Where did Noah’s ark land?

What Genesis says

The ship rested in the seventh month, on the seventeenth day of the month, on Ararat’s mountains.

Notice the plural. Genesis names a mountain country, not a summit, and it does not say on which height the ship came to rest. Noah sees nothing around him for months afterward, until on the first day of the tenth month “the tops of the mountains were visible” (8:5).

Ararat is Urartu

Ararat appears three more times in the Bible, always as a land. After murdering their father Sennacherib in Nineveh, two Assyrian princes “escaped into the land of Ararat” (2 Kings 19:37; Isaiah 37:38). The King James Version of 1611, following the Greek, calls it “the land of Armenia.” Jeremiah summons it against Babylon:

Call together against her the kingdoms of Ararat, Minni, and Ashkenaz!

Assyrian records call the same country Urartu. It was an Iron Age kingdom that rose in the mid-9th century BC, with its capital, Tushpa, on the shore of Lake Van, and it was strongest in the 8th and 7th centuries BC. Its lands covered the Armenian highlands, now divided among eastern Turkey, Armenia and the northwest corner of Iran. The Hebrew consonants of Ararat match the Assyrian name; the vowels were added to the text many centuries later.

Mount Ararat

The mountain that carries the name today is the giant of that country: a dormant volcano 5,137 meters (16,854 feet) high, the highest peak in Turkey, near its borders with Armenia and Iran. Turks call it Ağrı Dağı and Armenians Masis; an old Persian name is Kuh-e Nuh, Noah’s mountain. Armenian writers began to place the landing on it around the 11th century, and medieval world maps drew the ark on its peak. From Yerevan, across the border, it fills the sky, and it stands with the ark on Armenia’s coat of arms. Nobody is recorded on the summit until 1829, when the naturalist Friedrich Parrot and the Armenian writer Khachatur Abovian climbed it.

Mount Judi

An older tradition looks south, to Cudi Dağı, a ridge near Cizre above the Tigris, close to Turkey’s borders with Syria and Iraq. The Aramaic Targums and the Syriac Bible put the landing in Qardu, the land the Greeks called Gordyene. Josephus, in the 1st century AD, quotes the Babylonian priest Berossus: remains of the ship could still be seen in the mountains of the Cordyaeans, and people scraped off its pitch to wear as amulets (Antiquities 1.93). The Quran says the ship came to rest on al-Judi (11:44), and Muslim geographers placed al-Judi on this ridge, where a monastery once marked the spot.

The ark hunters

Mount Ararat has drawn searchers for two centuries. In 1955 the French industrialist Fernand Navarra came down with a piece of wood; a sample later tested for James Irwin, the Apollo 15 astronaut who led his own expeditions on the mountain from 1982, came out about 1,500 years old. In 1959 a Turkish army captain, İlhan Durupınar, spotted a boat-shaped mound in an aerial photo about 29 kilometers south of the summit; geologists have shown it is a natural fold in the rock. No trace of the ark has ever been verified. Genesis moves straight on to the window, the raven and the dove. For the months Noah spent waiting up there, see how long Noah was on the ark.