GIGANTIC SHIP

Evening Post, Volume CXI, Issue 74, 28 March 1931, Page 20

GIGANTIC SHIP

The story of Noah and tho Hood, as narrated by the inscription on a stoub tablet recently dug .out of the ruins of ancient Nineveh, gives for the Ark much larger dimensions than aro stated in the Bible, says tho "Daily Express.'1 According to tho Scriptural account, .the Ark (reckoning a "cubit" at 18 inches) was 450 ft long, 75ft beam, and 45ft deep. It had three decks, and "a window and a door in tho side." As described by the tablet, Noah's floating zoo was 180 ft beam and 180 ft high. The length of tho craft is not mentioned, but, to bo proportionate, it must have been over 9Uoft. Accepting this estimate, tho Ark was much larger than the steamship Leviathan, which is over 900 ft long and 100 ft wide. With its enormous width and height, it afforded lots of room for tho animals. The tablet says that it had seven stories and six decks, with nine transverse bulkheads. There was a railed forecastle and a mast for a sail. To build it must have been a huge job. The. tablet says that tho preliminary work of cutting down trees for tho timbers and assembling the requisite materials occupied four years. In the fifth year the frame was erected. Noah (tho Bible says) celebrated his GOO^h birthday on board of tho Ark. He came of a long-lived family, being a grandson of ..Methuselah. A pastoral patriarch, he dwelt somowhorO in the great plain of Mesopotamia, through ran two great rivers, the Euphrates and the Tigris. Those rivers have their sources in mountainous regions far to tho north, and each spring are swollen by waters from melting snows in Armenia and to westward. Oik a recent occasion a springtime overflow of tho Tigris inundated Bagdad, rising 15ft above parts of the city. One may reasonably suppose that the Noachian Deluge was dilo to such, a flood of unprecedented magnitude. .There is no telling how long Noah lived, Biblical dates Jiaving no' other authority than that of the Irish Archbishop Usher, who fixed them arbitrarily. The story of tho Deluge relates a prehistoric event; its authenticity rests upon tradition. In later times, yet long before the dawn of history, the Chaldeans by engineering lrienns effectively provided against the recurrence of disastrous floods. 1 The Chaldeans, who seem to have

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been the inventors of hydraulic engineering, established great works by which overflows of tho Tigris and Euphrates were regulated and floods prevented. Enormous reservoirs wore created, to store the surplus water during the flood season and hold it for uso during the dry months. The whole region was covered with a network of irrigation canals. Some of tho reservoirs were goodsized lakes, on which ships sailed, and around whoso shores were built palatial villas of wealthy people. Traces .of canals and ruins of gigantic dams to-day remain as memorials of an irrigation engineering system vastly more cxtensivo than any known in modern times. It transformed a desert country into the most fertile and productive area in the world. ;■ It was an area larger than tho whole of Egypt, and no other region was equally favoured for the production of cereals and fruits. There, it is believed, wheat was first cultivated. The country was literally a garden, and in ancient times was called Eden. A tradition that mankind originated there may very well have arisen. Tho Euphrates flowed through Babylon, which was the Chaldean capital, built astride tho-river. It was built of brick, and all that remains of it,today is represented by a vast'mound of debris. Ninety miles to the north ,is the city of Bagdad. Two hundred miles farther north is another vast mound, marking the site of ancient Nineveh, where' the tablet was found that tells tho story of Noah. A flood from the north would naturally have carried the Ark southward toward the Persian Gulf: How, then, could it have floated north, to land on Mount Ararat, in Armenia? Ararat is an extinct volcano, dome-shaped, over three miles high, nine thousand feet of its altitude clad in.ice and snow. If tho Ark arrived there, how did all the animals manage to climb down? Ararat was formerly, thought to be unsealoablo. In 1828, however, a Frenchman named JBarrot succeeded in climbing to the summit, and others have done' so since. The monks of a local monastery were wont to declare that remains of the Ark existed on the mountain-top, but the climbers could not find even its keel. Tn the language of ancient Mesopotamia the word "ararat" meant desert.