The Meroitic script consists of two
alphasyllabic scripts developed to write the
Meroitic language
The Meroitic language () was spoken in Meroë (in present-day Sudan) during the Meroitic period (attested from 300 BCE) and became extinct about 400 CE. It was written in two forms of the Meroitic alphabet: Meroitic Cursive, which was written wit ...
at the beginning of the
Meroitic Period (3rd century BC) of the
Kingdom of Kush
The Kingdom of Kush (; Egyptian language, Egyptian: 𓎡𓄿𓈙𓈉 ''kꜣš'', Akkadian language, Assyrian: ''Kûsi'', in LXX grc, Κυς and Κυσι ; cop, ''Ecōš''; he, כּוּשׁ ''Kūš'') was an ancient kingdom in Nubia, ce ...
. The two scripts are Meroitic Cursive, derived from
Demotic Egyptian
Demotic (from grc, δημοτικός ''dēmotikós'', 'popular') is the ancient Egyptian script derived from northern forms of hieratic used in the Nile Delta, and the stage of the Egyptian language written in this script, following Late Egypt ...
, and Meroitic Hieroglyphs, derived from
Egyptian hieroglyphs
Egyptian hieroglyphs (, ) were the formal writing system used in Ancient Egypt, used for writing the Egyptian language. Hieroglyphs combined logographic, syllabic and alphabetic elements, with some 1,000 distinct characters.There were about 1,00 ...
. Meroitic Cursive is the most widely attested script, comprising ~90% of all inscriptions, and antedates, by a century or more, the earliest, surviving Meroitic hieroglyphic inscription. Greek historian
Diodorus Siculus
Diodorus Siculus, or Diodorus of Sicily ( grc-gre, Διόδωρος ; 1st century BC), was an ancient Greek historian. He is known for writing the monumental universal history ''Bibliotheca historica'', in forty books, fifteen of which su ...
(ca. 50 BC) described the two scripts in his
Bibliotheca historica
''Bibliotheca historica'' ( grc, Βιβλιοθήκη Ἱστορική, ) is a work of universal history by Diodorus Siculus. It consisted of forty books, which were divided into three sections. The first six books are geographical in theme, ...
, Book III (Africa), Chapter 4. The last known Meroitic inscription is the Meroitic Cursive inscription of the
Blemmye king, Kharamadoye, from a column in the
Temple of Kalabsha
The Temple of Kalabsha (also Temple of Mandulis) is an ancient Egyptian temple that was originally located at Bab al-Kalabsha (Gate of Kalabsha), approximately 50 km south of Aswan.
In the 1960s the temple was relocated under the Internationa ...
(REM 0094), which has recently been re-dated to AD 410/ 450 of the 5th century. Before the Meroitic Period, Egyptian hieroglyphs were used to write Kushite names and lexical items.
Though the Kingdom of Kush ended with the fall of the royal capital of Meroë, use of the language and Cursive script continued for a time after that event. During the 6th century
Christianization
Christianization ( or Christianisation) is to make Christian; to imbue with Christian principles; to become Christian. It can apply to the conversion of an individual, a practice, a place or a whole society. It began in the Roman Empire, conti ...
of Nubia, the Kushite language and Cursive script were replaced by
Byzantine Greek
Medieval Greek (also known as Middle Greek, Byzantine Greek, or Romaic) is the stage of the Greek language between the end of classical antiquity in the 5th–6th centuries and the end of the Middle Ages, conventionally dated to the Ottoman co ...
,
Coptic
Coptic may refer to:
Afro-Asia
* Copts, an ethnoreligious group mainly in the area of modern Egypt but also in Sudan and Libya
* Coptic language, a Northern Afro-Asiatic language spoken in Egypt until at least the 17th century
* Coptic alphabet ...
, and
Old Nubian
Old Nubian (also called Middle Nubian or Old Nobiin) is an extinct Nubian language, attested in writing from the 8th to the 15th century AD. It is ancestral to modern-day Nobiin and closely related to Dongolawi and Kenzi. It was used throughou ...
. The Old Nubian script, derived of the
Uncial
Uncial is a majuscule Glaister, Geoffrey Ashall. (1996) ''Encyclopedia of the Book''. 2nd edn. New Castle, DE, and London: Oak Knoll Press & The British Library
The British Library is the national library of the United Kingdom and is one ...
Greek script, added three Meroitic Cursive letters: , , and possibly for Old Nubian
"> _-_ u.html"_;"title="close_back_rounded_vowel.html"_;"title="_-_close_back_rounded_vowel">u">close_back_rounded_vowel.html"_;"title="_-_close_back_rounded_vowel">u_and_Velar_nasal.html" ;"title="close_back_rounded_vowel">u.html" ;"title="close_back_rounded_vowel.html" ;"title=" - close back rounded vowel">u">close_back_rounded_vowel.html" ;"title=" - close back rounded vowel">u and Velar nasal">[ŋ] respectively. This addition of Meroitic Cursive letters suggests that the development of the Old Nubian script began, at least, two centuries before its first full attestation in the late 8th century and/or that knowledge of the Kushite language and script was retained until the 8th century.
The script was deciphered in 1909 by
Francis Llewellyn Griffith
Francis Llewellyn Griffith (27 May 1862 – 14 March 1934) was an eminent British Egyptologist of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
Early life and education
F. Ll. Griffith was born in Brighton on 27 May 1862 where his father, Rev. Dr. ...
, a British Egyptologist, based on the Meroitic spellings of Egyptian names. However, the
Meroitic language
The Meroitic language () was spoken in Meroë (in present-day Sudan) during the Meroitic period (attested from 300 BCE) and became extinct about 400 CE. It was written in two forms of the Meroitic alphabet: Meroitic Cursive, which was written wit ...
itself remains poorly understood. In late 2008, the first complete royal dedication was found, which may help confirm or refute some of the current hypotheses.
The longest inscription found is in the
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
The Museum of Fine Arts (often abbreviated as MFA Boston or MFA) is an art museum in Boston, Massachusetts. It is the 20th-largest art museum in the world, measured by public gallery area. It contains 8,161 paintings and more than 450,000 works ...
.
Form and values
There were two graphic forms of the Meroitic alphasyllabary: monumental hieroglyphs, and a
cursive
Cursive (also known as script, among other names) is any style of penmanship in which characters are written joined in a flowing manner, generally for the purpose of making writing faster, in contrast to block letters. It varies in functionalit ...
.
The majority of texts are cursive. Unlike Egyptian writing, there was a simple one-to-one correspondence between the two forms of Meroitic, except that in the cursive form, consonants are joined in
ligature
Ligature may refer to:
* Ligature (medicine), a piece of suture used to shut off a blood vessel or other anatomical structure
** Ligature (orthodontic), used in dentistry
* Ligature (music), an element of musical notation used especially in the me ...
s to a following vowel i.
The direction of cursive writing was from right to left, top to bottom, while the monumental form was written top to bottom in columns going right to left. Monumental letters were oriented to face the beginning of the text, a feature inherited from their hieroglyphic origin.
Being primarily alphasyllabic, the Meroitic script worked differently than Egyptian hieroglyphs. Some scholars, such as
Harald Haarmann
Harald Haarmann (born 1946) is a German linguist and cultural scientist who lives and works in Finland. Haarmann studied general linguistics, various philological disciplines and prehistory at the universities of Hamburg, Bonn, Coimbra and Ban ...
, believe that the vowel letters of Meroitic are evidence for an influence of the
Greek alphabet
The Greek alphabet has been used to write the Greek language since the late 9th or early 8th century BCE. It is derived from the earlier Phoenician alphabet, and was the earliest known alphabetic script to have distinct letters for vowels as we ...
in its development.
There were 23 letters in the Meroitic alphasyllabary, including four vowels. In the transcription established by Hintze (based on earlier versions by Griffith), they are:
*a appears only at the beginning of a word
*e was used principally in foreign names
*i and o were used like vowels in the Latin or Greek alphabets.
The fifteen consonants are conventionally transcribed:
*p, b, m, d, t, s, n, r, l, k, q, ḫ, ẖ, w, y
These consonants are understood to have an inherent vowel value /a/, such that p should generally be understood as /pa/.
An additional series of characters is understood to represent consonants with inherent vowels other than /a/:
*ne, se, te, to
These values were established from evidence such as Egyptian names borrowed into Meroitic. That is, the Meroitic letter which looks like an owl in monumental inscriptions, or like a numeral three in cursive Meroitic, we transcribe as m, and it is believed to have been pronounced as
However, this is a historical reconstruction, and while m is not in much doubt, the pronunciations of some of the other letters are much less certain.
The three vowels i a o were presumably pronounced /i a u/. Ḫ is thought to have been a
velar fricative
A velar fricative is a fricative consonant produced at the velar place of articulation. It is possible to distinguish the following kinds of velar fricatives:
*Voiced velar fricative, a consonant sound written as in the International Phonetic Alph ...
, as the ''ch'' in Scottish ''loch'' or German ''Bach.'' H̱ was a similar sound, perhaps
uvular
Uvulars are consonants articulated with the back of the tongue against or near the uvula, that is, further back in the mouth than velar consonants. Uvulars may be stops, fricatives, nasals, trills, or approximants, though the IPA does not prov ...
as ''g'' in Dutch ''dag'' or
palatal
The palate () is the roof of the mouth in humans and other mammals. It separates the oral cavity from the nasal cavity.
A similar structure is found in crocodilians, but in most other tetrapods, the oral and nasal cavities are not truly separ ...
as in German ''ich''. Q was perhaps a
uvular stop
In phonetics and phonology, a uvular stop is a type of consonantal sound, made with the back of the tongue in contact with the uvula, which hangs down in front of the throat (hence uvular), held tightly enough to block the passage of air (hence a ...
, as in Arabic ''Qatar''. S may have been like ''s'' in ''sun''. An /n/ was omitted in writing when it occurred before any of several other consonants within a word. D is uncertain. Griffith first transcribed it as ''r,'' and Rowan believes that was closer to its actual value. It corresponds to Egyptian and Greek /d/ when initial or after an /n/ (unwritten in Meroitic), but to /r/ between vowels, and does not seem to have affected the vowel a the way the other alveolar obstruents t n s did.
Comparing late documents with early ones, it is apparent that the sequences ''sel-'' and ''nel-,'' which Rowan takes to be /sl/ and /nl/ and which commonly occurred with the determiner ''-l-,''
assimilated over time to ''t'' and ''l'' (perhaps /t/ and /ll/).
The only
punctuation mark
Punctuation (or sometimes interpunction) is the use of spacing, conventional signs (called punctuation marks), and certain typographical devices as aids to the understanding and correct reading of written text, whether read silently or aloud. A ...
was a
word and phrase divider of two to three dots.
Principles
Meroitic was a type of alphabet called an
abugida
An abugida (, from Ge'ez language, Ge'ez: ), sometimes known as alphasyllabary, neosyllabary or pseudo-alphabet, is a segmental Writing systems#Segmental writing system, writing system in which consonant-vowel sequences are written as units; ...
: The vowel /a/ was not normally written; rather it was assumed whenever a consonant was written alone. That is, the single letter m was read /ma/. All other vowels were overtly written: the letters mi, for example, stood for the syllable /mi/, just as in the Latin alphabet. This system is broadly similar to the
Indian abugidas that arose around the same time as Meroitic.
Griffith and Hintze
Griffith identified the essential abugida nature of Meroitic when he deciphered the script in 1911. He noted in 1916 that certain consonant letters were never followed by a vowel letter, and varied with other consonant letters. He interpreted them as
syllabic
Syllabic may refer to:
*Syllable, a unit of speech sound, considered the building block of words
**Syllabic consonant, a consonant that forms the nucleus of a syllable
*Syllabary, writing system using symbols for syllables
*Abugida, writing system ...
, with the values ''ne, se, te,'' and ''to.'' ''Ne,'' for example, varied with ''na.'' ''Na'' could be followed by the vowels ''i'' and ''o'' to write the syllables ''ni'' and ''no,'' but was never followed by the vowel ''e.''
He also noted that the vowel ''e'' was often omitted. It often occurred at the ends of Egyptian loanwords that had no final vowel in
Coptic
Coptic may refer to:
Afro-Asia
* Copts, an ethnoreligious group mainly in the area of modern Egypt but also in Sudan and Libya
* Coptic language, a Northern Afro-Asiatic language spoken in Egypt until at least the 17th century
* Coptic alphabet ...
. He believed that ''e'' functioned both as a
schwa
In linguistics, specifically phonetics and phonology, schwa (, rarely or ; sometimes spelled shwa) is a vowel sound denoted by the IPA symbol , placed in the central position of the vowel chart. In English and some other languages, it rep ...
and a
"killer" mark that marked the absence of a vowel. That is, the letter m by itself was read , while the sequence me was read or . This is how
Ethiopic works today. Later scholars such as Hitze and Rilly accepted this argument, or modified it so that ''e'' could represent either or schwa–zero.
It has long been puzzling to epigraphers why the syllabic principles that underlie the script, where every consonant is assumed to be followed by a vowel ''a,'' should have special letters for consonants followed by ''e.'' Such a mixed abugida–syllabary is not found among the abugidas of India, nor in Ethiopic.
Old Persian cuneiform
Old Persian cuneiform is a semi-alphabetic cuneiform script that was the primary script for Old Persian. Texts written in this cuneiform have been found in Iran (Persepolis, Susa, Hamadan, Kharg Island), Armenia, Romania (Gherla), Turkey ( Van Fo ...
script is somewhat similar, with more than one inherent vowel, but is not an abugida because the non-inherent vowels are written with full letters, and are often redundantly written after an inherent vowel other than /a/.
Millet and Rowan
Millet (1970) proposed that Meroitic ''e'' was in fact an
epenthetic vowel
In phonology, epenthesis (; Greek ) means the addition of one or more sounds to a word, especially in the beginning syllable ('' prothesis'') or in the ending syllable (''paragoge'') or in-between two syllabic sounds in a word. The word ''epenth ...
used to break up Egyptian
consonant cluster
In linguistics, a consonant cluster, consonant sequence or consonant compound, is a group of consonants which have no intervening vowel. In English, for example, the groups and are consonant clusters in the word ''splits''. In the education fie ...
s that could not be pronounced in the Meroitic language, or appeared after final Egyptian consonants such as ''m'' and ''k'' which could not occur finally in Meroitic. Rowan (2006) takes this further and proposes that the glyphs ''se, ne,'' and ''te'' were not syllabic at all, but stood for consonants , , and at the end of a word or morpheme (as when followed by the
determiner
A determiner, also called determinative (abbreviated ), is a word, phrase, or affix that occurs together with a noun or noun phrase and generally serves to express the reference of that noun or noun phrase in the context. That is, a determiner m ...
''-l;'' she proposes Meroitic finals were restricted to
alveolar consonant
Alveolar (; UK also ) consonants are articulated with the tongue against or close to the superior alveolar ridge, which is called that because it contains the alveoli (the sockets) of the upper teeth. Alveolar consonants may be articulated with ...
s such as these. An example is the Coptic word ''prit'' "the agent", which in Meroitic was transliterated ''perite (pa-e-ra-i-te).'' If Rowan is right and this was pronounced , then Meroitic would have been a fairly typical abugida. She proposes that Meroitic had three vowels, , and that was raised to something like or after the alveolar consonants , explaining the lack of orthographic ''t, s, n'' followed by the vowel letter ''e.''
Very rarely does one find the sequence
C VC, where the C's are both labials or both velars. This is similar to consonant restrictions found throughout the Afro-Asiatic language family, suggesting to Rowan that there is a good chance Meroitic was an
Afro-Asiatic language
The Afroasiatic languages (or Afro-Asiatic), also known as Hamito-Semitic, or Semito-Hamitic, and sometimes also as Afrasian, Erythraean or Lisramic, are a language family of about 300 languages that are spoken predominantly in the geographic su ...
like Egyptian.
Rowan is not convinced that the system was completely alphabetic, and suggests that the glyph ''te'' also may have functioned as a
determinative
A determinative, also known as a taxogram or semagram, is an ideogram used to mark semantic categories of words in logographic scripts which helps to disambiguate interpretation. They have no direct counterpart in spoken language, though they may ...
for place names, as it frequently occurs at the end of place names that are known not to have a /t/ in them. Similarly, ''ne'' may have marked royal or divine names.
Unicode
Meroitic scripts, both Hieroglyphic and Cursive, were added to the
Unicode
Unicode, formally The Unicode Standard,The formal version reference is is an information technology Technical standard, standard for the consistent character encoding, encoding, representation, and handling of Character (computing), text expre ...
Standard in January, 2012 with the release of version 6.1.
The Unicode block for Meroitic Hieroglyphs is U+10980–U+1099F.
The Unicode block for Meroitic Cursive is U+109A0–U+109FF.
As a Meroitic Unicode font you may use Aegyptus which can be downloaded fro
Unicode Fonts for Ancient Scripts
See also
*
Afro-Asiatic
The Afroasiatic languages (or Afro-Asiatic), also known as Hamito-Semitic, or Semito-Hamitic, and sometimes also as Afrasian, Erythraean or Lisramic, are a language family of about 300 languages that are spoken predominantly in the geographic su ...
Languages
References
Sources
*
*Török, László (1998). The Kingdom of Kush: Handbook of the Napatan-Meróitic Civilization (Handbook of Oriental Studies/Handbuch Der Orientalistik). New York: Brill Academic Publishers. .
External links
Meroitic - AncientScripts*
{{list of writing systems
3rd-century BC establishments
Alphabets
Hieroglyphs
Writing systems of Africa
History of Nubia
Obsolete writing systems
History of Sudan
Kingdom of Kush
Blemmyes