Variant: two eggs in a nest

·    Variants (3):

o A. Full:

§ Top: Two circles – touching or non-touching, each circle:

·      Can have a dotted reinforcement inside the perimeter.

·      Can have either a dot or a crescent (tips pointing upwards) in the centre.

·      Can itself be made up of touching dots.

Not every combination is valid – for example, a crescent in the centre tends to be inside a single circle, not to have a “fancy” outer border.

·      Has a pair of feelers – feelers can be:

o    Standard left and right feelers (scrolls).

o    “Pax” feelers (curving upwards).

·      Standard feelers tend to have protectors while “pax” feelers don’t.

§ Bottom: boulder-outline with a single, large U indentation in the middle of the top (between the two circles).

·      Cross hatched area slightly smaller than the outline.

·      Outer edge of cross hatched area usually bold

o B. Reduced-1: left or right half only (currently no examples of right half only).

o C. Reduced-2: top part only (currently no examples). Perhaps this doesn’t exist, and only exists for k’u.

·    Do not confuse the full forms of ch’a and k’u. They resemble one another because the bottom parts of both are identical. The difference is in the top part:

o ch’a has two circles, each with two scrolls / left-and-right “feelers”.

o k’u has two sloping “rugby balls”.

·    Iconographic origin:

o AT-YT2021-lecture16.t0:02:16-02:30 Tokovinine explains that this represents a basket with smoking incense in it; that CH’AJ is the word for liquid inense. That’s the explanation for this glyph becoming used as a syllabogram for ch’a. In the equivalent AT-E1168-lecture18:10:01-10:23 he doesn’t say anything about the iconographic origin of ch’a at all, showing it only to warn of the possibility of its confusion with k’u.