Scholars have traditionally categorised early Syriac manuscripts as either Estrangela or Serto. The same categories dominate the prevailing narrative of how Syriac script is thought to have developed. Most see Estrangela as the earliest strata of Syriac and Serto as a later development. More recent scholarship explores how early manuscripts support neither this stark division between script styles nor a sequential development. Of particular challenge to this paradigm are a series of securely dated colophons and notes which use a script style different than the main part of the text. But previous work has looked at only five examples of this phenomenon. By expanding this investigation to 30 examples and drawing upon a recent compiled digital corpus of over 100,000 early Syriac letter forms, the present article explores how large data sets, digital analysis, and visual analytics can help one better understand the development of Aramaic scripts.

传统上，学者将早期的叙利亚手稿归类为Estrangela或Serto。在叙事脚本被认为是如何发展的主流叙述中，这些类别也占主导地位。多数人将埃斯特兰奇拉（Estrangela）作为叙利亚和塞托（Serto）的最早地层，作为后来的发展。最近的学术研究探索了早期手稿如何既不支持脚本样式之间的这种鲜明区分，也不支持顺序开发。该范式面临的特别挑战是一系列使用日期固定的，日期与正文不同的脚本样式和注释。但是以前的工作只研究了这种现象的五个例子。通过将这项调查扩展到30个示例，并利用最近汇编的超过100,000个叙利亚早期字母形式的数字语料库，本文探索了大型数据集，