Manuscript

A manuscript (Latin manu scriptus, "written by hand"), strictly speaking, is any written document that is put down by hand, in contrast to being printed or reproduced some other way. Information may be hand-recorded in other ways than in manuscripts, as inscriptions that are chiselled upon a hard material or scratched (the original meaning of graffiti) as with a knife point in plaster or with a stylus on a waxed tablet, (the way Romans made notes), or are in cuneiform writing, impressed with a pointed stylus in a flat tablet of unbaked clay.

Manuscripts in history

The traditional abbreviations are ms for manuscript and mss for manuscripts. (The second s, by the way, is not simply the plural, but, by an old convention, doubles the last letter of the abbreviation to express the plural, just as pp means "pages".)

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Before the invention of printing by inked carved blocks (in China) or by moveable type in a printing press (in Europe), all written documents had to be both produced and reproduced by hand. Historically, manuscripts were produced in form of scrolls (volumen in Latin) or books (codex, codices). Manuscripts were produced on vellum and other parchments, on papyrus, and on paper. In Russia birch bark documents as old as from the 11th century have survived.

Related Topics:
Moveable type - Printing press - Scroll - Book - Codex - Vellum - Parchment - Papyrus - Paper - Birch bark document

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When Greek or Latin works were published, numerous professional copies were made simultaneously by scribes in a scriptorium, each making a single copy from an original that was declaimed aloud.

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The oldest manuscripts have been preserved by the perfect dryness of their resting places, whether placed within sarcophagi in Egyptian tombs, or reused as mummy-wrappings, discarded in the middens of Oxyrhyncus or secreted for safe-keeping in jars and buried (Nag Hammadi library) or stored in dry caves (Dead Sea scrolls). Manuscripts in Tocharian languages, written on palm leaves, survived in desert burials in the Tarim Basin of Central Asia. Manuscripts preserved in volcanic ash preserve some of the Greek library of the Villa of the Papyri in Herculaneum.

Related Topics:
Sarcophagi - Mummy - Midden - Oxyrhyncus - Nag Hammadi library - Tocharian languages - Tarim Basin - Villa of the Papyri - Herculaneum

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Ironically, the manuscripts that were being most carefully preserved in the libraries of Antiquity are all lost.

Related Topics:
Ironically - Antiquity

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The study of the writing, or "hand" in surviving manuscripts is termed palaeography. In the West from the classical period through the early centuries of the Christian era, manuscripts were written without spaces between the words (scriptio continua), which makes them especially hard for the untrained to read. Extant copies of these early manuscripts written in Greek or Latin and usually dating from the 4th century to the 8th century, are classified according to their use of either all upper case or all lower case letters. Manuscripts using all upper case letters are called uncials, those using all lower case are called cursives. Early Hebrew manuscripts, such as the Dead Sea scrolls make no such differentiation.

Related Topics:
Palaeography - The West - Classical period - Christian era - Scriptio continua - Greek - Latin - 4th century - 8th century - Upper case - Lower case letter - Uncial - Hebrew - Dead Sea scrolls

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