FREIGHT: An amphora, a tall jar used by merchants
in ancient times, is shown off by expedition
chief scientist Dwight Coleman of the
Institute for Exploration in Mystic,
Connecticut. The amphora, resting on the deck of the
Bulgarian research vessel Akademik, was recovered
from the depths of the Black Sea
in August 2002 as part of the Black Sea
Programme led by Robert Ballard.
Fish bones in the amphora were found to date
to between the fifth and third centuries BCE.
in ancient times, is shown off by expedition
chief scientist Dwight Coleman of the
Institute for Exploration in Mystic,
Connecticut. The amphora, resting on the deck of the
Bulgarian research vessel Akademik, was recovered
from the depths of the Black Sea
in August 2002 as part of the Black Sea
Programme led by Robert Ballard.
Fish bones in the amphora were found to date
to between the fifth and third centuries BCE.
Robert Ballard, the man who discovered the remains of The Titanic, chose the beginning of January to announce the fact that last summer he had found the remnants of the oldest commercial ship in the world. And he found them in the Bulgarian part of the Black Sea.
This special exploration near the shore of the town of Varna started with the intention of finding something else, something bigger from a scientific point of view, something that would revolutionise the history of mankind. Ballard came to the Black Sea to search for another ship that has another meaning and is referred to as Noah's Ark.
The Great Flood and the Black Sea
The theory that the Great Flood, as described in the Bible, happened in the Black Sea region, is very old. And Ballard is not one of the strongest proponents of the idea. He just came to see if he could prove the theory by finding the legendary Noah's Ark, the vessel that saved humankind.
Is it possible that Noah's Ark lies somewhere in the depths of the Black Sea and is preserved? This is the question that bothered the mind of the great explorer. He put together his expedition in 2002 to try to trace a lost civilisation - a mission that could shed more light on the controversial timing and site of the biblical Great Flood.
Scientists offer us, as a candidate for the Great Flood, the flooding of the Black Sea in 5500 BCE.
Gilgamesh, hero of Babylonian mythology, went on a journey to find Utnapishtin, who had survived the flood. Gilgamesh meant to make Utnapishtin tell him how to escape death. So the great flood of antiquity tiptoes into yet another old myth. Maybe there were several floods. This Babylonian story can be traced back further than Genesis in its written form.
If, as some think, the Gilgamesh story refers to a Sumerian ruler who lived around 2600 BCE, the Black Sea flood would be much too early and somewhat far to the North. Still, Gilgamesh had to travel to find Utnapishtin, and myths do leapfrog from one real event to another.
The Black Sea flood was a truly major upheaval. The last ice age retreated 12 000 years ago and the world began warming. As it did, ice melted and oceans rose, while lakes began to evaporate and shrink.
The Black Sea was a great freshwater lake in those days and, as the new technology of farming matured eight thousand years ago, farmers moved into the lands around it.
By 5500 BCE, the lake lay 150 metres below sea level. Then the thin strip of land between the salt Sea of Marmara and the freshwater Black Sea gave way. A terrible gush of water cut through, creating the Bosporus channel. The flow was 400 times greater than Niagara Falls - making a sound heard over 100 kilometres away.
The water advanced one kilometre a day. Within three months it had flooded 100 000 square kilometres of farmland. The Black Sea had turned from fresh water to salt, and its size increased by a third. The farmers fled, carrying their art to places that had never known farming. Stone-age farms first appeared in the valleys and plains of central Europe about 200 years later.
The flood turned the high ground of the Crimean Peninsula into a near island. It created the Sea of Azov, above the Crimea and connected to the Black Sea by a small channel. The Sea of Azov remains a nearly freshwater body, fed by the Don River.
The rest of the Black sea is fed by the Danube and Dnieper rivers, but it is also fed by the salty Mediterranean. The fresh river water flows out through the Bosporus at surface level, while the heavier salt water flows in underneath it - in a fittingly Byzantine arrangement of flows.
And what about Noah's and Utnapishtin's floods? We can never know, of course. But the Black Sea certainly provides a dramatic enough basis for the grand myths - that we still remember today. This is what makes many scientists believe that the Bible described the Black Sea flood as the Great Flood and this could be the only real historical event that lies behind the book's story.
And this is what brought Robert Ballard to these lands and waters...
The discovery
Ballard found the oldest shipwreck ever discovered in the Black Sea, a discovery that suggests the ancient Greeks imported food from as far away as the Crimea, international media reported on January 16.
Recently completed radiocarbon analysis shows the ship, which was discovered last August, was possibly a trading vessel that went down off the coast of modern Bulgaria sometime between the fifth and third centuries BCE, at the height of the Greek city-states.
In 2000, Ballard found an intact wooden ship dated to 500 CE, 24 years after the fall of the Western Roman Empire, lying at the bottom of a 1000-foot-deep portion of the Black Sea. Older shipwrecks have been found in the Mediterranean, but the Black Sea had been closed to Western exploration until the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991.
While the Roman ship's wooden structure had been preserved by a lack of oxygen, a phenomenon unique to that part of the Black Sea, the most recent discovery was made in shallower water, 275 feet below the surface. All that remained visible to scientists was a large pile of amphorae - three-foot-tall jars that the ancient Greeks and Romans used to transport wine, olive oil and food.
Taking advice from University of Pennsylvania archaeologist Fred Hiebert, Dwight Coleman, director of research for the Institute for Exploration, recovered one of the amphorae with help from the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences' Institute for Oceanography and the University of Rhode Island's Institute for Archaeological Oceanography.
Hiebert said the amphora contained the bones of large, freshwater catfish. Butcher marks on the bones confirmed that that the fish had been cut up into steaks and placed in the jar.
"This would be food for the masses," Hiebert said during an international teleconference with Ballard and Coleman, adding that dried and heavily salted fish steaks were staples for the ancient Greek army as well as ordinary citizens. "This would not have been the kind of food that would have been fed to the elite, he said.
Heibert speculated the vessel could have been a merchant ship headed for the Mediterranean, intending to drop off its fish steak cargo in Greece.
Since the recovered amphora is of a design characteristic of Sinop, Hiebert said the ship probably originated at the Turkish port on the Black Sea's southern shore and headed north to the Crimean peninsula, where evidence of ancient Greek colonisation had been discovered previously.
Once in Crimea, the ship's crew would have tapped into the now-Ukrainian peninsula's abundant supply of river catfish and then headed west, where the ship sank off the Bulgarian coast before reaching its final destination.
Ballard said the expedition that led to the ship's discovery is part of a much larger, multi-year project aimed at mapping out ancient trade routes in the Black Sea.
"The key is to identify the trade routes themselves," Ballard said, noting that his team of scientists has spent the past few years studying the region's oceanography as well as sites on land. "I must say it has been helping us significantly. All the ships we have found both off Bulgaria, Romania and Turkey are on trade routes that we predicted from our analyses so we are going to continue working on those trade routes."
Ballard said his team plans to return to the wreck this summer for a fifth Black Sea mission with an even newer, high-tech submarine called Hercules. They will also revisit the wooden Roman ship found in 2000 as well as a site of possible human habitation on a continental shelf identified on the same expedition.
Hiebert noted that some have suggested that the shelf, which predates the flooding of the rim around the Black Sea, could be related to the Biblical mythology of Noah's flood.
"Whether we can actually come up with any physical evidence that would directly relate to that is not one of those things that archaeologists or oceanographers generally look for," Hiebert said. "We are out looking for testable hypotheses - things that we can actually prove by our investigation."
Hiebert said that one of the theories that will be tested this summer is whether the most recently discovered ship was a trading vessel, a notion that would be supported if other amphorae in the wreck also contain evidence of fish steaks. If not, they may have been just a crewmember's lunch.
Ballard said the expedition would be broadcast live at the Rhode Island Coastal Institute, URI and the Institute for Exploration. National Geographic also plans to broadcast the expedition on its explorer television program.
"We are right now in the final phases of designing a complete satellite telecommunications system for this expedition," Ballard said.
So, was it the Great Flood?
What is remarkable about the recent reports is the unabashed enthusiasm for linking this Black Sea flood with the Great Flood. This is surprising considering geologists, explorers, researchers and the media are normally very sceptical of the Bible, and disparage creationists who accept literally the Genesis record of Noah's world wide Flood.
For all the talk, the people still do not take the Bible seriously. The flood that happened around the Black Sea is definitely not the worldwide watery judgment of the Bible, some scientists have said.
The Bible says that Noah's flood was global, but the Black Sea flood was only local. The Bible says the Flood covered the highest mountains, but the Black Sea flood only rose by a few hundred feet. It didn't even cover the mountains in the local area. The Bible says that Noah built an ark, but the Black Sea flood needed no such vessel. The water came up so slowly that the residents would have walked to higher land. The Bible says that everyone outside the ark drowned, but the Black Sea flood simply displaced the residents. The Bible says that only the animals and birds on the ark survived, but not so with the local Black Sea flood. The Bible says there was forty days of rain, but the Black Sea flood had no rain. The Bible says that the Flood ended when the waters went down and land was dry. But the waters of the Black Sea flood have not gone down yet. The list could go on. There is absolutely no resemblance whatever between the Black Sea flood and the biblical Flood of Noah.
The only reason why explorers like Ballard and some historians believe in the theory is that they say the Bible got it wrong. However, most scientists deny the idea by saying that does not make sense. Almost every culture on Earth includes an ancient flood story. Details vary, but the basic plot is the same. The classic example is the Babylonian epic of Gilgamesh, but there are flood stories among the ancient Greeks, Romans, Chinese and others. Although a long stretch of the imagination, it may be possible to envisage these legends originating from the Black Sea flood some 7000 years ago.
But what about the flood legends of the Native Americans and the Australian Aborigines? The latter supposedly entered Australia
40 000 years ago, some 30 000 years before the Black Sea flood. The explanation cannot even account for the flood legends. It makes more sense that all the legends are corrupted memories of the true, worldwide Flood of Noah, as recorded in the Bible.
It is clear from the geological investigations that there is a good case for a sudden drowning of the Black Sea Shelf thousands of years ago. The weight of evidence is compelling, even more so now with Ballard's reports of definite signs of human habitation beneath the water.
But the link with Noah's Flood is wrong - nothing but wild, unsubstantiated speculation, scientists say. Not one of the characteristics of the Black Sea flood matches the tell-tale signature of the Flood described in the Bible. The assertion that the biblical record is just a corrupted version of flood legends derived from their Black Sea flood is wrong. That does not even explain how flood legends arose, especially those in places like America and Australia. On the contrary, the flood legends are corrupted recollections of the one-and-only worldwide Flood, the true account of which is faithfully recorded in the Bible.
However, such a denial would hardly stop explorers like Dr Robert Ballard in their search of what is believed impossible. Titanic was impossible to find, but he did it. Why not find Noah's Ark?
This special exploration near the shore of the town of Varna started with the intention of finding something else, something bigger from a scientific point of view, something that would revolutionise the history of mankind. Ballard came to the Black Sea to search for another ship that has another meaning and is referred to as Noah's Ark.
The Great Flood and the Black Sea
The theory that the Great Flood, as described in the Bible, happened in the Black Sea region, is very old. And Ballard is not one of the strongest proponents of the idea. He just came to see if he could prove the theory by finding the legendary Noah's Ark, the vessel that saved humankind.
Is it possible that Noah's Ark lies somewhere in the depths of the Black Sea and is preserved? This is the question that bothered the mind of the great explorer. He put together his expedition in 2002 to try to trace a lost civilisation - a mission that could shed more light on the controversial timing and site of the biblical Great Flood.
Scientists offer us, as a candidate for the Great Flood, the flooding of the Black Sea in 5500 BCE.
Gilgamesh, hero of Babylonian mythology, went on a journey to find Utnapishtin, who had survived the flood. Gilgamesh meant to make Utnapishtin tell him how to escape death. So the great flood of antiquity tiptoes into yet another old myth. Maybe there were several floods. This Babylonian story can be traced back further than Genesis in its written form.
If, as some think, the Gilgamesh story refers to a Sumerian ruler who lived around 2600 BCE, the Black Sea flood would be much too early and somewhat far to the North. Still, Gilgamesh had to travel to find Utnapishtin, and myths do leapfrog from one real event to another.
The Black Sea flood was a truly major upheaval. The last ice age retreated 12 000 years ago and the world began warming. As it did, ice melted and oceans rose, while lakes began to evaporate and shrink.
The Black Sea was a great freshwater lake in those days and, as the new technology of farming matured eight thousand years ago, farmers moved into the lands around it.
By 5500 BCE, the lake lay 150 metres below sea level. Then the thin strip of land between the salt Sea of Marmara and the freshwater Black Sea gave way. A terrible gush of water cut through, creating the Bosporus channel. The flow was 400 times greater than Niagara Falls - making a sound heard over 100 kilometres away.
The water advanced one kilometre a day. Within three months it had flooded 100 000 square kilometres of farmland. The Black Sea had turned from fresh water to salt, and its size increased by a third. The farmers fled, carrying their art to places that had never known farming. Stone-age farms first appeared in the valleys and plains of central Europe about 200 years later.
The flood turned the high ground of the Crimean Peninsula into a near island. It created the Sea of Azov, above the Crimea and connected to the Black Sea by a small channel. The Sea of Azov remains a nearly freshwater body, fed by the Don River.
The rest of the Black sea is fed by the Danube and Dnieper rivers, but it is also fed by the salty Mediterranean. The fresh river water flows out through the Bosporus at surface level, while the heavier salt water flows in underneath it - in a fittingly Byzantine arrangement of flows.
And what about Noah's and Utnapishtin's floods? We can never know, of course. But the Black Sea certainly provides a dramatic enough basis for the grand myths - that we still remember today. This is what makes many scientists believe that the Bible described the Black Sea flood as the Great Flood and this could be the only real historical event that lies behind the book's story.
And this is what brought Robert Ballard to these lands and waters...
The discovery
Ballard found the oldest shipwreck ever discovered in the Black Sea, a discovery that suggests the ancient Greeks imported food from as far away as the Crimea, international media reported on January 16.
Recently completed radiocarbon analysis shows the ship, which was discovered last August, was possibly a trading vessel that went down off the coast of modern Bulgaria sometime between the fifth and third centuries BCE, at the height of the Greek city-states.
In 2000, Ballard found an intact wooden ship dated to 500 CE, 24 years after the fall of the Western Roman Empire, lying at the bottom of a 1000-foot-deep portion of the Black Sea. Older shipwrecks have been found in the Mediterranean, but the Black Sea had been closed to Western exploration until the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991.
While the Roman ship's wooden structure had been preserved by a lack of oxygen, a phenomenon unique to that part of the Black Sea, the most recent discovery was made in shallower water, 275 feet below the surface. All that remained visible to scientists was a large pile of amphorae - three-foot-tall jars that the ancient Greeks and Romans used to transport wine, olive oil and food.
Taking advice from University of Pennsylvania archaeologist Fred Hiebert, Dwight Coleman, director of research for the Institute for Exploration, recovered one of the amphorae with help from the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences' Institute for Oceanography and the University of Rhode Island's Institute for Archaeological Oceanography.
Hiebert said the amphora contained the bones of large, freshwater catfish. Butcher marks on the bones confirmed that that the fish had been cut up into steaks and placed in the jar.
"This would be food for the masses," Hiebert said during an international teleconference with Ballard and Coleman, adding that dried and heavily salted fish steaks were staples for the ancient Greek army as well as ordinary citizens. "This would not have been the kind of food that would have been fed to the elite, he said.
Heibert speculated the vessel could have been a merchant ship headed for the Mediterranean, intending to drop off its fish steak cargo in Greece.
Since the recovered amphora is of a design characteristic of Sinop, Hiebert said the ship probably originated at the Turkish port on the Black Sea's southern shore and headed north to the Crimean peninsula, where evidence of ancient Greek colonisation had been discovered previously.
Once in Crimea, the ship's crew would have tapped into the now-Ukrainian peninsula's abundant supply of river catfish and then headed west, where the ship sank off the Bulgarian coast before reaching its final destination.
Ballard said the expedition that led to the ship's discovery is part of a much larger, multi-year project aimed at mapping out ancient trade routes in the Black Sea.
"The key is to identify the trade routes themselves," Ballard said, noting that his team of scientists has spent the past few years studying the region's oceanography as well as sites on land. "I must say it has been helping us significantly. All the ships we have found both off Bulgaria, Romania and Turkey are on trade routes that we predicted from our analyses so we are going to continue working on those trade routes."
Ballard said his team plans to return to the wreck this summer for a fifth Black Sea mission with an even newer, high-tech submarine called Hercules. They will also revisit the wooden Roman ship found in 2000 as well as a site of possible human habitation on a continental shelf identified on the same expedition.
Hiebert noted that some have suggested that the shelf, which predates the flooding of the rim around the Black Sea, could be related to the Biblical mythology of Noah's flood.
"Whether we can actually come up with any physical evidence that would directly relate to that is not one of those things that archaeologists or oceanographers generally look for," Hiebert said. "We are out looking for testable hypotheses - things that we can actually prove by our investigation."
Hiebert said that one of the theories that will be tested this summer is whether the most recently discovered ship was a trading vessel, a notion that would be supported if other amphorae in the wreck also contain evidence of fish steaks. If not, they may have been just a crewmember's lunch.
Ballard said the expedition would be broadcast live at the Rhode Island Coastal Institute, URI and the Institute for Exploration. National Geographic also plans to broadcast the expedition on its explorer television program.
"We are right now in the final phases of designing a complete satellite telecommunications system for this expedition," Ballard said.
So, was it the Great Flood?
What is remarkable about the recent reports is the unabashed enthusiasm for linking this Black Sea flood with the Great Flood. This is surprising considering geologists, explorers, researchers and the media are normally very sceptical of the Bible, and disparage creationists who accept literally the Genesis record of Noah's world wide Flood.
For all the talk, the people still do not take the Bible seriously. The flood that happened around the Black Sea is definitely not the worldwide watery judgment of the Bible, some scientists have said.
The Bible says that Noah's flood was global, but the Black Sea flood was only local. The Bible says the Flood covered the highest mountains, but the Black Sea flood only rose by a few hundred feet. It didn't even cover the mountains in the local area. The Bible says that Noah built an ark, but the Black Sea flood needed no such vessel. The water came up so slowly that the residents would have walked to higher land. The Bible says that everyone outside the ark drowned, but the Black Sea flood simply displaced the residents. The Bible says that only the animals and birds on the ark survived, but not so with the local Black Sea flood. The Bible says there was forty days of rain, but the Black Sea flood had no rain. The Bible says that the Flood ended when the waters went down and land was dry. But the waters of the Black Sea flood have not gone down yet. The list could go on. There is absolutely no resemblance whatever between the Black Sea flood and the biblical Flood of Noah.
The only reason why explorers like Ballard and some historians believe in the theory is that they say the Bible got it wrong. However, most scientists deny the idea by saying that does not make sense. Almost every culture on Earth includes an ancient flood story. Details vary, but the basic plot is the same. The classic example is the Babylonian epic of Gilgamesh, but there are flood stories among the ancient Greeks, Romans, Chinese and others. Although a long stretch of the imagination, it may be possible to envisage these legends originating from the Black Sea flood some 7000 years ago.
But what about the flood legends of the Native Americans and the Australian Aborigines? The latter supposedly entered Australia
40 000 years ago, some 30 000 years before the Black Sea flood. The explanation cannot even account for the flood legends. It makes more sense that all the legends are corrupted memories of the true, worldwide Flood of Noah, as recorded in the Bible.
It is clear from the geological investigations that there is a good case for a sudden drowning of the Black Sea Shelf thousands of years ago. The weight of evidence is compelling, even more so now with Ballard's reports of definite signs of human habitation beneath the water.
But the link with Noah's Flood is wrong - nothing but wild, unsubstantiated speculation, scientists say. Not one of the characteristics of the Black Sea flood matches the tell-tale signature of the Flood described in the Bible. The assertion that the biblical record is just a corrupted version of flood legends derived from their Black Sea flood is wrong. That does not even explain how flood legends arose, especially those in places like America and Australia. On the contrary, the flood legends are corrupted recollections of the one-and-only worldwide Flood, the true account of which is faithfully recorded in the Bible.
However, such a denial would hardly stop explorers like Dr Robert Ballard in their search of what is believed impossible. Titanic was impossible to find, but he did it. Why not find Noah's Ark?
