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.
Mount Ararat "largely because it would have been the first peak to emerge from the receding flood waters." Ararat is where the European tradition and most of Western Christianity place the landing of Noah's Ark. According to Spencer and Lienard the tradition "seems to be well entrenched in the Christian world." A 1722 biblical dictionary by Austin Calmet and the 1871 Jamieson-Fausset-Brown Bible Commentary both point to Mount Ararat as the place where tradition says the ark rested. American missionary H. G. O. Dwight wrote in 1856 that it is "the general opinion of the learned in Europe." James Bryce, while admitting