Augustus Mosaic Lettering

#roman #mosaic #lettering #augustus

Adding letters to mosaics tells us something rather disconcerting about levels of literacy amongst craftsmen in the Roman Empire. The designer of this mosaic had excellent layout skills but his letter forms suggest he was not a scribe himself and probably recited letters and got a scribe to write them down for him and his team to copy. 

The letter forms are more like written text preserved on papyri than the forms we see on carved inscriptions and the last 2 letters ... whether thats a delibarate abbreviation or some one running out of the right tesserae color ...