Direction Left-to-right Unicode alias Caucasian Albanian | ISO 15924 Aghb, 239 | |
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Unicode range U+10530–U+1056F
Final Accepted Script Proposal | ||
The Caucasian Albanian alphabet, or the alphabet for the Gargareans, was an alphabet used by the Caucasian Albanians, one of the ancient and indigenous Northeast Caucasian peoples whose territory comprised parts of present-day Azerbaijan and Daghestan. It was one of only two indigenous alphabets ever developed for speakers of indigenous Caucasian languages (i.e. Caucasian languages that are not a part of larger groupings like the Turkic and Indo-European languages families) to represent any of their languages, the other being the Georgian alphabet. The Armenian language, the third language of Caucasus with its own alphabet, is an independent branch of the Indo-European language family.
Contents
History
According to Movses Kaghankatvatsi, the Caucasian Albanian, or Gargarean, alphabet was created by Mesrop Mashtots, the Armenian monk, theologian and translator who is also credited with creating the Armenian alphabet.
Koriun, a pupil of Mesrop Mashtots, in his book The Life of Mashtots, wrote about the circumstances of its creation:
Then there came and visited them an elderly man, an Albanian named Benjamin. And he, Mesrop Mashtots, inquired and examined the barbaric diction of the Albanian language, and then through his usual God-given keenness of mind invented an alphabet, which he, through the grace of Christ, successfully organized and put in order.
The alphabet was in use from its creation in the early 5th century through the 12th century, and was used not only formally by the Church of Caucasian Albania, but also for non-religious means.
Rediscovery
Although mentioned in early sources, no examples of it were known to exist until its rediscovery in 1937 by a Georgian scholar, Professor Ilia Abuladze, in Matenadaran MS No. 7117, an Armenian language manual from the 15th century. This manual presents different alphabets for comparison: Armenian, Greek, Latin, Syriac, Georgian, Coptic, and Caucasian Albanian among them. The Caucasian Albanian alphabet came with a comment in Armenian: "Ałuanic girn e" - Աղուանից գիրն է - that is translated from Armenian as "the letters from Albania". Abuladze made an assumption that this alphabet was based on Georgian letters.
Between 1947 and 1952, archaeological excavations at Mingachevir under the guidance of S. Kaziev found a number of artifacts with Caucasian Albanian writing — a stone altar post with an inscription around its border that consisted of 70 letters, and another 6 artifacts with brief texts (containing from 5 to 50 letters), including candlesticks, a tile fragment, and a vessel fragment.
The first literary work in the Caucasian Albanian alphabet was discovered on a palimpsest in Saint Catherine's Monastery on Mount Sinai in 2003 by Dr. Zaza Aleksidze; it is a fragmentary lectionary dating to the late 4th or early 5th century AD, containing verses from 2 Corinthians 11, with a Georgian Patericon written over it. Jost Gippert, professor of Comparative Linguistics at the University of Frankfurt am Main, and other have published this palimpsest that contains also liturgical readings taken from the Gospel of John.
Legacy
The Udi language, spoken by some 8,000 people, mostly in Azerbaijan but also in Georgia and Armenia, is considered to be the last direct continuator of the Caucasian Albanian language.
Characters
The script consists of 52 characters, all of which can also represent numerals from 1-700,000 when a combining mark is added above, below, or both above and below them, described as similar to Coptic. 49 of the characters are found in the Sinai palimpsests. Several punctuation marks are also present, including a middle dot, a separating colon, an apostrophe, paragraph marks, and citation marks.
Unicode
The Caucasian Albanian alphabet was added to the Unicode Standard in June, 2014 with the release of version 7.0.
The Unicode block for Caucasian Albanian is U+10530–1056F: