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THE ALPHABET
Georgian Scripts
The earliest Georgian inscriptions extant go back to the fifth century A.D. and the earliest manuscripts to the eighth century A.D.
The "golden age" of Georgia was the twelfth and early thirteenth centuries under the kings David II and George III, and the Queen Tamara, and lasted for almost a century until the defeat of George IV by the Mongols in 1223.
The Georgians formerly employed two scripts (Fig. 151), (1) Khutsuri (khutsi, "priest"), the "ecclesiastical writing," an angular character, of 38 letters, in two forms (capitals, Aso-mt avruli, and minusculæ, Nuskha): see Fig. 151, 2; and (2) Mkhedruli (mkhedari, "knight, warrior"), the script of "the warriors," the "military, lay" writing, in one form only, of 40 letters (seven of them are obsolete, namely, long e and o, another variant of e, ie, v, ph, and an emphatic h): see Fig. 151, 3.
Mkhedruli is the script commonly employed at present in printing; a cursive form of which is slightly modified and contains frequent ligatures, and is the Georgian hand-writing of to-day.
Professor Bailey informs me that Dzanašia (History of Georgia, 1946, P. 94) has a plate illustrating the development of Georgian script from "ecclesiastical" to "civil" forms.
Origin
The origin of the Georgian writing and the connection between its two main varieties are still uncertain.
Traditionally it is considered as a creation of St. Mesrop, parallel to that of the Armenian writing. According to Allen, "the Georgian alphabet is a perfect instrument for rendering the wealth of varied sounds in the language; the letters give each different sound with accuracy and clearness, and no other alphabet, including the Armenian, compares with it in efficiency." Allen, therefore, concludes that "it would seem that the alphabet had a long and slow evolution to its present state of perfection, rather than it was invented whole by a foreigner." In conclusion, "the Georgian script is, like the Georgian language, ancient and original, and in its perfection to the use for which it is required, it bears the stamp of a venerable individuality."
According to a local tradition the Mkhedruli was invented about A.D. 300 by P'arnavaz, the first Georgian king, and it was more than a century older than the Khutsuri. According to another tradition, the latter was as many as nine centuries older than the former. Marr, a leading Russian linguist, while accepting the common opinion that the Khutsuri was a Georgian Christian creation, considers the Mkhedruli as a develop
