Palaeography
study of ancient writing
Palaeography (UK) or paleography (US) (ultimately from Ancient Greek: παλαιός, palaiós, 'old', and γράφειν, gráphein, 'to write') is the study and academic discipline of historical writing systems. It encompasses the historicity of manuscripts and texts, subsuming deciphering and dating of historical manuscripts, as well as the analysis of historic penmanship, handwriting scripts, signification, and printed media.
It is primarily concerned with the forms, processes, and relationships of writing and printing systems as evident in a text, document, or manuscript — analysis of the substantive textual content of documents is a secondary function. Included in the discipline is the practice of deciphering, reading, and dating manuscripts, and the cultural and technical context of writing systems, including the methods by which texts (such as manuscripts, books, codices, tracts, and monographs) were produced, and the history of scriptoria. Palaeography as a discipline is important for understanding, authenticating, and dating historical texts; however, in the absence of additional evidence, it is difficult to use palaeographic means alone to pinpoint exact dates of such texts.
The discipline is one of the auxiliary sciences of history, and is considered to have been founded by Jean Mabillon with his 1681 work De re diplomatica, the first textbook to address the subject. The term palaeography was coined by Bernard de Montfaucon with the publication of his work on Greek palaeography, the Palaeographia Graeca, in 1708.
Application
Palaeography is an essential skill for many historians, semioticians, and philologists, as it addresses a suite of interrelated lines of inquiry. First, since the style of an alphabet, grapheme, or sign system set within a register in each given dialect and language has evolved constantly, it is necessary to know how to decipher its individual substantive, occurrence make-up and constituency. For example, assessing its characters and typology as they existed in various places, times and locations.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Apr 27, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q179957. The Library of Congress control number is sh85097064. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1681 and 1708.
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This entry incorporates text from “Palaeography” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.