The Church of Caucasian Albania

Beside Armenia and Georgia there was a third Christian kingdom in the Caucasus. Albania, in what is now Azerbaijan and southern Dagestan, with its own royal line, its own bishops and its own alphabet. It held a council at Aghuen in the late fifth century that issued canons on clergy, marriage and what the nobility owed the church, and it produced a history — compiled from earlier material by a writer known as Movses Daskhurantsi. That is very nearly all the narrative it left. Pressed between Persian, Byzantine and then Arab power, and between the competing alignments of its Armenian and Georgian neighbours, it lost its independent standing in 705, when its catholicosate was placed under the Armenian church. Its written language was effectively lost for more than a thousand years, until palimpsests found at Saint Catherine's Monastery on Sinai in 1996 turned out to preserve Caucasian Albanian scripture beneath later Georgian text.