Week 11: The writings on the Stone

Before hieroglyphic writing was developed, between 900 and 700 BCE, people of the Armenian region expressed themselves by carving and painting on the rocks, which are known as petroglyphs or pictograms. The most fascinating aspect of petroglyphs is perhaps the fact that these represented ideas through pictures, as opposed to an alphabet, which captures sounds and is used to create words and sentences to express ideas.

Petroglyphs from Sevan region

The petroglyphs are commonly carved out on dark-shiny and sunburned surfaces of andesite-basalt rocks by stone-cutters, substituted later on by metal. The rocks are extremely hard, their colour, which was originally of a lighter shade, darkened by oxidation through the ages and also by a thin, shiny film called Wüstenlak, which forms on the rocks.

 

Petroglyphs from Gegham Ridge

Around 20000 carved rock pieces have been discovered in Armenia, of which 12000 are located in the vicinity of the Geghama and Vardenis Mountain Ranges (2500-3200 m above sea level) and more than 6000 in the Syunik Mountains (3000-3400 m) in the south. Another 2000 have been found on the slopes of Aragats (1100-3000 m), the highest peak in Armenia (4094 m) and on the slopes of Navasar, near the second peak of Kaputjugh (3904 m). There are also hundreds of rock-carvings in the Qarvachar Region of Artsakh.
A great number of rock-carvings has been found in Western Armenian provinces in modern Turkey and in the Kobustan area of Azerbaijan. All of the carvings located in Azerbaijan and eastern Turkey are similar in subject, style and technique to those in Current Armenia.

 

Petroglyph illustrations

 Above are the illustrations from pictographs which were executed between the 8th and 4th millennia BCE, (9000 to 3000 BCE). According to archaeologists the drawings are associated with Neolithic cultures, especially in the higher mountain regions (Aragats and Aghmaghan and the basin of Lake Sevan).

The Indo-European group of languages is one of the most widely spoken family of languages in the world. Around 3000 B.C.E., the Proto-Indo-European family of languages was probably closely unified, but by 2000 B.C.E., Greek and two extinct languages, Hittite and Sanskrit, were distinct languages. Though changes in grammar and meaning have taken place, analysis of vocabulary indicates that the people of the ancient Indo-European culture were metal-using farmers tending domestic animals. Recent discoveries suggest links to the Kurgan people, who lived on the steppes west of the Ural Mountains. In the Kingdom of Van, 810 BCE, inscriptions of economic and sacrificial nature were written in hieroglyphics. Specimens of Armenian hieroglyphics are also evident in Urartian excavations at Karmir-Blur, where pottery, bronze cups and cylinder seals were found. This type of writing was used by people living on the Ararat Plain, even before the penetration of the Urartian tribes, according to excavations at Cholagerd.
 

Urartian hieroglyphs

Beyond stone carvings, there is very little to suggest what a native language was like in Armenia between the Paleolithic and Urartian periods. Detailed maps showing ancient fortified towns and roads that exist to this day are scrawled on the sides of stone foundations, as are complex trigonometry and geometric formulas pointing to astral, solar and lunar phases.     It is not until the Urartian period (ca. 1300-550 BC) that a written language has been found and that was borrowed from Sumerians and Assyrians. As mentioned, stone was the preferred medium of expression, however there is some evidence that wood and leather parchment were used along with clay tablets in Mesopotamia and Egypt. But other than signs of zodiac, maps and geometric equations, no signs of writing from the Metsamor period have been uncovered. 

The metamorphoses of the alphabet

The current Armenian alphabet, which originally contained 36 letters, was introduced by Saint Mesrop Mashtots, an Armenian linguist and ecclesiastical leader  at 405 or 406 AD. Armenian literature with pre-Mashtotsian letters was burned during the introduction of Christianity. 

 Medieval Armenian sources also claim that Mashtots invented the Georgian and Caucasian Albanian alphabets around the same time. Traditionally, the following phrase translated from Solomon's Book of Proverbs is said to be the first sentence to be written down in Armenian by Mashtots:

Ճանաչել զիմաստութիւն եւ զխրատ, իմանալ զբանս հանճարոյ:
Čanačʿel zimastutʿiun yev zxrat, imanal zbans hančaroy.
To know wisdom and instruction; to perceive the words of understanding.

—Book of Proverbs, 1:2.

Armenian alphabet on a fresco in Wurzburg Palace by Tiepolo

On the image above is the nearly 7,300 square feet fresco, decorating the hallway of the Wurzburg Palace of Bavarian Bishops. Mythological creatures, ancient gods, nymphs, the inhabitants of exotic lands and many other figures fill the sky along with the distinctly rendered Armenian letters. Giovanni Battista Tiepolo (1696-1770) a famous Venetian artist was the creator of this masterpiece.
In previous chapter we have looked into the significance of Khachkars and we discovered that Khachkar, along with other religious meaning, also played a role of a book, by taking in the newly discovered Armenian alphabet.

Manuscript Khachkar

Therefore Khachkar continued the tradition of petroglyphs and proved to survive through the centuries of terror and destruction that was followed by numerous attacks from Ottoman and Persian Empires.


Modern Khachkar shaped as Armenian letters

The famous English poet and a leading figure in the Romantic movement Lord Byron has conducted much study into the Armenian culture. He learned the Armenian language in Venice from the Mechitarist Order, wrote substantially about the Armenian language and history, contributing to its improvement and translated ancient Armenian text into English. Byron's brief Armenian episode and his association with the Armenian monks of the Mekhitarist Order on the island of San Lazzaro near Venice may be traced in an unusually large collection of books on Byron, constituting an important segment of John S. Mayfield's library of more than 50,000 rare books and manuscripts, housed in the Syracuse University Library. The Mayfield collection includes several rare volumes relating specifically to this experience.



Lord Byron's Armenian studies

As we have seen in week 2 on the case study of the Lord Byron School, the Armenian nation holds the writer in high regards and the school named after Byron is still operating in the earthquake damaged Spitak.
After the implementation of the new alphabet, many decoding systems started emerging with the use of the new letters that had various mathematic mechanics behind.

The above video looks into some of the Cryptograms used particularly on Khachkars. This and other coding methods I will be looking at in later chapters.