"Preserved in rural areas of the Armenian kingdom, and favored by villagers who could readily understand the pictorial images, the Haikasian Script was predominate in the last bastions of pagan faith in Armenia and can be linked almost letter for letter with that uncovered by Mesrop Mashtots in 401-406 AD"

By the time Armenia became aligned with the Persian Empire, two scripts surfaced in the Middle East, both with profound influence on the Armenian language. The Haikasian Script had developed to the point where it is pointed to by linguists as "Old Armenian" Script.

The Haikasian Script is remarkable for several reasons. For one it continues a single line of development from the Copper-Bronze Age inscriptions in Armenia, developing the early pictograms into a hierarchy of letters and meanings. The script also contains specific sounds that were strung together to form words and phrases. Most remarkable of all, this script continued to be used in Armenia until the 14^th century AD almost a thousand years after the adoption of the Mashtots Script.

Preserved in rural areas of the Armenian kingdom, and favored by villagers who could readily understand the pictorial images(remember most of the population were illiterate), the Haikasian Script was predominate in the last bastions of pagan faith in Armenia and can be linked almost letter for letter with that uncovered by Mesrop Mashtots in 401-406 AD.

The Odessian Script, which is traced to the 5^th-4^th centuries BC in the Sinai, and was created by a separate Indo-European branch of Ancestral Armenians, surfaced recently. It bears an even more striking resemblance to the current Armenian script, with certain letters being almost identical to that credited to Mesrop Mashtots.

Taken together with the resilient Haikasian Script, historians and linguists are involved in a raging debate over how two much older scripts could so closely resemble that used in Armenia today, but receive any credit. They also give substantial credence to a common theory in Eastern Armenia about the source of the script discovered by Mesrop Mashtots.

Between the Persian and early Christian Period, the aristocracy and priest classes dropped both cuneiform and Haikasian Script in favor of others from the West. When Alexander the great invaded the area, defeating Darius III and destroying the Persian capital at Persepolis, his armies introduced Hellenism to Armenia. No other event so clearly divides the path the Armenian culture took from that it took before. The entire civilization changed. The aristocracy adopted Greek as the language of court (along with Arshakid Persian), the pantheon of gods took on a human aspect, supplanting the more abstract astral aspects, and Greek architecture and design found fertile ground in a population that had worshipped many of the same ideals for thousands of years.

Bear in mind that the Indo-European migrations took more than a root language with them, they brought ideas and beliefs distinct to their native home. Among these were the zodiac and the myths that sprung from their origins. One of the destinations for the Indo-European culture was Northern India, another the Doric culture in Greece. The Sanskrit language in particular has many root words identical to those found in Armenian.

There is also a common mythology between the cultures, beginning with the myth of Vishnu in Sanskrit, and ending with Dionysus in Greek mythology. A later version of the same myth was developed in Egypt, for a new god Isis. In Armenia, the myth was represented by the god Ara Geghetsik, with origins from around 2400 BC, the beginning of the old Armenian calendar. Another is the Armenian god-king Haik, the forerunner of the Greek Hercules.

The goddess of death by destruction is a common god form in ancient cultures, and the myth of Shiva, the most terrible and destructive of Hindu goddesses is firmly rooted in Armenian tradition. In the goddess Anahit, the Armenians have a myth so old and close to Shiva, it is considered proof of Indo-European influence on the North Indian culture. Unlike Shiva, Anahit gradually tamed her destructive influences and later generations knew her as the goddess of fertility and birth, and in Greece she was known as Artemis.

Other gods and goddesses with roots in ancestral Armenia are Aramazd (Zeus), Nouneh (Athena), Vahag’n (Hephaestus), Astghik (Aphrodite), Tir (Apollo) and Tork Angegh (Aries).

Hellenism which had an identical pantheon to the Armenian tradition, and worshipped it through sacrificial fire and divining the cosmos found quick converts in the Armenian kingdom. They shared a unified vision of the universe, and the temples erected in the Hellenistic tradition expanded on earlier Urartian designs.

The primary difference between cultures became their language: as the aristocracy adopted the Greek language, it separated itself from the population which continued to use the native Armenian tongue.

During the Roman Empire period, Latin was used interchangeably with Greek and Arshakid Persian, with Tigran the Great emulating Greco-Roman traditions in the building of his new city at Tigranakert. Still speaking the Armenian tongue, the division between the ruling class and the masses became more prominent without a unified script. No wonder the Haikasian Script lasted well into the Medieval Era: it was closely tied to ancestral Armenian roots, unlike the foreign scripts favored by those at court.

Armenia’s emergence as a Christian state is told in the story of Gregory the Illuminator, who waged a ferocious war against paganism at the same time Armenia was resisting incursions by Sassanids in the South. Entire communities were destroyed when they resisted the new faith, and almost all signs of paganism were wiped out during the long struggle. Churches were built on top of ruined temples, Vishaps were "baptized" by carving a cross on the ancient stones, and obelisks were converted into the earliest examples of khachkars (stone crosses) in the country.

The battle for Christianity was also a battle for the survival of the ruling house. Armenia’s kings had long been connected through marriage to the Arshakid (Parthev) Persian dynasty, which had been wiped out by the Sassanids. By adopting Christianity, the Armenians asserted themselves as a unique culture in the region, and temporarily united the kingdom against outside pagans.

During the 4^th century, paganism was not completely wiped out, though (it took three hundred more years of concerted effort to accomplish that). And the population was introduced to a strange mixture of Christian scriptures and pagan traditions in churches. Most problematic of all, the language used in the new Armenian faith was foreign to the native Armenian tongue, separating the masses from the divine intent. Within a hundred years, the gains made by Gregory the Illuminator were in danger of being lost unless the kingdom could regain its identity yet again in the face of enemies.