Old Georgian is the language of the earliest Georgian writing, appearing in inscriptions of the fifth century, among them the mosaic inscription of Bir el Qutt in the Judaean desert, left by Georgian monks abroad, and the Bolnisi church inscriptions in Georgia itself. The first surviving original work, the Martyrdom of the Holy Queen Shushanik, belongs to the same century, so Georgian literature begins, like Armenian, as a Christian literature. Bible translation proceeded book by book from the fifth century, drawing on Armenian, Greek and Syriac models, and was repeatedly revised toward the Greek.
The tradition reached a summit around the turn of the millennium in the Georgian monastery of Iviron on Mount Athos, where Euthymius the Athonite and George the Hagiorite produced the polished revised versions of scripture and liturgy that became standard, an achievement the Georgian church counts among its greatest. Old Georgian was written first in the monumental Asomtavruli script, then in the angular Nuskhuri that served church books for centuries, the two together called Khutsuri, the priestly script, before the secular Mkhedruli, ancestor of the modern script, displaced them outside the church.