Challenging the Estrangela / Serto Divide: Why the Standard Model of Syriac Scripts Just Doesn\u27t Work

As part of a larger digital paleography project, our team has assembled a database of tens of thousands of individual Syriac letters and letter data from 96% of extant early Syriac manuscripts that have a secure composition date. Long term, such data can help scholars develop more accurate ways to classify Syriac scripts. In the present article we use this data to illustrate just how frequently the most common way of categorizing Syriac scripts as either Estrangela or Serto does not accurately convey the ways early scribes actually wrote. In addition to challenging this “Standard Model” of Syriac scripts, the project illustrates how large data sets, digital analysis, and visual analytics can help researchers address key philological and historical problems