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| When did people first
start analyzing handwriting? It began when handwriting began.
Cursive handwriting goes back to the dawn of history. Thousands
of years before Christ, people in China and the Middle East
were using handwriting. In ancient Egypt, it was called hieratic.
All kinds of ideas were used in the development of handwriting;
for instance, the ancient Greeks would write one line of handwriting
in one direction and then start back at the end of the line
in the other direction. From the beginning, observant people
have noticed traits from people's handwriting, and you will
find comments by Aristotle, Confucius, Julius Caesar, and Cicero
about traits they noticed from handwriting. It wasn't until
after the Renaissance and the explosion of knowledge in Europe,
that more comprehensive investigation was begun. Camillo Baldo,
an Italian professor at Bologna wrote a book on handwriting
analysis in 1622. Observant scholars like Sir Walter Scott,
Leibnitz and Goethe continued to notice traits from handwriting
but did not make systematic studies of it. In 1868, a Frenchman
invented the word Graphology. It was in Europe in the 19th century
where systematic studies began on handwriting analysis. In the
20th century, scientific methods of investigation were applied.
There are thousands of scientific experiments involving handwriting
that were done in the 20th century to investigate the relationship
between handwriting and the person writing it. America has lagged
far behind Europe and Israel in the research and application
of handwriting analysis, in part because it was initially associated
with gypsies and the occult. |
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