Readable but not understood
Meroitic is the writing system of the later Kushite kingdom, used from roughly the second century BCE until the fourth or fifth century CE. It is often described as “undeciphered”, which is only half true. Since the early twentieth century, scholars have been able to read it aloud: they know what sound most signs stand for. What they cannot do is fully translate it, because the language it records is not well understood and has no close, securely identified relative with a large body of text. A phrase from Meroitic can often be sounded out, and some words and grammar are known, but many sentences remain unclear.
Two forms of one script
Meroitic was written in two forms. Meroitic hieroglyphic was used for monumental inscriptions on temple walls, stelae and royal monuments, and its signs were taken from Egyptian hieroglyphs, though with different sound values. Meroitic cursive was a handwritten form, written from right to left, used for administrative and everyday writing, as well as for many funerary texts. Each has about two dozen basic signs. This is far fewer than Egyptian hieroglyphs, and the Egyptian hieroglyphic script that inspired the monumental form had hundreds of signs.
The writing system is a kind of alphabet-like script in which consonant signs carry an inherent vowel, usually “a”, and separate signs are used for other vowels or to cancel the inherent vowel. Scholars call this type an alphasyllabary. Words were separated by a mark made of two or three dots, which helps in studying the texts. This is a different design from the consonantal alphabet used in Phoenician and early Hebrew, which marked no vowels at all, and from the Greek and Latin alphabets, which marked all of them.
How it was deciphered
The key figure is the British Egyptologist Francis Llewellyn Griffith, who in the first decade of the twentieth century worked out the values of the signs. He did this by comparing Meroitic names written in Egyptian and in Meroitic, such as royal names known from Egyptian and Greek sources, and by analysing inscriptions found in temples and tombs. His work gave the first reliable sound values, and later scholars refined them.
This is a different situation from the Rosetta Stone, where a long bilingual text allowed Egyptian to be translated. For Meroitic no such text is known. Only a very small number of short bilingual or related texts exist, and they are not enough to unlock the language. A comparison can be made with the Linear A script of Minoan Crete, which can be sounded out to some extent because many of its signs resemble those of the later Linear B, but whose language is not understood. The reasons for the difficulty differ in each case. In the Indus script debate, by contrast, even the basic nature of the signs is disputed, so Meroitic is in a better position than that.
The language
Meroitic is generally thought to belong to the Nilo-Saharan family of languages, perhaps its Eastern Sudanic branch, though this is debated and not all scholars accept it. Some connections have been proposed with Nubian languages spoken today, but these are not accepted by everyone, and only a handful of words are securely translated. For example, qore is understood as “ruler” or “king”, and kdke is the title usually rendered kandake. Names of gods, such as Apedemak and Amun, and many personal names can be identified. Some grammar, such as how certain endings mark noun phrases or verbs, is partly known.
What the inscriptions say
Preserved Meroitic texts amount to a modest corpus, on the order of two thousand inscriptions, and most are short. Common types include:
- Funerary texts. These are the largest group. Inscriptions on offering tables and stelae list names, family relationships, and wishes for the dead, in repeated formulas. Because the formulas repeat, scholars have worked out structure and names even where the full meaning is unclear.
- Royal and temple inscriptions. Longer texts on temple walls and stelae record kings and queens, building works, and religious activity. Some deal with campaigns or offerings.
- Graffiti and short notes. Visitors left brief texts at temples, including the island temple of Philae in Egypt, where one Meroitic inscription from around the fifth century CE is among the last known.
- Administrative texts. A small number of ostraca, pieces of pottery with writing, and other short documents hint at records kept on everyday matters.
Because the language is only partly translatable, the inscriptions give mainly names, titles, family ties and religious formulas. They help build the chronology of kings and queens and the history of the royal family, but they provide little narrative history. Most of what we know about events comes from Egyptian, Greek and Roman sources, together with archaeology.
Why it matters, and what could change
Meroitic matters because it was the written language of a major African kingdom, and because a better understanding of it would help trace the history of languages along the Nile, including the later Nubian languages and possibly links to the Aksumite kingdom and its neighbours. Progress is likely to come from new inscriptions, especially longer or bilingual ones, and from careful comparison with related languages, rather than from a single dramatic breakthrough. Until then, readers should treat claims of a full translation with caution.