Out of Styra: Quantifying a 5th-Century Greek Script

The APEX project reached a new milestone this season with the analysis of its first full regional corpus: 209 lead curse tablets from Styra on Euboea, dating to the 5th century BCE, comprising 1,857 individual letterforms.

For the first time, an entire epigraphic corpus—not just a sample—has been processed through the complete APEX pipeline: from manual tracing to feature extraction, metadata encoding, and statistical analysis. The result is a framework capable of quantifying local graphic style at unprecedented scale.

From Corpus to Dataset

Each tablet began as a published facsimile in Inscriptiones Graecae XII.9. Every letter was re-drawn in vector form and imported into the APEX 1.9 environment, where bounding boxes, glyph metadata, and geometric features were extracted.

The result is a dataset of nearly 60,000 individual measurements, capturing symmetries, curvature, stroke logic, and complexity across the full inventory. These data enable formal comparison among letter types and across inscriptions—transforming what was once qualitative observation into quantifiable structure.

Patterns in Form

Several clear patterns emerge from the Styra analysis:

• Symmetry and complexity show a strong inverse relationship. This correlation is predictable from the model itself, which rewards more symmetric forms with lower complexity scores (p. 1). I am still refining the weighting of this relationship (pp. 5–6), as symmetry’s contribution may be disproportionate to its theoretical coefficient.
• Letters whose prototypical forms balance around a central axis tend toward lower complexity scores, though theta is a notable exception. Others—particularly beta and rho—show the expected increase with intersections and irregularity.
• Roundness contributes variably to complexity, despite the formula’s explicit bias toward smoother contours. A D-shaped delta, for instance, has fewer strokes than a three-stroke Δ, as a single rounded arc replaces two straight segments (p. 7).

The way this roundness paradox resolves depends on prototypicality. Omicron and iota illustrate opposite tendencies: a rounder omicron is closer to its ideal form—fewer strokes, greater symmetry—while a rounder iota deviates from its single-stroke ideal, disrupting rather than enhancing regularity.

Within a single inscription, the internal consistency of execution can be measured by comparing like forms to like forms—omicron to omicron, for example, as on pp. 8–9. This insight provides the basis for a more formal measure of intra-inscriptional coherence, developed further in a forthcoming diachronic study of eight centuries of Euboean writing.

Finally, the most typical glyph for a given letter can be identified by calculating its Euclidean distance from the corpus mean (pp. 9–10).

The result confirms long-standing epigraphic intuitions, but does so with replicable metrics, complementing stylistic description.

Why Styra Matters

Styra’s tablets are small objects with large implications. Their relative heterogeneity, uniform medium, and chronological focus make them ideal for testing APEX’s capacity to model scribal behavior statistically. They also anchor the project’s broader Euboean dataset, providing a baseline for diachronic comparison.

By measuring how local conventions stabilized and where they flexed, APEX can begin tracing how the same principles of symmetry and reduction evolved across method—painted, carved, incised—and time.

This corpus establishes APEX as a functioning research instrument. Each glyph’s numerical record links directly to its image, provenance, and interpretive metadata. In this sense, letters become experiments—reproducible, contestable, and therefore newly scientific.

Next Steps

Upcoming phases will extend this model to additional Euboean sites, later centuries, and comparative Phoenician material, testing whether regional graphic “balance” can serve as an index of contact and adaptation. As APEX scales up and out, Styra remains its foundation: the first place where the alphabet was measured.

Download the PDF of the abridged report: A Synchronic Analysis of 5th-Century BCE Lead Tablet Inscriptions from Styra on Euboea