[citation needed] Metrodorus was a close friend and a court historian of the Armenian emperor Tigranes the Great and also wrote his biography.

a third century Roman theologian, Hippolytus of Rome (170–235), in his Chronicle, while writing about his contemporary, Emperor Severus Alexander (r. 222–235), mentions that the Armenians are amongst those nations who have their own distinct alphabet.

In Voghyump's work, amongst other histories, an episode was noted of the Armenian King Tigranes VII (who reigned from 144 to 161, and again from AD 164–186) erecting a monument on the tomb of his brother, the Mithraic High Priest of the Kingdom of Greater Armenia, Mazhan.

Movses of Khoren notes that Bardesanes translated this Armenian book into Syriac (Aramaic), and later also into Greek.

[citation needed] Another important evidence for the existence of a pre-Mashtotsian alphabet is the fact that the pantheon of the ancient Armenians included Tir, who was the patron god of writing and science.

Koriwn notes that Mashtots was told of the existence of ancient Armenian letters which he was initially trying to integrate into his own alphabet.

[9] The Armenian alphabet was introduced by Mesrop Mashtots and Isaac of Armenia (Sahak Partev) in AD 405.

Medieval Armenian sources also claim that Mashtots invented the Georgian and Caucasian Albanian alphabets around the same time.

[11] Traditionally, the following phrase translated from Solomon's Book of Proverbs is said to be the first sentence to be written down in Armenian by Mashtots: Ճանաչել զիմաստութիւն եւ զխրատ, իմանալ զբանս հանճարոյ:Čanačʿel zimastutʿiun yev zxrat, imanal zbans hančaroy.To know wisdom and instruction; to perceive the words of understanding.Various scripts have been credited with being the prototype for the Armenian alphabet.

Notrgir, or 'minuscule', invented initially for speed, was extensively used in the Armenian diaspora in the 16th to 18th centuries, and later became popular in printing.

The earliest known example of the script's usage was a dedicatory inscription over the west door of the church of Saint Sarkis in Tekor.

[13][better source needed] The earliest known surviving example of usage outside of Armenia is a mid-6th century mosaic inscription in the chapel of St Polyeuctos in Jerusalem.

[citation needed] Notes: In handwriting, the upper- and lower-case letters look more similar than they do in print, and the stroke order is more apparent.

[citation needed] From the middle of the 19th century, the Armenian alphabet was also used for books written in the Kurdish language in the Ottoman Empire.

Five Armenian ligatures are encoded in the "Alphabetic presentation forms" block (code point range U+FB13–FB17).

The ArmSCII character encoding, developed between 1991 and 1999, was widely used in Windows 9x operating systems but has become obsolete due to the advent of Unicode.

The phonetic layout is not very performant, due to the letter frequency difference between the Armenian and English languages, although it is easier to learn and use.