The Hands of Amitāyus

This experiment is part of a research project on scribal identification in Chinese manuscripts from Dunhuang.

The images are drawn from a curated corpus of ninth-century copies of the Amitāyus Sūtra attributed, through colophons, to named professional scribes. In each trial, you will be shown three isolated text-line images taken from different physical manuscripts. The lines share at least ten consecutive characters of overlapping text.

Exactly two of the lines were copied by the same scribe, while the third was copied by a different scribe. Your task is to identify the pair of lines that you believe was written by the same hand.

Your responses are anonymous and will be used solely for research purposes.