Mesrop Mashtots creates the Armenian alphabet

Christianity had been the religion of the Armenian kings for about a century, but the Bible and the services were in Greek and Syriac, which most Armenians did not understand. Mashtots, who had served in the royal chancery before becoming a monk and a missionary, took up the task of giving Armenian a script with the support of Sahak, the head of the Church, and of King Vramshapuh. Around 404 the king obtained a set of letters found by a Syrian bishop named Daniel; according to Koryun, Mashtots’s disciple and biographer, Mashtots taught with them for about two years before it became clear that they could not render all the sounds of Armenian.

Mashtots then went to Roman Mesopotamia. He worked out the new letters at Edessa and gave them their final form at Samosata with the help of a Greek calligrapher, Rufinus (Hropanos). The alphabet had thirty-six letters, seven for vowels and twenty-nine for consonants; scholars generally agree that its model was mainly the Greek alphabet, supplemented with signs for sounds that Greek lacked. By tradition the first sentence written in it came from the Book of Proverbs: “To know wisdom and instruction; to perceive the words of understanding.”

Back in Armenia, Mashtots and Sahak founded schools, sent pupils to Edessa, Constantinople and other centres of learning and organised the translation of the Bible — first from Syriac and then, completed about 434, from Greek manuscripts. Koryun’s Life of Mashtots, written soon after his death, is the main source for these events. Medieval Armenian writers also credited Mashtots with the Georgian and Caucasian Albanian alphabets; for the Georgian script this is disputed. The creation of the alphabet is dated to about 405 or to 405–406.