Albanian alphabet (Caucasian)
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The alphabet of the Caucasian Aghbans or Aghbanians, one of the Ibero-Caucasian peoples, ancient and indigenous population of modern Azerbaijan and Daghestan is also called the Aghban alphabet (in addition to that of the modern country of Albania; see Albanian alphabet). There are two versions about the origins of this alphabet (with 52 letters): 1) It was invented by an Armenian priest Mesrob Mashtots, according to his student, Koriun, who refers to this in his work Life of Mashtots. 2) It was invented in the 6th century AD on basis of the Georgian Asomtavruli and was discovered in 1937 by the noted Georgian scholar, Professor Ilia Abuladze; however, the extreme paucity of inscriptions made interpretation difficult. The first reasonably long work in Aghbanian was discovered on a palimpsest in St. Catherine's Orthodox Monastery on Mount Sinai in 2003 by Dr. Zaza Alexidze; it was an lectionary dating to the late 4th or early 5th century AD, with a Georgian Patericon written over it. It finally confirmed that Aghbanian was ancestral to modern Udi.
Literature
- Ilia Abuladze. "About the discovery of the alphabet of the Caucasian Aghbanians".- "Bulletin of the Institute of Language, History and Material Culture (ENIMK)", Vol. 4, Ch. I, Tbilisi, 1938
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