The Development and Role of Symmetry in Ancient Scripts

Abstract

This paper investigates various scripts regarding the occurrences of signs that have mir- ror symmetry along a central vertical line. The scripts belong to one of the following three script families: the Phoenician script family, the Minoan-Mycenaean script family, and the Indus Valley script family. It is shown that many scripts in these script families contain a high percentage of signs that have mirror symmetry. Moreover, the scripts within the Phoenician and the Minoan- Mycenaean script families show a tendency of increased percentage of mirror-symmetric signs over time. For example, while the Phoenician Alphabet contains 40.9 percent mirror-symmetric signs, one of its descendants, the Euclidean Greek Alphabet, contains 59.3 percent mirror-symmetric signs. The paper also identifies the boustrophedonic way of writing and religious writings with a deliberate mirroring as an afterlife symbolism as possible causes of the increased use of mirror- symmetric signs.