The modern italic type ampersand is a kind of ' et' ligature that goes back to the cursive scripts developed during the Renaissance.
The et-ligature, however, continued to be used and gradually became more stylized and less revealing of its origin (figures 4–6). During the later development of the Latin script leading up to Carolingian minuscule (9th century) the use of ligatures in general diminished. In the later and more flowing New Roman Cursive, ligatures of all kinds were extremely common figures 2 and 3 from the middle of 4th century are examples of how the et-ligature could look in this script. and the Old Roman cursive, in which the letters E and T occasionally were written together to form a ligature (Evolution of the ampersand – figure 1). The ampersand can be traced back to the 1st century A.D. Example of ampersand based on a crossed epsilon, as might be handwritten
