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
Urartu Urartu Urartu (), which corresponds to the biblical "mountains of Ararat", is the name of a geographical region commonly used as the exonym for the Iron Age kingdom also known by the modern rendition of its endonym, the Kingdom of Van, centered around Lake Van in the historic Armenian Highlands (present day eastern Anatolia). The written language that the kingdom's political elite used is referred to as "Urartian", which appears in cuneiform inscriptions in Armenia and eastern Turkey. It is unknown what language was spoken by the peoples of Urartu at the time of the existence of the kingdom, but