Mount Ararat H. F. B. Lynch (1893)—climbed the mountain. The first winter climb was by Turkish alpinist Bozkurt Ergör, the former president of the Turkish Mountaineering Federation, who climbed the peak on 21 February 1970. According to the fourth verse of the eighth chapter of the Book of Genesis (Genesis 8:4), following a flood, Noah's Ark landed on the "mountains of Ararat" (Biblical , "hare ararat"). Most historians and Bible scholars agree that "Ararat" is the Hebrew name of Urartu, the geographic predecessor of Armenia and referred to the wider region at the time and not the mountain today known as Ararat.
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