The Phoenicians

There is dimensionality here.

Characters can have curves or vertical lines or horizontal lines, and be centered or facing left or right.

We have: centered, orientation, count. Likely 10 bits whe it is all sorted, google can do this with alpha zero, find the optimum feature shapes and counts to minimally represent those shapes.

How did the Phoenicians figure this out? Because they were taught to do them as kids when learning to speak. Vocalizations are an optimal spread of basic lips, tongue, throat and teeth movements. We call it enunciation, mathematicians call it the optimum Huffman encoding for mouths speaking.

If one just imitated the mouth with the hand a lot of those symbols appear. The 'o' sound. The vibration of 'z' and ';s' become wavy fingers. The explosive sound are the fist opening, the the stops the fist closing. Those triangles like ducks quaking, and kids have done that hand sing for ages.  Imagine the puppeter of that era using hand shapes to simulate puppets speaking.