Cuneiform Numeric Sign Four U

In the U series, read it as forty.

Assyriologists write it as 4(U). The U sign 𒌋 marks one ten-unit, so four U units make forty. The unit or commodity that follows tells you what the total measures.

Cuneiform is an evolved writing system, not a single invented sign. Its complete system is first attested at Uruk IV around 3500–3200 BCE, in clay records tied to administration. This numeral belongs to a series whose shapes and stacking conventions changed across later periods.

Why did scribes use 𒐏?

It let record keepers write quantities compactly.

Cuneiform numerals handled administrative counts such as rations, grain, and land area. The U series expressed tens within a wider base-sixty system, where quantities are organized around sixty.

The Sumerian value nimin means forty; later Babylonian and Assyrian lexical lists preserve it in their own languages. With bur₃, a surface-area unit, 4(U) appears in a land measurement.

What does 𒐏 mean beside another sign?

The following unit tells what the forty counts.

Before a unit or commodity sign, read it as forty of that unit. In a sign list or transliteration, 4(U) identifies this particular ancient numeral; replacing it with bare 40 hides which sign was written.

It is not 𒐉, the Four Dish sign for a different measure convention. Unicode also encodes 𒑩 as a stacked form of Four U.