A study of the cryptographic cuneiform texts brought to light a small group of texts which pair numerals with syllabic signs. A brief description of the corpus and preliminary observations about the texts follows.
Each of the texts pairs numerals written in standard sexagesimal notation with the signs of Syllabary A (Sa). I call these texts number-syllabaries. All of the number-syllabaries are in a late hand; some are datable to the Seleucid period by the cursive form of the numeral nine. All of the exemplars are known or suspected to have come from Babylon.
The corpus consists of these texts: MMA 86.11.364 Rm. 806, BM 47732 + 48191, BM 77233, BM 46603(+)46609. Each of these, except BM 77233, duplicates part of at least one of the other fragments.
MMA 86.11.364 is the largest and most complete exemplar of the number-syllabaries. The pattern of its entries, numeral—DIŠ—syllabic sign, is standard for the other texts. This pattern clearly differs from the one in lexical texts, where the DIŠ sign indicates the initial component of each entry. MMA 86.11.364 preserves each Sa sign only once, and not the number of times it appears in Sa.
BM 47732 + 48191 is the largest of the BM number-syllabary pieces. It duplicates the Metropolitan text in two places. Unlike the latter, however, BM 47732 + 48191 repeats the syllabic signs and their corresponding numbers as many times as the sign forms appear in Sa.