Word
of the Day: Boustrophedon - Η λέξη της ημέρας : Βουστροφηδόν
I want to start a new series of
blogs to talk about words that I frequently use in Ancient Scripts but
sometimes ended up poorly defined because I don't want to make the pages go on
too many tangents. Ultimately when I have enough of these "Word of the
Day" posts I will collate them into a glossary in Ancient Scripts.
Anyway, here goes the first one.
Back in the day (yes I am THAT old)
when we had books and computer screens of only 80 columns by 25 rows, I've
never lost my place in a long paragraph. However, now that we have wide
displays with high resolution, texts can span for 15 inches! When I reach the
end of a line and move my eyes back to the left of the screen to the beginning
of the next line, I lose my position in the text! It'd take me a few seconds to
get context back and find the right line. It's extremely annoying.
My
solution? Bring back boustrophedon!
What is this boustrophedon thing you
ask? It's not some high-tech fancy gadget, but instead an ancient way of
alternating the direction of writing. In the history of the Greek alphabet,
there was a transitional period between the right-to-left direction inherited
from Phoenician and the better known left-to-right direction where texts were
written in both directions, alternating every line. The letters themselves
appeared mirrored depending on the direction of writing.
In the example above, the grey
dotted arrows indicate the direction of reading. The first line of the text
starts on the left and goes to the right, then continues immediately on the
right and goes back to the left. You can imagine a farmer plowing a field with
an ox, and when he gets to one end of the field, he turns his ox around and
goes in the opposite direction to plow the next row of his field. This is in fact
the meaning of boustrophedon, which means "turning of the ox" in
Greek.
Rongorongo tablets employed an even
more extreme for of boustrophedon called reverse boustrophedon. The glyphs are
mirrored both horizontally and vertically, or in other words, rotated 180°
every line. The idea, perhaps, was to read one line, turn the tablet 180°
upside-down and read the next line. On the example to the left, you can see
that the brown glyphs are the same on both line, but they are upside down and
mirrored. If anything, this style of boustrophedon fits the meaning of the name
much better because the ox and the farmer really do turn 180° each time.
If we take this analogy of "ox
turning" to ridiculous heights, then perhaps the most efficient kind of
plowing (and writing) would to continuously turn in a circular surface. You
might think this is contrived but I have seen verdant circular fields when
flying over agricultural heartlands of America. Granted these fields are plowed
and irrigated by machines, but the same logic of efficiency holds for writing
as well. There is no interruption when the scribe arrives at the end of the
line to move down one line. Instead he/she continuously turns the circular
surface until he/she runs out of space.
And somebody precisely thought of
this principle 3700 years ago. The Phaistos Disc (pictured to the right) is a
one-of-a-kind artifact, the only example of a stamped text starting from the
outside of the disc and spirals inward in a counterclockwise direction until
the text terminates at the very center of the disc. Actually the disc is still
undeciphered. The direction of writing is inferred from physical characteristics
of the signs themselves.
I just noticed that this Blogger
layout I chose is quite narrow. You probably read this whole post without
losing your place in the text even once. I guess I've self-defeated my
arguments to bring boustrophedon back. Oh well! Next time let's try to bring
back logograms.
http://pirforosellin.blogspot.gr/ -
Επιτρέπεται η αναδημοσίευση του περιεχομένου της ιστοσελίδας εφόσον
αναφέρεται ευκρινώς η πηγή του και υπάρχει ενεργός σύνδεσμος(link ). Νόμος
2121/1993 και κανόνες Διεθνούς Δικαίου που ισχύουν στην Ελλάδα.3400.
ΕΠΙΣΗΜΑΝΣΗ
Ορισμένα αναρτώμενα από το διαδίκτυο κείμενα ή
εικόνες (με σχετική σημείωση της πηγής), θεωρούμε ότι είναι δημόσια. Αν
υπάρχουν δικαιώματα συγγραφέων, παρακαλούμε ενημερώστε μας για να τα
αφαιρέσουμε. Επίσης σημειώνεται ότι οι απόψεις του ιστολόγιου μπορεί να μην
συμπίπτουν με τα περιεχόμενα του άρθρου. Για τα άρθρα που δημοσιεύονται εδώ,
ουδεμία ευθύνη εκ του νόμου φέρουμε καθώς απηχούν αποκλειστικά τις απόψεις των
συντακτών τους και δεν δεσμεύουν καθ’ οιονδήποτε τρόπο το ιστολόγιο.
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