Cuneiform EŠ₂₁ Sign

It writes three within cuneiform number notation.

Cuneiform number writing grew from accounting for goods in the late-fourth-millennium BCE. The first appearance of this exact variant is undated in the surviving record as of 2026. In an 8th-century BCE Neo-Assyrian inscription, EŠ₂₁ comes before GUN, the sign for a talent, an ancient unit of weight; together they mean three talents.

Cuneiform sign lists transcribe its stacked form as TAB.AŠ, a scholarly label for this sign form. Other sign families and measurement systems also had forms for three, so a shared value alone does not make them interchangeable.