Znamenny chant takes its name from znamena, signs, a system of graphic symbols, also called kryuki, hooks, for their shape, written above the liturgical text to indicate melodic movement without specifying exact pitch in the way a Western staff does. This makes the notation a memory aid for a chanter who already knows the underlying melodic tradition rather than a fully self sufficient score a stranger to the tradition could sight read, and reconstructing what the notation actually meant to medieval singers, a field called semiography, remains a genuinely difficult area of musicological research precisely because so much depended on oral transmission the written signs alone do not fully capture.
Scholars generally trace znamenny chant's roots to Byzantine chant, adapted following the Christianization of Kievan Rus in the late tenth century and transmitted at least partly through South Slavic, particularly Bulgarian, intermediaries who had already begun adapting Byzantine models into Slavic liturgical use. Over the following centuries, znamenny chant developed a melodic character increasingly distinct from its Byzantine ancestor, absorbing elements some scholars associate with earlier East Slavic musical practice, so that by the height of its use in medieval Muscovite Russia it constituted a genuinely independent tradition rather than a simple regional variant of Byzantine chant.