Creation of   
the Armenian Script

"The Madenataran is a shrine to [the Armenian language]. Set into the upper slopes of Yerevan, with its full view of Ararat, it is home to about ten thousand bound manuscripts and one hundred thousand historical documents. At its entrance, sits Mesrop Mashtots who made it all possible, who devised the so-called regiment of letters and its thirty-six warriors …
The Armenians and their script have become inseparable;
the survival of one would be impossible without the other."
(Marsden 1995, p. 171)

When Armenians received Christianity, they did not have a script for their language. At first, that was not much of a problem. Most of the nobility and clergy spoke and wrote Greek or Syriac, two languages of the literature and liturgy of the Eastern Church. However, as preachers tried to communicate the teaching of the church to the wider population it soon become clear that preaching in foreign language in the remote parts of the Armenian country, would be quite difficult. With the active support of the Catholicos (supreme patriarch) Sahak, monk Mesrop Mashtots created the script around the year 400 AD. Therefore, from the onset, the Armenian script was inexplicably connected with the Armenian church and together with the Armenian language become the holly trinity that defines one as Armenian.

Naturally, it would be easiest to take some existing writing system and apply it to the Armenian language. After trying to modify the Syriac and Hebrew alphabets, Mashtots, devised a script exclusively for the Armenian language. The traditional story of invention reinforces the mystical nature of the writing - after long and ordious efforts, Mashtots saw letters:

"… neither in his dream nor awake, not as a vision but in his heart and with the eye of his soul, the [Lord's] hand which writes on the stone like on the snow. And all this, though not apparent, thoroughly gathered in him like in a vessel …" (Petrosyan, p. 52)

Mashtots' system was based on the phonetically ordered and fully marked vowels following the model of the Greek alphabet, as well as left-to-right writing direction. The large uncial letters of the first alphabet are called erkat'agir script, name meaning, "engraved with an iron tool." The original form of the script remained in use down to the present day - the uppercase letters are practically the same as created by the Mashtots, while lowercase letters are based on the bolorgir cursive developed during the later Middle Ages.

The church actively supported translation and propagation of the ecclesiastical books. In monastic school, the seminarians would be taught the script after which they would be sent to the well-established Christian centers like Edessa to learn Greek and Syriac, and upon returning bring exemplars for translation. Because of the canonical independence of the Armenian church, which refused to accept the creed of Chalcedon (451 AD), translations of the Armenian Bible draw their translations on very old and unorthodox versions of the Scripture, what make them today extremely valuable for the exegesis research.

Listen to the sound of the Armenian language
on MENQ web site. Click individual letter and new page will open.
The letters, syllables and words are sounded when hovered over ...
... or read about creator of the script
Saint Mesrop Mashtots
in Armeniapedia.

History · Church · Sacred object · MSS Data · Provenance · Codicology · Scribes · Illuminators

Bibliography

Marsden, P. (1995). The crossing place: A journey among the Armenians. New York, Tokyo, London: Kodansha International.

Petrosyan, H. (2001) Writing and the Book. In Abrahamian, L. and Sweezy, N. (Ed.), Armenian folk arts, culture, and identity. (pp. 52-59) Indianapolis: Indiana University Press.

Thomson, R. (1997). Armenian literary culture through the eleventh century. In R. G. Hovannisian (Ed.), The Armenian people from ancient to modern times (Vol. I, pp. 199-239). New York: St. Martin's Press.

Copyright 2006, Vlasta Radan, all rights reserved.