Chorasmian Letter Beth

It is a letter used inside Chorasmian words.

Chorasmian was a historical language of Central Asia, and its local script descended from Aramaic. The letter appears in coin inscriptions, wooden and leather documents, silver vessels, and funerary ossuaries—containers for human bones.

Aramaic writing reached Chorasmia through Achaemenid scribes around the beginning of the 4th century BCE. The local script developed from it. The earliest known Chorasmian-script examples—coin inscriptions and documents on wood and parchment—date from about the end of the 2nd century CE.

Why is this letter called “Beth”?

“Beth” is a Unicode label, not a recorded local name.

Unicode follows the Imperial Aramaic naming tradition, from an official writing system used across the Achaemenid Empire. Traditional Chorasmian letter names were not attested as of the 2018 encoding proposal, so “Beth” is a borrowed label rather than a recorded local name.

The encoded form is cursive, with letters that join; older lapidary forms wrote letters separately. Late Chorasmian also appears in a modified Arabic script during the 11th–14th centuries CE, as Turkish displaced the language.

how do I type 𐾲?

Use Unicode hexadecimal entry or an HTML numeric character reference.

Chorasmian is written from right to left, and its letters can join. Beth joins on both sides, so its drawn shape may change with neighboring letters.

In the middle of a word, Beth, Nun, and Pe can look similar. Their shapes and surrounding letters help distinguish them in historical writing.