Palaeography
Palaeography or paleography is the study and academic discipline of historical writing systems. It encompasses the historicity of manuscripts and texts, subsuming deciphering and dating of historical manuscripts, as well as the analysis of historic penmanship, handwriting scripts, signification, and printed media.
It is primarily concerned with the forms, processes, and relationships of writing and printing systems as evident in a text, document, or manuscript — analysis of the substantive textual content of documents is a secondary function. Included in the discipline is the practice of deciphering, reading, and dating manuscripts, and the cultural and technical context of writing systems, including the methods by which texts were produced, and the history of scriptoria. Palaeography as a discipline is important for understanding, authenticating, and dating historical texts; however, in the absence of additional evidence, it is difficult to use palaeographic means alone to pinpoint exact dates of such texts.
The discipline is one of the auxiliary sciences of history, and is considered to have been founded by Jean Mabillon with his 1681 work De re diplomatica, the first textbook to address the subject. The term palaeography was coined by Bernard de Montfaucon with the publication of his work on Greek palaeography, the Palaeographia Graeca, in 1708.
Application
Palaeography is an essential skill for many historians, semioticians, and philologists, as it addresses a suite of interrelated lines of inquiry. First, since the style of an alphabet, grapheme, or sign system set within a register in each given dialect and language has evolved constantly, it is necessary to know how to decipher its individual substantive, occurrence make-up and constituency. For example, assessing its characters and typology as they existed in various places, times and locations. In addition, for hand-written texts, scribes often use many abbreviations and annotations so as to functionally aid speed, efficiency, and ease of writing and in some registers to importantly save invaluable space of the medium. Hence, the specialist-palaeographer, philologist and semiotician must know how to, in the broadest sense, interpret, comprehend and understand them. Knowledge of individual letterforms, typographic ligatures, signs, typology, fonts, graphemes, hieroglyphics, and signification forms in general, subsuming punctuation, syntagm and proxemics, abbreviations and annotations; enables the palaeographer to read, comprehend and then to understand the text and/or the relationship and hierarchy between texts in suite. The palaeographer, philologist and semiotician must first determine language, then dialect and then the register, function and purpose of the text. That is, one must by necessity become expert in the formation, historicity and evolution of these languages and signification communities, and material communication events. Secondly, the historical usages of various styles of handwriting, common writing customs, and scribal or notarial abbreviations, annotations conventions, annexures, addenda and specifics of printed typology, syntagm and proxemics must be assessed as a collective undertaking. Philological knowledge of the register, language, vocabulary, and grammar generally used at a given time, place and circumstance may assist palaeographers to identify a hierarchy of texts in a suite through discourse analysis, determining the provenance of texts, identifying forgeries, interpolations and recensions with precision; eliciting a professional authenticity in documentation, textual and manuscript evaluation with view to producing a critical edition if required and a critical assessment of a given discourse event as rendered and set in a materiality or medium.Knowledge of writing materials and discourse material production systems is foundational to the study of handwriting and printing events and to the identification of the periods in which a document or manuscript may have been produced. An important goal may be to assign the text a date and a place of origin, or determining which translations of a text are produced from which specific document or manuscript. This is why the palaeographer and attendant semiologists and philologists must take into account the style, substance and formation of the text, document and manuscript and the handwriting style and printed typology, grapheme typos and lexical and signification system employed.
Document dating
Palaeography may be employed to provide information about the date at which a document was written. However, "paleography is a last resort for dating" and, "for book hands, a period of 50 years is the least acceptable spread of time" with it being suggested that "the 'rule of thumb' should probably be to avoid dating a hand more precisely than a range of at least seventy or eighty years". In a 2005 e-mail addendum to his 1996 "The Paleographical Dating of P-46" paper, Bruce W. Griffin stated "Until more rigorous methodologies are developed, it is difficult to construct a 95% confidence interval for [New Testament] manuscripts without allowing a century for an assigned date." William Schniedewind went even further in the abstract to his 2005 paper "Problems of Paleographic Dating of Inscriptions" and stated: "The so-called science of paleography often relies on circular reasoning because there is insufficient data to draw precise conclusion about dating. Scholars also tend to oversimplify diachronic development, assuming models of simplicity rather than complexity".Ancient Near East
Aramaic palaeography
The Aramaic language was the international trade language of the Ancient Middle East, originating in what is modern-day Syria, between 1000 and 600 BC. It spread from the Mediterranean coast to the borders of India, becoming extremely popular and being adopted by many people, both with or without any previous writing system. The Aramaic script was written in a consonantal form with a direction from right to left. The Aramaic alphabet, a modified form of Phoenician, was the ancestor of the modern Arabic and Hebrew scripts, as well as the Brahmi script, the parent writing system of most modern abugidas in India, Southeast Asia, Tibet, and Mongolia. Initially, the Aramaic script did not differ from the Phoenician, but then the Aramaeans simplified some of the letters, thickened and rounded their lines: a specific feature of its letters is the distinction between and. One innovation in Aramaic is the matres lectionis system to indicate certain vowels. Early Phoenician-derived scripts did not have letters for vowels, and so most texts recorded just consonants. Most likely as a consequence of phonetic changes in North Semitic languages, the Aramaeans reused certain letters in the alphabet to represent long vowels. The letter aleph was employed to write /ā/, he for /ō/, yod for /ī/, and vav for /ū/.Aramaic writing and language supplanted Babylonian cuneiform and Akkadian language, even in their homeland in Mesopotamia. The wide diffusion of Aramaic letters led to its writing being used not only in monumental inscriptions, but also on papyrus and potsherds. Aramaic papyri have been found in large numbers in Egypt, especially at Elephantine—among them are official and private documents of the Jewish military settlement in 5 BC. In the Aramaic papyri and potsherds, words are separated usually by a small gap, as in modern writing. At the turn of the 3rd to 2nd centuries BC, the heretofore uniform Aramaic letters developed new forms, as a result of dialectal and political fragmentation in several subgroups. The most important of these is the so-called square Hebrew block script, followed by Palmyrene, Nabataean, and the much later Syriac script.
Aramaic is usually divided into three main parts:
- Old Aramaic
- Middle Aramaic, and
- Modern Aramaic of the present day.
Old Aramaic appeared in the 11th century BC as the official language of the first Aramaean states. The oldest witnesses to it are inscriptions from northern Syria of the 10th to 8th centuries BC, especially extensive state treaties and royal inscriptions. The early Old Ancient should be classified as "Ancient Aramaic" and consists of two clearly distinguished and standardised written languages, the Early Ancient Aramaic and the Late Ancient Aramaic. Aramaic was influenced at first principally by Akkadian, then from the 5th century BC by Persian and from the 3rd century BC onwards by Greek, as well as by Hebrew, especially in Palestine. As Aramaic evolved into the imperial language of the Neo-Assyrian Empire, the script used to write it underwent a change into something more cursive. The best examples of this script come from documents written on papyrus from Egypt. About 500 BC, Darius I made the Aramaic used by the imperial administration into the official language of the western half of the Achaemenid Empire. This so-called "Imperial Aramaic" is based on an otherwise unknown written form of Ancient Aramaic from Babylonia. In orthography, Imperial Aramaic preserves historical forms—alphabet, orthography, morphology, pronunciation, vocabulary, syntax and style are highly standardised. Only the formularies of the private documents and the Proverbs of Ahiqar have maintained an older tradition of sentence structure and style. Imperial Aramaic immediately replaced Ancient Aramaic as a written language and, with slight modifications, it remained the official, commercial and literary language of the Near East until gradually, beginning with the fall of the Achaemenids in 331 BC and ending in the 4th century AD, it was replaced by Greek, Persian, the eastern and western dialects of Aramaic and Arabic, though not without leaving its traces in the written form of most of these. In its original Achaemenid form, Imperial Aramaic is found in texts of the 5th to 3rd centuries BC. These come mostly from Egypt and especially from the Jewish military colony of Elephantine, which existed at least from 530 to 399 BC.