Textual Archaeology

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Reading and writing were skill sets few Greeks had. Even as late as in the Roman Period, one would not read a text silently as we do. Rather, someone trained in reading the alphabet would usually read a text aloud for others. In turn, an author would dictate a text to a scribe, who would write down what the author said. Consider the letters of the apostle Paul, who died ca. 64 CE.

Paul concluded three of his letters with the formulaic phrase, “greetings with my hand, of Paul” (ὁ ἀσπασμὸς τῆι ἐμῆι χειρὶ Παύλου, 1 Co 16:21,Col 4:18, and 2 Th 3:17). He added at the end of 2 Thessalonians, “thus I write” (οὕτως γράφω, 3:18). These statements probably mean that he signed off on the letters he had dictated, not that he actually wrote the letters himself by hand.

At Galatians 6:11 Paul says, “see what large letters I wrote to you in my own hand” (ἴδετε πηλίκοις ὑμῖν γράμμασιν ἔγραψα τῆι ἐμῆι χειρί). What Paul meant is open to some interpretation. It is often taken to mean that he expressed his anger by writing particularly large letters. Or perhaps he was so angry that he chose to finish his letter by writing with his own hand, but he was not a trained scribe and therefore wrote large unskilled letters like those at the top of this page, written between 1250 and 1300 CE:

Minuscules were developed in the 9th and 10th centuries CE. Until then, texts were written only in capital letters and, like hashtags, without breaks between words. Breathing marks were introduced in the Hellenistic Period, and accents in the Roman Period. They are called diacritics, or “distinguishing marks,” because they were intended to help people interpret printed words correctly. English has relatively few good examples that illustrate the importance of marks like this, but consider “dog’s,” where the apostrophe means that the word is genitive singular (“of a dog”) instead of plural “dogs.”

The ability to read majuscules is necessary for reading original texts like papyri, graffiti, and inscriptions. Although hand styles changed over time and sometimes differed regionally, there are relatively few significant variants in the way these letters were written.

This lesson introduces you to a range of original hand styles from the Archaic Period to the late Byzantine Period. You are not expected to translate the Greek in this lesson—at least not yet. Indeed, at least two of the early inscriptions we will look at use the archaic Greek alphabet but are not the Greek language. The point is to see how the Greek alphabet developed across the Greek world and in contiguous non-Greek cultures. So familiarize yourself with the different hand styles and see what words you can recognize in the images below. For practice, try rewriting the texts in these images using standard lowercase Greek letters.

The Archaic Greek Alphabet

Here is a selection of some common Archaic Greek letterforms from long before printing presses helped standardized the way letters were written:

The Etruscans learned a particular version of this archaic alphabet from the Greeks (specifically, Euboean Greeks on the island of Pithekoussai, now Ischia, in the Bay of Naples, Italy) and passed it on to the Romans. It is therefore an early form also of the alphabet we use for English, albeit after more than 2,700 years of stylization. Some commentary is needed in order to read this script.

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Transliteration:
          φανης με ανεθηκε τωπολλων[ . . . ]λησωι ο γλαυϙο

Translation:
          Phanes, the (son) of Glaukos, dedicated me to the Milesian Apollo

In this inscription you can see the use of κ before a front vowel (here ε) and ϙ before a back vowel (here ο).

Codex Sinaïticus folio 247

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