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
Urartu Urartu Urartu (), which corresponds to the biblical "mountains of Ararat", is the name of a geographical region commonly used as the exonym for the Iron Age kingdom also known by the modern rendition of its endonym, the Kingdom of Van, centered around Lake Van in the historic Armenian Highlands (present day eastern Anatolia). The written language that the kingdom's political elite used is referred to as "Urartian", which appears in cuneiform inscriptions in Armenia and eastern Turkey. It is unknown what language was spoken by the peoples of Urartu at the time of the existence of the kingdom, but