I've posted some of these on my blogs, including examples on Greek coins, but I've grabbed a group of them together to show how the idea of benching is natural to the thought process of those using Greek characters.
The Greeks did this with both letters (usually when stacking them vertically) and with numbers, and the Coptic alphabet (which was the Greek alphabet used to write Egyptian) also adapted it. Here is a quicky example of the Rho character benched in a number of ways to write numerals. These are found quite frequently in medieval Greek calendars:
If you shorten the center stem, you can see how similar some of them are to the VMS benched P-shapes. The stem was not always long. In calendars it sometimes reached the baseline and sometimes sat on top of the bench part (which also happens in the VMS). These also occur as half-benches.
The Greeks did this with both letters (usually when stacking them vertically) and with numbers, and the Coptic alphabet (which was the Greek alphabet used to write Egyptian) also adapted it. Here is a quicky example of the Rho character benched in a number of ways to write numerals. These are found quite frequently in medieval Greek calendars:
If you shorten the center stem, you can see how similar some of them are to the VMS benched P-shapes. The stem was not always long. In calendars it sometimes reached the baseline and sometimes sat on top of the bench part (which also happens in the VMS). These also occur as half-benches.
![[+]](https://www.voynich.ninja/images/collapse_collapsed.png)