Editing Epsilon (section)

===Origin===
The letter {{angbr|Ε}} was adopted from the [[Phoenician alphabet|Phoenician]] letter [[He (letter)|He]] (<span style="background-color: white;">[[File:Phoenician he.svg|inline|x12px|alt=A letter that looks like a capital E with arms pointing left instead of right]]</span>) when Greeks first adopted alphabetic writing. In archaic Greek writing, its shape is often still identical to that of the Phoenician letter. Like other Greek letters, it could face either leftward or rightward (<span style="background-color: white;">[[File:Greek Epsilon left.svg|inline|x14px]][[File:Greek Epsilon archaic.svg|inline|x14px]]</span>), depending on the current writing direction, but, just as in Phoenician, the horizontal bars always faced in the direction of writing. Archaic writing often preserves the Phoenician form with a vertical stem extending slightly below the lowest horizontal bar. In the classical era, through the influence of more cursive writing styles, the shape was simplified to the current {{angbr|E}} glyph.<ref name="jeffery63">{{cite book |last=Jeffery |first=Lilian H. |title=The Local Scripts of Archaic Greece |publisher=Clarendon |year=1961 |place=Oxford |pages=63–64}}</ref>