Meroitic language

The Meroitic language (/mɛroʊˈɪtɪk/) was spoken in Meroë (in present-day Sudan) during the Meroitic period (attested from 300 BCE) 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.

Meroitic
Kushite
Meroitic inscription (1st century CE), Egyptian Museum of Berlin
Native toKingdom of Kush
RegionSouthern part of Upper Egypt around Aswan (Lower Nubia) to the Khartoum area of Sudan (Upper Nubia).
EraPossibly attested as early as 12th Dynasty Egypt (ca. 2000–ca. 1800 BCE) and fully extinct no later than the 6th century CE
Meroitic alphabet
Language codes
ISO 639-3xmr
xmr
Glottologmero1237

Name

Meroitic is an extinct language also referred to in some publications as Kushite after the apparent attested endoethnonym[1][2] Meroitic qes, qos (transcribed in Egyptian as kꜣš).[3] 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.[4] In Meroitic, this city is referred to as bedewe (or sometimes bedewi), which is represented in ancient Egyptian texts as bꜣ-rꜣ-wꜣ or similar variants.[5][6]

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. The Kushite territory stretched from the area of the First Cataract of the Nile to the Khartoum area of Sudan.[7] 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 (ca. 2600–ca. 1500 BCE),[8] Napatan (ca. 900/750–ca. 300 BCE), and Meroitic periods.[9] The Meroitic toponym <qes>, <qos>, as well as Meroitic anthroponyms, are attested as early as Middle Kingdom Egypt's 12th Dynasty (ca. 2000 BCE) in the Egyptian execration texts concerning Kerma.[10][11][12][13] Meroitic names and phrases appear in the New Kingdom Book of the Dead (Book of Coming Forth by Day) in the "Nubian" chapters or spells (162 – 165).[14] see also [15][16][17] Meroitic names and lexical items, in Egyptian texts, are most frequently attested during Napatan Kushite control of some or all parts of Egypt[18] in the late 3rd Intermediate and Late Periods (ca. 750–656 BCE).[19][20] Both the Meroitic Period and the Kingdom of Kush itself ended with the fall of Meroë (ca. 350 CE), but use of the Meroitic language continued for a time after that event[21] as there are detectable Meroitic lexemes and morphological features in Old Nubian. Two examples are: Meroitic: <m(a)s(a)-l(a)>[22] "the sun" → Old Nubian: mašal "sun"[23] and Old Nubian: -lo (focus particle) ← Meroitic: -<lo> which is made up two morphemes, -<l(a)> (determinant) + <o> (copula).[24] The language likely became fully extinct by the 6th century when it was supplanted by Byzantine Greek, Coptic,[25] and Old Nubian.[26]

Orthography
Main article: Meroitic alphabet

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.[27]

Classification
A hieroglyphic Meroitic inscription adorns this royal votive plaque of king Tanyidamani. It is from the temple of Apedemak in Meroë. Circa 100 BCE, Walters Art Museum, Baltimore.

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.[28]

Rowan (2006, 2011) proposes that the Meroitic sound inventory and phonotactics (the only aspects of the language that are secure) 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 (C) 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.[29][30]

Claude Rilly (2004, 2007, 2012, 2016) 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 (SOV: subject-object-verb); there are postpositions and no prepositions; the genitive is placed before the main noun; the adjective follows the noun."[31][32]

Wordlist

A short wordlist of Kushite words and parts of speech whose meanings are positively known and are not known to be adopted from Egyptian. <...> Angle Brackets represent the graphemes, or orthographic letters, used to write a word. In other words, how a word is written as opposed to the word's phonemic representation. All non-syllabic, non-vocalic signs are written with their inherent <a> in parenthesis. All <e> signs are written in parenthesis (or brackets if in a word in parenthesis) because of not knowing whether the <e> is a non-phonemic placeholder to preserve the syllabicity of the script or is actually vocalic. It is known that the final <e> in Kandake/ Kentake (female ruler) is vocalic and the initial vowel in <yetmde>, <edxe>, and <erike> is vocalic. Since those are known to be vocalic, they are not in parenthesis. Any known <n(a)> signs resyllabified[33] into coda position are written.

  • <(a)b(a)r(a)> "man"[34]
  • <at(a)> "bread"
  • <ato> (← *as[V]tu)[35] "water"
  • -<b(a)>- (plural)
  • <(e/t[e]-)d(a)x(e)> "born, be born, child of"
  • <(t/y-)erik(e)> "beget, begotten"
  • <k(a)(n)di>[36] "woman, lady, female".
  • -<k(e)> (ablative)
  • -<l(a)>- (determinant)
  • <l(a)ẖ(a)> "great, big"
  • <m(a)k(a)> "god, deity"
  • <m(a)t(e)>, (later) <m(a)s(e)> "child, son"
  • <m(a)s(a)> "sun, sun god"
  • <qor(e)> "king, ruler"
  • <s(a)t(a)> "feet, foot, pair of feet"
  • -<s(e)>- (genitive)
  • <t(a)k(e)> "to love, beloved, to respect, to revere, to desire"
  • -<t(e)> (locative)/ -<y(a)t(e)> (a type of locative)[37]
  • -<x(a)>-, (later) -<x(e)>- (verbal pronominal suffix)
  • <yet(a)m(a)d(e)> "a non-filial, non-(grand)parental, non-avuncular-maternal familial relation"

References
  1. "Vers 2000 av. J.-C., la montée en puissance du royaume de Kerma, le premier État historiquement connu d'Afrique noire, fondé au sud de la 3e cataracte cinq siècles plus tôt, stoppa l’avance égyptienne et contraignit les rois de la xiie dynastie à ériger un dispositif de forteresses entre la 1e et la 2e cataracte pour se protéger des incursions kermaïtes. Un nom apparaît alors dans les textes égyptiens pour désigner ce nouvel ennemi : Koush (ég. Kȝš), sans doute l’appellation que se donnaient les Kermaïtes eux-mêmes, et qui continuera à les désigner jusqu’à la disparition de la langue égyptienne. " — paragraph #2 — Claude Rilly, « Le royaume de Méroé », Afriques [En ligne], Varia, mis en ligne le 21 avril 2010, consulté le 20 juin 2018. URL: http://journals.openedition.org/afriques/379
  2. "En fait, si notre hypothèse concernant l'équivalence du peuple de langue méroïtique avec l'ethnonyme « Koush » est avérée, c'est plus au nord encore, entre la deuxième cataracte et l'île de Saï 3, qu'on pourrait envisager de situer le berceau de cette population." — Rilly, Claude. 2007. La langue du royaume de Méroé: Un panorama de la plus ancienne culture écrite d'Afrique subsaharienne. (Bibliothèque de l'Ecole des Hautes Études, 344.) Paris: Honoré Champion. 624pp. p. 37
  3. <qes> phonetically = q/kwesa, <qos> phonetically = q/kwusa. There is a form <qesw>, but this may simply be <qes> + an affix. See, J. Leclant: "Recherches sur la toponymie meroitique". La toponymie antique. Actes du Colloque de Strasbourg, 12–14 juin 1975, Université des sciences humaines de Strasbourg, Travaux du Centre de recherche sur le Proche-Orient et la Grèce antiques, t. 4, 1977, Leiden. Brill. p. 264. pp.155 - 156.
  4. "Meroitic, adj. and n." Oxford English Dictionary. Oxford University Press. Retrieved 31 August 2018.
  5. Rowan, Kirsty (2006). Meroitic – a phonological investigation. London. p. 231.
  6. Eide, Tormod; Hägg, Tomas; Pierce, Richard Holton; Török, László (1996). Fontes Historiae Nubiorum: Textual Sources for the History of the Middle Nile Region Between the Eighth Century BC and the Sixth Century AD, vol. II: From the Mid-Fifth to the First Century BC. Bergen: University of Bergen. pp. 451 et passim. ISBN 978-82-91626-01-7.
  7. Egyptian rulers recognized the 1st Cataract of the Nile as the natural southern border of ancient Egypt. ― Bianchi, Robert Steven. Daily Life of the Nubians. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 2004. p.6.
  8. Louis Chaix (2017). Chapter 26: Cattle, A Major Component of the Kerma Culture (Sudan). In: Umberto Albarella with Mauro Rizzetto, Hannah Russ, Kim Vickers, and Sarah Viner-Daniels, eds. The Oxford Handbook of Zooarchaeology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017, xxii and 839 pp., 126 figs, 40 tables, online supplementary material, ISBN 978-0-19-968647-6). p. 414.
  9. "Meroitic was the main language spoken in northern Sudan not only during the time of the Kingdom of Meroe (c. 300 BCE–350 CE), after which it is named, but probably from as early as the time of the Kingdom of Kerma (2500–1500 BCE), as is suggested by a list of personal names transcribed in Egyptian on Papyrus Golenischeff (Rilly 2007b). Similar transcriptions of early Meroitic names are known from some Egyptian texts of the New Kingdom, but such names occur with particular frequency with the rise of the Kushite 25th Dynasty and its Napatan successor state (664–ca. 300 BCE), since the birth names of rulers and other members of the royal family were necessarily written in Egyptian documents. These Napatan transcriptions in Egyptian paved the way for the emergence of a local writing around the second half of the third century BCE." - Claude Rilly (2016). "Meroitic" in UCLA Encyclopedia of Egyptology. http://escholarship.org/uc/item/3128r3sw. p. 1
  10. Claude Rilly (2011). Recent Research on Meroitic, the Ancient Language of Sudan. http://www.ityopis.org/Issues-1_files/ITYOPIS-I-Rilly.pdf. Under the sub-heading - The original cradle of Proto-NES: chronological and palaeoclimatic issues. p. 18
  11. Claude Rilly (2007). La langue du royaume de Méroé, Un panorama de la plus ancienne culture écrite d’Afrique subsaharienne, Paris: Champion (Bibliothèque de l’École pratique des hautes études, Sciences historiques et philologiques, t. 344)
  12. Claude Rilly (2004). THE LINGUISTIC POSITION OF MEROITIC. http://www.ddl.ish-lyon.cnrs.fr/projets/clhass/PageWeb/ressources/Isolats/Meroitic%20Rilly%202004.pdf Archived 2015-09-23 at the Wayback Machine. p. 1
  13. Ahmed Abuelgasim Elhassan. Religious Motifs in Meroitic Painted and Stamped Pottery. Oxford, England: John and Erica Hedges Ltd., 2004. xii, 176 p. BAR international series. p.1.
  14. Leonard Lesko (2003). "Nubian Influence on the Later Versions of the Books of the Dead", in: Zahi Hawass (ed.), Egyptology at the Dawn of the Twenty-first Century: Proceedings of the Eight International Congress of Egyptologists. Cairo 2003. vol. 1,314-318. https://www.academia.edu/36035303/Nubian_Influence_on_the_Later_Versions_of_the_Book_of_the_Dead
  15. "III. G. Jebel Barkal in the Book of the Dead".
  16. Leonard Lesko (1999). "Some Further Thoughts on Chapter 162 of the Book of the Dead", in: Emily Teeter and John A. Larson (eds.), Gold of Praise: Studies on Ancient Egypt in Honor of Edward F. Wente. SAOC 58. Chicago 158 1999, 255-59.
  17. Leonard Lesko (2006). "On Some Aspects of the Books of the Dead from the Ptolemaic Period". Aegyptus et Pannonia 3 2006. pp. 151 -159. https://www.academia.edu/36035302/ON_SOME_ASPECTS_OF_THE_BOOKS_OF_THE_DEAD_FROM_THE_PTOLEMAIC_PERIOD
  18. Peust, Carsten (1999). "Das Napatanische: Ein ägyptischer Dialekt aus dem Nubien des späten ersten vorchristlichen Jahrtausends". Monographien zur Ägyptischen Sprache 3. Göttingen: Peust & Gutschmidt Verlag. http://digi.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/diglit/peust1999a
  19. See the 25th Dynasty of Egypt
  20. Michele R. Buzon, Stuart Tyson Smith, and Antonio Simonetti (2016). "Entanglement and the Formation of the Ancient Nubian Napatan State". American Anthropologist, Vol. 118, No. 2, pp. 284–300, ISSN 0002-7294, online ISSN 1548-1433. ©2016 by the American Anthropological Association. DOI: 10.1111/aman.12524. June 2016. https://www3.nd.edu/~asimonet/PUBLICATIONS/Buzon_et_al_2016_Amer_Anthro.pdf . See also Buzon, Michele R. (2014). "Tombos during the Napatan period (~750–660 BC): Exploring the consequences of sociopolitical transitions in ancient Nubia". International Journal of Paleopathology 7 (2014) 1–7. https://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.ijpp.2014.05.0021879-9817/. ©2014 Published by Elsevier Inc.
  21. "Even so, Meroitic had influence on Nubian: the word for “sun”, for instance, was clearly borrowed from Meroitic (/masa/) into Nubian (/mašal/), but the loanword is restricted to the Nubian languages of the Valley (Midob /passar/ was later borrowed from Dongolawi). There is no need to suppose that this linguistic influence took place earlier than the Nubian invasion of the Nile Valley. The Meroitic and Nubian languages must have been spoken concurrently in the early Middle Ages, until the former was finally superseded by the latter." Claude Rilly. "Enemy Brothers. Kinship and Relationship Between Meroites and Nubians (Nuba)." Abstract. http://nubia2006.uw.edu.pl/nubia/abstract.php?abstract_nr=113
  22. masa (sun) + la (determinant)
  23. Old Nubian seemingly passed this form to other Nubian languages. Rilly — "On one hand, Meroitic was influential on Nile Nubian: the word for “sun” (which is included in the PNNS list) was clearly borrowed (with the Meroitic article -l) from Meroitic ms /masa/ “sun, Sun-God” into Nile Nubian (Old Nubian mashal = /mašal/, Nobiin màšà, Dongolawi masil). The Proto- Nubian *ees-i “sun”, was retained in the Western languages (Kordofan Nubian éej, Birgid iizi) and in Nile Nubian ees with a secondary meaning “heat of the day, noon”. Midob has pàssàr “sun” and èes “heat”, but the former was borrowed from Old Dongolawi at the time of the Makurian colonisation of Darfur." — Rilly, Claude (2008a). Enemy brothers: Kinship and relationship between Meroites and Nubians (Noba). In Between the cataracts: Proceedings of the 10th Conference of Nubian Studies, Warsaw, 27 August – 2 September 2006. Part one. Mains Papers , PAM Supplement Series 2.1, ed. Wlodzimierz Godlewski and Adam Łajtar, pp. 211- 225. Warsaw: PAM. — 2. MEROITES AND NUBIANS: TERRITORY AND CONFLICTS: 2.5. Traces of extinct languages in Nile Nubian, p. 222 — https://www.academia.edu/36487671/Claude_Rilly_ENEMY_BROTHERS._KINSHIP_AND_RELATIONSHIP_BETWEEN_MEROITES_AND_NUBIANS_NOBA. There is also Ken(u)z(i): masil. See http://starling.rinet.ru/cgi-bin/response.cgi?root=new100&morpho=0&basename=new100\esu\nub&first=1&off=&text_word=sun for Ken(u)z(i). Further notes, Midob: *massal ― proto-Nubian: */b/ or */m/ → Midob: /p/ and Midob: /l/ → /r/.
  24. Rilly states, "In Old Nubian, there is a morpheme -lo that is similar in appearance and has the function of adding focus. Its similarity with the nominal clauses in Meroitic suggests a linguistic relationship:...The Meroitic -lo is not a single morpheme, contrary to the Old Nubian -lo. It is also not the copula, as has been thought in the past, but an occasional combination of the determinant -l, pronounced [la], mandatory for the nominal phrase, and the copula -o, pronounced [u]. Contracted into a diphthong, they eventually become [lo] as is found in the texts. The Old Nubian morpheme cannot be dissected and, moreover, has a minor syntactic status, suggesting that it is a loan from Meroitic. It cannot be found in any other Nubian language, not even Nobiin, the direct descendant of Old Nubian, and, as such, is probably not a constitutive element of the language." ― Rilly, C., & De Voogt, A. (2012). Grammar. In The Meroitic Language and Writing System (pp. 132-173). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/CBO9780511920028.006 under A. GENERAL STRUCTURE: 4. The Nominal or Noun Phrase: c. The Historical Derivation of the Determinant, pp. 140 - 141.
  25. Paragraphs 15 (Coptic) and 16 (Greek) under "Multilingualism in Nubia" ― Mokhtar Khalil et Catherine Miller, « Old Nubian and Language Uses in Nubia », Égypte/Monde arabe,Première série, 27-28 | 1996, mis en ligne le 08 juillet 2008. URL: http://journals.openedition.org/ema/1032 ; DOI:10.4000/ema.1032
  26. Ochała, Grzegorz. “Multilingualism in Christian Nubia: Qualitative and Quantitative Approaches.” Dotawo 1 (2014): pp. 1–50. pp. 7, 8. “It has been pointed out many times that the Greek epitaph of (I)stephanou also called Eiñitta from Dongola (DBMNT 74), dated to 797 [CE], is the first appearance of Old Nubian, with its use of the words “Eiñitta, Maraña, choiakiššil, joknaiššil, and Puš.” While this is demonstrably the first attestation of the Old Nubian alphabet, with its characteristic enchoric letters, the first Old Nubian word ever to occur in writing is “Samata”, attested in the Coptic foundation inscription from Dendur (DBMNT 517), dated to the second half of the sixth century.29” Footnote 29: “…Cf. Millet, “Writing and literacy in ancient Sudan,” p. 54, who supposes that the invention of the Old Nubian script might have taken place around ce 600, when the inhabitants of the Middle Nile Valley could still read and understand Meroitic. The evidence of the inscription from Dendur, so far unnoticed, may thus be seen as a ‘missing link’ in his theory of development.”
  27. The inscription of the Blemmye king, Kharamadoye.
  28. Kirsty Rowan. "Meroitic - an Afroasiatic language?". CiteSeerX 10.1.1.691.9638. Cite journal requires |journal= (help)
  29. Rowan, Kirsty (2011). "Meroitic Consonant and Vowel Patterning". Lingua Aegytia. 19 (19): 115–124.
  30. Rowan, Kirsty (2006). "Meroitic - An Afroasiatic Language?" (PDF). SOAS Working Papers in Linguistics (14): 169–206.
  31. Rilly, Claude; de Voogt, Alex (2012). The Meroitic Language and Writing System. Cambridge University Press. p. 6. ISBN 978-1-107-00866-3.
  32. Rilly C (June 2016). "Meroitic". UCLA Encyclopedia of Egyptology.
  33. "Resyllabification is a phonological process in which consonants are attached to syllables other than those from which they originally came." Kirsty Rowan speaking of the adoption of Egyptian <Hm-nTr> (literally, servant of god) → Coptic (hont) "prophet, priest" into Kushite as <an(a)t(a)> /anata/ which, in later Kushite, becomes <at(a)> /anta/, "However, the nasal sign <n(a)> /na/ is not written in the late period form <at>, as the nasal has become resyllabified into coda position due to diachronic vowel reduction/weakening and subsequent complete syncope of the following vowel: <ant> /ˈanata/ → /ˈanəta/ → /ˈanta/ = <at>..." — Rowan, Kirsty (2015) 'The Meroitic Initial a Sign as Griffith's Initial Aleph.' Zeitschrift für Ägyptische Sprache und Altertumskunde, 142 (1). pp. 70-84. Under 2.2 Meroitic forms with no loss of initial <a>, p. 78
  34. In Kushite, initial <a>, in some words, undergoes aph(a)eresis. Kirsty Rowan believes Kushite <a> to be /ʔa/. The validity of that proposal is unknown. Claude Rilly follows that initial <a> is an unstressed vowel in some words and undergoes an aphetic process. Kirsty Rowan states, "The stress assignment of Meroitic forms can only be speculated although there are common variant forms where the Meroitic sign <a> is frequently omitted and these forms are suggestive for proposals on the placement of stress. It is claimed here that the omission of <a> in Meroitic is due to its pretonic position in the word. When <a> is not in a pretonic position, there is no omission of this sign. This is comparable to the diachronic loss of Egyptian <3> /ʔ/ in pretonic position (Peust 1999b, 149)." ― Rowan, Kirsty (2015) 'The Meroitic Initial a Sign as Griffith's Initial Aleph.' Zeitschrift für Ägyptische Sprache und Altertumskunde, 142 (1). pp. 70-84. Under 2.1 Pretonic loss of Meroitic <a>, p. 77
  35. Apparently, the /s/ is resyllabified in the same manner as <na>. The /s/ is known to exist via the Egyptian transcriptions of Kushite toponyms from the New Kingdom African Peoples List <ı͗stʰ(w)-dg(3)(y)r/l𓈗𓈘𓈇> (ı͗s[V]tʰ[w]...𓈗𓈘𓈇), from the late Napatan era Nastasen Stele <ı͗sd𓈗-rs(3)tʰ> (ı͗s[V]tˀ / tʰ𓈗), and Ptolemaic Era Greek transcriptions of Ἀστά- from the hydronyms: Ασταβόρας, Ἀστάπους/ Ἄσταπος, and Ἀστασόβας. Based on the Egyptian and Greek transcriptions, the /s/ is present before the 1st century CE then disappears after the first century CE. See, Peust, Carsten (1999a). 20. "Namen von Personen, Göttern, Tempeln, Städten, Völkern, und Ländern". In Napatanische: ein ägyptischer Dialekt aus dem Nubien des späten ersten vorchristlichen Jahrtausends. Peust & Gutschmidt Verlag, 1999 - 371 pages, Under "Jsdrst" on p. 222. http://digi.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/diglit/peust1999a/0227?sid=c68725dccdf226c9001489b686df6882&navmode=fulltextsearch&ft_query=dgr&nixda=1 After discussing the 𓈗 determinative in <ı͗-s-d(tˀ / tʰ)-𓈗-r-s(3)-tʰ>, Mr. Peust says: "Dasselbe determinative steht schon im Neuen Reich in dem toponyme istdgr, das als ortschaft in Kusch gennant wird." → English: "The same determinative is already in the New Kingdom in the toponym, <istdgr>, which is called as a village in Kush."
  36. The resyllabified /n/ is known, firstly, from transcriptions of Kushite: <kdke>, <ktke> "female ruler" as Egyptian: <kntı͗ky>, Greek: κανδάκη, Latin: Candace, and Ge'ez: xan(ə)dākē of which <k(a)(n)di> is the base and, secondly, from Hesychius' gloss of Kushite: <k(a)di> as κάνδη /kɒndɛː/ translated as Greek: γυνὴ "woman, lady, wife". See, I. Hofmann, Material für eine meroitische Grammatik (Veröffentlichungen der Institute für Afrikanistik und Ägyptologie der Universität Wien 16. Beiträge zur Afrikanistik 13), Wien 1981, p. 41. https://books.google.com/books?id=bHMOAAAAYAAJ&dq=searchwithinvolume&q=hesychius
  37. The regular locative is -<t(e)>. A form of the locative, written as -<y(a)t(e)>, seems to indicate direction towards a destination, the destination arrived to, or is arriving to. For instance, in the Kushite phrase: <Sim(a)lo-k(e) dik(a) Selele-y(a)t(e)> = "From Simalu (going/ traveling/ proceeding) to Selele."

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