Mark Cartwright, age 15, of Gulfport, Miss., for his question:

CAN YOU EXPLAIN PALEOGRAPHY?

Paleography, in its widest sense, is the study and analysis of the writing of ancient times and of the Middle Ages. In its restricted sense, paleography denotes only the study of writing on such destructible materials as papyrus, wax, parchment and paper.

Paleography is usually further limited to the study of writing in Greek and Latin and their derivatives. A related science, epigraphy, is devoted to the study of inscriptions engraved on stone or metal.

The most commonly used ancient writing materials were the wax tablet, the papyrus roll and later the parchment codex, or book.

Wax tablets were convenient for letters, accounts and writing of a temporary nature. Papyrus sheets, made into rolls from 20 to 30 feet in length, provided the most common writing material of classical antiquity, being in constant use from about 500 B.C. until about A.D. 300 and even later. Parchment, known to have been used for literary works in Rome as early as the first century A.D. became increasingly popular.

In both papyrus rolls and the parchment books that supplanted them, prose texts were written in columns. Until the 9th century, words were not separated, although in some writing, both inscriptions and literary works, dots or points were used as division.

The difficulty of deciphering medieval manuscripts arises largely from errors in transcription by scribes who were either careless or uneducated, as well as from the contractions, abbreviations and ligatures that were employed to economize on labor and expensive parchment. In early manuscripts, abbreviations were rarely used, but they became more and more numerous in succeeding centuries.

Two styles of penmanship in antiquity are known: formal literary, or book hand, and a more rapid cursive hand, which was used for nonliterary, everyday purposes.

All Greek and Roman manuscripts, ancient and medieval, are classified as either majuscule, that is written in large letters, or as minuscule, written in small letters.

Majuscule writing is subdivided into (1) capitals, either square capitals, carefully formed with angles to resemble inscriptions carved on stone, or rustic capitals, drawn with somewhat greater freedom with oblique and short strokes; and (2) unicals, modified capitals in which curves are favored and angles avoided as much as possible.

Minuscules resulted from the rapid writing of majuscules under cursive influence. The letters became changed in form and reduced in size, but minuscule writing is, in most instances, distinct from cursive writing.

The earliest Greek literary papyrus, a fragment of the "Persae" by the poet Timotheus (445 357 B.C.) is written in capital letters similar to those of inscriptions. By the third century B.C. the book hand had become unical.

Latin paleography begins with the majuscule writing found in the earliest Latin manuscripts extent, such as the Virgil manuscripts of the fourth and fifth centuries A.D.