Old Permic alphabet by usual writing. The inclusion of the latter aided the alphabet in greater acceptance among the medieval Permic speakers of the time. The alphabet was in use until the 17th century, when it was superseded by the Cyrillic script. Abur was also used as cryptographic writing for the Russian language. April 26, which is the saint's day of Stephen of Perm, is celebrated as Old Permic Alphabet Day. The Abur inscriptions are among the oldest relics of the Uralic languages. Only one of them has earlier documents: Hungarian, which had been written using the Old Hungarian script first before the
Khitan small script scripts appeared most often on epitaphs and monuments, although other fragments sometimes surface. The Khitan small script was invented in about 924 or 925 CE by a scholar named Yelü Diela. He drew his inspiration from “the Uyghur language and script,” which he was shown by a visiting Uyghur ambassador at the Khitan court. For this reason, Khitan small script was originally thought to be a daughter script of the Old Uyghur alphabet. Using a smaller number of symbols than large script, small script was less complex, yet still “able to record any word.” While small-script inscriptions employed some logograms