Chronological Profiling for Paleography

This paper approaches manuscript dating from a Bayesian perspective. Prior work on paleographic date recovery has generally sought to predict a single date for a manuscript. Bayesian analysis makes it possible to estimate a probability distribution that varies with respect to time. This in turn enables a number of alternative analyses that may be of more use to practitioners. For example, it may be useful to identify a range of years that will include a document's creation date with a particular confidence level. The methods are demonstrated on a selection of Syriac documents created prior to 1300 CE.