ConceptsPalaeography
Concept · manuscript studies · in 8 mysteries
Palaeography
Dating and placing a manuscript by the forms of its letters and the habits of its scribes.
Handwriting changes with time and place, so the shapes of letters, abbreviations and layout can date a document to within a generation and put it in a region, when there is enough comparable material. Used alongside radiocarbon dating for the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Voynich Manuscript; it is also what tells how many hands wrote a text.
Where it comes up
Proto-Sinaitic and Wadi el-Hol: the first alphabet
Hamilton's palaeography allows use of the script at Serabit over several centuries, which would make a single date for the corpus wrong.
Q: How many letters did the earliest alphabet have, and which Egyptian signs are their prototypes?Q: When were the Serabit el-Khadim inscriptions written: in the Middle Kingdom, about 1850 BC, or in the New Kingdom?Hamilton's palaeography allows use of the script at Serabit over several centuries, which would make a single date for…
Linear A
The fraction signs, long partly obscure, were given a consistent set of values in 2021 by Corazza, Ferrara, Montecchi, Tamburini and Valério, who combined palaeography with a computational search for value assignments…
Cite it
Mysteries Department. (2026). Palaeography [Concept CPT0DECW05E35K0]. https://mysteriesdept.com/r/CPT0DECW05E35K0
@misc{mysteriesdept_cpt0decw05e35k0,
title = {Palaeography},
author = {{Mysteries Department}},
year = {2026},
note = {Concept, catalog key CPT0DECW05E35K0},
url = {https://mysteriesdept.com/r/CPT0DECW05E35K0}
}