particular letters in papyri such technical terms as capitals, or uncials, or minuscules, we cannot convey by those terms the exact ideas which we convey when thus describing the individual letters of medieval manuscripts. For the letters of the papyrus period were not cast in finished moulds, while the uncial writing and the minuscule writing of the middle ages were settled literary hands. As will presently be seen, the early medieval uncial hand of the vellum codices developed directly from the literary writing of the papyri; the minuscule book-hand of the 9th century was a new type moulded from the cursive into a fixed literary style.
Necessarily, the non-literary papyri are much more numerous than the literary documents, and present a much greater variety of handwriting, being in fact the result of the daily transactions of ordinary life; and how very widespread was the knowledge of writing among the Greek-speaking population of Egypt is sufficiently testified by the surviving examples, coming as they do from the hands of all sorts and conditions of men. We will first examine these specimens of the current handwriting of the day before passing to the review of the more or less artificial book-writing of the literary papyri.
Non-Literary, Cursive, Hands.—As already stated, the oldest material for the study of Greek cursive writing is chiefly contributed by the papyri discovered at Gurob. Among them are not only the fragments of official registers, which have been mentioned, but also a variety of miscellaneous documents relating to private affairs, and in various hands of the 3rd century and early 2nd century B.C. The non-literary cursive papyri bear actual dates ranging from 270 to 186 B.C. But the discovery (1906) of papyri at Elephantine takes our dated series of cursive documents back to 285-284 B.C.; and in this collection also is the oldest dated Greek document yet found—the marriage contract of the year 311-310 B.C., already mentioned. In this instance, however, the writing is not cursive, but of the literary type.
The leading characteristic of Greek cursive writing of the 3rd century B.C. is its strength and facility. While it may not compare with some later styles in the precise formation of particular letters, yet its freedom and spontaneous air lend it a particular charm and please the eye, very much in the same way that a scholar's practised and unconscious handwriting of a good type is more attractive than the more exact formality of a clerk's hand. The letters generally are widely spread and shallow, and, particularly in the official hands, they are linked together with horizontal connecting strokes to such an extent that the text has almost the appearance of depending from a continuous horizontal line. The extreme shallowness or flatness of many of the letters is very striking. A significant indication of the antiquity of Greek cursive writing is found in connexion with the letter alpha, which is, even at this early period, in one of its forms reduced to a mere angle or wedge.
A few lines from an official order (fig. 1) of the year 250 B.C. will serve to convey an idea of the trained cursive style of this century:—
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| Fig. 1.—Official Order, 250 B.C. | ||||||||||||
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As a contrast to this excellent hand, we give a facsimile of a section from a roughly written letter from a land steward to his employer, of about the same date:—
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| Fig. 2.—Letter of a Land Steward, 3rd century B.C. | ||||||||||||||
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Here there is none of the linking of the letters which is seen in the other example: every letter stands distinct. But while the individual letters are clumsily written, the same laws govern their formation as in the other document. The shallow, wide-spread mu, the cursive nu, the small theta, omikron, and rho, are repeated. Here also is seen the tau, with its horizontal stroke confined to the left of the vertical instead of crossing it, and the undeveloped omega, which has the appearance of being clipped—both forms being characteristic of the 3rd century B.C.
The trained clerical hands of the 2nd century B.C. (fig. 3) differ generally from those of the earlier century in a more perfect and less cursive formation, the older shallow type gradually disappearing, and the linking of letters by horizontal strokes being less continuous. But the Ptolemaic character marks the handwriting well through the century; and it is only towards the close of that period and as the next century is entered, that the hand begins to give way and to lose altogether its linked style and the peculiar crispness of the strokes which give it its distinctive appearance. The cursive hand in its best style (e.g. N. ct Extr. pls. xxviii., xxix.) is very graceful and exact:—
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| Fig. 3.—Petition, 163-162 B.C. | ||||
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Towards the end of the Ptolemaic period material greatly fails. There are very few extant cursive documents between the years 80 and 20 B.C. But marks of decadence already appear in the examples of the beginning of the 1st century B.C. The general character of the writing becomes slacker, and the forms of individual letters are less exact. These imperfections prepare us for the great change which was to follow.
With the Roman period comes roundness of style, in strong contrast to the stiffness and rigid linking of the Ptolemaic hand. Curves take the place of straight strokes in the individual letters, and even ligatures are formed in pliant sweeps of the pen. This transition from the stiff to the flexible finds something of a parallel in the development of the curving and flexible English charter hand of the 14th century from the rigid hand of the 13th century; following, it would seem, the natural law
