India, Sept. 26 -- In the 3rd century BCE, the Greeks wrote without any spaces, punctuations or distinction between capital letters or lowercase. To the modern eye this would look like undecipherable code: just capital letters scribbled together continuously on stone tablets and scrolls.

But it was also a time when parchment was expensive and the spoken word had more relevance and impact in a hardly literate world. Understanding unfamiliar documents on the first read was a struggle, so the humble dot was introduced to break the stream of text. The suggestion, by a librarian in Alexandria, was a breakthrough. The dots represented pauses but not the grammatical boundaries of punctuation today.

It was only by the 7th century CE that these ...