The Meroitic language was spoken in Meroë during the Meroitic period and became extinct about 400 CE. It was written in two forms of the Meroitic alphabet: Meroitic Cursive, which was written with a stylus and was used for general record-keeping; and Meroitic Hieroglyphic, which was carved in stone or used for royal or religious documents. It is poorly understood, owing to the scarcity of bilingual texts.
Name
Meroitic is an extinct language also referred to in some publications as Kushite after the apparent attested Meroitic qes, qos. The name Meroitic in English dates to 1852 where it occurs as a translation of German Meroitisch. The term derives from Latin Meroē, corresponding to Greek Μερόη. These latter names are representations of the name of the royal city of Meroë of the Kingdom of Kush. In Meroitic, this city is referred to as bedewe, which is represented in ancient Egyptian texts as bꜣ-rꜣ-wꜣ or similar variants.
Location and period of attestation
The Meroitic period began ca. 300 BCE and ended ca. 350 CE. Most attestations of the Meroitic language, via native inscriptions, hail from this period, though some attestations pre- and post-date this period. Kushite territory stretched from the area of the First Cataract of the Nile to the Khartoum area of Sudan. It can be assumed that speakers of Meroitic covered much of that territory based on the language contact evidenced in Egyptian texts. Attestations of Meroitic in Egyptian texts, span across the Egyptian Middle Kingdom, the New Kingdom, and the late 3rd Intermediate, Late, Ptolemaic, and Roman periods – respectively corresponding to the Kushite Kerman, Napatan, and Meroitic periods. The Meroitic toponym , , as well as Meroitic anthroponyms, are attested as early as Middle Kingdom Egypt's 12th Dynasty in the Egyptian execration texts concerning Kerma. Meroitic names and phrases appear in the New Kingdom Book of the Dead in the "Nubian" chapters or spells. see also Meroitic names and lexical items, in Egyptian texts, are most frequently attested during Napatan Kushite control of some or all parts of Egypt in the late 3rd Intermediate and Late Periods. Both the Meroitic Period and the Kingdom of Kush itself ended with the fall of Meroë, but use of the Meroitic language continued for a time after that event as there are detectable Meroitic and morphological features in Old Nubian. Two examples are: Meroitic: "the sun" → Old Nubian:mašal "sun" and Old Nubian:-lo ← Meroitic: - which is made up two morphemes, - + . The language likely became fully extinct by the 6th century when it was supplanted by Byzantine Greek, Coptic, and Old Nubian.
Orthography
During the Meroitic period, Meroitic was written in two forms of the Meroitic alphasyllabary: Meroitic Cursive, which was written with a stylus and was used for general record-keeping; and Meroitic Hieroglyphic, which was carved in stone or used for royal or religious documents. The last known Meroitic inscription is written in Meroitic Cursive and dates to the 5th century.
Classification
The classification of the Meroitic language was uncertain due to the scarcity of data and difficulty in interpreting it. Since the alphabet was deciphered in 1909, it has been proposed that Meroitic is related to the Nubian languages and similar languages of the Nilo-Saharan phylum. The competing claim is that Meroitic is a member of the Afroasiatic phylum. Rowan proposes that the Meroitic sound inventory and phonotactics are similar to those of the Afroasiatic languages, and dissimilar from Nilo-Saharan languages. For example, she notes that very rarely does one find the sequence CVC, where the consonants are both labials or both velars, noting that is similar to consonant restrictions found throughout the Afroasiatic language family, suggesting that Meroitic might have been an Afroasiatic language like Egyptian. Claude Rilly is the most recent proponent of the Nilo-Saharan idea: he proposes, based in on its syntax, morphology, and known vocabulary, that Meroitic is Eastern Sudanic, the Nilo-Saharan family that includes Nubian. He finds, for example, that word order in Meroitic "conforms perfectly with other Eastern Sudanic languages, in which sentences exhibit verb-final order ; there are postpositions and no prepositions; the genitive is placed before the main noun; the adjective follows the noun."
