New Project Explores the Craft of Writing in the Medieval Nordic World

A major Nordic research effort is taking a fresh look at the earliest written culture in medieval Finland—by studying not only what documents say, but what they are made of.

https://www.medievalists.net/2026/03/new-project-explores-the-craft-of-writing-in-the-medieval-nordic-world/

Paleography at PG:
https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/subjects/search/?query=paleography

#books #paleography #old_manuscripts

https://xeirographa.com/ Learn Greek paleography, step by step. Progressively harder to read documents.

#greek #paleography

The perils of paleographic dating: a few Aramaic examples from Arabia

My last post included a quote by Michael Macdonald that concluded:

This text shows that different forms of the same letter within the Aramaic alphabet could be held in the memories of scribes, and presumably readers, and used as they pleased to achieve various effects. Such a conclusion is not particularly startling but it shows the dangers of trying to use supposed palaeographical sequences to date inscriptions.

This is in reference to the second of the three inscriptions on the picture below, the one that Macdonald says is in Tayma Aramaic. While most of the inscription is in something in between Imperial and Nabataean Aramaic, the first word is in nice, old-fashioned lapidary Imperial Aramaic. The effect is something like lead-in small caps in Latin typography:

Tʜɪꜱ ɪꜱ the funerary monument of …

I think this is a great point. While certain script styles may be typical of a certain time and place, that doesn’t mean they were strictly limited to that setting and you can never be 100% sure of a dating based on paleography alone. In this short post, I want to give two more examples.

First, here are two funerary inscriptions in Nabataean Aramaic (Macdonald, one of the editors, again considers the first one Tayma Aramaic). They are both dated, so we know they were written a century and a half apart (203 and 356 CE). But the earlier one has considerably more advanced letter forms than the later one. In each case, I’ll give you a transliteration in (Unicode’s pretty archaic) Nabataean and Arabic script so you can compare the letter shapes to those extremes.

𐢅𐢀 𐢕𐢘𐢜 𐢁𐢝𐢗𐢍𐢆
𐢕𐢃𐢑𐢋𐢀 𐢃𐢛 𐢍𐢈𐢖𐢘
𐢛𐢁𐢜 𐢞𐢍𐢓𐢌 𐢅𐢌 𐢁𐢚𐢍𐢒
𐢗𐢑𐢇𐢈𐢌 𐢗𐢓𐢛𐢒 𐢈𐢁𐢝𐢓𐢈
𐢁𐢊𐢈𐢇𐢌 𐢃𐢍𐢛𐢊 𐢁𐢍𐢛
𐢝𐢕𐢞 𐢮𐢮𐢮𐢮𐢭𐢬𐢩 𐢑𐢇𐢘𐢛𐢏𐢍𐢀

دا نفس اسعيه
نبلطا بر يو𐢖ف
راس تيمى دي اقيم
علهوي عمرم واسمو
احوهي بيرح اير
سنت 𐢮𐢮𐢮𐢮𐢭𐢬𐢩 لهفركيا

𐢅𐢕𐢆 …
𐢗𐢅𐢍𐢈𐢔 𐢃𐢛 𐢊𐢕𐢌 𐢃𐢛 𐢝𐢓𐢈𐢁𐢐 𐢛𐢍𐢜
𐢊𐢄𐢛𐢀 𐢑𐢓𐢈𐢍𐢆 𐢁𐢞𐢞𐢆 𐢃𐢛𐢞
𐢗𐢓𐢛𐢈 𐢃𐢛 𐢗𐢅𐢍𐢈𐢔 𐢃𐢛 𐢝𐢓𐢈𐢁𐢐
𐢛𐢍𐢜 𐢞𐢍𐢓𐢀 𐢅𐢌 𐢓𐢍𐢞𐢞 𐢃𐢍𐢛𐢊
𐢁𐢂 𐢝𐢕𐢞 𐢓𐢁𐢞𐢍𐢔 𐢈𐢊𐢓𐢝𐢍𐢔
𐢈𐢁𐢊𐢅𐢌 𐢃𐢛𐢞 𐢝𐢕𐢍𐢔 𐢞𐢑𐢞𐢍𐢔
𐢈𐢞𐢓𐢕𐢌

دنه…
عديون بر حني بر سموال ريس
حجرا لموية اتته برت
عمرو بر عديون بر سموال
ريس تيما دي ميتت بيرح
اب سنت ماتين وحمسين
واحى برت سنين تلتين
وتمني

It’s also interesting that the older text is mostly in good Aramaic (with one or two interesting spelling mistakes), while the second one uses a more phonetic spelling of the Aramaic words and has borrowed two Arabic numbers. So the linguistic evidence at least points in the right direction, dating-wise.

The second and last example is a graffito that wasn’t published too long ago (Nehmé 2017), but that may deserve some more attention outside epigraphic circles. What appears to be the same inscription, dated to 548/9 CE, starts with the Aramaic phrase dkyr (𐢅𐢏𐢍𐢛) ‘may he be remembered’ written in a not terribly advanced Nabataeo-Arabic and then continues in the Arabic language and Paleo-Arabic script. The use of the cognate verb in the opening phrase (ذكر الإله ḏakara l-ʾilāhu ‘may God remember’) allows for a nice comparison of the two script types. Normally, we would consider these to be centuries apart, but they appear to have been inscribed by the same hand.

So remember, kids, have fun dating inscriptions paleographically, but be careful out there.

What is the double-purple-underlined Russian word? A collaborator told me that it means “decorated” or “honored.” My best wrong reading is «кагратдей»... not apparently a word. Can anyone please correct me?

#russian #cyrillic #paleography #cursive #document #русский

Reviewing Joseph Champion’s New and Complete Alphabets (this copy at SFPL) for something unrelated. But this page leads me to believe that by the 18th century English Court Hand was already completely unreadable — even to those well versed in the lettering world at the time. Champiod didn’t label any of the other blackletter hands.

#calligraphy #paleography

The complex inner history (paleography) of the tengwa called "alda" and how voiceless l was written in Quenya modes.
This is from my forthcoming "A Tengwar Primer".

#tolkien #tengwar #paleography

📯 This week's #DigitalHistoryOFK: Riham Aida Mokrani presents "Manuscript Meets Model: Digital Approaches to Arabic #Paleography" - exploring how #OntologyEngineering & #ML are transforming Arabic #ManuscriptStudies.

📅 4 June, 4-6 pm (CET), online
ℹ️ Abstract: https://dhistory.hypotheses.org/10533

#DigitalHistory #4memory #Paleography #MachineLearning #semanticweb #ontologies
@histodons @historikerinnen @digitalhumanities