How it began
The Meroitic script was developed in the Kingdom of Kush, in what is now Sudan, at the beginning of the Meroitic period in the 3rd century BCE. It exists in two forms. Meroitic Cursive was derived from Egyptian Demotic and Meroitic Hieroglyphs from Egyptian hieroglyphs. The cursive form is older by a century or more than the earliest surviving hieroglyphic inscription, and it accounts for about 90 percent of all known texts. The Greek historian Diodorus Siculus, writing around 50 BCE, described the two scripts.
Before it existed
Before the Meroitic period, writing in Kush meant Egyptian writing. Egyptian hieroglyphs were the script in use, and Kushite names and individual Kushite words had to be spelled out with Egyptian signs inside Egyptian texts. The Meroitic script gave the kingdom a way to write its own language directly.
How it works
The script has 23 letters: four vowel signs, fifteen consonant signs and four signs for fixed syllables (ne, se, te and to). Each consonant sign carries an inherent vowel a, so the sign transcribed p is read pa unless another vowel sign follows. This makes it an alphasyllabary, which works on a different principle from Egyptian writing.
The two forms match one to one. Cursive runs from right to left. The hieroglyphic form is written in columns, and its signs face the start of the text. Some scholars see the vowel letters as a sign of Greek influence.
What lasted
The script outlived the kingdom. The last known inscription, set up for the Blemmye king Kharamadoye at the Temple of Kalabsha, has been re-dated to about 410 to 450 CE. When Nubia became Christian in the 6th century, Meroitic gave way to Greek, Coptic and Old Nubian. The Old Nubian alphabet, based on Greek, kept three Meroitic cursive letters for sounds Greek lacked, which suggests that knowledge of the old script lasted for some time.
Where it stands today
Francis Llewellyn Griffith, a British Egyptologist, worked out the sound values of the signs between 1909 and 1911 by using Meroitic spellings of Egyptian names. The texts can therefore be read aloud, but the Meroitic language is still poorly understood and most inscriptions cannot be fully translated. A complete royal dedication found in 2008 may help test current hypotheses. Both forms of the script are encoded in Unicode.
