Meroitic Script: The Undeciphered Language of Ancient Kush

The Meroitic script was the writing system of the ancient Kingdom of Kush, used in the Nile valley of what is now Sudan from about the 2nd century BC to the 5th century AD. It is one of the oldest writing systems in sub-Saharan Africa. Thanks to the British Egyptologist Francis Llewellyn Griffith, scholars have been able to read its signs aloud since about 1911, but the Meroitic language itself remains largely untranslated.

Origins

For centuries the rulers of Kush wrote their official inscriptions in Egyptian, using Egyptian hieroglyphs. This tradition went back to the Napatan kings who ruled Egypt as its 25th Dynasty in the 8th and 7th centuries BC. During the Meroitic period, when the royal centre lay at Meroe, Kushite scribes developed a way of writing their own language.

The earliest securely dated text in Meroitic hieroglyphs is usually linked to Queen Shanakdakheto, who ruled in the 2nd century BC. Her name appears in an inscription from a temple at Naqa. Cursive Meroitic may be as old or slightly older, but early examples are harder to date.

How the script works

Meroitic had two forms. The hieroglyphic form borrowed pictures from Egyptian hieroglyphs and was used for royal and religious monuments. The cursive form, based on Egyptian Demotic, was faster to write and was used for most texts, including funerary inscriptions, letters and accounts.

Unlike Egyptian, which used hundreds of signs, Meroitic used only 23. Most signs stood for a consonant followed by the vowel a. Separate signs for e, i and o changed that vowel, and the e sign could also show that no vowel followed. Linguists describe this kind of system as an alphasyllabary. Words were separated by two or three dots, which made texts easier to divide.

Cursive Meroitic was written from right to left in horizontal lines. Hieroglyphic Meroitic was usually written in columns. Known texts number more than a thousand, ranging from a few words on offering tables to long royal inscriptions.

Griffith and the decipherment

The key to the sounds came from a bilingual source. A stone barque stand from Wad ban Naqa, made for King Natakamani and Queen Amanitore in the 1st century AD, gave royal names in both Egyptian hieroglyphs and Meroitic hieroglyphs. Because the Egyptian signs could be read, the Meroitic equivalents could be matched to them.

Francis Llewellyn Griffith used these names, along with comparisons between the hieroglyphic and cursive forms, to assign sound values to all the signs between 1909 and 1911. His results, published in works such as Karanòg (1911), have been refined but not overturned. The process resembled how the Rosetta Stone helped open Egyptian hieroglyphs, but with one crucial difference: there was no known related language to supply the meaning of the words.

A language that resists reading

Today scholars understand the grammar of many funerary formulas and the meaning of some words. Examples include qore (ruler), kdke (the royal title rendered in Greek and Latin as Candace) and words connected with offerings, water and bread. But long historical texts, such as royal stelae, can be read aloud and only partly understood.

The great problem is the lack of a long bilingual text and of a well-known related language. In the 2000s the French linguist Claude Rilly argued convincingly that Meroitic belongs to the Northern East Sudanic branch, related to Nubian and several other languages of Sudan. This comparison has helped identify more words, and work continues. Meroitic shares the status of a partly readable writing system with scripts such as the Indus script, though for different reasons.

Key inscriptions

• The Hamadab Stela (British Museum), a large sandstone stela found near Meroe in 1914, has dozens of lines of cursive Meroitic. It names the ruler Amanirenas and Prince Akinidad and probably refers to their wars with Rome in the 20s BC.
• The Wad ban Naqa barque stand provided the bilingual royal names used in the decipherment.
• The Kalabsha inscription of King Kharamadoye, from the 5th century AD, is among the last known Meroitic texts.

Timeline

• 2nd century BC: Earliest datable Meroitic hieroglyphic inscription, naming Queen Shanakdakheto.
• 1st century BC: Long cursive royal texts, including those of Amanirenas and Akinidad.
• 1st century AD: The Wad ban Naqa barque stand is made with bilingual royal names.
• c. AD 350: The Meroitic kingdom declines; use of the script falls away.
• 5th century AD: Kharamadoye’s inscription at Kalabsha, one of the last Meroitic texts.
• 1909–1911: Griffith assigns sound values to all 23 signs.
• 2000s: Claude Rilly links Meroitic to the Northern East Sudanic languages.

Why it matters

The Meroitic script shows that an African state created its own writing system, adapting Egyptian models to its own language. Reading it fully would open the internal history of Kush from its own point of view, rather than through Egyptian, Greek or Roman eyes. It remains one of the great unfinished puzzles of ancient languages.