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.