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
Mount Ararat Indeed, the phrase is translated as "mountains of Armenia" ("montes Armeniae") in the Vulgate, the fourth century Latin translation of the Bible. Nevertheless, Mount Ararat is considered the traditional site of the resting place of Noah's Ark. It is therefore called a biblical mountain. Mount Ararat has been associated with the Genesis flood story since the 11–12th centuries. The local Armenian population began to identify it as the ark's landing place during those centuries. F. C. Conybeare wrote that the mountain was "a center and focus of pagan myths and cults [...] and it was only in the eleventh century,