Mount Ararat that the biblical passage implies that the ark rested upon a "mountain in the district which the Hebrews knew as Ararat, or Armenia", wrote in an 1878 article for the Royal Geographical Society that the biblical writer must have had Mt. Ararat in mind because it is so "very much higher, more conspicuous, and more majestic than any other summit in Armenia." During his visit to Armenia in 2001 Pope John Paul II declared in his homily in Yerevan's St. Gregory the Illuminator Cathedral: "We are close to Mount Ararat, where tradition says that the Ark of Noah came to
Ancient Near East Bronze Age until 585 BC. The Kingdom of Urartu was located in the mountainous plateau between Asia Minor, the Iranian Plateau, Mesopotamia, and the Caucasus mountains, later known as the Armenian Highland, and it centered on Lake Van (present-day eastern Turkey). The name corresponds to the Biblical "Ararat". The term Neo-Babylonian Empire refers to Babylonia under the rule of the 11th ("Chaldean") dynasty, from the revolt of Nabopolassar in 623 BC until the invasion of Cyrus the Great in 539 BC (Although the last ruler of Babylonia (Nabonidus) was in fact from the Assyrian city of Harran and not Chaldean),