Da alpha ad ayb. Per le origini greche dell’alfabeto armeno

This paper deals with the vexata quaestio of the origins of the Armenian alphabet, which was «invented» (or, better expressed, obtained as a divine gift from God’s hand) by saint Mesrop (also known as Maštoc‘) at the very beginning of the 5th century (the traditional date is AD 405). After a brief review of the main theories of the last two centuries regarding its models – including various attempts at deriving the Armenian alphabet from the Greek, Iranic, Aramaic, Phoenician or Aethiopic writing systems, and even from the prehistoric petroglyphs –, the author shows, thanks to a detailed comparative palaeographical analysis, that the models used by Mesrop were the letter-forms of the cursive majuscule Greek as they are attested in contemporary papyri (documentary and literary). From those, which in some instances were already proto-minuscule letter-forms, Mesrop was able to create a truly majuscule Armenian alphabet through a clever process of refined calligraphization which had also the (probably intended) effect of hiding the Greek roots of the new writing system. At that moment in history much of the Armenian territory was subject to Persian power, and it therefore did not seem wise to show cultural and ecclesiastico-political closeness to the Byzantine empire.