_{Matenadran Illuminated Gospel 9th-12th Centuries.
The Tree of Life and the Cosmic Hierarchy with the Immovable Centre [Black Sun Surrounded by the Golden Sun, Seven Layers within One; Two Birds (duality) facing the Apex (the point of communion)}

from Armenian Highland (location: Encyclopedia, Manuscripts)

In 1967, Ryszard Kapuściński travelled through seven southern republics of the former USSR. The following excerpts are from his account of Armenia, translated by Klara Glowczeska, 1994.

...The comrade who is our guide (so beautiful!) says in a hushed voice that many of the manuscripts that we see were saved at the cost of human life. There are pages stained with blood here. There are books that for years lay hidden in the ground, in the crevices of rocks. Armenians buried them in the same way defeated armies bury their banners. They were recovered without difficulty: information about their hiding places had been handed down from generation to generation.

A nation that does not have a state seeks salvation in symbols. The protection of the symbol is as important to it as the protection of borders is to other states. The cult of the symbol becomes a form of the cult of country. Protection of the symbol is an act of patriotism. Not that the Armenians never had a state. They had one, but it was destroyed in antiquity. It was then reborn in the ninth century, and after 160 years it perished – in that earlier form – forever. It is not just a question of statehood. For at least two thousand years Armenians were in danger of complete extermination. They were still threatened with it as recently as this century, right up until 1920...

...A certain monk named Mashtots creates the Armenian alphabet. Mashtot’s life bears the mark of the anonymous monastic existence. He is entirely hidden by his work. Armenians always say of him “the genius Mashtots.” ... It is amazing that the invention a then-little-known monk could be so immediately and generally espoused. And yet it is a fact! Already, then, there must have existed among Armenians a strong need for identity and individuation. They were a lonely Christian island in a sea of alien Asiatic elements. The mountains could not save them: at approximately the same time as Mashtot’s alphabet is proclaimed, Armenia loses its independence.

From then on foreign armies – Persian, Mongolian, Arabs, Turkish – will blow across this country like ill winds. A curse will grip this land. Whatever is built will be destroyed. The rivers will flow with blood. The chronicles are full of dismal images...

Vanquished in the field of arms, Armenia seeks salvation in the scriptoria. It is a retreat, but in this withdrawal there is dignity and a will to live. What is a scriptorium? It can be a cell, sometimes a room in a clay cottage, even a cave in the rocks. In such a scriptorium is a writing desk, and behind it stands a copyist, writing. Armenian consciousness was always infused with a sense of impending ruin. And by the fervent concomitant desire for rescue. The desire to save one’s world. Since it cannot be saved with the sword, let its memory be preserved. The ship will sink, but let the captain’s log remain.

So comes into being that phenomenon unique in world culture: the Armenian book. Having their alphabet, Armenians immediately go about writing books. Mashtots himself sets the example. He had barely produced the alphabet, and already we find him translating the Bible. He is assisted by another luminary of Armenian culture, Catholicos Saak Partef, and a whole pleiad of translators recruited throughout the dioceses. Mashtots initiates the great movement of the medieval copyists, which among the Armenians will develop to an extent unknown anywhere else.

Already by the sixth century, they had translated into Armenian all of Aristotle. By the tenth century, they had translated the majority of Greek and Roman philosophers, hundreds of titles of ancient literature. Armenians have an open, assimilative intellect. They translated everything that was within reach. They remind me in this of the Japanese, who translate wholesale whatever comes their way. Many works of ancient literature survived owing entirely to the fact that they were preserved in Armenian translations. The copyists threw themselves upon every novelty and immediately placed it on the writing table. When the Arabs conquered Armenia, the Armenians translated all the Arabs. When the Persians invaded Armenia, the Armenians translated the Persians. They were in conflict with Byzantium, but whatever appeared on the market there, they would take and translate that as well.

Entire libraries came into being. These must have been enormous collections: in 1170 the Seljuks destroy a library in Syunik consisting of ten thousand volumes. They are all Armenian manuscripts. To this day, twenty-five thousand Armenian manuscripts have survived. Of these, more than ten thousand are in Yerevan, in Matenadaran. Whoever would like to see the rest will have to make a journey around the world...

At first they wrote on skins, then on paper. They once made a book that weighed thirty-two kilograms. Seven hundred calves went into it. But they also have trifles, books small as May flies. Whoever could read and write, copied, but there were also professional copyists whose entire lives were spent behind the writing desk. In the fifteenth century Ovanes Mankasharence transcribed 132 books. “For seventy-two years,” notes his pupil Zachariash, “winter and summer, day and night, Ovanes copied books. When he reached his later years, his sight dimmed, and his hand shook and caused him great suffering. He died in Panu at the age of eighty-six, and now I Zachariash, pupil of Ovanes, am completing his unfinished manuscript.” These were titans of painstaking labour, martyrs of their passion. Another copyist describes how, while going hungry, he would spend his last penny on resinous chips to illuminate the pages he was transcribing. Many of these books are masterpieces of the calligraphic art. Golden armies of small Armenian letters crawl over hundreds of pages. The copyists were also accomplished painters...

The fate of these books is the history of the Armenians. Armenians, persecuted and exterminated, reacted to their situation in one of two ways: some went up into the mountains, taking refuge in caverns, and some emigrated, scattering over all the continents. Both groups took Armenian books with them. Because the wanderers left on foot, certain manuscripts, those that were too heavy, were divided in half. These often roamed to different ends of the earth. (46-51 Imperium)

_{Mesrop Mashtots, courtesy of Vahan Bego}

_{Matenadaran, Armenia's state repository of ancient manuscripts, courtesy of Vahan Bego}

In 1915 on their long road of deportation with many of their friends and neighbors, a young couple, Mr. and Mrs. Tabriz, came upon a marketplace where a Kurd is selling spices. He is tearing pages from and old Armenian bible to wrap his merchandise. Upon Mr. Tabriz's curious inquiry, the Kurd says that he saved several books from a burning Armenian Church in the valley. Mr. Tabriz buys the books from the Kurd and and later brings them to the United States. *

_{The Caucasus: Armenia & Georgia}

_{Judas' treason (Gospel of the Seven Miniaturists, illuminated in the XIIIth century and in 1320, in Cilicia, by six anonimous artists who worked almost simultaneously, and then by Sargis Picak)}

_{from Armenian Highland and Unesco}

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