Discovery of ancient unknown script -- Caucasian Albanian A devastating fire in 1971 at St. Catherine's Monastery on Mt. Sinai led to the discovery of 1100 manuscripts that had been kept in a crypt below the chapel floor but which had been totally forgotten until they were accidentally discovered during reconstruction of the chapel in 1975.[4][5] The most significant discovery was a palimpsest manuscript which had Georgian script on the visible layer but an unknown script, which was barely visible on the underlying layer and which turned out to be an ancient Caucasian Albanian text. In 1990, Dr. Zaza Aleksidze, Director of the Center for Manuscripts in Tbilisi, Georgia, discovered the unknown script. In 1996, he identified it as Caucasian Albanian, a script which has 52 letters based on Georgian, Ethiopian, and Armenian alphabets. The script described a language in the Caucasus that was the ancestor to the language spoken by the present-day Udis, who live in three villages in Azerbaijan and Georgia.[6] In 2001, Aleksidze was able to decipher his first word -- "Thesalonike," referring to passages in the New Testament that St. Paul addressed to the Thessalonians.[7] and he later identified the text of some 300 pages as one of the earliest existing Lectionaries in the Christian religion (5th--6th centuries).[8] Kings 10:29 "Howbeit [from] the sins of Jeroboam the son of Nebat, who made Israel to sin, Jehu departed not from after them, to wit, the golden calves that were in ...

• published: 24 Nov 2011
• views: 1433
• author: Dave Flang