Greek printed typography

I'm quoting for educational purposes and review an excerpt from Barry B. Powell's book Homer (Wiley-Blackwell, 2007).  It has a great introduction to the problem of the difference betweeen printed Greek texts and actual manuscripts:

"Early printed editions were set in typefaces made to imitate handwriting in medieval Byzantine manuscripts, an orthographic system (= "way of writing") much changed since ancient times, with many abbreviations and ligatures in which more than one letter is combined into a single sign.

Certainly Plato could not have read the first printed text of Homer, nor can a modern scholar without special training, even a professor who has spent an entire lifetime teaching and studying Greek.

In the 19th century, modern printed typefaces and orthographic conventions replaced those based on manuscripts handwritten in Byzantium before the invention of printing, but in no sense did such modern conventions attempt to recreate the actual appearance, or material nature, of an ancient text of Homer.

For example, the forms of the Greek characters in T.W. Allen's standard Oxford Classical Text, first published in 1902, imitate the admirable but entirely modern Greek handwriting of Richard Porson (1759-1808 [by which the Porson Font is named]), a Cambridge don important in early modern TC.  

Complete with lower and upper-case characters, accents, breathing marks (that is, pronounced with an H or without), dieresis marked by two horizontal dots (separate pronunciation of contiguous vowels), punctuation, word division, and paragraph division, such Greek seems normal to anyone who studies Greek, say, at Oxford or Wisconson U today.  Here is what the 1st seven lines of the Illiad looks like in a modern printed type (from Loeb):

If you study Greek today, and take a course, you will expect to translate such a version.   You are reading "Homer" you think, but in fact the orthography, the way things are written, is a hodgepodge that never existed in the 19th century A.D.   A full accentual system, only sometimes semantic ("with meaning"), does not appear untile around 1000 A.D. in Greek writing and is never used consistently.   The distinction between upper and lower case letters is medieval.

Porson's internal sigma [inside words] is drawn σ, but in the Classical Period the sigma was a vertical zigzag Σ (hence our "S") and after the Alexandrian period always a half-moon shape C  (the lunate sigma");  the shape σ appears to be Porson's invention.   The dieresis, or two horizontal dots to indicate that vowels are pronounced separately (e.g. προοιαψεν), is a convention of recent printing.   Periods and commas are modern, as is word division, unknown in Classical Greek.  

The Oxford text would have mystified Thucydides or Plato just as much as the first printed text based on Byzantine conventions.  The much earlier, we might say original, text of Homer would have puzzled them just as much, which seems to have looked something like [below]:

The direction of reading switches back and forth from right to left, then left to right (called boustrophedon writing, "as the ox turns").  In the earliest form of Greek writing, as we reconstruct it from meager inscriptions, there is no distinction between omicron = short o and omega = long o, or between epsilon = short e and eta = long e.  and doubled consonants are written as single consonants.  there are no word divisions or upper and lower-case letters, or diacritical marks such as accents, or capitals of any kind. 

In reading such an early text the exchange of meaning from the material object to the human mind takes place in a different way from when we read Homer in Porsonian Greek orthography or English. 

The philologist is keenly interested in how this might have worked.   Apparently the Greek reader of the 8th century B.C. was decoding his writing by the ear.  For this reason the ancient Greek felt no need for word divisions or line divisions or diacritical marks or paragraph markers or quotation marks because to him the signs represented a continuous stream of sounds.  A thousand years after Homer the Greeks still did not divide their words.  (In Latin, words were often divided from the earliest times. )

When we read Greek (or English), by contrast, we decode the test by the eye.  We are deeply concerned where one word ends and another begins.  The appearance of our texts is semantic, it carries meaning, as when a capital letter says "A sentence begins here" or a space says  "the word ends here".  Our text of Homer is directly descended from an ancient Greek text, yes, but the text works for us in a different way.

When modern philologists attempt to recover as closely as possible an "original text", as editors claim, in fact they never mean that they are going to reconstruct an original text, that Homer might have recognized.   Rather they represent an interpretation of how an original text might be explained according to modern rules.   What appears to be orthography, in a modern text, "the way something is written", is really editorial comment on meaning and grammatical syntax.  If editors gave us the original, no one could read it."

(p 7-8)
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mr.scrivener

Dating MSS by Vellum Color

Some brief notes are recorded here for the assistance of palaeographers:

From:  THE OTTO F. EGE PALEOGRAPHY PORTFOLIO page

1. Switzerland: New Testament ( Testamentum Novum, cum Glossis Bedae, Hieronymi, et Gregorii).
Early XIIth Century. Latin Text; Revised Carolingian Script.

John 19.7-12, recto; John 19:12-19, verso.

... interlinear glosses and commentaries from the writings of Bede, Jerome, Gregory and other Church Fathers. These were inserted at various times during the following century around a central panel of the original text. All hands based on revival of early Carolingian minuscule. the beginning of the trend to compactness and angularity is seen in many of these later additions. 

'The colour and texture of the vellum is frequently an aid in allocating a manuscript to a certain district and time. The XIIIth century skins are often yellower than those of later dates as the result of the fact that a weaker lime-water solution was used in the bleaching process.'

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3. Italy: Lectionary (Lectionarium; Secundam Lucam)
Middle XIIth Century, Latin Text; Revised Carolingian Script

 
A Lectionary contains selected readings from the Epistles and Gospels as well as the Acts of the Saint and the Lives of the Martyrs. These were read by the sub-deacon from a side pulpit. This practice necessitated that they be written in a separate volume, apart from the complete Missal. This fine large bookhand shown here, suited to easier reading in a dark cathedral, is a revival of the script developed nearly four centuries earlier in scriptoria founded by Charlemagne. Maunde Thomson calls this Lombardic revival the finest of all European bookhands. Even the XVth century humanistic scribes could not surpass it for beauty and eligibility.
 

The tone or hue of ink frequently helps allocate a manuscript to a particular district or century. Ink of brown tone is generally found in early manuscripts, less frequently after 1200 A.D.

 

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"The quills used in writing were obtained from the wings of crows, wild geese, and eagles. To keep them sharp and their strokes of uniform width required skill and great sensitivity in hand pressure. It would be difficult to imitate or approximate the fine details even with the special steel lettering pens of today."

mr.scrivener

Uncial Talk (3) - M. Brown

We continue our survey of Latin Capitals and Greek/Latin Uncials with some more observations of value from Michelle Brown's book, A Guide to Western Historical Scripts from Antiquity to 1600 (U of T press, 1993);

Rustic Capitals (cont. from our previous post)

Vat. Lat. 3867, Vergilius Romanus:  (c. 4th  century  A.D.)

"Script:  An elegant example of Rustic Capitals, written with great fluidity of the pen and with a tendency towards calligraphic flourishes (seen in the treatment of the heads of F and X and the descent of L below the line).  Bows are minimal.  Note the curved head of the secnond minim of H, another scribal feature.  Curvaceous feet are systematically applied to minims.
Punctuation is by the medial punctus (centre-dot) which imposes word division, rather than the more usual scriptura continua, in the manner of monumental epigraphic inscriptions.
The Column Picture is an increasingly popular element of de luxe manuscripts from the 4th century onwards.  The naturalistic impressionism of antique painting is beginning to give way to a more linear and stylized approach."

Two important points noted above are:

a)  Spaces between words were already commonplace in Latin and Greek writing by the 4th century.  Thus the presence of spaces cannot be used to indicate later dates for manuscripts.

b)  Even such fancy adornments as full column-width pictures embedded into the text were also popular features from the 4th century onwards.  

The significance of this is that manuscript decoration and production was already quite varied and sophisticated even in the 4th century, and so this feature cannot be used to assign later dates to manuscripts with such features, nor can their absence be used to date manuscripts to the 4th century or earlier.

Especially important is that any discussion of decoration and/or pictography or the lack of it must be done in the light of the controversies re: icons, which occurred after this period.  Many manuscripts containing "idolatrous" icons and pictoral decoration were destroyed during the "Iconoclasm" battles, which would have provided a more complete picture of scribal practices for earlier periods.


mr.scrivener