Back to A Different Lens

Armenian and Georgian chant are sung in churches every week, and neither is sung from the notation its own medieval scribes wrote down. The signs survive on the page. What they told a singer to do does not.

Two Chants, Two Silent Scripts

Armenian chant uses signs called khaz, and nobody today can read them. Komitas Vardapet, the composer and priest who did more than anyone to preserve the tradition, worked on khaz for years without reaching a decipherment, and a later systematic study by Robert At'ayan did not produce one either. What congregations sing today descends instead from a nineteenth century notation devised by Hampartsoum Limonjian. Georgian chant is unread for a related reason: its tenth century neumes do not map cleanly onto Byzantine notation, the obvious comparison, and no rival decipherment exists to weigh against another. The living repertory rests on transcriptions taken from singers in the 1880s, one generation before those singers themselves would have been lost.

A Key Lost, Not Knowledge That Never Existed

The same shape turns up outside music. No Etruscan text on the practice of haruspicy, reading the future in an animal's liver, survives in any language, and no reconstruction of the method has ever been proposed and defended against another. The rules of senet, the funerary board game of ancient Egypt, were never recorded in a way that survived, so reconstructions of how it was played have nothing to be tested against. In every one of these cases the knowledge existed, was written or practiced, and the key to reading it was lost. That is a different kind of gap from one where nobody ever wrote anything down at all.

Where To Read More

• Armenian Chant (Sharakan)Chant StyleSung today from Limonjian's notation, not from the khaz its own scribes wrote
• Georgian ChantChant StyleIts tenth century neumes are unread; the repertory rests on 1880s transcriptions
• Extispicy and HaruspicyDivinatory RitualsNo method text survives; the same shape of loss outside music
• SenetFunerary RitualsIts rules were never recorded in a form that survived to test a reconstruction against