The Discovery of Noah's Ark: How the World's Greatest Archaeological Mystery was Solved

by David Fasold. Sidgwick and Jackson, 1990. 331pp.

$39.95.

Reviewed by Bernard Howard

Did Noah build his Ark using a measuring unit derived from the metre and an accurate value of pi? Most of us are under the impression that the metre was invented 200 years ago, and that the ancients had only a rough knowledge of the value of pi, yet David Fasold bases the argument in this book on that surprising proposition.

Fasold is a selective fundamentalist. He fervently believes most of what the Bible says of the flood, of Noah and his Ark, but pours scorn on those who persist in looking for the Ark on Mount Ararat. This book is an account of his investigation of a peculiar boatshaped feature seen in aerial photographs taken by Turkish surveyors in 1959. It lies almost 2,000 metres above sea level, on a ridge about 25 km south of Mt. Ararat itself.

In the absence of excavation (forbidden by the Turkish authorities,.and for which he is probably unqualified anyway) Fasold was thrown back on measuring surface features and using a dubious "black box" frequency generator, which, when properly tuned, detects iron objects in the ground. The author tries unconvincingly to square the dimensions of his "ark" with those of Noah's, and his frequency generator has supposedly located the iron nails with which he claims the pre-Iron Age patriarch held things together.

This is an irritating book to read. It has a few very poor maps, no index, no bibliography and some not especially helpful black-and-white photographs. It is scrappily organised, and the Style swings wildly between the erudite, the inane and the bizarre. Fasold's erudition shows in his discussion of Hebrew and other ancient texts, but this does not sit well with the verbatim reports of slangy chat with his companions.

The many bizarre aspects of his approach include a scatter of numerological ideas (if we express Noah's measuring unit in inches rather than in metres, we get another number of mystical power), acceptance of Velikovsky's catastrophism, and a lengthy discussion of whether Shem was 602 years old when he died or a mere youth of 600.

Fasold's site, so he tells us, has now been declared the "Noah's Ark National Park" by the Turkish government. Archaeologists, already sceptical that a structure so improbable as the biblical Ark could be stranded thousands of metres up a Turkish mountainside, are likely to remain unconvinced by this account.

The Press, Christchurch