The Lapidary Paleography of Olbia: Current State /Scientific Bulletin of the Izmail State University of Humanities. Section Historical Sciences

It is considered that the main problem of the development of Olbian lapidary paleography is the practical absence of precisely dated monuments, therefore there is an urgent need for its development and improvement. A selective review of the state of lapidary paleography of Olbia over the past 50 years revealed some negative trends in the development of this auxiliary historical discipline. Examples of researchers’ attempts to determine the paleographic date of a monument are given, ignoring the real accuracy of the paleographic method, and this is one of the negative modern trends in the use of paleographic analysis. A type of false algorithm also consists in the preliminary application of other considerations, different from paleography (historical, numismatic, etc.); in the future, not a real, but a formal «paleographic analysis» is added to the decision already made about the date of the monument, which supposedly confirms this dating.