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Scripts at Vindolanda

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Scripts at Vindolanda

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A fragment of a military report (152)

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A fragment of a military report (152)

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© CSAD

‘Old Roman Cursive’ was the script used for documents and letters written in the Roman world in the first three centuries AD. The characters are often small and sometimes resemble modern capital (upper-case) letters more than lower-case letters. They are joined by ligatures (225), but are more usually written separately, unlike modern handwriting. In the hundreds of different hands represented in the tablets the quality of writing varies greatly. Some scripts are elegant and sloping (248, 295), some squarish and upright (218, 247) and some clumsy (250, 310). Tablets written by a scribe but finished by the author clearly portray the differences in quality and elegance between different writers (291). 152 presents one of the most elegant examples of calligraphic handwriting from Vindolanda. Surprisingly this document is not a letter but a fragment of one of the ‘all present and correct reports, submitted by junior officers, the optiones. The addresses on the backs of the letters are written in the same cursive script, but the letters are larger and more elongated or ‘spindly’.

Address on a letter to Flavius Genialis (218)

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Address on a letter to Flavius Genialis (218)

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© CSAD

 

Word divisions are only sometimes marked, either by a space (225) or by interpunct, i.e. the placing of a medial point between words, not always easily distinguished from dirt and ink blots. Interpunct is not often used consistently but placed here and there through the text (297, 323). Interpunct also sometimes marks out numerals. An oblique dash or apex (plural – apices) was used over a and o, sometimes distinguishing long from short vowels (291).

Words are abbreviated or represented as symbols in many instances, for example military units or ranks, dates, weights and measures and units of currency. The tablets provide new information on some symbols, especially for the fractions of the denarius. Other individual words are also sometimes abbreviated, for example Cl for the name Claudia and Vindol for Vindolanda. Numerals may be marked with a superscript bar or dots before and after to distinguish them from ordinary letters.

A line from book 9 of Virgil's Aeneid in a capital script (118)

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A line from book 9 of Virgil's Aeneid in a capital script (118)

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© CSAD

An fragment with several lines of shorthand. At the bottom (upside down) part of a text in capital letters (122)

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An fragment with several lines of shorthand. At the bottom (upside down) part of a text in capital letters (122)

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© CSAD

 

Cursive script is distinct from the ‘bookhands’, which used capital forms for copying literary texts. Capital script is however occasionally found in the tablets, for example in the the line from Virgil’s Aeneid in 118 and in headings in some accounts and reports (162, 186). Among the tablets is a small group of documents in shorthand, the only Latin shorthand documents to survive from classical antiquity. They remain undeciphered. Shorthand was known, in the late Roman period at least, as ‘Tironian notes’, named after Tiro, freedman secretary of the orator Cicero.

Historical context

The history of Latin handwriting can be sketched in a general way. The ‘Old Roman Cursive’ (ORC) of the Vindolanda tablets is very similar to the script of contemporary papyri from Egypt, although coming from the opposite end of the empire. From the later third century ORC was replaced by ‘New Roman Cursive’ (NRC), of which the letter forms are closer to modern lower-case letters. NRC led directly to an early medieval script, Caroline minuscule, used in 9th century France and Germany. This script in turn was rediscovered in the Renaissance and is the basis for the scripts we employ today.

However the detailed development of the Latin cursive script during the imperial period is poorly understood. The relationship between ORC and NRC is obscure and controversial, partly because of the scarcity of ORC documents. Most Egyptian papyri for example are written in Greek, only a small percentage in Latin. The Vindolanda writing tablets are the largest group of Latin documents from the western Roman empire, although now supplemented by other material from Britain, including leaf tablets from Carlisle and curses scratched on lead tablets from Bath. The Vindolanda documents clearly demonstrate that there is much more variation within ‘Old Roman Cursive’ than had previously been thought. The history of Latin scripts must be rewritten to take account of this complexity.

The history of scripts may seem like a historical footnote. However their use and development can tell us much about the nature of education and literacy. We now see for example that the same scripts and conventions were in use for Latin documents at different ends of the empire, in Northumberland and in Egypt. Since Latin documents in Egypt too are usually found in military contexts, these common features may be the product of scribal training within the army, about which we otherwise know very little.

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