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Comment by telman17 | Hacker News Reader

I always wonder how they actually date things like this. Carbon dating? Something else? Is it obviously apparent to an expert if a manuscript is 800 or 1000 years old?

(Additionally, I feel rather foolish that my first thought went to the hybrid poodle breed when I read the topic headline. My own doodle was at my feet though so it’s not completely my fault. )

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Carbon dating can help, since it gives an upper bound on the age (a terminus post quem if you want to be fancy; the manuscript wouldn't have have been written while the parchment was still hide on a cow) and the pages would probably have been written on fairly recently after being turned into parchment. Of course parchment can have its initial contents scraped off and reused, or overwritten which complicates matters. But as you say, an expert palaeographer can probably eyeball the age of a manuscript quite often, since the style of handwriting is largely dictated by both time and place. For example, to my (untrained) eye the hand in the manuscript in the article looks a bit like an insular script[0], which is specific to the British isles at time in question. An Italian of French manuscript of similar age would have a different script. And as others have pointed out for some manuscripts record sleuthing can find stuff surprisingly far back.

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insular_script

Aren't manuscripts / books usually dated? I'm reading the current-day years-based-on-the-birth-of-jesus only came in full swing around 700, which would be around the time these manuscripts were made. But there will have been other ways to indicate when it was written / what year it was.

You can rather easily infer a earliest possible date based on multiple ways, and of course intersect them to make a more solid hypothesis.

One thing is that human being generally very bad at predicting specific future event, if a text depict such an event, chances are good that the document was written after this event.

There are also things like which script/police was used, as well as other philologists cues.

The material used to make the document can also give you a rough idea of when it was created, even without isotopic analysis: people didn’t have easy access to the same technologies and primary material over time and region.

Of course, counterfeit of something that seems older than it really is always a possibility. Time travel to the past is far less probable though. :)

From records [0]. Interestingly the book had some blank pages filled with extra prayers by someone later.

You can't conceivably carbon date a scratch.

But the book could easily be carbon dated but that process has its own difficulty [1] and relates only to the time the animal or other organic matter the book is made of.

[0] https://medieval.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/catalog/manuscript_8904

[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-01499-y

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