fontes historiae nubiorum - Digitalt - Universitetet i Bergen

Introduction
A General Note to the Meroitic Texts
The Kushite royal and temple inscriptions were written in Egyptian hieroglyphic
until the 3rd-2nd century BC. In the course of the 2nd century BC a
hieroglyphic as well as a cursive script began to take shape in Kush, the former
for the writing of monumental texts, and the latter for "private" inscriptions
and administrative documents in the Meroitic lartguage. Its 23 hieroglyphic
signs were borrowed from the Egyptian hieroglyphic script, while the 23 cursive
signs, each corresponding to a hieroglyphic one (Fig. 1), show the impact of
Egyptian "abnormal hieratic" (see, with the literature of earlier research, Priese
1973b). Unlike Egyptian script, however, Meroitic script includes vowel notations
and constitutes a syllabic system in which every symbol represents a consonant
plus the vowel a, except when followed by another symbol indicating
the vowel i, o, or e. A symbol for the vowel a is only writeten at the beginning of
a word (Hintze 1978, 93 f.). The earliest surviving Meroitic hieroglyphic inscription,
the name of Queen Shanakdakheto in Temple F at Naqa (see (148)), can be
dated to the late 2nd century BC; and the earliest preserved document in the
4 e 4,:z>G
/
h
/ o IIJ 3 (s)
m y tt vi/ s (se)
P 3 w L k
r91‘ V b Å /;1 q
GD L P Y t
y m
[-L n 1=' 4- to
X 71"
.. (n e) ilt X, d
. , word
= (-4-1 r . . divider
Fig. 1. The hieroglyphic and cursive forms of the Meroitic script with their phonetic values (after
Hintze 1978, 93).
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