language of a single people has a comparatively narrow and simple career. On the other hand, the Latin alphabet, having been adopted by the nations of western Europe, underwent many transformations in the course of development of the national hand writings of the different peoples, and consequently had a wide and varied career. But in one respect Latin palaeography is at a disadvantage as compared with the sister branch. As we have seen, Greek documents are extant dating back to the 4th century B.C., and the development of Greek writing can be fairly well illustrated by a series of examples of the succeeding centuries. There is no such series of Latin documents available to afford us the means of tracing the growth of Latin writing to the same remote period. No Latin document, either of a literary or of a non-literary character, has yet been recovered which can be placed with certainty earlier than the Christian era. Egypt, while giving up hundreds and thousands of documents in Greek, has hitherto yielded but little in Latin, even of the 1st century, and little too of the next following centuries. Indeed, for our knowledge of Latin writing of the 1st century we still have to depend chiefly upon the results of excavations at Pompeii and Herculaneum and in the Roman catacombs, upon the wall-scribblings which have been laid bare, and upon the waxen tablets and the few papyri which have thence been recovered.
At the time when we come into touch with the first extant examples of Roman writing, we find a few instances of a literary or book-hand as well as a fairly extensive variety of cursive hands. It will be convenient in the first place to examine the Roman cursive writing during the early centuries of our era. Then, for the moment suspending further research in this branch of our subject, we shall proceed to describe the literary script and to trace the development of the large form of book-hand, or majuscule writing, in its two divisions of capitals and uncials, and of the intermediate styles composed of a mixture of large and small letters, or consisting of a blend of the two classes of letters which has received the name of half-uncial. Then we shall turn to follow the development of the national hands, when it will be necessary to come into touch again with the Roman cursive, whence the western continental scripts were derived; and so we shall proceed to the formation of the minuscule writing of the middle ages.
The materials for the study of the early Roman cursive hand have been found in the wall-scribblings, or graffiti, of Pompeii and Herculaneum and Rome (collected in the Corp. inscr. lat. vol. iv.); in the series of 127 libelli or waxen tablets, consisting of perscriptiones and other deeds connected with sales by auction and tax receipts discovered in the house of the banker L. Caecilius Jucundus at Pompeii, and bearing dates of A.D. 15, 27, and 53-62 (published in C.I.L. iv., supplement); in a few scattered papyri from Egypt; and in a set of four-and-twenty waxen tablets bearing dates ranging from A.D. 131 to 167, which were found in ancient mining works in the neighbourhood of Alburnus Major (the modern Verespatak) in Dacia (C. I. L. iii.).
It will have been observed that in the case of the above documents there are three different kinds of material on which they have been inscribed: the plaster surface of walls, the waxen coatings of tablets, and the smooth surface of papyrus. The two former may be classed together as being of a nature which would offer a certain resistance to the free movement of the stilus; while in the case of papyrus the writing-reed or pen would run without impediment. Hence, in writing on the former materials there was a natural tendency to form the letters in disconnected strokes, to make them upright or even inclined to the left, and to employ vertical strokes in preference. The three following specimens from the graffiti and the two sets of tablets will demonstrate the conservative character of this kind of writing, covering as they do about a century and a half. This conservativeness may suggest the probability that the hand seen in the graffiti and the Pompeian tablets had not changed very materially from that practised a century or more earlier, and that it is practically the hand in which the Roman classical writers composed their works. When examining the alphabet of this early Roman cursive hand, we find (as we found in the early Greek cursive) the first beginnings of the minuscule writing of the middle ages. The slurring of the strokes, whereby the bows of the capital letters were lost and their more exact forms modified, led the way to the gradual development of the small letters. With regard to the particular forms of letters employed in the waxen tablets, compare the tables in Corp. inscr. lat., vols, iii., iv. The letter A is formed by a main stroke supporting an oblique stroke above it and the cross bar is either omitted, or is indicated by a small vertical stroke dropping, as it were, out of the letter.
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| Fig. 20.—Wall inscription, 1st century. |
(censio est nam noster |
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| Fig. 21.—Pompeian Tablet, A.D. 59. | ||||
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| Fig. 22.—Dacian Tablet, A.D. 167. | |||
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The main stroke of B dwindles to a slight curve, and the two
bows are transformed into a long bent stroke so that the letter
takes the shape of a stilted a or of a d. The D is chiefly like the
uncial 
; the E is generally represented by the old form || found
in inscriptions and in the Faliscan alphabet. In the modified
form of G the first outline of the flat-headed g of later times
appears; H, by losing half of its second upright limb in the haste
of writing, comes near to being the small h. In the Pompeian
tablets M has the four-stroke form ||||, as in the graffiti; in the
Dacian tablets it is a rustic capital, sometimes almost an uncial
. The hastily written is formed by two strokes both convex,
almost like a. As to the general character of the writing, it is
close and compressed, and has an inclination to the left. There
is also much combination or linking together of letters (Corp.
inscr. lat. iii. tab. A). These peculiarities may, in some measure,
be ascribed to the material and to the confined space at the
command of the writer. The same character of cursive writing
has also been found on a few tiles and potsherds inscribed with
alphabets or short sentences—the exercises of children at school
(Corp. inscr. lat. iii. 962).
In writing with the pen upon the smooth and unresisting surface of papyrus, the scribe would naturally write a more fluent hand. The disjointed writing of the graffiti and the tablets was changed for one which gradually became more consecutive and which naturally tended in course of time to
