Kenneth Scharf wrote:

Actually, I think the answer lies in the fact that some early writing
was done not on paper like material with charcoal or ink, but with stone
tablets and chisels. Since a right handed person would hold the chisel
with his left hand to strike it with a hammer held in his right, the
characters would be written from right to left. So ancient languages
like Hebrew would have been written from right to left, and still are
even though nothing is carved in stone anymore.

While Hebrew words are written right to left, in Israel, numbers are not.

Dates are the European format, dd/mm/yy. Telephone numbers used to be six digits
123-456 and they went to 7 digits a digit was added at the begining, so the they
became 1234-567.

Did pre WWII schematics in China and Japan go right to left? I know that Japan
had a thriving electronics industry and university level studies.

Geoff.


--
Geoffrey S. Mendelson, Jerusalem, Israel N3OWJ/4X1GM