BIBLE STORY OF FLOOD IS TRUE, SCIENTIST SAYS

Sun (Auckland), Volume II, Issue 616, 19 March 1929, Page 9

BIBLE STORY OF FLOOD IS TRUE, SCIENTIST SAYS

SENSATIONAL FINDS MADE BY EXCAVATION AT UR OF CHALDEES (United P.A.—By Telegraph — Copyright) (Australian and N.Z. Press Association) LONDON, Sunday. Professor Leonard Wooley, head of the British Museum’s expedition to Ur of the Chaldees, has come to the conclusion that the Biblical story of the flood in the days of Noah is true, despite the fact that distinguished theologians have ridiculed it. The professor says the sensational discoveries made by his party in the latest excavation are capable of no other interpretation. The excavators unearthed strata which indicated that the earliest settlements on the Euphrates delta had been overwhelmed.

When the workmen reached the clay deposit they announced that it was virgin ground, but Professor Wooley decided to see if there were anything below it. He bored through eight feet of the clay and then found deposits which indicated that Ur was a civilised and properly built town. The excavators believe the catastrophe which demolished the town could only have been, a flood and that only a flood of unexampled magnitude could have deposited an eight-feet bank of clay upon the original site of Ur.

SHORT HUMAN HISTORY Professor Stephen Langdon, Oxford Assyriologist, says the recent revelations in the excavations at Kish suggested that there had been two great deluges there, the second one having marked the beginning and the end of the long period of Sumerian civilisation.

The Sumerians were the first people to possess a legend that a flood had occurred and that men built boats to escape from it.. The Babylonians and the Greeks borrowed that legend, and the whole of Hebrew tradition is borrowed from the Babylonian tradition. Presumably, says Professor Langdon, human history does not go much further back than 5,000 years B.C.

EGYPTIAN TREASURES TOMB OF TUTANKHAMEN (United Service) LONDON, Monday. An exhibition of the latest treasures recovered from Tutankhamen’s tomb was opened at Cairo yesterday. It is the most beautiful yet seen. The exhibits include a wonderful gold bed, an alabaster boot, the first real sickle sword ever found, and two ivory boxes of games exquisitely carved. The marvels of the tomb are not exhausted.