Mesrop Mashtots and the Invention of an Alphabet

Classical Armenian, called Grabar, the written language, entered history fully formed in the early fifth century, when the monk Mesrop Mashtots devised the Armenian alphabet, traditionally in the year 405, with the support of Catholicos Sahak and King Vramshapuh. Armenia had adopted Christianity as a state religion a century earlier, but worship still leaned on Greek and Syriac books that most Armenians could not read. The new alphabet of thirty six letters fitted the language so exactly that it has needed only two additions since. The first sentence translated is remembered as the opening of Proverbs, to know wisdom and instruction.

Mashtots and his pupils, the Holy Translators whom the Armenian Church still commemorates with a feast day, rendered the Bible from Syriac and Greek, and the resulting version was so admired that later scholarship called it the queen of the translations. The same fifth century generation produced original theology and history, including Yeznik of Kolb's refutation of the sects and the histories ascribed to Agathangelos and Movses Khorenatsi, giving Armenian literature a golden age in its very first century and binding the national identity to the church and the script that carried it.