Cuneiform times of Parthian Empire (250 BC – AD 226). The last known cuneiform inscription, an astronomical text, was written in 75 AD. The complexity of the system prompted the development of a number of simplified versions of the script. Old Persian was written in a subset of simplified cuneiform characters known today as Old Persian cuneiform. It formed a semi-alphabetic syllabary, using far fewer wedge strokes than Assyrian used, together with a handful of logograms for frequently occurring words like "god" and "king". Ugaritic was written using the Ugaritic alphabet, a standard Semitic style alphabet (an "abjad") written using the
Cuneiform (Unicode block) there are signs written as ligatures of varying constituent signs, such as KURUM (Borger 2003 no. 729) that was written IGI.NÍG in early times, but later IGI.ERIM. Since there is no code point for KURUM, the sign must be expressed as either IGI.NÍG (U+12146 U+1243C, ) or IGI.ERIM (U+12146 U+1209F, ) depending on the shape of the glyph, in violation of the basic principle of Unicode to encode characters, not glyphs. While those signs can in principle still be added by a "Cuneiform Extended" range in the future, as has been done for a number of other scripts ("Latin Extended"