Mesrop Mashtots as a young priest

Mesrop Mashtots as a young priest. The image comes from Ohan Gaidzakian’s book Illustrated Armenia and the Armenians, published in Boston in 1898. The drawing shows a bearded man in a long robe holding a book and an ornamented cloth; below is the English caption ‘Mesrop, as young priest’.

Mesrop Mashtots was an Armenian scholar and linguist, the creator of the Armenian alphabet, and the founder of Armenian literature and writing, of the national school and of educational thought. He was an enlightener, missionary, translator of the Bible and theologian, and is a saint of the Armenian Apostolic Church and the Armenian Catholic Church.