Several years ago, Ryan Baumann, a digital humanities developer at Duke University, was leafing through an early 20th-century collection of ancient Greek manuscripts when he ran across an intriguing comment. The author noted that there was an undeciphered form of shorthand in the margins of a piece of papyrus and added a hopeful note that perhaps future scholars might be able to read it. The casual aside set Baumann off on a new journey to unlock the secrets of an ancient code.
Initially, Baumann told me, he thought that perhaps everything had been deciphered. “I thought to myself, ‘Well, it’s been about 100 years, maybe someone has figured it out!’ So, I looked into it, and to my delight, the system of ancient Greek shorthand does seem to have been largely figured out.” To his dismay, though, this century-spanning scholarly achievement has also been largely overlooked and underexplored. Very few people are interested in shorthand.
Why does this matter? Well, ancient Greek and Latin shorthand (also known as stenography or tachygraphy) were the bedrock of ancient writing and record keeping. The scripts that emerged in the first century BCE allowed people to record things faster than “normal.” Just like today, said Baumann, stenography was “crucially important” for recording courtroom proceedings and political speeches, but dictation was also used to compose letters, philosophy, and narrative. Everything from ancient romance novels to foundational political theories were first transcribed in shorthand. Often this would have happened on erasable wax tablets (we have many examples from archaeological excavations), but shorthand was also used on papyri and parchment.
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Though his primary training was in computer science, Baumann has been working with the Duke Collaboratory for Classics Computing since 2013 and on papyri since 2007. The Duke Collaboratory runs papyri.info, an open access online resource that gathers information about ancient Greek papyrus manuscripts and their contents. Duke is one of the foremost institutions in the world for working on ancient manuscripts—it not only has a remarkable collection, it is the home of numerous prominent manuscript experts. So, Baumann was in a position to think more about these ancient codes.
There are various different theories about where shorthand came from but most of the legends about its origins identify it as “slave knowledge.” Latin shorthand may have had its origins in Greek shorthand but the most popular theory, since the Christian writer Jerome in the fifth century, connects it to Tiro, the best known of the politician Cicero’s secretaries. According to tradition, it is Tiro who was responsible for inventing a multiple-thousand system of abbreviations—often referred to as Tironian Notes—that condensed spoken word into a terse system. There’s some evidence that elite authors thought shorthand was déclassé: Seneca described it as “slavish brands” devised by “the lowest quality slaves.”
It’s easy to see why this was important for Tiro as he was charged with recording a chunk of the nearly 90,000 letters that Cicero wrote in his lifetime. But shorthand wasn’t only useful for letters. It had huge bureaucratic value (and has a great deal in common with the systems of abbreviation that we find in technical literature about ancient science and mathematics). This meant that some important legal documents were transcribed by enslaved workers using abbreviations and symbols.
Unlike the forms of shorthand that dominated 20th-century Europe and America, however, ancient Greek and Latin shorthand was not always standardized and was uncompromisingly difficult to learn. A second-century contract from Egypt tells us that it took two years for a literate enslaved child to become proficient in Greek shorthand. The curriculum began with the student memorizing a basic set of signs vowels, syllables, word endings, and phrases before progressing to a more complicated system of compound signs. In this second step a single sign was modified by a dot or dash to augment its meaning. With only a few exceptions, these symbols were in no way pictographic, so you couldn’t guess what they meant just by looking at them. This made it useful for military communications and espionage: Both Julius Caesar and the Jewish freedom fighters who led the mid-second-century Bar Kochba revolt used it to send messages.
Those who learned ancient shorthand were aided by something called the “commentary,” a set of sentences that served as mnemonic devices for the student. A copy of this commentary was published by Sofía Torallas Tovar and Klass Worp in the important volume To the Origins of Greek Stenography. It has helped scholars decipher more complex signs and understand how it was learned. “At the conclusion of this process,” said Baumann, “the student would have learned a system of over 800 signs alongside what is essentially a gigantic lookup table of over 4,000 words and phrases.”
In my own work I have argued that, to the best of our knowledge, only those who went through this arduous process—that is enslaved and formerly enslaved workers—could actually read it. To the untrained eye it resembles squiggles or chicken scratch. Given the transformational nature of translating the spoken word first into symbols and subsequently into ancient Greek (or Latin) literacy seems important. (Full disclosure: I have an article coming out early next year in the Journal of Theological Studies in which I discuss the ramifications of this for thinking about the composition of early Christian texts and the ways in which enslaved people might have resisted structures of power).
To complicate the matter even more for modern scholars, people modified and personalized their shorthand systems. So, while a child might have learned a standard form as part of their education, they quickly modified it so that it worked for them. The marginalia in a fragment of Plato discussed by Kathleen McNamee, for example, uses a somewhat modified system. Those who worked in bureaucracy needed legal terms and measurements and those who assisted doctors needed a lot of signs for ailments and body parts. While we have largely deciphered Greek shorthand, we still have to be attentive to it. Dr. Jeremiah Coogan told me that it is highly contextual and emerges out of the practical contexts of workshops, bureaucratic spaces, and households.
The problem, Baumann told me, is that scholars haven’t been that interested in shorthand and, thus, haven’t been fully or accurately noting its presence. When an editor just notes that there were “shorthand marks” in a particular ancient text this doesn’t tell us even how many there were much less what they were. Sometimes editors of manuscripts describe it not as shorthand, but as an “unidentified script.” If an entire text was written in shorthand, it might have been misidentified at some point in its study. And, in some cases, editors might not have registered it at all. The lack of editorial consistency makes it difficult to get a sense of how much untranslated shorthand there even is. Short of going back and reviewing the hundreds of thousands of papyrological fragments sat in university libraries, museums, and private collections we can’t really be sure what is out there.
This is one space where digitization could be helpful if additional resources were available to scholars. We lack the adequate tools for notation: we don’t have a font for shorthand script so even if you wanted to transcribe ancient shorthand and print it in a book or put it on a website like papyri.info you wouldn’t be able to. In 1992, Giovanna Menci started a database of papyri that included shorthand with the goal of eventually establishing a corpus of shorthand texts. But the project was abandoned due to technological challenges and a shortage of funding.
What this means, then, is that there are codes inscribed in ancient manuscripts that we could read but aren’t. This material might give us insight into the hidden spaces of ancient writing culture and access to scientific thinking, bureaucratic processes, and literary interpretation. It’s especially promising for helping us understand the obscured lives of enslaved people and decipher the workings of the Roman military. But, currently, only a select group of scholars and librarians are even thinking about it. The first steps, Baumann said, are to produce transcriptions and readings of the papyri we have and expand our understanding of how it worked. This is still an obscure sub-sub-discipline and just gathering what we know so far would allow a larger number of people to participate in the project. If we want to understand stenography, Baumann told me, “We must first reanimate the dead understanding of ancient Greek shorthand.” If we do that then “knowledge that was lost for over a millennium can be reclaimed.”
