RE: Why I Love Reading the Sunday Paper
August 22, 2011 at 9:05 am
(This post was last modified: August 22, 2011 at 9:22 am by The Grand Nudger.)
Well, Thor Heyerdahl gave us a proof of concept regarding the seaworthiness ancient boat designs when he sailed the Ra (a large reed sailing vessel based on egyptian "river barges") across the Atlantic. There are plenty of bronze age boat designs that relied upon a framework which was then covered by skins, for example. The main limiter of size being the skins themselves (watertight stitching, not so common).
They seem to be advocating a pitch covered "super-canoe". Fair enough. You're right in saying that no bronze age boat looked like that. Believers will simply say its a pitch canoe with a wooden frame made larger, but just taking a boat and making it bigger (and then loading it with cargo) is a pretty well understood no-no. The model there is based off of techniques available to people of the time, but corrected with knowledge that was not available.
In any case, a pitch boat like that would have been found by now, what with tiny pitch canoes found in the Netherlands that date to 8200-7600 BC. Something that well constructed (it would have to have been) and covered in tar.....would still be sitting on top of whatever mountain it ended up on. The "exact specifications" of the ark probably ended up weaseling their way into the narrative as generations of people interrupted the storyteller with a "wait a fucking minute..how big WAS this boat?". That thought always puts a smile on my face.
http://www2.ulg.ac.be/archgrec/IMG/aegeu...orgiou.pdf
I may have to modify that statement above. The techniques for building a pitch canoe were available to them, but a pitch canoe of that size? Nothing short of a miracle. Notice a canoe's nasty habit of tipping with inexperience operators? A small boat is relatively easy to balance. A boat of that size, imagine how precise and identical the frame timbers would have to have been milled to keep it from capsizing under it's own weight. Then you have the issue of load on the frame, and the action of the flood, he would have needed some here-to-fore un-theorized joining techniques to keep the thing from ripping itself apart while it was busy not capsizing.
In short, it would absolutely have been a miracle, in which case, the specs are irrelevant, not that god should have needed a boat to save what he chose to save in the first place. The guy can part waters yes?
They seem to be advocating a pitch covered "super-canoe". Fair enough. You're right in saying that no bronze age boat looked like that. Believers will simply say its a pitch canoe with a wooden frame made larger, but just taking a boat and making it bigger (and then loading it with cargo) is a pretty well understood no-no. The model there is based off of techniques available to people of the time, but corrected with knowledge that was not available.
In any case, a pitch boat like that would have been found by now, what with tiny pitch canoes found in the Netherlands that date to 8200-7600 BC. Something that well constructed (it would have to have been) and covered in tar.....would still be sitting on top of whatever mountain it ended up on. The "exact specifications" of the ark probably ended up weaseling their way into the narrative as generations of people interrupted the storyteller with a "wait a fucking minute..how big WAS this boat?". That thought always puts a smile on my face.
http://www2.ulg.ac.be/archgrec/IMG/aegeu...orgiou.pdf
I may have to modify that statement above. The techniques for building a pitch canoe were available to them, but a pitch canoe of that size? Nothing short of a miracle. Notice a canoe's nasty habit of tipping with inexperience operators? A small boat is relatively easy to balance. A boat of that size, imagine how precise and identical the frame timbers would have to have been milled to keep it from capsizing under it's own weight. Then you have the issue of load on the frame, and the action of the flood, he would have needed some here-to-fore un-theorized joining techniques to keep the thing from ripping itself apart while it was busy not capsizing.
In short, it would absolutely have been a miracle, in which case, the specs are irrelevant, not that god should have needed a boat to save what he chose to save in the first place. The guy can part waters yes?
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