Because most people are right-handed, it was only natural to write from right to left as one could hold the chisel in his/her left hand and hammer in his/her right.īut when Greek were developed around 900BCE, other materials were known as well such as dried animal skins (parchment) and papyrus. When the Proto-Canaanite alphabet was developed before 1050 BCE, people were only writing on stone. Historians have hypothesized that this is due to the mediums/material that were available to the people when the languages were invented. What we don’t know for sure is why Greek and Latin are written from left to right and Proto-Canaanite from right to left. On the other hand, languages such as Arabic, Hebrew and Persian are based on the Proto-Canaanite alphabet – an ancestor of the Phoenician script that was written from right to left hence they adopted the writing style of right to left.

For example, Western languages are based on Greek and Latin – both of these languages are written from left to right and this is why Western civilizations write from left to right.

We know that modern languages are written in a specific writing style that’s same with the writing style of the original language they’re based upon. In our search for the answer we’ve came to the conclusion that this based on two things: one that we know the answer for and one that we don’t.

Is paleo hebrew read right to left