The Life of Mashtots

The Life of Mashtots is the biography of Mesrop Mashtots by his own pupil, Koriun, written soon after Mashtots died.¹ It tells how Mashtots left royal service for missionary work; how he searched for a script for Armenian and found it with the help of a Syrian bishop named Daniel and a Greek scribe at Samosata; how the first text translated was the Proverbs of Solomon; and how he divided his pupils between a Syriac school at Edessa and a Greek one at Samosata.² It also tells of his work on the Georgian alphabet.²

It is the oldest account of the Armenian alphabet and the starting point for everything written about it since. An English translation by Bedros Norehad was published in New York in 1964.²