Le méroïtique. Données grammaticales, lexicales, position linguistique. Vol I

The Meroitic script in its two forms, cursive and hieroglyphic, was deciphered by the British writer Griffith between 1909 and 1911, thanks in part to its resemblance to the Egyptian signs from which it originated. However, the texts that became legible in this way also contained incomprehensible words. In fact, there are no bilinguals, and no language, including the modern and medieval Nubian (“Old Nubian”) on which Griffith had placed so much hope, seemed related to this idiom. Only a few borrowings from Egyptian, a few names of places, gods and people could be understood, and some rare indigenous terms and morphemes guessed by their context. The work of philologists, above all the German F. Hintze, then led to some progress on grammatical structures. With the campaign to save the monuments of Nubia in the 1960s, research became more international, led by figures such as N. Millet and B. Trigger in Canada, and J. Millet in France. Trigger in Canada, J. Leclant and A. Heyler in France, I. Hofmann in Austria. But the 1980s brought a certain degree of discouragement, and when we entered this field six years ago, hopes of one day understanding Meroitic texts were at their lowest ebb. In this thesis, we endeavour to show that this despondency is unfounded, and to bring new elements to bear which suggest that the goal is much closer than we might have thought. Our work is based on the publications of all our predecessors, which we have without exception read, reread, compiled and compared. At the same time, we have scrutinized the original texts, joining in the publication of J. Leclant's Répertoire d'Épigraphie Méroïtique, as well as those of the newly discovered texts at Saï by F. Geus, at El-Hobagi by P. Lenoble, at Naga by D. Wildung, at Dokki-Gel by Ch. Bonnet and D. Valbelle, and El-Hassa by V. Rondot. It is therefore on a basis that can be considered sound that we now offer a first synthesis of the Meroitic language. Our study is divided into three main parts: an overview of grammatical data, now fairly precise in the nominal domain, but embryonic in the verbal domain; a list of the main Meroitic lexemes and morphemes, called the “Lexicon” for convenience, but in which very few translations can be found; and finally, a last part which proposes a precise linguistic position for Meroitic within the African languages.

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