the use of the cuneiform characters, which were common successively in Assyria and Persia, and which are still found in the ruins of the city built on the shores of the lake Van, in Armenia*. Under the Persian domination, Armenia must also have become acquainted with the Zend and Pehlevi alphabets; with the Greek, under the Seleucidæ and the descendants of Arsaces and Tigranes; with the ancient Pehlevi under the Sassanides; with the Greek again under the Romans and Greeks; with the Syriac alphabet together with Christianity; and lastly, with a national writing, which is represented in the Plate. At the commencement of the fourth century, Armenia, abandoning the doctrines of the Magi and Zoroaster, adopted that of Christ; the Syrian missionaries visited them in great numbers, preaching the Gospel, founding churches and monasteries, and organizing an ecclesiastical hierarchy, of which the centre was in Syria. The Syriac language having become that of religion in Armenia, it was exclusively employed in their sacred and liturgical books; whilst the Armenian population did not understand it, or only acquired a knowledge of it after long study.

At the commencement of the fifth century a learned Armenian, named Mesrob, who deserves to be enrolled in the catalogue of saints, invented an alphabet applicable to the national language; from which period an Armenian literature, properly so called, arose. A perfect knowledge of the Greek language having been preserved within the country, the works of a number of the best Greek authors, sacred and profane, Aristotle and Plato, the Fathers of the Church, and the entire Bible from the text of the Septuagint, were translated into Armenian.

The Armenian alphabet, of which three specimens are represented in the present Plate, is thus a local invention of the fifth century of our era, produced by science, and diffused by royal authority throughout the two provinces of Armenia.

* See the article on Cuneiform writing, Plate XV.

Armenian writing, influenced probably by the usage of the Greek, is read from left to right, and the alphabet is composed of thirty-eight letters.

Four kinds of Armenian writing are distinguished, which were probably unknown to the inventor; but it may be easily understood how the introduction of these varieties could take place in a writing very much cultivated, which has so continued to our own times, and which has been adopted in printing.

The first of these varieties is a majuscule character used for writing on stone or iron, and employed in inscriptions, in titles of books, and in headings of chapters. The first letters of the examples Nos. 1 and 2 are majuscules of this kind.

Another kind of majuscule is composed of the figures of men, animals, and flowers, of which an instance is seen in No. 3, consisting of the figures of two birds.

The same specimen commences with a smaller kind of cursive majuscule, used by notaries and for ordinary matters.

The text of the specimen No. 1 is written in a large and very regular uncial character, and that of Nos. 2 and 3 in a rounded minuscule, of different sizes. No. 1 is taken from a vellum manuscript (No. 7), containing the four Gospels, written in the eleventh century*; and Nos. 2 and 3 are from a Menologium (No. 89), copied at Ispahan, the capital of Persia, for the church of Surat, in India, at the close of the sixteenth century. Both these manuscripts belong to the Bibliothèque Royale at Paris.

*Westwood in his Palæographia Sacra Pictoria notices, that in the Burney MS. 277, ff. 43-4, in the British Museum, there are two fragments of the Gospels in Armenian, so similar to the specimen No. 1 given by Silvestre, as to make it probable they were written by the same hand. In the same work is described at length a manuscript of the Armenian Gospels formerly in the library of the Duke of Sussex, and now in the British Museum, MS. Add. 15,411. The date hitherto assigned to this volume, of the thirteenth century, is erroneous, since, as appears by the note at the end, it was executed in the year 770 of the Armenian era, A.D. 1321, during the reign of Leo V. in Armenia.—ED.

PLATE XLIII.

GEORGIAN WRITINGS.

XIVTH AND XVIITH CENTURIES.

LITURGICAL FRAGMENTS.

THE apparent, and indeed real resemblance, which will be perceived at first sight, in comparing the specimens of Georgian writing with the writing of Armenia, are not the only analogies in the institutions of these two nations. Their territories are contiguous; their languages, although different, are ethnographically classed in the same Caucasian group; their historical traditions and social condition have been, and still are, nearly identical; their conversion to Christianity was contemporaneous, as well as the adoption of their actual system of writing; and lastly, the Georgian alphabet, like the Armenian, is written from left to right, in the manner of European alphabets, and contrary to the practice of the nations which surround and traffic with them.

Ancient Iberia, the primitive name of Georgia, is often named by the Greek and Latin writers; other traditions connect its history with the wife of Uriah and with King David, and subsequently with that of Alexander the Great, before whom must necessarily be placed the Medes and Persians; and during this interval of time there must have been various modes of writing the Iberian language, either nationally or in the manner introduced by the conquerors, so long as they remained masters of the country.

Iberia changed its name to Georgia, and the influence which induced this change effected also many others; the language was enriched or deteriorated by the introduction of

a number of words, at first Persian or Arabic, subsequently Greck, more recently Turkish, &c. The change of religion introduced a series of ideas and words entirely new both to the language and the mind; the Georgians, indeed, possessed ancient books, composed in a language free from these novelties, and also recent works, in which they occupied a large place; thus from that period there existed both an ancient and a modern language.

This ancient Georgian was written with an alphabet, the invention of which is attributed to King Pharnabases, a contemporary of the first successors of Alexander the Great, in the third century before the Christian era. This alphabet is said to have been preserved until the fifth century after Christ, and was used in writing the Georgian translation of the Bible made at that period.

But the Georgian alphabet generally known extends back to a much less remote antiquity; and its author is said to have been Mesrob, the inventor also of the Armenian alphabet, and its date the fifth century. The Georgian is therefore another of the numerous alphabets which owe their construction to the exclusive influence of Christianity, especially to the Greek Church. It is said, that the Georgians sent a Christian bishop and priests to Constantine the Great, to solicit his alliance.

In the course of time, therefore, an ancient and a new alphabet existed in Georgia, as there was an old and a new language; and the ancient, when the new came into use, was, (like the Slavonian in respect to the Russian,) reserved for the use of the Church and liturgy, and the new for ordinary purposes.

The Plate XLIII. combines specimens of these two kinds of Georgian writing. The first, in red ink, and the third, in double columns, belong to the sacred or ecclesiastical kind of writing. No. 1 is written in majuscule or capital

letters, and is a proof of the troublesome custom adopted by the Georgian scribes, to unite several letters together, forming a series of monograms, after the fashion of the Greeks, and very difficult to decypher. Superfluous ornaments also are not wanting, contributing not merely to the elegance, but the complication of the title.

No. 3 is written in the ecclesiastical minuscule character*. This alphabet consists of thirty-seven letters, which are independent of any other orthographical sign, being without accents, spirits, apostrophe, or punctuation, beyond the separation of the phrases by one or more points. Three majuscule letters (R, D, and L,) form the initials of the three paragraphs. This writing slopes This writing slopes a little to the right; the Armenian is generally upright.

No. 2 is written in the ordinary Armenian cursive letter. It is usually of a rounded form (thence called round-hand), and is therefore of a more more pleasing appearance than the other, which, being rectangular, is called the square-hand. The use indeed of a more cursive writing than the latter, was required by a people, which so early as the twelfth century possessed a literature worthy of notice.

The specimens are copied from two manuscripts in the Bibliothèque Royale, at Paris; the lower one being of the fourteenth; and the two upper specimens of the seventeenth century.

* Two early Georgian manuscripts on vellum, probably of the beginning of the fourteenth century, in this ancient character, are preserved in the British Museum, Add. 11,281, 11,282.-ED.

VOL. I.

H