The Last Traces of Meroitic? A Tentative Scenario for the Disappearance of the Meroitic Script

Abstract

Meroitic was the language of the successive kingdoms of Kush, the Ancient Sudan, along the Middle Nile, roughly from the first Cataract upstream to the Khartoum Reach (see Fig. 8.1). Although this language was not written with a script of its own before its latest stage, in the Kingdom of Meroe (c. 300 BC–AD 350), I have presented evidence for its having appeared altogether earlier in the Nile Valley (Rilly 2001).