Typology of Forged Manuscripts

The typology of forged manuscripts adopted by the project separates forgeries into four categories based on their script, text, or physical characteristics.

Nonsensical script

This category is a spectrum running between two types of script:

• Simulated Alphabet: Fabricated alphabetic forms: the majority of forms are not identifiable, even if some resemble real forms.
• Adapted Alphabet: letters from an identifiable alphabet(s), but forming incomprehensible words.

Composite manuscript

Pieces of papyrus from separate original manuscripts, attached together to form a single sheet, thus creating a new artefact and a new text is generated, which is almost always nonsensical. Sometimes nonsensical scripts are written on these composites.

Composition

A text substantially composed by the forger. This category can be subdivided as follows.

• Adaptation from real text: A new text is generated by modifying an existing text; traces of the original text are recognisable.
• Composite text: Selections from either one or multiple existing texts have been combined and reproduced as a single, new text.
• Inspired text: The texts is inspired by ancient traditions, whether by genre or by mention of a lost work or author, but a specific model was not used.

Copies of existing texts

While such forgeries all reproduce, at least in aspiration, an existing ancient text, sub-categories can be recognised. As separating the first two categories depends to some extent on divining the intent of the forger, they cannot always be distinguished.

• Accidental Variation: A text which attempts to faithfully reproduce a model, but which contains unintentional variants.
• Deliberate Variation: A text which has exactly copied an existing model, but in which variations from the existing text have been deliberately introduced.
• Exact text: A forgery which reproduces the exact text of an existing model, but may have an independent or modified format.