Early Cyrillic
| Early Cyrillic alphabet |
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|---|---|
 |
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| Type | |
| Languages | Old Church Slavonic, Church Slavonic, old versions of many Slavic languages |
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Time period
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from circa 893 |
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Parent systems
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Egyptian hieroglyphs
|
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Sister systems
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Latin alphabet Coptic alphabet Armenian |
| Direction | Varies |
| ISO 15924 | Cyrs, 221 |
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The Early Cyrillic alphabet is a writing system that was developed during the late ninth century on the basis of the Greek alphabet for the Orthodox Slavic population in Europe. It was developed in the Preslav Literary School in the First Bulgarian Empire in order to write the Old Church Slavonic language. The modern Cyrillic script is still used primarily for Slavic languages, and for East European and Asian languages that were under Russian cultural influence during the 20th century.
The earliest form of manuscript Cyrillic, known as ustav, was based on Greek uncial script, augmented by ligatures and by letters from the Glagolitic alphabet for consonants not found in Greek.
The Glagolitic alphabet was created by the monk Saint Cyril, possibly with the aid of his brother Saint Methodius, around 863. Cyrillic, on the other hand, may have been a creation of Cyril's students (most notable of which was Clement of Ohrid) in the 890s at the Preslav Literary School under Bulgarian Tsar Simeon the Great as a more suitable script for church books, though retaining the original Bulgarian symbols in Glagolitic. An alternative hypothesis proposes that it emerged in the border regions of Greek proselytization to the Slavs before it was codified and adapted by some systematizer among the Slavs; the oldest Cyrillic manuscripts look very similar to 9th and 10th century Greek uncial manuscripts, and the majority of uncial Cyrillic letters were identical to their Greek uncial counterparts. One possibility is that this systematization of Cyrillic was undertaken at the Council of Preslav in 893, when the Old Church Slavonic liturgy was adopted by the Bulgarian Empire.
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