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This study investigates the earliest surviving Tibetan paper, from the Dunhuang cave library, using paper fibre analysis combined with codicological, palaeographical and textual information. The hypotheses tested by this method concern the regional origins and production centres of early Tibetan paper and methods for dating this material. Using overlapping typologies, we classify a sample of manuscripts into coherent groups, relating them to particular 'book cultures'. By linking three main manuscript groups to different geographical regions, we offer new insights into an important manuscript collection, and show that the method of overlapping typologies has the potential to yield further insights. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The chronology of the Ancient South Arabian civilisation in the first millennium BC has always been based on palaeography. In the past, however, palaeographical comparison of the extant inscriptions was in fact the only reliable tool for historical reconstruction of that period; absolute dates were confined to the alleged synchronism of the Sabaean ruler Karibʾil Watar in Assyrian sources in the early seventh century BC. Only recently have some Ancient South Arabian inscriptions come to light, which are dated according to an absolute (foreign) era and thus allow us, for the first time, to determine the absolute date of a particular ductus of the script in that period. Furthermore, the radiocarbon analyses of a number of inscribed wooden sticks from ancient Yemen have helped to establish a reliable chronology for this particular type of documentation as well (see Drewes et al., this volume). Based on this new evidence, the paper gives a general overview of the development of the Ancient South Arabian script from its emergence in the late second millennium BC up to the latest instances in the mid-sixth century AD. The different periods of both monumental and minuscule variants of this script are characterised by representative examples of established chronology in order to provide some reliable cornerstones for dating epigraphic material from pre-Islamic Yemen. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Phylogenetic systematics, developed in biology for reconstructing evolutionary histories of organisms, has been successfully applied to languages and manuscripts. This paper pioneers its use for writing systems, with Linear B, a pre-alphabetic Greek script, the test subject. Taxa represent scribal hands. Phylogenetic characters represent different forms of the same Linear B sign. The tree produced by running the data matrix using parsimony as the optimality criterion is consistent with and clarifies what is known or hypothesized about the history of Linear B. This demonstrates the effectiveness of using phylogenetic analysis to reconstruct the history of writing systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]