Palaeography

Palaeography (UK) or paleography (US) (ultimately from Ancient Greek: παλαιός, palaiós, 'old', and γράφειν, gráphein, 'to write') 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 (such as manuscripts, books, codices, tracts, and monographs) 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(s) 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

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