Direction of the Script and Methods of Inscribing

North Semitic inscriptions were written continuously from right to left; this has been amply demonstrated, at least from the time of our earliest surviving examples in the second millennium B.C. It is also evident from the earliest surviving Greek inscriptions that, in adopting the Semitic alphabet, the Greeks naturally accepted with it the basic principles (a) that the correct direction of the letters, following each other in the abecedarium, was from right to left, and (b) that therefore any writing ought to begin in this retrograde way.

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