378 Sir Edward Maunde Thompson [March 1^, 



of business, jnst as well as the literary man, could write with as 

 much ease and fluency as we can ourselves. Their handwriting is 

 fully matured and bears on its face the evidence of a development 

 which must have been the growth of a long period. The knowledge 

 of writing in (Greece, we fully believe, must be at least coeval with 

 the oldest Greek inscriptions ; and we are not to assume that, because 

 those inscriptions are laboured and painfully executed, therefore the 

 handwriting of the same time was equally laboured and painful. On 

 the contrary, the handwriting may have been, and probably was^ 

 tolerably fluent ; and it would be jas unjust to measure the ancient 

 Greek's capacity for expressing himself with the pen by the standard 

 of his inscriptions, as it would be to take the rustic lettering of our 

 provincial tombstones as a measure for deciding the proficiency of 

 modern penmanship. 



As I have already said, we have to depend, for our acquaintance 

 with the earliest examples of Greek writing, upon the papyri which 

 have been found in Egypt. These may be broadly classified in two 

 divisions : the first, literary ; the second, official and domestic. The 

 literary documents, naturally, are generally written with more care 

 than those of the other class. Texts intended for the market were 

 inscribed in a formal style which would correspond to the print- 

 ing of the present day. But others, even though of a literary 

 character, if written for the scholar's own use, would not be neces- 

 sarily transcribed in this formal fashion, but might appear in the 

 ordinary current handwriting of the scholar himself or of his 

 amanuensis. On the other Land, official and domestic documents 

 are generally written in cursive handwritings, more or less exact or 

 careless, according to the education or skill of the writer. In dating 

 the domestic documents we have not the same difficulty — as a rule — 

 as in dealing with literary works, for a large proportion bear actual 

 dates, and thus form standards of comparison for those documents 

 which have not been so dated. In dealing with literary works 

 written in the cursive handwritings we have the same advajitage of 

 comparison with the dated cursive examples of the official and 

 domestic division. But, when we come to the formally written works, 

 our real difficulty begins. 



The faculty of deciding the age of handwritings of a formal 

 character of any period must chiefly grow from familiarity j and this 

 familiarity, of course, can only be acquired by the survey of a large 

 number of examples. Every palaeographer knows how easy it is to 

 assign dates to manuscripts of the middle ages, say from the twelfth 

 to the fifteenth centuries, of which there are plentiful examples ; his 

 difficulties begin when he moves back into the earlier centuries 

 when his material is more limited ; and when he comes to examine, 

 for example, such a formal handwriting as the uncials of the fourth, 

 fifth and sixth centuries, he does not venture to be dogmatic. "Wheii 

 we go back to a period still more remote, such as the third, second 

 and first centuries B.C., our difficulties become extreme. It is not to 



