The Life of Mashtots (Armenian: Վարք Մաշտոցի,Vark’ Mashtots’i) is the only known work by the Armenian writer Koriun (ca. 5th century AD) about the creator of the Armenian alphabet Mesrop Mashtots. It is the earliest known original work written in Armenian[1] and other scholars place it after Agathangelos - The Lives of Saint Gregory.[2][3] According to Armenian tradition, the Georgian script was also developed by Mashtots and his students based on the report of Koriun in The Life of Mashtots and Movses Khorenatsi in History of the Armenians, on which the other Armenian sources depend: Hovhannes Draskhanakerttsi (Catholicos of Armenia from 897 to 925) - History of the Armenians, Movses Kaghankatvatsi/Daskhurantsi - The History of the Country of Albania, Kirakos Gandzaketsi - History of the Armenians. It is also possible to think of an early interpolation of Koriun's chapters on the creation of the Georgian alphabet by Mashtots because Koriwn's Life is not always entirely trustworthy. It may be that Koriun's reporting here is either biased, or at least inaccurate and has less to do with the events of that time than with the Armenian Church's claim to leadership in church affairs, whereby Koriun implicitly expresses the dependence of the Georgian church leadership on Armenia, there is absence of any trace of the people and events in other sources.[4]
History
editThe oldest fragments of the incomplete manuscript are in the 643 pages dated to the 12th century, which are kept in Paris's Bibliothèque nationale (Arm. 178) and were copied by the scribe Poghos,[5] Two shorter versions are dated the middle of the 14th century and are in the Matenadaran (M 3787 and M 3797) and one longer version is dated the late 17th century.[6] All earlier writers called the inventor of the Armenian alphabet Mashtots' and the name Mesrop is not found in other authors until the 8th century.[7]
References
edit- ^ La Porta, Sergio (2018). "Koriwn". In Nicholson, Oliver (ed.). The Oxford Dictionary of Late Antiquity. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-866277-8.
- ^ Agathange; Thomson, Robert William (2010). The lives of Saint Gregory: the Armenian, Greek, Arabic, and Syriac versions of the history attributed to Agathangelos. Ann Arbor (Mich.): Caravan books. ISBN 978-0-88206-118-4.
- ^ Gippert, Jost; Dum-Tragut, Jasmine, eds. (2023). Caucasian Albania: an international handbook. De Gruyter reference. Berlin ; Boston: De Gruyter. p. 49. ISBN 978-3-11-079459-5. OCLC 1334722543.
- ^ Winkler, Gabriele; Koriun, Vardapet (1994). Koriwns Biographie des Mesrop Maštocʻ: Übersetzung und Kommentar. Orientalia Christiana analecta. Roma: Pontificio istituto orientale. pp. 288–319. ISBN 978-88-7210-298-5.
- ^ Matevosyan, Artashes (ed.). (1994). Koryun - Varkʻ Mesrop Mashtotsʻi Վարք Մեսրոպ Մաշտոցի [Life of Mashtots] (in Armenian) [Life of Mashtots] (PDF). With 1941 introduction and translation into modern Armenian by Manuk Abeghian. Yerevan: Hayastan. p. 15.
- ^ Koriun (2022). The Life of Mashtots' by His Disciple Koriwn: Translated from the Classical Armenian with Introduction and Commentary. Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-284741-6.
- ^ Moses; Thomson, Robert W. (1978). History of the Armenians. Harvard Armenian texts and studies (in English and Armenian). Cambridge: Harvard University Press. pp. 2–3. ISBN 978-0-674-39571-8.