Can you say your "ZYXs"?

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Boustrophdon

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The words you are now reading will flow from left to right, when suddenly
                     .egap eht fo nigram tfel eht ot nruter dna noitcerid tfihs yeht

What you have just read is not an idle word game, but an example of boustrophdon, defined by the American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language as "an ancient method of writing in which the lines are inscribed alternately from right to left and from left to right." In a typical example of boustrophdon, the letters on the the second line would also face to the left (as in a mirror image of their left-to-right shapes).

"Boustrophdon" means "turning like an ox while plowing" (from Greek bous, "ox," and strop-, "a turning"). It was one of the options for Greek scribes in the days before the left-to-right pattern became the norm.

The pattern also had some mystical vibes during the Middle Ages. In Victor Hugo's The Hunchback of Notre Dame, the sinister Dom Frollo muses on its astrological powers:

"Explain to me the virtues of the vertical boustrophedon, or the treasures contained in the numeral ziruph, and in those of the numeral zephirod.”

What effect did the ancient rejection of boustrophdon have on society? We should not be too hasty to dismiss the question. For instance, educational literature abounds in studies of the role of eye movements in reading skills. Website design takes eye movement seriously, not only in general, but also in consideration of how different age groups will scan a page.

Had our Roman alphabet "gone with boustrophdon," would reading speed have benefitted? Would eye fatigue have diminished? And would schoolchildren say their "ABCs" up to Z, then to return to A as a drill in boustrophdon format?

These are things about which we can but wonder, within an alternative universe light years away. One might even say a "mirror world" of our own.