Boustrophedon is a style of writing in which alternate lines of writing are reversed, with letters also written in reverse, mirror-style.
The original term comes from Ancient Greek: “like the ox turns [while plowing]”. It is mostly seen in ancient manuscripts and other inscriptions. It was a common way of writing on stone in Ancient Greece.
A fun variation is the reverse boustrophedon: the text in alternate lines is rotated 180 degrees rather than mirrored.
The reader begins at the bottom left-hand corner of a tablet, reads a line from left to right, then rotates the tablet 180 degrees to continue on the next line from left to right again. When reading one line, the lines above and below it appear upside down.
I heard about it on a podcast about the Rapa Nui people of Easter Island. They use used the reverse boustrophedon style for their system of glyphs called Rongorongo, which remains undeciphered.
Are there any scripts in which all the characters are symmetrical across the vertical axis? So that, when written like this, the letters would be the same either way.
Edit: oh wait, I know one! Ogham, from medieval Ireland. There is one character that’s not symmetrical, but it’s apparently one of the five “additional” characters that do not appear in the majority of known examples of ogham
I used to write things in Ogham when I was in high school when I didn’t want my teachers to know what I was writing.
My friends and I also wrote notes to each other in Tolkien runes.
We might have been nerdy, but we never had to read our notes aloud in class.
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