The ancients, however, attached a peculiar sacred ness to the tops of high mountains, and hence the belief was early propagated that the ark must have rested on some such lofty eminence. The earliest tradition fixed on one of the chain of mountains which separate Armenia on the south from Mesopo tamia, and which, as they also inclose Kurdistan, the land of the Kurds, obtained the name of the Kardu, or Carduchian range, corrupted into Gordian and Cordyxan. This opinion prevailed among the Chaldans, if we may rely on the testimony of Berosus as quoted by Josephus i. 3, 6) : It is said there is still some part of the ship in Armenia, at the mountain of the Cordyans, and that people carry off pieces of the bitumen, which they use as amulets.' The same is reported by Abydenus (in Euseb. Prop. ix. 4), who says they employed the wood of the vessel against diseases. Hence we are prepared to find the tradi tion adopted by the Chaldee paraphrases, as well as by the Syriac translators and commentators, and all the Syrian churches. In the three texts where Ararat' occurs, the Targ.um of Onkelos has rrip and, according to Buxtorf, the term Kardyan' was. in Chaldee synonymous with 'Armenian.' At Gen. viii. 4, the Arabic of Erpenius has Jibal-el-Karud (the Mountain of the Kurds), which is likewise found in the Book of Adam' of the Zabteans. For other proofs that this was the prevalent opinion among the Eastern churches, the reader may consult Eutychius, (Annals), and Epiphanius (Hores. i8). It was no doubt from this source that it was borrowed by Mahomet, who in his Koran (xi. 46) says, The ark rested on the mountain Al-Judi.' That name was probably a corruption of Giordi, e. Gordicean (the designation given to the entire range), but afterwards applied to the special locality where the ark was supposed to have rested. This is on a mountain a little to the east of Jezirah ibn Omar (the ancient Bezabde) on the Tigris. At the foot of the mountain there was a village called Kaiya Thaminiv, i. e., the Village of the Eighty—that being the number (and not eight) saved from the flood according to the Mohammedan belief. The historian Elmacin mentions that the emperor Hera clius went up, and visited this as the place of the ark.' Here, or in the neighbourhood, was once a famous Nestorian monastery, the Monastery of the Ark,' destroyed by lightning in A. D. 776. The credulous Jew, Benjamin of Tndela, says that a mosque was built at Mount Judi, of the remains . of the ark,' by the Khalif Omar. Macdonald Kinneir, in describing his journey from Jezirah along the left bank of the Tigris to Nahr Van, says, We had a chain of mountains running parallel with the road on the left hand. This range is called the Juda Dag (z1 e., mountain) by the Turks, and one of the inhabitants of Nahr Van assured me that he had frequently seen the remains of Noah's ark on a lofty peak behind that villiage.' (Comp. Rich's Kurdistan, vol. ii. p. 124.) A French savant, Eugene Bore, who lately visited those parts, says the Mohammedan dervishes still maintain here a perpetually burning lamp in an oratory. (Revue Francaise, vol. xii. ; or the Semen? of October 2, 1839.) After the disappearance of the Nestorian monas tery, the tradition which fixed the site of the ark on Mount Judi appears to have declined in credit, or been chiefly confined to Mohammetans, and gave place (at least among the Christians of the West) to that which now obtains, and according to which the ark rested on a great mountain in the north of Armenia—to which (so strongly did the idea take hold of the popular belief) was, in course of time, given the very name of Ararat, as if no doubt could be entertained that it was the Ararat of Scripture. We have seen, however, that in the Bible Ararat is nowhere the name of a mountain, and by the native Armenians the mountain in question was never so designated ; it is by them called Mdcis, and by the Turks Aghur-dagh, i. e., ' The Heavy or Great Mountain.' The Vulgate and Jerome indeed, render Ararat by ' Armenia,' but they do not particularize any one mountain. Still there is no doubt of the antiquity of the tra dition of this being (as it is sometimes termed) the Mother of the World.' The Persians call it Kuhi Nuch, 'Noah's Mountain.' The Armenian etymology of the name of the city of Nakhchevan (which lies east of it) is said to be `first place of descent or lodging,' being regarded as the place where Noah resided after descending from the mount. It is mentioned by Josephus under a Greek name of similar import, viz. 'Aroga T .,pLOP, and by Ptolemy as Na.mana.
The mountain thus known to Europeans as Ararat consists of two immense conical elevations (one peak considerably lower than the other), towering in massive and majestic grandeur from the valley of the Aras, the ancient Araxes. Smith and Dwight give its position N. 57° W. of Nakh chevan, and S. 25° W. of Erivan (Researches in Armenia, p. 267); and remark, in describing it before the recent earthquake, that in no part of the world had they seen any mountain whose im posing appearance could plead half so powerfully as this a claim to the honour of having once been the stepping-stone between the old world and the new. ' It appeared,' says Ker Porter, ' as if the hugest mountains of the world had been piled upon each other to form this one sublime immensity of earth and rocks and snow. The icy peaks of its double heads rose majestically into the clear and cloudless heavens ; the sun blazed bright upon them, and the reflection sent forth a dazzling radiance equal to other suns. My eye, not able to rest for any length of time upon the blinding glory of its summits, wandered down the apparently interminable sides, till I could no longer trace their vast lines in the mists of the horizon; when an irrepressible impulse immediately carrying my eye upwards, again refixed my gaze upon the awful glare of Ararat.' To the same effect Monier writes : —` Nothing can be more beautiful than its shape, more awful than its height. All the surrounding mountains sink into insignificance when compared to it. It is perfect in all its parts ; no hard rugged feature, no unnatural prominences, everything is in harmony, and all combines to render it one of the sublimest objects in nature.' Several attempts had been made to reach the top of Ararat, but few persons had got beyond the limit of perpetual snow. The French traveller Tournefort, in the year 1700, long persevered in the face of many difficulties, but was foiled in the end. Between thirty and forty years ago the Pasha of Bayazeed undertook the ascent with no better success. The honour was reserved to a German, Dr. Parrot, in the employment of Russia, who, in his Reise zum Ararat (Journey to Ararat) gives the following particulars The summit of the Great Ararat is in 39° 42' north lat., and 61° 55' east long. from Ferro. Its perpendicular height is 16,254 Paris feet above the level of the sea, and 13,350 above the plain of the Araxes. The Little Ararat is 12,284 Paris feet above the sea, and 9561 above the plain of the Araxes.' After he and his party had failed in two attempts to ascend, the third was successful, and on the 27th September (o. s.), 1829, they stood on the summit of Mount Ararat. It was a slightly convex, almost circular platform, about 200 Paris feet in diameter, com posed of eternal ice, unbroken by a rock or stone : on account of the immense distances, nothing could be seen distinctly. The mountain was, it is said, afterwards ascended by a Mr. Antonomoff, but the fact both of his and Parrot's having reached the top is stoutly denied by the natives, and especially by the inmates of the neighbouring convent of Echmiadzin, who have a firm persuasion that in order to preserve the ark no one is permitted to approach it. This is based on the tradition that a monk, who once made the attempt, was, when asleep from exhaustion, unconsciously carried down to the point whence he had started; but at last, as the reward of his fruitless exertions, an angel was sent to him with a piece of the ark, which is pre served as the most valuable relic in the cathedral of Echmiadzin.
Since the memorable ascent of Dr. Parrot, Ararat has been the scene of a fearful calamity. An earthquake, which in a few moments changed the entire aspect of the country, commenced on the loth of June (o. s.), 1840, and continued, at intervals, until the rat of September, Traces of fissures and landslips have been left on the surface of the earth, which the eye of the scientific observer will recognise after many ages. The destruction of houses and other property in a wide tract of country around was very great ; fortunately, the earthquake having happened during the day, the loss of lives did not exceed fifty. The scene of greatest devas tation was in the narrow valley of Akorhi, where the masses of rock, ice, and snow, detached from the summit of Ararat and its lateral points, were thrown at one single bound from a height of 6000 feet to the bottom of the valley, where they lay scattered over an extent of several miles. See Major Voskoboinikof's Report, in the Athenawm for 1841, p. 157).—N. M.