Mesrop Mashtots and the Armenian alphabet: letters to translate the Bible

At the beginning of the fifth century Armenia had been a Christian kingdom for about a century, but it had no script of its own. The liturgy and the Scriptures were read in Greek or Syriac, languages the people did not understand. It was to bridge this gap that a monk named Mesrop Mashtots, with the support of King Vramshapuh and the Catholicos Sahak, undertook to create an alphabet suited to the Armenian language, completed according to tradition around 405.

Koriun's account

We know this story mainly thanks to the Life of Mashtots written by Koriun, his disciple, a few years after the master's death. In his youth Mashtots had been an official of the royal chancery, where he learned Greek, Syriac and Persian, before embracing the ascetic life and preaching. Koriun relates that a first attempt, based on letters collected by a Syrian bishop named Daniel, proved unable to render all the sounds of Armenian.

Mashtots then went with some pupils to the Syrian cities of Edessa and Samosata. According to Koriun's account, during prayer he saw in his heart a right hand tracing letters on rock, and from that vision he drew the shape of the new signs. At Samosata a Greek calligrapher named Rufinus helped him give the characters a harmonious design.

Thirty-six letters and a book of Proverbs

The original alphabet had thirty-six letters, arranged in an order that largely follows the Greek one, but with many new signs for sounds specific to Armenian. In the Middle Ages two more letters were added, bringing the total to thirty-eight. As in Greek, every letter also had a numerical value, and the first nine indicated units, the following ones tens and hundreds.

According to tradition, the first sentence translated into the new script was the opening of the book of Proverbs: «to know wisdom and instruction, to perceive the words of understanding». The translation of the whole Bible followed, carried out by Mashtots, Sahak and their pupils, later called the Holy Translators. The quality of that version earned it, among Armenian scholars, the title of «queen of translations».

A legacy kept in manuscripts

The fifth century is remembered as the golden age of Armenian literature. Within a few decades theological, philosophical and historical works were translated from Greek and Syriac, some of which survive today only in their Armenian version. Every autumn the Armenian Church celebrates the feast of the Holy Translators, and Mashtots is venerated as a saint. His tomb is at Oshakan, not far from Yerevan.

In Yerevan the institute of ancient manuscripts bears his name: the Mesrop Mashtots Matenadaran, which holds thousands of codices, many of them splendidly illuminated. Koriun also credits Mashtots with creating the Georgian and Caucasian Albanian alphabets, but this claim is disputed, above all regarding Georgian, which Georgian tradition traces to a different origin.

The story of Mashtots clearly shows a recurring phenomenon in the history of sacred scripts. The Armenian alphabet was born of a religious need, to translate the Bible, but it became the foundation of the cultural identity of an entire people, able to withstand sixteen centuries of conquest, dispersion and persecution. Even today its thirty-eight letters are used, almost unchanged, in Armenian books and churches all over the world.