Those Are Some Fancy Doodles!

A Meroitic inscription

So for this blog post I was determined to find some further information on the written language of Kush (Meroitic). I scoured the web, and I spent a good chunk of time in the library poring over titles on African linguistics and literature. It's safe to say that I came out of that experience a lot more confused than when I went in. I found NOTHING about further research on the Kushite language, and I could hardly find anything on Ancient African languages at all! I did however find plenty of sources analyzing the language families, ancestral connections, and literature of modern day Africa. I didn't spend a whole lot of time looking through those because that's not in the prescribed time period for this course, but I did learn a few interesting things...

The ancient city of Meroe

Did you know that in Ethiopia (part of the region that was once occupied by the Kush) there are over 40 different non-Semitic languages spoken, many with various dialects?! Or that new studies show that sub-Saharan languages are more closely related along latitudinal lines (East-West) rather than by their neighbors to the North and South? This would mean that the ancient languages spoken on the West coast of Africa are more similar to what the Kush empire might have spoken than their Egyptian neighbors to the North, which goes against a lot of the preconceptions of the languages of the continent. Anyways, that brings me to another point! Despite the wealth of local languages used in the area of Kush, there is hard evidence of Egyptian being a widely used language in many cases, (they were usually under Egyptian rule after all, and they even controlled Egypt for a time) so using our well documented knowledge of ancient Egyptian we can better understand the mysterious Kush language.

When I see ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs all I see are little drawings of objects that often don't seem related at all (as I'm sure a time-traveling ancient Egyptian would think upon seeing our writing), so I decided I would do more research into their structure. Thanks to the source Professor Burton gave us I was able to find reliable information on this topic. Unlike our alphabet of 26 characters, there are over 2000 ancient Egyptian hieroglyphic characters that each represent a sound or idea associated with an object (much like Chinese characters). Also, when needing to describe something that isn't easily represented by its own character (like a name), there is a hieroglyphic alphabet that is used to spell out the word. These characters are read as the sound they represent. For example a vulture represents the sound "ah."



 On top of these alphabet hieroglyphs there are biliterals, which combine the sounds of two alphabet characters to streamline the writing process. There are also other characters called determinatives which are placed at the ends of character phrases to put them into context and clarify their meaning. Another interesting thing I found is that hieroglyphs can be written right to left or up to down, and vice versa. The way you can tell which way to read the characters is by which way either the human or animal characters are facing. (I thought this was really cool!) Also, when written in top to bottom columns there would usually be another column with an identical meaning but written in reverse to show symmetry.

Sudanese school children

What little research we have shows that the Merotic language was a kind of simplification of the Egyptian hieroglyphic system that was used earlier. It has improvements such as a comprehensive alphabet, and vowel sounds. Hopefully one day we will be able to decipher this lost language and unlock the knowledge that the powerful Kush had acquired.