Fonts in the Epigraphic and Manuscript traditions of Roman Antiquity: Guest post by Olena Mudalige

Hello, I am Olena Mudalige. I am a second-year PhD candidate at the Kharkiv State Academy of Design and Arts, studying Design. I previously completed a master’s degree studying art criticism and graphic practices and have qualified as an art critic and lecturer. I have come to the UK under the ‘Homes for Ukraine’ programme after leaving Ukraine on February 24 2022 and have become affiliated with the CREWS project through the European Research Area for Ukraine (ERA4Ukraine), https://euraxess.ec.europa.eu/ukraine scheme. I’m currently interested in the origins and early forms of writing and in the history of study of writing in the ancient world. Today I want to write a bit about different graphical traditions in Roman writing.

The small number of surviving Latin inscriptions is explained by the fact that they were applied to marble only in the second half of the 1st C. BC. Prior to this, inscriptions were applied to tuff and limestone, which were prone to erosion from wind and rain. Inscriptions were erected on public buildings, triumphal arches, columns, tombstones. They were a reflection of the cultural aspects of the history of Roman society and a means of public and solemn representation of the Roman Empire in a vast territory from the British Isles to Egypt, from Gibraltar to the deep regions of Asia.

The widespread use of writing in ancient Rome, the high percentage of the population which was literate, the growth of libraries, the opening of enterprises for correspondence and distribution of books, public readings – all this contributed to the development of the art of beautiful writing and the emergence of the profession of ‘font master’.

Literacy in Ancient Pompeii… in Lego!

It’s time to say happy International Lego Classicism Day again! Our special treat this year is a brief excursion to ancient Pompeii, to consider the nature of literacy at the site. Who could write in Pompeii, and what sorts of writing might a resident of the city have encountered in their day-to-day life? Let’s explore this through a small Lego street scene.

Punic in Wales? An intriguing inscription

Punic is the name we give to a language spoken in north Africa, a continuation of the earlier Phoenician language (originating in the Levant, around modern Syria and Lebanon), and written for the most part in a developed form of the same writing system. Punic inscriptions have surfaced in several areas around the Mediterranean, but one of the furthest-flung examples comes from a less exotic location – Holt, a town on the Welsh border, a bit to the south of Chester. So what was Punic doing there?

Image from A. Guillaume ‘The Phoenician Graffito in the Holt Collection of the National Museum of Wales’, Iraq 7 (1940), 67-8.

Handwriting in Roman London

A couple of months ago a major epigraphic discovery was announced: a number of wooden writing tablets, dated to the 1^st century AD, had been found in an excavation in London. This was a considerable archive, with 405 tablets of which 87 have been analysed and translated by Dr Roger Tomlin of Oxford. A picture of one is shown in Figure 1 below.

Figure 1. Wooden writing tablet from Roman London dated to 8th January 57 AD.

Why should we get excited about this find? Well, for one thing these objects allow us a rare chance to observe Roman handwriting. We have plenty of surviving Latin but the vast majority has come through one of two routes: either through being copied down over and over again since ancient times (which is why a lot of our earliest copies of Classical authors date from the medieval period) or through being written on a durable medium such as stone or pottery that has survived to be read today. Neither of these gives us access to what Latin looked like when it was written down by hand directly by an ancient Latin speaker him/herself.

One of the reasons why Roman handwriting is hard to find has to do with the materials that were usually written on. One place to look for handwriting is in graffiti, such as have been found on the walls of Pompeii – a favourite example of mine is shown as a drawing in Figure 2 (labyrinthus hic habitat Minotaurus written around a depiction of a labyrinth). But graffiti on walls are rare and you are much more likely to find a scrawled graffito on a sherd of pottery than on a wall, with Pompeii representing an unusual chance to observe mural graffiti.

Figure 2. Minotaur graffito from Pompeii.