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Inscriptional Parthian was a script used to write the 
Parthian language
The Parthian language, also known as Arsacid Pahlavi and Pahlawānīg, is an extinct ancient Northwestern Iranian language once spoken in Parthia, a region situated in present-day northeastern Iran and Turkmenistan. Parthian was the language of ...
, the majority of the text found were from clay fragments. This script was used from the 2nd century CE to the 5th century CE or in the Parthian Empire
The Parthian Empire (), also known as the Arsacid Empire (), was a major Iranian political and cultural power centered in ancient Iran from 247 BC to 224 AD. Its latter name comes from its founder, Arsaces I, who led the Parni tribe ...
to the early Sasanian Empire
The Sasanian Empire (), officially Eranshahr ( , "Empire of the Iranian peoples, Iranians"), was an List of monarchs of Iran, Iranian empire that was founded and ruled by the House of Sasan from 224 to 651. Enduring for over four centuries, th ...
. During the Sasanian Empire
The Sasanian Empire (), officially Eranshahr ( , "Empire of the Iranian peoples, Iranians"), was an List of monarchs of Iran, Iranian empire that was founded and ruled by the House of Sasan from 224 to 651. Enduring for over four centuries, th ...
it was mostly used for official texts.
Inscriptional Parthian is written right to left and the letters are not joined.
Letters
Inscriptional Parthian uses 22 letters:Ligatures
Inscriptional Parthian uses seven standard ligatures: The letters sadhe (𐭑) and nun (𐭍) have swash tails which typically trail under the following letter.Numerals
Inscriptional Parthian uses its ownnumerals
A numeral is a figure (symbol), word, or group of figures (symbols) or words denoting a number. It may refer to:
* Numeral system used in mathematics
* Numeral (linguistics), a part of speech denoting numbers (e.g. ''one'' and ''first'' in English ...
:
Numbers are written right-to-left. Numbers without corresponding numerals are additive. For example, 158 is written as (100 + 20 + 20 + 10 + 4 + 4).
Unicode
Inscriptional Parthian script was added to theUnicode
Unicode or ''The Unicode Standard'' or TUS is a character encoding standard maintained by the Unicode Consortium designed to support the use of text in all of the world's writing systems that can be digitized. Version 16.0 defines 154,998 Char ...
Standard in October, 2009 with the release of version 5.2.
The Unicode block for Inscriptional Parthian is U+10B40–U+10B5F:
References
Abjad writing systems Iranian inscriptions Parthian language Obsolete writing systems Persian scripts {{Abjad-stub