Noah's Ark
Noah's Ark is the huge vessel described in the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament book of Genesis, through which the Hebrew God saved a single man, Noah, together with the other seven members of his family, plus representatives of all the species of animals and birds, from a cataclysmic flood with which he wished to exterminate all other life on Earth. It is described as 300 cubits long, or approximately 450 feet (137 m) - considerably longer than any wooden vessel ever built in historical times. According to Genesis 8:4 the Ark came to rest "in the mountains of Ararat."
The motivation of the searchers is summed up in this quotation from the Institute for Creation Research: "If the flood of Noah indeed wiped out the entire human race and its civilization, as the Bible teaches, then the Ark constitutes the one remaining major link to the pre-flood World. No significant artifact could ever be of greater antiquity or importance.... [with] tremendous potential impact on the creation-evolution (including theistic evolution) controversy." The writer might equally have added the implications for geology, cosmology, and almost every other branch of modern science.
The search has been largely American, supported by evangelical and millenarian churches, and sustained by ongoing popular interest expressed through faith-based magazines and lecture tours, videos, occasional (and often sensationalist) television specials, and, more recently, the Internet. Ark searchers have had little to guide them to the Ark beyond the Genesis mention of the "mountains of Ararat." By the middle of the 19th century, archaeologists had identified a 1st millennium BC kingdom and region of Urartu, contemporaneous with the Assyrian empire and the early kingdoms of Judah and Israel, and located in the mountains of present day eastern Turkey around Lake Van — roughly coterminous with the region known today as Kurdistan.
Delusion of Grandeur, grandiose delusion delusional conviction of one's own importance, power, or knowledge or that one is, or has a special relationship with, a deity or a famous person.
Megalomania (from the Greek word μεγαλομανία) is a psychopathological condition characterised by delusional fantasies of wealth, power, or omnipotence - often generally termed as delusions of grandeur. It includes an obsession with grandiose or extravagant things or actions. It is sometimes symptomatic of manic or paranoid disorders.
Megalomania is portrayed very often in fiction, usually as an affliction of supervillains. It is not always used in a strictly correct manner; for instance, it is common for a villain to be described as a "megalomaniac" if he demonstrates an obsession with gaining immense power and wealth (rather than a delusion that he already possesses these things). However, fiction also contains genuinely megalomaniacal supervillains (for instance, the villain in Flash Gordon Conquers the Universe), and the lesser sense of an obsession with grandiose or extravagant things or actions is a common supervillain trait.
A delusion is commonly defined as a fixed false belief and is used in everyday language to describe a belief that is either false, fanciful or derived from deception. In psychiatry, the definition is necessarily more precise and implies that the belief is pathological (the result of an illness or illness process).Delusions typically occur in the context of neurological or mental illness, although they are not tied to any particular disease and have been found to occur in the context of many pathological states (both physical and mental). However, they are of particular diagnostic importance in psychotic disorders and particularly in schizophrenia.
