The Meroïtic script was used in the Kingdom of Kush, from the 2nd
century BCE onwards until the 5th century CE, in an area of the Nile
Valley stretching from Philae in Nubia to near Khartoum in Sudan.
The form of this script was borrowed from Egyptian, but the way the
system worked was quite different.
There are two major scriptal traditions, the hieroglyphic
and the cursive. The hieroglyphic signs were written in
columns from top to bottom, and appear all most exclusively on
monuments. The cursive style flows usually in horizontal lines
from right to left. For both cases signs read in the direction
which the figures face (ie if the sign that looks like a bull faces
right, then you start from the right and goes left).
A glance at the phonetic values of the signs indicates some
strange mixture of alphabetic and syllabic signs. In reality this
system was really a minimalistic syllabary much like
Old Persian. The signs that appear
to stand for consonantal sounds are really combinations of that
consonant plus the vowel 'a'. However, these same signs changes
to be purely consonantal if followed by vowels 'i', 'e', or 'o'.
Furthermore, the glyph for 'a' was used only in the beginning of
words (where a syllabic 'a' might occur). In addition, to represent
a simple consonant sound unattached by any vowel, the symbol for
for 'e' was written after the consonantal sign to indicate the
lack of the default vowel 'a' following the consonant.
The main impetus behind deciphering Meroïtic was done by the
English scholar Francis Llewellyn Griffith (1862-1934). He worked out
the phonetic value of the signs by comparing proper names on texts in
Meroïtic and Egyptian. However, scholars can read, but cannot
understand what the texts mean, because the problem is that the
Meroïtic language is an isolate as far as linguists know. It has no
known relatives, and the meaning of its words and its grammatical
structure remain relatively obscure, therefore so impeding attempts
at reading of the texts.
Search
Topics
Related Scripts