Meroitic, the Script of Kush

South of Egypt lay the kingdom of Kush, which you met in Egypt and Nubia. Its kings ruled Egypt as the 25th Dynasty and long afterward ruled from Napata and then Meroë. At first they wrote in Egyptian. From around the 3rd or 2nd century BC, while Egypt was writing in Demotic, they began to write their own language in a script of their own: Meroitic.

Key idea

Meroitic has two forms: a monumental hieroglyphic form, with signs borrowed from Egyptian hieroglyphs, and a cursive form, derived from Demotic. Each has 23 signs. Francis Llewellyn Griffith worked out their sound values in 1909, so Meroitic can be read aloud, but much of the language is still not understood.

Why it works

Reading a script and understanding a language are different problems. Griffith could find the sounds because Meroitic texts spell the names of kings, queens and gods that are known from Egyptian sources. But there is no long bilingual text, like the Rosetta Stone, and the Meroitic language has no well-known living relative, so most words cannot be translated. A few are known, such as qore "king" and kandake, the title of a ruling queen, which the Greeks and Romans heard as "Candace".

The two forms of Meroitic.
	Meroitic hieroglyphic	Meroitic cursive
Derived from	Egyptian hieroglyphs	Demotic
Used for	royal and temple monuments	most texts: about nine in ten
Direction	in columns, read right to left	right to left
Signs	23	23

Meroitic is an alphasyllabary: a consonant sign is read with the vowel a unless a vowel sign follows. Words are separated by a mark of two or three dots. The language's family is debated: Claude Rilly and others argue that it belongs with the Eastern Sudanic languages, which include Nubian, while some scholars have proposed other links.

Meroë, the later capital of Kush, between the Fifth and Sixth Cataracts.

Meroitic is not on this chart of Egyptian scripts: it writes a different language, though its signs come from Egyptian ones.

Worked example: Reading without understanding

A Meroitic inscription can be sounded out completely. Why can't scholars translate it?

Sound values come from names known in Egyptian sources.
Meanings need a bilingual text, or a well-understood related language, to compare with. Meroitic has neither in full.
So scholars can say the words but know the meaning of only some of them.

Answer: Sounds are known; most meanings are not.

Worked example: Reading a sign

In Meroitic, a consonant sign alone carries the vowel a. How is the consonant k read alone, and how when followed by the vowel sign i?

Alone, a consonant has the built-in vowel a: ka.
A following vowel sign replaces it: ki.

Answer: ka alone; ki with i.

Common mistake

Thinking being able to read a script means understanding it. Meroitic can be sounded out, but its meaning is only partly known.

Meroitic, the Script of Kush

Practice

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