Greek handwriting

Origins to the 8th century ce

The oldest Greek writing, syllabic signs scratched with a stylus on sun-dried clay, is that of the Linear B tablets found in Knossos, Pylos, and Mycenae (1400–1200 bce). Alphabetic writing, in use before the end of the 8th century bce, is first found in a scratched inscription on a jug awarded as a prize in Athens. The consensus is that the Homeric poems were written down not later than this time; certainly from the time of the first known lyric poet of ancient Greece, Archilochus (7th century bce), individuals committed their works to writing. But the vehicles of literary writing have perished. Scratchings on pottery or metal and then texts deliberately cut in bronze or marble or painted on vases are, until about 350 bce, the only immediate evidence for the way the Greeks wrote, and their study is normally treated as the province of epigraphy.

A find in 1962 at Dervéni (Dhervénion), in Macedonia, of a carbonized roll of papyrus (Archaeological Museum, Thessaloníki, Greece) offers the oldest example of Greek handwriting and the only one preserved in the Greek peninsula (end of the 4th century bce). From then until the 4th century ce, there are countless texts, especially on papyrus. Found in Egypt and, with a few exceptions, written there, these texts have given a firm foundation for knowledge about the handwriting of the era. From outside Egypt there is a Greek library buried in Herculaneum, 79 ce; and papyri and parchments from Owrāmān, Kurdistan, 1st century bce; from Dura-Europus on the Euphrates, 3rd century bce to 3rd century ce; from Nessana, 6th century ce; and from the Dead Sea area (Qumrān, 1st centuries bce and ce; Murabbaʿat and ʿEn Gedi, 2nd century ce). A number of original vellum manuscripts have survived from the 4th century ce onward, preserved in libraries such as at the monastery of Saint Catherine at Mount Sinai. These materials of diverse origin suggest that the forms and shape of Greek handwriting were remarkably constant throughout the Greek world, wherever writing was practiced and whatever material was used; within this consistent framework it is occasionally possible to distinguish local variations (as between the contract hands of 1st-century-ce Dura and of Egypt).

The principal vehicles for writing were wax tablets incised with a stylus or a prepared surface of skin, such as leather and vellum, or of papyrus written on with a pen. Other surfaces—e.g., broken pieces of pottery, lead, wood, and even cloth—were also used. To some extent the forms of letters were affected by the resistance of the material to the writing instrument. It is likely that the use as a pen of a hard reed, split at the tip and cut into a nib (which had to be constantly sharpened), is an invention of the Greeks. Egyptian scribes used a soft reed, with which ink was brushed on.

Until about 300 ce, ink was usually made of a fine carbon powder such as lampblack, mixed with gum arabic and water, which even today retains its black lustre. Carbon inks were then replaced by iron-gall inks made from a mixture of tannic acid (made from oak galls soaked in water), ferrous sulphate, and gum arabic. There seem to have been several reasons for the changeover to iron-gall inks: they were easier and more economical to make, they could be made in quantity, and they did not flake off the surface of vellum (which was becoming the preferred writing surface of the time) as carbon inks did. Iron-gall ink does have certain drawbacks: it has a tendency to fade and oxidize over time, turning from a dark grayish-black when freshly written to a characteristic brown (which today is often associated with early manuscripts), and it sometimes has a corrosive effect on vellum, causing the writing from one side of a page to bleed through to the other. On paper, some iron-gall inks have actually eaten through the writing surface. Erasures, which could be made on wax with the blunt end of a stylus and on papyrus by wiping with a wet sponge, were more difficult on vellum written with iron-gall inks. Corrections were made by scraping the faulty text off with the edge of a knife, rubbing the surface with an abrasive, and then burnishing it to make it smooth enough to receive ink again. Sometimes when vellum was not easily available or was relatively expensive, an outdated text might be erased and written over. Since the ink actually dyes the vellum, traces of the original text often remain and appear faintly under newly written text. Such doubly written manuscripts are called palimpsests.

Papyrus was normally sold in rolls (volumina) made up of 20 to 50 or more sheets. These sheets were made by laying freshly cut strips from the papyrus plant (Cyperus papyrus or Papyrus antiquorum) side by side in one direction with another layer of strips crossing them at right angles. Sometimes a third layer was added parallel to the first. This “sandwich” was then moistened with water and pressed together until dry, forming a sheet. The layer containing the horizontal fibres was placed on the inside of the roll, on which side (the recto) each attached sheet overlapped the next when the roll was held horizontally. Leather, similarly, was used for making rolls (e.g., the Dead Sea Scrolls). With the advent of the Christian Era, the custom of folding sheets of papyrus or vellum down the middle and stitching the gatherings of two or four sheets along this fold into a cover gave rise to a book of modern form—the codex (a word that originally referred to a set of wax tablets coupled with a leather thong).

The early Christians deliberately chose the commercial vellum notebook (membranae) in which to circulate the Christian Gospels in preference to the traditional Jewish roll. Almost without exception the earliest texts of the New Testament are in codex form, even though written on papyrus, which is less able than vellum to bear repeated bending. In the 2nd century ce, pagan works of literature also appeared in this format. By the 4th century it became the predominant form, and codices with handsome margins, of dazzling white vellum, and of sufficient size to contain the whole Bible (e.g., the Codex Sinaiticus) were being produced.

The fundamental distinction in types of handwriting is that between book hands and documentary hands. The former, used especially for the copying of literature, aimed at clarity, regularity, and impersonality and often made an effect of beauty by their deliberate stylization. Usually they were the work of professionals. Outstanding calligraphy is not common among papyrus finds, perhaps because they are mainly provincial work. But the British Museum Bacchylides (discussed further under “The Roman period,” see below) or the Bodleian Library Homer can stand comparison with any later vellum manuscript from outside Egypt. Book texts are written in separately made capitals (often called uncials, but in Greek paleography, except for the time-hallowed class of biblical uncials, the term is better avoided) in columns of writing, with ample spaces between columns and good margins at head and foot. Punctuation (usually by high dot, a point next to the top of the last letter of a section) is minimal or completely absent; accents are inserted only in difficult poetic texts or as practice by children; and letters are not grouped into separate words.

Documentary hands show a considerable range: stylized official “chancery” hands, the workaday writing of government clerks or of the street scribes who drew up wills or wrote letters to order, the idiosyncratic or nearly illiterate writing of private individuals. The scribe’s aim was to write quickly, lifting the pen very little and consequently often combining several letters in a continuous stroke (a ligature); from the running action of the pen, this writing is often termed cursive. Scribes also made frequent use of abbreviations. When the scribe was skillful in reconciling clarity and speed, such writing may have much character, even beauty; but it often degenerates into a formless, sometimes indecipherable, scrawl.

Both types of hand, in spite of the different styles they assume at different periods, show remarkable uniformity and continuity in the shapes of letters. Behind both lies an unvarying basic alphabetic form taught in the schools. The more skillful a book-hand scribe was, the harder it is to date the scribe’s work. Documents in the ancient world carried a precise date; books never did. To assign dates to the latter, paleographers take account of their content, the archaeological context of their discovery, and technical points of book construction (e.g., quires, rulings) or modes of abbreviation. But they find of great service: (1) a stylistic comparison with those dated documentary hands that show resemblances to book hands, and (2) those cases where a roll was reused—i.e., has a literary text on its recto and a dated document on its verso (in which case there is an estimate for the literary text, generally no more than 50 years before the date of the verso) or has a dated document on the recto and a book hand on the verso (which gives a possible date for the literary text of not more than 25 years after the document). The number of illustrated manuscripts of this period is small; their quality is varied; and there is no agreement among specialists about the sources from which illustrations were taken.

Any historical sketch is bound to be a simplification. At certain epochs several different styles of handwriting existed simultaneously, so that there is no straight line of development. Moreover, owing to the arbitrariness of finds, generalizations are based mainly on provincial work; and, even in that, examples of book hand belonging to the 2nd century bce and the 5th century ce are still relatively rare.

Ptolemaic period

In the roll from Dervéni, Macedonia, dated on archaeological grounds to the 4th century bce, lines and letters are well spaced and the letters carefully made in an epigraphic, or inscription, style, especially the square E, four-barred Σ, and arched Ω; the whole layout gives the effect of an inscription. In the Timotheus roll in Berlin (dated 350–330 bce) or in the curse of Artemisia in Vienna (4th century bce), the writing is cruder, and ω is in transition to what is afterward its invariable written form. Similar features can be seen in the earliest precisely dated document, a marriage contract of 311 bce. It has been argued that a documentary hand of cursive type had not yet been developed and that it was a creation of the Alexandrian library. Plato, however (Laws 810), speaks of Athenian writing whose aim was speed; later on, when a cursive hand had certainly been developed, documentary scribes often used separate capitals.

Characteristic of its period is the contrast of size between the long letters (e.g., ) and narrow letters . And characteristic forms are to be seen in the letters (with its long crossbar, often with initial stroke); (upsilon) with long shallow bowl; or in three or four strokes; in three strokes; (alpha) raised off the line and its last vertical not finished; small round (with internal dot or tiny stroke); and broad epigraphic and . In documentary cursive hands of this period, letters seem to hang from an upper line: (alpha) often turns into a mere wedge, and (nu) lifts its second vertical above the line.

In the 2nd century bce the contrast between long letters and narrow letters disappears, the writing grows rounder, and letters are often linked by ligatures at the top of their last vertical (e.g., ). In a loan contract of 99 bce (The John Rylands University Library of Manchester), in which capitals and cursive are mixed, this irregular roundness is clearly seen. Note the ε with detached crossbar and the exaggerated serifs which have been elevated by some paleographers into a criterion of a special style, though in fact they are always apt to occur.

Roman period

Half a century or so passed after 30 bce before a definitely Roman manner was established. In documentary hands the tendency to roundness continued. Documentary cursive may be influenced in various ways (e.g., by Latin forms such as those of e and d, or by the exaggeration of verticals practiced by chancery scribes); the script may lean over in either direction, or it may be reduced to tiny proportions. In the 2nd century the cursive hand tended to be round and sprawling, in the 3rd century to become more angular, and in the 4th century to become characterless and to combine letters into ligatures that distorted the forms of the letters concerned. The book hand of a manuscript of Plato’s Phaedo (c. 100 ce; Egypt Exploration Society, London) shares the informality of cursive but regularizes the letter forms. Written on a larger scale and with more formality, this round hand can be very beautiful. In an example found at Hawara (2nd century ce), almost every letter (even ρ, τ, ι) would go into an identical square; only ϕ and ψ cross it above and below, μ, ω, and π horizontally.

If this writing is made to lean to the right and to revive the 3rd-century-bce distinction between narrow and broad letters, it takes on the aspect of the “severe” style of the Bacchylides roll in the British Museum (2nd century ce). If, however, the scribe makes the verticals or obliques thicker and his horizontals thinner, the hand is called biblical uncial, so named because this type is used in the three great early vellum codices of the Bible: Codex Vaticanus and Codex Sinaiticus of the 4th century and Codex Alexandrinus of the 5th century. It is now certain that this style goes back to the 2nd century ce. Heavy decoration is also a feature of the Coptic style, of which there are examples as early as the 2nd century ce. This hand may be thought of as constituting a special case of biblical uncial.