James Bryce, 1st Viscount Bryce
1877
NOTE |
James Bryce (1838-1922) was a British academic and politician whose many accomplishments made him a well-regarded international figure. He also tried to tell an amusing story about his 1876 ascent of Mt. Ararat in Turkey that ended up convincing many, especially in the United States, that he had discovered proof of Noah’s Ark. To tell the story, I have excerpted relevant section from the very long description of his ascent in his 1877 book Transcaucasia and Ararat, to which I have appended explanatory press clippings.
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Ascent of Mount Ararat.—In September, 1876, Mr. J. Bryce made the ascent of the greater peak of Mount Ararat, and at a recent meeting of the London Geographical Society gave an account of the feat. Mount Ararat is situated nearly in the centre of the region known as Armenia—a territory divided between three empires, and lying round the sources and upper courses of the Araxes, Euphrates, and Tigris. The mass of Ararat is about twenty-five miles long from northwest to southeast, and from twelve to fourteen miles wide. It consists of two peaks joined together by a sort of neck. The greater peak, Great Ararat, rises 17,000 feet above sea-level, and the lesser peak, Little Ararat, 12,800 feet; both are of volcanic origin. Mr. Bryce began the ascent from a small Tartar village on the northeastern face of Great Ararat, being accompanied by a friend and two guides, a Cossack and a Kurd. At the height of about 11,500 feet Mr. Bryce’s friend abandoned the attempt to reach the summit. The remainder of the climb had to be made over beds of snow, and over bare, loose, broken stones; the latter course Mr. Bryce chose. At the height of 15,000 feet the Cossack and the Kurd refused to go any farther, so he was compelled to journey alone. The last part of the ascent was upon a slope of rotten rocks, rather soft and sulphurous, which crumbled under his feet, adding greatly to his fatigue. Near the top of this slope Mr. Bryce could just discern the edges of the plateau of snow, and hanging on this a curtain of clouds. After ascending into these clouds two strong blasts of wind swept them away, and then a wonderfully grand and extensive view lay before him. The Caucasus could be seen to the north, distant about 250 miles; the highest ranges of mountains round Erzeroum to the west; the mountains of Assyria, and South Kurdistan, the mountains in the direction of Nineveh, and the valley in the direction of the Zab, to the south; to the east, the enormous mountain-masses in Persia, and north as far as the Caspian. But in his fondest anticipation Mr. Bryce was doomed to a sad disappointment: he could find no fragment of Noah’s ark!
The Popular Science Monthly 13 (July 1878), 381. |
TRANSCAUCASIA AND ARARAT
CHAPTER VI.
ARARAT.
None of the native peoples that behold from the surrounding plains and valleys the silvery crest of Ararat know it by that name. The Armenians call it Massis, or Massis Ljarn (ljarn meaning “mountain”), a name which we may connect with the Masius of Strabo (though his description of that mountain does not suit ours); the Tatars and Turks, Aghri Dagh, which is interpreted as meaning “curved mountain,” or “painful mountain”; the Persians, Koh i Nuh, “the mountain of Noah,” or, according to Sir John Chardin, Sahat Toppin, which he interprets to mean “the Happy Hillock.” It has received among geographers the name of Ararat, which the Russian use is now beginning to spread in the neighbourhood, and which the ecclesiastics at Etchmiadzin have taken as the title of a monthly magazine they publish, only from its identification with the Biblical mountain of the Ark, an identification whose history is curious.
The only topographical reference in the Scripture narrative of the Flood is to be found in the words, Genesis viii. 4, “In the seventh month, on the seventeenth day of the month,” “the ark rested upon the mountains of Ararat,” which may be taken as equivalent to “on a mountain of (or in) Ararat.” The word Ararat is used in three, or rather two, other places in Scripture. One is in 2 Kings xix. 37, and the parallel passage in Isaiah xxxvii. 38, where it is said of the sons of Sennacherib, who had just murdered their father, that “they escaped into the land of Ararat,” rendered in our version, and in the Septuagint, “Armenia.” The other is in Jeremiah li. 27, “Call together against her” (i. e. Babylon) “the kingdoms of Ararat, Minni, and Ashchenaz.” The question then is, what does this Ararat denote? Clearly the Alexandrian translators took it for Armenia; so does the Vulgate when it renders in Genesis viii. 4 the words which we translate, “on the mountains of Ararat,” by “super montes Armeniae.” This narrows it a little, and St. Jerome himself helps us to narrow it still further when, in his commentary on Isaiah xxxvii. 38, he says that “Ararat means the plain of the middle Araxes, which lies at the foot of the great mountain Taurus.” Besides, Moses of Chorene, the well-known Armenian historian of the fifth century, speaks of a province or district he calls Ajrarat, lying on the Araxes, and which some have tried to identify with the name of the Alarodians in Herodotus. Now as our modern Mount Ararat, Aghri Dagh, is by far the highest and most conspicuous mountain of that region, no one who looked at it, already knowing the story of the Flood, could doubt that it was the first part of the dry land to appear as the waters dried up, so much does it rise above all its neighbours.
The identification, therefore, is natural enough: what it is of more consequence to determine is how early it took place; for as there is little or no trace of an independent local tradition of the Flood, we may assume the identification to rest entirely on the use of the name Ararat in the Hebrew narrative. Josephus (Ant. Jud. bk. i. ch. iii.) says that the Armenians called the place where Noah descended the disembarking place (àπoßaτńρiov), “for the Ark being saved in that place, its remains are shown there by the inhabitants to this day,” and also quotes Nicolas of Damascus, who writes that “in Armenia, above Minyas, there is a great mountain called Baris (is this word the Armenian Masis?), upon which it is said that many who escaped at the time of the Flood were saved, and that one who was carried in an ark came ashore on the top of it, and that the remains of the wood were preserved for a long while. This might be the man about whom Moses, the law-giver of the Jews, wrote.” This ȧπoßaτýpov has usually been identified with the town of Nakhitchevan (called by Ptolemy Naxuana), which stands on the Araxes, about thirty-five miles south-east from our mountain, and whose name the modern Armenians explain as meaning “he descended first,” which would seem to show that in the first century of our era-and how much sooner we cannot say-the Armenians living round the mountain believed it to be the Ark mountain. They might have heard of the Bible narrative from Jews, who were already beginning to be scattered through these countries (there is a story that some of those carried away by Shalmanezer were settled in Armenia and Georgia); they might know the Chaldaean legend of the Flood, which was preserved by Berosus, to whom Josephus so often refers, and a version of which has been found on clay tablets in the ruins of Nineveh and deciphered by the late Mr. George Smith. The curious thing is that this Chaldee legend fixed the spot of Noah’s landing in a quite different region, although one which was sometimes included in the wide and loose name Armenia, viz. in the mountain land (called by the Jews Qardu) which rises to the east of the Upper Tigris, that is, north-east of Nineveh and Mosul, in the direction of Urumia. This country was called in ancient times Gordyene, a name which appears in the Hebrew Qardu, and in our modern name Kurds, as well as in the Karduchi of Xenophon. As its mountains, although far less lofty than our modern Ararat, are of great height, and visible far away into the Assyrian plain (Mr. Layard saw Aghri Dagh from the summit of one of them), it was natural for the inhabitants of that plain to assume that they were the highest on earth, which the Deluge would be the last to cover, and where the vessel of safety would come to land. The Jews also, probably at the time of the Captivity, took up this notion, and it became the dominant one among them, is frequently given in the Talmud, and by Josephus himself, in a passage (Ant. Jud. xx. ii. 2) where he mentions that in the country of Adiabene, and in the district of Carrae (others read “of the Cardi” = Kurds), there were preserved the remains of the Ark. Probably he thought that the disembarking place mentioned in the beginning of his treatise was here, for he quotes Berosus as stating that it was among the Kurds, who in those days are not mentioned so far north as they wander now. Berosus’ words are, “It is said that there is still some part of this ship in Armenia at the mountain of the Cordyaeans (πρὸς τῷ ὄρει τῶν Κορδυαίων), and that some people carry off pieces of the bitumen, which they take away and use chiefly as amulets for the averting of mischief.” But probably Josephus’ ideas of the geography of these regions were vague enough, and he may not have known that from the land of Ajrarat, on the middle Araxes, to Gordyene it is more than 200 miles. From the Jews, this idea that Gordyene was the Biblical spot passed to the Syrian Church, and became the prevailing view throughout the Christian East, as it still is among the Nestorians, who dwell hard by. It passed also to the Muslims; and Gudi, the mountain where the Ark rested according to the Koran, is usually placed by them in the same Kurdish land, near the spot where there seems to have stood for several centuries (it was burnt in A.D. 655, but may have been rebuilt later) a convent to which tradition pointed as the guardian of the sacred fragments. Those who assume, as many Oriental scholars do, that the original tradition of the Flood is to be found in Assyria, naturally prefer this latter identification, since the mountains of Southern Kurdistan, the Qardu land, are quite high enough to satisfy the narrative, and must have been always familiar to the Chaldees, whereas the Araxes valley lies far away to the north, and the fact that its summits are really loftier would in those times be little known or regarded. Without the aid of our modern scientific appliances, men’s ideas of relative height are even vaguer and less capable of verification than their ideas of distance. On the other hand, the view which holds the Ararat of the Bible to lie in Northern Armenia, near the Araxes, can appeal not only to the undoubted fact that there was in that region the province called Ajrarat, but also to the reference to a “kingdom of Ararat” in Jeremiah li. 27, which could hardly apply to Gordyene.1 And one does not see why the Old Testament writers, whose geographical knowledge was in some points a good deal wider than is commonly assumed, should not have heard of the very lofty summits that lie in this part of Armenia. Full liberty is therefore left to the traveller to believe our Ararat, the snowy sovereign of the Araxes plain, to be the true Ararat, and certainly no one who had ever seen it rising in solitary majesty far above all its attendant peaks could doubt that its summit must have first pierced the receding waves.
The modern Armenian tradition of course goes for nothing in settling the question, for that tradition cannot be shown to be older than our own era, and is easily accounted for by the use of the word Ararat in the book of Genesis, which the Armenians, when Jews or Christians came among them, would of course identify with their Ajrarat. Once established, the tradition held its ground, and budded out into many fantastic legends, some of them still lingering in Armenia, some only known to us by the notices of passing mediæval travellers. Marco Polo, whose route does not seem to have led him near it, says only, in speaking of Armenia: “Here is an exceeding great mountain: on which it is said the Ark of Noah rested, and for this cause it is called the mountain of the Ark of Noah. The circuit of its base cannot be traversed in less than two days; and the ascent is rendered impossible by the snow on its summit, which never dissolves, but is increased by each successive fall. On the lower declivities the melted snows cause an abundant vegetation, and afford rich pastures for the cattle which in summer resort thither from all the surrounding countries.” But the Franciscan friar, William of Rubruk, who, in 1254, a little before Marco Polo’s time, had on his return from Karakorum passed under Ararat, says that here upon the higher of two great mountains above the river Araxes the Ark rested, which mountain cannot be ascended, though the earnest prayers of a pious monk prevailed so far that a piece of the wood of the Ark was brought to him by an angel, which piece is still preserved in a church near by as a holy relic. He gives Massis as the name of this mountain, and adds that it is the mother of the world: “super Massis nullus debet ascendere quia est mater mundi.”
Sir John Maundeville, of pious and veracious memory, has also a good deal to tell us. After speaking of Trapazond (Trebizond), and stating that from there “men go to Ermonye (Armenia) the Great unto a cytee that is clept Artyroun (Erzerum), that was wont to ben a gode cytee and a plentyous, but the Turkes han gretly wasted it,” he proceeds: “Fro Artyroun go men to an Hille that is clept Sabisocolle. And there besyde is another Hille that men clepen Ararathe: but the Jews clepen it Taneez, where Noes Schipp rested: and zit is upon that Montayne: and men may see it a ferr in cleer wedre: and that Montayne is well a 7 Myle high. And sum men seyn that they have seen and touched the Schipp; and put here Fyngres in the parties where the Feend went out whan that Noe seyd’ Benedicite.’ But thei that seyn such Wordes seyn here Wille, for a man may not gon up the Montayne for gret plentee of Snow that is alle weyes on that Montayne nouther Somer ne Winter; so that no man may gon up there: ne nevere man did, sithe the tyme of Noe: saf a Monk that be the grace of God broughte on of the Plankes down, that zit is in the Mynstre at the foot of the Montayne. And besyde is the Cytee of Dayne that Noe founded. And faste by is the Cytee of Any, in the whiche were 1000 churches. But upon that Montayne to gon up this Monk had gret desir; and so upon a day he wente up and whan he was upward the 3 part of the Montayne he was so wery that he myghte no ferthere, and so he rested him and felle to slepe; and whan he awoke he fonde himself liggynge at the foot of the Montayne. And then he preyede devoutly to God that he wolde vouche saf to suffre him gon up. And an Angelle cam to him and seyde that he scholde gon up; and so he did. And sithe that tyme never non. Wherfore men scholde not beleeve such Woordes.”
This laudable scepticism of Sir John’s prevailed, for it has long been almost an article of faith with the Armenian Church that the top of Ararat is inaccessible. Even the legend of the monk, which, as we find from Friar William, is as old as the thirteenth century, is usually given in a form which confirms still further the sacredness of the mountain. St. Jacob (Hagop), as the monk is named, was consumed by a pious desire to reach and venerate the holy Ark, which could in seasons of fair weather be descried from beneath, and three several times he essayed to climb the steep and rocky slopes. Each time, after reaching a great height, he fell into a deep sleep, and, when he woke, found himself at the foot of the mountain. After the third time, an angel appeared to him while he still lay in slumber, and told him that God had forbidden mortal foot ever to tread the sacred summit or touch the vessel in which mankind had been preserved, but that on him, in reward for his devout perseverance, there should be bestowed a fragment of its wood. This fragment he placed on the sleeper’s breast, and vanished; it is that which is still preserved in the treasury at Etchmiadzin, or, as others say, in the monastery of Kjeghart; and the saint is commemorated by the little monastery of St. Jacob, which stands, or rather stood till 1840, on the slopes of Ararat, above the valley of Arghuri, the spot of the angel’s appearing. Every succeeding traveller has repeated this tale, with variations due to his informant or his own imagination: so, though the reader has probably heard it, I dare not break through a custom so long established. Among these repeaters is Sir John Chardin, who travelled through Armenia and Persia towards the end of the seventeenth century, and whose remarks upon it are as follows. They show the progress which criticism had been making since the days of the earlier Sir John.
“This is the Tale that they tell, upon which I shall observe 2 Things. First, that it has no coherence with the relations of ancient authors as Josephus, Berosus, or Nicolaus of Damascus, who assure us that the Remainders of the Ark were to be seen, and that the people took the Pitch with which it was besmeared as an Antidote against Several Distempers. The second, that whereas it is taken for a Miracle that no Body can get up to the Top: I should rather take it for a greater Miracle that any Man should climb up so high. For the Mountain is altogether uninhabited, and from the Halfway to the Top of all, perpetually covered with Snow that never melts, so that all the Seasons of the Year it appears to be a prodigious heap of nothing but Snow.”
Whether Chardin himself believed the Ark to be still on the top of the mountain, does not appear. In two views of it which he gives, showing also Erivan and Etchmiadzin, the Ark appears, in shape exactly the Ark of the nursery on Sunday afternoons, poised on the summit of Great Ararat. But this may be merely emblematic; indeed I have not found any author who says he has himself seen it, though plenty who (like the retailers of ghost stories) mention other people who have.
Religious fancy has connected many places in the neighbourhood with the Biblical narrative. Not to speak of the sites which have been suggested in the Araxes valley for the Garden of Eden, the name of Arghuri itself is derived from two Armenian words which mean, “he planted the vine”; it is taken to be the spot where Noah planted that first vineyard which is mentioned in Genesis ix. 20: and till 1840, when the village was overwhelmed by a tremendous fall of rocks, shaken down by the great earthquake of that year, an ancient vine stock, still bearing grapes, was pointed out as that which had been planted by the patriarch’s hands. The town of Marand, the Marunda of Ptolemy (in Armenian = “the mother is there”), is said to be called after the wife of Noah, who there died and was buried; and (as has been mentioned already) the name of another still considerable town, Nakhitchevan, in the Araxes valley, is explained to mean, “he descended first,” and has therefore been identified with the ȧπoßaτńpiov of Josephus aforesaid. There too was shown, perhaps is still shown, the tomb of Noah. Modern historians and geographers have been hardly less fanciful than Armenian monks: some derive the Tatar name Aghri or Arghi Dagh from the word Arca. Some imagine a relation between this and the Argo; others connect the word baris (mentioned above as an ancient name for the mountain) with a supposed Oriental word meaning “boat” (see Herodotus, ii. 96), or with the Armenian bariz (= exit); in fine, there is no end to the whimsical speculations that attach themselves to the mountain. What is certain is that the word Ararat, though it is a genuine old Armenian name for a district, and is derived by Moses of Chorene from Arai jarat, “the fall of Arai,” a mythical Armenian king slain in battle with Semiramis, has never been the name by which those who lived round the mountain have known it, albeit it is found in the Armenian version of the Bible just as in our own.
Of the other legends that cluster round the mountain, I shall mention only two. One of them connects it with the so-called Chaldaean worship of the stars, and affirm that upon it stood a pillar with a figure of a star; and that before the birth of Christ twelve wise men were stationed by this pillar to watch for the appearing of the star in the east, which three of them followed, when it appeared, to Bethlehem. The other, of a very different kind, relates to a spring which bursts forth on the side of the Great Chasm, above the spot where the convent of St. Jacob stood. There is a bird called by the Armenians tetagush, which pursues and feeds on the locusts whose swarms are such a plague to this country. Now, the water of this sacred spring possesses the property of attracting the tetagush, and when the locusts appear, the first thing to be done is to fetch a bottle of it, and set it on the ground near them, taking care not to let it touch the ground upon its way. The bird immediately appears; the locusts are devoured, and the crops are saved. It is a pity the Canadians have no tetagush to set at their destroying beetle.
Before finally quitting the realm of fancy for that of fact, I will repeat an observation by which more than one orographer of distinction, struck by the remarkable geographical position which Ararat occupies, has suggested a sort of justification for the Armenian view that it is the centre of the earth. It stands in the centre of the longest line of the old continent, stretching from the Cape of Good Hope to Behring Straits. It is also in the line of the great deserts and of the great inland seas from Gibraltar to Lake Baikal, that is, in a line of almost continuous depressions. It is almost exactly equidistant from the Black Sea, the Caspian, and the northern end of the great Mesopotamian plain, which at no distant period was probably also part of the ocean bed.
[…]
The only topographical reference in the Scripture narrative of the Flood is to be found in the words, Genesis viii. 4, “In the seventh month, on the seventeenth day of the month,” “the ark rested upon the mountains of Ararat,” which may be taken as equivalent to “on a mountain of (or in) Ararat.” The word Ararat is used in three, or rather two, other places in Scripture. One is in 2 Kings xix. 37, and the parallel passage in Isaiah xxxvii. 38, where it is said of the sons of Sennacherib, who had just murdered their father, that “they escaped into the land of Ararat,” rendered in our version, and in the Septuagint, “Armenia.” The other is in Jeremiah li. 27, “Call together against her” (i. e. Babylon) “the kingdoms of Ararat, Minni, and Ashchenaz.” The question then is, what does this Ararat denote? Clearly the Alexandrian translators took it for Armenia; so does the Vulgate when it renders in Genesis viii. 4 the words which we translate, “on the mountains of Ararat,” by “super montes Armeniae.” This narrows it a little, and St. Jerome himself helps us to narrow it still further when, in his commentary on Isaiah xxxvii. 38, he says that “Ararat means the plain of the middle Araxes, which lies at the foot of the great mountain Taurus.” Besides, Moses of Chorene, the well-known Armenian historian of the fifth century, speaks of a province or district he calls Ajrarat, lying on the Araxes, and which some have tried to identify with the name of the Alarodians in Herodotus. Now as our modern Mount Ararat, Aghri Dagh, is by far the highest and most conspicuous mountain of that region, no one who looked at it, already knowing the story of the Flood, could doubt that it was the first part of the dry land to appear as the waters dried up, so much does it rise above all its neighbours.
The identification, therefore, is natural enough: what it is of more consequence to determine is how early it took place; for as there is little or no trace of an independent local tradition of the Flood, we may assume the identification to rest entirely on the use of the name Ararat in the Hebrew narrative. Josephus (Ant. Jud. bk. i. ch. iii.) says that the Armenians called the place where Noah descended the disembarking place (àπoßaτńρiov), “for the Ark being saved in that place, its remains are shown there by the inhabitants to this day,” and also quotes Nicolas of Damascus, who writes that “in Armenia, above Minyas, there is a great mountain called Baris (is this word the Armenian Masis?), upon which it is said that many who escaped at the time of the Flood were saved, and that one who was carried in an ark came ashore on the top of it, and that the remains of the wood were preserved for a long while. This might be the man about whom Moses, the law-giver of the Jews, wrote.” This ȧπoßaτýpov has usually been identified with the town of Nakhitchevan (called by Ptolemy Naxuana), which stands on the Araxes, about thirty-five miles south-east from our mountain, and whose name the modern Armenians explain as meaning “he descended first,” which would seem to show that in the first century of our era-and how much sooner we cannot say-the Armenians living round the mountain believed it to be the Ark mountain. They might have heard of the Bible narrative from Jews, who were already beginning to be scattered through these countries (there is a story that some of those carried away by Shalmanezer were settled in Armenia and Georgia); they might know the Chaldaean legend of the Flood, which was preserved by Berosus, to whom Josephus so often refers, and a version of which has been found on clay tablets in the ruins of Nineveh and deciphered by the late Mr. George Smith. The curious thing is that this Chaldee legend fixed the spot of Noah’s landing in a quite different region, although one which was sometimes included in the wide and loose name Armenia, viz. in the mountain land (called by the Jews Qardu) which rises to the east of the Upper Tigris, that is, north-east of Nineveh and Mosul, in the direction of Urumia. This country was called in ancient times Gordyene, a name which appears in the Hebrew Qardu, and in our modern name Kurds, as well as in the Karduchi of Xenophon. As its mountains, although far less lofty than our modern Ararat, are of great height, and visible far away into the Assyrian plain (Mr. Layard saw Aghri Dagh from the summit of one of them), it was natural for the inhabitants of that plain to assume that they were the highest on earth, which the Deluge would be the last to cover, and where the vessel of safety would come to land. The Jews also, probably at the time of the Captivity, took up this notion, and it became the dominant one among them, is frequently given in the Talmud, and by Josephus himself, in a passage (Ant. Jud. xx. ii. 2) where he mentions that in the country of Adiabene, and in the district of Carrae (others read “of the Cardi” = Kurds), there were preserved the remains of the Ark. Probably he thought that the disembarking place mentioned in the beginning of his treatise was here, for he quotes Berosus as stating that it was among the Kurds, who in those days are not mentioned so far north as they wander now. Berosus’ words are, “It is said that there is still some part of this ship in Armenia at the mountain of the Cordyaeans (πρὸς τῷ ὄρει τῶν Κορδυαίων), and that some people carry off pieces of the bitumen, which they take away and use chiefly as amulets for the averting of mischief.” But probably Josephus’ ideas of the geography of these regions were vague enough, and he may not have known that from the land of Ajrarat, on the middle Araxes, to Gordyene it is more than 200 miles. From the Jews, this idea that Gordyene was the Biblical spot passed to the Syrian Church, and became the prevailing view throughout the Christian East, as it still is among the Nestorians, who dwell hard by. It passed also to the Muslims; and Gudi, the mountain where the Ark rested according to the Koran, is usually placed by them in the same Kurdish land, near the spot where there seems to have stood for several centuries (it was burnt in A.D. 655, but may have been rebuilt later) a convent to which tradition pointed as the guardian of the sacred fragments. Those who assume, as many Oriental scholars do, that the original tradition of the Flood is to be found in Assyria, naturally prefer this latter identification, since the mountains of Southern Kurdistan, the Qardu land, are quite high enough to satisfy the narrative, and must have been always familiar to the Chaldees, whereas the Araxes valley lies far away to the north, and the fact that its summits are really loftier would in those times be little known or regarded. Without the aid of our modern scientific appliances, men’s ideas of relative height are even vaguer and less capable of verification than their ideas of distance. On the other hand, the view which holds the Ararat of the Bible to lie in Northern Armenia, near the Araxes, can appeal not only to the undoubted fact that there was in that region the province called Ajrarat, but also to the reference to a “kingdom of Ararat” in Jeremiah li. 27, which could hardly apply to Gordyene.1 And one does not see why the Old Testament writers, whose geographical knowledge was in some points a good deal wider than is commonly assumed, should not have heard of the very lofty summits that lie in this part of Armenia. Full liberty is therefore left to the traveller to believe our Ararat, the snowy sovereign of the Araxes plain, to be the true Ararat, and certainly no one who had ever seen it rising in solitary majesty far above all its attendant peaks could doubt that its summit must have first pierced the receding waves.
The modern Armenian tradition of course goes for nothing in settling the question, for that tradition cannot be shown to be older than our own era, and is easily accounted for by the use of the word Ararat in the book of Genesis, which the Armenians, when Jews or Christians came among them, would of course identify with their Ajrarat. Once established, the tradition held its ground, and budded out into many fantastic legends, some of them still lingering in Armenia, some only known to us by the notices of passing mediæval travellers. Marco Polo, whose route does not seem to have led him near it, says only, in speaking of Armenia: “Here is an exceeding great mountain: on which it is said the Ark of Noah rested, and for this cause it is called the mountain of the Ark of Noah. The circuit of its base cannot be traversed in less than two days; and the ascent is rendered impossible by the snow on its summit, which never dissolves, but is increased by each successive fall. On the lower declivities the melted snows cause an abundant vegetation, and afford rich pastures for the cattle which in summer resort thither from all the surrounding countries.” But the Franciscan friar, William of Rubruk, who, in 1254, a little before Marco Polo’s time, had on his return from Karakorum passed under Ararat, says that here upon the higher of two great mountains above the river Araxes the Ark rested, which mountain cannot be ascended, though the earnest prayers of a pious monk prevailed so far that a piece of the wood of the Ark was brought to him by an angel, which piece is still preserved in a church near by as a holy relic. He gives Massis as the name of this mountain, and adds that it is the mother of the world: “super Massis nullus debet ascendere quia est mater mundi.”
Sir John Maundeville, of pious and veracious memory, has also a good deal to tell us. After speaking of Trapazond (Trebizond), and stating that from there “men go to Ermonye (Armenia) the Great unto a cytee that is clept Artyroun (Erzerum), that was wont to ben a gode cytee and a plentyous, but the Turkes han gretly wasted it,” he proceeds: “Fro Artyroun go men to an Hille that is clept Sabisocolle. And there besyde is another Hille that men clepen Ararathe: but the Jews clepen it Taneez, where Noes Schipp rested: and zit is upon that Montayne: and men may see it a ferr in cleer wedre: and that Montayne is well a 7 Myle high. And sum men seyn that they have seen and touched the Schipp; and put here Fyngres in the parties where the Feend went out whan that Noe seyd’ Benedicite.’ But thei that seyn such Wordes seyn here Wille, for a man may not gon up the Montayne for gret plentee of Snow that is alle weyes on that Montayne nouther Somer ne Winter; so that no man may gon up there: ne nevere man did, sithe the tyme of Noe: saf a Monk that be the grace of God broughte on of the Plankes down, that zit is in the Mynstre at the foot of the Montayne. And besyde is the Cytee of Dayne that Noe founded. And faste by is the Cytee of Any, in the whiche were 1000 churches. But upon that Montayne to gon up this Monk had gret desir; and so upon a day he wente up and whan he was upward the 3 part of the Montayne he was so wery that he myghte no ferthere, and so he rested him and felle to slepe; and whan he awoke he fonde himself liggynge at the foot of the Montayne. And then he preyede devoutly to God that he wolde vouche saf to suffre him gon up. And an Angelle cam to him and seyde that he scholde gon up; and so he did. And sithe that tyme never non. Wherfore men scholde not beleeve such Woordes.”
This laudable scepticism of Sir John’s prevailed, for it has long been almost an article of faith with the Armenian Church that the top of Ararat is inaccessible. Even the legend of the monk, which, as we find from Friar William, is as old as the thirteenth century, is usually given in a form which confirms still further the sacredness of the mountain. St. Jacob (Hagop), as the monk is named, was consumed by a pious desire to reach and venerate the holy Ark, which could in seasons of fair weather be descried from beneath, and three several times he essayed to climb the steep and rocky slopes. Each time, after reaching a great height, he fell into a deep sleep, and, when he woke, found himself at the foot of the mountain. After the third time, an angel appeared to him while he still lay in slumber, and told him that God had forbidden mortal foot ever to tread the sacred summit or touch the vessel in which mankind had been preserved, but that on him, in reward for his devout perseverance, there should be bestowed a fragment of its wood. This fragment he placed on the sleeper’s breast, and vanished; it is that which is still preserved in the treasury at Etchmiadzin, or, as others say, in the monastery of Kjeghart; and the saint is commemorated by the little monastery of St. Jacob, which stands, or rather stood till 1840, on the slopes of Ararat, above the valley of Arghuri, the spot of the angel’s appearing. Every succeeding traveller has repeated this tale, with variations due to his informant or his own imagination: so, though the reader has probably heard it, I dare not break through a custom so long established. Among these repeaters is Sir John Chardin, who travelled through Armenia and Persia towards the end of the seventeenth century, and whose remarks upon it are as follows. They show the progress which criticism had been making since the days of the earlier Sir John.
“This is the Tale that they tell, upon which I shall observe 2 Things. First, that it has no coherence with the relations of ancient authors as Josephus, Berosus, or Nicolaus of Damascus, who assure us that the Remainders of the Ark were to be seen, and that the people took the Pitch with which it was besmeared as an Antidote against Several Distempers. The second, that whereas it is taken for a Miracle that no Body can get up to the Top: I should rather take it for a greater Miracle that any Man should climb up so high. For the Mountain is altogether uninhabited, and from the Halfway to the Top of all, perpetually covered with Snow that never melts, so that all the Seasons of the Year it appears to be a prodigious heap of nothing but Snow.”
Whether Chardin himself believed the Ark to be still on the top of the mountain, does not appear. In two views of it which he gives, showing also Erivan and Etchmiadzin, the Ark appears, in shape exactly the Ark of the nursery on Sunday afternoons, poised on the summit of Great Ararat. But this may be merely emblematic; indeed I have not found any author who says he has himself seen it, though plenty who (like the retailers of ghost stories) mention other people who have.
Religious fancy has connected many places in the neighbourhood with the Biblical narrative. Not to speak of the sites which have been suggested in the Araxes valley for the Garden of Eden, the name of Arghuri itself is derived from two Armenian words which mean, “he planted the vine”; it is taken to be the spot where Noah planted that first vineyard which is mentioned in Genesis ix. 20: and till 1840, when the village was overwhelmed by a tremendous fall of rocks, shaken down by the great earthquake of that year, an ancient vine stock, still bearing grapes, was pointed out as that which had been planted by the patriarch’s hands. The town of Marand, the Marunda of Ptolemy (in Armenian = “the mother is there”), is said to be called after the wife of Noah, who there died and was buried; and (as has been mentioned already) the name of another still considerable town, Nakhitchevan, in the Araxes valley, is explained to mean, “he descended first,” and has therefore been identified with the ȧπoßaτńpiov of Josephus aforesaid. There too was shown, perhaps is still shown, the tomb of Noah. Modern historians and geographers have been hardly less fanciful than Armenian monks: some derive the Tatar name Aghri or Arghi Dagh from the word Arca. Some imagine a relation between this and the Argo; others connect the word baris (mentioned above as an ancient name for the mountain) with a supposed Oriental word meaning “boat” (see Herodotus, ii. 96), or with the Armenian bariz (= exit); in fine, there is no end to the whimsical speculations that attach themselves to the mountain. What is certain is that the word Ararat, though it is a genuine old Armenian name for a district, and is derived by Moses of Chorene from Arai jarat, “the fall of Arai,” a mythical Armenian king slain in battle with Semiramis, has never been the name by which those who lived round the mountain have known it, albeit it is found in the Armenian version of the Bible just as in our own.
Of the other legends that cluster round the mountain, I shall mention only two. One of them connects it with the so-called Chaldaean worship of the stars, and affirm that upon it stood a pillar with a figure of a star; and that before the birth of Christ twelve wise men were stationed by this pillar to watch for the appearing of the star in the east, which three of them followed, when it appeared, to Bethlehem. The other, of a very different kind, relates to a spring which bursts forth on the side of the Great Chasm, above the spot where the convent of St. Jacob stood. There is a bird called by the Armenians tetagush, which pursues and feeds on the locusts whose swarms are such a plague to this country. Now, the water of this sacred spring possesses the property of attracting the tetagush, and when the locusts appear, the first thing to be done is to fetch a bottle of it, and set it on the ground near them, taking care not to let it touch the ground upon its way. The bird immediately appears; the locusts are devoured, and the crops are saved. It is a pity the Canadians have no tetagush to set at their destroying beetle.
Before finally quitting the realm of fancy for that of fact, I will repeat an observation by which more than one orographer of distinction, struck by the remarkable geographical position which Ararat occupies, has suggested a sort of justification for the Armenian view that it is the centre of the earth. It stands in the centre of the longest line of the old continent, stretching from the Cape of Good Hope to Behring Straits. It is also in the line of the great deserts and of the great inland seas from Gibraltar to Lake Baikal, that is, in a line of almost continuous depressions. It is almost exactly equidistant from the Black Sea, the Caspian, and the northern end of the great Mesopotamian plain, which at no distant period was probably also part of the ocean bed.
[…]
CHAPTER VII.
THE ASCENT OF ARARAT.
At 8 A.M., on the morning of the 11th of September, we set out from Aralykh to ascend the mountain. We had arranged to start at sunrise, knowing how terrible the heat would be for the first part of the road, but to get a large party under way is always troublesome, and certainly not least so in these countries, where there is no sense of the value of time, and no conception of the conditions of a successful mountain expedition. Indeed, what with the collecting of the soldiers, the packing of provisions, the hundred little things that occur to one’s mind at the last moment, a compass, snow spectacles, warm gloves, and, above all, the indispensable lemons, more than three hours would have been consumed had we been in any hands but those of our genial and energetic host. The last thing was to write a few lines home, wondering what the next lines would have to report, and then we filed out of the cantonment amid adieux and good wishes given in strange tongues. We were nine in all, six soldiers of the Cossack detachment, the gentleman who had undertaken to interpret, and our two selves. The soldier in command was a Kurd named Jaafar, a man of great mental as well as bodily force, in whom the colonel reposed full confidence, and whose singularly keen and expressive glance made us wish that we could have held some direct communication with him.
[Bryce describes the first day and night’s climb at length, after which, the following:]
At eight o’clock I buckled on my canvas gaiters, thrust some crusts of bread, a lemon, a small flask of cold tea, four hard-boiled eggs, and a few meat lozenges into my pocket, bade good-bye to my friend, and set off. Rather to our surprise, the two Cossacks and one of the Kurds came with me, whether persuaded by a pantomime of encouraging signs, or simply curious to see what would happen. The ice-axe had hugely amused the Cossacks all through. Climbing the ridge to the left, and keeping along its top for a little way, I then struck across the semicircular head of a wide glen, in the middle of which, a little lower, lay a snowbed, over a long steep slope of loose broken stones and sand. This slope, a sort of talus or “screes,” as they say in the Lake country, was excessively fatiguing from the want of firm foothold, and when I reached the other side, I was already so tired and breathless, having been on foot since midnight, that it seemed almost useless to persevere farther. However, on the other side, I got upon solid rock, where the walking was better, and was soon environed by a multitude of rills bubbling down over the stones from the snow-slopes above. The summit of Little Ararat, which had for the last two hours provokingly kept at the same apparent height above me, began to sink, and before ten o’clock I could look down upon its small flat top, studded with lumps of rock, but bearing no trace of a crater. Mounting steadily along the same ridge, I saw at a height of over 13,000 feet, lying on the loose blocks, a piece of wood about four feet long and five inches thick, evidently cut by some tool, and so far above the limit of trees that it could by no possibility be a natural fragment of one. Darting on it with a glee that astonished the Cossack and the Kurd, I held it up to them, made them look at it, and repeated several times the word “Noah.” The Cossack grinned, but he was such a cheery, genial fellow that I think he would have grinned whatever I had said, and I cannot be sure that he took my meaning, and recognised the wood as a fragment of the true Ark. Whether it was really gopher wood, of which material the Ark was built, I will not undertake to say, but am willing to submit to the inspection of the curious the bit which I cut off with my ice-axe and brought away. Anyhow, it will be hard to prove that it is not gopher wood. And if there be any remains of the Ark on Ararat at all—a point as to which the natives are perfectly clear—here rather than the top is the place where one might expect to find them, since in the course of ages they would get carried down by the onward movement of the snow-beds along the declivities. This wood, therefore, suits all the requirements of the case. In fact, the argument is, for the case of a relic, exceptionally strong: the Crusaders who found the Holy Lance at Antioch, the archbishop who recognized the Holy Coat at Treves, not to speak of many others, proceeded upon slighter evidence. I am, however, bound to admit that another explanation of the presence of this piece of timber on the rocks at this vast height did occur to me. But as no man is bound to discredit his own relic, and such is certainly not the practice of the Armenian Church, I will not disturb my readers’ minds, or yield to the rationalizing tendencies of the age by suggesting it.
[...]
[Bryce describes the first day and night’s climb at length, after which, the following:]
At eight o’clock I buckled on my canvas gaiters, thrust some crusts of bread, a lemon, a small flask of cold tea, four hard-boiled eggs, and a few meat lozenges into my pocket, bade good-bye to my friend, and set off. Rather to our surprise, the two Cossacks and one of the Kurds came with me, whether persuaded by a pantomime of encouraging signs, or simply curious to see what would happen. The ice-axe had hugely amused the Cossacks all through. Climbing the ridge to the left, and keeping along its top for a little way, I then struck across the semicircular head of a wide glen, in the middle of which, a little lower, lay a snowbed, over a long steep slope of loose broken stones and sand. This slope, a sort of talus or “screes,” as they say in the Lake country, was excessively fatiguing from the want of firm foothold, and when I reached the other side, I was already so tired and breathless, having been on foot since midnight, that it seemed almost useless to persevere farther. However, on the other side, I got upon solid rock, where the walking was better, and was soon environed by a multitude of rills bubbling down over the stones from the snow-slopes above. The summit of Little Ararat, which had for the last two hours provokingly kept at the same apparent height above me, began to sink, and before ten o’clock I could look down upon its small flat top, studded with lumps of rock, but bearing no trace of a crater. Mounting steadily along the same ridge, I saw at a height of over 13,000 feet, lying on the loose blocks, a piece of wood about four feet long and five inches thick, evidently cut by some tool, and so far above the limit of trees that it could by no possibility be a natural fragment of one. Darting on it with a glee that astonished the Cossack and the Kurd, I held it up to them, made them look at it, and repeated several times the word “Noah.” The Cossack grinned, but he was such a cheery, genial fellow that I think he would have grinned whatever I had said, and I cannot be sure that he took my meaning, and recognised the wood as a fragment of the true Ark. Whether it was really gopher wood, of which material the Ark was built, I will not undertake to say, but am willing to submit to the inspection of the curious the bit which I cut off with my ice-axe and brought away. Anyhow, it will be hard to prove that it is not gopher wood. And if there be any remains of the Ark on Ararat at all—a point as to which the natives are perfectly clear—here rather than the top is the place where one might expect to find them, since in the course of ages they would get carried down by the onward movement of the snow-beds along the declivities. This wood, therefore, suits all the requirements of the case. In fact, the argument is, for the case of a relic, exceptionally strong: the Crusaders who found the Holy Lance at Antioch, the archbishop who recognized the Holy Coat at Treves, not to speak of many others, proceeded upon slighter evidence. I am, however, bound to admit that another explanation of the presence of this piece of timber on the rocks at this vast height did occur to me. But as no man is bound to discredit his own relic, and such is certainly not the practice of the Armenian Church, I will not disturb my readers’ minds, or yield to the rationalizing tendencies of the age by suggesting it.
[...]
“Transcaucasia and Ararat” (1877) was in the main not a mountaineering record, but a study of the Caucasian isthmus and its peoples, as seen by a passing visitor. But the account of an ascent of Mount Ararat, in which Lord Bryce reached the top without his companions, fixed public attention and had some singular consequences. In a rash moment he wrote of a piece of wood he picked up near the top, a relic of a previous Russian ascent, that he was not able to state it might not be gopherwood. When in the United States he had frequent applications from out-of-the-way local museums for the smallest fragment of this invaluable relic of Noah’s Ark!
Nature, January 26, 1922, p. 114. |
Source: James Bryce, Transcaucasia and Ararat: Being Notes of a Vacation Tour in the Autumn of 1876 (London: Macmillan and Co., 1877), 198-210, 264-266.
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