“The Phoenician alphabet was adopted by the ancient Greeks and spreak through their city-states around 1000 B.C. . . . The Greeks took the Phoenician or North Semitic alphabet and changed five consonants to vowels. . . . .

From a graphic design standpoint, the Greeks applied geometric structure and order to the uneven Phoenician characters, converting them into art forms of great harmony and beauty. The written form of Greek . . . has a visual order and balance as the letters move along a baseline in an even repetition of form and space. The letters and their component strokes are somewhat standardized because a system of horizontal, vertical, curved, and diagonal strokes is used. In the inscriptional form, the letters became symmetrical geometric constructions. . . . [M]any letterforms, including the E and M, are based on a square, A is constructed from an equilateral triangle, and the design of the O is a near-perfect circle.

Initially the Greeks adopted the Phoenician style of writing from right to left. Later they developed a writing method called boustrophedon, from the words meaning ‘to plow a field with an ox,’ for every other line reads in the opposite direction. Line one reads from right to left; then the characters do an about-face, and line two reads from left to right. . . . Finally the Greeks adopted the left-to-right reading movement that continues to this day in Western civilization.”

—Phil Meggs & Alston Purvis, Meggs’ History of Graphic Design, 2006.