The right hand

by Sir Daniel Wilson

Right-handed usages, and the ideas which they suggest, largely influence the ceremonial customs of many nations, affect their religious observances, bear a significant part in the marriage rites, and are interwoven with the most familiar social usages. Among the ancient Greeks the rites of the social board required the passing of the wine from right to left,—or, at any rate, in one invariable direction,—as indicated by Homer in his description of the feast of the gods (Iliad, i 597, θεοῖς ἐνδέξια πᾶσιν οἰνοχόει), where Hephæstus goes round and pours out the sweet nectar to the assembled gods. The direction pursued by the cupbearer would be determined by his bearing the flagon in his right hand, and so walking with his right side towards the guests. This is, indeed, a point of dispute among scholars. But it is not questioned that a uniform practice prevailed, dependent on the recognition of right and left-handedness; and this is no less apparent among the Romans than the Greeks. It is set forth in the most unmusical of Horace’s hexameters: “Ille sinistrorsum, hic dextrorsum abit;” and finds its precise elucidation from many independent sources, in the allusions of the poets, in the works of sculptors, and in the decorations of fictile ware.

CHAPTER VIII
HANDWRITING

It is manifestly important to determine whether the term used by the Ninevite, the Assyrian, Greek, Roman, and other ancient nations for the right hand was exclusively limited to the member of the body on what is now universally recognised as the right side; or was applicable to either hand, implying no more than the one habitually and preferentially employed. But the true right and left of the Hebrew and other ancient Semitic nations has a special significance, in view of the fact that, whilst the great class of Aryan languages, as well as the Etruscan and others of indeterminate classification, appear, from a remote date, to have been written from left to right; all the Semitic languages, except the Ethiopic, as well as those of other races that have derived their written characters from the Arabian,—such as the Turks, Malays, and Persians,—are written from right to left. Habit has so largely modified our current handwriting, and adapted its characters to forms best suited for continuous and rapid execution in the one direction, that the reversal of this at once suggests the idea of a left-handed people. But the assumption is suggested by a misinterpretation of the evidence. So long as each character was separately drawn, and when, moreover, they were pictorial or ideographic, it was, in reality, more natural to begin at the right, or nearer side, of the papyrus or tablet, than to pass over to the left. The forms of all written characters are largely affected by their mode of use, as is abundantly illustrated in the transformation of the Egyptian ideographs in the later demotic writing. The forms of the old Semitic alphabet, like the Egyptian hieroglyphics, are specially adapted to cutting on stone. The square Hebrew characters are of much later date; but they also, like the uncials of early Christian manuscripts, were executed singly, and therefore could be written as easily from right to left as in a reverse order. The oldest alphabets indicate a special adaptation for monumental inscription. The Runic characters of northern Europe owe their peculiar form apparently to their being primarily cut on wood. When papyrus leaves were substituted for stone, a change was inevitable; but the direction of the writing only becomes significant in reference to a current hand. The Greek fashion of boustrophedon, or alternating like the course of oxen in ploughing, illustrates the natural process of beginning at the side nearest to the hand; nor did either this, or the still earlier mode of writing in columns, as with the ancient Egyptians, or the Chinese, present any impediment, so long as it was executed in detached characters. But so soon as the reed or quill, with the coloured pigment, began to supersede the chisel, the hieratic writing assumed a modified form; and when it passed into the later demotic handwriting, with its seemingly arbitrary script, the same influences were brought into play which control the modern penman in the slope, direction, and force of his stroke. One important exception, however, still remained. Although, as in writing Greek, the tendency towards the adoption of tied letters was inevitable, yet to the last the enchorial or demotic writing was mainly executed in detached characters, and does not, therefore, constitute a true current handwriting, such as in our own continuous penmanship leaves no room for doubt as to the hand by which it was executed. Any sufficiently ambidextrous penman, attempting to copy a piece of modern current writing with either hand, would determine beyond all question its right-handed execution. But no such certain result is found on applying the same test to the Egyptian demotic. I have tried it on two of the Louvre demotic MSS. and a portion of a Turin papyrus, and find that they can be copied with nearly equal dexterity with either hand. Some of the characters are more easily and naturally executed, without lifting the pen, with the left hand than the right. Others again, in the slope and the direction of the thickening of the stroke, suggest a right-handed execution; but habit in the forming of the characters, as in writing Greek or Arabic, would speedily overcome any such difficulty either way. I feel assured that no habitually left-handed writer would find any difficulty in acquiring the unmodified demotic hand; whereas no amount of dexterity of the penman compelled to resort to his left hand in executing ordinary current writing suffices to prevent such a modification in the slope, the stroke and the formation of the characters, as clearly indicates the change.

Attention has been recently called to this special aspect of the subject in a minutely detailed article in the Archivio Italiano per le Malatie Nervose, of September 1890, by Dr. D’Abundo Guiseppe, of the University of Pisa. The inquiry was suggested to the Pisan professor by the peculiar case of a left-handed patient, thus stated by him: “I was treating electrically a gentleman, thirty-three years of age, who had been affected for two years with difficulty in writing, and which proved to be a typical case of the spasm called writer’s cramp. The fact to which I desire to draw attention is that the gentleman was left-handed, and had been so from his birth, so that he preferentially used the left hand except in writing, as he had learned to write with the right hand. He was a person of good intellect and superior culture; and he had taught himself to sketch and paint with the left hand. Under the electric treatment he improved, but in view of the liability to relapse, I advised him to commence practising writing with the left hand; more especially as he is left-handed. But he informed me that in the first attempts made by him he felt, in addition to the difficulty; that they produced painful sensations in the right arm, as if he were writing with it. Wishing to master the facts, I caused him to write in my presence; and I observed that, instead of commencing from left to right, he automatically proceeded from right to left. At my request, he began with the greatest readiness and rapidity to write some lines which I dictated to him. What struck me was the rapidity with which he wrote, the regularity of the writing, and the ease with which, with unruled paper, he went on writing from right to left. He assured me that he had never before made any attempt to write in that way; and he was himself really surprised.”[7]

[7] Archivio Italiano, Milan, September 1890, “Su di alcune particolarità della scrittura dei mancini,” p. 298.

Dr. Guiseppe’s attention being thus directed to this aspect of the subject, his next aim was to determine whether the phenomenon might not be physiological, and specially characteristic of left-handed persons; and he naturally reverted to the pathological evidence bearing on left-handed manifestations. He points out that Buchwald, in three cases of aphasia, had found a very peculiar disturbance of written language, which consisted in the fact that the letters were written by the patient from right to left, with reverted slope. He accordingly made further research, with a special view to determine whether this peculiar manifestation was due to morbid causes. Unfortunately, although he states that the subjects of his observation included a considerable number of left-handed persons, the cases stated by him in detail are mainly those of the right-handed who, by reason of injury or loss of the right hand, had been compelled to cultivate the use of the other. Such cases, however, amount to no more than evidence of the extent to which the left hand may be educated, and so made to perform all the functions of the right hand. To one, indeed, familiar by practical experience with the exceptional facilities and the impediments of the left-handed, it is curious to observe the difficulty experienced by a highly intelligent scientific student of the phenomena, to appreciate what seems to the ordinary left-handed man not only natural but inevitable. In the case of Dr. Guiseppe’s original patient, he wrote reversely instinctively, and with ease, on the first attempt to use the unfamiliar pen in his left hand. Acquired left-handedness revealed itself, on the contrary, in the writer placing the paper obliquely; or in other ways showing that, with all the facility derived from long practice, it was the result of effort and a persevering contest with nature. Dr. Guiseppe accordingly adds in a summary of results: “In general, I have discovered that right-handed persons who became the subjects of disease affecting the right arm from their infancy were forced to learn to write with the left hand; and they wrote from right to left with sufficient facility, varying the slope of the letters. Those, however, who had become affected with disease in the right arm in adult life, when they had already familiarly practised writing with the right hand, and in consequence of disease had been obliged to resort to the left hand, were less successful in writing with the reversed slope.”[8]

[8] Archivio Italiano, September 1890, p. 304.

To the naturally left-handed person, especially when he has enjoyed the unrestrained use of the pencil in his facile hand, the reversed slope is the easiest, and the only natural one. But this is entirely traceable to the comparatively modern element of cursive writing. No such cause affected the graver, or the hieroglyphic depictor of ideographs, even when reduced to their most arbitrary demotic forms, so long as they were executed singly.

So soon as the habitual use of the papyrus, with the reed pen and coloured pigments, had developed any uniformity of usage, the customary method of writing by the Egyptian appears to have accorded with that in use among the Hebrew and other Semitic races; though examples do occur of true hieroglyphic papyri written from left to right. But the pictorial character of such writings furnishes another test. It is easier for a right-handed draftsman to draw a profile with the face looking towards the left; and the same influence might be anticipated to affect the direction of the characters incised on the walls of temples and palaces. This has accordingly suggested an available clue to Egyptian right or left-handedness. But the evidence adduced from Egyptian monuments is liable to mislead. A writer in Nature (J. S., 14th April 1870) states as the result of a careful survey of the examples in the British Museum, that the hieroglyphic profiles there generally look to the right, and so suggest the work of a left-handed people. Other and more suggestive evidence from the monuments of Egypt points to the same conclusion, but it is deceptive. The hieroglyphic sculptures of the Egyptians, like the cufic inscriptions in Arabian architecture, are mainly decorative; and are arranged symmetrically for architectural effect. The same principle regulated their introduction on sarcophagi. Of this, examples in the British Museum furnish abundant illustration. On the great sarcophagus of Sebaksi, priest of Phtha, the profiles on the right and left column look towards the centre line; and hence the element of right-handedness is subordinated to decorative requirements. If this is overlooked, the left-handedness ascribed above to the ancient Egyptians may seem to be settled beyond dispute by numerous representations both of gods and men, engaged in the actual process of writing. Among the incidents introduced in the oft-repeated judgment scene of Osiris,—as on the Adytum of the Temple of Dayr el Medineh, of which I have a photograph,—Thoth, the Egyptian God of Letters, stands with the stylus in his left hand, and a papyrus or tablet in his right, and records concerning the deceased, in the presence of the divine judge, the results of the literal weighing in the balance of the deeds done in the body. In other smaller representations of the same scene, Thoth is similarly introduced holding the stylus in his left hand. So also, in the decorations on the wall of the great chamber in the rock-temple of Abou Simbel, Rameses is represented slaying his enemies with a club, which is held in his left hand; and the goddess Pasht is shown decapitating her prisoners with a scimitar also in the left hand. This evidence seems sufficiently direct and indisputable to settle the question; yet further research leaves no doubt that it is illusory. Ample evidence to the contrary is to be found in Champollion’s Monuments de l’Egypte et de la Nubie; and is fully confirmed by Maxime du Camp’s Photographic Pictures of Egypt, Nubia, etc., by Sir J. Gardner Wilkinson’s Manners and Customs of the Ancient Egyptians, and by other photographic and pictorial evidence. In a group, for example, photographed by Du Camp, from the exterior of the sanctuary of the palace of Karnac, where the Pharaoh is represented crowned by the ibis and hawk-headed deities, Thoth and Horus, the hieroglyphics are cut on either side so as to look towards the central figure. The same arrangement is repeated in another group at Ipsamboul, engraved by Champollion, Monuments de l’Egypte (vol. i. Pl. 5). Still more, where figures are intermingled, looking in opposite directions,—as shown in a photograph of the elaborately sculptured posterior façade of the Great Temple of Denderah,—the accompanying hieroglyphics, graven in column, vary in direction in accordance with that of the figure to which they refer. Columns of hieroglyphics repeatedly occur, separating the seated deity and a worshipper standing before him, and only divided by a perpendicular line, where the characters are turned in opposite directions corresponding to those of the immediately adjacent figures.

When, as in the Judgment scene at El Medineh and elsewhere, Osiris is seated looking to the right, Thoth faces him, holding in the off-hand—as more extended, by reason of the simple perspective,—the papyrus or tablet; while the pen or style is held in the near or left hand. To have placed the pen and tablet in the opposite hands would have required a complex perspective and foreshortening, or would have left the whole action obscure and unsuited for monumental effect. Nevertheless, the difficulty is overcome in repeated examples: as in a repetition of the same scene engraved in Sir J. Gardner Wilkinson’s Manners and Customs of the Ancient Egyptians (Pl. 88), and on a beautifully executed papyrus, part of The Book of the Dead, now in the Louvre, and reproduced in facsimile in Sylvestre’s Universal Palæography (vol. i. Pl. 46), in both of which Thoth holds the pen or style in the right hand. The latter also includes a shearer holding the sickle in his right hand, and a female sower, with the seed-basket on her left arm, scattering the seed with her right hand. Examples of scribes, stewards, and others engaged in writing, are no less common in the scenes of ordinary life; and though when looking to the left, they are at times represented holding the style or pen in the left hand, yet the preponderance of evidence suffices to refer this to the exigencies of primitive perspective. The steward in a sculptured scene from a tomb at Elethya (Monuments de l’Egypte, Pl. 142) receives and writes down a report of the cattle from the field servants, holding the style in his right hand and the tablet in his left. So is it with the registrar and the scribes (Wilkinson, Figs. 85, 86), the steward who takes account of the grain delivered (Fig. 387), and the notary and scribes (Figs. 73, 78)—all from Thebes, where they superintend the weighing at the public scales, and enumerate a group of negro slaves.