The Cyrillic Alphabet
Tradition says that the Cyrillic alphabet was invented by St. Cyril and St. Methodius in the early 860s in preparation for a mission expedition from Constantinople to the Slavic people in Moravia. The idea was to create an alphabet for writing the liturgical texts in the native Slavic language.[4] There's no evidence of any written Slavic prior to 860 or so.
[4] My sources for information on the Cyrillic alphabet are Paul Cubberley, “The Slavic Alphabets,” in The World's Writing Systems, pp. 346–355, and Bernard Comrie, “Adaptations of the Cyrillic Alphabet,” op. cit., pp. 700–726.
One problem with this account is that there were actually two alphabets created around that time for writing the Slavic languages: Glagolitic ...
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