U+1208D CUNEIFORM SIGN E2

U+1208D 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. In text U+1208D 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:

É (Cuneiform: 𒂍) is the Sumerian word or symbol for house or temple.

The Sumerian term É.GAL ("palace", literally "big house") denoted a city's main building. É.LUGAL ("king's house") was used synonymously. In the texts of Lagash, the É.GAL is the center of the ensi's administration of the city, and the site of the city archives. Sumerian É.GAL "palace" is the probable etymology of Semitic words for "palace, temple", such as Hebrew היכל heikhal, and Arabic هيكل haykal. It has thus been speculated that the word É originated from something akin to *hai or *ˀai, especially since the cuneiform sign È is used for /a/ in Eblaite.

The term temen appearing frequently after É in names of ziggurats is translated as "foundation pegs", apparently the first step in the construction process of a house; compare, for example, verses 551–561 of the account of the construction of E-ninnu:

He stretched out lines in the most perfect way; he set up (?) a sanctuary in the holy uzga. In the house, Enki drove in the foundation pegs, while Nanshe, the daughter of Eridu, took care of the oracular messages. The mother of Lagash, holy Gatumdug, gave birth to its bricks amid cries (?), and Bau, the lady, first-born daughter of An, sprinkled them with oil and cedar essence. En and lagar priests were detailed to the house to provide maintenance for it. The Anuna gods stood there full of admiration.

Temen has been occasionally compared to Greek temenos "holy precinct", but since the latter has a well established Indo-European etymology (see temple), the comparison is either mistaken, or at best describes a case of popular etymology or convergence.

In E-temen-an-ki, "the temple of the foundation (pegs) of heaven and earth", temen has been taken to refer to an axis mundi connecting earth to heaven (thus re-enforcing the Tower of Babel connection), but the term re-appears in several other temple names, referring to their physical stability rather than, or as well as, to a mythological world axis; compare the Egyptian notion of Djed.