could reflect the native Armenian-language form of this same name (compare to Armenian erku (երկու, meaning "two")). Today, both Ararat and Masis are common male first names among Armenians. Ağrı and Agirî The Turkish name is Ağrı Dağı (; Ağır Dağ), i.e. "Mountain of Ağrı". Ağrı literally translates to "pain" or "sorrow". This name has been known since the late Middle Ages. The 17th century explorer Evliya Çelebi referred to it as Ağrî in the Seyahatnâme. The Kurdish name of the mountain is Çiyayê Agirî , which translates to "fiery mountain". An alternative Kurdish name is Grîdax, which is composed of the word grî, presumably a corrupted version of the Kurdish girê, meaning hill, or Agirî, and dax, which is the Turkish dağ, meaning mountain. Despite the supposed meaning in Turkish Ağrı Dağı as "pain mountain" and Kurdish Çiyayê Agirî as "fiery mountain", some linguists underline a relationship between the mountain's name and a village on its slopes called Ağori that was decimated after a landslide in 1840. The exact meaning of these related names remains unknown. Other names The traditional Persian name is , , , literally the "mountain of Noah". In classical antiquity, particularly in Strabo's Geographica, the peaks of Ararat were known in ancient Greek as Ἄβος (Abos) and Νίβαρος (Nibaros). Geography Mount Ararat is located in the Eastern Anatolia Region of Turkey between the provinces of Ağrı and Iğdır, near the border with Iran, Armenia and Nakhchivan exclave of Azerbaijan, between the Aras and Murat rivers. The Serdarbulak lava plateau, at 2600 meters of elevation, separates the peaks of Greater and Little Ararat. Mount Ararat's summit is located some west of the Turkey-Iran border and south of the Turco-Armenian border. The Ararat plain runs along its northwest to western side. Elevation Ararat is the third most prominent mountain in West Asia. An elevation of for Mount Ararat is given by some encyclopedias and reference works such as Merriam-Webster's Geographical Dictionary and Encyclopedia of World Geography. However, a number of sources, such as the United States Geological Survey and numerous topographic maps indicate that the alternatively widespread figure of is probably more accurate. The current elevation may be as low as due to the melting of its snow-covered ice cap. Summit ice cap The ice cap on the summit of Mount Ararat has been shrinking since at least 1957. In the late 1950s, Blumenthal observed that there