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Comparative analysis - concluding remarks.


       After graphically comparing the runes from Murfatlar with letters from scripts that could be the prototype, genetically related, or donor of individual characters, I came to the following interesting conclusions:

  • The following 23 Murfatlar signs are found among the signs of the runic alphabets of Europe and Asia:




  • The following 21 Murfatlar characters are found among the characters of the Greek alphabet, Cyrillic and Glagolitic:



  • 7 of the Murfatlar characters are found among the letters of the Greek alphabet, Cyrillic and Glagolitic, but not among the letters of the runic alphabet. It is very likely that both the graphic and sound values of those Murfatlar letters were borrowed from Glagolitic and Cyrillic alphabets.






  • The following 11 characters do not occur in any of the alphabets analysed above.




  • Two of the Murfatlar characters, which are among the most common, have counterparts in all runic alphabets and Glagolitic. In the verb letter „онъ“ although there are two circles at the end, it repeats the same pattern and the letter „нашъ“, despite the knitting, also repeats the same loop. In the Orkhon-Yenisei script, Sekler runes and Glagolitic, these letters have the same sound value: o and n (in the Orkhon-Yenisei script, this grapheme represents two sounds, "o" and "u"). Specialists believe that these two letters were borrowed from the Semitic alphabets of Central Asia in which they have almost the same form (Clauson G. 1970, Livshits V. 1980)


  • In the Murfatlar alphabet, these two signs have the opposite direction to the direction of the same-shaped signs in the Turkic runic alphabet. This raises the question of the direction of writing in the Murfatlar alphabet. For this, we can look for evidence in the inscriptions from Murfatlar. In the inscription M1 inscribed in the upper arm of a cross, it is clearly seen that on the left, all the signs start at the same and close distance from the outline of the cross, but this is not the case on the right, where the characters reach the shape of the cross at different lengths, sometimes quite large.

Inscription M1


In the inscription M3, the leftmost upper letter has clearly visible added ornaments as of a capital letter.

Inscription M3


     All this gives reason to assume that the Murfatlar inscriptions were written from left to right. How to explain this? The situation with the inscriptions from Byala and Shudikovo is interesting. The same sequence of characters is written in two different directions.




Inscription from Byala




Inscription Shudikovo 4

Does this mean that at some point, the direction of writing in the runic alphabets in Medieval Bulgaria changed under the influence of the Greek script? An inscription from Ravna (P1) sheds light on this question.



Inscription Ravna 1


Above a drawing of a man are incised the first three letters of the Greek alphabet.  On the left, several characters are inscribed into a horse's body. Here, the first grapheme after a sign which can be seen as punctuation, is Greek alfa. The next character corresponds to b from the Orkhon-Yenisei script. A similar grapheme was recognised as "b" by M. Moskov in another inscription from Ravna (P2), and this reading is accepted by most specialists (Kyzlasov I. 1994, Popkonstantinov K. 1993, Tryjarski E. 1995).



Inscription Ravna 2

Is it then possible to have the beginning of the runic alphabet in the contours of the horse, adding the fact that in the Hungarian runic alphabet, "a" is of a similar shape?

  •  Something even more interesting. After the sixth sign, a cross, two more signs follow, and then three dots, then two more signs. The Orkhon-Yenisei alphabet is written in groups of two characters in the only two known runic alphabets (Kyzlasov I. 1994).
The Toyok and Ryukoku Manuscripts

  • Unlike inscription P1, the Murfatlar characters, which are asymmetric along the vertical axis, are turned to the right. This also applies to the two signs discussed here.





        The above comparative analysis gave some general and tentative directions for further research. The results achieved so far can be rejected or confirmed by the inscriptions' content. But how to figure it out? This question will be answered in the next part of this study.

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