Paleography

I. Introduction

Paleography, in its widest sense, the study and analysis of the writing of ancient times and of the Middle Ages. In its restricted sense, paleography denotes only the study of writing on such destructible materials as papyrus, wax, parchment and vellum, and paper. Paleography is usually further limited to the study of writing in Greek and Latin and their derivatives. A related science, epigraphy, is devoted to the study of inscriptions engraved on stone or metal.

II. Ancient Writing Materials

The most commonly used ancient writing materials were the wax tablet, the papyrus roll, and later the parchment codex, or book. Wax tablets were convenient for letters, accounts, and writing of a temporary nature. Papyrus sheets, made into rolls from 6 to 9 m (20 to 30 ft) in length, provided the most common writing material of classical antiquity, being in constant use from about 500 BC to AD 300 and even later. The papyrus roll had several disadvantages; because it had to be rerolled after each reading, it was extremely awkward to use for reference, and often the beginning and end of a roll would be torn or mutilated from excessive wear. As a result, lacunae, or gaps, sometimes appear in the texts of classical authors.

Parchment, known to have been employed for literary works in Rome as early as the 1st century AD, and used by the Greeks much earlier, became increasingly popular. By the 4th century, Greek and Latin literature was generally transferred from the papyrus roll to the parchment codex, made into book form in imitation of the wax tablet. The codex was much more suitable for long works and lent itself more readily to convenient reference. Some pre-Christian works, however, were not transcribed, and thus many Greek texts have been lost to us.

III. Ancient Writing Styles

In both the papyrus rolls and the parchment books that supplanted them, prose texts were written in columns. Until the 9th century words were not separated, although in some writing, both inscriptions and literary works, dots or points were used as divisions. These practices accounted for many errors in transcription by scribes who were either careless or uneducated.

The difficulty of deciphering medieval manuscripts arises largely from such faults in copying, as well as from the contractions, abbreviations, and ligatures that were employed to economize on labor and expensive parchment. In the early manuscripts abbreviations were rarely used, but they became more and more numerous in succeeding centuries.

The two styles of penmanship in antiquity are known as the formal literary, or book, hand and the more rapid cursive hand, which was used for nonliterary, everyday purposes. The extant manuscripts of the classical authors are written either in the ancient book hands or in scripts that developed later, in the Middle Ages, under cursive influence.

All Greek and Roman manuscripts, ancient and medieval, are classified either as majuscule, that is, written in large letters, or as minuscule, written in small letters. Majuscule writing is subdivided into (1) capitals, either square capitals, carefully formed with angles to resemble inscriptions carved on stone, or rustic capitals, drawn with somewhat greater freedom with oblique and short cross strokes; and (2) uncials, modified capitals, in which curves are favored and angles avoided as much as possible. Minuscules resulted from the rapid writing of majuscules under cursive influence; the letters became changed in form and reduced in size, but minuscule writing is, in most instances, distinct from cursive writing.

IV. Greek Writing

The earliest Greek literary papyrus, a fragment of the Persae by the poet Timotheus, is written in capital letters similar to those of inscriptions. Precursors of uncial appeared in the 1st century AD , and a handsome broad uncial continued in use on papyri until the 6th or 7th century AD. Three periods in the history of Greek writing on papyrus may be recognized: the Ptolemaic, from 330 to 30 BC; the Roman, from 27 BC to AD305, marked by round, flowing strokes; and the Byzantine, from 360 to the Arab conquest of Egypt in 640, marked by a decorative style.

The oldest vellum manuscripts are the three great uncial codices of the Bible, the Codex Vaticanus, the Codex Sinaiticus, and the Codex Alexandrinus of the 4th and 5th centuries AD ; these manuscripts of the New Testament in Greek have essentially the uncial characters of the papyrus rolls. About the 7th century a slanting uncial became popular; this type of uncial was pointed, with a strong contrast between heavy and light strokes, and is known as the Slavonic uncial, because in the 9th century it formed the basis of the Slavic alphabet.

V. Latin Writing

Latin paleography begins with the majuscule writing found in the earliest Latin manuscripts extant, such as the Virgil manuscripts of the 4th and 5th centuries AD, which are written in square or rustic capitals. As a literary hand, uncial writing extends from the 5th to the 8th century, predominantly for biblical and patristic works. The cursive hand in general use influenced the literary majuscule hand, so that a style designated as half-uncial became a popular book hand. This clear and beautiful script had an important effect on some of the medieval book hands. After the 7th century, the various book hands were all minuscule, developed by scribes from the cursive with an admixture of uncial or half-uncial forms. The earliest examples of the cursive style are the wall inscriptions and wax tablets of the ancient city of Pompeii, written before AD 79. The minuscule scripts that developed from cursive became the so-called national hands of the Middle Ages, each assuming an individuality in the locality in which it prevailed.

VI. Development of National Styles

Seven important national hands evolved. The Beneventan, or Lombardic, script was the writing of southern Italy, as practiced in the monasteries of Monte Cassino and La Cava from the 9th to the 13th century. The Visigothic was employed in Spain from the 8th to the 12th century. The Insular scripts, those of Ireland and England from the 7th to the 11th century, differ from the Continental forms of writing in that they were not derived from the cursive style, but from the half-uncial, which had been taken to Ireland by missionaries in the 4th and 5th centuries. Manuscripts written in the Insular scripts, such as the Lindisfarne Gospels (7th century) or the Book of Kells (8th-9th century), are noted for their calligraphy and their ornamentation.

The Merovingian, or pre-Carolingian, script written in France during the 7th and 8th centuries was reformed during the reign of the emperor Charlemagne, when much attention was given to copying earlier manuscripts. Scribes, writing in a plain, simple, and beautiful script strongly influenced by the earlier half-uncial characters, produced a new hand known as the Carolingian minuscule. During the 11th century Carolingian minuscule began to assume an individual form in the various nations of western Europe.

In the 12th century the so-called Gothic, or black letter, writing came into use; it was a modification of the Carolingian minuscule with angles replacing the curves. Excessive angularity and compression, and the use of numerous contractions and abbreviations, made the Gothic hand difficult to read. Once the prevalent form for printed material in Germany, it is now rare.

A renaissance of the Carolingian style took place in Italy in the 14th century, where an extremely regular and beautiful style developed, leading to the so-called Humanistic script of the 15th century. This style served as the model for the first typesetters of Italy, and thus the clear and simple Roman letters that go back through the Carolingian script to the half-uncials of the earlier period were preserved. These minuscule letters were the ancestors of the lowercase letters of the modern Roman type.

See Book; Calligraphy; Type. See also Writing.

Contributed By:

George E. Duckworth, M.A., Ph.D.

Late Giger Professor of Classics, Princeton University.

HOW TO CITE THIS ARTICLE

"Paleography," Microsoft® Encarta® Online Encyclopedia 2000