The Armenian alphabet also functions as a mathematical table, where each of the four columns of nine letters represents units; tens; hundreds, and thousands. The Armenian Apostolic Church has always dated its temples in this way, and the three or four-letter combinations you’ve noticed on their portals are the dates when the churches were completed.
For instance, the Surb Nikogayos church built in Kamianets-Podilskyi had an inscription on its portal, as recorded by chroniclers, ՌՄԾ, which corresponds to the year 1250 AD.
After a fire, the church was rebuilt, this time dedicated to the Annunciation of the Holy Virgin. The portal then bore the letters ՌՆԶԵ (1495). After the forced conversion of Armenians to Catholicism, their departure, or transformation into nobility, the church remained an Armenian Catholic until 1810, then became a parish of the Russian Orthodox Church, and from 1991, a temple of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church. However, without any letters and without the icon of the Armenian Mother of God, brought by the first settlers from Ani, but lost during the sectarian raids.
So, the recording of letters, numbers, and musical signs (in Armenian the word ‘notation’, and even the expression on the face, is written and sounds like ‘note’) are closely interconnected for us. This is the perfect alphabet, the sum of whose signs equals 666, a number considered lucky among all Eastern peoples.
However, starting from the 17th century, this same number was turned into the ‘number of the beast’ by Western political technologists based on the suddenly discovered ‘Apocalypse’ of John the Theologian. ‘Apocrypha’ – this and similar forgeries are called by eggheaded specialists, and with a smart look, they discuss the dates and authorship of the information throw-in. But we can only throw up our hands because ‘apagrich’ in Armenian frankly explains: ‘disinformant’.
Regarding the “Apocalypse,” this supposedly Christian text presents kabbalistic dreams of seas of blood, traditional techniques of locust outbreaks, plagues, destruction of a third of the world’s population, and other niceties for inhumans.
As you’ve noticed, our minds have been tricked not just since yesterday. What’s more, the once-written script is being increasingly pushed towards realization by the current global money masters. And it’s not unlikely they’ll succeed if we continue to play into their field of vulgar materialism, forever leaving our own – the spiritual one.
Yes, they are the masters of money, but we – we are the masters of language! That which people think in and use to describe their thoughts and feelings, to bless for a happy marriage and a righteous fight, to declare love and serve a requiem prayer. Therefore, it’s so, oh so important! – for us to understand words and names in their original, intended meaning.
So, the Armenian alphabet, capable of recording the maximum number ՔՋՂԹ, 9999. The next number, 10,000, has its own name – “bür.” Administrators appointed in ancient Rome and Byzantium from among the most literate, just, and organizationally skilled individuals were called bür/a/crat, which meant “bearer of ten thousand [virtues],” that is, by default – a scholar and a leader.
Staff selection was invariably carried out based on the exceptional abilities of the candidates: the word was alive, speaking, obligating, like a job description!
But once the original, Armenian meaning was eradicated from the administrative term, and it was represented as a mix of modern French (bureau, a body of people directing a society) with ancient Greek (kratos, power), which, admit, is funny – and look at what happened to humanity, into what global problem bureaucratic machines turned into, whose servants can hardly be considered scholars or commanders!
Roman Emperor Diocletian wanted what was best – and in 301 AD, precisely when Armenia adopted Christianity as the state religion, he issued an edict aimed at combating speculators and usurers, introducing fixed prices for goods sold and fixed wages.
Among the organizational measures were established market gallows, where executioners diligently fought against price increases according to a promptly composed and announced verdict. And the prices kept rising!
Since the senators (who were also usurers, just like today) managed to convince the emperor that the problem was due to a Christian conspiracy, in 303 AD – just when the Holy Etchmiadzin was built in Vagharshapat – Diocletian issued an edict banning the preaching of Christianity within his empire and obligating every Christian to publicly repent and renounce their faith.
Otherwise – the beheading of Christians on the gallows, designed for usurers. This was done with Diocletian’s wife, converted to Christianity by Surb Gevorg, Saint George. Some historians believe that the executed woman was not named Alexandra but Briska, and the name Alexandra was given to her at baptism. About this name – in great detail.
Strangely enough, most of the bisyllabic (two-letter), and therefore the most ancient, roots in the Armenian language are much less studied than the trisyllabic and tetra-syllabic (three- and four-letter).
We have already addressed the issue of why the work of the great dictionary of Grachya Acharyan was cut in volume and lost in the flight of scientific thought.
Here it must be noted that as a result, he laid the foundation for a disregard for these important linguistic units and led behind him talented Stepan Malhasyants and Edward Aghayan, as well as some mediocrities of the present, who prefer the status of grant-eating national traitors to serving their native language, and thus the world, not the customer.
Meanwhile, the evolution of the meanings of short roots of the Armenian language demonstrates the distant past not only of our people but also the historical memory of other peoples.
For example, the word “Al” Ալ is explained in the great dictionary as “monster”. E. Aghayan also presents it in the sense of “red”. In compound words, both extrapolate the meanings of words, relying on the Arabic language, where “al” functionally acts as a definite article.
Meanwhile, the Armenian language has preserved two-root words Alevor and Aleher, where we see a fundamentally different picture. In the epic about the heroes of Sasun, readers certainly remembered the scene where the brothers Sanasar and Baghdasar, unable to name the cyclopean fortress they built themselves, set off to find Alevor Mardm (Ալևոր մարդմը), who would name it. Let’s not forget that the brothers brought a whole village of residents to Sasun, where there were, of course, adults and young children, and old peasants.
But they needed Alevor Mardm, who could handle this complex toponymic task. That is, we should assume that the sought-after person was a smart, wise man. As we remember from the text, he was finally found far away, and being placed on the shoulders of Sanasar, he rode around the fortress for three whole days, at the end of which he finally named it Sasun, which means “Causing tremble.”
If we assume that the first root of the word Al/e/vor really means “wise,” then by analogy with “aknotsavor” ակնոցավոր (glasses wearer); “behavor” բեղավոր (mustachioed); “tagavor” թագավոր (crown possessor; king) and many other words of the same structure, we literally and really get “bearer of wisdom,” or simply “wise man.”
Let’s not forget that gray hair in the Armenian language is determined as “al/e/her” ալ/ե/հեր, and the second root, հեր, means “hair” (“gangraher”, curly; “shikaher”, blond, etc.).
So the question is not about the color of the hair (just think, red-haired old men!), but about the external sign of the corresponding age group, which has gained experience and wisdom over a long life. At least, it used to be possible to count on this. Now we can confidently assert that “aleher” means “[possessing] the gray hair of wisdom,” and “al” means wise.
Since our dictionaries loved to go “over hill and dale” to find the meaning of absolutely endemic names, let’s also go to Kazakhstan, where there is a funny hero of a cycle of folk tales, each of which ends with his jest.
The hero’s name was Aldar Kөse, and modern folklorists in Kazakhstan, who, unlike ours, seek the origins of their folklore at home and not in exotic countries, translated the name as “beardless deceiver,” where the word “aldar” acts as “deceiver.”
Meanwhile, the hero, although he allowed himself small tricks from time to time, was an honest guy and a defender of the poor. He simply boasted, like all storytellers, and wanting to lend authority to his own words, before summarizing another tale, he did not speak about himself in the third person, as some researchers think, but repeated: “Aldar Kөse.”
Why? Yes, because in a language much more ancient than Kazakh, “aldar” ալ/դար means “wisdom of times”. The wandering wise man simply relied on the collective power of the wisdom of time and said: “Aldar Kөse”, “The wisdom of the era testifies”.
So, pulling his characteristic to a roguishness, and կըսէ – to քոյսը (in both cases in Kazakh it will be necessary to write kөse, but the verb “says” turns into the adjective “beardless”) is hardly appropriate. No doubt, he was a quite mustachioed man.
Turning to Russian folklore, we find the intriguing morpheme “Alatyr”. Here is the famous spell: “Lies the white stone Alatyr in the sea-ocean, … on the stone stands the Throne of God, on this throne sits the Holy Mother.”
Slavic scholars compare it with the Tunguska meteorite and consider the origin of the stone cosmic. And here again we encounter the mysterious root “al”. Moreover, it is obviously connected with the word Lord, Ter, and Alater ալ/ա/տեր which here is already “The Sovereign of Wisdom”! It is no coincidence that this mysterious stone possesses healing properties and hierarchically is “above all stones on earth”.
It should be noted here that over the course of one and a half centuries of squandering our semantic roots in favor of other languages, the main beneficiaries turned out to be Hebrew and Farsi. In this case, it is specifically the Persian language.
Therefore, there are attempts to pronounce “alatyr” as “al tor”, which in Persian means “white stone”. That is, instead of qualifying the miraculous stone of mysterious cosmic origin, the Russian people simply pointed out its color, white, and thus completed the logical-semantic connection.
But if everything is so simple, where did the “little red flower” come from, which Aksakov recorded as “a flower of scarlet color, of unseen and unheard beauty, neither to tell in a fairy tale, nor to write with a pen”?
And again, we have to find out the semantic load of the root “al”! And for this, we go straight to the East, where the wisest caliphs and imams were not in vain named Ali, and it was interpreted as “wise”. Moreover: the more respected a person, the more often “al” is used in his name.
For example, the only caliph whose righteousness is recognized by the orthodox branch of Shiism in Islam, the cousin, son-in-law, and companion of Prophet Muhammad, was called Abu-Al-Hasan Ali ibn Abu Talib Al-Qurashi. And finally, let’s remember the English language, where alian means “alien”. Or altarian, altar in Latin, where the embedded meaning of control (տանել; տարել – tanel, tarel — “to lead, to guide”) of this part of the temple by some existential force is evident.
The newspaper column limits us, so I will not provide examples from other languages, but I can already assert that, being a morpheme of the Armenian language, i.e. meaningful sound and letter combination, “al” signifies existential wisdom, a certain cosmic genesis in all languages of the world, and testifies to the spread and serious impact of this Armenian component on their semantic load.
In this vein, let’s return to Ancient Rome, to Diocletian, mired in bureaucratic intrigues, and his wife, who was baptized by Surb Gevork as Alexandra, later executed for this according to the edict of her own husband and recognized by the Christian Church as Saint Alexandra of Rome. But we must stray from the martyr one last time for a better understanding of her and many other names. And the reason for this detour is a certain article in the oblique cases of Grabar.
This is the prefix “Z” (often pronounced as “S”, and in borrowings, it is written as “S”), which, after refusing from Grabar, where the reason is a whole political detective story, was replaced in the grammar of modern Armenian by a definite article at the end of the word.
For readers familiar with Armenian writing, the example is easy, and it is from the prayer “Our Father”, where “… give us this day our daily bread; and forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors…” in Armenian is written and sounds like “Զհաց մեր հանապազորդ տուր մեզ այսօր. Եւ թող մեզ զպարտիս մեր որպէս եւ մեք թողումք մերոց պարտապանաց” (highlighted by me).
In modern Armenian, this is already հացը and պարտքերը, and it doesn’t work, especially for prayers. Thus, we finally return to Saint Al/ek/s/andra, whose name you already understand without me: “The Wise One, Coming from Afar (almost from another Galaxy)”. Although where she really came from, history is silent.
But it speaks in detail about where Alexander the Great came from to satisfy the appetites of Persia. As always in modern history and linguistics, cause-and-effect relationships are reversed, so the name of the conqueror of tyrants who came from afar to Persia was explained: “Conqueror”.
But that’s not true: he was wise beyond his years, not least thanks to his teacher and mentor Aristotle and his incredible literacy. So, it was thanks to his prophetic name, as well as the appropriate upbringing and education, that Alexander became a Conqueror. After all, a name is a life program. Stay healthy and name your children and grandchildren correctly!
by Lia Avetisyan
Translated by Vigen Avetisyan
