Early Dynastic Cuneiform is a Unicode block of the Supplementary Multilingual Plane (SMP), at U+12480–U+1254F, introduced in version 8.0 (June 2015).
The original Cuneiform block, introduced in version 5.0 (July 2006) is designed for the requirements of Ur III era cuneiform, with the younger (Old Assyrian and Neo-Assyrian) literary tradition to be considered font variants (analogous to the precedent of the approach followed in Han unification).
Even for the Ur III era, many signs recognized in relevant dictionaries did not receive their own code point but are intended as being expressed as ligatures of two or more constituent signs, to be handled by the font, but for the purposes of representing archaic cuneiform, the inventory of the original block was recognized as insufficient and an additional 196 characters were added in version 8.0.
The LAK has 870 signs in total, most of which are already covered in the previous Unicode blocks in the form of their Ur III continuants.
[5] The following Unicode-related documents record the purpose and process of defining specific characters in the Early Dynastic Cuneiform block: