Mount Nisir (also spelled Mount Niṣir, and also called Mount Nimush), mentioned in the ancient

Mesopotamia Mesopotamia is a historical region of West Asia situated within the Tigris–Euphrates river system, in the northern part of the Fertile Crescent. Today, Mesopotamia is known as present-day Iraq and forms the eastern geographic boundary of ...

n ''

Epic of Gilgamesh The ''Epic of Gilgamesh'' () is an epic poetry, epic from ancient Mesopotamia. The literary history of Gilgamesh begins with five Sumerian language, Sumerian poems about Gilgamesh (formerly read as Sumerian "Bilgames"), king of Uruk, some of ...

'', is supposedly the mountain known today as Pir Omar Gudrun (elevation 2,588 m (8490 ft.)), near the city Sulaymaniyah in

Iraqi Kurdistan Iraqi Kurdistan or Southern Kurdistan () refers to the Kurds, Kurdish-populated part of northern Iraq. It is considered one of the four parts of Greater Kurdistan in West Asia, which also includes parts of southeastern Turkey (Northern Kurdist ...

. The name may mean "Mount of Salvation". According to the ''Epic of Gilgamesh'', Mt. Nisir is the resting place of the ship built by Utnapishtim. Despite the precise descriptions in the ''Epic of Gilgamesh'', those curious have never attempted to search for the remains of the giant ship on Mount Nisir. An alternative translation of "Mount Nisir" in the ''Epic of Gilgamesh'' XI,141a is based on the ambiguous words: "KUR-ú ^KUR ''ni-sir'' held tight the boat." The Sumerian word KUR can mean land or country or hill, but not mountain. In Akkadian, KUR with the

phonetic complement A phonetic complement is a phonetic symbol used to disambiguate word characters (logograms) that have multiple readings, in mixed logographic-phonetic scripts such as Egyptian hieroglyphs, Akkadian cuneiform, Linear B, Japanese, and Mayan. O ...

-ú is read as ''shadû'' which can mean hill or mountain. The second KUR is a

determinative A determinative, also known as a taxogram or semagram, is an ideogram used to mark semantic categories of words in logographic scripts which helps to disambiguate interpretation. They have no direct counterpart in spoken language, though they ...

indicating that ''nisir'' is the name of a hill or land or country (or in Akkadian a mountain). But Thompson read this determinative as ''matu'', an Akkadian word for country. The country Nisir may have got its name from ''nisirtu'' which means a locality that is hidden, inaccessible, or secluded. Hence the boat may have grounded on an inaccessible hill.R. M. Best, page 277.

References

{{coord, 35.5000, N, 45.4167, E, source:wikidata, display=title Mythological mountains