This research will examine archaeological evidence associated with the story of Noah's Ark told in Genesis. The Genesis story of Noah's Ark, which describes a great flood that destroys all life and civilization except for an extended family and the extended family of livestock in its care, is premised on the idea that the family patriarch, Noah, received instructions from God to build a gigantic boat, or ark. The ark serves as home and haven, allowing Noah, family, and animals to ride out the 40-day rain and the long-term flood that follows. When the waters recede sufficiently, Noah and family return the animals to the world and then reestablish a human presence in the world. No tangible record of Noah and the flood exists except in Biblical text. However, Noah and the flood narrative have been identified with a prototype from Babylonian myth, the hero Utnapishtim, who survives the primordial deluge and passes the tale on to the Sumerian archetypal hero Gilgamesh (Campbell, Hero 186). Campbell explains that "imagery of the various creation stories of the Bible derives from a general fund of Sumero-Semitic myth, of which the Babylonian epic of Creation is an example" (Campbell, Masks 85).
The power of Biblical text to capture Western imagination, both religious and secular, in combination with absence of a fossil or other archaeological record has fostered archae ological research and speculation within the disciplines of the scientific method, including at tempts to locate the period of the flood in geologic time. The archaeological segment of such research is known as biblical archaeology.
Articulation of alternative visions of Noah in the modern period has occurred in a climate of contentiousness. That is because the absence of definitive archaeological confirmation of the ancient texts runs up against a widespread insistence in Judaeo-Christian culture on the historicity of the Noah story. The extent of contentiousness was ma...