During September through November 1999, the web site for www.mazzaroth.com doubled in size as to client access and page hits. I had noticed an unusual trend of clients from overseas. In this case from countries and cities such as: Budapest, Hungary; Gdansk and Elblag, Poland; also Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, Russia, Romania, and Greece. At first I thought I had just found new markets for my work. |
As you know the book "The Alpha and the Omega," has promoted the start date for the Biblical Flood as 6,000 B.C. for the Masoretic text, and 6,349 B.C. for the Samaritan Pentateuch, and 5,414 B.C. from the Septuagint. This can be seen at Star Chart for Gemini, therefore giving basis that the constellation Gemini which passes in chronological time beginning at 6,690 B.C. through 4,530 B.C. The chart shows the Deluge is gauged from the alignment of the alpha star Castor at 6,000-5,998 B.C. plus or minus 25 years. In this book, Gemini is in direct correlation with Noah and the events specified in the Biblical text as well as its opposite Sagittarius. This date can be easily keyed back 1,656 years before the Flood promoting the Fall of Adam at 7,656 B.C. in the constellation of Cancer.
As seen in Genesis 7:11-12, the great flood lasted 40 days and 40 nights, and submerged (Gen. 7:21) all flesh that moved upon the earth (Gen. 7:23 "upon the face of the ground") beneath 24 feet (Gen. 7:20 "fifteen cubits") of water for 150 days, and (Gen. 7:23-24) sparing only Noah, his family and the animals he protected on his ark. Please view the following link to see Genesis 7:11-12 in detail which provides a KJV version compared to the Hebrew. It also defines the influence of the moon as to the first occurrence of a month in the Biblical texts.
The water began receding after 150 days (Genesis 8:3) and the Ark rested on the mountains of Ararat (8:4, another 221 days) and the earth dried and Noah left the ark in Genesis 8:14 thus totaling altogether 371-376 days.
The Black Sea project, funded by the National Geographic Society and the University of Pennsylvania, began in 1995, as teams of archaeologist began mapping the Turkish city Synope and its environs. This seaport acted as a major trading center during the Bronze Age, around 3000 B.C., and maybe even earlier. Artifacts have linked Synope to Black Sea sites north in Crimea and west in Bulgaria, as well as to Troy, the fable Aegean city that guarded the entrance to the Black Sea.
A new book entitled:
Although scientists have never found Noah’s ark, some believe they may have found his flood. Columbia University marine geologists William Ryan and Walter Pitman, of the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory in Palisades, New York, have presented a theory of how an actual deluge around 5600 B.C. may have been the source of the ancient flood stories. They described the catastrophe in their book Noah’s Flood, based on 30 years of research that began with coring samples showing the same abrupt transition from lake to sea. They argue that this flood was not a devastating global event, but one limited to the Black Sea, and therefore could not have covered the whole world, it could not have laid down every sedimentary rock bed, and Noah could not have rescued every living species. At that time, the Black Sea was approximately 500 feet below sea level and was a somewhat smaller lake, around which many people probably lived. Ryan and Pitman postulated that the continuous warming and rise in sea level since the end of the last Ice Age (northern Asian ice cap and melting glaciers of 8,000 B.C., drained downhill) caused water from the Mediterranean Sea to overflow through the Bosporus Strait into the Black Sea, around 5,600 B.C., then a freshwater lake, but today the Black Sea is salty, like the ocean.
This grew within days to a colossal, roaring torrent as it gouged out a deep notch in the hills. Storms, lightning, earthquakes and other geophysical disturbances surely accompanied this catastrophe.
It took only two years for the water level to rise 330 feet, inundating 60,000 square miles of land (10 cubic miles of sea water per day). The Black Sea and its outlet to the Mediterranean, the Bosporus, became as we know them today in a geologic instant. It surely drowned or scattered any shore-dwellers, and any survivors of the Flood long remembered what happened in epic songs and myths, one version of which is preserved in the book of Genesis.
Soon the Sea of Azov, north of the Black Sea, was also flooded. It began forcing people and animals to flee or drown, killing freshwater fish and plants by the ton, inundating forests, villages and entire cities and spreading pestilence and death for miles.
Finally a 30 percent expansion in the Black Sea's size gave the body of water its modern configuration. At present the Black Sea is a large body of water bounded by Russia, Bulgaria, Romania, and Turkey. The Bosporus Strait, the Sea of Marmara, and the Dardanelles Strait connect it with the Mediterranean Sea. At present it is 750 miles (1,207 kilometers) long and 380 miles (612 kilometers) wide, and covers an area greater than the state of California. Its deepest bed is 7,238 feet (2,206 meters) below the surface. Freshwater rivers such as the Danube, the Dnestr, the Dnepr, and the Don flow into it. It includes the Sea of Azov, which is a really large bay of the Black Sea.
So to provide evidence of this geologically instantaneous event, a distinct sedimentary sequence was found and traced from the present-day shore to between 520-550 feet below the surface water of the Black Sea. The key to their flood theory was to determine whether the water level of the Black Sea changed gradually (millions of years) or instantaneously. In order to test this, mussel shells from the lowest portion, presumed to be the first immigrants from the Mediterranean Sea after the flood, were pulled from core samples of the deepest sediments of the Black Sea. An international team of geologists and oceanographers has reconstructed the history of this catastrophic flood from data gathered by a Russian research ship in 1993. Seismic soundings and sediment cores revealed traces of the sea's former shorelines, showing an abrupt 500-foot rise in water levels. Carbon 14 dating of the shells across this shallow-to-deep transect, or horizon, would show whether the shells were all of the same age – proving an instantaneous flood – or whether they showed a range of ages, indicating a slower rise in water level. Amazingly, the carbon 14 dating showed that the mussel shells across the Black Sea transect were all pretty much the same age – about 7,500-7,600 years old! This is convincing proof that the flooding of the Black Sea was instantaneous, at least on a geological scale.
Ryan and Pitman also suggested that the flood may have triggered massive migrations to destinations as diverse as Egypt, western Europe and central Asia, an idea that has provoked some academic controversy. These scattered peoples versed in agricultural practices across two continents, into eastern and western Europe as well as across the Takla Makan Desert into western China. The change from hunter-gatherer societies to stable farming communities in Europe around the sixth millennium B.C. – Europe’s so-called Golden Age – may have been catalyzed by this great migration to escape the Black Sea flood.
The deluge filled the lake and transformed it into a sea, it also created an ecosystem unique in the world – an oxygenless abyss (anoxic) where ship wrecks could rest for thousands of years in chill, inert darkness uncorrupted by living creatures.
This has become a starting point for deep-water archaeology and specifically explorer Robert D. Ballard, who discovered the Titanic, and now has a goal of discovering a single ship in the "Black Sea Project." Ultimate proof for this theory would be the discovery of remains of human habitation underwater at the correct depth in the present-day Black Sea. In 1998 sonar revealed "shapes that are too large for a shipwreck and too regularly shaped to not be manmade," according to team member David Mindell, of MIT.
Early reports indicated that they have found an ancient coastline 450 feet below today’s water level. In the summer of 1999, Ballard began using sonar to look for traces of human settlement in the Black Sea, and captured the first sonar images of a gentle berm and a sandbar submerged undisturbed for thousands of years on the sea floor. Now, using radiocarbon dating techniques, analysts have shown that the remains of freshwater mollusks subsequently dredged from the ancient beach date back to 7,500 years and saltwater species begin showing up 6,900 years ago. Explorer Robert D. Ballard, who led the team that collected the shells, said on November 21, 1999, the findings indicate a flood occurred sometime during the 600-year gap. "What we wanted to do is prove to ourselves that it was the biblical flood," Ballard said in an interview this week.
As they described the catastrophe in their book Noah’s Flood, based on 30 years of research that began with coring samples showing the same abrupt transition from lake to sea that Ballard confirmed with his dredge in August near the Turkish port of Synope (analyzed by Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts).
The science of the Black Sea flood stands undisputed. Ryan and Pitman dated the event at 7,600 years ago (5,600 B.C.), and they fixed the likely depth of the ancient coastline almost exactly where Ballard found it.
Also of interest is that on the south east corner of the Black Sea is ARARAT, a volcano which the Bible (Genesis 8:4 "mountains of Ararat") says is the place Noah’s ark came to rest after the flood. The 17,011-foot (5,185-meter) volcano stands in Turkey, near the place where Iran, Russia, and Turkey meet. A Babylonian story says that the ark landed northeast of Ararat.
To the east of the Black Sea and the Caucasus Mountains is the Caspian Sea a great salt lake below sea level, and is the largest inland body of water in the world. Russia surrounds it on three sides, and Iran lies against its southern shore, and encompasses an area almost the size of California, or 750 miles (1,207 kilometers) long and varying 130-300 miles (209-483 kilometers) wide. Due to Russian irrigation the Caspian Sea is shrinking from evaporation. It lies about 92 feet (28 meters) below sea level, and has no outlets to any ocean, and is 3,264 feet (995 meters) deep. Because seals live in its waters, it is believed that it was once linked to the Artic Ocean. More likely this was overflow from the Black Sea around the Caucasus Mountains which extends from northeast to southeast for about 750 miles (1,210 kilometers). Mount Elbrus is at 18,481 feet, or 5,633 meters above sea level, and is a boundary line between Europe and Asia.
Also 175 miles to the east of Caspian Sea is the Aral Sea is a large 270 mile (435 kilometers) long and 175 miles (282 kilometers) wide salt-water lake in Russian Turkestan, and maximum depth is 223 feet (68 meters).
Is it not strange that huge seas of saltwater just happened to be in the middle of major land masses?
I personally feel that the Deluge was world wide and commend Ryan and Pitman for discovering some hard evidence to prove a time frame that it may have occurred at. Time will only tell in the end the validity of the Biblical scripture.
The Sumerian account of the Flood and the king-priest Ziusudra also connected to Dilmun (the land of Tilmun) is the oldest version, recorded around 2,700 B.C. on the fragment of a tablet discovered at ancient Nippur, between Kish and Shuruppak in north central Babylonia. It was probably retold by the Akkadians around 1,600 B.C., where it appears in the tales of the Assyrians, Babylonians, Hittites and Canaanites. The Babylonian version of the Deluge constitutes the eleventh book of the famous Assyrian-Babylonian Epic of Gilgamesh. The Gilgamesh who may have inspired the epic was possibly a ruler of the Sumerian city of Uruk (Gen. 10:10 Biblical Erech, modern Warka) around 2,600 B.C. Moreover, old Hindu texts in ancient Sanskrit also contain an Aryan flood story called Rigveda, and a number of flood myths were recorded by the ancient Greeks.
Some biblical scholars date the writing of the book of Genesis, from which the story of Noah is taken, at sometime between 900 B.C.-400 B.C. Lest we not forget that the Genesis was orally transmitted to Moses (who lived in 1,500 B.C.) as he was inspired by angels whom were sent from God to provide him with the knowledge and account of the Flood. The other accounts were not inspired by God, but documented by men.