Palindrome (; "again") and ' (; "way, direction"). Palindromes date back at least to 79 AD, as a palindrome was found as a graffito at Herculaneum, a city buried by ash in that year. This palindrome, called the Sator Square, consists of a sentence written in Latin: "Sator Arepo Tenet Opera Rotas" ("The sower Arepo holds with effort the wheels"). It is remarkable for the fact that the first letters of each word form the first word, the second letters form the second word, and so forth. Hence, it can be arranged into a word square that reads in four different
Palindrome ways: horizontally or vertically from either top left to bottom right or bottom right to top left. As such, they can be referred to as palindromatic. A palindrome with the same square property is the Hebrew palindrome, "We explained the glutton who is in the honey was burned and incinerated", (פרשנו רעבתן שבדבש נתבער ונשרף; "perashnu: ra`avtan shebad'vash nitba`er venisraf"), credited to Abraham ibn Ezra in 1924, and referring to the halachic question as to whether a fly landing in honey makes the honey "treif" (non-kosher). The palindromic Latin riddle ""In girum imus nocte et consumimur igni"" ("we go in