Sacred mountains Examples of this would be the Hindu belief that Mount Kailas is the final resting place for the souls of the dead, as well as the large cemetery placed on Mount Koya-san. Sacred mountains can also provide an important piece of a culture's identity. For example, Messerli and Ives write, “The Armenian people regard Mount Ararat, a volcano in eastern Turkey believed to be the site of Noah's Ark in the Bible, to be a symbol of their natural and cultural identity”. As a result of the mountain's role as a part of a cultural identity, even people who do
Searches for Noah's Ark "mountains of Ararat" are to be found in the region then known as Armenia, roughly corresponding to Eastern Anatolia. Syrian tradition of the early centuries BC had a tradition of the ark landing at Mount Judi, where according to Josephus the remains of the ark were still shown in the 1st century BC. The location of the "Place of Descent" (αποβατηριον, i.e., "Nakhchivan") described by Josephus was some 100 km to the southeast of the peak now known as Mount Ararat, in what is today Iraqi Kurdistan. According to Jewish Rabbinic tradition, the Ark was looted in antiquity, the remains