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
Mount Ararat agreed to cede the area to Turkey in a territorial exchange. The Iran-Turkey boundary skirts east of Lesser Ararat, the lower peak of the Ararat massif. Ararat (sometimes "Ararad") is the Greek version of the Hebrew spelling (אֲרָרָט; "'RRṬ") of the name Urartu, a kingdom that existed in the Armenian plateau in the 9th–6th centuries BC. German orientalist and Bible critic Wilhelm Gesenius speculated that the word "Ararat" came from the Sanskrit word "Arjanwartah", meaning "holy ground." Some Armenian historians, such as , link the origin of the word "Ararat" to the root of the endonym of the indigenous peoples