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Where Was the Ark Mountain of Mt. Baris in the Flood Account of Nicolaus of Damascus?

5/24/2014

9 Comments

 
A blogger at the Daily Kos wrote last night of how an episode of Ancient Aliens changed his or her view of ancient astronauts. After not having believed in any supernatural or extraterrestrial claims, and after having found Ancient Aliens ridiculous, the blogger was so overwhelmed by the otherworldliness of Puma Punku during an Ancient Aliens episode that something changed: “Now I don’t know if aliens made it but saying aliens made it sounds at least as credible as the archeological explanations. There are perfectly round holes straight through a few feet of rock and they say it was done by bouncing stones on it. There is just no way that could be.” Point of fact: The holes were drilled, not made by bouncing. The blogger seems to be confusing the drilling of holes with the use of pounding stones for carving and polishing blocks.
Consequently, the blogger feels that archaeology cannot explain Puma Punku and “I need a better explanation” than what (and these are the blogger’s actual sources) Wikipedia and Ancient Aliens’ summary of archaeologists’ views can provide.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is why we need better science education and easier access to high quality archaeological material. If you lock it all away behind paywalls and in dense, unreadable academic books, this is what you get.

Moving on to a different topic…

I came across an interesting problem that deserved an answer. In Antiquities of the Jews, Flavius Josephus provides a series of testimonies from the pagan authors testifying to the reality of Noah’s Ark and its continued existence as a venerated relic. Here is the relevant passage from 1.93-95 (= Book 1, chapter 3, sec. 6):
(93) Now all the writers of barbarian histories make mention of this flood, and of this ark; among whom is Berosus the Chaldean. For when he is describing the circumstances of the flood, he goes on thus: “It is said there is still some part of this ship in Armenia, at the mountain of the Cordyaeans; and that some people carry off pieces of the bitumen, which they take away, and use chiefly as amulets for the averting of mischiefs.” (94) Hieronymus the Egyptian also, who wrote the Phoenician Antiquities, and Mnaseas, and a great many more, make mention of the same. Nay, Nicolaus of Damascus, in his ninety-sixth book, hath a particular relation about them; where he speaks thus: (95) “There is a great mountain in Armenia, over Minyas, called Baris, upon which it is reported that many who fled at the time of the Deluge were saved; and that one who was carried in an ark came on shore upon the top of it; and that the remains of the timber were a great while preserved. This might be the man about whom Moses the legislator of the Jews wrote.” (trans. William Whiston)
The quotation from Berosus is familiar enough to most readers since I’ve discussed it often enough, and the next two authors are non-entities who are basically unknown, though there are a few extant fragments of Mnaseas. Many scholars believe Josephus simply copied their names from the last author listed, Nicolaus of Damascus, a pagan author also known only from fragments. He lived in the time of Augustus, was a close friend of Herod the Great, and wrote a universal history in 144 volumes.

It is Nicolaus’s reference to Mt. Baris that is the problem. What might this mountain be? The question sparked the interest of the Associates for Biblical Research, an archaeological group dedicated to proving the inerrancy of the Bible. Rick Lanser of the ABR became upset after reading Bill Crouse’s 2006 article on the ancient tradition that identified the mountain on which the Ark rested with Al-Judi (Cudi Dagh), near Nisibis in what is now Turkey. Lanser felt that this discredited his own efforts to find Noah’s Ark on Mt. Masis, now known as Mt. Ararat because “I cannot bring myself to dismiss many of the testimonies claiming the Ark’s landing place was on Mount Ararat.” In other words, because other Biblical literalists think they saw the Ark on modern Ararat, the earlier testimony has to be wrong.

So Lanser set about proving the Mt. Baris was in fact Mt. Masis, the current Mt. Ararat, and therefore supports not the pagan myths of Berosus but the Biblical history of Genesis. To that end, he lays out his case for why we should identify Baris with Masis and not Judi in the Gordyaean Mountains, as Josephus clearly intended us to read the passage. The claims are as follows:

  • The words Baris and Masis look alike, implying a philological connection.
  • Masis is more directly north of the land of Minyas (below Lake Urmia in Iran) than Judi, making it a stronger candidate for “over” Minyas than Judi.
  • William R. Shepherd identified Masis as Baris in a 1923 map.
  • An obscure German scholar named Friedrich Murad identified the two in 1901.
  • When translated into cuneiform, Baris and Masis share the same symbols and could be confused.

Obviously, Lanser has not made a particularly rigorous case, but he does raise doubts about what Nicolaus meant by Mt. Baris. Lanser’s first point can be dismissed instantly, as indeed Lanser himself dismisses, noting that the resemblance need not imply derivation.

The second point is stronger, for the land of the Minyas (Minni or Mannu) in the area around Lake Urmia is indeed due south of the current Mt. Ararat but southeast of Mt. Judi. However, this implies that (a) Nicolaus placed north at the top of his conception of the world, (b) had an accurate way of reckoning due north over hundreds of miles, and (c) considered north to be “over” (or “above”) more southerly areas. When considered in those terms, and given the poor quality of geographical knowledge in the years when Nicolaus wrote, his identification of the Ark mountain as “above” the land of Minyas could equally well apply to Masis or Judi since both were generally north of Lake Urmia and both significantly upland from there. (For comparison, in Geography 11.12.14 Strabo places a mountain discussed below “above” Nisibis despite it being northeast of the city). We can’t apply modern cartographical rigidity to ancient geography, so this part of Nicolaus’s text does not exclude either possibility.

Obviously, Shepherd’s map is irrelevant since he simply took Nicolaus’s Baris as the Greek name for Ararat in creating a “Reference Map of Asia Minor under the Greeks and Romans.”

Murad’s 1901 identification of Baris with Masis is more complex but rests ultimately on his belief that the Greek adopted “Baris” as a direct transliteration of the Armenian adjective bardsr (high), used to describe Masis in modern times. In his view, the Greeks gained the name indirectly from neighbors of the Armenians who somehow adopted the adjective for the mountain as its name. While I can’t disprove this possibility, as we shall see, it is not supported by modern scholarship. Murad’s claims are in German, but F. C. Conybeare outlined them in English here, noting that the Armenians did not themselves identify Masis with Ararat until the eleventh century CE. Prior to that, Masis had been the site of a (probably Mesopotamian-derived) local myth of a flood-surviving Ark that the Armenian Christians seemed to think it blasphemous to equate with Noah on distant Judi.

That leaves us with the cuneiform claim, which derives from the work of an Armenian, Dr. Artak Movsisyan. I will of course not cast aspersions on Dr. Movsisyan, but I’ve found in the case of Georgian scholars working on the problem of Colchis that people have a tendency to reach conclusions about Greek material that glorify their homelands. I don’t know Dr. Movsisyan from dirt, but it is unsurprising that he concludes that Baris has to do with Armenia rather than enemy Turkey. (Ararat is currently in Turkey but is a historical region of Armenia.) In fact, Movsisyan is best known for his argument that the Armenians invented a well-developed writing system millennia before Christianization, controversially connecting Armenian writing (attested in the fifth century CE) with the earlier Uratian script (last used c. 585 BCE).

Anyway, Movsisyan was quite taken with the name “Baris.” In his 2004 book The Sacred Highlands: Armenia in the Spiritual Geography of the Ancient Near East, he said that because there was no mountain of Armenia named Baris, the name was too important to have been “forgotten” and therefore must be a corruption. He proposed that the corruption occurred before the extinction of the Minyas, which he places around 600 BCE on Biblical evidence (Jeremiah 51:27), for this is the last mention of the Minni in historical records. It is not certain that the Biblical Minni are the same as the Mannaeans or Nicolaus’s Minyas, for Nicolaus also says that the Minyans of Orchomenus (the ancestors of Jason’s Argonauts) were expelled from Greece and took up residence in Asia Minor (FGrH 90F51).

From all of this, Movsisyan concludes that Baris would have been a corruption that occurred prior to 600 BCE and therefore likely occurred in cuneiform when a Greek misread the name Masis as Baris because the cuneiform symbols for mas- and bar- were the same. So far as I can tell, the Armenian place names have not been found in cuneiform texts, and according to Lanser Movsisyan simply sidesteps the question through the circular argument of claiming that the existence of the name Baris shows that Mesopotamians must have been familiar with the name Masis or else the confusion could not have taken place.

Lanser notes the problems but believes that since Baris is found in the same sentence as Minyas, the name must predate 600 BCE and therefore refer to Ararat in Turkey; thus he is right to look for Noah’s Ark there.

But does it really?

There is actually some scholarly conjecture that Baris is a Greek translation of Masis, where a name derived from baros, or heavy, was used as a synonym for “Masis,” meaning “great.” But this is uncertain. Alternately, some believe the name is actually a Greek corruption of the name Mt. Lubar from Jubilees 5:28, on which the Ark landed and which Epiphanius (Panarion 1.2.2) equated with Mt. Judi in 375 CE. He placed Lubar “between Armenia and Cardyaei” (i.e., Corduene, the area around Judi).

But let’s assume that Baris really does derive from Masis. Does that prove that we’re talking about the Masis now identified with Ararat?

No, it doesn’t.

Strabo is our witness against this identification. In his Geography (11.12.4) he writes of “Mount Masius, which is situated above Nisibis.” The mountain located above Nisibis is Mt. Judi, and here Strabo tells us that at the time he wrote—roughly contemporary with Nicolaus of Damascus—it was called Mt. Masis! Just to drive home the point, he repeats the same fact again at 16.1.22. This is the same place where Faustus of Byzantium (History of the Armenians 3.10) placed the recovery of wood from Noah’s Ark by Jacob of Nisibis in the fourth century CE.

If we still don’t want to believe this, well Josephus himself also records (Antiquities 20.22 = Book 20, chapter 2, sec. 2) that the Ark was located north of Adiabene in a land called Carra or Carron, along the Zab river, as did Julius Africanus (Syncellus, Chronicon 21), who called this area part of Parthia, of which it was in his day. Adiabene was the territory abutting Gordyene, in the same Gordyeaen mountains where Berosus placed the Ark back in the 300s BCE. Therefore, it seems obvious that Josephus wants us to read Baris as Mt. Judi, and none of the objections Lanser raised to this reading withstand scrutiny.

9 Comments
caralex
5/24/2014 10:43:29 am

Excellent point about science articles being inaccessible to the general public, because of being hidden behind paywalls!

Reply
spookyparadigm
5/24/2014 01:23:22 pm

I rarely comment on these posts, but the usual suspects haven't arrived yet.

While I have no issue with academic journals being more open, that's not the issue here. The blogger there was repeatedly shown basic facts, and simply refused to believe them.

The number one mistake I think a lot of skeptics/science communicators make, I believe, is thinking that everyone will think like they do if they are provided facts. Or if they teach the benighted masses "critical thinking." Any slight amount of experience with conspiracy theorists and other participants in occulture should disabuse them of that real fast, and yet ....

I'm far more disturbed that the two basic polar points on this are either the TV show Ancient Aliens and its backup BS literature, or the youtube video ancient aliens debunked in which the reality of the flood and the existence of giants/nephilim are preached (the same filmmaker has other openly conspiracy theory based films, like the David Icke debunked film I'd like to watch but which goes into CFR and Trilateral New Age globalist conspiracy theory before minute 2).

To get back to the point, the fruits of actual archaeology are available in many, many, many places for free. Numerous places on the web, all over wikipedia, and in libraries across this country. Lectures on itunes and youtube, loads of documentaries online, etc..

The information is available. The stuff behind paywalls is generally technical stuff aimed at other scholars, and priced for university libraries to pay for. The basics needed to debunk simple BS are available. But it doesn't matter.

Archaeology has given up on the educated working and middlea class of post-industrial (aka global North) societies, its long-time audience (though this varies from place to place). It has for very good reasons at least made declarations of embracing subaltern populations, especially in historical archaeology.

But the primary consumer of archaeology has for a century been the educated middle class first, and the working class second (actual archaeologists, of course, usually did not come from these classes before WWII). In Europe, archaeologists were routine radio guests, TV hosts, and the like, and we can see traces of this in Time Team and the excellent efforts at publishing inexpensive popular books on archaeology by Thames & Hudson (I have no relationship with T&H as an author or otherwise beyond someone who has consumed more than a few of their works). This was not quite as strong in the US for reasons of internal colonialism and how archaeology could not support the project of national identity the way it could in other places.

But for long term political reasons too long to get into here, archaeologists by and large have openly abandoned this audience. Not only is this the most likely consumer of archaeology, it is also in the era of social media and media diversification, the most likely audience for pseudoscience if it isn't served by actual science.

Reply
Jason Colavito link
5/24/2014 01:32:58 pm

You are of course right, and when I mentioned the paywall stuff, I was responding specifically to the blogger's desire for a detailed and technical explanation of the Puma Punku drilled holes, which I imagine is something that needs to be dug out of the academic literature since popularizing works would probably leave it at the fact that they were likely drilled with copper drills.

The bigger point, of course, is that archaeologists don't do much direct communication with the middle class and the working class, and therefore they turn to pseudoscience as the most accessible form of the material that piques their interest since those are the writers and speakers talking directly to them.

spookyparadigm
5/24/2014 01:51:53 pm

That might help with the tool thing (though I'd point more to the quartz than to metal, Andean metallurgy was advanced for its own purposes, but it wasn't that much into making harder metals until the Late Intermediate), but he keeps going on about Diorite or "ITS NOT RED SANDSTONE" after everyone tells him, including people who have been there, that's exactly what it is.

For reasons not having to do with inquiry, that author has latched unto secret knowledge (in his mind) and isn't going to let go. If he does let go of that, I'd wager he'll just find something else. Hofstadter was right when he talked about the paranoid style (rather than any given theory or belief set) That's where my handle comes from, that spookiness isn't this or that belief, but a way of seeing the world, one that is extremely predictable (certain kinds of key words or tones can instantly set off someone with spooky radar).

Don't get me wrong, I think sites like this one are a major way forward. Archaeology and those interested in archaeology have to respond directly, and I would argue definitively when possible, to BS. At the same time, they have to appeal to the sense of wonder craved by the big center of society, and not cater to either a small chorus of ideologically like-minded political friends (politics I agree with, but still) or to technocratic granting agencies. Especially since certain sections of the political spectrum, either due to "austerity" beliefs in Europe or due to a mix of austerity, anti-government, and religious sentiments in the US, are becoming increasingly determined to cut science funding and are aiming at archaeology.

That some of these same people pushed Ancient Aliens on the floor of Congress this week, is not coincidental.

spookyparadigm
5/24/2014 02:07:18 pm

Hell, CAST has made some of the scans from Tiwanaku available.

http://www.cast.uark.edu/home/research/archaeology-and-historic-preservation/archaeological-informatics/internet-virtual-metrology-lab-invirmet1/invirmet-data-repository/tiwanaku-3d-data.html

I've printed off a (miniature) copy of one of the Machu Picchu point clouds. Information is out there if people want it. What the blog you linked to, and more importantly its comments, make clear is that most people engaging in "alternative" archaeology aren't interested in getting information or inquiry, they're interested in performing their identity.

Jason Colavito link
5/24/2014 02:17:02 pm

In that sense, it is indeed related to claiming special knowledge, knowledge that "they" don't want you to know and which connects you with other people who share your values and beliefs.

Varika
5/24/2014 02:24:38 pm

Jason, what about places like Jamestown and Williamsburg? Gettysburg? Plymouth Plantation? Are all these places somehow inaccessible to the middle class? The archeological dig itself at Jamestown has been turned into a park, for people to come and see for themselves. Around my area, every few months there's an announcement at the library about the small digs that happen around here. (It's Delaware, there's nothing big in Delaware. Ever.)

I really don't think this is a case of "the real science isn't accessible enough." It's a case, perhaps, of exactly the opposite. The real science is TOO accessible, therefore it must be a lie. It is not "special" enough a knowledge.

There's a reason that mystery religions have always been so popular, that most of human history has revolved around bigotry, and that conspiracy theories and fringe history are so popular, and that is that people want to feel like they know something other people don't. I do not exempt myself from this. I love knowing something other people don't, and I love it even more when it's a REAL thing, not a fictional thing. I even went through a period of belief in Something Else (in my case, supernatural things). Some people grow out of it, others get mired in it forever, and no amount of proof will change it.

spookyparadigm
5/24/2014 02:42:55 pm

Varika, I think that's a good insight (especially the too available thing), but I would suggest that while you are correct about mystery religions, it need not go that route.

The classical appeal of popular knowledge has been that one could still cultivate it, and deploy it. We've all met the "Brainy Smurf" (or less charitably, Cliff Claven) types, who want to share factoids and obscure knowledge (vs getting into something much deeper, or less charitably, more self-aggrandizingly pompous). Some of us here probably are those people.

Those people are also much of the bread and butter of ancient aliens, and "discovery" occulture more generally (cryptozoo, UFOs, etc.). Rattling off names of cases, incidents, anomalies, etc., just like a sports fan rattles off stats and games.

This sort of audience has become anathema to academic writers, for several reasons, some I've already alluded to. They are, however, those most likely to consume history, archaeology etc. (I suspect this is exactly WHY they're anathema, for reasons of generational academic politics).

They do want that special knowledge. But they also want that aspect of wonder and escape, one that is filled to a large degree today by geekery about sci-fi and fantasy. But it is driven from archaeology not because it focuses on little things, but because it has become so earnest, so intent on convincing you it is simultaneously boring and yet somehow "relevant" in a very technowonk or politically important sort of way.

I'm working on a project on this topic right now, so I probably shouldn't be expending too much energy here :) but at the same time it's got me thinking about ways forward.

.
5/24/2014 04:00:39 pm

the paywalls freeze knowledge at the cusp of the millennium.
papers not at the graduate level are reflective of the intellectual
freedom of the second half of Bill Clinton's term. the paranoia
under the "W" put things back 20 or 30 years. you either pay
JSTOR etc and write a technical and almost unreadable paper
or you write a most thorough but dated undergraduate paper...
the area that has had a revolution over the past 15 years is DNA
research, and if you limped thru Biology over the past 40 years
you can only dive in as deep into the pool of knowledge as the
"expert" you tend to trust. Directly and indirectly DNA rewrites
Anthropology. Migratory patterns can emerge that predate the
Neolithic Revolution. Physics is being advanced by slow degrees.

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