Palaeography

[rochvelleth]

I have a question for all of you:

Is your writing internally consistent? By which I mean, does the shape of each letter you write vary, or is it always pretty much the same?You see, the reason I'm asking is that I'm thinking a lot about palaeography at the moment, especially since there seems to have been rather widespread literacy among the

Comments

[naath]

Mine's all squigly and all over the place.

[naath]

Oh, but I guess that if I hand-wrote more things I'd probably have a more distinctive handwriting style.

[rochvelleth]

Ah, I was just wondering what effect computers (and indeed just the advent of printing) would have on these trends (if they are trends)... but I can't quite work it out. It surely must impose a kind of standardisation - but on the other hand, computers mean that you write by hand less and so have a considerably smaller individual writing tradition to go on. *shrug*

[woodpijn]

I agree.

The Greek word-final sigma and ordinary sigma, which I assume are reasonably hard-and-fast rules, remind me of the two variants of s I was taught in primary school handwriting lessons - one for beginnings of words and following letters with hooks in the middle of the line, and the other for following letters with hooks at the bottom of the line. That was taught as though it was just as hard-and-fast a rule, but it's just one particular style of formal handwriting, and now I use the first kind of s everywhere, as do most people. And I probably went through a stage in between where I used them inconsistently.

To argue the other side, though, maybe people are more consistent with their handwriting when they're hacking into stone tablets than when they're scribbling with a biro, because it's more effort and they have to think about it more.

[rochvelleth]

To argue the other side, though, maybe people are more consistent with their handwriting when they're hacking into stone tablets than when they're scribbling with a biro, because it's more effort and they have to think about it more.

You're right, that's an important element to it. Linear B is (almost) all on clay, so it's sort of impressed with a stylus (i.e. lines and curves drawn with a stylus, rather than punched signs as in cuneiform). Cypro-Minoan, however, appears on several different materials written in several different ways - scratched on stone or metal, carved in stone, painted on pottery, punched on clay, incised on clay, etc. I suppose that for Linear B, where we have a scribal tradition coupled with the fact that inscribing wet clay isn't terribly easy, we might indeed expect more internal consistency? I think that's quite convincing anyway.

[ewx]

Looking at a recent sample of my own handwriting I can see lower case "i" leaning both left and right depending on which side (if either) it's connected to another letter.

[rochvelleth]

Ah, now that reminds me of another interesting factor - the direction of writing. We don't know whether all Cypro-Minoan inscriptions read left-to-right or whether some might be right-to-left (the Cypriot Syllabary, the later and related script used for Greek, has that alternation). Inverted signs are the most commonly cited evidence for writing in more than one direction, but signs leaning one way or another are also sometimes cited. So that's very interesting!

Is that the only variation you notice in your own writing?

[ewx]

That sample's not to hand right now but I'll see if I spot another one this evening...

[rochvelleth]

Thanks!

[vyvyan]

When I was doing palaeography (in ASNaC) ISTR one didn't decide on identity of scribes in quite such an absolutist way as this. You wouldn't require someone to always write letters in a specific way to judge them as a single writer, rather, you would look for peculiarities and tendencies which, taken en masse, disinguished them from other scribal hands. But I think there were still many grey areas and particular manuscript sections which some scholars thought were written by one person, and others by more than one etc

[rochvelleth]

I've never done that kind of palaeographic analysis myself, so my impression of the identification of hands in Linear B is rather based on articles about analyses - and I'm sure I could be misinterpreting how the Linear B palaeographists go about it. But yes, thank you, now I think of it I do seem to remember reading the odd things about peculiarities and tendencies of particular hands as well.

I'm very interested in how all the information about individuals builds up as a picture of the whole writing tradition as well, actually. Epigraphists (or at least the ones in my field) tend to speak about tendencies so broadly that you lose the sense of what things are like at the individual level. And I'm especially interested in how epigraphic change (both script-to-script, though that's obviously an oversimplification, and within a single script) works as it's happening. But of course it's one of those things that it's rather difficult to study, especially nowadays, IYSWIM.

[constant_muse]

vyvyan's ASNAC mirrors my experience with XII C. hands, it's particular marks or flourishes or habits that tend to identify a writer. There can be some variety in the way they form any given letter, but the hand can be identified from e.g. the thickness of downstrokes, and use of serifs.

But what I was going to say was that scribes trained in a particular institution would be encouraged to adopt a relatively uniform style, e.g. the English medieval chancery-hand. That's if the purpose of their writing was bureaucratic, aiming always to express the same sort of things to the same audience, with abbreviations understood by them. So rather than an individual, an identified hand could come from a group of writers.

Also the technology, the condition of the pen nib, the ink and the parchment could affect how a script looks.

My own handwriting used to be pretty uniform when I left school, but it has completely atrophied in the last 10 years or so.

[rochvelleth]

The effect of scribal traditions is a very interesting aspect. We do sometimes find spelling differences for individual Mycenaean scribes, I think[1], but I can't remember right now whether we see variant sign shapes for single writers in that tradition.

[1] Sometimes these are accompanied by an argument that one writer couldn't possibly use variant spellings, and so they must actually be different words (the pe-mo and pe-ma problem is the most important one here - even used as evidence of an intrusive second dialect). The methodology is a bit different of course, but the assumption is similar.

So rather than an individual, an identified hand could come from a group of writers.

Ah, that's interesting. For Linear B, hands are always assumed to be individuals, but they also fall into 'classes' (sharing similar features) and 'schools' (sharing a significant set of similar features).