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Encyclopedia Britannica - Main :: EUD-FAT |
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EVTIVW 1LEFM1 TPEla Ka--co ra 7rpos TIpI KaXXtep--al T1)V beau rou 7r') In the long range covered by the Greek papyri the formation of individual letters necessarily varied under different influences; but in not a few instances the original
capital letter and a cursive shape somewhat resembling a small n, being in fact an imperfectly written B in which the bows are slurred. This form lasted through the Ptolemaic period. Then arose the natural tendency to reverse the strokes and to form the letter on the principle of n; but still the capital letter also continued in use, so that through the Roman and Byzantine periods the u-shape and the B-shape run on side by side. Analogously the letter kappa, formed on somewhat the same lines as the beta, runs a similar course in developing a cursive u-shaped form by the side of the primitive capital. Delta remained fairly true to its primitive form until the Byzantine period, when the elongation of the head into a flourish led on to the minuscule letter which is familiar to us in the medieval and modern alphabet. Epsilon, the most frequently recurring letter in Greek texts, departs less from its original
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dtioe O-Evaneit. 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
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
. AIN-A- r4U r1AI7E'NALN'E'AA T'F1`~~'~'-1`~NEve. 1`tllaMA a=oYt MPYPat'ACAIa, r6 NaE't4TA&E'ahr1i AAM F'f E'AA AAArf rat' rN 7 TE me NT ET ?As (a fbaro SE KUalvw--v OElplac re vaes EXX-- re r7aav vtwv 7ro?Ua--a%ouo-c,u 7.c 7rvpos Se ae$a--S o vo ra SE aAyri--a a Es EXAaSa r7yav--yvvm 71Ev rrpao) 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 w-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 311310 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 mostancient 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: tfw'er-c E 1L rcAsrfl ~T N Arr A), vP-p pi rJ sc M MI-t AnI A,-h i ?tp1tc A'I'A~-rHNIAEIcEA1"iMrJc'A Af rtcAl VA I A. 0rolsFeeAir-eApAlc AF'Y'fc AtI-ciMrEyrI44i'M{-c4c,iI4A i'1 (oEwv 7raOov0a de EK TOVTW/L avaKwpCV ovo 77 avayK77 xf n7v[O1 ac avrrp' S as eavrrgv au). XEyeCBac Kai aOpoq'EVBac 7rapaKe Xev6o[O]ac 7nareuaV Se tc1)SEYL aX7Wl) 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 and 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
Passing to the 1st century B.C., the papyri which have been recovered from the ashes of Herculaneum come into account. 562 Many of them, the texts of which are of a philosophical nature, are written in literary hands, and are conjectured to have possibly formed part of the library of their author, the philosopher Philodemus; they are therefore placed about the middle of the century. To the same time are assigned the remains of a roll containing the oration of Hypereides against Philippides and the third Epistle of Demosthenes (Brit. Mus. papp. cxxxiii., exxxiv.). But the most important addition to the period is the handsomely written papyrus containing the poems of Bacchylides (fig. 8), which retains in the forms of the letters much of the character of the Ptolemaic style, although for other reasons it can hardly be placed earlier than about the middle of the century: >C t.rp-i-t'r 1 N H ri r ocPrr;'R 1nh~+Kb-ctA-4r -r t- p-as.TeTl+4-4 0IN7r 1'1,4 f"1Ap"~ I'o-S t E~ArD~1114 O-Yry.5.e-ra1. Iicarl gore 7rD-t'+oi1-+1140Tf1 t Wetpas avretvwv 7rpos avyas 17rirWKEOS aEXLov TEKVa Svuravoto Avo-Oas 7rap4povos E ayayEty BU OW SE TOL ELKOOL OOUS of vyas 4 OLPLKOTpLXaS) With the latter half of the 1st century B.C. we quit the Ptolemaic period and pass to the consideration of the literary papyri of the Roman period; and it is especially in this latter period that our extended knowledge, acquired from recent
Just on the threshold of the Roman period, near the end of the 1st century B.C., stands a fragmentary papyrus of the last two books of the Iliad, now in the British Museum (pap. cxxviii.), which is of sufficient extent to be noted. Then, emerging on the Christian era, we come upon a fine surviving specimen of literary writing, which we have satisfactory reason for placing near the beginning of the 1st century. It is a fragment of the third book of the Odyssey (fig. 9), the writing of which closely resembles that of an official document (Brit. Mus. pap. cccliv.) which happens to be written in a formal literary hand, and which from internal evidence can be dated within a few years of the close of theist century B.C. There can be no hesitation, there-fore, in grouping the Odyssey with that document. The contrast between the round Roman style and the stiff and firm Ptolemaic hands is here well shown in the facsimiles from this papyrus (fig. 9) and the Phaedo and Bacchylides: TT A t A,000k.(O1Arej11Xt'AtA) cuCe#J.6 O 12s sP.1TOY- wxIueN \4 ;tN berYNt-I-Mill n ctTo N K (,I 0+Are01Ae~o1clal oree(P. e A N A. AP .S.Tri x e bJC 0 CTT e P I K Ai\ TT APLPdN ecro?f ncrletc f C e C()Pn1LANeB l~Ily eKAl I-1N Flo. g.The Odyssey, beginning of 1st century..[GREEK PAPYRI (haloes Eot aye T7fXeaxwt S evaO u apar ayovres watt
In a similar style of writing are two fragments of Hesiodic poems recently published, with facsimiles, in the Silzungsberichte (1900, p. 839) of the Berlin Academy. The earliest of the two, now at Strassburg, may be assigned to the first half of the 1st century; the other, at Berlin, appears to be of the 2nd century. At this point two MSS. come into the series, in regard to which there is now held to be reason for revising views formerly entertained. The papyrus known as the Harris Homer (Brit. Mus. papa cvii.), containing portions of the eighteenth book of the Iliad, which was formerly placed in the 1st century B.C., it is thought should be now brought down to a later date, and should be rather assigned to the 1st century of the Christian era. The great papyrus, too, of Hypereides, containing his orations against Demosthenes and for Lycophron and Euxenippus, which has been commonly placed also, in the 1st century B.C., and by some even earlier, is now adjudged to belong to the latter part of the 1st century A.D. Within the 1st century also is placed a papyrus of great literary interest
With regard to the later literary works on papyrus that have been recovered, the period which they occupy is somewhat uncertain. The following are, however, placed in the 3rd century, during which a sloping literary hand seems to have been developed, curiously anticipating a similar change which took place in the course of development of the uncial writing of the vellum MSS., the upright hand of the 4th to 6th centuries being followed by a sloping hand in the 7th and 8th centuries: a MS., now in the British Museum, of portions of bks. ii.-iv. of the Iliad, written on eighteen leaves of papyrus, put together in book-form, but inscribed on only one side; on the verso of some of the leaves is a short grammatical treatise attributed to Tryphon: portion of Iliad v., among the Oxyrhynchus papyri (No. ccxxiii.): a fragment of Plato's Laws (Ox. pap. xxiii.): a papyrus of Isocrates, in Nicodem, now at Marseilles: a fragment of Ezekiel, in book-form, in the Bodleian Library: a fragment of the " Shepherd " of Hermas at Berlin: and a fragment of Julius Africanus, the Hellenica of Theopompus or Cratippus, and the Symposium of Plato, all found at Oxyrhynchus. Of the 3rd century also are some fragments which are palaeographically of interest
With the 3rd century the literary hand on papyrus appears to lose most of its importance. We are within measurable distance of the age of vellum, and of the formal uncial writing of the vellum MSS. which is found in some existing examples of the 4th century and in more abundant numbers of the 5th century. We have now to see how the connexion can be established between the literary handwriting of the papyri and the firmer and heavier literary uncial writing of the vellum codices. The literary hands on papyrus which have been reviewed above are distinctly of the style inscribed with a light touch most suitable to the comparatively frail material of papyrus. In the Bankes Homer, however, one may detect some indication of the fullness that characterizes the vellum uncial writing. But it now appears that a larger and rounder hand was also employed on papyrus at least as early as the 1st century. In proof of this we are able to cite a non-literary document (fig. 1o) bearing an actual date, which happens to be written in characters that, exclusive of certain less formally-made letters, are of a large uncial literary type. This writing, though not actually of the finished style familiar to us in the early vellum MSS., yet resembles it so generally that it may be assumed, almost as a certainty, that there was in the 1st century a full literary uncial hand formed on this pattern, which was the direct ancestor of the vellum uncial. The tendency to employ at this period a calligraphic style, as seen in the fragments: of the Odyssey and one of the Hesiodic poems mentioned above, supports this assumption. The document now referred to is a deed of sale written in the seventh year of Domitian, A.D. 88 (Brit. Mus. pap. cxli.). The letters still retaining a, cursive element are alpha, upsilon, and in some instances epsilon.End of Article: EVTIVW 1LEFM1 If you wish, you can link directly to this article.
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