Mount Cudi and the Older Tradition

"It is said there is still some part of this ship in Armenia, at the mountain of the Cordyaeans; and that some people carry off pieces of the bitumen, which they take away, and use chiefly as amulets for the averting of mischiefs." — Berossus, about 280 BC, as quoted by Josephus¹

Summary

Cudi Dağı is a limestone ridge that rises to about 2,070 m on the north-east bank of the Tigris,² above the town of Cizre in south-east Turkey, close to the Syrian and Iraqi borders.  For about fifteen hundred years it, or the district around it, was where Jews, Christians and Muslims said the Ark had landed.  The modern Mount Ararat, Ağrı Dağı, about 320 km to the north-east, took over only in the eleventh and twelfth centuries AD.  That much of the Cudi case is right.  What it cannot do is show that the Ark is there, or even that the tradition remembers anything independent of Genesis.

1. The oldest texts name a district, and it is this one (Part 1). Berossus, a Babylonian priest writing about 280 BC, said part of the ship "still" remained "at the mountain of the Cordyaeans," and that people scraped bitumen off it for amulets.¹ The Kordyaeans lived in Gordyene, the hill country on the Tigris where Cudi stands. The Aramaic Targums, the Syriac Bible and Epiphanius render or explain the "mountains of Ararat" as the mountains of Qardu or of the Kardyaeans.³² No text before about AD 1000 puts the Ark on Ağrı Dağı.
2. The tradition was never unanimous. Nicolaus of Damascus put it on "Baris" above Minyas. Josephus himself names a mountain in Armenia, the Kordyaean mountain and a district in Adiabene. Julius Africanus said Parthia, and the Sibylline Oracles said Phrygia, in western Turkey.¹¹²⁴
3. One peak was fixed late (Part 2). No early text names Cudi. The specific summit was fixed by Nestorian Christians, who built a monastery of the Ark on it, and by Muslim writers who read the Qur'an's al-Jūdī (11:44) as this mountain. Even that identification is disputed: there is also a Jabal Judi in northern Arabia.²²
4. What is on the mountain (Part 3). A ruined stone shrine on the summit called the Ship of the Prophet Noah, an annual sacrifice there in the early twentieth century, and Assyrian rock reliefs of Sennacherib at the foot of the ridge, carved about 700 BC. None of it is from a ship. The one reported find of wood, by the German geologist Friedrich Bender in the 1950s, is known only from a memoir, with no laboratory, sample number or published date.⁴
5. Why the tradition moved (Part 4). The summit monastery burned after a lightning strike in the 760s or 770s, Armenian writers moved the landing to Masis in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, and European travellers reached the Near East by the Armenian route. The full story of Ağrı Dağı belongs to Mount Ararat and the Ararat Anomaly.
6. What the tradition is worth (Part 5). The Jewish, Christian and Muslim witnesses all start from Genesis 8:4 or the Qur'an and place its mountain in the nearest known district. Bill Crouse, Cudi's leading modern advocate, says the Targums show "a definite tendency to update place names."⁴ That is localisation, not memory. Berossus is the one witness outside the Bible. He departs from his own cuneiform source, which put the landing on Mount Nimush, so he probably reports a relic shown in his own day. That proves a "ship" was being shown in Gordyene by about 280 BC, between 1,976 and 3,106 years after the biblical Flood dates. It does not prove what the object was. Israelites had been settled in Assyria and Media for 442 years by then, so even Berossus may be hearing a local reading of Genesis.⁵

Verdict:  Cudi Dağı is the right answer to the question "where did the oldest tradition put the Ark?"  It is not evidence that the Ark landed there, and nothing on the mountain has been shown to come from a ship.  Genesis says only "the mountains of Ararat," a region that includes Cudi, so the Flood account neither gains nor loses by the outcome.  The parent article, Searching for Noah's Ark, treats what the text itself locates.

Part 1: The earliest landing traditions

Genesis 8:4 says the Ark came to rest "on the mountains of Ararat."  Ararat is the Hebrew name of Urartu, the kingdom around Lake Van that Assyrian records name, and the verse names a region, not a peak.  The parent article owns that reading.  This Part asks a narrower question:  when later writers tried to say where in that region the Ark lay, what did they say, and when?

The witnesses in order

The quotations and their sources follow.

Berossus, the one witness outside the Bible

Berossus was a priest of Bel at Babylon who wrote a history of Babylonia in Greek for the Seleucid court.  His book is lost.  It survives in quotations, chiefly through Alexander Polyhistor in the first century BC, then Josephus, then Eusebius and the Byzantine chronicler George Syncellus about AD 800.  Russell Gmirkin, who argues that Genesis depends on Berossus rather than the reverse, dates the Babyloniaca to 278 BC.⁶

Berossus tells the flood story of Xisuthros, his Greek name for the Sumerian hero Ziusudra.  After the waters fall, he says, "The vessel being thus stranded in Armenia, some part of it yet remains in the Corcyraean mountains of Armenia;  and the people scrape off the bitumen, with which it had been outwardly coated, and make use of it by way of an alexipharmic and amulet."⁷  "Corcyraean" is the Syncellus manuscript's slip for "Kordyaean";  the Armenian translation of Eusebius reads "the mountains of the Corduaeans," and Josephus, quoting the same passage, has "the mountain of the Cordyaeans."¹⁷  An excerpt from Abydenus, another Greek writer on Babylon, adds that the inhabitants made "bracelets and amulets of its wood."⁷

The Kordyaeans are the Karduchoi of Xenophon and the Gordyaeans of Strabo, the hill people of Gordyene between the Tigris and the Upper Zab, south and south-east of Lake Van.²  Cudi Dağı is on the south edge of that country.  Berossus does not name a peak, and nothing in the fragment points to Cudi rather than any other mountain of Gordyene.

The Jewish texts

Jubilees, a retelling of Genesis from about 160-150 BC, names the mountain but not the district:  "And the ark went and rested on the top of Lubar, one of the mountains of Ararat."⁸  Noah plants his vineyard on Lubar and is buried there.⁸  No other source knows a mountain called Lubar except those that copy Jubilees.

Josephus tells the story three ways in one book.  In his own words, "the ark rested on the top of a certain mountain in Armenia," and "the Armenians call this place, [Apobaterion] The Place of Descent;  for the ark being saved in that place, its remains are shown there by the inhabitants to this day."¹  He then quotes Berossus on the Kordyaean mountain, says that Hieronymus the Egyptian and Mnaseas "make mention of the same," and quotes Nicolaus of Damascus:  "There is a great mountain in Armenia, over Minyas, called Baris, upon which it is reported that many who fled at the time of the Deluge were saved;  and that one who was carried in an ark came on shore upon the top of it;  and that the remains of the timber were a great while preserved."¹  Minyas is the Mannea of Assyrian records, south of Lake Urmia in north-west Iran, well to the east of Cudi.⁴  In book 20 Josephus adds a fourth place.  The king of Adiabene gave his son "the country called Carra; it was a soil that bare amomum in great plenty:  there are also in it the remains of that ark, wherein it is related that Noah escaped the deluge, and where they are still shown to such as are desirous to see them."¹

Two of these places are not Cudi on any reading.  Whiston, Josephus's translator, put the Place of Descent at Nakhichevan, north of Ağrı Dağı, but that is his own footnote, not Josephus.¹  Crouse reads "Carron" as a copyist's slip for "Kardu," since the Hebrew letters d and r look alike.⁴  That is a possible emendation, not what the text says.

The Aramaic Targums translate the verse rather than retell it.  Targum Onqelos, the official Babylonian Targum, reads 'al ṭūrē qardū, "on the mountains of Qardu."⁹  Targum Pseudo-Jonathan harmonises:  "upon the mountains of Qadron;  the name of the one mountain is Qardania, and the name of the other mountain Irmenia."⁹  The Targum of the Prophets makes the same change in Isaiah 37:38, where Sennacherib's sons, having killed him, "escaped into the land of Kardu."⁹  So the Targums do not hold a separate tradition about the Ark.  They translate every biblical "Ararat" by the name of the nearest district their readers knew.  Crouse, Cudi's advocate, says so:  "There is a definite tendency to update place names."⁴

The Christian texts

The Syriac Bible, the Peshitta, also reads Qardu at Genesis 8:4.²  Ephrem, writing in Syriac at Nisibis and Edessa about 360-370, follows it:  "the ark came to rest on Mt. Qardu."¹⁰  Epiphanius, bishop of Salamis on Cyprus, writing about 375, joins Jubilees to the Syriac reading.  The ark came to rest "in the mountains of Ararat, between the Armenians and the Kardyaeans, on the mountain called Lubar."  Later he adds that "even now the remains of Noah's ark are shown in the land of the Kardyaeans."³³  One manuscript of the first passage reads "Caucasians" for "Kardyaeans," so even the copyists did not agree on the district.³

Other Christian writers put it elsewhere.  Theophilus of Antioch, about 180:  "of the ark, the remains are to this day to be seen in the Arabian mountains."¹¹  Hippolytus:  "shown to this day in the mountains called Ararat, which are situated in the direction of the country of the Adiabene."²  Julius Africanus:  "the mountains of Ararat, which we know to be in Parthia."²  Africanus also notes that some put it at Celaenae in Phrygia, which is where the Sibylline Oracles place "Ararat," and Crouse calls that "certainly problematic for the view being presented."⁴

What the list shows

1. Every early text that names a district names the Kordyaean or Qardu country or a neighbour of it: Adiabene to the south-east, "Parthia," Minyas to the east. All of them lie within or beside old Urartu's southern fringe. None names Masis, the Armenian name of Ağrı Dağı.
2. Most of them are translations or retellings of Genesis 8:4. Their agreement shows how the Aramaic-speaking east read "Ararat," not that each writer had separate knowledge of the site.
3. Several report remains "shown to this day." None describes what was shown, measures it, or says who had seen it.
4. No text before the Qur'an names a single mountain that can be found on a map today. Lubar and Baris cannot be located.

Part 2: How the tradition fixed on one peak

The early texts name a district.  The peak was fixed by two groups between the seventh and tenth centuries:  the Syriac-speaking Christians of the Church of the East, often called Nestorians, and the Muslim scholars who explained the Qur'an.

The monastery of the Ark

Lloyd Bailey, an Old Testament scholar at Duke whose 1989 book is the fullest critical survey of the landing sites, sums up what the Syriac and Arabic sources say:  the Nestorians "put the specific landing place on a conspicuous mountain that rises just north of the Tigris at the edge of the Gordyene /Qardu range: a 6,800-foot peak, now called by the Turks Cudi Dag."  They "built several monasteries on the mountain, including one on the summit called the Cloister of the Ark.  This was destroyed by lightning in 766 C.E."²²  George Sale, the English translator of the Qur'an, gave the year as 776 in 1734, citing the chronicle of the Syriac patriarch Dionysius.¹²  When the monastery was founded is not recorded in any source read for this article.

The Qur'an's al-Jūdī

The Qur'an says only:  "the ark rested on the mountain Al Judi."¹²  It does not say where al-Jūdī is.  Two readings have been offered.

1. A mountain in Arabia. There is a Jabal Judi in the ʿAjāʾ range of northern Arabia, at the edge of the Nafud desert. Bailey takes it to be the Qur'an's mountain, and suggests the Muslims "may have picked up the ark tradition for this mountain from Syrian Christians."²
2. The Qardu mountain. Franz Rosenthal, translating al-Ṭabarī's History, suggests that "The form [al-Jūdī] could very well have originated from a conflation of Gurdi (Gordy-), slightly misread in its Syriac form, with some mountain in Arabia."¹³ Bailey lists three explanations for the name on the Tigris: a survival of the Assyrian "land of Guti"; a corruption of Gardu or Qardu with the r* lost; or a transfer from the Arabian mountain.²

Whichever is right, the commentators and geographers of the Abbasid period read al-Jūdī as the mountain above the Tigris.  Al-Ṭabarī, who died in 923, places the landing on al-Jūdī in the district of Qarda in the Jazira, and says Noah built a village at its foot called Thamanin, "Eighty."¹³  Al-Masʿūdī, writing in 947, says al-Jūdī reaches as far as Jazirat ibn ʿUmar, in the territory of Mosul:  "This mountain is eight farsangs from the Tigris.  The place where the ship stopped, which is on the top of this mountain, is still to be seen."¹⁴  Eutychius, the Melkite patriarch of Alexandria, who died in 940, wrote that "The Ark rested on the mountains of Ararat, that is, Jabal Judi near Mosul."⁴  Bailey concludes that the Muslims "accepted the Nestorian tradition of the ark’s landing on Cudi Dag and erected a mosque on the site of the Cloister of the Ark."²

Heraclius and Benjamin of Tudela

Two later reports are often quoted as if they were eyewitness accounts.  They are not.

The Byzantine emperor Heraclius fought the Persians near Nineveh in 627.  The story that he climbed al-Jūdī to see the place of the Ark comes from al-Makīn, a Coptic Christian historian of the thirteenth century, writing six hundred years later.  Sale's note and Bailey both give it from al-Makīn.¹²²

Benjamin of Tudela, a Jewish traveller from Navarre who crossed the Near East about 1165-1173, reached Jazirat ibn ʿUmar, the island town on the Tigris that is now Cizre.  He wrote:  "It is a distance of four miles to the place where Noah's Ark rested, but Omar ben al Khataab took the ark from the two mountains and made it into a mosque for the Mohammedans.  Near the ark is the Synagogue of Ezra to this day, and on the ninth of Ab the Jews come thither from the city to pray."¹⁵  Benjamin did not climb the mountain.  He reports a story told in the town about a mosque said to date from the early caliphs.  Sale names the builder as the later caliph ʿUmar ibn ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz, "whom he by mistake calls Omar Ebn al Khattâb."¹²

So by the twelfth century the tradition was fully local:  a named summit, a shrine on it, a mosque in town said to be built from the Ark's timbers, and an annual pilgrimage.  Every element is attested only after the Qur'an and after the Nestorian monastery.

Part 3: What has been reported on the mountain

Four kinds of thing have been reported on or near Cudi Dağı:  a summit shrine, a living pilgrimage, Assyrian rock reliefs, and wood.  Only the first three have been seen by more than one visitor, and none of them is a ship.

The shrine: Gertrude Bell, 1909

Gertrude Bell, the British archaeologist and traveller, crossed northern Mesopotamia in the spring of 1909, returning to England "in July 1909."¹⁶  She opens her chapter on the climb:  "The Babylonians, and after them the Nestorians and the Moslems, held that the Ark of Noah, when the waters subsided, grounded not upon the mountain of Ararat, but upon Judi Dagh.  To that school of thought I also belong, for I have made the pilgrimage and seen what I have seen."¹⁶

What she saw on the summit was this:  "That which they actually see is a number of roofless chambers upon the extreme summit of the hill.  They are roughly built of unsquared stones, piled together without mortar, and from wall to wall are laid tree-trunks and boughs, so disposed that they may support a roofing of cloths, which is thrown over them at the time of the annual festival."¹⁶  The shrine is called Sefinet Nebi Nuh, "the ship of the Prophet Noah."¹⁶  Her judgement of its age:  the walls "are all, as I should judge, constructions of a recent date, and they are certainly Mohammadan, since one of the chambers contains a mihrab niche to the south."¹⁶  Lower down, on a small plateau, she found "carefully built walls, stone doorposts, and lintels showing above the level of the soil," and wrote:  "Here, I make little doubt, was the site of the Nestorian monastery."¹⁶

Bell measured nothing and dug nothing.  She reports no wood, bitumen or pottery from the summit.  Her account of the monastery's destruction by lightning in 766 came from her guide, Kas Mattai, and her footnote gives Carl Ritter's geography as its source.¹⁶

The pilgrimage: the Wigrams, 1914

W. A. and E. T. A. Wigram described the festival five years later.  One of them served in the Archbishop of Canterbury's Assyrian Mission, which gave them their knowledge of the country.¹⁷  "A relatively insignificant ridge, known as Judi Dagh, is regarded as the authentic spot by all the folk in this land."  Noah's sacrifice "is still commemorated year by year on the place where tradition says the ark rested — a ziaret which is not the actual summit of the mountain but a spot on its ridge."  Christians, Muslims, Sabaeans, Jews and Yezidis come, "each group bringing a sheep or kid for sacrifice."  The day is "the first day of Ilul, or September 14 of our calendar."¹⁷  They add that "the tradition goes back to the year A.D. 300 at least," with no source for the date.¹⁷

The reliefs: Sennacherib, about 700 BC

At the village of Hasanah, at the foot of the ridge, Bell photographed a smoothed niche "carved with the figure of an Assyrian king, wearing a long fringed robe and carrying a sceptre."  Her footnote reports that the Assyriologist L. W. King, who had visited the site, told her "that all the reliefs are of Sennacherib and were carved in the year 699 B.C."¹⁶  The Assyrians probably called the mountain Nipur, and Sennacherib's fifth campaign, about 697 BC, was fought there.²⁴  The reliefs show an Assyrian king in the mountains.  Crouse, who wants them to matter, concedes that Sennacherib "never mentions seeing the ark."⁴  They are evidence that the Assyrians reached the mountain, and of nothing about a ship.

The wood: Hussein Aga, 1820, and Friedrich Bender, 1953

Claudius Rich, the British resident at Baghdad, recorded the first claim of a wooden hull on the summit in his account of travels in Kurdistan in 1820, published in 1836.  A local chief, "Hussein Aga maintained to me that he has with his own eyes seen the remains of Noah's Ark.  He went to a Christian village, whence he ascended by a steep road of an hour to the summit, on which he saw the remains of a very large vessel of wood almost entirely rotted, with nails of a foot long still remaining."¹⁸  Rich did not go to see it.  No later visitor reports it.  Bell, eighty-nine years later, saw roofless stone chambers roofed with "tree-trunks and boughs."  Crouse cites Rich's page for "bronze spikes" found by "several sources from antiquity."⁴  Rich's page has nails a foot long, of unstated metal, from one informant, in 1820.

Friedrich Bender, a German geologist, climbed the mountain in 1953.  His own account, translated in Bible and Spade in 2006:  "In the spring of 1953, I was able to climb Cudidag, despite the difficulties in reaching this location in eastern Turkey in those days, and to recover a sample of asphalt-bound wood remains (Bender 1956)."  His reason for going was "reports of Kurdish Muslims that the Cudidag was a pilgrim destination where 'pieces of wood from Noah’s Ark,' relics of great value, could be dug up."  He adds:  "My guides’ constraints during this climb did not permit me to obtain detailed records of the geologic-Quaternary stratigraphy."¹⁹

His result:  the wood was "dated with the 14 C method; they are 6500 years old, i.e. pre-Sumerian."¹⁹  Bender gives no laboratory, sample number or error in the part of the article that could be read.  He does not argue that the wood is the Ark of Genesis.  He uses it for a local Mesopotamian flood, and says geology and landforms "exclude the high peaks of Ararat."¹⁹  Crouse turns the figure into "an ancient date of 4500 BC" and calls the finds "of course inconclusive."⁴  Part 5 prices the date.

What is still missing

No excavation report on the summit has been read for this article.  Şırnak, the provincial capital nearest the mountain, hosted an international symposium on "Noah and Mount Cudi" in 2013, where Crouse gave the paper cited here.⁴  Turkish survey work since then has not been searched for this draft.  If any of it has dated a structure on the summit or found ship timber, that would be the first physical evidence of its kind.

Part 4: Why Cudi fell from favour and Ağrı Dağı rose

The southern tradition held for a long time after the monastery burned.  Al-Ṭabarī and al-Masʿūdī wrote in the tenth century, Benjamin of Tudela in the twelfth.  Bar Hebraeus, the Syriac scholar who died in 1286 and lived in this region, "continued to affirm that the landing place was Mount Qardu."²

The change came from the Armenian side.  Davis Young, a geologist writing a history of how the church handled the Flood, dates it:  "Only toward the eleventh and twelfth centuries did the focus begin to shift toward the huge volcanic cone Agri Dagh, the modern Mount Ararat in easternmost Turkey, as the final resting place."²⁰  Bailey, summarising the Armenian scholar Heinrich Hübschmann, makes the same point from the Armenian texts:  "the older Armenian writers all understood the Gordian (Qardu) Mountains to be the ark's landing place."²  Bailey argues that even the fifth-century Armenian story of St. Jacob of Nisibis climbing toward the Ark was first set in the canton of Gordukh, "almost within sight of Saint Jacob’s hometown of Nisibis," and only later moved north.²

Sale, in 1734, knew both traditions.  He thought the southern one had lost credit after the monastery burned, and "given place to another, which obtains at present, and according to which the ark rested on Mount Masis, in Armenia, called by the Turks Aghir dagh."¹²  That is Sale's guess at a cause, not a finding.  The fuller story of how Ağrı Dağı acquired the name Ararat, and what has been reported there since, is in Mount Ararat and the Ararat Anomaly.

The local tradition never died.  The festival Bell and the Wigrams described was still held on the ridge in the early twentieth century, nearly eight hundred years after the Armenian shift.¹⁷

Part 5: What the tradition is worth as evidence

Test 1: is any witness independent of Genesis?

A tradition is evidence for a fact only if at least one of its witnesses could have known the fact without the text being explained.  Sorted by that test, the Cudi witnesses fall into five groups.

1. Translations. The Targums and the Peshitta render the word "Ararat." Their choice shows what their readers called the mountains north of Assyria. It is a gloss, and the Targum of the Prophets makes the same gloss for Sennacherib's sons in Isaiah 37:38, where nobody claims a separate tradition.⁹
2. Retellings. Jubilees, Ephrem and Epiphanius follow Genesis and the Aramaic renderings. Ephrem's modern translators say he is "Following the Peshitta, Josephus, Antiquities 1.3, 5-6, Genesis Rabbah 33.4, the Targums on this verse."¹⁰
3. The Qur'an and its commentators. The Qur'an names al-Jūdī without placing it. Its commentators placed it where the Nestorians already had a monastery of the Ark, and Bailey says the Muslims "accepted the Nestorian tradition."²
4. Reports that remains were shown. Josephus, Nicolaus, Hippolytus, Theophilus and Epiphanius say that something was shown to visitors. None describes it. They disagree about where it was: the Kordyaean country, Adiabene, Minyas, "the Arabian mountains."
5. Berossus. The one witness outside the biblical line, and the earliest.

Groups 1 to 3 are localisations of a known text.  Their agreement is real, and it counts as one fact:  the Aramaic- and Syriac-speaking east read "Ararat" as the Qardu country.  Group 4 is evidence that a relic was being shown, in more than one place.  So the whole case for Cudi as a memory, not a reading, rests on Berossus.

Test 2: what a Babylonian priest about 280 BC can show

Berossus says three things:  part of the ship "yet remains" in the Kordyaean mountains, it was coated with bitumen, and people scrape the bitumen off for amulets.⁷  That is a report of a relic and a practice in his own day.

Three points make it look like an independent report rather than a borrowing.

1. It departs from his own source. The Babylonian flood story Berossus was retelling puts the boat on Mount Nimush, in the Zagros, not in the Kordyaean country. The parallels belong to Flood Legends. Crouse notes that Berossus "knows that it gives him a different mountain, but instead gives the one that is more in agreement with the Hebrew Bible! Why he does this is an interesting question for which we have no answer."⁴ The simplest answer is that Berossus was not copying a tablet at this point. He was reporting where a relic was shown in his time.
2. The hero is Babylonian. The relic is Xisuthros's ship, not Noah's. A Jewish localisation passed to a Babylonian priest would be expected to carry Noah with it.
3. It is early. It is about 120 years older than Jubilees and more than four centuries older than the Targums.

Four points limit what it can show.

1. It reaches us third-hand. The fragment survives through Alexander Polyhistor in the first century BC, Josephus about AD 94, and Eusebius and Syncellus later still. The versions differ: Josephus has one "mountain of the Cordyaeans," Syncellus has the "Corcyraean mountains."¹⁷ The Kordyaean detail is secure for the first century BC. That it is Berossus's own words, and not an excerptor's, is likely but not provable.
2. It describes a practice, not an object. Nobody in the fragment measures, draws or describes the "ship." Pilgrims scraping bitumen from something called a ship is what a relic cult looks like whatever the object was.
3. It cannot rule out Jewish influence. Israelites were deported to "Halah and in Habor by the river of Gozan, and in the cities of the Medes" in 722 BC, 442 years before Berossus wrote, and Judeans had lived in Babylonia since the 590s BC.⁵ A local reading of "Ararat" had centuries to reach Babylon. The Babylonian hero makes this less likely, not impossible.
4. It is very late against the Flood. The biblical Flood dates computed by the young-earth writers Chris Hardy and Robert Carter run from 2256 to 3386 BC.²¹ Berossus wrote 1,976 to 3,106 years after those dates.⁵ A relic shown that long after the event says where people looked, not what they found.

So Berossus shows that by about 280 BC, and certainly by the first century BC, the Kordyaean mountains held a flood-ship relic.  It is the strongest single point in the Cudi case, and it supports the region, not the peak.  It cannot show that the relic was a ship.  The dependence may even run the other way.  Bailey suggests that "The idea that Noah’s ark landed in this area may come from Berossus," through Josephus, and he calls it "Less excusable" that modern searchers quote Berossus for Ağrı Dağı.²  If he is right, the Jewish and Christian Qardu readings are not even a second line.

Test 3: pricing the wood

Bender's sample is the only physical claim with a number attached.  Even taken at face value, the number cannot decide the question, because the two young-earth readings of radiocarbon give opposite verdicts on it.⁵

1. On a plain calendar reading, 6,500 radiocarbon years is about 4550 BC. That is 1,164 years older than the earliest biblical Flood date in Hardy and Carter's range. Bender himself reads it as "pre-Sumerian" and uses it for a local flood.¹⁹
2. On the RATE project's reading, wood that grew before the Flood should show about 0.12 percent of modern carbon-14 today, because John Baumgardner holds that the pre-Flood biosphere carried far more carbon, so organisms "with 0.2 pMC 14C 4500 years ago would display a level of 0.12 pMC today."²² That level corresponds to a radiocarbon age of about 54,000 years. An age of 6,500 years means 44.5 percent of modern carbon, 371 times what RATE expects for Ark timber.
3. On Andrew Snelling's simpler test, "a wood sample from the Ark must carbon-14 date older than 4,800 years."²³ Bender's date passes.

So the date is too old for one young-earth reading, far too young for another, and acceptable to a third.  Without the laboratory, the sample number, the pretreatment, or even the depth and place of collection, it is not evidence either way.  It is the kind of claim the parent article warns about:  a decisive sample announced and never released for checking.

What the tradition does show

The Cudi tradition is good evidence for the history of interpretation.  From about 280 BC to the twelfth century AD, almost everyone in the region who placed the Ark put it in the Kordyaean country on the upper Tigris.  Strabo says the Gordyaeans were "held in subjection by the king of the Armenians," so Gordyene was counted part of Armenia, the later name for Ararat's region.²  The tradition therefore fits Genesis 8:4's "mountains of Ararat" without strain.  It does not add a fact that Genesis 8:4 lacks.

Objections and responses

1. "Pagan, Jewish, Christian and Muslim witnesses all agree. That consensus is strong evidence." Crouse's first and "primary" reason for Cudi is "the abundance and diversity of credible ancient witnesses."⁴ Diversity of religion is not independence of source. The Jewish, Christian and Muslim witnesses descend from Genesis 8:4 through the Aramaic and Syriac renderings, as Part 5 shows, and several of them say so. Counted by independent line, the case has one early witness, Berossus, plus a relic practice reported by several writers in several places.
2. "Berossus had the cuneiform tablets and still chose Gordyene. He must have known something real." He probably knew something real: that a relic was shown there in his day. That is the most this argument can carry. It does not show what the relic was, and his own source put the boat elsewhere.
3. "The Qur'an names al-Jūdī. That confirms Cudi." The Qur'an names a mountain without placing it, there is a Jabal Judi in Arabia, and Rosenthal thinks the name may be a conflation of the Syriac Gurdi with an Arabian mountain.¹³² Placing al-Jūdī on the Tigris is the work of later commentators who found a Nestorian monastery of the Ark already there.
4. "Bender found ancient wood with asphalt on the mountain. That is physical evidence." It is a reported sample with no published laboratory result in the part of his article that could be read, collected without a record of the stratigraphy, by a scientist who used it to argue for a local flood and against an Ark on Ararat.¹⁹¹⁹ Its date fails one young-earth test and passes another. Crouse himself calls the finds "of course inconclusive."⁴
5. "Ağrı Dağı is a post-Flood volcano and the sightings are fiction, so Cudi wins by default." The case against Ağrı Dağı is strong and is made in Mount Ararat and the Ararat Anomaly. Eliminating one candidate does not confirm another. Genesis names a region, and Lubar, Baris and the Adiabene site are also old candidates within or beside it.
6. "Cudi is only about 2,000 m high. A landing there means the Flood was local." Bender and the geologist Carol Hill do use a low landing site to argue for a regional flood.²⁴¹⁹ But the height of the landing place says nothing about the depth of the water until the text says when the Ark grounded relative to other peaks, which is the parent article's question. The Cudi tradition is a tradition, not a measurement of water depth.
7. A skeptic's objection: "Every culture parks its flood boat on the nearest impressive mountain. The Cudi story shows the Ark is folklore." The record fits that reading: the site moved with the readers, from Gordyene to Adiabene, Phrygia, Arabia and finally Ağrı Dağı. But a wandering tradition about where a boat lies is what any old event would produce once the object itself was gone. Genesis 8:4 claims a region, not a relic, and the region it names is the one the oldest tradition chose. The history of the site is evidence about the readers, not about whether the Flood happened.
8. "An Ark on the edge of Cudi, overlooking the plain, would have been seen by thousands for millennia." Crouse argues this as his second reason.⁴ Nobody in the record describes a hull. The earliest witness reports scraped bitumen, the later ones report "remains" shown, and the first eyewitness description of the summit, Bell's, is of dry-stone chambers with a mihrab. If a ship-sized object had stood there in historic times, at least one of these writers would be expected to say what it looked like.

Issues and unanswered questions

1. The monastery's date. Bailey and Bell's guide give 766 for the lightning, Sale gives 776. The Syriac chronicle that Sale cites, through Assemani's Bibliotheca Orientalis vol. 2 p. 113, has not been read. Nor has any source for the monastery's founding.
2. The Peshitta. The reading Qardu at Genesis 8:4 is taken from Bailey and from Ephrem's translators. The Syriac text itself was not transcribed for this draft.
3. The Genesis Apocryphon. The Qumran retelling of Genesis has the Ark come to rest on "one of the mountains of Ararat" in column 10, by a helper's reading of a translation. The printed page was not anchored, so it is not in Part 1's table.
4. Eutychius was read only as quoted by Crouse and Bailey; Pococke's 1656 Latin edition did not yield the passage.
5. The reliefs. L. W. King's 1913 publication of the Sennacherib reliefs, which identifies the mountain with Mount Nipur, was not obtained. Bell's "699 B.C." is King's date as she heard it; other summaries give about 697.
6. Bender's 1956 publication, which should give the laboratory and the sample, was not obtained. Nor was his memoir. The preview of his 2006 article breaks off before any methods section.
7. Turkish work since 2013. Survey or excavation reports by Şırnak University or the Ministry of Culture, if they exist, were not searched. Gordon Franz's article on whether Sennacherib took wood from the Ark was found but not read.
8. The bitumen. Berossus's pilgrims and Bender's sample both involve bitumen-bound wood. Whether there are natural asphalt seeps on or near Cudi Dağı, which would explain both without a ship, was not checked. It is the most useful single fact a field geologist could add.
9. Errors in the advocate's case. Crouse cites Rich 1836 for "bronze spikes" reported by "sources from antiquity"; Rich reports one informant's claim of foot-long nails in 1820. Crouse's quotation of Josephus's "Carron" as a corruption of "Kardu" is an emendation he does not attribute to an edition. Neither error touches his strongest point, which is Berossus.

Verdict

The oldest landing traditions do point to the Kordyaean country on the upper Tigris, and Cudi Dağı is its most conspicuous mountain.  Berossus places a relic there about 280 BC, the Aramaic and Syriac Bibles read "Ararat" as Qardu, Epiphanius says remains were shown "in the land of the Kardyaeans," and Nestorian Christians and Muslim geographers fixed the site on Cudi's summit by the tenth century.  Ağrı Dağı enters the record only in the eleventh and twelfth centuries.  On the question "where did the old tradition put the Ark?", Cudi is the answer.

On the question "is the Ark there?", the evidence is nil.  The Jewish, Christian and Muslim witnesses localise Genesis 8:4 rather than remember the site.  Berossus is a real early witness to a relic cult, and to nothing more.  The summit holds a recent Muslim shrine on what was probably a Nestorian monastery.  The reliefs are Assyrian.  The one reported wood sample has never been published in a form anyone can check.  Genesis 8:4 claims only "the mountains of Ararat," and the Cudi tradition is a fair early reading of that claim.  It neither proves nor weakens it.

Sources