Ararat: An Addendum

Mount Ararat (Agirî)/ by Sevan Nişanyan

Note: Sevan Nişanyan is a prominent Turkish intellectual, a hotelier, and a writer of several guide books to Turkey. In the following short article, which can be considered an Addendum to my post, The Five-Thousand Meter Fantasy, he fills in some interesting facts about the origin of Ararat's Turkish name, Ağrı Dağı. Above all, he talks about the most irrational thing about Ararat; namely, that its name means "the mountain of pain." Obviously he's correct; it must be a Turkified version of a Kurdish name. For more about Urartu, simply do a Google search.

This article was sent to me by Zerkes, who blogs at zerkesorg.blogspot.com. He also very kindly provided the translation. The original was in the Kurdistan Post. I have altered some of the syntax, as well as adding notes.

How can there be a mountain named Ağrı (Pain) for God's sake? What pain, whose pain? Agir means "fire" in Kurdish. Agirî is the adjective form [of Agir] making it [Mount Ararat] the "mountain of fire." It's obvious the Turkish name came from this word. The most recent volcanic activity [in Mount Ararat] was recorded in 1840, when it emitted smoke. But I couldn't find out when the name [Agirî] was used first.

The mountain's Armenian name is not Ararat, but Masis. Ararat is a common Hebrew name in the Torah for the mountain-country today called "Eastern Anatolia". In Genesis 8:4 it's written that Noah's Ark, landed on the MOUNTAINS of Ararat: "And the ark rested in the seventh month, on the seventeenth day of the month, upon the mountains of Ararat." Notice that it is plural, not singular [MountainS]. Later on, they reasoned and decided that Agri/Masis would be the one [where Noah's Ark landed] and they named the mountain as Ararat. However, Mount Cudi near Sirnak [Sirnex] is more likely [for the Ark to land]. When one looks north from the Middle East, the first mountain of the mountain-country is Cudi. If Euphrates [Ferat] and Tigris [Dicle] flood high up to the sky and you manage to swim, logically, you will find yourself on top of Cudi.

Ararat's Assyrian name is Urart, and with normative suffix -u, it becomes Urartu. The name Urartu is preferred in the scientific community because Henry Layard who deciphered the Assyrian Language and Archibald Sayce who read the Van [Wan] inscriptions used this name. However, using Ararat instead of Cudi is equally correct. Both of them are exonyms; just like us [Turkish speaking individuals] calling Deutsch Alman and Hungarians calling us Német, all "names given by outsiders". At that time, the peoples who lived in Van [Wan] and governed the whole mountain country named themselves as Khald* or Xald and their country as Nairi** or Bianili [beyanî/biyanî in Kurdish means "foreign" or "foreigner"]. Their neighbors in the south, Sami, called
the country Ararat/Urartu. Why they used that name, nobody knows.

Conclusion: A) A lot peoples passed through that country, B) they were not all Turkish, C) they were not all Kurdish or Armenian either. One feels the need to be a little modest when he puts things into the perspective of three thousand years.

[* Khaldi was the name of their principal deity. **Lake Van, to the Urartians, was called the Sea of Nairi. --G.T.]