Mount Ararat #19

Mount Ararat is a mountainous region named in Genesis as the resting place of Noah’s Ark following the great flood. After the floodwaters had covered the earth and begun to recede, the biblical text states simply that “the ark rested in the seventh month, on the seventeenth day of the month, upon the mountains of Ararat” (Genesis 8:4). Noah waits still longer, sending out a raven and then a dove, before he finally removes the ark’s covering, sees that the ground is dry, and comes out to build an altar and offer sacrifices of thanksgiving (Genesis 8:6-20).

A Region, Not a Single Peak

The Hebrew word rendered “Ararat” names a kingdom or region rather than a single mountain — it corresponds to Urartu, a kingdom known from Assyrian records that was centered in the highlands of eastern Anatolia and the modern borderlands of Turkey, Armenia, and Iran. Genesis itself says only that the ark came down somewhere on “the mountains of Ararat,” plural, without naming a specific summit. Two other biblical references confirm that Ararat was understood as a real, named territory north of Mesopotamia rather than a mythical place: Jeremiah lists it among the kingdoms summoned against Babylon (Jeremiah 51:27), and 2 Kings and its parallel in Isaiah record that after the Assyrian king Sennacherib was murdered by his own sons, “they escaped into the land of Armenia” (2 Kings 19:37; Isaiah 37:38) — the King James translators’ rendering, in this instance, of the very same Hebrew place-name elsewhere translated “Ararat.”

Identification

Since at least the medieval period, popular tradition has fixed specifically on the tallest, snow-capped peak in the region, a dormant volcano near Turkey’s borders with Armenia and Iran now called Mount Ararat (Ağrı Dağı), as the ark’s landing site. Numerous expeditions over the centuries, some well-funded and widely publicized, have searched its slopes and glaciers for remains of the ark, and a handful of purported sightings and photographs have circulated, none of them verified by mainstream archaeology or geology. This precise identification with a single named peak is a later tradition rather than a claim made explicitly by the biblical text, which most precisely denotes only the broader Urartu highlands, and access to the mountain has also been complicated at times by its location in a sensitive military border zone. No archaeological discovery on the mountain has been conclusively verified, and the exact landing site, like much else about the ark’s geography, remains a matter of tradition and speculation rather than settled fact.