The map of Armenia from Kircher’s Book “Noah’s Ark”

According to the map of Athanasius Kircher (sometimes erroneously spelled Kirchner) from the 1675 book “Noah’s Ark“, the Heaven was located near Ararat mount and the Armenian Upland, between the rivers Tigris and Euphrates. Armenia was considered to be the whereabouts of the Paradise.

Athanasius Kircher (1602-1680) was a German Jesuit scholar, erudite, philosopher, mathematician, theologian, astrologer who is called “the father of modern science”, “universal genius” and “master of hundreds of arts”.

Kircher studied in Köln (Cologne), Mainz and Würzburg. The disasters of the Thirty Years’ War that broke out in Germany forced him to leave his homeland. He moved first to Lyon and then to Avignon.

Afterwards through the mediation of the French humanist and scholar Nicolas-Claude Fabri de Peiresc Kircher was invited by the pope to Rome, where at the Roman College he has taught mathematics, physics and oriental languages for six years.