Reasoning and symbolism in Diophantus 339
abbreviation as against a fully spelled out word, are tenuous. Sometimes
one discerns affi nities: the same sequence of symbols is sometimes used in
a group of manuscripts, suggesting a common origin (and why shouldn’t a
scribe be infl uenced by what he has in his source?). But such cases are rare
while, on the whole, patterns are more oft en found inside a single manu-
script: a tendency to avoid abbreviations for a stretch of writing, then a
tendency to put them in...
However, Tannery did not make appeal to this argument – which would
have put his edition in the uncomfortable position of being, in a central
way, Tannery’s rather than Diophantus’. So he made appeal to another
argument. When criticized by Hultsch ( 1894 ) for his failure to note scribal
variation for symbolism in his apparatus, Tannery replied that he had
found that tedious,^9 because – so he had implied – Diophantus had purely
abbreviated forms, that is in line with Tannery’s edition – which then were
corrupted by the manuscript tradition. Th is question merits consideration.
In the handful of thirteenth-century manuscripts we possess (the earli-
est), symbolism is more frequent. Th us the tendency of scribes, during the
historical stretch for which we have direct evidence , was to resolve abbrevia-
tions into words. Th e simplest hypothesis, then, would be that of a simple
extrapolation: throughout, scribes tend to resolve abbreviations – hence,
Diophantus himself must have produced a strict abbreviated text.
Th is is false, I think, for the following reasons. First, the relevant con-
sideration is not that of Diophantus’ manuscript tradition alone, but that
of scribal practice in general. We may then witness a peak in the use of
abbreviations in Byzantine technical manuscripts of the relevant period of
the twelft h and thirteenth centuries – which are in general characterized
by minute writing aiming to pack as much as possible into the page. Early
minuscule manuscripts, and of course majuscule texts, oft en are more of
luxury objects and have fewer abbreviations; humanist manuscripts, again,
for similar reasons, tend to have fewer abbreviations. Th us the evidence of
the process of resolution of abbreviations, from the thirteenth to the six-
teenth centuries, may not be extended into the past, as an hypothetical series
of resolution stretching all the way from as far back as the fourth century ce.
Second, I fi nd it striking that the Arabic tradition knows nothing of
Diophantus’ symbols. Th ere are of course good linguistic reasons why
Arabic (as well as Syriac and Hebrew) would not rely as much on the
kind of abbreviation typical to the Greek and Latin tradition. Indeed, to
continue with the linguistic typology, symbolism is also independently
9 T1893/5: xxxiv–xlii.