These facts may be due to accident, the few early papyri happening to represent an archaic style which had survived along with a more advanced one; but it is likely that there was a rapid development at this period, due partly to the opening of Egypt, with its supplies of papyri, and still more to the estab lishment of the great Alexandrian library, which systematically copied literary and scientific works, and to the multifarious activities of Hellenistic bureaucracy. Henceforward the two types of script were sufficiently distinct (though each influenced the other) to require separate treatment. Some literary papyri, like the roll containing Aristotle's Constitution of Athens, were written in cursive hands, and, conversely, the book-hand was occasionally used for documents. Since the scribes did not date literary rolls such papyri are useful in tracing the development of the book-hand.
The documents of the mid 3rd century B.C. show a great variety of cursive hands. We have none from the chancelleries of the Hellenistic monarchs, but some letters, notably those of Apollonius, the finance minister of Ptolemy II., to his agent, Zeno, and those of the Palestinian sheikh, Toubias, are in a type of script which cannot be very unlike the Chancery hand of the time, and show the Ptolemaic cursive at its best. These hands have a noble spaciousness and strength, and though the individ ual letters are by no means uniform in size there is a real unity of style, the general impression being one of breadth and upright ness. H, with the cross-stroke high, H, M, with the middle strokes reduced to a very shallow curve, sometimes approaching a horizontal line, T, and T, with its cross-bar extending much further to the left than to the right of the up-stroke, and N, whose last stroke is prolonged upwards above the line, often curving backwards, are all broad; e, c, 0, and 0, which some times takes the form of two almost perpendicular strokes joined only at the top, are usually small; w is rather flat, its second loop reduced to a practically straight line. Partly by the broad flat tops of the larger letters, partly by the insertion of a stroke connecting those (like H, T) which are not naturally adapted to linking, the scribes produced the effect of a horizon tal line along the top of the writing, from which the letters seem to hang. This feature is indeed a general characteristic of the more formal Ptolemaic script, but it is specially marked in the 3rd century B.C.
Besides these hands of Chancery type, there are numerous less elaborate examples of cursive, varying according to the writer's skill and degree of education, and many of them strik ingly easy and handsome. In some cursiveness is carried very
far, the linking of letters reaching the point of illegibility, and the characters sloping to the right. A is reduced to a mere acute angle (L ), T has the cross-stroke only on the left, w becomes an almost straight line, H acquires a shape somewhat like h, and the last stroke of N is extended far upwards and at times flat tened out till it is little more than a diagonal stroke to the right. The attempt to secure a horizontal line along the top is here abandoned. This style was not due to inexpertness, but to the desire for speed, being used specially in accounts and drafts, and was generally the work of practised writers. How well established the cursive hand had now become is shown by some wax tablets of this period in University college, London (Ancient Egypt, 1927, part 3), the writing on which, despite the difference of material, closely resembles the hands of papyri.
Documents of the late 3rd and early 2nd centuries B.C. show, perhaps partly by the accident of survival (we have nothing analogous to the Apollonius letters), a loss of breadth and spaciousness. In the more formal types the letters stand rather stiffly upright, often without the linking strokes, and are more uniform in size; in the more cursive they are apt to be packed closely together. These features are more marked in the hands of the 2nd century. The less cursive often show an approxima tion to the book-hand, the letters growing rounder and less angular than in the 3rd century; in the more cursive linking was carried further, both by the insertion of coupling strokes and by the writing of several letters continuously without raising the pen, so that before the end of the century an almost current hand was evolved. A characteristic letter, which survived into the early Roman period, is T, with its cross-stroke made in two portions (T). In the ist century the hand tended, so far as can be inferred from the surviving examples, to disintegrate; we can recognize the signs which portend a change of style, irregu larity, want of direction, and the loss of the feeling for style. A fortunate accident has preserved two Greek parchments written in Parthia, one dated 88 B.c., in a practically unligatured hand, the other, 22/21 B.C., in a very cursive script of Ptolemaic type; and though each has un-Egyptian features the general char acter indicates a uniformity of style in the Hellenistic world.