THE STORY OF WRITING, PART 2

So why do we write the way we do - from left to right and top to bottom? Why the change? It is not the sort of change that happens spontaneously. Something momentous must have happened to change the way of the world. It had. A new invention - which is usually the reason why we change the way we do things. And it must have been a great invention to change things the way it did - an invention as great as the telephone, the vacuum cleaner, the refrigerator and freezer, and (dare I say it) sliced bread. After all, the soft reed brush wrote quite easily, even on the comparatively rough surface of papyrus, in whatever direction it was moved. It was also easy to write with it on a horizontal writing surface, because the absorbent structure of its stem retained the ink and prevented it from flooding on to the paper.

It was the Greeks that did it. They introduced a new writing instrument, the split-reed pen, from which the quill pen, the pen nib and the fountain pen are all derived. This pen had the advantages of durability - it lasted longer - and versatility. However it did bring some new constraints. Cut from one of the hard-skinned, hollow-stemmed species of a reed similar to bamboo, and made with a point that could be cut square or fine, it stored ink in the hollow stem. This type of pen, when used on a horizontal writing surface, would easily flood and spread all of its ink over the paper. To control the flow of ink and so stop this happening, the writing surface had to be tilted so that the pen could be held more horizontal. Constraint number one. Moreover, the hard tip resisted being pushed 'nose first' across the rough papyrus page. Constraint number two. On an angled board, unlike a surface held horizontally on our knees, our hand obscures the letters to the right of us. Because the space between our body and the writing surface is reduced we have less room for the leftward movement of the arm, which, to a right-handed person is more awkward than a movement to the right. If the letters which have just been made are obscured by the hand, it is more difficult to judge their even spacing; and an inspection of early Greek inscriptions shows that even spacing was carefully sought after. At first the Greek alphabet followed its Phoenician progenitor in being written from right to left, even with this new type of writing implement (probably because of the use of smooth writing surfaces like leather and vellum which didn't catch the pen so much when it was pushed), but it wasn't long before signs of change occurred, and some inscriptions are even found which show a transition: the lines go from right to left and then back the other way, just like the plough following the ox. By the second century BC the split-reed pen was firmly established, by which time Greek writing was universally left-to-right.

It is true that in most of the Middle Eastern scripts and the Eastern alphabets which developed from them - including Arabic and Hebrew - right-to-left writing has survived. This is probably because the Egyptians delayed the adoption of the split-reed pen for so long that when they did take it up, it was at too late a stage for their writing system to be reversed. The Hebrew scribes continued to write from right to left, but they had traditionally used leather, and later, parchment as writing surfaces for the making of records. Both of these surfaces are much smoother and considerably more sympathetic to the harder writing instrument than papyrus. Similarly, the widespread use of the Arabic script, after the impetus provided by Mohammed in the sixth century, was first written extensively on animal skins before they were able to benefit from the fine smooth paper from China, of which they were the first importers. It is interesting to observe, however, that many of the elaborate cursive flourishes which appear at the base of Arabic letters are written by the scribe whilst swinging his pen from left to right.

The earliest examples of Greek writings to have survived are inscriptions engraved in stone or painted on pottery, and they tend to look rigid and geometric. No examples have been found of Greek writing on papyrus done during this period, although it must have been very widespread. After all, to do a long, carved inscription you need a draft to make sure you get it right - an error at any time usually means a restart. The stone inscriptions are carefully spaced, deliberate and elegant, but without the freedom and grace of later handwritten inscriptions - or indeed of the earlier work of the Egyptians. It seems possible that this early writing style, with its linear angularity, owed much to the common use for day-to-day note-making of another writing material: the wax tablet. This consisted of a wooden base with raised edges, the hollow being filled with a sheet of wax on which letters could be scratched with an iron or wooden stylus. The tablet could be erased by using the handle of the stylus to polish out the letters; the friction of rapid rubbing melts the wax slightly, and smoothes the waxen surface for re-use. I have never tried to write on a wax tablet, but my imagination tells me that the drawing of tight curves is not all that easy, and a more angular form of lettering using straight lines is much easier to do, and could be done by jabbing the surface with a stylus with a short straight end.

Bill Hutchings