Language and Writing in the Kingdom of Meroe

Abstract

Sudan is one the rare places in inner Africa where the study of languages can rely on a huge long historical depth, thanks to the ancient Egyptian sources. Two linguistic phyla, Afro-Asiatic and Nilo-Saharan, are present in the region for millennia. Meroitic, belonging to the Nilo-Saharan phylum, was since the second millennium BC the main spoken language of Nubia. Although its two scripts were deciphered in 1911, the language is not yet fully understood. Further progress in expected from linguistic comparison with living languages of the same family and from future excavations.