Mesrop Mashtots and the Armenian Alphabet

The world that shaped him

Mesrop Mashtots was born around 361 into a family of modest means in the village of Hatsekats, in the province of Taron. He received a Greek education, learned Persian and Syriac, and went to work in the Armenian royal chancellery, where documents were written in those foreign languages. There he saw the problem at first hand: the Armenian state ran its business, and the Armenian church held its services, in scripts that ordinary Armenians could not read.

Politics made the problem urgent. In 387 the Roman and Sasanian empires partitioned the kingdom between them, and in 428 the Armenian monarchy was abolished altogether. Greek was the language of learning in the western part, while Persian and Syriac served in the east. Split between two empires, with no written language in common, Armenians risked losing the sense that they were one people at all.

Around 392 Mashtots left the court, became a monk and went to preach in the province of Goghtn. There he met the same difficulty from the other side. He could talk to villagers in Armenian, but every reading from scripture had to be translated aloud on the spot from a Syriac or Greek text, and nothing he taught could be written down for them to keep. Preaching without books, he concluded, left no lasting result.

The creation of the script

With the backing of Catholicos Sahak Partev and King Vramshapuh, Mashtots set out on a methodical search. He travelled to Edessa, Amid and Samosata, centres of Syriac and Greek learning, where he studied scripts and consulted scholars. He tested an earlier set of letters attributed to a bishop named Daniel, but it could not represent all the sounds of Armenian. So instead of forcing a foreign alphabet onto the language, Mashtots analysed spoken Armenian and designed signs to fit it.

The result, completed around 405, was an alphabet of thirty-six letters, each standing for a single distinct sound of Armenian. Two more letters, օ and ֆ, were added in the twelfth century. That is why the alphabet is usually counted as thirty-eight letters, or thirty-nine if the ligature և is counted as a letter in its own right, as the reformed orthography treats it. Because the system is almost entirely phonetic, Armenian spelling stayed stable for centuries and the script was easy to teach. Where Armenian and Greek sounds correspond, the letters also follow the Greek order, a sign of careful, deliberate design.

According to tradition, the first sentence written in the new letters was the opening line of the Book of Proverbs, in which Solomon speaks of knowing wisdom and instruction. The calligrapher Rufinus of Samosata is credited with giving the letters their final shape. Mashtots then went back to Armenia and turned straight to the task that mattered most: teaching.

• Thirty-six original letters, expanded to thirty-eight in the twelfth century, or thirty-nine counting the ligature և
• Designed to represent each Armenian sound with one distinct sign
• Created around 405 with royal and church support
• First written sentence traditionally taken from the Book of Proverbs

Schools and the Golden Age of translation

Mashtots and Sahak Partev opened schools across the country and sent their most gifted students to Edessa, Constantinople and Alexandria to master Greek and Syriac. These students, later known as the Holy Translators, came home with manuscripts and new skills. The fifth century that followed is called the Golden Age of Armenian literature. Its central achievement was the Armenian translation of the Bible, made so carefully that later European scholars nicknamed it the queen of translations.

The translators did not stop at scripture. They produced Armenian versions of works on theology, history, philosophy, grammar and science. Several Greek and Syriac texts survive only in these Armenian translations, because the originals were later lost. That makes the fifth-century Armenian writings valuable to scholars far beyond Armenian studies.

Original writing followed at once. Koriun, a direct student of Mashtots, wrote a biography of his teacher, the earliest original work of Armenian literature. Yeghishe described the wars of the 450s, and Agathangelos recorded the conversion of the kingdom. Within a single lifetime, Armenian had become a literary language with its own history, theology and biography. Movses Khorenatsi's history of the Armenian people belongs to the same tradition, but his date is one of the longest-running disputes in Armenian studies. He presents himself as a fifth-century pupil of Mashtots, while many scholars outside Armenia place him in the eighth century, judging by the place names and institutions he mentions.

Later work and death

Mashtots did not stop with Armenian. Ancient sources say he also worked on scripts for the Georgian and Caucasian Albanian languages during missionary journeys to neighbouring lands. Scholars debate how large his part was in each case. Still, these accounts show that people at the time saw his method of matching signs to sounds as something that could work for more than one language.

He went on teaching until his death in 440, only a few months after his friend and collaborator Sahak Partev. He was buried at Oshakan, and the church built over his tomb is still a place of pilgrimage. Armenian children traditionally visit it when they start school, a custom that links the alphabet directly to learning to read.

The Armenian Church commemorates Mashtots, Sahak and their students on the Feast of the Holy Translators, one of the few religious holidays anywhere dedicated to scholars and writers. In Armenia the day is also a cultural festival, with readings, book fairs and school events.

The alphabet today

The Matenadaran in Yerevan, the national repository of ancient manuscripts, holds more than seventeen thousand manuscripts. Most are Armenian, and the rest are in Arabic, Persian, Greek, Syriac and other languages. It also keeps thousands of fragments and archival documents. The Matenadaran sees itself as continuing the tradition of the schools and scriptoria Mashtots founded, and its collection lets scholars trace Armenian handwriting from the earliest surviving parchments to the age of print.

On an open hillside above the village of Artashavan, a monument called the Armenian Alphabet Park displays all thirty-nine letter forms carved in stone. It was put up in 2005 for the sixteen-hundredth anniversary of the script. Visitors walk among the letters as if among standing stones. The setting says something about how Armenians regard their alphabet: as a monument in its own right, as well as a tool.

For students today the lesson is practical. A people with its own written language can record its law, faith, poetry and memory without depending on anyone else's script. That is why Armenians remember the invention of 405 less as a technical feat than as the moment their culture gained the means to preserve itself.