Ararat

The Hebrew name Ăraraṭ, in the Bible a northern country, not a single mountain. The ark comes to rest “on the mountains of Ararat” (Genesis 8:4); the assassins of Sennacherib flee to “the land of Ararat” (2 Kings 19:37); and Jeremiah summons “the kingdoms of Ararat, Minni, and Ashkenaz” against Babylon, listing it among real political powers of the north. In every case Ararat is the Armenian highland as a region, the same land the Assyrians fought as Urarṭu.

The name is in fact the Hebrew form of Urarṭu itself, the great kingdom north of Assyria, whose own people called it Biainili. The Hebrew preserves the Assyrian toponym, with the loss of the initial vowel and a softening of the consonants, and applies it as the Bible’s name for the whole region. The famous narrowing, from a kingdom spanning the highland to the single snow-capped cone now called Mount Ararat, came only with later tradition; in the Hebrew, the resting place of the ark is not a peak but a country, the lost kingdom of Urarṭu under another spelling.

The Greek form Ararát, the transliteration in the Septuagint of the Hebrew Ăraraṭ. The translators of Genesis kept the name rather than rendering it, so that the ark in the Greek Bible rests “on the mountains, tà órē tà Ararát,” carrying the Hebrew toponym unchanged into Greek. The same name stands in the Greek Jeremiah among the kingdoms called against Babylon.

The Septuagint’s choice mattered for what came after. Where the Greek Bible kept Ararát, the Latin Vulgate would translate the same phrase as “the mountains of Armenia,” identifying the biblical region with the country the Romans knew, and the Syriac Peshitta would substitute the Gordyaean mountains of Qardū. The Greek thus stands at the head of one of three divergent traditions about where the ark landed, the one that preserved the original name intact and passed Ararat, untranslated, to every later reader of the Greek scriptures.

The Syriac name Qardū, the mountains on which the Peshitta sets the resting of the ark, rendering the Hebrew “mountains of Ararat” not by the name Ararat but by Qardū, the Gordyaean range of the upper Tigris south of Lake Van, the Carduchian country of the Greeks and the home of the Kurds. The Syriac tradition, native to the region, located the landing not on the distant northern peak but on the nearer mountains its own people knew.

Qardū is the third answer to the question the name Ararat left open. The Hebrew and Greek kept Ararat; the Latin made it Armenia; the Syriac placed the ark on Qardū; and the Quran, following a related tradition, on al-Jūdī, a peak in the same Gordyaean range. Four scriptural traditions thus disagree on which mountains held the ark, and the Syriac preserves the local claim, the range visible from the Mesopotamian plain rather than the remote cone that later convention would crown with the biblical name.

The Latin Ararat survives by half a translator’s decision. Jerome, making the Vulgate at the end of the fourth century, met the Hebrew Ăraraṭ three times and split it: in Jeremiah’s summons of the northern kingdoms he transliterated, regna Ararat, but in the flood narrative and the murder of Sennacherib he translated, so that the ark of the Latin Bible comes to rest super montes Armeniae, on the mountains of Armenia, and the assassins flee to the land of the Armenians. Jerome knew, as the scholarship of his day did, that Ararat meant the old northern kingdom whose land was now Armenia, and he modernized the geography where the story seemed to want a real place.

The consequence is one of the atlas’s quietest ironies. Because Jerome translated Genesis, the medieval Latin West grew up with an ark that landed in “Armenia,” no Ararat in the verse at all; the name’s modern fame, and its eventual attachment to the great volcano this page maps, flowed through other channels, the Hebrew text and its vernacular translations, until “Mount Ararat” became one of the most recognized mountain names on earth. The Latin entry is thus the family’s near-miss: the one great transmission language that chose, at the crucial verse, to explain the name instead of passing it on, and so let the ark’s mountain slip through its fingers.

Masis is the Armenian name for the great peak the rest of the world calls Mount Ararat, attested from the earliest Armenian literature. The historian Movsēs Xorenacʿi tells of the mountain in his account of the national origins, and in the Armenian tradition Masis is the towering double-coned summit that dominates the plain of the Araxes, the heart of the Armenian homeland. The name is wholly distinct from Ararat: Armenians did not, until modern usage borrowed it back, call their mountain by the biblical word, and folk etymology instead derived Masis from a legendary king Amasia.

This entry is the local counterpoint to the biblical Ararat that names the same highland. Where the Hebrew Araraṭ is the Assyrian kingdom-name Urarṭu narrowed from a country onto a peak, Masis is the mountain’s name in the mouths of the people who actually live beneath it, owing nothing to the Mesopotamian or biblical traditions. The two names for one mountain, the imported Ararat and the native Masis, sit beside each other much as Armenia’s own Haykʿ sits beside the world’s Armenia: the inside name and the outside name, rarely the same word.

The Arabic geographers’ name for the great mountain of Armenia, paired with a diminutive for its companion: al-Ḥārith the greater peak and al-Ḥuwayrith the lesser, the pairing standardly identified with Greater and Lesser Ararat. Al-Qazwīnī’s cosmography reports the two mountains of Armenia that no one is able to climb, and Ibn al-Faqīh attaches to them the legend of the thousand cities of the Araxes valley destroyed for rejecting their prophet, with the two peaks hurled there from al-Ṭāʾif. The names themselves are ordinary Arab personal names, a man’s name and its diminutive, as if the two summits were an elder brother and a younger.

What is missing from the Arabic name is the flood. Every biblical tradition on this page bends toward the ark; the Qurʾan sets the ark’s landfall not here but on al-Jūdī, far to the south, the same southward displacement the Syriac Qardū entry records. Relieved of scripture, Ararat needed no sacred name in Arabic and received a human one instead. The mountain that Genesis made the most famous landfall on earth carries, in the language of the geographers who could see it from the caravan roads, a name with no flood in it at all.