Old Georgian

Old Georgian is the language of the earliest Georgian writing, appearing in inscriptions of the fifth century, among them the mosaic inscription of Bir el Qutt in the Judaean desert, left by Georgian monks abroad, and the Bolnisi church inscriptions in Georgia itself. The first surviving original work, the Martyrdom of the Holy Queen Shushanik, belongs to the same century, so Georgian literature begins, like Armenian, as a Christian literature. Bible translation proceeded book by book from the fifth century, drawing on Armenian, Greek and Syriac models, and was repeatedly revised toward the Greek.

The tradition reached a summit around the turn of the millennium in the Georgian monastery of Iviron on Mount Athos, where Euthymius the Athonite and George the Hagiorite produced the polished revised versions of scripture and liturgy that became standard, an achievement the Georgian church counts among its greatest. Old Georgian was written first in the monumental Asomtavruli script, then in the angular Nuskhuri that served church books for centuries, the two together called Khutsuri, the priestly script, before the secular Mkhedruli, ancestor of the modern script, displaced them outside the church.

Scholars date the Old Georgian period from the fifth century to about the eleventh, after which the language of texts shades into Middle Georgian, the register of the medieval epics, and eventually into the modern language. The name Classical Georgian is often applied to the older literary language as a whole. What did not change was the church.

The Georgian Orthodox Church continues to celebrate its services in the old liturgical register, and its clergy still learn to read the Khutsuri scripts in which the service books were copied, so a Georgian priest today reads letterforms unchanged for a thousand years. The Old Georgian corpus is large and still yielding discoveries, hagiography, hymnography including the distinctive iadgari chant books, homiletics, and translations that preserve early Christian works lost in Greek.

Georgian manuscripts from Sinai, Jerusalem and Athos have proved essential witnesses to the early liturgy of Jerusalem, which Georgian monks recorded while it was still living practice. In 2016 the living culture of the three Georgian scripts, Asomtavruli, Nuskhuri and Mkhedruli, was inscribed by UNESCO as intangible cultural heritage, recognition that the oldest layers of the written language remain in active ecclesiastical use rather than behind museum glass.