Ararat

Start with the word. אֲרָרַט occurs four times in the Old Testament: Genesis 8:4, 2 Kings 19:37, Isaiah 37:38 and Jeremiah 51:27. The site's own lexicon floor glosses it "Ararat (or rather Armenia)" at Strong's H780. In three of those four places it is plainly a territory, and Albert Barnes said so from the text alone in the nineteenth century, calling it a land forming part of Armenia and citing the same three verses. Genesis 8:4 puts the plural noun "mountains" in front of it. The text is describing a range inside a country. That country has been excavated. Ararat corresponds to Urartu, the Assyrian name for a kingdom whose own inscriptions call it Biainili. It stood from roughly 860 BC to about 590 BC in the highlands between Lake Van, Lake Urmia and Lake Sevan, with its capital from about 832 BC at Tushpa, under the citadel at modern Van. Its kings include Sarduri I, Ishpuini, Menua, Argishti I, Sarduri II, Rusa I, whom Sargon II of Assyria defeated in 714 BC, and Rusa II. Cimmerian and Scythian pressure wore it down and the Medes took Van about 590 BC. Excavated Urartian centres include Toprakkale near Van, Ayanis, Altıntepe, and Karmir Blur, ancient Teishebaini, dug by Boris Piotrovsky from 1939. Two things follow. Genesis 8:4 uses a place name that belongs to a real Iron Age kingdom, and Jeremiah 51:27 uses it as a live political name at exactly the period when that kingdom existed. The older attested landing tradition does not point at the famous cone. Berossus, a Babylonian priest writing about 281 BC, reported that part of the vessel survived at the mountain of the Cordyaeans and that people scraped bitumen off it for amulets. Josephus preserves that report in Antiquities 1.3.5-6, about AD 93, where he also writes that the Armenians call the site the Place of Descent and that the remains were shown there in his day. Targum Onkelos and the Syriac Peshitta both render Genesis 8:4 with Qardu rather than transliterating Ararat, and Barnes notes at Isaiah 37:38 that the Syriac, Chaldee and Arabic translators generally substitute that name. A third-century exegetical fragment carried under the name of Hippolytus has the ark nearing Mount Kardu; the drifting course and the fifty-one days it describes are that fragment's own tradition and not Genesis. Ephrem the Syrian wrote in the fourth century from Nisibis and Edessa, in the region next to Qardu, and stands in the same reading. The Islamic tradition names al-Jūdī at Sūra Hūd 11:44, and the ridge is called Cudi Dağı today. The cone tradition is the popular one and it is later on the attested record. Jerome's Vulgate reads montes Armeniae at Genesis 8:4, and the Nova Vulgata of the twentieth century restored montes Ararat. Identification with Masis becomes prominent in the medieval period and it is the reading Western Christian usage carried from the later Middle Ages onward. Josephus preserves a third name from Nicolaus of Damascus, a great mountain in Armenia over Minyas called Baris, on which one who was carried in an ark came ashore. Baris is neither Masis nor Qardu and this page keeps it separate rather than folding it into either. Jamieson, Fausset and Brown gave the two peaks in 1871 as 17,750 ft and 13,420 ft; modern survey gives 16,854 ft and 12,782 ft, and this page prints the modern figures as the measurement and the older ones as what a Victorian reader was told. The candidates are Masis, Qardu and Baris, with sources, dates and holders for each. The text names none of them and this page names none of them either. Four modern claims come up whenever this mountain does, and none of them is supported. Fernand Navarra, a French industrialist, recovered a hand-tooled oak beam from ice high on Greater Ararat in 1955 and further samples in 1969, and published the account as J'ai trouvé l'arche de Noé in 1956. Radiocarbon results from five laboratories placed the 1955 wood roughly 1,200 to 1,700 years old and the 1969 samples at about 1,350 years. Analyses by colour, density and degree of lignitisation were reported as suggesting about 5,000 years, but those are not dating methods with standing in the field and they are not weighed here as though they were. What is not disputed is that Navarra brought back worked wood from high on the mountain. What the radiocarbon says is that the wood is medieval. İlhan Durupınar of the Turkish Air Force noticed a boat-shaped feature near Doğubayazıt on a 1959 aerial survey. Ron Wyatt promoted it as the ark from 1977 and Turkey made the area a national park in 1986. David Fasold, who had promoted the site himself, later co-authored the study that closed it: Lorence G. Collins and David F. Fasold, "Bogus 'Noah's Ark' from Turkey Exposed as a Common Geologic Structure," Journal of Geoscience Education 44:4 (1996). Their finding is that the supposed metal-braced walls are natural concentrations of limonite and magnetite in steeply inclined layers in the limbs of a doubly plunging syncline, and that the boat shape is a known erosional form with other examples in eastern Turkey. Noah's Ark Ministries International announced on 25 April 2010 that an expedition had entered a wooden structure high on the mountain with specimens dated to about 4,800 years before present, and within days Randall Price, an evangelical archaeologist who had worked with the group, alleged publicly that the site had been staged with wood carried in from elsewhere. In both cases the strongest objections came from inside the believing community rather than from outside it. Separately, a US Air Force mission photographed a linear feature on the northwest edge of the western plateau on 17 June 1949; five frames were declassified in March 1995 after Freedom of Information Act requests by Porcher L. Taylor III, some analysts read the feature as too straight to be natural and others read it as ice and rock, and no expedition has reached it and identified it. That is the whole of what can be said. Mesopotamia tells this story too and the parallel is real. The Sumerian flood story and the Eridu Genesis carry the hero Ziusudra in the early second millennium BC. Atrahasis, Old Babylonian and around the eighteenth century BC, has the gods send the flood because human noise disturbs Enlil's sleep, and Enki warns the hero through a reed wall. Tablet XI of the Standard Babylonian Epic of Gilgamesh has Utnapishtim build a boat, survive, release a dove, a swallow and a raven, and offer a sacrifice; his boat grounds on Mount Nimush, read in older editions as Nisir and usually placed in the Zagros. George Smith of the British Museum read that tablet from Ashurbanipal's library at Nineveh and presented it in London on 3 December 1872. The differences are as sharp as the likenesses. Genesis gives a moral cause and a righteous man; Atrahasis gives noise and a god's irritation. Genesis has one God who judges and then binds Himself by covenant; the Mesopotamian gods quarrel, panic at their own flood, and swarm the sacrifice afterward. Three positions on the relationship hold the field. Literary dependence, where Genesis draws on the older Mesopotamian tradition, is the standard reading in the university field. Independent memory of a real event, where all these accounts remember the same flood and Genesis preserves it accurately while the others carry it in polytheistic dress, is held across conservative and evangelical scholarship and is the reading this site's tradition takes. A third position has both descending from a common source older than either. How far the water reached is a separate question and this page does not settle it. Genesis 7:19-20 says the waters covered all the high mountains under all the heavens and stood fifteen cubits above them, 7:23 says every living thing on the face of the earth was destroyed, and 2 Peter 3:6 says the world of that time perished in the flood. Jamieson, Fausset and Brown stated the traditional case plainly, that the language is not consistent with the theory of a partial deluge. A flood over the whole globe, a young earth and a chronology counted from the genealogies are widely held beliefs, presented here at full strength and not asserted as this site's position. Beside them stands a reading held by believing scholars including Bernard Ramm in The Christian View of Science and Scripture (1954), Davis A. Young in The Biblical Flood (1995) and Hugh Ross, that the universal language covers the whole world known to Noah. An evidence-based reading belongs on the page, and it may never be used to erase the traditional one. Genesis was written by Moses for Israel in the exodus to teach them who the LORD is, and it was not written to answer every question a modern reader brings to it. The documents closest in time to Genesis agree with the Hebrew rather than with either peak. The Genesis Apocryphon (1Q20), an Aramaic retelling from Cave 1 at Qumran in the first century BC, has the ark come to rest on one of the mountains of Hurarat, the Aramaic form of the same name, and later has Noah plant his vineyard on Mount Lubar. It was among the first seven scrolls recovered in 1947, published by Nahman Avigad and Yigael Yadin in 1956, with the standard commentary by Joseph A. Fitzmyer. The Book of Jubilees, second century BC and canonical in the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church, retells the Watchers, the flood and the covenant in chapters 5 to 7 and names the landing on the peak of Lubar, one of the mountains of Ararat. The Book of Giants, Aramaic and second to first century BC, survives in fragments from Qumran and tells of the giants born to the Watchers and their dreams of the judgment. Jubilees and the Book of Giants are not in this site's store, so they are named, dated and placed here and never quoted. Two details in this paragraph are flagged for checking against printed critical editions before any wider use: the exact column and line of the Genesis Apocryphon's landing notice in Fitzmyer's third edition, and the Jubilees chapter and verse for Lubar in a current edition of the Ge'ez text.