Raising the land from the elevation data…

About this view

What the view shows

This is the land from Mount Judi, above the Tigris in the south, to Mount Aragats in the north, about 403 km from south to north and 268 km across, built from measured heights. Lake Van lies near the middle, and Mount Ararat stands in the north-east above the plain of the Aras. We have drawn no modern borders, roads or towns on it.

Genesis 8:4 says the ark rested “upon the mountains of Ararat”. In the Bible, Ararat is the name of a land, the kingdom the Assyrians called Urartu, and Genesis names no single peak in it. Each place along the bottom is either somewhere people have put the ark’s resting place or a church that keeps the story. The last one, Which mountain?, sets them side by side and says who holds to each, without choosing between them.

The heights are drawn twice as tall as they are, so that you can read the shape of the land, and a note in the corner of the view says so. At Khor Virap, See it from the plain shows the land at true scale, seen from the plain below the monastery.

From Scripture
We quote Genesis 8:4, 2 Kings 19:37 and Jeremiah 51:27 in the words of the King James Version.
From the record
Here we report what a source says or what has survived. That covers the Quran’s verse, Josephus, the Armenian Church’s own tellings, Answers in Genesis, the geologists, the 2026 drilling team and the encyclopaedias, and every height and distance we read from the elevation data.
Drawn
We traced the lands of Urartu from a historian’s list, and the Tigris and the Aras along the lowest ground. We also drew or modelled the surface of the lake, the snow, the stretched heights and the cross-section through Durupınar.
Our reading
Three things are our own interpretation, and someone could dispute them. We take the Cordyaeans whom Josephus names to be the people of the hill country where later writers put Mount Judi, and we hold that one story has pointed to two mountains. The wording of each place’s note is ours as well.

How we built the land

The ground comes from two grids of heights in the Terrain Tiles. For the whole land we used zoom level 9, which gives a height about every 120 m, and for the Ararat massif, Durupınar and Khor Virap we used zoom level 11, a height about every 60 m. The page decodes those stored heights, raises a surface from them and shades it as if the light came from the north-west. At this spacing the summits come out smoothed, so the data gives Greater Ararat as 5,106 m, lower than its published height.

Lake Van is drawn as the flat surface joined to a point in the lake, at the height the data gives it. We traced the Tigris and the Aras along the lowest ground between points we chose on each river, rather than taking them from a map. The snow is painted above 4,300 m, the height Britannica says the snow line retreats to by the end of summer.

For the lands of Urartu we followed Paul Zimansky’s list of the areas “most certainly under the Urartian central government” and those it “probably” ruled. Zimansky warns that a frontier line misrepresents the kingdom, which he calls “a terrestrial archipelago” of farmland among mountains, so we drew each area as an island of low ground. The height that bounds each island is our choice, not his: 1,900 m for the Lake Van basin, 1,150 m for the upper Aras and the plain of Erevan, 1,750 m for the Murat valley and 1,000 m for the middle Aras.

Every distance is a straight line over the curved earth. The angle at which the summit stands above the horizon takes that curve into account, along with the usual bending of light near the ground.

How Christians read the flood

Christians who agree that Genesis is Scripture still read the flood in different ways, and how they read it shapes the question of where the ark landed. We give each reading in its own words.

Answers in Genesis

It reads the flood as covering the whole earth.

Its geologist Andrew Snelling writes that “we do not need to find Noah’s ark to be convinced that the global flood really occurred.” He argues against Durupınar from the calendar of Genesis 8. The ark landed “on the mountains of Ararat”, and “it was not for another 74 days that the tops of surrounding mountains were seen”, yet the formation “is found in a 1000-meter (~3280 feet) deep valley on the southern slopes of Mount Ararat.”

Ragioni per credere

It reads the flood as taking all humanity without covering the globe.

In its own words, the flood “wiped out all humanity and associated animals, save those on Noah’s ark, without covering the globe.”

BioLogos

It reads the story as a real event retold in Israel’s theology, with no global flood.

It calls the story “an interpretation of an actual historical event retold in the rhetoric and theology of ancient Israel.”

The Catholic New American Bible notes

They find two sources woven into one story and ask that it be read as one story.

The notes ask readers to take the account “as a coherent narrative”, and the note on Genesis 8:4 says, “There is no Mount Ararat in the Bible.”

Moving around

Step through the places with Back and Next, under the land. Drag the land to turn it, and scroll or pinch to come closer.

1a 8 the places, in order ←→ the previous or next place 0back to the place’s own view after you have dragged the land Nlabels on or off; H hides everything but the land

Sources and licences

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