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September 11, 2007
In Which Direction Should One Write?
Last Thursday I took a clay tablet to lunch to show to a couple of the people that Shirley and I have lunch with almost every week. After the question, "Can anyone really read this?" the next question was "In which direction is it written?" When I answered, "left to right," one our friends said they thought Semitic languages were always "backwards." I assumed that meant right to left. Well it just isn't so with Akkadian (the language on the tablet I took for show and tell) or Ugaritic. Scribes always wrote these languages in cuneiform from left to right. Yes, "always" always has an exception here and there. For example, a few inscriptions in the short cuneiform alphabet from Ugarit and elsewhere were written right to left. Amurriyu's Sacrifice to Baal, KTU 1.77, is an example.
And it is not necessarily the case that West Semitic languages written in linear alphabets were always written from right to left either. Many of the earliest ones where written left to right. See, for example, the Lachish ewer or the ‘Izbet Sartah Sherd, among others, which were written from left to right. Other inscriptions of roughly comparable age were written right to left. Some time in the Iron Age I period writing West Semitic languages like Phoenician, Hebrew, etc, right to left became standardized.
Well, how about Greek? Was it always written left to right. No. The direction of writing in early Greek inscriptions was also not completely fixed. It could be written right to left, left to right, or even "ox-turning (βουστροφηδόν, i.e. back and forth)." The very earliest known inscriptions were written right to left. Eventually, the Greeks too adopted a standard direction of writing, in their case left to right.
I was again reminded of all this by today's announcement of the discovery of an inscribed bronze flask found in 1999 with an archaic Greek inscription. Well, archeologists discovered the flask in 1999 but the inscriptions on the flask was only recently discovered during cleaning as part of conservation work. The inscription reads in translation, "Tilephilos dedicated me to Herakles" and runs from right to left. You can read more about it in the Kathimerini article. The article has a fairly good picture, but not quite good enough for me to do a meaningful tracing.
Posted by Duane Smith at September 11, 2007 2:15 PM | Read more on Scribal Schools |
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Comments
Etruscan was also normally written from right to left and we also see boustrophedon like the ancient Greeks, as in the Tabula Capuana. On the Pyrgi Tablets, both Etruscan and Phoenician are recorded right to left.
Posted by: Glen Gordon at September 12, 2007 8:09 PM
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