The first written Armenian riddles, invented in the V-VI centuries, are de­di­cated to writing. These riddles attributed to David Poet or David Philosopher follow each other with a certain purposefulness, they show the birth of writing as a divine creation, its donation to people from the heavenly height, the crea­tion of the Armenian alphabet.

This riddle is made up of ten small units. It condenses the meaning of writ­ing for the humanity as a whole, and with separate riddles it defines and charac­terizes the objective-functional specific applications of writing.

Following Davit Poet's riddle, the riddles of Nerses Shnorhali and Abraham Astapatsi were later invented. With some semantic and stylistic differences, the au­thors had maintained the ideology of David’s riddle in relation to the spiritual symbol of the writing.

Shorhali expanded the thematic range of the riddles dedicated to writing, in­­cluding the various subjects related to the art of writing. In addition to the rid­dles about the writing, book, the number of letters of the alphabet, there are rid­dles about the pen, paper, inkpot, ink and about the "necessary handy, beautiful little art" that is the grammar. 

In later centuries the authors followed Shnorhali, preferring the same range of the subjects for the solution. There are only two riddles dedicated to new subjects: to a desk and to a string liner, which authors are Hovhannes Tsor­tso­retsi and Karapet Sebastatsi.

In the riddles dedicated to the writing, starting from Shnorhali, the enig­matic images-formulas used by him are also spread, such as the image of being born from a black womb, that is an inkpot, and being spread in a white field, as well as the images of the pages of a book compared with white lambs, of the letters compared with black ewes, of the book sheets with a field. They were ap­plied by Georg Yerznaktsi, Hovhannes Tsortsoretsi, and by the anonymous au­thor. The authors sometimes managed to give original tones to the same pic­to­rial base. In his enigmatic form, the divine pen compares the book to a nigh­tingale with a thousand mouths, to a speaking hen, whose voice can be heard on­ly by one who sees the heavenly paradise.

In Stepanos Dashtetsi's riddle, the book is presented as a preacher and teach­er speaking before both emperors and slaves.

The 36 letters of the Armenian Alphabet are presented in the book of rid­dles of Movses Bjnetsi with different possible numerical combinations. Alth­ough over the centuries, the riddles dedicated to writing have moved towards the everyday life, towards the realms of the use of the objects, however, they have preserved the mentality of the divine writing formed in the 5th century.