At the height of the Roman Empire’s reign of power, a bunch of guys wearing baxas, olive branch headgear and lined saffron togas told a bunch of guys wearing carbatinas, no headgear and cheapo coarse togas to go and hammer the proud history of the Empire onto every worthy slab of rock, obelisk and wall out there. This resulted in countless rocky manifestations of ancient clipart, interesting stories and weird messages becoming national tourist attractions and museum dressing all over the world to this very day, which is some 2000 years later.
One of the constants in all the hammered history of Roman times is the alphabet used to caption the clipart or tell the stories. That Roman/Latin alphabet, which was a direct spawn of the Greek alphabet, just happens to be the same one the majority of the world still uses today. Records showing what the letters of that alphabet looked like during Roman times seem quite consistent in depicting the overall forms, but vary wildly when it comes to the slight variations introduced by whoever drew the forms. For a random example, sometimes the M had straight legs and two serifs up top, and at other times it had splayed legs and pointy, serifless tops. Ditto the N. And sometimes when the rock slab’s length was misjudged by the guy with the hammer, he sneakily blended two or more letters together, or enveloped one letter within another. Those guys had to do such things to save space. It was either trick it out like that or go out again and risk a sunstroke while trying to find another smooth slab (or steal someone’s roof). It was just their bloody luck that their leaders wouldn’t settle for simple minimalist stuff like Stonehenge.
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