quote:Originally posted by kenndo: you are right the demotic script was the same script but the oldest found so far was under taharqa.the kushites invented for thier used but the egyptians used it too.so demotic was used in kush and egypt and it was not invented by the 26 dy.
Well, I don't know about the Kenndo's details on the Kushites development of the demotic script mainly for Kushitic use; perhaps Kenndo will shed light on the specifics of those details, but the development appears to have occurred under their watch, in the late period of the 25th Dynasty, ca. 650 B.C. onwards. The late period coincides with the dawn of the 26th Dynasty line. The script certainly started gaining a relative more widespread use within administrative circles in the 26th Dynasty onwards. Here is one perspecitive on this issue:
About the Origins of Early Demotic in Lower Egypt, in: Life in a Multi-Cultural Society, 91-102. (tables, pl.), by Ola El-AGUIZY:
The first group of the Serapeum stelae, which dates back to the XXIInd Dynasty (Sheshonq V), shows that a cursive writing quite similar to abnormal hieratic was also used in Lower Egypt. The author assumes that the evolutions of the hieratic scripts of Upper and of Lower Egypt must have passed through similar phases, the latter leading to a cursive writing similar to abnormal hieratic. The Serapeum stelae are proof of this. The XXVth Dynasty stelae show that the few signs resembling Early Demotic have intermingled with a well-formed hieratic style. Such a style must have co-existed in Lower Egypt with a more cursive one, and might probably be considered as the origin of the Early Demotic script born in this part of the country. The author suggests that Demotic is not derived from a different cursive branch of hieratic used in Lower Egypt, but rather from one of two hieratic styles used in Lower Egypt itself. The first of these styles, being the natural development of late hieratic, had become too cursive to go on being used. The second, closer to the hieratic originals, developed into Early Demotic, by a gradual and normal simplification of well-formed hieratic signs. As for the early XXVIth Dynasty Stela Louvre C 101, bearing hieroglyphic, hieratic and Demotic signs, it must have been copied from a hieroglyphic original by a scribe familiar with Demotic. For the evolution see the comparative palaeographic tables added.
El-AGUIZY, Ola, A Palaeographical Study of Demotic Papyri in the Cairo Museum from the Reign of King Taharqa to the End of the Ptolemaic Period (684-30 B.C.), Le Caire, Institut français d'archéologie orientale, 1998 = MIFAO [Mémoires. Institut français d'archéologie orientale], 113. (27 x 35 cm; XVI, 456 p.).ISBN 2-7247-0227-1; pr. FF 340/ LE 200
This palaeography of pre-Roman Period Demotic starts with a bibliography, general as well as of papyri studied, and a list of the source documents in the Cairo Museum arranged in ten categories. In the introduction the author points out the problem of the development out of hieratic, since there is also a Theban script generally called Abnormal Hieratic. In fact, the first aim of her work is to attempt to determine the origins of Demotic and its relation with the preceding scripts, in order to define whether it was an entirely new script or derived from its predecessors. Next, the study is concerned with the development of Demotic writing since its appearance in the XXVIth Dynasty down to the end of the Ptolemaic Period, whereby it is also determined whether this development was influenced by historical or geographical factors or both. The classification adopted by her for the development of the Demotic writing is as follows: (1) Early Demotic, spanning the XXVIIth to XXXth Dynasties; (2) Ptolemaic Demotic, spanning the entire Ptolemaic Period, but generally subdivided into Early Ptolemaic, covering the years of flowering and ending with the reign of Ptolemy V Epiphanes, and Late Ptolemaic, contemporary with the decline of the dynasty and distinct from the earlier period by mentioning in dates also the day of the month; (3) Late Demotic of the Roman Period. Phase (3) is not included as documents dating to it are not numerous enough in the Cairo Museum to provide certain information.
The present work is based on the published papyri of the Cairo Museum, starting with the reign of Taharqa and having as the oldest among the texts those written in Abnormal Hieratic. However, owing to the scarcity of documents in Abnormal Hieratic texts from other collections (the Louvre and the British Museum) have been added to permit a more thorough study of this type of script. The work is presented in two parts, the first giving a detailed commentary on individual signs of interest in the study of the origins and development of the Demotic script, including figures illustrating the hieratic forms of the particular sign under study, in order to permit its comparison with the Demotic equivalent and establish the similarities or differences between them. The signs are divided into categories arranged by Gardiner's Sign-List and Möller's hieratic palaeography, but the numbering system is continuous (in Roman numerals), altogether 303 (CCCIII) signs, a number of which have been left undescribed by the author. Users will note that the alphabetic signs are grouped separately in front of the other categories. In this way, Gardiner's and Möller's category "A" is headed here under "B" etc.; further, two categories, i.e. anthropomorphic deities (= Gardiner "C" and Möller "C") and loaves and cakes (= Gardiner "X") are omitted (see the concordance on p. 4). This first part concludes with considerations on some of the papyri studied and on palaeographical matters. The second part consists of the plates corresponding with the author's sign list in Part 1, each plate being arranged in ten sections giving the Demotic sign forms by period and region. The first section concerns Abnormal Hieratic, the following concern the three periods Early Demotic and Early and Late Ptolemaic (Demotic), each geographically subdivided into Lower, Middle and Upper Egypt. The signs are accompanied by source references. The sign numbering is also used in the commentary dealing with some of the signs of particular interest to the study of the development of the Demotic writing. In this commentary, Möller's palaeography is used in the comparison of hieratic and Demotic signs, despite the fact that his work is not always very accurate. Figures of the hieratic sign forms are given in the commentary, to determine the degree of affinity between a Demotic sign and its predecessor(s). It is worth noting that as transliteration system of the Demotic the method of Fr. de Cenival is adopted. Of the two indexes the first presents the sign forms from Early to Late Hieratic (Möller parts I-III) and Abnormal Hieratic, so as to show the process of development from hieratic to Demotic; the second lists the signs discussed in the commentary and given on the plates.
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...looks like a read that might be worth pondering!
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here is something about meriotic .it is old info and few thing need to be updated or corrected but it is overall good info.oh it should be kushite not kushitic since that is reminds me more of cushitic the language group that is not kushite.
Copyright (c) 2004 Aramco Services Company. All Rights Reserved.
July/August 1983 Volume 34, Number 4
July/August 1983 Volume 34, Number 4
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The Meroitic Mystery
From Nubia—the land of Kush—a language lost in history
Written and photographed by Krzysztof Grzymski
The Sudan, with a written history beginning as early as the third millennium B.C., is archeologically one of the richest countries in the world. Its monuments include Islamic mosques, Christian monasteries, Egyptian fortresses and temples - and the towns and pyramids of a culture called Kushitic, oldest of the indigenous Sudanese empires.
note-it should say cities and towns
The Kushitic culture, also called Nubian, came to prominence near Kerma, south of the Third Cataract, and reached its peak in the 16th century B.C. Then the Egyptians occupied Kush as far south as the Fourth Cataract, and governed it through an official called the "Son of Kush"; one of the pharaoh's ranking officials, he had to supply gold from the Nubian gold mines.
By 1000 B.C., Kush had won its independence, and by 750 B.C., under King Piye (or Piankhi), not only ruled Egypt, but became, in Egyptian history, the 25th - or "Kushitic" - Dynasty.
Spanning more than 1000 years, the Kushitic civilization had two important centers: Napata, an important religious center, and Meroe - which gave its name to the whole country. Modern scholars, indeed, tend to speak about the "Meroitic Kingdom" and "Meroitic culture," rather than using the Egyptian name "Kush," since "Kush" or "Kushitic" may also be applied to earlier Sudanese civilizations.
Thanks to the exhibition organized in 1979 in the Brooklyn Museum, and later presented in Seattle, New Orleans and The Hague (See Aramco World, July-August 1979), the hitherto unknown art of the Meroites is now better known. But the Meroites' contributions to civilization didn't stop there. They also developed a system of writing.
Apart from Egyptian hieroglyphics, the Meroitic writing system was the oldest in Africa. It was also in many ways superior to the Egyptian system. The people of Meroe reduced the multitude of hieroglyphic signs to 23 basic signs - an alphabet. Again, unlike the Egyptian system, this alphabet also included vowel sounds, a great improvement over the hieroglyphic system, as well as including a sign marking the division of words, an uncommon feature in ancient writing.
There are two kinds of Meroitic script: hieroglyphs, apparently adapted from Egypt's system, and the so-called "cursive" or demotic writing, which seems to be a distinctive Meroitic invention, though it may have been influenced by the Egyptian demotic.
The first person to publish Meroitic inscriptions was the French architect Gau, who visited Nubia in 1819, but it was not until the middle of the 19th century that serious interest in this mysterious script was aroused; at that time the German scholar Lepsius published a large number of Meroitic inscriptions in a major work called Denkmäler aus Ägypten und Äthiopen.
Although Lepsius predicted that decipherment would be easy, he was totally wrong. In 1982 -139 years after his prediction - scholars were still baffled by the Meroitic mystery. Even distinguished scholars have gone astray seeking to decipher Meroitic. Two eminent scholars, one in 1887 and another in 1910, published articles in which they claimed to have deciphered Meroitic language, only to be proven wrong; and one Egyptologist, in an otherwise enlightening article, read the inscriptions in the wrong direction, apparently because Meroitic hieroglyphs, unlike their Egyptian counterparts, must be read in the direction in which the figures face.
In 1909, Francis Llewellyn Griffith, an Egyptologist from Oxford University, recorded one breakthrough while with the University of Pennsylvania Expedition to Nubia. Led by two British archeologists -Leonard Woolley, later immortalized by his excavations in Ur, and David Randall-MacIver, who later gained fame for his work in Italy and Zimbabwe - this expedition found a number of Meroitic funerary-offering tables and stelae. By careful analysis, Griffith was able to identify 23 signs of the Meroitic cursive script.
His next step was to compare them with Meroitic hieroglyphic characters - known mostly from "the inscriptions written on temple walls and columns - and with an unpublished funerary inscription in hieroglyphics that Lepsius had brought to Berlin. This was important because funerary texts usually repeated certain formulae at the beginning and end of each inscription. When Griffith compared what he had with Lepsius's find, he noticed that his cursive texts began invariably with the following cursive signs: (see graphics in original text )
and that the Berlin hieroglyphic inscription also began with two words: (see graphics in original text )
In comparing the two clusters, Griffith immediately realized that both the number of hieroglyphic signs and their order exactly paralleled the cursive text; by analyzing other groups of words, he was able to develop a list of cursive characters and their hieroglyphic equivalents - in sum, a short dictionary. This equivalency of individual signs as well as whole words also proved that he dealt with two different forms of script - but only one language.
Griffith's next step was to try and identify the phonetic value of each sign. He was helped in this task by another inscription discovered by Lepsius at Wad ben Naga, a site near Meroe. This inscription included the names of a king and a queen, written in both Egyptian and in Meroitic hieroglyphs, and Griffith, moving step by step, was able to compile a list of signs and their phonetic values. Noting a number of borrowings from Egyptian, he successfully identified several priestly and administrative titles, such as "envoy" or "ambassador," from the Meroitic "apote" or Egyptian "wpwTj."
Unfortunately, the number of loan words recognizable in Meroitic was quite small, as was the number of Meroitic words surviving in Nubian, a language still spoken in the middle Nile Valley. So, after Griffith died in 1934, this field of study was largely neglected for over 20 years.
In the 50’s, however, the international campaign to safeguard the monuments of Nubia reawakened interest in the Meroitic problem. The thrill of working on a still undeciphered language, in fact, fostered a sudden growth of Meroistics; in 1980, during a Meroitic conference in Berlin, some 80 scholars presented papers dealing with various aspects of Meroitic art, archeology and language. Today - in addition to traditional centers of Meroitic research like France, East Germany, Canada and The Sudan - representatives from the U.S.A., Saudi Arabia, Egypt and European countries are making substantial efforts in the field of Meroitic research.
What is needed, of course, is another Rosetta Stone, the bilingual tablet in three scripts found in Egypt; it enabled scholars to match a known language - Greek - with the undecipherable hieroglyphics, and the demotic script of Egypt. Professor Peter Shinnie, who for many years co-directed a joint Calgary-Khartoum expedition to Meroe, hopes that such an inscription will be found among the ruins of the ancient capital city. Another group of researchers has programmed an IBM computer in Paris to analyze all texts, as far as this can be done with an undeciphered language, and a professor in Berlin recently published a Meroitic grammar.
Until now, however, the solution to the Meroitic Mystery has eluded all the experts. Although the Meroitic scripts can be read, the language they are written in is still unknown, and until a related language is discovered, or an extensive bilingual inscription, progress will be slow. The challenge of the language of Meroe is still open .
Krzysztof Grzymski, an archeologist, was horn in Poland and has degrees from universities in Warsaw and Calgary.
This article appeared on pages 22-23 of the July/August 1983 print edition of Saudi Aramco World.
See Also: ARCHEOLOGY AND ARCHEOLOGISTS, EGYPT, ANCIENT, LANGUAGE
Check the Public Affairs Digital Image Archive for July/August 1983 images.
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Copyright (c) 2004 Aramco Services Company. All Rights Reserved.
Copyright (c) 2004 Aramco Services Company. All Rights Reserved.
quote:Originally posted by kenndo: here is something about meriotic .it is old info and few thing need to be updated or corrected but it is overall good info.
Can you shed light on these "updates" or "corrections".
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here is a nubian and egyptian scholar reviewing a book about egypt.his name is inside he made a mistake about the time period when the 25th dy. ended(or the person writing for him made the mistake and should have said 656 b.c and instead of 756 b.c.) but he has other works where it is correct.in the meantime you talk about egypt and kushite relations and the demotic script.i talk to him before and he mention that demoitc was created during tararqa time but alot egyptian scholars do not like to give credit to this nubian invention
quote:Originally posted by kenndo: i talk to him before and he mention that demoitc was created during tararqa time but a lot egyptian scholars do not like to give credit to this nubian invention
Why not share your personal correspondence to the extent that the rest of us can perhaps learn something from it, in terms of finer details of how the Kushites in particular, dealt with the new writing form...aside from observations of the scripts on the 25th Dynasty era stalae!
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quote:Originally posted by kenndo: here is something about meriotic .it is old info and few thing need to be updated or corrected but it is overall good info.
Can you shed light on these "updates" or "corrections".
oh,i was just talking about the date below,just nit-picking. oh yes,computers are used now to try to fully or mostly understand the cursive script ,and the above most did not make it that clear,but some of meriotic could be read,but below does mention progess is being made so i guess that is clear enough.
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quote:Originally posted by kenndo: i talk to him before and he mention that demoitc was created during tararqa time but a lot egyptian scholars do not like to give credit to this nubian invention
Why not share your personal correspondence to the extent that the rest of us can perhaps learn something from it, in terms of finer details of how the Kushites in particular, dealt with the new writing form...aside from observations of the scripts on the 25th Dynasty era stalae!
I had some things from this scholar that i save from before,but i am really sorry supercar,i lost all that info when my computer could messed up. but i have his email address and i will send it to you if you wish.
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oh here is a history of nubia from richard a. lobban point of view.rasol posted awhile ago.you could read the comments after that as well.oh he is located at rhode island college and you could find his email on the website too. i found the corrrct link from rasol- edited info.
Why not share your personal correspondence to the extent that the rest of us can perhaps learn something from it, in terms of finer details of how the Kushites in particular, dealt with the new writing form...aside from observations of the scripts on the 25th Dynasty era stalae!
I had some things from this scholar that i save from before,but i am really sorry supercar,i lost all that info when my computer could messed up. but i have his email address and i will send it to you if you wish.
Okay, do you remember what he told you about the issue in question?...that should be good enough, I hope.
Ps - Now of course, none of this, i.e., the details of development of 'demotic' under Kushitic rule and its subsequent use mainly within the Kushitic administrative circles, should distract from the fact that Meroitic script is in its own right, unique in form, and reflects forward-thinking & creativeness of Kushites.
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quote:Originally posted by kenndo: right,i ask him when i saw his history page and he send me one by mail too. when i spoke to him i said that i did not know that this writing was formed under kush. he told me yes it was and they found and dated the script to his time period.the details i do not remember to much but it was short and simple and it was over 4 or 5 years ago,but it was before i came here.he goes to sudan and egypt for research and digging,so i do not know if he will respond to my email right away. I WILL send another email so he could give his take on it again,but all he said was that the script was older and dating back to the 25 dy. but it became more widespread in egypt after it became more widespread in kush and it was invent by kush to have more of the kushites elite and others of kush to understand the egyptian script and language better and for the elite and some others to write down things quicker,after that i ask no more questions about that subject and i move on to something else fast since it was a long distance call.his email was not detailed but our phone conversation was not either on that subject,but i was just what him to confirm what he said in the email,and he just told me when it dates back and i moved on to something else.
note -it was the elite by the way that was egyptianized to a certain extent,not the masses,but the elite was still nubian in culture and soon became more nubianized again during the late napatan period and later.
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quote:Originally posted by Supercar: Now of course, none of this, i.e., the details of development of 'demotic' under Kushitic rule and its subsequent use mainly within the Kushitic administrative circles, should distract from the fact that Meroitic script is in its own right, unique in form, and reflects forward-thinking & creativeness of Kushites.
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