Greek Capital Letter Archaic Sampi

Greek Capital Letter Archaic Sampi at U+0372 is a historic Greek letter in the Greek and Coptic block, used for the uppercase form of archaic sampi. It represents a letter once used in some local Greek alphabets before the classical alphabet became standardized, rather than a character in ordinary modern Greek writing. Its main use today is scholarly: epigraphy, papyrology, classical philology, and Unicode transcription of ancient inscriptions or documents. Editors may use it when reproducing archaic Greek text where the original sign is interpreted as sampi, especially in discussions of regional alphabets and early Greek letterforms. It should be distinguished from the later Greek numeral sampi, which is used as a number sign for 900 in the Greek numeral system. Archaic sampi is about representing an old alphabetic letterform, while numeral sampi belongs to the tradition of alphabetic numerals; specialist fonts may be needed to make that distinction visually clear.