The antiquity of the name of Ararat is not disputed. It first comes to our notice in the book of Genesis, as we have seen in connection with the resting of the ark “upon the mountains of Ararat.” The book of Genesis is considered by the best critics to be the oldest book, or at least, having the oldest documents that compose the book in the Scriptures, and its authorship is assigned to Moses, who lived in the fifteenth century before the Christian era. Ararat was known as the name of Armenia even several centuries before the time of Moses. “An ancient bilingual tablet (W. A. I., II 48, 13) makes Urdhu the equivalent of _tilla_, the latter, as Sir H. Rawlinson long ago pointed out, being probably a semitic loan-word, and meaning “the highlands.” _Tilla_, the equivalent of Urdhu, usually signifies that land of Accad or northern Babylonia, but since it is not glossed in this passage, and stands, moreover, between Akharu or Palestine, and Kutu Kurdistan, it would seem that it is here employed to denote Armenia. Urardhu, therefore, contracted into Urdhu, would have been the designation of the highlands of Armenia among the Babylonians as early as the sixteenth and seventeenth century B.C.”[25] We know that the Assyrians sprang out of the ancient Babylonian people; they were of the same blood and race. Assyria was colonized from Babylonia.[26] Thus, their early acquaintance with the highlands of Armenia, by the name of Urardhu, accounts for their calling the Kings of Armenia the kings of Urardhu or Ararat. There has been a great deal of discussion among the scholars as to whether these Vaunic kings and people belong to the Aryan race or not, and whether their language belongs to the Indo-European family of languages. The question may be considered still a debatable one, though the consensus of opinion of the modern writers is in the negative. Yet a man like the late Dr. Hincks, who was the first to begin the decipherment of the Vaunic inscriptions, has recorded his opinion in the following words: “I flatter myself, that those who read this paper will admit that I have made a beginning, and gone a considerable way in the decipherment and interpretation of a set of inscriptions, which, however slight may be their value in a historical point of view, are invaluable to the philologer, as being beyond all comparison the oldest specimens of the Asiatic branch of the Indo-Germanic family; nay, for aught we know to the contrary, they are more ancient than any Greek which has come down to us.”[27]