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
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