Nisir
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The Assyrian king Ashurbanipal claimed that he had been to Mount Nisir and saw the boat of Utnapishtim. His army and he then took artifacts from the boat and put them in his museum of ancient artifacts. However, this museum has long since been destroyed so archaeology doesn't know how much truth there is in the story. Mount Nisir is supposedly in modern-day Iran, and thus it is inaccessible to the western world.
The word nişir (spelled with a dot under the s) may have come from the Akkadian word nişirtu which, with reference to localities, had the "connotation of hidden, inaccessible, secluded" and also meant arcane and secret.[1] In other words, nişir could be descriptive, in addition to being a proper name. The partly translated sentence in line 141a of the Gilgamesh flood myth is "KUR-ú KUR ni-şir held tight the boat." The first KUR is followed by a phonetic complement -ú which indicates that KUR-ú is to be read in Akkadian as šadú (hill). The second KUR without the complement is read mātu (country). Since šadú (sha-doo) can mean mountain as well as hill, and scholars were familiar with the expression Mount Ararat, it has become customary to translate "KUR-ú KUR ni-şir" as Mount Nisir or Mount Nimush.
This noun phrase was probably derived from an earlier Sumerian edition and was first written in clay about 2600 BC when the only written language was the Sumerian language. Therefore, we should read KUR as a Sumerian word, not as Akkadian. In Sumerian, KUR did not mean mountain. The Sumerian word for mountain was HURSAG. In Sumerian, KUR meant land, or hill, or country, especially a foreign country. Hence the sentence "KUR-ú KUR ni-şir held tight the boat" should be read as "A mound in an inaccessible country held the boat tight."[2] A sand bar in a marsh would qualify.
