Mladen Popović, Maruf Dhali, and Lambert Schomaker have now published their groundbreaking PLOS ONE paper arguing that there are strong paleographic indications that the two halves of the Great Isaiah Scroll were written by two different writers.
More background on the project can be found in their recent presentations here, here, and here.
I am happy to announce that the recordings from the 2021 Groningen International Symposium "Digital Palaeography and Hebrew/Aramaic Scribal Culture" are now available online. These are great resources for those interested in the current state of digital paleography and the study of Hebrew/Aramaic scripts.
You can find the program and direct links on the conference web page.
The videos are hosted on the University of Groningen YouTube channel on a dedicated playlist.
Business Insider has an interesting video on modern papyrus manufacture in Al-Qaramous, Egypt, for those who are interested.
Christopher Rollston gives a fascinating discussion of recent finds of clay cylinders at Tell Umm el-Marra in Western Syria that appear to be inscribed in Early Alphabetic script. They were found in what is said to be a firm 3rd millennium BCE archeological context, which Rollston concedes could imply that Early Alphabetic was invented earlier than is normally assumed (19th-18th centuries BCE).
Here is an interesting article on early American typefaces and their modern collectors: The Puzzling Provenance of Historic Hebrew Type.
HT Agade
Thanks to everyone who helped make the 2021 International Groningen Symposium "Digital Palaeography and Hebrew/Aramaic Scribal Culture" a smashing success! It was full of exciting papers and vibrant discussion between computer scientists and paleographers, which I hope will be a starting point for many future collaborations and discussions.
For those who were not able to attend, I wanted to let you know that the sessions were recorded and will be made available online in the near future.
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UPDATE 21 April 2021
You can find the program and direct links on the conference web page.
The videos are hosted on the University of Groningen YouTube channel on a dedicated playlist.
Longacre, Drew
Writing is an expression of culture and is subject to intercultural influences. In this comparative study, I argue that Egyptian and Judean Hebrew/Aramaic scripts from 400 BCE–400 CE were heavily influenced by Greek and later Latin writing cultures, which explains many previously inexplicable phenomena. Jewish writers in the third century BCE adopted the Greek split-nibbed reed pen, which dramatically changed the appearance of Hebrew/Aramaic scripts. At the same time, the normal size for Hebrew/ Aramaic scripts shrank considerably, the pen strokes became mostly monotone and unshaded, and the scripts became more rectilinear, angular, bilinear, and square.
Each of these features appears to be due to direct imitation of contemporary Greek formal writing. Beginning in the first century BCE, Hebrew/Aramaic writers began to decorate their formal scripts with separate ornamental strokes like those of contemporary Greek and Latin calligraphic scripts. And from the second or third century CE, Hebrew/Aramaic calligraphic scripts seem to be increasingly characterized by horizontal shading, parallel to the contemporary rise of Greek and Latin shaded scripts. Furthermore, in the late Roman period, the traditional Hieratic-derived Aramaic numeral system was replaced by an alphabetic numeral system under the influence of the Greek Milesian alphabetic numerals.
