This is 99% invisible. I'm Roman Mars.

In the beginning was the word.

And the word was, well actually there was just one word, one long endless word.

For thousands of years, text in Europe had no spaces between words.

There was nothing at all to guide the reader.

That's Keith Houston. He's a returning 99 p.I guest and author of the book,

Shady Characters. So the idea was that the reader would read it aloud and they would have to find the boundaries between words

they would have to work at where sentences and clauses began and ended on their own.

Sometimes this never-ending string of letters would execute what was called an ox turn.

If the first line of text read from left to right, the line below it would read from right to left

with the characters themselves drawn

and backwards. The point is reading was hard. So there was a librarian at

Alexandria in the third century BC called Aristophanes suggested that readers might want to use

little dots which are very easy to insert between letters in order to help them remember

where the pauses were.

The system didn't follow strict rules of grammar.

It wasn't about demarcating sentences, but about rhythm.

It was initially a kind of stage direction.

It was all about the performance of the text.

So a point halfway up the line was a very short pause. A point at the bottom of the line was a longer pause,

and a point at the top of the line was the longest

pause, kind of like a full stop.

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