Meroitic Writing

Résumé En

Meroitic, the main language of ancient Sudan, remained unwritten for at least two millennia. There were only rare transcriptions of proper names in Egyptian texts. With the rise of the 25th ‘Kushite’ dynasty, Egyptian script and language became the official means of written communication in Kush. A local form of Demotic was probably used in addition to the hieroglyphs, although archaeological evidence is still lacking. This local Demotic is the ancestor of the Meroitic cursive script, which appeared in the third century BC. A century later, a second script, called ‘hieroglyphic’, was created in order to replace Egyptian in the monumental inscriptions. The signs were selected among the Egyptian hieroglyphs but this new script was merely the prestigious counterpart of the cursive characters, with a one-to-one correspondence between signs. The Meroitic writing system is an alphasyllabary. It includes 16 basic signs for syllables with default vowel /a/ and three vocalic modifiers used to write syllables with /e/, /ə/, /i/ and /u/. Four additional signs are used for the frequent syllables ne, se, te, to. A word-divider made of two or three dots is inserted between the different groups of the sentences. The Meroitic script disappeared in the 5th century AD, but three signs were integrated in the Old Nubian alphabet, which remained in use until the conversion to Islam