Bench Gallows Writing Order

[Emma May Smith]

Having thought about it some more, I feel like the order Marco suggests would certainly be the most logical approach, for two reasons:

• 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.
  

But I also really think that the gallows look inserted. That's a bit strange, since, in our current paradigm of c-K-c, it would mean that the order of writing the letters is 1-3-2.

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.
  

Or something else or nothing...

Now you know the problems I'm having with figuring out this character. At first it seems obvious it should be written left to right. But the more I examine bench gallows I think the ch must come first and the gallows inserted into it.

As you hint, this could totally alter what we make of the character depending on what it reveals about the working of the scribe's mind. If the scribe knew nothing about the script (a position I don't actually accept) then any order would be possible. But if the scribe knew how the script worked he would incorporate that knowledge into how he wrote. Writing the bench round the gallows is, mentally speaking, very different from inserting the gallows into the bench.