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It is probably fair to say that not much thought is given in our day-to-day to what was going on in medieval Yemen, just south of Saudi Arabia today, on the coast of the Red Sea. But it was here in the Middle Ages that a multilingual glossary was created, which included Armenian, the 100 Years, 100 Facts Project website reported. 

The 13th-14th centuries was an era when both the great Mongol conquests that stretched from China to Europe as well as the Armenian Kingdom of Cilicia were coming to an end. It was a time period that brought east and west together in very active overland trade.

One expression of that cosmopolitan atmosphere took place under the patronage of the sixth Rasulid king of Yemen, al-Malik al-Afdal al-Abbas, who ruled from 1363 to 1377. Although it was not uncommon then to have dictionaries made of the major languages of the region – notably Arabic, Persian, and Turkish – a glossary of six languages was a highly unusual undertaking. The Rasulid Hexaglot, as it is now called, lists over a thousand words in Arabic, Persian, Turkic, Mongol, Greek, and Armenian.

The discovery of this document was made in the 1960s, and it took some thirty years and more to study, translate, and publish it as a work of modern scholarship.

It is noteworthy that Armenian was considered a significant enough regional language in the Near East at the time to be included.

What is also noteworthy is the fact that the Rasulid Hexaglot was written in the Arabic script – a rarity, to have Armenian words transcribed in Arabic (and the same goes for the Greek as well). The system of transliteration hints that the Armenian dialect of Cilicia, closer to what is Western Armenian today, had made its way all the way to Yemen in the 14th century.

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