area as a safe haven against the Turkish state. Iran eventually agreed to cede the area to Turkey in a territorial exchange. The Iran-Turkey boundary skirts east of Lesser Ararat, the lower peak of the Ararat massif. the mountain is open to climbers only with "military permission". The procedure to obtain the permission involves submitting a formal request to a Turkish embassy for a special "Ararat visa", and it is mandatory to hire an official guide from the Turkish Federation for Alpinism. Access is still limited, even for climbers who obtain the necessary permission, and those who venture off the approved path may be fired upon without warning. Names and etymology Ararat Ararat (Western Armenian pronunciation: Ararad) is the Biblical Hebrew name (אררט ʾrrṭ; Tiberian vocalization אֲרָרָט ʾărārāṭ; Pesher Genesis הוררט hōrārāṭ), cognate with Assyrian Urartu, of a kingdom that existed in the Armenian Highlands in the 9th–6th centuries BC. In the 19th century Wilhelm Gesenius speculated an origin from Arjanwartah, an unattested Sanskrit word without any clear cognates, supposedly meaning "holy ground." Some Armenian historians, such as Ashot Melkonyan, link the origin of the word "Ararat" to the prefix of a number of placenames in the Armenian Highland ("ar–"), including the Armenians. The mountain is known as Ararat in European languages, however, none of the native peoples have traditionally referred to the mountain by that name. This mountain was not called by the name Ararat until the Middle Ages; early Armenian historians considered the biblical Ararat to be in Corduene. Masis The traditional Armenian name is Masis (Մասիս ; sometimes Massis). However, nowadays, the terms Masis and Ararat are both widely, often interchangeably, used in Armenian. The folk etymology expressed in Movses Khorenatsi's History of Armenia derives the name from king Amasya, the great-grandson of the legendary Armenian patriarch Hayk, who is said to have called the mountain Masis after himself. Various etymologies have been proposed. Russian orientalist Anatoly Novoseltsev suggested that Masis derives from Middle Persian masist, "the largest." According to Armenian historian Sargis Petrosyan the mas root in Masis means "mountain", cf. Proto-Indo-European *mņs-. According to archaeologist Armen Petrosyan, the name originates from the Māšu (Mashu) mountain mentioned in the Epic of Gilgamesh, which sounded like Māsu in Assyrian. According to this theory, the name meant "twin," referring to the twin peaks of the mountain. Erkuahi, a land mentioned in Urartian texts and identified with Mt. Ararat,