Mount Judi independent of the Genesis account of Noah's flood, rooted in the more general Near Eastern flood legends, but following Christianization of the Syrians, from about the 2nd century AD, it became associated with the Mountains of Ararat where Noah landed according to Genesis, and from Syria also this legend also spread to the Armenians. The Armenians did not traditionally associate Noah's landing site with Mount Ararat, known natively as "Masis", but until the 11th century continued to associate Noah's ark with Mount Judi. It is to be noted, the biblical "Ararat" is thought be a variation of "Urartu", an ancient
Searches for Noah's Ark "mountains of Ararat" are to be found in the region then known as Armenia, roughly corresponding to Eastern Anatolia. Syrian tradition of the early centuries BC had a tradition of the ark landing at Mount Judi, where according to Josephus the remains of the ark were still shown in the 1st century BC. The location of the "Place of Descent" (αποβατηριον, i.e., "Nakhchivan") described by Josephus was some 100 km to the southeast of the peak now known as Mount Ararat, in what is today Iraqi Kurdistan. According to Jewish Rabbinic tradition, the Ark was looted in antiquity, the remains