The Thought No One Can Read

A stone offering table carries lines of writing. A reader can sound the signs out, one after another. The words stay closed. KTT counts what a Kushite person once thought as thoughts, noticed or not, and asks what is left of them in a language nobody can read. The sources read for this article describe the script and the language. None of them reads a Meroitic text about thinking, because no such text is understood yet.

The script

The kingdom of Meroë in what is now Sudan used Meroitic from about 300 BCE to about 400 CE. The writing system is alphasyllabic, with twenty-three signs and a word divider. The British scholar Francis Llewellyn Griffith deciphered it between 1907 and 1911, using royal names written in both Meroitic and Egyptian hieroglyphs. Since then, scholars can read the signs aloud and transliterate them.

The language

The words are another matter. The language is only partly understood. Over 2,000 inscriptions have been found, and about a third are funerary texts built on repeated formulas. That is where most of what is known comes from. The great missing help is a bilingual text, a Rosetta-stone kind of tablet, which has not been found. Claude Rilly places Meroitic in the Northern East Sudanic branch of the Nilo-Saharan family, and that finding has helped. Some classifications are still disputed.

What this means for thoughts

Nobody can say how people in Kush spoke about thinking, remembering, deciding or dreaming. The one thing a reader may be tempted to do is borrow the answer from Egypt, whose texts can be read and whose rulers shaped Kushite writing. KTT does not borrow it. Egyptian concepts do not carry over to Kush by default.

A silence in the record is not a silence in the past. It says that the records cannot be read yet.

What is not known

How Kushite speakers understood thought is not known at all, in the sense that no readable text says.

Whether a bilingual text will turn up is not known. Whether progress in comparative linguistics can unlock the funerary corpus is open, and researchers expect gradual progress.

Whether Meroitic texts outside the funerary formulas, such as temple inscriptions, say anything about thinking is also open.