Caucasian Albanian Alphabet - Rediscovery

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 "Aghuanic alphabet/writing". 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 reasonably long work in the Caucasian Albanian alphabet was discovered on a palimpsest in St. Catherine's Monastery on Mount Sinai in 2003 by Dr. Zaza Aleksidze; it was a 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, is preparing an edition of this manuscript.