Mountains of Ararat Mountains of Ararat In the Book of Genesis, the mountains of Ararat (Biblical Hebrew , Tiberian "", Septuagint: ) is the term used to designate the region in which Noah's Ark comes to rest after the Great Flood. It corresponds to ancient Assyrian Urartu, an exonym for the Kingdom of Van. Citing historians Berossus, Hieronymus the Egyptian, Mnaseas, and Nicolaus of Damascus, Josephus writes in his "Antiquities of the Jews" that "[t]he ark rested on the top of a certain mountain in Armenia, . . . over Minyas, called Baris." Likewise, in the Latin Vulgate, Jerome translates Genesis 8:4 to
Mount Ararat "largely because it would have been the first peak to emerge from the receding flood waters." Ararat is where the European tradition and most of Western Christianity place the landing of Noah's Ark. According to Spencer and Lienard the tradition "seems to be well entrenched in the Christian world." A 1722 biblical dictionary by Austin Calmet and the 1871 Jamieson-Fausset-Brown Bible Commentary both point to Mount Ararat as the place where tradition says the ark rested. American missionary H. G. O. Dwight wrote in 1856 that it is "the general opinion of the learned in Europe." James Bryce, while admitting