Peculiar things happened to these signs once ‘evolution’, meaning changes over time, started to literally make its mark on them. As children, we are taught to write carefully one way, but then are later taught to mess up those neat letters in a way that makes it harder to decipher later on.
For example, “Something like this” becomes
Something like this
We might be tempted to view the difference as fairly insignificant, but when we recognize that these kinds of changes happened over thousands of years, all over the globe, and without any regulatory system to prevent these changes from running wild, you gain a much stronger understanding of how it was possible for each writing system to morph and transform so much.
Imagine teaching your kids how to write based on your own handwriting style, and then them doing the same for their kids based on the handwriting style that they derived from you, and so on, over thousands of years. It’s impossible to imagine what would result after thousands of years, but it would be radically different than the handwriting system that started it all.