THE MOUNT ARARAT IN THE BIBLE

Abstract

The name of the Mount Ararat in the Bible was taken as the object of ethnolinguistic research in
this paper. We come to such a conclusion that Ararat is a theonym of oronymic origin.
Arar and Urar are the names of the two deities of Western Asia. Then these theonyms turned into
the forms Aral and Ural with the change from r to l.
In the mythical thinking of the ancient Proto-Turkic people, Aral was a good deity, and Ural was
an evil one. Ural “urur”, i.e. he hits, kills, and Aral bandages the wounds of the brave men who were
wounded in the battle.
That is why, they used not to bury the brave men who were killed in the battle. They used to put
them in the shrine and wait for 12 days. They believed that Aral would come and revive them.
Faustus from the Buzan dynasty of the Bulgars wrote such a fact about this belief. The Christian
chroniclers with Greek education writes the name of the God Aral as Aralez.
Being of the theonymic origin the names of the Ural mountains and the Lake Aral are formed
from ethnonyms.