These are two of the most famous books in the Arabic language.
This is the Qur'an... and this is 1001 Nights.
Notice anything?
These are the front covers, though someone used to writing a European
or Indian language might expect these to be the back covers!
Arabic reads from right to left, while English or Russian or Tamil reads from left to right.
If you look at the arabic script in context, along with the rest
of the Phoenician-derived script systems, it's actually quite rare in this aspect.
Of all these writing systems, it's just Arabic, Hebrew,
and a few smaller writing systems like Syriac and Samaritan that are written this way round.
So why is Arabic written right to left?
Let's take a look at this map of the Phoenician-derived scripts. Phoenician,
the common ancestor of these scripts, descends from Proto-Sinaitic,
the first traces of alphabetic writing that we have at all.
And those are thought to come from Egyptian hieroglyphs.
The Sinaitic family is the largest family of scripts in the world, and it includes the Latin,
Greek and Cyrillic alphabets, the Indic abugidas, the Arabic alphabet, and well...
Scripts like Arabic and Hebrew are more precisely described as "abjads",
because rather than representing all sounds as independent letters like Latin does,
they only represent consonant sounds, with vowels being left up to context, or to
diacritic markings in vocalised scripture, like here, with each of these little accents
telling the reader what vowel comes after the consonant letter it's modifying.
Now back to Proto-Sinaitic, which is also technically an abjad.
Just like the Egyptian hieroglyphs it comes from, this script was probably written in either
direction, with the way the symbols were facing determining which direction to read them in.
The main two descendants of Sinaitic were Phoenician and the South Semitic family.
Almost all of this branch has now completely died out, with the exception being Ge'ez,
the abugida script of Ethiopia, which, surprise surprise, also reads left to right.
Phoenician, meanwhile, was an abjad,
which could, like its ancestors, be written in either direction...
but as it became standardised, it began to have a consistent right to left direction.
Now, its descendants were...
Wait, right to left?
Left to right, no?
No. Right to left. the same direction as Arabic.
Actually both phoenician and the ancestors of the Ge'ez script were written right to left,
suggesting that this was the preferred direction of the late era Sinaitic script altogether.
So the question isn't really why are Hebrew, Syriac,
Samaritan and Arabic written right to left?
The question should be why aren't... Ge'ez, Latin, Cyrillic, Greek,
Armenian, Bengali-Assamese, Devanagari, Gujarati, Tamil, Telugu, Burmese, Thai,
Lao, Cham, Malayalam, Khmer, Javanese, Sinhalese, Tagbanwa, Batak, Sundanese,
Hanunoo, Chakma and Tifinagh... also written in this direction.
What makes this more interesting is that this switch of direction from right to left, to left to
right, has occurred at least four times, each time independent of the others, in this script family.
Firstly, there's Ge'ez, which is descended from the ancient South Arabian script.
Then, we have these scripts here, branches from the Phoenician abjad...
The Tifinagh, script and the Greek alphabet,
which is the ancestor of Latin, Cyrillic, and probably Armenian.
Finally, we can look at the Aramaic branch, the common ancestor of Arabic, Syriac, and Brahmi.
This right here is where our final switch happens, and it's the common ancestor of
the Indic scriptures, which is why they're all written left to right.
But... why?
A common way of writing, especially on stone tablets, was something called "boustrophedon".
This literally means "like the ox that turns", and it's called that
because it's where you write every other line in an opposite direction.
A writer would start here, and then work their way across that line,
and then start writing in the opposite direction for the next line.
Here, the letters themselves would become flipped.
This is likely where these mirrored versions of the letters came from
to begin with, at least in the case of Greek.
But... why?
Is left-to-right writing... just better?
The answer is... we don't know. One theory is this.
When people were mainly writing on stone, it would be easier for the majority of people,
and by that I mean right-handed people, to hold the hammer with the right hand,
and the chisel with the left, thereby naturally leading people to keep writing leftwards.
When people switched to using ink on paper or animal skin instead, it was
easier for right-handed people to switch the direction of writing
to avoid smudging the ink as they wrote, a problem left-handed people still know today.
There are problems with this like the existence of boustrophedon, or other variations in the
direction of writing within a system, and let's not forget that the Arabs wrote on papyrus too!
Are we supposed to believe that they're just better at not smudging stuff?
Still, it may at least help to explain why this directional switch was so common.
Some things, we just don't know. This could all just be one big coincidence.
In the wider scheme of things, these four switches of direction (five if you count
Mongolian) in this entire family tree... sure they happen to be in convenient points, especially
in the cases of Brahmi and Greek, to affect large portions of the Sinaitic script family,
but actually only switching four times in this whole family of constantly evolving scripts?
especially when you include all the ones that have died out, actually might not be that much.
The thing is, we don't know what the probability of a language's
script switching direction is, and we can't!
We only have a sample size of one to tell from. We only have one Earth, one Sinaitic script
family. We can't go look at a load of parallel universes and see in how many of them Greek and
Brahmi switch direction, or in how many of them Arabic is the one to switch to left to right.
At least not yet.
So if there isn't an answer, why talk about it?
How is this interesting?
Well, it's not.