Mt. Ararat, the traditional landing place of Noah’s Ark, is located in eastern Turkey near the Armenian and Iranian borders. The summit of Ararat is 16,946 feet (5,165 meters) above sea level. Also called Agri Dagi, Ararat is a dormant volcano and its last eruption was in 1840. Classical writers considered Ararat impossible to scale and the first known ascent was by a German in 1829. Over the years various groups have explored Ararat in the hopes of finding remains of Noah's Ark. Both Josephus in about 70 AD and Marco Polo about 1300 AD mention the Ark’s existence on the mountain, but their reports are based on others' accounts. The story of Noah's Ark told in the Old Testament is a reworking of an earlier Babylonian myth recorded in the Gilgamesh Epic, itself based on a devastating flood in the Euphrates River basin. The Biblical references to a great flood and Noah’s Ark have remarkable parallels in many other archaic myths found around the world. These myths of great floods devastating human civilization are not the imaginative creations of ancient people but are instead reports, embellished and altered over the millennia, of real events.

Mt. Ararat on the Sacred Sites Website.

Written by  Martin Gray.

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