mirrored writing

Leonardo da Vinci is famous for having written most of his personal notes in mirror, only using standard writing if he intended his texts to be read by others. There are two popular theories on why he did this. Leonardo da Vinci was left-handed, causing the ink to smudge easily if he wrote in standard writing. He may also have wanted to protect his ideas from theft or hide them from the Roman Catholic Church (with whom his research practices sometimes collided). However, the latter idea, popular among conspiracy theorists, is highly unlikely: it is (and was even at the time) clear, even to a child, that the text in question could be easily read "backwards" (either directly or through its reflection, such as in a mirror). The true purpose of this practice thus remains unknown. A third theory is that he taught himself to write: given the propensity of children to start writing from the bottom right hand corner of a page[citation needed], this would have led him to produce mirror writing.


Matteo Zaccolini apparently wrote in mirror script his original four volume treatise on optics, color, and perspective in the early 1600s; he was apparently dependent on Leonardo's text.

Mirror writing calligraphy was popular in the Ottoman Empire during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries among the Bektashi order, where it often carried mystical associations.[3] The origins of this mirror writing tradition may date to the pre-Islamic period in rock inscriptions of the western Arabian peninsula.[3]