What 𐁅 means
It stands for the syllable nwa in Linear B. A syllabogram — a sound sign inside spellings — not a standalone word or a picture.
The oldest Linear B tablets come from the Room of the Chariot Tablets, an archive at the palace of Knossos, dated around the 14th century BCE — palace bookkeeping: clay lists of goods, animals, workers.
Linear B grew out of the older Minoan script Linear A; 𐁅's documented counterpart is 𐘩 AB048, itself traced to a Cretan Hieroglyphic sign. Linear A is undeciphered — that ancestor is a shape, not a word.
Can 𐁅 replace nu-wa?
Yes — an optional one-sign spelling. Scribes could write nu-wa with 𐁅 alone or spelled out as 𐀝𐀶; the choice was orthographic, not a different word.
Signs like 𐁅 exist because plain Linear B signs are consonant-plus-vowel; a cluster like nw needed two signs or one compressed 'complex' syllabogram.
Scholars transliterate it nwa — a sound value recovered when Michael Ventris deciphered Linear B in 1952, not an ancient name.
Archival and specialist — real work among Linear B signs, decoration with credentials alone.
Don't read the shape as a picture: its only job is a sound.
Part of the collection
Who writes 𐁅
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What it means when someone sends it to you
2 readingsIt is the sound nwa inside a word — a syllable, not a thing.
Don't confuse it with
1
Related characters
2
Combination ideas
1Questions people ask
2Is 𐁅 the same as nu-wa?
It can be. In Linear B, 𐁅 may replace the two-sign spelling nu-wa — same word, shorter writing.
Why does 𐁅 show as a box?
Font trouble, not another meaning — 𐁅 sits outside the basic multilingual plane and most fonts skip it. A Linear B font like Noto Sans Linear B shows it properly.
More like this
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How to type or find 𐁅
- Also called
- nwa · nu-wa · B048
- Search it as
- ab048 · syllabogram · linear-a · linear b · mycenaean
- Shows up in
- Anything that takes text · its shape is whatever your font draws
𐁅\10045Codes and encoding1 code points
A visible symbol can contain several code points. JS .length counts UTF-16 units; UTF-8 counts bytes.