Early Dynastic Cuneiform is the name of a

Unicode Unicode, formally The Unicode Standard,The formal version reference is is an information technology standard for the consistent encoding, representation, and handling of text expressed in most of the world's writing systems. The standard, ...

block Block or blocked may refer to: Arts, entertainment and media Broadcasting * Block programming, the result of a programming strategy in broadcasting * W242BX, a radio station licensed to Greenville, South Carolina, United States known as ''96.3 ...

of the

Supplementary Multilingual Plane In the Unicode standard, a plane is a continuous group of 65,536 (216) code points. There are 17 planes, identified by the numbers 0 to 16, which corresponds with the possible values 00–1016 of the first two positions in six position hexadecimal ...

(SMP), at U+12480–U+1254F, introduced in version 8.0 (June 2015). It is a supplement to the earlier encoding of the cuneiform script in the two blocks U+12000–U+123FF "

Cuneiform Cuneiform is a logo- syllabic script that was used to write several languages of the Ancient Middle East. The script was in active use from the early Bronze Age until the beginning of the Common Era. It is named for the characteristic wedg ...

" and U+12400–U+1247F "

Cuneiform Numbers and Punctuation In Unicode, the Sumero-Akkadian Cuneiform script is covered in three blocks in the Supplementary Multilingual Plane (SMP): * U+12000–U+123FF Cuneiform * U+12400–U+1247F Cuneiform Numbers and Punctuation * U+12480–U+1254F Ear ...

". "Early Dynastic Cuneiform" is designed to provide cuneiform signs used during one of the earliest phases of cuneiform writing, the Early Dynastic Period (c. 2900–2350 BC), also known as

archaic cuneiform Cuneiform is a logo- syllabic script that was used to write several languages of the Ancient Middle East. The script was in active use from the early Bronze Age until the beginning of the Common Era. It is named for the characteristic wedge-sh ...

, but discontinued in the

Ur III period The Third Dynasty of Ur, also called the Neo-Sumerian Empire, refers to a 22nd to 21st century BC (middle chronology) Sumerian ruling dynasty based in the city of Ur and a short-lived territorial-political state which some historians consider t ...

. The original

block, introduced in version 5.0 (July 2006) is designed for the requirements of Ur III era cuneiform, with the younger ( Old Assyrian and

Neo-Assyrian The Neo-Assyrian Empire was the fourth and penultimate stage of ancient Assyrian history and the final and greatest phase of Assyria as an independent state. Beginning with the accession of Adad-nirari II in 911 BC, the Neo-Assyrian Empire grew t ...

) literary tradition to be considered font variants (analogous to the precedent of the approach followed in

Han unification Han unification is an effort by the authors of Unicode and the Universal Character Set to map multiple character sets of the Han characters of the so-called CJK languages into a single set of unified characters. Han characters are a featu ...

). Even for the Ur III era, many signs recognized in relevant dictionaries did not receive their own code point but are intended as being expressed as ligatures of two or more constituent signs, to be handled by the

font In movable type, metal typesetting, a font is a particular #Characteristics, size, weight and style of a typeface. Each font is a matched set of type, with a piece (a "Sort (typesetting), sort") for each glyph. A typeface consists of a range of ...

, but for the purposes of representing archaic cuneiform, the inventory of the original block was recognized as insufficient and an additional 196 characters were added in version 8.0. The sign inventory is mostly based on the 1922 dictionary ''

Liste der archaischen Keilschriftzeichen ''Liste der archaischen Keilschriftzeichen'' (; "list of archaic cuneiform signs"), abbreviated LAK, is a dictionary of Sumerian cuneiform signs of the Fara period ( Early Dynastic IIIa, c. 25th century BC short chronology, 26th century BC middle ...

'' (LAK), with a substantial number of characters (U+124D5 to U+12518) identified by their LAK number (or as composed of characters identified by their LAK number) rather than attempting to identify them by a reconstructed phonetic value. The LAK has 870 signs in total, most of which are already covered in the previous Unicode blocks in the form of their Ur III continuants. The Preliminary Proposal for the block submitted in 2012.Everson and Crisostomo (2012): "The proposed glyphs have been compiled primarily from the modern Assyriological sign list of the Early Dynastic period, Liste der archaischen Keilschriftzeichen aus Fara (henceforth LAK), in conjunction with the Oracc Global Sign List (www.oracc.org/ogsl). Every sign in LAK was carefully considered and collated by available photographs (provided by the Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative www.cdli.ucla.edu) and hand copies. If the sign was determined to have been incorporated in the original Sumero-Akkadian Unicode proposal, N2786, it was not included in this proposal. Also not included are glyphs given in LAK which do not derive from the Early Dynastic period, but rather only from later periods such as Ur III or Old Babylonian. Moreover, numerals have been omitted due to the complexity of numeral signs from this period. ..Additionally, glyphs discovered in two publications since LAK, Robert D. Biggs Oriental Institute Publications vol. 99 and Miguel Civil Cornell University Studies in Assyriology and Sumerology vol. 12, have been incorporated."

Chart

History

The following Unicode-related documents record the purpose and process of defining specific characters in the Early Dynastic Cuneiform block:

References

{{reflist Cuneiform Cuneiform Early Dynastic