Meroitic Cursive Number Three Thousand

They recorded quantities and dates in Meroitic writing. Examples include accounts, measurements, funerary texts, and monument dates or counts. Surviving evidence contains no written arithmetic.

Cursive Meroitic emerged by the 3rd century BCE; its earliest dated text is about 200 BCE.

It drew partly on Demotic, an Egyptian script for everyday writing. A connection between its numerals and late hieratic, an older Egyptian cursive style, remains disputed. By the sixth century, Coptic had superseded the Meroitic scripts and borrowed three cursive symbols to write Nubian.