The Black Sea Project

From The Alpha and the Omega - Volume III
by Jim A. Cornwell, Copyright © 11/24/99, all rights reserved "The Black Sea Project"

View of Mediterannean Sea, Black Sea, Caspian Sea and Aral Sea

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.

Then one day while I was researching some new findings I noticed that it is these countries that particularly surround the Black Sea: Russia, Turkey, Poland, Romania, Hungary, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, Greece.
The following is my assumption to the above response:

    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:

Noah’s Flood:
The New Scientific Discoveries About the Event That Change History,
by William Ryan and Walter Pitman
(New York: Simon & Schuster, 1999) 319 pp. $25.00 (hardback).

    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 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.

Archaeologist Eager To Explore Depths Of Black Sea
by Richard C. Lewis, The Associated Press.
July 28, 2003
    In 1994, archaeologists Fredrik Hiebert of the University of Pennsylvania rode around northern Turkey looking for evidence of ancient civilizations around the Black Sea.    He and other scientist will conduct the first excavation of ancient ships and a possible human settlement left mummified in the Black Sea's oxygen-free waters.    On a $5 million, two week expedition to find evidence of a great flood about 7,500 years ago that inundated the Black Sea, turning the freshwater lake into a saltwater ocean.    Some scholars have said the engulfing could be the Biblical flood of Noah.    Others say the theory lacks any scientific premise and complain it could overshadow more noteworthy experiments that will take place.
    Robert Ballard's Institute for Exploration in Mystic, Conn. will be watching live, as from the Black Sea's command center at the University of Rhode Island, with satellite feeds from the ship will be broadcast on a separate Internet channel.
    The team will be working off the coast of Sinop (southern border of the Black Sea).    Scholars have determined it was a major trade hub for centuries, for olive oil, honey and iron in carrot-shaped shipping jars called amphorae north to Crimea in exchange for wine and other goods.Shipwreck D," is so well-preserved in the Black Sea's anoxic waters that its hand-carved mast protruding above the seabed looks as good as new.
    At another location about 330 feet underwater, the explorers think they have found a settlement that could be more that 7,500 years old.    Scientists theorize the rectangular-shaped site was a hunter or fisherman's house on a bluff overlooking the water before the Black Sea flooded, wiping out the home.
    The 61-year-old Ballard and his team of engineers have built a 7-foot-tall robot names Hercules that will gingerly dig around the ruins and gather artifacts, much like an archaeologist would on land.

    This article came out on March 14, 2005.
    While they are now at the bottom of the North Sea, the lands between present-day Great Britain and the European mainland formed a land bridge uniting regions during the last ice age.    Small villages and settlements must have dotted the region, which is now open ocean.
    Modern technology, in the form of computer reconstructions and undersea archaeology, is offering a clearer picture of what life was like when this part of the world began thawing.
    A team of divers from the Submerged Prehistoric Landscapes Project at the University of Newcastle Upon Tyne has discovered the sites of at least two ancient settlements, near Newcastle Upon Tyne, one dating to the Late Mesolithic period (8,500 to 5,000 years ago) and the other to the early Mesolithic (10,000 to 8,500 years ago).    Both sites were flooded as sea levels rose after the Ice Age.
    A separate research team from the University of Birmingham is using data first gathered by engineers seeking undersea oil deposits to construct three-dimensional visions of how these Mesolithic villages may have looked.
    Researchers hope these new surveys will point them to likely archaeolgical sites that once flourished but now are deep underwater.
    Researchers have found microliths that were glued onto shafts to make arrows.

    So as seen above we have further collaboration of underwater ancient settlements from another area, dating between (6,500 B.C. to 3,000 B.C.) and (8,000 B.C. to 6,500 B.C.), close enough to comply with the flood that occurred at the Black Sea time frame.

As seen in the Archaeology magazine, page 12-13, Mar/April 2005 issue.
The oldest known pottery was found in Syria and possibly the entire Middle East, was excavated by Dutch archaeologist at the northern site of Tell Sabi Abyad. They found dozens of jars and pots dating from 6,800 to 6,300 B.C.

4,100-year-old golden rings unearthed in Bulgaria
by Nevyana Hadjiyska, Associated Press.
August 18, 2005.     SOFIA, Bulgaria -- Bulgarian archaeologists have unearthed about 15,000 tiny golden pieces that date to the end of the third millennium B.C. - a find they said matches the famous treasure of Troy.
    The ornaments, estimated to be between 4,100 and 4,200 years old, were unearthed during the past year from an ancient tomb near the central village of Dabene, about 75 miles east of Sofia, said Vasil Nikolov, an academic consultant on the excavations.
    "This treasure is a bit older than Schliemann's finds in Troy, and contains much more golden ornaments," he said.
    Heinrich Schliemann, an amateur German archaeologist, discovered the site of ancient Troy in 1868.
    The treasure consists of minature golden rings, some so finely crafted that the weld is invisible with an ordinary microscope.
    Bozhidar Dimitrov, directory of the National History Museum of Bulgaria, said the site consisted of a settlement and three mounds, and excavations would continue.
    "This is the oldest golden treasure ever found in Bulgaria after the Varna necropolis," Dimitrov said.
    The golden artifacts from a vast burial complex discovered in the 1970s near the Black Sea port of Varna date to the end of the fifth millennium B.C.

Hiker finds gold pendant made 6,500 years ago
by Associated Press.
February 17, 2006.     Thessaloniki, Greece -- A hiker found a 6,500-year-old gold pendant in a field and handed it over to authorities, an archeologist said.    The flat, roughly ring-shaped prehistoric pendant probably had religious significance and would have been worn on a necklace by a prominent member of society.
    Only three such gold artifacts have been discovered during organized digs, said archaeologists Georgia Karamitrou-Mendesidi, head of the Greek archaeological service in the northern region where the pendant was found.
    "It belongs to the Neolithic period, about which we know very little regarding the use of metals, particularly gold," she said.

This file updated on 7/30/2003, 3/14/2005, 1/7/2006 and 5/20/2006. Return to the Table of Contents or the Home Page