It’s one of the most famous stories in the Bible: the Flood, Noah’s Ark, and the miraculous survival of humanity reduced to one family and a floating menagerie. But a question remains, at the crossroads of theology, art and science: which animals precisely would have boarded this legendary ship? The biblical text, in reality, only names two – the raven and the dove – sent by Noah to watch for the decline. The rest was left to the human imagination, summarizes a National Geographic article.
Since Antiquity, the arch has fascinated and is the source of numerous illustrations. The oldest known image, struck on a coin from the 3rde century AD, shows the ship and its birds. But it was above all medieval artists who took hold of the story, fascinated and enchanted by the idea of a universal bestiary saved from the waters. Illuminations and manuscripts from the Middle Ages show processions of cows, goats and pigs leaving the Ark in pairs, all animals familiar to European peasants.
Little by little, with the broadening of horizons and the arrival of exotic animals thanks to explorations and princely menageries, the representations of the Ark are enriched. We see lions, ostriches, giraffes and even monkeys appear there. At Norwich Cathedral, 15th centurye century, a sculptor even took the bold step of placing a unicorn among the survivors of the Flood.
This openness to the imagination explains the proliferation of fabulous beasts in manuscripts, side by side with very real animals. Unicorns, griffins and dragons naturally found their place there, proof of a time when the border between zoology and mythology remained porous. After all, the Flood already seemed to be something marvelous; why not add a touch of pure magic?
We need a bigger boat
From the Reformation in the 16th centurye century, things change: the story of the ark is increasingly read as a historical and literal event. A difficulty then arises: how to reconcile this strict reading of Genesis with the discovery of an ever more diverse fauna, revealed by the great maritime explorations? Scholars propose sometimes strange theories to solve the equation: French mathematician Johannes Buteo, for example, estimates that barely a hundred mammals embarked, the rest appearing spontaneously after the Flood “from the mud”. Some theologians even maintain that the insects did not need a boarding ticket since they were born… from decomposing corpses.
This logic is accentuated until the 17th centurye century, where a German Jesuit priest named Athanase Kircher, tried to imagine a complete inventory of the Ark in his monumental work Arca Noe. Fascinated by the idea of hybrids, he asserts, for example, that the giraffe is only a cross between a camel and a leopard, and that the armadillo is the improbable fruit of a turtle and a porcupine. According to his calculation, just 130 mammals, 30 species of snakes and 150 birds would have been enough to repopulate the Earth. Practical.
As extravagant as they were, these speculations had an unexpected consequence: they contributed to the emergence of the modern notion of “species”. Because to determine which animals could or could not be found on the ark, it was necessary to begin to classify them, to distinguish their lineages, to establish membership criteria. These debates, halfway between imagination and scientific premises, in spite of themselves paved the way for the Darwinian revolution two centuries later.
Thus, Noah’s ark served as a mental laboratory for scientists of different eras, a place of reflection where religious beliefs, medieval fantasies and the first beginnings of biology intersected.
