Archaeometry 49, 4 (2007) 749–764 doi: 10.1111/j.1475-4754.2007.00333.x *Received 15 August 2005; accepted 10 August 2006 †Corresponding author: email mpanagop@central.ntua.gr © University of Oxford, 2007 Blackwell Publishing Ltd Oxford, UK ARCH Archaeometry 0003-813X © University of Oxford, 2007 XXX Original Articles Identifying hands on ancient athenian inscriptions S. V. Tracy et al. *Received 15 August 2005; accepted 10 August 2006 IDENTIFYING HANDS ON ANCIENT ATHENIAN INSCRIPTIONS: FIRST STEPS TOWARDS A DIGITAL APPROACH* S. V. TRACY American School of Classical Studies at Athens, 54 Souidas Street, GD-106 76, Athens, Greece C. PAPAODYSSEUS,† P. ROUSSOPOULOS, M. PANAGOPOULOS, D. FRAGOULIS, D. DAFI and TH. PANAGOPOULOS National Technical University of Athens, School of Computer and Electrical Engineering, Zografou 157 73, Greece In this paper, a novel methodology is introduced for the identification of the workmen (hands) that carved ancient inscriptions. This methodology employs specific geometric characteristics of each letter and computes the mean value and variance of these characteristics for each one of the available inscriptions separately. Subsequently, we define original decision thresholds that make use of the statistical distribution of the difference of these values in order to attribute an inscription to a given hand. The inscriptions of the hands under consideration have been properly processed and all information extracted, both visual and statistical, is stored in a suitable database. Application of this methodology to nine Athenian inscriptions, some of which contain very similar letters, offered correct, clear-cut hand identification. KEYWORDS: AUTOMATED LETTER-CUTTER IDENTIFICATION, AUTOMATED INSCRIBER IDENTIFICATION, HANDWRITER IDENTIFICATION, AUTOMATED CLASSIFICATION OF HANDWRITING STYLE, STATISTICAL HANDWRITING RECOGNITION 1 INTRODUCTION—A BRIEF DESCRIPTION OF THE PROBLEM AND THE APPLIED METHODOLOGY What follows is a first methodological article exploring the possibility of using digital technology to aid the recognition of hands on ancient Athenian inscriptions. In Tracy (1990, 1995, 2003), it has been established that it is actually possible to reliably identify the hands of individual ancient letter-cutters. Nevertheless, employing mathematics, digital image processing and pattern recognition for identifying the hand that formed an inscription may make the process automated and essentially more objective. In fact, as things are at the present time, identifying writers of ancient inscriptions incorporates a significant amount of subjectivity. The first step towards the development of the methodology introduced in this paper was to set up a test case. Professor S. V. Tracy, as the epigraphist—that is, the specialist in inscriptions among the authors—provided the rest of the team with photographs of stones cut by very prolific workmen who were inscribing decrees in Athens during the second half of the third century bc. In particular, Professor Tracy offered high-quality digital images of the following inscriptions with reference numbers: IG II 2 336, Agora XV 240, Agora XVI 208, IG