Cuneiform Sign Sha3

It can mean “heart” or “inside.”

In scholarly transliteration—a way to write cuneiform with Latin letters—𒊮 is read šag₄. Its range includes the heart, inner body, womb, inside, and middle, so “heart” alone is too narrow.

An Early Dynastic (early Mesopotamian) royal inscription uses šag₄ in a phrase translated with “heart.” Cuneiform grew from accounting in the late fourth millennium BCE into a writing system for religious, political, literary, and scholarly records. In writing in the Akkadian language during the first millennium BCE, the same sign could stand for libbu, “heart” or “middle,” in set phrases such as ina libbi, “in” or “within.”

What does 𒊮 mean when someone sends it?

Read it as cuneiform; a lone message cannot fix its value.

If someone sends it alone, the safest reading is a cuneiform reference, not a clear English “heart” message. Ask what they mean if the distinction matters; the ancient reading depends on language, period, and neighboring signs.

Unicode preserves the sign’s identity, while fonts can draw period-specific forms. Its wedges and proportions may change without encoding a different sign.