NOAH AND THE ARK

Evening Post, Volume CVIII, Issue 108, 2 November 1929, Page 20

NOAH AND THE ARK

EVIDENCE OF FLOOD

(Copyright.) Making history out of legends is Mr. C. Leonard Woolley's occupation. During the past .three, or,-four years this unimposing man of medium height, brown of hair, arid grey of eye, has exercised his xnagnetie personality on all around him to such good effect that Ur of the Chaldees has been brought to light and the Sumerian race rescued from oblivion. Now, like a bomb exploring in our startled midst, comes the dramatic fact of the flood. Time brings some strange revenges, but surely none in recent memory is so remarkable as the evidence Mr. Woolley produces that the most vivid Bible story of our childhood days is historically true. Thanks to an Anglo-American expedition headed by Mr. "Woolley, the lands watered by the Tigris and Euphrates have supplied in addition to the earliest known inscriptions, in which legend almost insensibly gives place to chronicle, direct evidence of the fact of the flood. oSfoah ;and his family and his zoo, travelling northward to Ararat in a boat of timber, painted with pitch and furnished with a covered deck, have come alive! • According to Mr. "Woolley, a definite archaeological gap has been found between the discoveries of two, periods. The oldest levels yet tapped in southern Mesopotamia produce a very fine painted pottery. This first period, ending about 3200 8.C., shows a very slight knowledge of copper. At a later period copper is fully used and the painting of pottery has ceased. The deposits in which these remains are preserved are divided by an eightfoot bank of clay. The length of the interval between the two periods cannot yet bo determined, but Mr. Woolley suggests that only a flood of unexampled magnitude could have produced that cleavage of clay. "However, much tradition may have magnified amd coloured the account of the flood," he says, "it would be absurd to deny the ultimately historical character of a story which bears on itself the Btamp of truth;,' the details harmonise so perfectly with the local conditions of the southern delta that only here could the story have-origin-ated-. Floods arising from . various causes are common in lower Mesopotamia, and it is only requires jiist such a combination of these causes acting simultaneously as' isaetually; described in the legend for an inundation to take almost the same proportionsattributed to the deluge of Noah's day." The British Museum authorities claim that Mr. Woolley's is the first actual areheologieal evidence of the flood ever published. This modest explorer into the distant past is far too scientific a scholar to regard his suggestion as proved; he prefers to call it "a pointer." But the literary evidence is so strong that it is not now generally doubted even by the sceptics that the flood actually occurred.