L a letter which was the twelfth letter of the Phoenician alphabet. It has in its history passed through many changes of form, ending curiously enough in its usual manuscript form with a shape almost identical with that which it had about 900 B.C. (
). As was the case with B and some other letters the Greeks did not everywhere keep the symbol in the position in which they had borrowed it
. This, which was its oldest form in Attica and in the Chalcidian colonies of Italy, was the form adopted by the Romans, who in time converted it into the rectangle
, which passed from them to the nations of western Europe. In the Ionic alphabet, however, from which the ordinary Greek alphabet is derived it appeared as
. A still more common form in other parts of Greece was