Idea-just spitballin'

[-JKP-]

And so we know the scribe's were right handed - no sign of wet ink being brushed by their cuffs.

I have been doubting the point that the scribe was right handed. Speaking in terms of the curve-line system, the lines are always at an angle counter-clockwise. That would be natural for a left-handed person, but what does that mean for a right-handed one? Possibly, alignment to some diagonal macro-grid? Why diagonal?

...

There might be a few reasons for that. Some people hold their pens very differently. Remember grade school? Some kids held pens in very strange ways and continued to do so as adults. Another reason could be that maybe the writer learned to write right-to-left (Hebrew, Arabic) and then adapted to writing left-to-right (perhaps at a young age).

Another reason could be a left-hander who was taught/forced/coerced into writing with their right hand. My grandma's generation used to do that, force left-handed kids to write with their right hands (not a good idea to mess with a person's brain-wiring, but they did it). After a few years they get used to it but judging by what some of their generation said about it, it never felt completely natural.

And then there's someone like da Vinci. He was a left-hander who wrote right-to-left most of the time, because that was natural for him (and prevented smudging of ink), but also wrote left-to-right when it was for other people to read, but not quite as elegantly (which maybe meant it wasn't quite as comfortable for his hand). It would be interesting to study which of the leftie shapes he retained in his writing (the slant, etc.) when writing right-to-left.