone. On finally reaching it (exhausted from the difficult climb, extreme thirst, and an ordeal with PKK guerrilla fighters), I found that the formation now consists largely of holes, trenches, and mounds of dirt and rocks, apparently the result of centuries of digging in the rocky ground. Some of the mounds (likely more recent) consist of dirt mixed with stone. But in most cases, centuries of rain appear to have washed the dirt away, leaving mostly stone in the piles along the old pits and trenches.

      Unfortunately, because I took photos from different positions as I explored the structure, it was difficult to find exact matches, and the foreground was incomplete. So I went through my videos and found this pan along its east side, which would be the foreground of the above panorama:

Using screenshots from the video, I created a second panorama:

      And, since the left side of this panorama mirrors that of the initial panorama, I was able to combine them into a more complete view of the structure:

      Here is the completed panorama overlaying a satellite view of the same spot (courtesy of Bing Maps) and annotated:

     For interactive exploration of this site (atop Mount Cudi on the Turkey/Iraq/Syria border) from the safety of your laptop, I have embedded Google Earth and Bing maps:

      And a last image to close the post, just the Ark:

      I’ll try to get future posts up in a more timely fashion. This one took much longer than expected. Just piecing together that first 30,000-pixel-wide panorama slowed my laptop to a glacial pace and crashed it repeatedly, eliciting some unfortunate outbursts from its operator.

    

NOTES

^{1. On the importance of this site: “If the Ark of Noah should ever be discovered, it would be the greatest archaeological discovery of all time.” —Gilbert Hovey Grosvenor, editor of the National Geographic Magazine for 55 years. My earlier posting of the first individual photos of the structure can be seen here. In them, I failed to capture the entirety of the structure, due to its enormous size, the rough topography, the ground cover, and extreme time constraints. I have attempted to remedy that in this new post by joining multiple photos and a video into a high resolution panorama of the site.↩}

^{2. The 3rd century BC Babylonian priest and historian Berosus wrote of the Great Flood: “It is said that there is still some part of this ship in Armenia, at the mountain of the Cordyaeans [Kurds]; and that some people carry off pieces of bitumen, which they take away, and use chiefly as amulets for the averting of mischiefs.”↩}

^{3. Babylonian Talmud: Tractate Sanhedrin, folio 96a. Sennacherib inscribed his own image and an account of his ascent here on the side of Mount Cudi. He also left multiple stone prisms that boast of his ascent on his return trip from laying siege to Jerusalem. The story of Sennacherib is the first time that the Bible mentions “Ararat” after saying that the Ark landed there. The context strongly suggests that Mount Cudi was the Biblical Mount Ararat, and Jewish tradition identified Cudi as Ararat at least as early as the 11th century visit to the region by Benjamin of Tudela. See the following citation.↩}

^{4. Benjamin of Tudela, The Itinerary of Benjamin of Tudela, trans. Marcus Nathan Adler (London: Philipp Feldheim, Inc., 1907), 33. Mount Cudi is the Turkish spelling of Mount Judi, the traditional name of this mountain, which is named in the Quran as the place where the Ark of the prophet Nuh rested. ↩}

^{5. J J. Benjamin II, Eight Years in Asia and Africa: From 1846 to 1855 (Hanover, 1863), 93-94.↩}

This is a quick overview of the summit of Mount Cudi to help put the Ark’s remains and the various sacred ruins that surround it in geographical context. (This is partially in response to Timo Roller’s The German Explorers of Cudi Dağı.)

 

A. UNDERGROUND CHAMBERS

I almost missed this hole in the ground, and previous expeditions do not mention it:

Nearby, I found two large rectangular depressions with stone walls and an intact door lintel. Although Bell described “a tank fed by the winter snows” here, a comparison with the underground chamber (above) suggests that these were similar but caved in. The singular “tank” in Bell’s account implies that, as of her 1911 expedition, only one had collapsed:

 

B. THE CHURCH

This was the Christian portion of the summit. There was once a monastery on the summit that burned in a 776 AD lightning strike:

C. MUSLIM SHRINE

The Muslim shrine, here with inscription praising Allah, is the one building that Bell photographed:

 

D. UNDERGROUND CHAMBERS

At the edge of a large plateau, I found what appeared to be more collapsed chambers. The masonry is of better quality here:

 

E. THE ARK?  

This is what I came to see, the place where thousands of pilgrims and a couple of emperors came to dig up pieces of Noah’s Ark! I’m working on a much better view of this for the next post:

This is a happy intersection of my love of history, coding, and writing, as well as my adopted hometown, Chicago. I had the honor of cowriting the code and writing all of the text for this app as an official guide to Chicago’s historic Tribune Tower and the 150 stones from famous monuments (the Great Pyramid at Giza, the Great Wall of China, the White House, the Kremlin, Notre Dame, the Taj Mahal, the Moon . . . ) embedded in its facade:

https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/chicago-rocks/id829708167?ls=1&mt=8

 

I saw this extraordinary bird on the way to the mountain.

 

Just a simple butterfly:

These flowers were everywhere, and I thought they were a wonderful infusion of color into the dry landscape, until I touched one and it drew blood:

 

 

I don’t think this picture does justice to the size of these enormous grasshopper.

 

These were my favorites, the mountain goats or ibexes. Their agility and sure-footedness on the most difficult of terrain is astonishing. This was two females with a kid between them:

 

While the above were my own photos, the following are from motion-sensing cameras that Turkish biologists set up in 2013 to examine the wildlife around Cudi after its 30 years of isolation. They found striped hyenas:

Porcupines:

 

Foxes:

 

And more (or perhaps the same) mountain goats:

 

A couple of months later, a beautiful leopard was shot by a shepherd in nearby Diyarbakır province.

Locally, the Tigris River, which flows beneath Mt. Cudi, is said to have been given its name, the Latin word for “tiger,” because of the leopards that were once common around the upper reaches of this “Tiger River.” Apparently, they used the same caves, rough terrain, and remote location to stay clear of humanity as the guerrilla fighters now employ.   

I noticed this strangely perfect circle in the satellite photos of a very remote area that has been sealed off for decades due to conflict:

 

When I first arrived at the coordinates, this was all I found:

 

Most of the perimeter that appears circular from space is just a mounded edge encased with earth and vegetation:

 

However, on the northeast corner I found a place where the mounding is missing and instead a structure of stone is exposed:

 

This appears to be the remains of a circular wall more than 600 feet in diameter.The edge or facade of the wall appears to have been formed of regular stonework, while its interior appears to have been filled more haphazardly. Semicircular protrusions occur at regular intervals around the perimeter, perhaps the remains of guard towers:

 

I believe this is the town that the Arabic geographers called Thamanin and believed to be the oldest city in the world. It was said to have lain just at the southern foot of Mount Cudi. It also occurs in early Christian documents, such as The Book of the Cave of Treasures from circa 350 AD. And the Byzantine Emperor Heraclius stayed here circa 628 AD when he visited Mt. Cudi to see Noah’s ark. This Suq Thamanin seems to have been the staging site for such pilgrimages as well as a place of interest in its own right.

Whatever its origins, it fell into ruins nearly a millennia ago. In the 10th century, Al-Muqaddasi described Thamanin as a fair-sized city on the edge of a stream one day’s march to the west of Cizre. But by the 13th century Hamdallah Mustawfi found it in ruins “at the foot of Mt. Judi.” And the city ruins that I found had likewise clearly been in ruins for a very long time. Here is a view of the apparently collapsed wall as viewed from outside the circle looking in:

 

Notice on the satellite photo above that there is a grid-like pattern inside the circle. These also appear to be the remains of stone walls, with the foundations of other stone walls branching off at right-angles:

The grove of trees here covers additional mounding in the shape of a rectangle in front of the northeast end of the circular city walls. See the satellite photo above. This entrance to or extension of the city walls points at the summit of Mt. Cudi:

 

This is from atop Mt. Cudi. The city’s faint, lighter-colored circle and square grove of trees can be seen (to the right of center and just to left of the stream) pointing up toward the summit:

The use of Thamanin as the layover spot for pilgrims seeking to visit Mt. Cudi, going back to at least the time of the Heraclius,  is consistent with the location and orientation of this archaeological site. There is also a unique artifact from atop the mountain that depicts the sacred summit and the circular Thamanin below, but I will save that for the book.

Here are the coordinates for those who want to explore the satellite imagery for themselves: 37 19′ 45″ N 42 28′ 7″ E. You can see some other interesting structures around the old city wall. The area around the mountain is also peppered with the remains of tiny villages that did not survive the conflicts of the twentieth century. But this city wall was planned and organized at a much larger scale than the more recent village homes of goat herders and subsistence farmers. Although, I suspect some more recently ruined stone huts nearby were built of ready-made stone blocks appropriated from the ruins of Thamanin.

This is a satellite view of the summit of Mt. Cudi. Notice the roughly ship-shaped formation on the left (west) side of the summit (satellite photo courtesy of Bing Maps):

In ancient times, there were numerous pilgrimages to the top of this mountain to view what was said to be Noah’s Ark. However, with the exception of satellites, this artifact had never been photographed. I climbed the mountain for a closer look. Up close, the main line of that feature is just heaped up stones:

Circular depressions with larger stones atop them were distributed along the main line. These can also be seen in the satellite view above.

I wondered if this could be the remains of a building. However, unlike the other ruins here and elsewhere on the mountain and its foothills, the apparent wall was just loose heaped up gravel. The circles along the line reminded me somewhat of those along the city wall of Thamanin, which I had discovered in the foothills (the subject of my next blog post). However, those were regularly spaced along the wall, possibly the remains of guard towers. These looked completely random. (A close look at the satellite photography will confirm this.) And as I looked more closely, I noticed something about the order in which things had been done. The gravel-like stones had been heaped up first. Only later had someone stacked the larger stones around the perimeter of the circles, placing them on top of the heaped gravel. They were not original walls.

I noticed that elsewhere around the summit, the stones from crumbling but once well-built ancient walls had been harvested and stacked in crude semi-circles. These were not especially sturdy or durable, so I suspect that they had not been standing very long. Since the mountain has been occupied by guerrilla fighters for the past several decades, this was likely an attempt to form fortifications from the ancient shrines. Plowshares into swords. I suspect that the existing holes in the ship-like structure were likewise reinforced with stones from the old walls to make what look like machine gun nests. I found some shell casings near the summit, which seem consistent with this theory.

Thousands of years of historical accounts tell of people ascending Mt. Cudi to dig up pieces of wood covered in tar from Noah’s Ark (or its equivalent in their various great flood traditions). The Babylonian priest Berosus records pilgrimages to take souvenirs of the ship of their flood hero. The Assyrian king Sennacherib is said to have made an idol of the wood in 699 BC, promised to sacrifice his sons to said deity if he had military success, and then been bludgeoned to death with that very idol when his sons got word of the oath. In 537 AD, the Byzantine Emperor Justinian is said to have had the wood for the doors of the Hagia Sophia Cathedral brought from here. And with the rise of Islam, Umar ibn Al-Khattāb was said to have taken what remained and built a mosque from them. Since then, there have been additional claims of people digging up tar covered bits of wood.

For example, J. J. Benajmin II, who visited the mountain in the late 1840s (but did not summit), describes an annual Kurdish pilgrimage (since discontinued): “On descending the mountain they bring with them some remains of the Ark, which, according to their assertion, is still deeply buried in the earth. The little pieces received are in the form of planks; some whitish grey; some black and pierced with holes… I myself obtained several fragments of the Ark which appeared to be covered with a kind of substance resembling tar.”

I suspect that this spot is where this alleged ship protruded from the ground, and after the easy pickings were gone, where pilgrims began to dig for buried wood. As they dug down (on the left side of the line of gravel seen in the first pic), they heaped up earth toward the outside of the sacred ship. Being exposed to the elements for centuries, most of the dirt washed away in rains leaving the stone content of this rocky soil in rain-washed heaps in a line all along the perimeter of their excavations. As even these edges became hard to reach, every now and again someone showed up and and tried to dig a very deep hole in hopes of reaching the more deeply buried portions. These naturally took the form of circles randomly distributed along the perimeter line. (Sometimes missing the mark as the mountaintop used to be covered by snow much of the year.) Later these holes (partially filled in by erosion) were repurposed by the PKK guerrilla fighters.

In July of 2013, on my third trip to Turkey, I finally succeeded in summiting the sacred mountain associated for millennia with the great flood story, Mt. Cudi. I believe I am the first American to have done so.

 

 

 

I also got myself captured by guerrilla fighters in the foothills and found a lost city. But we’ll save those stories for future posts. The summit and its ruins and artifacts are amazing enough on their own, and some of the photos here and in future blogs are the first ever taken of their respective ruins or artifacts.

This feature is at the summit of Mt. Cudi. It may be the remains of the Synagogue of Ezra, which stood atop the mountain through at least 1170 AD (when Benjamin of Tudela passed through), or of the church associated with the Cloister of the Ark, a monastery that was struck by lightning in 776 AD and burned down along with its unfortunate inhabitants. In antiquity, this mountain was the only place that people of all religions made peace and worshipped together, including Christians, Jews, Muslims (Sunni and Shia), Yezidis . . . , sort of the religious equivalent of the Olympics.

 

An intriguing hole in the ground near the summit:

 

Descending into the hole and finding a hidden, arched subterranean chamber:

 

Similar subterranean chambers having long ago collapsed?

Inscribed stones:

This is enough for now. The Noah’s Ark remains that made this mountain so famous and sacred for so many centuries deserve their own separate post.