Paleography

Translations

paleografia | Paléographie | Paläografie

Article

Paleography is the study of diachronic change in the shape of the glyphs of a writing system. As such, it pertains to the evolution of the graphic features of written signs, and not to their function.

In the philological study of ancient texts, paleography is a major criterion for establishing the date of a text, be it a copy or, far more significantly, an original. The date of a text has obvious implications on the date of variety of language and of the lexicon that the text contains, making paleography highly significant for the study of language contact in antiquity.

Furthermore, changes in a writing system that originate locally may occasionally spread to different traditions or areas, which is indicative of contacts between scribal habits and/or of the circulation of written materials.

Example

Examples in which paleographic data allow the definition of the date of a loanword are many. For instance, since the paleography of the texts containing the non-Hittite word lahanni- (on which see Giusfredi 2019) is middle Hittite, corresponding roughly to the XV century BCE, this means that the contact scenario in which the word was borrowed occurred not later than the XV century. This excludes that the word was borrowed, for instance, during the age of the southern expansion of the Hittite Empire to Syria in the late XIV century BCE, in spite of the existence of comparable forms in West Semitic languages of the area.

References

Giusfredi, F. 2018. lahan , lahannum, ^DUGlahanni-: an exotic flask. NABU 2018/2, n. 42.