Epigraphers have to develop skills, based on painstaking study and wide experience, to fill the gaps in texts that survive only in fragments, and to assess the material's date and provenance. ...this work has usually relied on the deep experience of a community of scholars, who gradually learn to identify the linguistic conventions of particular societies and their customary procedures (such as ratifying a decree). The authors then applied this tool to assess a group of fragmentary texts, and to produce suggestions for the restoration of missing text, as well as for provenance and date. ...the study of the ancient world, which was initially focused almost entirely on literary texts, has expanded to engage with a wide range of sources, from shopping lists to poetry.