29-05-2017, 07:45 PM
Having thought about it some more, I feel like the order Marco suggests would certainly be the most logical approach, for two reasons:
Now it's still hard to tell whether this is the case or not, and any conclusions drawn from it are highly speculative. To me it might indicate either of these things:
- it respects the left-to-right writing order of the main glyphs. The crossbar can be seen as dotting i's and crossing t's, i.e. to return to a letter to finish it.
- it would allow for a more accurate length of the crossbar since the gallow is already there.
Now it's still hard to tell whether this is the case or not, and any conclusions drawn from it are highly speculative. To me it might indicate either of these things:
- The scribes were really copying these glyphs and didn't think of them as sounds. They were "drawing" rather than writing.
- Or, in the scribes' mind, bench glyphs form a unit, that can be optionally stretched to add in a gallow.

