The Animals on Noah's Ark

Alice C. Linsley

Noah was a Proto-Saharan ruler in the region of Lake Chad during the African Humid Period (the Aqualithic). The Lake Chad region is the only place on earth claimed to be Noah's homeland by the local populations. The area is called Borno or Benue, both meaning "Land of Noah" and the local Kanuri people call Lake Chad Buhar Nuhu, meaning "Sea of Noah". 

The historicity of Noah’s concern for animals is supported by the discovery that Proto-Saharan rulers kept royal menageries of exotic animals. The oldest known zoological collection was found during the 2009 excavations of the city's elite cemeteries at Nekhen on the Nile. The menagerie dates to c. 3500 B.C. and includes bulls, hippos, elephants, baboons, wildcats, and dogs (The Oxford Handbook of Zooarchaeology, p. 456). The animals had been well tended as is evident by treatment of a few bone fractures that required medical care to heal properly. The animals in the elite cemeteries had received mortuary treatments similar to the humans buried there.

Noah lived in the early days of Nekhen's establishment, and he would have known Nekhen as an early worship center for the Horite Hebrew.

This Nekhen tomb painting shows a sickle boat
in what is today the Sahara.

Climate studies reveal that the Lake Chad Basin held much more water in Noah's time. During a period of flooding in the Chad Basin Noah preserved his animals by putting them on small ships constructed of bundles of reeds. 

These prehistoric rock paintings found in the Sudan show the boats and cows of Proto-Saharans. Clearly, moving animals by boat was a common practice.

The boats were made mainly of large bundles of reeds bound together over a wood frame. Boat types have been identified as sickle, incurved sickle, square, incurved square and flared boat. These images were found on rock surfaces in the Central Eastern Desert of Egypt. (Read more here: Boat Petroglyphs in Egypt's Central Eastern Desert)

Nilo-Saharan rulers built large boats out of bundles of reeds. Genesis 6:4 describes the construction material as גפר (gofer/gopher), the same word used to describe to the reed basket made for the baby Moses (Ex. 2:3). The Schocken Bible reads: "Make yourself an Ark of gofer wood, with reeds make the Ark...", Vol. I, p. 35. Noah's ark likely looked like the boat shown below.

As a ruler Noah would have had a fleet of these small ships. He was one of the "might men of old" (Gen. 6). These early Hebrew rulers dispersed across the Ancient Near East before the time of Abraham. Nimrod is an example. He left the Nile Valley and settled in Mesopotamia where he became a famous city builder (Gen. 10).

DNA studies indicate that R1b peoples were living in the Lake Chad Basin before the time of Noah (c. 20,000 years ago). The dispersion of the R1b group is shown on the map below. Note the bright red mark in the region of Lake Chad, Noah's homeland.

The dark red spot in Central Africa is the Lake Chad Basin.

Related reading: Noah's Birds; Noah's Flood; When the Sahara Was Wet; Boats and Cows of the Proto-Saharans