{"id":4699,"date":"2024-11-25T14:24:07","date_gmt":"2024-11-25T19:24:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/latestnews\/?p=4699"},"modified":"2024-11-15T14:24:25","modified_gmt":"2024-11-15T19:24:25","slug":"babylonian-artifact-may-hold-the-secret-to-finding-noahs-ark","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/latestnews\/2024\/11\/25\/babylonian-artifact-may-hold-the-secret-to-finding-noahs-ark\/","title":{"rendered":"Babylonian Artifact May Hold the Secret to Finding Noah’s Ark"},"content":{"rendered":"

Noah’s Ark<\/a> is known to Christians and non-adherents alike as the massive wooden ship that rescued the world during the great flood (Genesis 6-9). That was approximately 2350 BCE, based on traditional Biblical dating) and God shared its location in the Bible as if it was a dynamic geocaching clue.<\/p>\n

But God remembered\u00a0Noah and all the wild animals and the livestock that were with him in the ark, and he sent a wind over the earth,\u00a0and the waters receded.<\/span> Now the springs of the deep and the floodgates of the heavens\u00a0had been closed, and the rain\u00a0had stopped falling from the sky.<\/span> The water receded steadily from the earth. At the end of the hundred and fifty days\u00a0the water had gone down,<\/span> and on the seventeenth day of the seventh month\u00a0the ark came to rest on the mountains\u00a0of Ararat.<\/span><\/p>\n

Genesis 8:1-4 NIV<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

July 17, 2350 BCE was it? It’s even mentioned in the Qur’an (Suras 11 and 71). There have been mighty explorations from Christians and Muslims alike to Mount Ararat to find this divinely built ocean cruiser, but no one has been able to pinpoint its location. Until, maybe now<\/a>.<\/p>\n

For over a decade, theological linguists and archaeologists have worked to deciphering the language on a 3,000-year-old tablet called the Imago Mundi<\/a>, or “Image of the World.” The artifact was first unearthed in an 1882 excavation in Northern Iraq. Until now, the cuneiform (a Mesopotamian script of logo-syllabic characters) depicts a circular world map and features ancient Babylonian ideas about the creation of the world, hence, the artifact’s name.<\/p>\n

According to Dr. Irving Finkel, a British Museum curator, “this is the oldest map of the world, in the world.”\u00a0Finkel recently shared this exhaustive study of the cuneiform tablet does indeed reveal exacting references about Noah’s Ark. Although broken, chipped, and ruddy, the Imago Mundi speaks volumes about the familiar scriptures read in our Bible.
\n<\/code><\/p>\n