Meroitic Cursive Number Five Hundred

It means five hundred in Meroitic Cursive. In a Meroitic number string, it contributes the value 500 while the other signs express the rest of the amount.

Meroitic cursive was the general-use form of writing in the Kushite kingdom of Nubia, in the Nile Valley south of Egypt, and it was written mostly right to left. Meroitic writing was used from around the second century BCE to the fourth century CE. Its hieroglyphic form, using picture-like signs, was reserved for formal inscriptions.

Why did Meroitic writers use this numeral?

It recorded amounts, measures, dates, and counts. Meroitic numerals appear in administrative work such as tax records and measurement, and in funerary or monumental texts for dates and quantities of people.

Meroitic cursive developed from Egyptian Demotic, a handwritten Egyptian script. The numeral shapes, however, are especially close to late Egyptian hieratic, an older cursive writing style. The Akinidad stela, an inscribed stone monument, includes a large number dated to the late first century BCE.