There Arabic writing is accomplished from right to left For religious, historical, cultural motivations but also for practical reasons. According to a widespread religious interpretation, in the Muslim world it is believed that every action must begin with right handsymbol of virtue and justice, while the left hand represents evil. This tradition does not only concern writing, but extends to everyday gestures such as eating or shaking hands. However, theorientation from right to left of Arabic writing has deeper roots, which sink into the history of ancient civilizations.
Historical origins of right-to-left writing
The orientation of the Arabic script derives directly fromAramaicone Semitic language very ancient. To fully understand the origins of this practice, it is useful to take a step back and look at the people of the gods Phoenicians. Around the 1000 BCthe Phoenicians abandoned the Mesopotamian cuneiform systemwhich was engraved with a stylus on clay tablets, and they adopted a new writing system, the linear alphabet. This alphabet, more flexible and quicker to use, was written on light materials such as parchment or papyrus, and was traced from right to left. At first they arranged the letters in a serpentine, moving from right to left and without interruption, starting from left to right and so on, according to a type of writing called boustrophedic, which was later abandoned.
The choice to write from right to left may have been practicesince the scribes, who used tools such as the let’s gothey found it easier avoid smudging the ink making the marks this way. Furthermore, the right-left direction would facilitate the readingas Middle Eastern scribes unrolled their papyrus to the left, while writing with their right hand. Additionally, the direction of the writing would also depend on the how the tool was used: feather, stone or inkwell; depending on whether or not you placed your hand on the support, whether you scratched it in spots or whether you used a liquid like for inks. Writing from left to right, in fact, would have entailed the risk of passing the freshly inked hand over the characters just written.
The Arabic alphabet and its evolution
The Arabic alphabet, adopted around 4th century ADis directly connected to the Aramaic one, not only for the orientation, but also for the phonetic structure and the shape of the letters. This alphabet consists of 28 letters basic, to which is added the ḥamzawhich represents a sound glottal. Each letter can take on different shapes depending on its position in the word: initial, median, final or isolated. This makes Arabic writing not only a communication tool, but also a art formespecially in calligraphywhich has a prominent place in Islamic culture.
Another interesting aspect of Arabic writing is its consonantal nature. Short vowels are not usually written, but are indicated using diacritics. This system is called abjadand differs from the traditional alphabet used in languages such as Italian, where each letter represents a vowel or consonant sound. The lack of written vowels is a common feature of many ancient Semitic scripts, such as Hebrew and Syriac, which are also oriented from right to left.
In addition to the religious explanation and the practical one linked to writing with instruments such as the quill, there are theories that connect the orientation from right to left to cognitive modalities of antiquity. Some scholars believe that early forms of human writing were influenced by observations of celestial movements or the natural orientation of the human body. Even if these hypotheses are not widely accepted, it is interesting to note how the orientation of writing has a strong connection with the cultural and geographical context of the civilizations that developed it.
From the Phoenician system came Aramaic, a language spread from Egypt to Pakistan and spoken for almost 900 years. Aramaic, also written from right to left, became consolidated as the lingua franca of Semitic populations (toRabi, Jews, Arameans, Assyrians, Canaanite-Phoenicians), meaning the one spoken by ancient and modern populations ofSouthwestern Asia and of theNorthern Africawhich greatly influenced other languages and cultures in the region.
Arabic writing, developed in the context of the Arabian Peninsula and the Islamic Empire, spread rapidly with the expansion of Islam, reaching much of the Mediterranean world and beyond. Today, it is also used for languages such as Persian, Urdu, Kurdish and Pashto. Its adoption in so many contexts is testament to its flexibility and cultural importance.
