The small letters are not the capitals made small. They are what the capitals became when people stopped cutting them in stone and started writing them at speed, over about six hundred years, and nobody decided any of it.

• The top row has one case because in the first century there was no other. The bottom two rows have both, set together, because by then there were two alphabets and no reason to choose.
• Three hands are shown as schematic drawings after documented forms. New Roman cursive, half-uncial and Carolingian minuscule are drawn as line art, the same way the Proto-Sinaitic row is drawn on the other charts.
• Uncial is not lowercase. It is capitals relaxed for a pen: round, broad and still a single alphabet. Half-uncial is where the second one begins, because that is where letters get parts that stick up and down past the body.
• The reform is Charlemagne's. Carolingian minuscule made one hand legible from one end of Europe to the other, and settled the small letters into the shapes we still use.
• The last row is a misattribution. Italian humanists hunting classical texts found them in Carolingian copies, took the hand for Roman, and revived it. Our capitals really are Roman; our small letters are ninth-century Frankish. They are eight hundred years apart.

Twelve letters rather than twenty-six: this is the set where the change is worth drawing. Datings are conventional approximations, and the hands overlap heavily - half-uncial and uncial were written side by side for four centuries.

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