Khrabr
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Khrabr (Old Church Slavonic Храбръ) was a 10th century Bulgarian monk who was a near-contemporary of Saint Cyril and Saint Methodius, the Byzantine saints who created the Cyrillic alphabet and did much to promote Christianity among the Slavs.
He is best known for his Account of Letters (Bulgarian: За буквите, Old East Slavic: О писменех / o pismenex /), a chronicle of the development of Cyrillic. He wrote of the situation of the Slavs before the invention of Cyrillic and described the impact of the new script:
- Being still pagans, the Slavs did not have their own letters, but read and communicated by means of tallies and sketches. After their baptism they were forced to use Roman and Greek letters in the transcription of their Slavic words but these were not suitable ... At last, God, in his love for mankind, sent them St. Constantine the Philosopher, called Cyril, a learned and upright man, who composed for them thirty-eight letters, some (24 of them) similar to the Greek, but some (14 of them) different, suitable to express Slavic sounds.
In doing so, he provided information critical to Slavonic palaeography and records that the pre-Christian Slavs employed a "stroke and incision" (черты и резы /chert1 i rez1/, translated as "tallies and sketches" above) writing that was, apparently, insufficient properly to reflect the spoken language. It is thought that this may have been a form of runic script but no authentic examples are known to have survived.