Mount Ararat rest." Patriarch Kirill of Moscow, the head of the Russian Orthodox Church, also mentioned Mount Ararat as the resting place of Noah's Ark in his speech at the Etchmiadzin Cathedral during his visit to Armenia in 2010. Those critical of this view point out that Ararat was the name of the country, not the mountain, at the time when Genesis was written. Arnold wrote in his 2008 Genesis commentary, "The location 'on the mountains' of Ararat indicates not a specific mountain by that name, but rather the mountainous region of the land of Ararat." Ararat has traditionally been the main
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