PALEOGRAPHY (Gr. palaios, old, and graphg, writing), the science of ancient writ ings. It comprehends not merely the art of reading them, but such a critical know ledge of all their circumstances as will serve to determine their age, if they happen to be undated, and their genuineness, in the absence of any formal authentication. .For these purposes, the paleographer needs to be acquainted with the various substances, such as bark, leaves, skins, paper, etc., which have been used for writing; with the various manners of writing which have prevailed, and the changes which they have undergone; with the various forms of authenticating writings, such as seals, signets, cachets, signatures, superscriptions, subscriptions, attestations, etc., which have been employed at different times; with the various.phases through which the grammar, vocabulary, and orthography of the language of the writing with which he is dealing, has passed; and with more or less, as the case may be, of the history, laws, institutions, literature, and art of time age and country to which the writing professes to belong.
Paleography may be said to have been founded by the learned French Benedictine, Jean Mabillon, whose .7)e Re Diplomatica, first published in 1681 in 1 vol. fol., reprinted in 1709, and again in 1789, in 2 vols. fol., is still, perhaps, the most masterly work on the subject. Along with the Nouveau Traite de Diplomatigue (Par. 1750-65, 6 vols. 4to) of the Benedictines of St. Maur, and the Elements de Pa Viograplae (Par. 1838, 2 vols. 4to) by M. Natalis de Wailly, it is the great authority for French paleography. English paleography is perhaps less favorably represented in Astle's Origin and Progress of Writing (Loud. 1803) than Scottish paleography in Anderson's and Ruddiman's Diplo mats Scotia (Ellin. 1739). 'Muratori treats of Malian paleography in the third volume of his great work, the Antiquitates Italica; 3fedii YEW • and among later works on the same subject may be mentioned the Diplomatica Pontiiria (Rome, 1841) of Marino Marini. The paleography of Greece is illustrated in the Paleographia Grmea (Par. 1708) of Monlfaucon. Spanish palaeography may be studied in the Bibliotheca de la Poly .graphia Espanola (Mad. 1738) of Don C. Rodriguez. Of works on German paleography, it may be enough to name Eckard's Introductio in Rein Diplomatieam (Jen. 1742), Heu commentarti de Re Diplennatica (Norimb. 1745), Walther's Lexicon Diplomaticum (Gott. 1745), and Kopp's Palaogrophia Critica (Manh. 1817). Hebrew paleography has been elaborated by Gesenius in his Oeschichts der Hebraischen Sprache and Schrift, and other works. The great work on paleography generally—one of the most sumptuous works of its class ever published—is the Pa-liographie Universelle (Par. 1839-45, in 5 vols.
fol.) of M. J. B. Silvestre. See BLACK LETTER, CONTRACTIONS, PALIMPSEST, PAPYRI.
P.iLEOGRAPHY. Modern paleography, since the simultaneous reading of the cuneatic Persian by Rawlinson, Lassen, and Burnouf, in 1836. lies at the bottom of all that exact and laborious criticism which in thirty years enabled the entire history of antiquity to be rewriaen from a linguistic and archaeological point of view. The whole subject turns on an intimate acquaintance with the most minute points in the history of whatever people may be under discussion. Back of all is the real living feeling of that people, as shown in their remains—that is, their inscriptions. Having a series of inscrip tions, granted in an unknown alphabet, the first thing is to verify the copies, an exceed ingly ditlicult operation, since every scholar knows it is impossible to correctly copy writing not understood. Recourse should be had, when reachable, to rubbing with heel-bail, to squeezes in paper or clay, to casts, and to photography. The approximate date of each should then be ascertained, the place of its " find," the date of the find, and a proces-verbal of its exact location, most especially with regard to ground-level or later con structions. No duplicates or comparative collations should be made without these, and they should always be affixed to the original and printed in essays. The Kypriot texts of Moritz Schmitt are almost useless from neglect of these evident rules, which apply with equal force to MSS., where the experienced eye notices a hundred details all tend ing to approximate the date of fabrication. Next comes the correction of the text. No
man can correct an inscription until he understands the grammar of its language, and the grammar of a language is tabulated only from a thousand examples. /Whole gener ation of German scholars battered their brains over the reading of the Malperg glosset, and utter failure resulted even to Grimm from neglect of the ordinary processes of analy sis. The mistakes in a text usually arise from three causes: from dialect; from literal resemblances; from ignorant copyists. There is an enormous mass of pedantic analysis wasted on old English and old German spelling, which, on correction by three known systems-,-Saxon, Norse, and Gothic—shows differences neither abnormal nor arbitrary. A letter, like every creation in form, depends upon three things: the intention, the capacity, and the material. Letters may be successively analyzed as: a, imitative—a picture of the thing thought of; b, conventional—a change in shape for quickness or convenience which recalls little or not at all the original picture; c, symbolical—they become signs, and subject, as puns, metaphors, or similes, to all the turns of human wit or wisdom. It follows that they get a double meaning to one sound, or a double sound to one mean ing; or, new sounds being evolved, new characters are created as, d, explanatory— generally abbreviations of .other characters, or a change, by altering shape or affixing marks; lastly they become, e, traditional—in which ease the original generation is for gotten and the character is arbitrarily connected with a given object. They decrease from signs of words to signs of syllables, to sounds of syllables, to sounds of letters merely, to silent indications of an extinct letter. The actual form of a sign, in one of these successive states, depends on the other original two conditions—the material and the tool in use. If in a hard stone they will be chiseled square; if in a soft, rounded, usually sunk, but occasionally in relief or intaglio-relief. This must have been preceded by scratching on stone, carving in wood, stamping or picking in clay, and painting or stenciling on a surface. Many eastern alphabets are written across the fiber of dry, hard leaves, and are,usually minute and crumpled. Characters in soft clay or wax are legible and rounded. The invention of ink involves a brush, which gives a peculiar flowing look, or a reed pen, or a quill, whether for square or cursive characters, or the abomina tion of the artist—a steel-pen, with all the thick and thin lines of modern script. Stamped letters, for embossing or gilding, naturally led to block type, and they to separate type. The kinds of type in use in ornamental English printing are almost 100, yet each has a history and a reason. In regard to the method of writing, letters may go from left to right, direct; or right to left, reverse; or back and forth, woven; or from top to bottom, in columns. Some few occasionally go above or below another letter, and many abbreviate by contractions or monograms. The letters may occur in a syllabary, or in a vowelic syllabary, where each letter adds for a different vowel a hook or a tail; or they may be alphabetic. with vowels expressed, scriptio plena, or with vowels understood, scriptio defectiva. The letters may be all capitals, uncial, or with small letters (almost always different), minuscles; they may be connected by a bar at top, bottom, or middle, or with each other, cursive. Finally, they may be accented, pointed, or with hooks attached, apices. Words are not always separated, and letters often vary in shape when occurring as initial, medial, or final. The earliest efforts ,at signs are tallies, still found in the Egyptian and Chinese numbers; the origin of the Chinese and several American systems is unknown to us; there are two or three systems known to he self-invented in modern times, and one or two, like the Lepcha or Ron of the Himalayas, and the running runes of the Panes and Celts (oghams), cannot be distinctly connected with a known alphabet.. With these exceptions all systems known are traceable to one common center, but so lately has it been possible to assert this that Lenormant's Spread of the Phenecian 41phabet, first edition in 1868, and the best authority for the central Asiatic paleography, must be rewritten.