The Obituary
Meroitic was spoken in the Kingdom of Kush, centred on the city of Meroë in what is now Sudan, the southernmost literate culture of the ancient Nile. From around the 2nd century BCE it was written in an indigenous alphabetic script, alongside earlier Egyptian hieroglyphs. The script was deciphered phonetically in 1909, so its inscriptions can be read aloud, but the underlying language is still poorly understood. As the kingdom of Meroë collapsed around 350 CE under pressure from Aksum, the language gave way to Old Nubian.
Worth remembering
- Scholars can sound out its alphabet, deciphered by Francis Llewellyn Griffith in 1909, yet the meaning of most words remains unknown.
- It was the southernmost literate language of the ancient Nile, the voice of the pyramids of Meroë in present-day Sudan.
Sources
- Meroitic was the language of the Kingdom of Kush and Meroë, written in an indigenous script and largely undeciphered in meaning. Wikipedia
- Meroitic declined after the fall of the Meroitic kingdom around the 4th century CE. Encyclopaedia Britannica
A graveyard tradition: leave a stone to show you came, and remembered.