U+12038 CUNEIFORM SIGN ASH

U+12038 was added to Unicode in version 5.0 (2006). It belongs to the block Cuneiform in the Supplementary Multilingual Plane.

This character is a Other Letter and is mainly used in the Cuneiform script.

The glyph is not a composition. It has a Neutral East Asian Width. In bidirectional context it acts as Left To Right and is not mirrored. The glyph can, under circumstances, be confused with 2 other glyphs. In text U+12038 behaves as Alphabetic regarding line breaks. It has type OLetter for sentence and ALetter for word breaks. The Grapheme Cluster Break is Any.

The Wikipedia has the following information about this codepoint:

The cuneiform Aš sign, is found in both the 14th century BC Amarna letters and the Epic of Gilgamesh. In the Epic, it has the following meanings, besides aš:

aš

dil

ina

ṭel

AŠ

Some special considerations for a single "cuneiform sign" are as follows. In Egyptian hieroglyphs, the space for a group of signs (in cuneiform, a group of individual strokes), is called (quadrat)-block. Among cuneiform signs, only a handful of signs (specifically the individual 'skrokes', horizontal, vertical, "wedge", 'half-strokes', etc.) are found in single usage. For aš specifically, (the full-length, horizontal stroke) its highest usage in the Epic of Gilgamesh is for the preposition ina (for in, into, etc; confer for a specific "ina" usage (by Kovacs), Gilgamesh flood myth#Alternative translations). The specific usage numbers for the sign's meaning in the Epic is as follows: aš-(4), dil-(3), ina-(284), ṭel-(1), AŠ-(1). The high usage as the preposition may be for space considerations, but it should be considered that the Epic of Gilgamesh was also a "training document" for scribes, over hundreds of years, so the multi-functioning of signs may also have been in issue, (one cuneiform sign substituted for the prepostion: i-na, of two signs.)