Did Slavs have a script before the Cyrillic alphabet?
Today, extremely few documents mentioning pre-Cyrillic Slavic writing are known. Scientists have only managed to find rare accounts from foreign travelers about Slavic scripts, references to some written treaties between Slavic tribes and Byzantium and a few everyday objects covered in undeciphered symbols.
In the 10th century, another Bulgarian monk named Chernorizets Hrabar wrote the book ‘Tale of Writings’, in which he mentioned: “Before, the Slavs did not have letters, but they read and divined by strokes and notches, being pagans.” The monk is referring to the time before their Christianization. After baptism, “they tried to write Slavic speech in Roman and Greek letters”. But, it turned out that not all Slavic words and sounds could be written with Greek letters.
Ancient runes or just some random strokes?
Some experts believe that these mentioned “strokes and notches” were merely primitive symbols for counting and divination. Other researchers think it was a type of rune, which the Slavs used to write entire texts.
It is, however, reliably known that Slavs actively interacted with neighboring peoples, who already had writing by the 8th and 9th centuries. Therefore, modern science leans toward the opinion that after the simplest “strokes and notches” and before the official Slavic alphabet, some form of pre-Christian writing did exist. It may have conveyed the sounds of the pre-Cyrillic Slavic language through combinations of foreign letters.
In his work ‘1,100 Years of the Slavic Alphabet’, researcher Viktor Istrin (1906-1967) noted that, in the east and south, Slavs most likely borrowed the Greek alphabet, while, in the west, they used both Greek and Latin. Eastern Slavs may have borrowed some symbols and Hebrew letters from the Khazars. It’s also possible that Slavs used elements of Georgian and Armenian alphabets.
Some researchers believe this “transitional script” must have emerged around the 8th century, when Slavic statehood was forming.
“As many researchers have noted, the words for ‘писать’ ('write'), ‘читать’ ('read'), ‘письмо’ ('letter') and ‘книга’ ('book') are common to all Slavic languages. Consequently, these words, like Slavic writing itself, likely appeared before the division of the common Slavic language into separate branches. That is, no later than the middle of the first millennium AD,” Viktor Istrin wrote.
What did Cyril & Methodius base their alphabet on?
Istrin references the biographies (actually church hagiographies) of Cyril and Methodius. According to them, in the 850s-860s, Cyril discovered in Crimea’s Chersonesus a Gospel and a Psalter ‘written in Russian letters’. Although the official Christianization of Old Russia was still more than 100 years away, many Eastern Slavs who traveled to Crimea and Byzantium were accepting Christianity “in whole companies”. This could explain the appearance of sacred texts in the language of Old Russia. This led the researcher to believe that Cyril's alphabet did not emerge from nothing, but was based on the experience of Slavs themselves:
“The existence of a Proto-Cyrillic script among Slavs is also evidenced by the extremely short time it took Cyril, according to his biography, to develop an ordered Slavic alphabet. Such a short period was only possible if Cyril had some kind of initial materials,” Istrin wrote.
Together with his brother Methodius, Cyril translated and recorded liturgical books in the Slavic language. With these books, the brothers went to preach in Great Moravia, a Slavic principality that had already adopted Christianity by that time. Unfortunately, not a single copy of these books has survived. The earliest Slavic documents to reach scientists date back to the 10th century. And they already feature two alphabets, Cyrillic and Glagolitic.
The first alphabet is linked to Christian missionary work
It’s unknown under what circumstances these two alphabets emerged. Most experts believe that Cyril developed both versions in the 860s. Glagolitic was the first alphabet, which may have inherited a mixture of symbols from pre-Christian Slavic writing.
“Glagolitic letters resemble some letters of the Byzantine (minuscule), Hebrew and Coptic alphabets. A number of Glagolitic letters show no visible similarity to any alphabet known to us. It’s possible that Glagolitic is based on signs from some extinct script,” Oksana Voloshina wrote in her book ‘The History of Writing’.
Most scholars consider Glagolitic to be the first alphabet created by Cyril for the Slavs, artificially, for Christian missionary activity. After all, the first letter of the Glagolitic alphabet is shaped like a cross, the main symbol of the Christian religion.
Cyrillic became a kind of Slavic-Greek compromise, as it was based on the Byzantine uncial script. Thanks to its simplicity, it was Cyrillic that evolved into the modern alphabet that Russians, Ukrainians, Belarusians, Bulgarians, Serbs and Macedonians now use.
Cyrillic is also used by dozens of non-Slavic peoples living in the territory of the former USSR. It has been calculated that, at various times, an alphabet based on Cyrillic existed for as many as 108 languages.
You can find the full version of the article (in Russian) on the Culture.ru website.