More Ark Stupidity

The Ağri Daği was called Ararat in the Middle Ages

I already blogged about the stupidity of people looking for Noah’s ark. Whether it exists or not is beyond my knowledge – I just wanted to show that within their own paradigm, these people are incredibly stupid. The Bible does not mention a mountain named Ararat, which is the Hebrew version of the name Urartu. The mountain that is now called Ararat, owes this name to medieval travelers. It’s a well-known error, and if these so-called “evangelical explorers” had actually read the text of the Bible, even in translation, they would have seen it. I suppose they are illiterates.

I asked who was more stupid: the excavators, the people who paid them, the journalists who reproduced this crap, or the authorities who want to make this world heritage? Perhaps the journalists. Whatever the explorers’ errors, at least they did not write that “carbon dating conducted on wood and stone from the site has revealed their age as 4,800 years old”. Radiocarbon dating of stone… yeah, right.

Or perhaps it’s the people who pay the illiterates. Mike Heiser’s entertaining blog PaleoBabble had an interesting post that suggests that it’s the financiers: he quotes from a letter by one of them, who is still missing $100,000 and explains that the objects are outright fakes. $100,000 is a lot of money, but it’s a fair price for the lesson that you must not trust researchers who do not read the sources.