One Thousand and One Conjectures

Nearly everything quantitative about ordinary pre-print writing comes from three preservation flukes — the dry rubbish mounds of Oxyrhynchus, the waterlogged fort at Vindolanda, and the anaerobic clay under Novgorod's streets. These are different climates, centuries, empires, and languages, so if everyday…

The choice between a potsherd and a papyrus sheet is usually told as a story about poverty, but it is better modeled as freight economics: papyrus was manufactured in the Nile valley and Delta, and its effective price rose with every desert…

Documentary papyri carry day-and-month dates, so the entire dated corpus is a calendar of when ordinary writing happened — and different genres should obey different clocks. Contracts and receipts should spike with the agrarian-fiscal cycle of harvest, tax deadlines, and sowing leases,…

A potsherd is a fixed, curved, often small writing surface, and that geometry should discipline the text written on it: line lengths truncated at sherd width, and — the sharper effect — abbreviation and symbol rates rising to squeeze standard formulas into…

The village notary office of Tebtunis left day-by-day registers of every document it drew up — the closest thing antiquity offers to a notarial cash register. Demand for documents should breathe with the agrarian year: leases before sowing, loans in the hungry…

On Egypt's Eastern Desert ostraca, soldiers and contractors wrote in both Greek and Latin, and the conventional guess ties language choice to the writer's origin. The institutional alternative is starker: Latin was the army's paperwork register, so its share should track the…

Vindolanda's fame rests on its ink leaf-tablets, but the excavations also recovered stylus tablets — wax-coated boards for legal and financial writing — in comparable or greater numbers, and they remain overwhelmingly undeciphered because the wax is gone and only stray scratches…

A wax tablet was designed to be erased, so what survives as legible stylus scratches on the wood beneath is text that was pressed hard, written last, or never smoothed over — which should systematically favor final, formal, legal acts over the…

The earliest Novgorod birch-bark letters read like tokens accompanying a spoken message; the later ones read like self-sufficient documents with greetings, structured requests, and closings. If writing among the townsfolk of Rus' matured from speech-adjunct to autonomous instrument, the corpus should show…

The roughly 130 lead prayers from the sacred spring at Bath are often imagined as furious bathers scratching their own maledictions, but the tablets' palaeography permits a head count of hands, and hands are the tell: personal writing predicts nearly as many…

A striking fraction of British curse tablets carry pseudo-writing — rows of writing-like marks by people who could not write but knew the god required a document. Pseudo-writing is the purest evidence that the form of writing had social force independent of…

Abecedaria — bare alphabets written out in order — are filed as school exercises, but their find-contexts tell a stranger story: alphabets turn up cut on tomb walls, scratched at sanctuaries, and deposited in foundations, places where no pupil practiced. If the…