To add to the question most religions of the time saw the left hand as a bad thing, so I’m assuming everyone regardless of dominance used their right hand. Also, wouldn’t the writing from right-to-left cause smudge errors in the script similar to how lefties get the “grey palm” when writing?
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It’s also been suggested that reading left to right developed from tall thin monuments used as a sundial. (*like the Washington monument)
In Europe and the middleast (*above the equator), the suns shadow moves left to right.
The first writing was not with ink but by carving stone and pressing sticks into clay. Neither smudge. Paint can smear but you don’t paint with your palm against whatever you’re painting.
It stems from how they wrote down texts in the old ages. By using a hammer and chisel it was easier to write right to left with the hammer hand being the dominant hand.
Later writing tools eventually developed into using ink instead. At this point most writing styles shifted from left to right, but Hebrew and Arabic remained using the same writing direction as they were set in stone preferring not to change.
The stone carving thing makes sense to me, a thought that occurs is that if you go left to right, while chiseling into stone and you make a mistake. You’re more likely to fuck up your previous work. If you’re going to right to left and the chisel slips, you mess up some blank space instead.
It’s precisely because they were right handed; they used to carve words into stone before the advent of paper.
Much easier to hold the hammer in the right hand if you’re right handed.
With paper, people just got kinda used to writing right to left.
The trick is apparently to keep your writing hand in the lines below the words (or rotate the paper by like 45 degrees).
Through different lineages, Arabic, Hebrew as well as Latin and Greek scripts ultimately come from the Phoenician script which was written horizontally from right to left (the first to have this kind of fixed direction). So the answer is just that Arabic and Hebrew ultimately maintained this characteristic from the parent script.
Greek/Latin on the other hand were still being written in a [boustrophedon](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boustrophedon) style: starting from the right to the left for the first line, then you start from left to right for the next line, with the letters flipped, and so on, giving a serpent-like way of writing. Ultimately Greek and then Latin had their direction codified as left to right only, and therefore maintained the flipped letter which became the alphabet we know today.
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