Ararat - Noah's Ark

Ararat is chiefly famous as the place where, according to the Old Testament (I. Moses 8:4), Noah's Ark finally came to rest, a claim based on a highly questionable interpretation of the biblical text. To the Hebrews Ararat was the land north of the Assur Empire, so the biblical reference was probably to the Armenian area as a whole i.e. to the Assyrian Arardi/Uruartru (13th century B.C.) or Accadian Urartu (from about 900 B.C.). Because the name had survived only as the name of the mountain, the interpreters of the bible were almost certainly misled. The legend of Noah and the Great Flood can itself be traced back to Sumerian sources dating from the third millennium B.C.. In these a King Ziusudra of Shuruppak survives the Great Flood in an ark which, according to the Gilgamesh Epic (late second millennium B.C.), came to rest on a mountain called Nisir (in Iranian Kurdistan). Armenians believe its resting place was Süphan Dagi, the extinct volcano near Lake Van, while for Muslims it was Cudi Dagi, in Mardin Province, near Cizre. Here, in 1953, fragments of timber thought to be 6500 years old were discovered in alluvial sand. Although scholarly research has shown the Old Testament stories and the Gilgamesh Epic to be set much further south, over the last 140 years there have been several reported "sightings" of the Ark on Ararat. In 1833 a Turkish expedition reiterated, though without any new evidence, an old shepherds' tale of a wooden ship's prow protruding from the south glacier in summer. In 1892 the then Archdeacon of Jerusalem and Babylon put forward the thesis that the wrecked vessel does indeed lie hidden beneath the ice. In the First World War a Soviet air force officer called Roskovitzki claimed to have seen remains of a large shipwreck on the southern flank (photographs reportedly taken by a Soviet expedition are said to have been lost in the October Revolution). During the Second World War a Soviet and four American pilots reported similar sightings. In 1951 an American historian named Smith spent twelve days combing the mountain but found nothing. The Frenchman Navarra claims to have found remains of very old beams in a glaciated area. Since 1985 those searching for the Ark have concentrated their efforts on the col between Great and Little Ararat.