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The Caucasian Albanian alphabet, sometimes called Old Udi script, was an alphabet used by the Caucasian Albanians, one of the ancient and indigenous Northeast Caucasian peoples whose territory comprised parts of present-day Azerbaijan and Daghestan. Although mentioned in early sources, no written examples of it were known to exist until it was rediscovered in 1937 by a Georgian scholar, Professor Ilia Abuladze. The alphabet was found 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 was titled: "Aluanic girn e" (Albanic letters). 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 Albanian writing — a stone altar post with an inscription around its border that consisted of seventy letters, and another six Albanian epigraphic artifacts with brief texts (containing from five to fifty letters), including candlesticks, a tile fragment, and a vessel fragment.

The Udi language, spoken by some 8000 people, mostly in Azerbaijan but also in Georgia and Armenia, is thought to be the last remnant of the language once spoken in Caucasian Albania.

According to Movses Kaghankatvatsi, the Caucasian Albanian alphabet was created by Mesrob Mashtots, the Armenian monk, theologian and translator who is also credited with creating the Armenian and Georgian alphabet.

Armenian historian, Koriun, in his book The Life of Mashtots, wrote:

Then there came and visited them an elderly man, an Albanian named Benjamin. And he Mesrob Mashdots inquired and examined the barbaric diction of the Albanian language, and then through his usual God-given keenness of mind invented an alphabet, which he, through the grace of Christ, successfully organized and put in order.

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 Alexidze; it was an lectionary containing verses from 2 Corinthians 11 dating to the late 4th or early 5th century AD, with a Georgian Patericon written over it. Alexidze believes that the language was ancestral to modern Udi. Jost Gippert, professor of Comparative Linguistics at the University of Frankfurt (Main), is preparing an edition of this manuscript.

References

1. Ilia Abuladze. "About the discovery of the alphabet of the Caucasian Aghbanians". In the Bulletin of the Institute of Language, History and Material Culture (ENIMK), Vol. 4, Ch. I, Tbilisi, 1938.
2. Philip L. Kohl, Mara Kozelsky, Nachman Ben-Yehuda. Selective Remembrances: Archaeology in the Construction, Commemoration, and Consecration of National Pasts. University of Chicago Press, 2007. ISBN 0226450589, 9780226450582
3. "Caucasian Albanian Script. The Significance of Decipherment" (2003) by Dr. Zaza Alexidze.
4. Moses Kalankaytuk, The History of Aluank, I, 27 and III, 24.
5. Koriun, The life of Mashtots, Ch. 16.
6. Alexidze, Zaza and Betty Blair. 2003. Caucasian Albanian Alphabet: ancient script discovered in ashes. Azerbaijan International 11.3:56,57.
7. Digitization of the Albanian palimpsest manuscripts from Mt. Sinai

External links

• Armazi project:
  • Jost Gippert: The "Albanian" Alphabet as preserved in Armenian Tradition – has images of glyphs
  • Zaza Aleksidze: A Breakthrough in the Script of Caucasian Albany
• For a specimen of the 'Caucasian Albanian Palimpsest', see : Wolfgang Schulze “The Language of the ‘Caucasian Albanian’ (Aluan) Palimpsest from Mt. Sinai and of the ‘Caucasian Albanian’ inscriptions”
• Multiple articles on the script:

• Alphabetic writing systems
• Scripts without ISO 15924 code
• History of Azerbaijan
• History of the Caucasus
• Caucasian Albania
• Udi language