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Four thousand years ago, just as today, people who could not write used a simple cross to sign letters and formal documents. In fact, the first name for this ancient symbol actually meant “mark” or “sign.”
One might logically assume that this common signature stand-in was the origin of our present X. But that’s not the case. Instead, what looked like an X to ancient writers eventually gave birth to the Roman T.
How did that happen? Let’s go back to around 1000 B.C. During this time, the Phoenicians and other Semitic tribes used a variety of crossed forms to represent the letter they called “taw.” This letter, one of the first recorded, served two purposes: it represented the ‘t’ sound, and it provided a mark for signing documents that could be used by those who could not write their names.
When the Greeks adopted the taw for their alphabet ten centuries later, they altered it slightly until it looked pretty much like what our T looks like today. The Greeks called this letter “tau.” The tau was passed on, virtually unchanged, from the Greeks to the Etruscans, and finally to the Romans.