classical painting of the day

 


Above: Part of a painting by Francesco Majotto showing Mesrop Mashtots inventing the Armenian alphabet.

I recently noticed a weird similarity between a cipher I used in my diary when I was a high school kid and the Armenian alphabet. I never noticed this resemblance in previous years because the Unicode charts show the Armenian script in a squared-off and slightly diagonal form. My diary code resembled the rounder and non-slanted form seen here:



I don’t think I had any access to information about the Armenian script back in those days (pre-Internet times). The dictionaries and encyclopedias of that era often included a chart showing the Phoenecian, Hebrew, Greek and Roman alphabets side by side, but the odds of seeing a table of Armenian (or other exotic) glyphs while living in small-town Florida were next to nil.

So, this leaves me wondering if the similiarity is sheer coincidence, if I saw a sample of the Armenian alphabet and forgot seeing it, or if there is some supernatural force at work (ghosts, reincarnation, etc). None of these explanations seem likely.