What kind of history could connect the combination of the Greek letters tau and rho traced by an anonymous hand in a Latin document written on slate in Visigothic Spain during the reign of King Recaredo (581-601 AD) and the same graphic device (a staurogram) drawn in 505 AD in Egypt by Theophanes, count of military affairs of the late Roman state, in an order on papyrus issued by himself in Greek, at the beginning of his signature written in Latin in his own hand? What kind of paths could be followed without running the risk of being naïve, in order to connect the crosses drawn all over the post Roman West by illiterates giving their consent, testifying their presence, expressing their identity on written records to similar signs drawn by illiterates in the late Roman state? What kind of interpretation could ever be possible to explain the similar complex sign we can observe in signatures written in Greek in byzantine Egypt by notaries and in signatures written in Latin in their own hand by laymen, not necessarily professional scribes, in Byzantine Italy or by Frankish aristocrats in Merovingian France or by bishops in Lombard Italy?
The project NOTAE – NOT A writtEn word but graphic symbols. An evidence-based reconstruction of another written world in pragmatic literacy from Late Antiquity to early medieval Europe – aims to answer to these and other similar questions: it represents the first attempt to investigate the presence of graphic symbols in documentary records as a historical phenomenon from Late Antiquity to early medieval Europe.
Graphic symbols are meant as graphic entities, composed by graphic signs, including alphabetical ones, drawn as a visual unit within a written text, but communicating something other, or something more, than a word of that text. We say 'symbol' and not 'sign', because there is no intrinsic prior relationship between the message-bearing graphic entity and the informations conveyed by it. Even when a graphic symbol seems to be to us, men and women of the 21th century, easy to understand (Fig. 1), the message is to discover, because that graphic entity is an object of historical investigation.
Our sources are texts generated for pragmatic purposes: petitions, official and private letters, lists, receipts, authentics from relics, contracts and so on, written on papyrus, wooden tablets, slates, parchment. In particular, legal documents enable to relate graphic symbols to illiterate people: the gradual introduction of signatures in the late antique documentary practice meant an increasing use of graphic symbols not only by literate people writing their subscriptions in their own hands but also by illiterate contract partners or witnesses, who performed graphic symbols by their own hands in the empty space left for it in the line of their subscription written by the scribe or by a delegated third-party literate person. In conclusion, NOTAE aims to investigate the graphic symbols in order to capture all the possible historical implications by studying their graphic execution as well as their models and cross influences, their context and transmission, with the purpose to frame also the category of illiterates in terms of gender and social status, for each significant period and region involved in the research; and studying evidences preserved in a problematic documentary transmission is where another challenge lies.
