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.

During a rainy period in 1948, an earthquake and its aftershocks caused mudslides around the mountain now known as Ararat. One of these, 17 miles to the south, either uncovered Noah’s Ark or happened to create an island between two mud flows that looked like a ship.

An expedition in 1960 dug three archaeological trenches into the formation in search of wood or artifacts but failed to find anything but clay, dirt, and a few stones. Impatient to see deep inside it, they then turned to the meticulous archaeological technique of blasting holes in with dynamite. But even this failed to yield any artifacts and they concluded that it was a natural formation.

Interest in the site waned until 1977 when Ron Wyatt visited it with a metal detector and got hits, which he claimed were due to the use of metal in the construction of the Ark. Following up on this, David Fasold allegedly mapped out an interior structure. Although he later recanted and admitted that it was just a dirt formation and not a ship, the earlier claim retains many followers. 

I went to see it for myself. The taxi ride to the ark passed through quaint little villages:

When I arrived at the “Ark,” I found villagers making hay around the formation:

Although I had baled and stacked a lot of hay growing up in rural Iowa, my first attempts with a scythe elicited laughter. But I kept trying, and it’s fun to laugh and make new friends. Afterward, I was invited to climb the ship, which normally can only be seen from a distant viewing station. (Something about a lack of respect for holy sites and the archaeological use of dynamite.)

It seems like an impressive coincidence that the feature has the general shape of a ship and sits within sight of the mountain now known as Ararat.

As you can see, there are actually two ship shapes overlapping each other. This was convenient because it allowed the researchers to choose between the boats and between different notions of the length of a cubit in order to find a reasonable match between the length of the formation and the dimensions of the Ark mentioned in the Bible.

With regard to the metal detector hits, I made a small accidental observation. Little clods of dirt from the “Ark” had a remarkable affinity for the magnet that is supposed to hold the (MagSafe) power cord against my laptop. They attached firmly and were difficult to pry free due to their high iron content. This was not only true of the “Ark” but also of the surrounding dirt.

A small local museum displays the sum total of the alleged artifacts removed from this “Ark”:

I found none of these “artifacts” even remotely convincing. And my understanding is that even Fasold no longer argues that this is Noah’s Ark.

Finally, our intrepid explorer dismounts the Ark, leaps across a creek, bounds up the other side of the ravine, and then trips on level ground. : )