Did a Sixteenth Century Map Show Noah's Ark as the Durupinar Formation?

​Recently, the creationists at Noah’s Ark Scans have been trying to drum up more interest in their claim that the Durupinar formation eighteen miles south of Mt. Ararat in Turkey is the Ark. To that end, the group’s leader, Andrew Jones, has been on a media tour promoting his claim that a scan found a thirteen-foot tunnel running through the Ark-shaped rocks, which geologists insist is actually a natural formation. Genesis 8:4 specifies that the Ark landed upon the mountains of Ararat, but Durupinar is located near the base of Mount Tendürek. 

​As part of the media tour, Noah’s Ark Scans has asserted that ancient trees that were petrified upright are proof of the Flood, since dead trees would fall over before being buried. The trees, known to creationists as “polystrate fossils,” a term not used by geologists. Creationists claim that these trees, which pierce through several layers of sedimentation, are proof that geological layers mainstream scientists believe to be millions of years old were in fact deposited in forty days during the Flood. Geologists say the upright forests formed from periods of rapid sedimentation in actively subsiding plains or volcanic activity. (Wikipedia has lengthy discussion of the processes creationists misrepresent.)
 
Noah’s Ark Scans and Jimmy Corsetti also pointed to Urbano Monte’s 1587 planisphere map as supporting evidence for Durupinar. They claim that the location marked as Noah’s Ark on the map is the Durupinar site. “The same location as the Durupinar site, virtually the exact same length. Coincidence?” Corsetti wrote on social media.
 
There is no way to calculate the length of the Ark from the map, which shows the Ark as being bigger than nearby cities and as large as a nearby lake. That’s because it’s a symbolic representation, not a scale drawing of a real feature. It is also placed atop a mountain, while Durupinar is not located on a peak.
 
But there is an interesting question of what exactly the map depicts. I can’t show you the entire planisphere (which is available online here), but in focusing in on the area around the Ark, it was not clear to me which lakes the bodies of water above and below it were meant to represent. There are three substantive lakes in the region: Sevan, Van, and Urmia, but only two appear on the map. But which two? 

​It's an important question because it makes a massive difference to the argument about Durupinar if the Ark is positioned north of Lake Van, where Mt. Masis (the modern Mount Ararat) is located or if it is south of Lake Van, where early traditions placed the Ark atop one of the peaks traditionally known as Mt. Judi or Cudi. (There are several mountains that go by that name, but the traditional one associated with the Ark from the time of Berossus is located between Assyria and Lake Van.) Mt. Judi remains the mountain Islam associates with the Ark, and Christians also marked it as the Ark’s location down to the late Middle Ages, when Mt. Masis took over among Western Christians, in part due to Armenian traditions, in part due to the Crusades, and in part because Christians looked for the highest mountain in the region rather than the one traditionally associated with it.

(You can read ancient and medieval primary sources about the location of the Ark here.)
 
On the map, Urbano Monte’s geography is clearly inaccurate for the region of Armenia (now eastern Turkey). He places the city of Van, then as now located on the eastern shore of Lake Van, in the middle of mountains somewhere to the west of a lake.  
 
But there are some details that can help us figure out what he intended. The lake located to the south of the Ark has a caption below it reading “Arbil, where Alexander the Great defeated Darius.” That tells us that the city is Arbil (modern Erbil in Iraqi Kurdistan), and thus the lake is Lake Urmia, the dried remains of which are now located in western Iran, south of Armenia.
 
That would make the lake north of the Ark Lake Van, meaning that Monte placed the Ark south of Van, in the traditional location of Mt. Judi.
 
This reading also conforms to other historical maps of Armenia from the time, which show it inclusive of Lake Van and Lake Urmia. I can’t be absolutely sure about this identification—we’d need an expert in Monte’s cartography to confirm it—but it certainly isn’t as obviously Durupinar as some have assumed.