To follow up on this a bit, almost all of the alphabetic scripts (which ultimately go back to the Phoenician script) were originally commonly written boustrophedonically. Eventually scripts like Greek ended up left-to-right and the semitic scripts ended up right-to-left, but –early on– there are lots of examples of all such scripts going either way, before they finally “settled down”.

For example, the earliest known example of writing in Hebrew (the so-called Izbet Sartah Abecedary) is written left-to-right[*].

In many cases the direction of the text seemed to be decided by how the text looked in the place where it was used. For example, if you’re near a museum that contains such things check out the images on the ancient Greek pottery, etc. It was common to add small labels to indicate who the people were. In these cases it’s not uncommon for the names to be written either way, the direction apparently being decided by which way it “fit” better.

[* To be precise, the example mentioned above was actually written in “paleo-hebrew”, the script that preceded the “square” script that we commonly recognize as Hebrew today. By the time the square script showed up the direction was pretty much settled. Also the phrase “earliest known” here means “earliest know when I was more up-to-date on this stuff”; details may have changed since then….)

Something I recently learned about ancient Greek was that for a time it was written boustrophedon, alternating right-to-left, then left-to-right, like an ox plowing a field (which is where the word boustrophedon comes from).

I had always thought that ancient Greek was written right-to-left, just like Phoenician. Greek and the Semitic languages (Aramaic, Hebrew, Arabic, etc.) are all derived from Phoenician (the names of the Phoenician letters are the same as the Hebrew names, and clearly obvious in the Greek names; aleph, beth, gimmel, daleth became alpha, beta, gamma, delta).

A waiter in my local Greek diner was writing something in Greek right-to-left, and I commented on it. He told me about the boustrophedon Greek writing which eventually turned into left-to-right writing.

Useless info: There are no vowels in Phoenician. Greek gave us vowels, which are still missing in the Semitic languages. Vowels are indicated in Hebrew and Arabic by diacritical marks under the consonant letters.

(… goes back to plowing her carpet with the vacuum cleaner, boustrophedon-style …)

@Liza 215: Thank you! I’m glad to know you’re reading it. I hope you comment there some time.

And you have a fine blog, too. That post about the world’s largest photograph (as of 1904) particularly fascinates me.

Of course it’s not as glib as I make it – but at least here there is no question of who pays, I would not want to be faced with that extra layer of anxiety.

Hilariously, Boyfriend’s first movie crush? Wednesday Addams.