Concept
The Armenian alphabet (Հայոց գրեր, Hayoc’ grer or Հայոց այբուբեն, Hayoc’ aybuben), or more broadly the Armenian script, is an alphabetic writing system developed for Armenian and occasionally used to write other languages. It was developed around 405 AD by Mesrop Mashtots, an Armenian linguist and ecclesiastical leader. There are several inscriptions in Armenian lettering from Sinai and Nazareth that date to the beginning of the 5th century. The script originally had 36 letters; eventually, two more were adopted. It was in wide use in the Ottoman Empire in the 18th and 19th centuries. The Armenian word for 'alphabet' is այբուբեն (aybuben), named after the first two letters of the Armenian alphabet: այբ ayb and բեն ben. Armenian is written horizontally, left to right. One of the classical accounts of the existence of an Armenian alphabet before Mesrop Mashtots comes from Philo of Alexandria (20 BC – AD 50), who in his writings notes that the work of the Greek philosopher and historian Metrodorus of Scepsis (145 BC – 70 BC), On Animals, was translated into Armenian. Metrodorus was a close friend and a court historian of the Armenian emperor Tigranes the Great and also wrote his biography. A third century Roman theologian, Hippolytus of Rome (AD 170–235), in his Chronicle, while writing about his contemporary, Emperor Severus Alexander (208-235 AD), mentions that the Armenians are amongst those nations who have their own distinct alphabet. Philostratus the Athenian, a sophist of the second and third centuries AD, wrote:And they say that a leopardess was once caught in Pamphylia which was wearing a chain round its neck, and the chain was of gold, and on it was inscribed in Armenian lettering: "The king Arsaces to the Nysian god". According to the fifth-century Armenian historian Movses of Khoren, Bardesanes of Edessa (AD 154–222), who founded the Gnostic current of the Bardaisanites, went to the Armenian castle of Ani and there read the work of a pre-Christian Armenian priest named Voghyump, written in the Mithraic script of the Armenian temples, named after Mihr, the Armenian national god of light, truth, and the sun.
