CURSIVE, HANDWRITING. — By "cursive" (s. c.) is meant that handwriting executed rapidly, *currenti calamo*, in contrast to upright or set hand.
I. In Greek Paleography
In ancient Greece, from the 3rd century B.C. onward, alongside the *uncial* (v.) there appears a more current type of writing, used for ordinary correspondence, contracts, wills, receipts, notes, and, in short, for all the affairs of daily life. This type of writing, called cursive, is distinguished from uncial by the fact that the letters exhibit certain characteristics arising from the scribe’s carelessness or from the desire to lift the pen as little as possible in order to write more quickly; thus some letters are formed with fewer strokes than their uncial counterparts (*leta* in two strokes instead of three: h for H; the *tau* in a single stroke instead of two: v for T); others are joined together by a stroke that unites the last part of one letter with the first part of the next; angles are sometimes rounded, sometimes narrowed or disappear; some strokes are simplified, shortened, or even omitted. But apart from the deformations that logically result from this, the fundamental shape of the letters in cursive remains the same as in uncial: it is essential, therefore, not to confuse cursive with *minuscule* (v.), which is a distinctly Byzantine product.The earliest datable examples of Greek cursive writing that have come down to us go back to about the middle of the 3rd century B.C., but it is very difficult, if not impossible, to draw a clear line of demarcation between uncial and cursive, because the transition between the two types is imperceptible. Some 3rd-century B.C. papyri in uncial script also display features of cursive: H and T in the forms already mentioned (h and v) and various letter ligatures. One can therefore only affirm that by the 3rd century B.C. cursive was in full development.
As found in papyri, ostraca, wax tablets, etc., cursive is usually divided into three phases, corresponding to the three different regimes that Egypt underwent after the fall of the *ancient Egyptian empire*: the Ptolemaic, from 323 to 30 B.C.; the Roman, from Augustus’ conquest until the end of the 3rd century; and the Byzantine, down to the date of the Arab conquest (640–43) and beyond. Each change of regime brought a corresponding change in the general character of cursive, due to the influence of the official script of the time (cf. E. M. Thompson, p. 151). However, an attempt to classify cursive from the 3rd century B.C. to the 8th century A.D. is almost a vain undertaking, as with the handwritings of our own day, because cursive, except in official documents, naturally has too subjective a character in other records, so that even in more recent centuries, alongside new letter forms, old ones are still encountered. In very general terms, however, Ptolemaic-era cursive, as seen in 3rd- and 2nd-century B.C. papyri (no material exists to judge the general characteristics of that of the 1st century B.C.), displays very simple and unmistakable forms, in contrast to those of the *Roman period*, which are rounded and flowing. Byzantine-period cursive, on the other hand, is characterized by an artificiality of forms, revealed in the exaggerated length of the strokes of some letters, projected upward or downward between the lines: one notes in the writing an effort toward elegance. From Byzantine-style cursive there then developed the minuscule.