SCIENTISTS THINK TO HAVE DISCOVERED THE LOCATIONS OF THE BIBLICAL ARK AFTER CRACKING 3 THOUSAND YEAR OLD MAP

Hurrah! The animals entered two by two. Hurrah! That must have just triggered a memory from a very long time ago, doesn't it? Although many people consider the biblical story of Noah's Ark and its accompanying nursery rhyme to be a thing of the past, and perhaps even of fiction, it has been brought up to date with the 21st century.

Yes, that's because after deciphering a 3,000-year-old map, scientists think they have discovered the "location of Noah's Ark."

All of this boils down to the Imago Mundi, an ancient artifact from Babylon that is a clay tablet with symbols written on it that outlines the creation theory of Christianity. It describes the things that a traveler will encounter along the way; in one section, it explains that they must travel "seven leagues… [to] see something that is thick as a parsiktu-vessel."

Although that strange-sounding word appears on other Babylonian tablets, it is especially noteworthy in this instance because it describes the size of a boat required to survive the Great Flood. This makes it possible to connect the dots. After following those directions, researchers discovered a route leading to "Urartu." According to this old poem from Mesopotamia, a man and his family landed an ark so they could preserve life. A man named Noah perhaps?

Indeed, the place is the Assyrian equivalent of the Hebrew word for the mountain that Noah's ship crashed into, "Ararat."

"It demonstrates that the story was the same, and of course that one led to the other, but also that from the Babylonian point of view, this was a matter of fact thing," said Dr. Irving Finkel, curator at the British Museum. "That you would see the remains of this historic boat if you did embark on this journey."

The tablet has been damaged since it was discovered in present-day Iraq in 1882, but it once had eight triangles that scientists determined represented mountains.

The passage goes on to describe how a traveler will eventually come across a giant vessel. "Number four says 'to the fourth, to which you must travel seven leagues,'" Dr. Finkel explained. An ark, of course. The curator stated, "This parsiktu measurement is something that makes an Assyriologist's ears prickle, and the fact is that it's only once formerly known from cuneiform tablets, and it's rather an interesting cuneiform tablet too."

“Because it is the description of the Ark which was built, theoretically, by the Babylonian version of Noah.”