Mount Ararat, and the Early Abode of Noah and His Descendants

In the opinion of the most learned among the moderns, Mount Ararat, where the ark of Noah rested, after the deluge, was in Armenia, or Tibet, and between 90o and 100o E. long, and between 30o and 35o north lat, north of Hindostan and Persia, west of the river Indus and of central Asia, and east of Mesopotamia and the Caspian Sea. This is a temperate clime, and favorable to health and long life, as well as to the pursuits of the shepherd and agriculturist. The Ararat, the Caucasus, and the Taurus are connected, and form almost one group or range, extending a great distance from what is usually called Asia Minor, to India.

The Indian and Hindoo [Hindu] traditions of the earliest times point to Noah and the Deluge; and they claim to be the descendants of that patriarch. Noah and his sons would not long remain on the mountain where the ark rested, on the subsiding of the waters. They advanced no doubt, to the south, to a milder climate and a more champaign country. In the fourth generation, or one hundred and fifty years from the deluge, they removed westward, to the plains of Shinar where they began to construct a building which should reach to heaven. Dispersed from this place about one hundred and fifty or one hundred and sixty years after the deluge, they went forth, in different companies, east, west, north, and south; but most to the south and to the east, and both the face of the country and the climate would invite. Noah lived two hundred years after this event, and probably journeyed east where traditions relating to the flood, and the safety of a few from that catastrophe have much prevailed.-From Noah and his sons would be communicated to their posterity whatever was known by them of antedeluvian [antediluvian] discoveries and inventions in the arts of life. These could not have been very small during seventeen hundred years, the duration of the old world, according to the common computation; but at this distance of time, and in the want of early records, no very accurate opinion can be formed as to how great, or what those inventions were. But we may safely conclude, that they were not very great; otherwise the early generations after the deluge would have been more civilized than there is now evidence or reason to believe.