The Latin T's descent, from Phoenician taw through Greek tau, is discussed elsewhere in this atlas. Taw is the last letter of the Phoenician and Hebrew alphabets and was originally drawn as a simple cross or X mark, literally meaning a mark or a signature; by the time Greek borrowed it as tau, the crossing point had shifted to the top of the vertical stroke, producing the T shape already familiar from classical Greek inscriptions.
Etruscan and Roman scribes carried tau's shape into Latin essentially without change, and the Roman capital T, one of the plainer and more geometrically stable letterforms in the alphabet, has remained a simple crossed vertical since antiquity. The lowercase t, formed through medieval cursive handwriting, extended the vertical stroke slightly below the crossbar and curved its foot, a modest departure from the capital that nonetheless makes t one of the few lowercase Latin letters with a short descender rather than a full ascender or a plain x-height body. T carries no Roman numeral value; the numeral system's tally of I, V, X, L, C, D and M skips directly past it, leaving taw's ancient meaning as a mark or signature only as an etymological curiosity, distinct from the living ritual weight the same letter carries as the last of the Hebrew alphabet, covered elsewhere in this atlas.