archaic writing

The article explores the archaic graphic and orthographic features of the 13th-century antigraph reflected in the letter of the first half of the Tikhonravov chronograph (dating from the end of the 15th — beginning of the 16th centuries), in particular cases of writing the letter “г” with the so-called “hammer”, and the use of the forms of the asigmatic aorist of the verb “рѣщи”: “рѣхъ”, “рѣхомъ”, and the preservation of reduced forms in combination with smooth forms: *tъ-rъ-t, *tъ-lъ-t. Examples of dialect features of writing and relatively later (16th century?) cinnabar marginal notes are given, indicating the creation and existence of the manuscript in the Western Russian contact zone. A close similarity was found between the drawings of pointing fingers on its margins and similar drawings on the margins of the Vilna chronograph. It is noteworthy that there are no extant examples in the historiography of the use of the grapheme “г” with a “hammer” by ancient Russian scribes. However, in the Tikhonravov chronograph, these letters are present in various sources of its text and thus uniquely mark the initial layer of articles of the manuscript’s antigraph, which ends with an extensive prophetic compilation. The archetype of this compilation served as the source of the “Philosopher’s Speech” in the Tale of Bygone Years. The absence of archaic traces in the rest of the text may indicate some kind of mechanical connection in its antigraph of different-time manuscripts.