Where did Noah's ark land?

Question

Accepted Answer

Genesis says only that “the ark rested … upon the mountains of Ararat”, and Ararat is not a mountain but a country: the Hebrew name of Urartu, the kingdom around Lake Van in the highlands of eastern Turkey, Armenia and north-western Iran, which the Assyrians fought from the ninth to the seventh century BC. The map point for the region stands on the peak now called Mount Ararat, about 1,200 km north-east of Jerusalem in a straight line. Which peak the ark rested on the Bible does not say, and the traditions differ: that volcanic cone, 5,137 m, is the usual answer since the Middle Ages, while the older sources point to Mount Judi (Cudi Dağı), far to the south near the Tigris. The name recurs: Sennacherib's sons, having killed him, “escaped into the land of Armenia”, which the Hebrew calls Ararat, and Jeremiah summons against Babylon “the kingdoms of Ararat, Minni, and Ashchenaz”, Urartu and its neighbours. The flood story of Mesopotamia, on the eleventh tablet of the Epic of Gilgamesh, lands the boat of Uta-napishti on Mount Nimush, which Assyrian annals place in the Zagros east of the Tigris; the Mesopotamian tradition, too, looked to the northern mountains in general. Josephus says that the Armenians called the place the Landing and still showed remains of the ark; he cites Berossus, who puts them at the mountain of the Cordyaeans, the Gordyaean hills by the upper Tigris where Judi stands, and Nicolaus of Damascus, who names a great mountain Baris in Armenia. Mount Judi, above Cizre in south-eastern Turkey, is the ark's mountain in the Qur'an, al-Judi, and in the Syriac and early Armenian writers, whose mountains of Qardu are the Gordyaean mountains of the Greeks; Jacob of Nisibis was said to have climbed it for a plank of the ark. Mount Ararat itself, Masis to the Armenians and Ağrı Dağı to the Turks, is first tied to Noah in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, and western travellers, William of Rubruck in 1254 and then Marco Polo, carried the identification to Europe. Modern searches for the ark on both mountains have found nothing that archaeology accepts. The map point marks the region, as Genesis names it, and takes neither peak as certain.