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
Mount Ararat agreed to cede the area to Turkey in a territorial exchange. The Iran-Turkey boundary skirts east of Lesser Ararat, the lower peak of the Ararat massif. Ararat (sometimes "Ararad") is the Greek version of the Hebrew spelling (אֲרָרָט; "'RRṬ") of the name Urartu, a kingdom that existed in the Armenian plateau in the 9th–6th centuries BC. German orientalist and Bible critic Wilhelm Gesenius speculated that the word "Ararat" came from the Sanskrit word "Arjanwartah", meaning "holy ground." Some Armenian historians, such as , link the origin of the word "Ararat" to the root of the endonym of the indigenous peoples