| Meroitic | |
|---|---|
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| Script type | with inherent vowel /a/ except on the vocalic signs:⟨a⟩,⟨e⟩,⟨i⟩,⟨o⟩ and the syllabic⟨ne⟩,⟨se⟩,⟨te⟩, and⟨to⟩ signs |
Period | 300 BC – 600 AD |
| Languages | Meroitic language and possiblyOld Nubian |
| Related scripts | |
Parent systems | |
| ISO 15924 | |
| ISO 15924 | Mero, 100: Meroitic HieroglyphsMerc, 101: Meroitic Cursive |
| Unicode | |
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| This article containsphonetic transcriptions in theInternational Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). For an introductory guide on IPA symbols, seeHelp:IPA. For the distinction between[ ],/ / and ⟨ ⟩, seeIPA § Brackets and transcription delimiters. | |
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TheMeroitic script consists of twoalphasyllabic scripts developed to write theMeroitic language at the beginning of theMeroitic Period (3rd century BC) of theKingdom of Kush. The two scripts are Meroitic Cursive, derived fromDemotic Egyptian, and Meroitic Hieroglyphs, derived fromEgyptian hieroglyphs. Meroitic Cursive is the most widely attested script, constituting ~90% of all inscriptions,[1] and antedates, by a century or more,[2] the earliest surviving Meroitic hieroglyphic inscription. Greek historianDiodorus Siculus (ca. 50 BC) described the two scripts in hisBibliotheca historica, Book III (Africa), Chapter 4. The last known Meroitic inscription is the Meroitic Cursive inscription of theBlemmye king, Kharamadoye, from a column in theTemple of Kalabsha (REM 0094), which has recently been re-dated to AD 410/ 450 of the 5th century.[3] 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 centuryChristianization of Nubia, the Kushite language and Cursive script were replaced byByzantine Greek,Coptic, andOld Nubian. The Old Nubian script, derived from theUncial Greek script, added three Meroitic Cursive letters:⟨ne⟩,⟨w(a)⟩, and possibly⟨kh(a)⟩, for Old Nubian[ɲ],[w –u], and[ŋ] respectively.[4] 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.[5][6][7]
The script was deciphered in 1909 byFrancis Llewellyn Griffith, a British Egyptologist, based on the Meroitic spellings of Egyptian names. However, theMeroitic language itself remains poorly understood. In late 2008, the first complete royal dedication was found,[8] which may help confirm or refute some of the current hypotheses.
The longest inscription found is in theMuseum of Fine Arts, Boston.
There were two graphic forms of the Meroitic alphasyllabary: monumental hieroglyphs, and acursive.[9] 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 inligatures to a following voweli.
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 asHarald Haarmann, believe that the vowel letters of Meroitic are evidence for an influence of theGreek alphabet 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:
The fifteen consonants are conventionally transcribed:
These consonants are understood to have an inherent vowel value /a/, such thatp should generally be understood as /pa/.An additional series of characters is understood to represent consonants with inherent vowels other than /a/:
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 asm, and it is believed to have been pronounced as [m]. However, this is a historical reconstruction, and whilem is not in much doubt, the pronunciations of some of the other letters are much less certain.
The three vowelsi a o were presumably pronounced /i a u/.Ḫ is thought to have been avelar fricative, as thech in Scottishloch or GermanBach.H̱ was a similar sound, perhapsuvular asg in Dutchdag orpalatal as in Germanich.Q was perhaps auvular stop, as in ArabicQatar.S may have been likes insun. 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 asr, 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 vowela the way the other alveolar obstruentst n s did.
Comparing late documents with early ones, it is apparent that the sequencessel- andnel-, which Rowan takes to be /sl/ and /nl/ and which commonly occurred with the determiner-l-,assimilated over time tot andl (perhaps /t/ and /ll/).
The onlypunctuation mark was aword and phrase divider of two to three dots.
Meroitic was a type of alphabet called anabugida: The vowel /a/ was not normally written; rather it was assumed whenever a consonant was written alone. That is, the single letterm was read /ma/. All other vowels were overtly written: the lettersmi, for example, stood for the syllable /mi/, just as in the Latin alphabet. This system is broadly similar to theIndian abugidas that arose around the same time as Meroitic.
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 assyllabic, with the valuesne, se, te, andto.Ne, for example, varied withna.Na could be followed by the vowelsi ando to write the syllablesni andno, but was never followed by the vowele.
He also noted that the vowele was often omitted. It often occurred at the ends of Egyptian loanwords that had no final vowel inCoptic. He believed thate functioned both as aschwa[ə] and a"killer" mark that marked the absence of a vowel. That is, the letterm by itself was read[ma], while the sequenceme was read[mə] or[m]. This is howEthiopic works today. Later scholars such as Hitze and Rilly accepted this argument, or modified it so thate could represent either[e] 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 vowela, should have special letters for consonants followed bye. Such a mixed abugida–syllabary is not found among the abugidas of India, nor in Ethiopic.Old Persian cuneiform 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 (1970) proposed that Meroitice was in fact anepenthetic vowel used to break up Egyptianconsonant clusters that could not be pronounced in the Meroitic language, or appeared after final Egyptian consonants such asm andk which could not occur finally in Meroitic. Rowan (2006) takes this further and proposes that the glyphsse, ne, andte were not syllabic at all, but stood for consonants/s/,/n/, and/t/ at the end of a word or morpheme (as when followed by thedeterminer-l; she proposes Meroitic finals were restricted toalveolar consonants such as these. An example is the Coptic wordⲡⲣⲏⲧprit "the agent", which in Meroitic was transliteratedperite (pa-e-ra-i-te). If Rowan is right and this was pronounced/pᵊrit/, then Meroitic would have been a fairly typical abugida. She proposes that Meroitic had three vowels,/aiu/, and that/a/ was raised to something like[e] or[ə] after the alveolar consonants/tsn/, explaining the lack of orthographict, s, n followed by the vowel lettere.
Very rarely does one find the sequenceCVC, 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 anAfro-Asiatic language like Egyptian.
Rowan is not convinced that the system was completely alphabetic, and suggests that the glyphte also may have functioned as adeterminative 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.
Meroitic scripts, both Hieroglyphic and Cursive, were added to theUnicode 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.
| Meroitic Hieroglyphs[1] Official Unicode Consortium code chart (PDF) | ||||||||||||||||
| 0 | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | A | B | C | D | E | F | |
| U+1098x | 𐦀 | 𐦁 | 𐦂 | 𐦃 | 𐦄 | 𐦅 | 𐦆 | 𐦇 | 𐦈 | 𐦉 | 𐦊 | 𐦋 | 𐦌 | 𐦍 | 𐦎 | 𐦏 |
| U+1099x | 𐦐 | 𐦑 | 𐦒 | 𐦓 | 𐦔 | 𐦕 | 𐦖 | 𐦗 | 𐦘 | 𐦙 | 𐦚 | 𐦛 | 𐦜 | 𐦝 | 𐦞 | 𐦟 |
Notes
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| Meroitic Cursive[1][2] Official Unicode Consortium code chart (PDF) | ||||||||||||||||
| 0 | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | A | B | C | D | E | F | |
| U+109Ax | 𐦠 | 𐦡 | 𐦢 | 𐦣 | 𐦤 | 𐦥 | 𐦦 | 𐦧 | 𐦨 | 𐦩 | 𐦪 | 𐦫 | 𐦬 | 𐦭 | 𐦮 | 𐦯 |
| U+109Bx | 𐦰 | 𐦱 | 𐦲 | 𐦳 | 𐦴 | 𐦵 | 𐦶 | 𐦷 | 𐦼 | 𐦽 | 𐦾 | 𐦿 | ||||
| U+109Cx | 𐧀 | 𐧁 | 𐧂 | 𐧃 | 𐧄 | 𐧅 | 𐧆 | 𐧇 | 𐧈 | 𐧉 | 𐧊 | 𐧋 | 𐧌 | 𐧍 | 𐧎 | 𐧏 |
| U+109Dx | 𐧒 | 𐧓 | 𐧔 | 𐧕 | 𐧖 | 𐧗 | 𐧘 | 𐧙 | 𐧚 | 𐧛 | 𐧜 | 𐧝 | 𐧞 | 𐧟 | ||
| U+109Ex | 𐧠 | 𐧡 | 𐧢 | 𐧣 | 𐧤 | 𐧥 | 𐧦 | 𐧧 | 𐧨 | 𐧩 | 𐧪 | 𐧫 | 𐧬 | 𐧭 | 𐧮 | 𐧯 |
| U+109Fx | 𐧰 | 𐧱 | 𐧲 | 𐧳 | 𐧴 | 𐧵 | 𐧶 | 𐧷 | 𐧸 | 𐧹 | 𐧺 | 𐧻 | 𐧼 | 𐧽 | 𐧾 | 𐧿 |
| Notes | ||||||||||||||||
As a Meroitic Unicode font you may use Aegyptus which can be downloaded fromUnicode Fonts for Ancient Scripts.