Being Able to Read Backwards and Upside Down
Publius Paquius Proculus, they say, invented pizza most 2,000 years agone. I don't retrieve he did, and anyhow, that's not the coolest thing about Proculus, a very successful baker and onetime politico, who was living in Pompeii the day Mt. Vesuvius erupted. He, his house and his family were buried. So, centuries afterward, when archeologists unearthed his habitation they discovered a bulletin, etched onto one of his household walls. It looked like this:
Every bit you tin can see, it's five latin words, SATOR, AREPO, TENET, OPERA and ROTAS, each of them five letters long, arranged in a square. You can read them left to right, right to left, tiptop to lesser or bottom to top.
What is this? Well, patently it's a very clever palindrome (palindromes are word sequences that say the same matter frontward or backward; this 1's a super-version, going upwardly and down as well.) It translates, roughly to...
"The Farmer Arepo works with a turn."
Why put something like this on your wall? It wasn't simply on the wall at Publius Paquius Proculus' place; at that place was another on a cavalcade nearly Pompeii's amphitheater. Other versions (aforementioned words) were plant at Roman sites in Germany, Britain and France.
Nobody knows why this ambiguous square was so popular 2,000 years ago. Scholars suggest dark reasons (run into my note beneath) but there's a simple caption: it's fun. When you expect at it, upwardly, down, left, correct, information technology keeps saying the same thing, and you smile. Romans liked that. Then do we. Symmetrical puzzles are very pleasing.
More than recently (back in 1908), a designer in Cincinnati sent the word "chump" to a paper, written so that y'all could turn it upside down, and it would even so spell "chump." A hundred years ago, people smiled at this.
These designs, drawn to be reverse-readable, are now chosen ambigrams. They can be read in several different directions, or orientations. Like this:
In our day, there are two designer/artists who accept fabricated the ambigram their specialty. I don't know if anybody has topped the SATOR/ROTAS foursquare in Pompeii, but here are some creations I recall they are kind of brilliant. John Langdon, painter, designer and wordsmith, created this meditation on Life and Expiry. Picket what happens if you rotate your calculator 180 degrees (or stand on your head):
This Langdon blueprint celebrates a certain October holiday, only only if you rotate the image.
To practice this right, you have to accept an boggling blueprint sense, a experience for balance and a subtle center. There'southward a discussion for this:
Langdon thinks he may have invented the ambigram a few decades ago, but he concedes that California designer Scott Kim independently came up with the same thought at the same time. Kim, a longtime columnist at Discover, who designs puzzles and computer games, called his creations "inversions." Much of the time, he'll create a design that reads forrad or backward, like this 1:
Simply — and here's where we leave the brick and mortar world of Pompeii behind — Kim is able to create transformations then subtle you can't quite see when or how they happen. Images morph from 1 state to another, seamlessly, as in Escher drawings. That'south why science fiction writer Isaac Asimov chosen Kim "the Escher of the alphabet."
Hither's a perfect example. Kim takes the earth "Figure" and moves information technology from white messages on a black field to black messages on a white field, and I defy yous to notice the moment where the change clicks in.
The search for hidden patterns and symmetries is a securely mathematical instinct, and these puzzlers are celebrations of pattern. Washed well, the cleverness is contagious. When the symmetry pops into place, I giggle. I similar being in on the joke. Information technology'due south a man matter. Afterward all, what put a smiling on Publius Paquius Proculus' face all those years ago nevertheless puts a smile on mine.
Scott Kim's 1996 volume on symmetry is chosen Inversions; John Langdon's piece of work can be found in his 2005 book, Wordplay: The Philosophy, Fine art, and Science of Ambigrams. At that place is a website dedicated to the history of ambigrams here.
Some scholars call up that the ROTAS Square was a secret betoken among early Christian families in Rome. If you rescramble the letters in the five latin words, you can rework them into the latin APATERNOSTERO, significant "Our Father" as in "Our Begetter Who Art in Heaven." (If y'all double up on the N, you can even arrange the letters in the shape of a cantankerous.) Maybe having the ROTAS Square on your wall, therefore, might have been a way for early on Christian families to secretly say "We're Christian" without risking arrest.
Source: https://www.npr.org/sections/krulwich/2012/04/26/151311708/the-delights-of-reading-upside-down
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