Start Using Cuneiform and Hieroglyphic Numbers

Cuneiform and Hieroglyphic Numbers 1.0 generated from template.

Keyboard Layout

This keyboard only redefines the use of 10 keys. It allows the user to enter cuneiform and hieroglyphic numbers. Your application will need to have access to a font that supports the Cuneiform codepoints. Noto Sans Cuneiform and Noto Sans Egyptian Hiero from Google Noto Fonts work very well. The Windows fallback font for Historic languages, Segoe UI Historic also works well (and covers both cuneiform and hieroglyphic numbers), but it seems that it is missing the glyph for the number 20 in cuneiform.

Usage guidelines

Entering cuneiform and hieroglyphic numbers is similar, but for hieroglyphic numbers you must also indicate the order of magnitude using the e-p keys.

Cuneiform Numbers

To enter a cuneiform number, you enter a semicolon(;) immediately followed by a digit key from the top row of the keyboard. Unshifted keys produce units. Shifted keys produce 10's.

Units: ;1 produces 𒐕. Thus, ;[1 through 9] produce the cuneiform for the digits 1 through 9.
Tens: ;SHIFT+1 produces 𒌋. Thus, ;[SHIFT+1 through SHIFT+9] produce the cuneiform for 10 through 90.
In order to type an actual semicolon, just type ; followed immediately by a space.

For example, 47 would be keyed as ;SHIFT+4;7 and would generate 𒐏𒐛 .

For numbers greater than 59, put extra space between each sexagesimal "digit". For example, 192, which is (3,12) would appear as 𒐗 𒌋𒐖.

Hieroglyphic Numbers

To enter a hieroglyphic number you must enter three characters:

Enter a semicolon(;) to indicate that you are going to enter a number.
Enter one character from the set {e,r,t,y,u,i,o,p} to indicate whether the number is a unit, ten, hundred .. ten million.
- p - 1's
- o - 10's
- i - 100's
- u - 1,000's
- y - 10,000's
- t - 100,000's
- r - 1,000,000's
- e - 10,000,000's
Enter a digit from 1 .. 9.

Remember, Egyptian numbers were typically written with the units first, tens second ...

Let's look at some examples:

To enter the number 7, type ;p7 - which will produce 𓐀.
To enter the number 500,000 type ;t5 - which will produce 𓆐 𓆐 𓆐 𓆐 𓆐.
To enter the number 304,160 type ;o6;i1;u4;t3 - which will produce 𓎋𓍢𓆿𓆐𓆐𓆐. (Remember, we want units first.)