Typographical considerations
Cuneiform is one of the oldest surviving forms of writing. It was used in Mesopotamia to compose a tremendous number of texts on clay tablets, thousands of which survive to the present day. Cuneiform had no paragraphs or even spacing between words with the symbols all written directly adjacent to one another.[1] Egyptian hieroglyphics were also unspaced, but as they wrote on papyrus with ink, Egyptians scribes introduced the practice of rubrication: the scribes used black ink for the main body text and contrasting red ink for headings.
Greek scribes developed other approaches to organizing text, although the earliest Greek and Latin documents were written in solid blocks of capital letters with little to no spacing, paragraph breaks, or punctuation. Some of the oldest Greek inscriptions were written boustrophedon (literally ‘as the ox turns’) where the direction of the text’s flow and the direction the letters face would switch at the end of each line, as an ox plowing a field would reverse directions. Over time, text direction (left to right) became standardized. Word dividers and punctuation were developed in Hellenistic Alexandria, but were only gradually adopted over centuries. Literature scholars believe that early manuscripts lacking in punctuation and spacing were meant to be read aloud.
