Expert: Maria - 11/11/2011

Question
QUESTION: Hi Maria,

This is a follow-up question to an older similar one that you have answered (http://en.allexperts.com/q/Ancient-Classical-History-2715/lower-case-letters.htm).

In particular, I am interested in sources/references on the origin of lower case letters. In other words, are there any papers or references in books that explicitly describe the use of lower case letters for the first time; i.e. time and work (clearly I am referring to Greek and Latin) ?

I am not asking for a big list; I just do not know where to begin my search, so if you can give me one or two references, that's more than enough for me to begin my journey. I also assume that these references actually give the name of the works where the lower case letters can be found, or at least pinpoint to an exhibit that can be found in a museum; at least, this is what I am looking for.

I want to thank you in advance for all your help.

ANSWER: Hello Dimitris,

Acyually it’s impossible to tell you exactly either the time or the work where the lower case letters began to be used in ancient Greek and Latin.

What I can tell you is that:

1-in ANCIENT GREECE lower case letters that developed gradually through transformations of the capital letters,  which were the earliest  form of writing  in ancient alphabets, seem to date back to the 3rd. century B.C.
Such a transformation happened because  the lower case letters that formed by the elimination of a part of the upper case letters (see for example the small beta  β  from the capital beta B)  were used to write faster on papyrus and parchment.

Anyway, we have no ancient document written in lower case letters until the 9th.century AD, since by the time of late antiquity and the early Byzantine period two different styles of  Greek handwriting developed, both suitable to the act of writing with quill and ink on soft materials such as paper or parchment.

So, the earliest dated Greek lower-case manuscript known today is the Uspenski Gospels (Minuscule 461) written in Constantinople in the year 835 AD probably by a monk named Nicolaus. Later this manuscript belonged to the monastery of Mar Saba  in Palestine. In 1844 Bishop Porphiryj Uspenski took it and brought it to Russia.
See:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Uspensky_gospels.jpg

Also for earliest type of minuscule writing, from a 10th century manuscript of Thucydide ("codex vetustissimus"), 10th Century, (Florence, Laurentian Library, Plut. 1xix) see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Greek_manuscript_vetustissimus_Thucydides.png

Lastly, you can read the following books:
Roger D. Woodard's book, Greek Writing from Knossos to Homer
Barry Powell,Homer and the Origin of the Greek Alphabet




2-in ancient ROMAN TIMES  the change from capital letters to small letters  probably happened earlier than  the 1st.century AD when the lower case letters  became  the everyday form of cursive handwriting  used in private letters as well as in business accounts and education.

We know in fact that the Roman playwright Plautus (ca. 250 BC-184 BC)  in his comedy "Pseudolus" tells of the illegibility of cursive letters when the slave Pseudolus appears to be  unimpressed by the writing on a wax tablet sent to his master, Calidorus, by the young man’s lover, the prostitute Phoenicium, but he calls these lower case letters “scratches”, i.e. hasty scribbles, as you can read below in the dialogue between Pseudolus and Calidorus:

[Pseudolus 13ff: trans. Watling]
Pseudolus: All these letters, they seem to be playing at fathers and mothers, crawling all over each other.
Calidorus: Oh, if you’re going to make a joke of it -
Pseudolus: It would take a Sibyl to read this gibberish; no one else could make head nor tail of it.
Calidorus: Why are you so unkind to those dear little letters, written on that dear little tablet by that dear little hand?
Pseudolus: A chicken’s hand was it? A chicken surely scratched these marks…

[Pseudolus 13ff: Latin text]
Pseudolus: Ut opinor, quaerunt litterae hae sibi liberos: alia aliam scandit.
Calidorus: Ludis iam ludo tuo?
Pseudolus: Has quidem pol credo nisi Sibylla legerit, interpretari alium posse neminem.
Calidorus: Cur inclementer dicis lepidis litteris lepidis tabellis lepida conscriptis manu?
Pseudolus: An, opsecro hercle, habent quas gallinae manus? Nam has quidem gallina scripsit.
[Pseudolus 13ff: Latin text]

As you can see, even Roman readers sometimes had difficulty with this sort of script in lower case letters.

To conclude, although I cannot mention either the exact  time  or  a literary work where the lower case letters were first used in Roman times, I can at least suggest some  websites  where you can see  lower case letters written with a stylus  on wooden tablets found at the Roman fort of Vindolanda, near the modern village of Bardon Mill, south of the Hadrian‘s Wall,in  northern England.

These tablets, discovered during the 1970s and 1980s, date back to the 1st. century AD  onward  [until 410 AD when the last Roman legions abandon Britain, which is left to its own fate, after a rule of 367 years] and include the largest group of Latin letters ever discovered.  These letters often bear on the official and private concerns of the officers, their families, and slaves, while the military documents tell us much about the way the Romans organized a newly acquired frontier area.

See at:
http://137.204.167.79/rombo/iscriz/vindolan.htm
http://vindolanda.csad.ox.ac.uk/exhibition/paleo-1.shtml
http://vindolanda.csad.ox.ac.uk/exhibition/paleo-2.shtml
http://vindolanda.csad.ox.ac.uk/exhibition/paleo-3.shtml
http://www.vindolanda.com/doorway-articles/writing-tablets
http://www.vindolanda.com/
http://www.vindolanda.com/Roman-Vindolanda-Fort

Also:
-Birley, R., Vindolanda : a Roman frontier post on Hadrian's Wall, London: Thames and Hudson, (1977)
-A.K. Bowman - J.D. Thomas, The Vindolanda Writing Tablets (Tabulae Vindolandenses II), London 1994, pp. 256-259, n°291;
-A.K. Bowman, Life and Letters of the Roman Frontier. Vindolanda and its People, London 1994, p. 127, n°21

Hope these suggestions can be helpful to you.

Best regards,
Maria


---------- FOLLOW-UP ----------

QUESTION: Hi again Maria,

As a concluding remark, I am wondering if there is a similar "witnessing" remark for the lower case Greek letters that allows us to make a statement that lower case Greek date back to the 3rd. century B.C. (just like there is this reference in "Pseudolus" for lower case Latin). If the "hint" is in one of the two books that you suggested for Greek, that's all I really want to know.

I want to thank you once again for your detailed answer and for the provision of references. I really appreciate your time and help that you provided me.

Best regards,
Dimitris

Answer
Hi again Dimitris,

I think I have found  some  documents that can somehow bear witness to the fact that  the lower case Greek letters date back to the 3rd.century BC and  even to the 4th century BC, not in the sense that  these documents  have been written entirely in lower case letters, but in the sense that they begin to show how some capital letters were changing and becoming small letters.
For example, the ε from the E, the ω from the Ω.

Here are these documents:

1-TIMOTHEUS PAPYRUS - Papyri graecae berolinenses.Inventory 9875(P.BEROL.INV.9875), dated late 4th.century BC.

It is a Greek papyrus  where we read  few fragments of a poem entitled The  Persians (possibly the oldest Greek papyrus in existence), discovered at Abusir (near Cairo, Egypt) and  edited by Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Mollendorff  in 1903.[Wilamowits-Moellendorf,  Die Perser: aus einem papyrus vom Abusir].
As for Timotheus of Miletus, he was a Greek musician and dithyrambic poet (c. 446-357 BC).

In this papyrus we can see that the capital Ω begins to become a small ω and the E begins to become the lower case ε .
See at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:P.Berol._inv._9875_col._v_coronis.jpg


2- THE "PHAEDON" OF PLATO PAPYRUS. British Museum. Papyrus 488, dated  3rd CENTURY BC where we see that the capital Ω begins to become  a small  ω and the E begins to become the lower case ε .
See at:
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Platonos_Phaedon.JPG

http://anemi.lib.uoc.gr/php/pdf_pager.php?rec=/metadata/c/4/3/metadata-01-000011

http://www.mlahanas.de/Greeks/Bios/PlatoPhaedoPapyrus488.html

Moreover you can read the pages  110-111 of the online text of "An Introduction to Greek and Latin Palaeography" by Thompson, Edward Maunde, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1912,  at:
http://en.calameo.com/read/0001070445cf24fb92a27.

To conclude, I hope I’ve given you some helpful suggestions.

All the best,
Maria