In Lexicon Abbreviaturarum by Adriano Cappelli (1901), page 435, a similar symbol stands for VI (or 6), VIII century.
What if the scribe was copying and encoding an earlier text but did not know how to interpret the symbol and depicted it as it looked like?
What if the scribe was copying and encoding an earlier text but did not know how to interpret the symbol and depicted it as it looked like?

