This chapter does not offer a comprehensive history of scholarly attempts to establish attributions but simply seeks to identify a number of fields in which interesting problems of this kind have been recognised and addressed. Erudite disputes over the identity of the creators of texts are probably as old as writing, and may well predate it. Many ancient, orally transmitted works descended along with the names of their presumed originators, which must sometimes have been questioned, as happens to present-day ‘Beecham’ and ‘Churchill’ anecdotes when they are told (often with greater authority) about other conductors and politicians. Writing, and the storing of records together in archives, brought the need to identify the physical item by a title or label, which usually included the name of its presumed author.

The scholarly study of attributions made its appearance at a period when literacy had ceased to be the monopoly of small cadres of specialist scribes and reading was for the first time practised by a substantial public, ministered to by booksellers, stationers, scribal publishers, schoolmasters and grammarians. In the Western tradition such a public seems first to have consolidated itself in the fifth and fourth centuries bce in Athens, contemporaneously with the intellectual ferment aroused by the teaching of the sophists. The study of attribution presupposes the existence of libraries in which texts may be checked against others of known date and authorship and the meaning of allusions ascertained.