Aghwan
Old Udi Gargarian Caucasian Albanian
𐕒𐕡𐔳𐔼𐕎 𐕌𐕒𐕡𐔵owdin mowz
A 7th-century column capital with Caucasian Albanian text
Native to	Caucasian Albania
Era	6th–8th century AD. Developed intoUdi[1]
Language family	Northeast Caucasian Lezgic Samur Eastern Samur Aghwan
Writing system	Caucasian Albanian
Language codes
ISO 639-3	xag
Linguist List	xag
Glottolog	aghw1237

Caucasian Albanian (also calledOld Udi,Aluan orAghwan)^[2] is anextinct member of theNortheast Caucasian languages. It was spoken inCaucasian Albania, which stretched from current day southDagestan toAzerbaijan. Linguists believe it is an early linguistic predecessor to the endangered Northeast CaucasianUdi language.^[3] The distinctCaucasian Albanian alphabet used 52 letters.

Caucasian Albanian possibly corresponds to the "Gargarian" language identified by medieval Armenian historians. Despite its name, Caucasian Albanian bears no linguistic relationship whatsoever with theAlbanian language spoken inAlbania, which belongs to theIndo-European family.

The existence of the Caucasian Albanian literature was known only indirectly before the late 20th century.Koryun'sLife of Mashtots, written in the 5th century but only surviving in much later corrupted manuscripts, andMovses Kaghankatvatsi'sHistory of the Caucasian Albanians, written in the 10th century, attribute the conversion of the Caucasian Albanians to Christianity to two missionaries, Enoch and Dana, and the creation of the Caucasian Albanian alphabet to the Armenian scholarMesrop Mashtots. A certain Bishop Jeremiah then translated theChristian Bible into their language. As recently as 1977,Bruce Metzger could write that "nothing of [this] version has survived".^[4]

In 1996,Zaza Aleksidze of the Centre of Manuscripts inTbilisi,Georgia, discovered apalimpsest^[5] atSaint Catherine's Monastery onMount Sinai,Egypt, with an unknown script.^[6] He went on to identify the alphabet as Caucasian Albanian,^[7] and to identify the manuscript as an early Christianlectionary from about the 5th or 6th century. The lectionary may be the earliest extant lectionary in the Christian religion.^[8]

Then linguistsJost Gippert and Wolfgang Schulze got involved with theCaucasian Albanian alphabet.^[9] Specialized x-ray equipment was used, which made it possible to read the Caucasian Albanian palimpsest texts in their entirety.^[10] A list of Caucasian Albanian month names, which survived in a number of medievalmanuscripts, gave one of the clues to the language.^[9] In 2017, two additional texts of Caucasian Albanian were discovered in Saint Catherine's Monastery.^[11] The original text on the palimpsests was erased anywhere between the 4th and 12th century.^[12]

The deciphered text of the lectionary includes excerpts from theHebrew Bible (Psalms andIsaiah)^[2] and from theNew Testament (Acts of the Apostles the gospels ofMatthew,Mark andLuke, and the epistles ofRomans,1 Corinthians,2 Corinthians,Galatians,Ephesians,1 Thessalonians,2 Thessalonians,1 Timothy,2 Timothy,Hebrews,2 Peter,1 John andJames).^[2][13][14] Text from theGospel of John, separate from the lectionary, was also found. Its text proved much more difficult to recover and on some pages it can only be identified by theEusebian canons at the bottom of the page. This was likely a complete gospel originally,^[2] and it is possible that the whole Bible had at some point been translated into Caucasian Albanian.^[13]

The Caucasian Albanian translation of the Bible relies predominantly onOld Armenian translations, but it deviates from the known Armenian text in several places, suggesting that the originalGreek and possiblyGeorgian andSyriac translations were also used as source texts.^[2]

Apart from the Caucasian Albanian palimpsests kept at Mt. Sinai, the most famous samples of Caucasian Albanian inscriptions were found in 1949 during excavations inMingachevir region, Azerbaijan. Among the known Caucasian Albanian words arezow (I),own (and) andavel-om (much, ordinal form).^[15]

Old Udi was anergative–absolutive language.^[16]

• Aleksidzé, Zaza (2020). "The deciphering of the script of the Caucasian Albanians". In Hoyland, Robert (ed.).From Albania to Arrān: The East Caucasus between the Ancient and Islamic Worlds (ca. 330 BCE–1000 CE). Piscataway, NJ, USA: Gorgias Press. pp. 335–350.doi:10.31826/9781463239893-018.
• Gippert, Jost; Schulze, Wolfgang (2023). "The Language of the Caucasian Albanians". In Gippert, Jost; Dum-Tragut, Jasmine (eds.).Caucasian Albania: An International Handbook. Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter Mouton. pp. 167–230.doi:10.1515/9783110794687-004.

• Udi language
• Northeast Caucasian languages
• Languages attested from the 6th century
• Languages extinct in the 8th century
• Extinct languages of Asia
• Languages of the Caucasus

• Articles with short description
• Short description is different from Wikidata
• Articles containing Aghwan-language text
• Language articles with Linglist code
• Language articles with unreferenced extinction date