Mediæval Kabardian Alphabet:

Kassogian Inscriptions in Kabarda

  

[Collected by Amjad Jaimoukha based on Peter Dobrev’s

Inschriften und Alphabet der Urbulgaren, 1995.

This theme is in need of further development by specialists to reproduce the whole mediæval writing system of the Kabardians]

 

The early Middle Ages was a very interesting period in the history of the alphabets. Various alphabets developed at different places of Eastern Europe at that time. Some of them later spread thousands of kilometres by the large migrations of peoples. During this period, quite different alphabets were developed almost simultaneously in the Caucasus and in its bordering areas – the Kassogian alphabet, the Armenian alphabet, the Georgian alphabet, and the alphabet of the Caucasian Albanians. G. Turchaninov discovered a multiplicity of inscriptions of this type in the North Caucasus, Southern Ukraine, and in the Imeon (Pamir) mountains. The direction of writing from left to the right, although rare in the East, was characteristic of a number of Caucasian peoples, such as the Kassogs, etc.

The Kassogs, proto-Kabardians or the ancestors of the Kabardians, had developed a runic alphabet of the Murfatlar type in the sixth-seventh centuries AD.[1] Most probably this intellectual development was an adjunct to the spread of Christianity in Kassogia (Kabarda), where there was need to spread the good word, so to speak... Read more in the attached pdf file. 

[1] Runic inscriptions similar to the Kassogian inscriptions found in the Caucasus were discovered in Murfatlar (today Bessaraby), a small village in Northern Dobrudja in Romania. See the map reproduced in this account.

MediaevalKabardianAlphabet.pdf MediaevalKabardianAlphabet.pdf
Size : 247 Kb
Type : pdf
 
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