Meroitic script
| Meroitic | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Script type | |
Time period | 300 BC to 600 AD |
| Languages | Meroitic and possibly Old Nubian |
| Related scripts | |
Parent systems | |
Child systems | Old Nubian |
| ISO 15924 | |
| ISO 15924 | Mero (100), Meroitic Hieroglyphs |
| Unicode | |
Unicode alias | Meroitic Hieroglyphs |
The Meroitic script is an alphabetic script originally derived from Egyptian hieroglyphs, used to write the Meroitic language of the Kingdom of Meroë/Kush. It was developed sometime during the Napatan Period (about 700–300 BCE), and first appears in the 2nd century BCE. For a time, it was also possibly used to write the Nubian language of the successor Nubian kingdoms.[1]
If the Meroitic alphabet did continue in use by the Nubian kingdoms that succeeded the Kingdom of Meroë, it was replaced by the Coptic alphabet with the introduction of Christianity to Nubia in the sixth century CE. The Nubian form of the Coptic alphabet retained three Meroitic letters.
The script was deciphered in 1909 by Francis Llewellyn Griffith, a British Egyptologist, based on the Meroitic spellings of Egyptian names. However, the Meroitic language itself has yet to be translated.
Form
There were two graphic forms of the Meroitic alphabet: a monumental epigraphic form taken from Egyptian hieroglyphs, and a cursive form derived from Demotic Egyptian. 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 in ligatures to a following vowel i.
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 alphabetic, the Meroitic script worked differently than Egyptian hieroglyphs. Some scholars, such as Harald Haarmann, believe that the vowel letters of Meroitic are evidence for an influence of the Greek alphabet in its development.
There were 23 letters in the Meroitic alphabet, including four vowels. In the transcription established by Griffith and later Hintze, they are:
- a appears only at the beginning of a word
- e was used principally in foreign names
- i and o were used like vowels in the Latin or Greek alphabets.
The fourteen or so consonants are conventionally transcribed:
- ya, wa, ba, pa, ma, na, ra, la, cha, kha, ka, qa, sa, da.
The only punctuation mark was a word and phrase divider of two to three dots.
Principles
Meroitic was a type of alphabet called an abugida: The vowel /a/ was not normally written; rather it was assumed whenever a consonant was written alone. That is, the single letter m was read /ma/. All other vowels were overtly written: the letters mi, for example, stood for the syllable /mi/, just as in the Latin alphabet. Some syllable-final consonants, especially /n/ and /s/, were often omitted. This system is broadly similar to the Indian abugidas that arose around the same time as Meroitic.
Griffith and Hintze
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 as syllabic, with the values ne, se, te, and to. Ne, for example, varied with na. Na could be followed by the vowels i and o to write the syllables ni and no, but was never followed by the vowel e.
He also noted that the vowel e was often omitted. It often occurred at the ends of Egyptian loanwords that had no final vowel in Coptic. He believed that e functioned both as a schwa [ə] and a "killer" mark that marked the absence of a vowel. That is, the letter m by itself was read [ma], while the sequence me was read [mə] or [m]. This is how Ethiopic works today. Later scholars such as Hitze and Rilly accepted this argument, or modified it so that e could represent either [e] or schwa–zero.
It has long been puzzling to epigraphers why the syllabic principles that underly the script, where every consonant is assumed to be followed by a vowel a, should have special letters for consonants followed by e. Such a mixed abugida–syllabary is not found among the abugidas of India, nor in Ethiopic.
Millet and Rowan
Millet (1970) proposed that Meroitic e was in fact an epenthetic vowel used to break up Egyptian consonant clusters that could not be pronounced in the Meroitic language, or appeared after final Egyptian consonants such as m and k which could not occur finally in Meroitic. Rowan (2006) takes this further and proposes that the glyphs se, ne, and te 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 the determiner -l; she proposes Meroitic finals were restricted to alveolar consonants such as these. An example is the Coptic word ⲡⲣⲏⲧ prit "the agent", which in Meroitic was transliterated perite (pa-e-ra-i-te). If Rowan is right and this was pronounced /pərit/, then Meroitic would have been a fairly typical abugida.
Values
In the standard transcription, which is used here, the Meroitic letters are given equivalents in the Latin alphabet. It is believed, based on evidence from Egyptian names and other clues, that these had approximately the sound values that an English speaker would assume reading the transcription. That is, the Meroitic letter which looks like an owl in monumental inscriptions, or like a numeral three in cursive Meroitic, we transcribe as m, and it is believed to have been pronounced as /m/. However, this is a historical reconstruction, and while m is not in much doubt, the pronunciations of some of the other letters are much less certain.
Kh is thought to have been a velar fricative, as the ch in Scottish loch or German Bach. Ch was a similar sound, perhaps palatal as in German ich, or uvular as g in Dutch dag. Q was perhaps a uvular stop, as in Arabic Qatar. S may have been like s in sun, or perhaps as sh in shun (see below).
There were in addition several letters that stood for syllables. These contained inherent vowels other than /a/. There is little doubt that the letters te and to stood for full syllables, perhaps [tə] and [tu]. However, there is some dispute over the other suspected syllabic letters:
- ne may have stood for the syllable /ne/, or it may have been a consonant /ny(a)/.
- se may have been a syllable /se/ or a consonant /s(a)/; if the latter, the letter traditionally transcribed as s may have been read /sh(a)/.
- ti may have been either /ti/ or /t(a)/. Note however that since the syllables /te/ and /to/ had dedicated letters, even if ti were a simple consonant, it would only ever been used to write /ti/ and /ta/.
References
- Rowan, Kirsty (2006). "A phonological investigation into the Meroitic 'syllable' signs ne and se and their implications on the e sign" (PDF). SOAS Working Papers in Linguistics. pp. 14: 131-167. Retrieved 2008-11-15.
See also
- The constructed language Nuwaubic, sometimes called Meroitic.