fixing the date of documents within a fixed limit of time. In
the Ptolemaic period the letter, always of the C-form, is upright,
with a flattened horizontal head; in the Roman period a tendency
sets in to curve the head, and in the course of the 1st century,
by the side of the old stiffer form of the letter, another more
cursive one appears, in which the head is drawn down more
and more in a curve, .jpg){kind=small}
. This form is in common use from
the latter part of the 1st century to the beginning of the 3rd
century. The cursive form of tau, in which the horizontal
stroke is kept to the left of the vertical limb, without crossing
it, is one of the early shapes of the letter. The formation of
the letter Xi in three distinct horizontal strokes is characteristic
of the Ptolemaic period, as distinguished from the later type
of letter in which the bars are more or less connected. Lastly,
the early Ptolemaic form of the ω-shaped omega is noticeable
from having its second curve undeveloped, the letter having the
appearance of being clipped.
Literary Hands.—Literary papyri written in book-hands, distinct from the cursive writing which has been under consideration (and in which literary works were also occasionally written), may be divided into two classes: those which were produced by skilled scribes, and therefore presumably for the market, and those which were written less elegantly, but still in a literary hand, and were probably copied by or for scholars for their own use.
Standing at the head of all, and holding that rank as the only literary papyrus of any extent which may be placed in the 4th century B.C., is the famous lyrical work of Timotheus of Miletus, entitled the Persae, which has already been referred to and of which a section of a few lines is here reproduced:—
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| Fig. 6.—The Persae of Timotheus, late 4th century B.C. | ||||||||||||||
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The hand, as will be seen, is rather heavy and irregular, but written with facility and strength, and, though the papyrus, perhaps, is not to be classed among the calligraphic productions for the book market, it must rank as a well-written example of the literary script of the time. Capital forms of letters which afterwards assumed the rounded shapes known as uncial are here conspicuous. The exactly formed alpha, the square epsilon with projecting head-stroke, the irregular sigma, the small theta and omikron are to be remarked. Indeed, the only letter which departs essentially from the lapidary character of the alphabet is the omega, here a half-cursive form but still retaining the principle of the structure of the old horse-shoe letter and quite distinct from the ω-shape which was soon to be developed. Of this type of writing are also the two non-literary documents already mentioned above, viz. the “Curse of Artemisia” at Vienna, and the marriage contract of the year 311-310 B.C., found at Elephantine. In the latter the sigma appears in the rounded uncial form.
By rare good fortune important literary fragments were recovered in the Gurob collection, which yielded the most ancient dated cursive documents of the 3rd century B.C., so that, almost from the beginning, we start with coeval specimens of both the cursive and of the book-hand, and we are in a position to compare the two styles on equal terms, and thus approximately to date the literary papyri. Palaeographically, this is a matter of the first importance; for while cursive documents, from their nature, in most instances bear actual dates, the periods of literary examples have chiefly to be decided by comparison, and often by conjecture.
The literary fragments from Gurob fall into the two groups just indicated, MSS. written for sale and scholars' copies. Of the former are some considerable portions of two works, the Phaedo of Plato and the lost Antiope of Euripides. Both are written in carefully formed characters of a small type, but of the two the Phaedo is the better executed. As the cursive fragments among which they were found date back to before the middle of the 3rd century B.C., it is reasonable to place these literary remains also about the same period. Their survival is a particularly interesting fact in the history of Greek palaeography, for in them we have specimens of literary rolls which may be fairly assumed to differ very little in appearance from the manuscripts contemporary with the great classical authors of Greece. Indeed, the Phaedo was probably written within a hundred years of the death of the author.
In the facsimile (fig. 7) of a few lines from this papyrus here placed before the reader, the characteristics of the Ptolemaic cursive hand are also to some extent to be observed in the formal book-hand:—
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| Fig. 7.—The Phaedo of Plato, 3rd century B.C. | ||||||||||
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The general breadth of the square letters, the smallness of the letters composed of circles and loops, and the particular formation of such letters as pi and the clipped omega, are repeated. But the approach also of many of the letters to the lapidary capital forms, like those in the papyrus of Timotheus, is to be remarked, such as the precisely shaped alpha, and the epsilon in many instances made square with a long head-stroke. This mixture of forms seems to indicate an advance in the development of the book-hand of the 3rd century B.C., as contrasted with the archaic style of the older Timotheus.
Of the 2nd century B.C. there are extant only two papyri of literary works written in the formal book-hand, and both are now preserved in the Louvre. The one, a dialectical treatise containing quotations from classical authors, has long been known. The other is the oration of Hypereides against Athenogenes, which is an acquisition of comparatively recent date. The dialectical treatise must belong to the first half of the century, as there is on the verso side of the papyrus writing subsequently added in the year 160 B.C. The period of the Hypereides cannot be so closely defined; but the existence on the verso of later demotic writing, said to be of the Ptolemaic time, affords a limit, and the MS. has been accordingly placed in the second half of the century. While the writing of the earlier papyrus is of a light and rather sloping character, that of the Hypereides is firm and square and upright.
Passing to the 1st century B.C., the papyri which have been recovered from the ashes of Herculaneum come into account.
