Meroitic Analytic Dictionary

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Horst Beinlich
• Subject Area: Egyptology and Ancient Near Eastern Studies
• Term: from 2017 to 2022
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 392412163

Meroitic is the most ancient recorded language of Black Africa and therefore of the greatest importance in the search for their identity among Africans. Meroitic language documents date from the 3rd century BCE to the 4th century CE and come from find spots along the Nile from Philae south to Meroe. In the year 2000 about 1000 documents were known, most of which pertain to formulaic funerary inscriptions. Supported by the DFG, the large collections of Meroitic inscriptions from Qasr Ibrim, Gebel Adda and the Batn el-Hagar region, all of them excavated in the framework of the UNESCO campaign for the salvage of the Nubian monuments during the 1960?s, have been published by the applicant in the last fifteen years. As a result of this work, the number of known Meroitic documents has increased by half. More important than the quantitative enlargement, however, is the change in the nature of the newly enlarged text corpus because the proportion of the stereotypical written funerary texts, once 50 percent of known texts, was reduced to only 25 percent. With the addition of these new, non-formulaic types of texts, the number of previously unknown words has dramatically increased. This newly expanded corpus of documents now offers the materials needed for the creation of a dictionary of the Meroitic language presenting the current state of understanding the richness of this language. Such a dictionary does not exist. The MEROITIC ANALYTIC DICTIONARY being applied for in this application evaluates all published and most of the unpublished inscriptions, a total of about 2000 documents. It includes all Meroitic words as defined by a word divider in the original inscriptions and all incomplete words of at least three joined signs. The dictionary is organized by four different kinds of entries: words that can be grammatically analysed and reduced to their lexemes, words that cannot be analysed due to their state of preservation, names (which form their own semantic category), and finally the lexemes themselves. The time consuming analysis of the words and the identification of their lexemes is of the highest importance for further comparative linguistic studies of the Meroitic language. The lexemes, the names and the words that cannot be fully analysed are included along with full citations to their references. In addition to the analysis mentioned above, a detailed and therefore time consuming classification of each word?s use forms the second focus of the dictionary. THE MEROITIC ANALYTIC DICTIONARY includes about 23000 entries. It will be published bilingually (German and English) and will be about 1600 pages in length.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants