Mount Ararat (Ağrı Dağı)

Mount Ararat is a volcano in the far east of Turkey, close to its borders with Armenia, Azerbaijan and Iran, in the Armenian Highlands. Its main peak, Greater Ararat, the highest peak in Turkey, rises to 16,854 ft (5,137 m). Turks call it Ağrı Dağı, Armenians Masis, Kurds Çiyayê Agirî ("fiery mountain") and Persians Koh i Nuh, "the mountain of Noah". The name Ararat, the land's name reapplied to the peak, was once used for the mountain only by Western geographers, and is now its common name outside Turkey. It is one of the places proposed as the landing place of Noah's ark, which are discussed under Mountains of Ararat.

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What Genesis says

Genesis says that on the seventeenth day of the seventh month the ark "came to rest on the mountains of Ararat" (Genesis 8:4). In the account of the Flood, the tops of the mountains became visible on the first day of the tenth month (Genesis 8:5), and once the earth was dry Noah, his family and every living creature came out of the ark (Genesis 8:13-19). The plural, "mountains", points to a mountainous region rather than a single peak, and the Bible names no particular mountain. Genesis does not say that the ark survived or that it would ever be found.

In other passages Ararat is a land: after Sennacherib, king of Assyria from 705 to 681 BC, was killed by his sons Adrammelech and Sharezer, they "escaped to the land of Ararat" (2 Kings 19:37; Isaiah 37:38). In both verses the King James Version translates the name as "Armenia". Jeremiah lists Ararat among the kingdoms summoned to battle: "Ararat, Minni, and Ashkenaz" (Jeremiah 51:27). This land is Urartu, a kingdom centered on Lake Van that contended with Assyria for northern Mesopotamia and Syria from the ninth to the seventh century BC.

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The mountain

The mountain has two volcanic cones: Greater Ararat and, on its eastern flank, Little Ararat, which rises to 12,782 ft (3,896 m). It is a volcano that has been active within historical times, and its summit is capped with ice. In 1840 an earthquake, estimated at magnitude 7.4, struck the Ararat depression and killed 10,000 people. On 2 July 1840 a landslide from the summit, set off mainly by the earthquake and possibly also by an eruption, destroyed the village of Arkory and the monastery of St James (St Jakob).

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How this peak came to be identified as the ark's mountain

Josephus, in his Antiquities of the Jews, reports Berossus, a Babylonian priest and writer, as saying that part of the ark still remained "in Armenia, at the mountain of the Gordyaeans". Josephus also writes that the Armenians called the place where the ark was saved the "Place of Descent", and that the people living there still showed its remains. In Genesis 8:4 the Aramaic and Syriac translations name "Ture Kardu" where the Hebrew text has Ararat. Two Targums of Genesis 8:4, Onqelos and Pseudo-Jonathan, place the ark on "the mountains of Qardū", and the Qur'an says the ship came to rest on Judi (Surah Hud 11:44). A tradition placing the ark on Mount Judi (Cudi Dağı), above Cizre, goes back at least to the fifth century AD.

Among Armenians, the identification of Masis with the ark's mountain became widely held in the 11th to 12th centuries AD. In the 13th century the missionary William of Rubruck described two mountains, "the one greater than the other", in which, he was told, Noah's ark rests.

Randall Younker, in a 2021 article in the Journal of the Adventist Theological Society, argues that the Hebrews placed the ark's landing near this peak, because "mountains of Ararat" covered a smaller area when the biblical writer wrote. Younker grants that Mount Judi "has received the greater support among scholars".

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Climbers and ark searchers

Friedrich Parrot, who described the climb in his book Journey to Ararat, made the first recorded ascent of the mountain in 1829, with companions who included the Armenian deacon Khachatur Abovian, known as the "father of modern Armenian literature". Parrot wrote that "all the Armenians are firmly persuaded that Noah's ark remains to this very day on the top of Ararat". The American astronaut James Irwin climbed the mountain several times in search of the ark, leading an expedition in 1982 and trying again in 1983. His 1982 expedition was cut short by an accident on the climb.

On 25 April 2010 a joint Chinese and Turkish team, NAMI, announced at a press conference in Hong Kong a possible discovery of the ark's remains on the mountain. The team's press release stated that "wood specimens were dated as 4,800 years old". The claim was made to the world's media and met a largely skeptical response. A scientist writing for Answers in Genesis said he was "cautious and somewhat skeptical of bold and spectacular claims". One of the reported sightings is the "Ararat anomaly", a feature on the mountain seen in US government surveillance images. Porcher Taylor, of the University of Richmond, had some of those images released to him, and writes that he pressed the intelligence agencies for 13 years to declassify their satellite images of it. For all the reported sightings and claims, no scientific evidence that the ark lies on the mountain has been produced. In 2020 the Institute for Creation Research, a young-earth creationist organization, conceded that despite many expeditions the ark had not been found and looked unlikely to turn up.

The Durupınar site, a rock structure 17 miles (27 km) southwest of the mountain that some take to be the fossilized ark, is a separate proposal; a 2016 geological study found that its partial boat shape was formed by erosion of the bedrock by landslide debris.

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Armenia's mountain

Mount Ararat is the national symbol of Armenia, and Armenia's coat of arms shows it, with Noah's ark, at the center of its shield. It has been part of Turkey since the treaties of Moscow and Kars in 1921. From across the border it dominates the skyline of Yerevan, Armenia's capital.