And, indeed, it is a fact that all
early writing habitually took the opposite direction from that which is
now universal in western countries. Every schoolboy knows, for instance
(or at least he would if he came up to the proper Macaulay standard),
that Hebrew is written from right to left, and that each book begins at
the wrong cover. The reason is that words, and letters, and
hieroglyphics were originally carved, scratched, or incised, instead of
being written with coloured ink, and the hand was thus allowed to follow
its natural bent, and to proceed, as we all do in naive drawing, with a
free curve from the right leftward.
Nevertheless, the very same fact--that we use the right hand alone in
writing--made the letters run the opposite way in the end; and the
change was due to the use of ink and other pigments for staining
papyrus, parchment, or paper. If the hand in this case moved from right
to left it would of course smear what it had already written; and to
prevent such untidy smudging of the words, the order of writing was
reversed from left rightward. The use of wax tablets also, no doubt,
helped forward the revolution, for in this case, too, the hand would
cover and rub out the words written.
The strict dependence of writing, indeed, upon the material employed is
nowhere better shown than in the case of the Assyrian cuneiform
inscriptions. The ordinary substitute for cream-laid note in the
Euphrates valley in its palmy days was a clay or terra-cotta tablet, on
which the words to be recorded--usually a deed of sale or something of
the sort--were impressed while it was wet and then baked in, solid.
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