Message #217144

[Cleopatra]

 However, study of "objects from daily life," another of the exhibition's categories, suggests that there was always a significant African underlay, with ceramic materials in particular featuring geometric and figurative designs for which there are no Egyptian parallels.

Further distinctive features of Meriotic civilisation include ancient Meroe's funerary customs and the Meriotic language. While the pyramids marking the graves of Meroe's rulers seem to have functioned along the lines of ancient Egyptian royal tombs, with a mortuary temple originally standing in front of each pyramid in which rituals would have been performed, they depart from the Egyptian model in that the Meriotic pyramids are merely markers, rather than tombs, the tomb itself lying in the rock below.

Mummification seems not to have been performed, and grave goods were less extensive and elaborate than those in Egyptian tombs. Moreover, the use of pyramids as royal tombs is of course a feature of the Egyptian Old Kingdom, with the pyramids at Giza having been built between 2600 and 2500 BCE. Why the Meriotic Pharaohs should have adopted the pyramid form many centuries after it had been abandoned in Egypt is unknown, but it is a fact that the multiple pyramids crammed together at the royal necropolis at Meroe were built between 270 BCE and 350 CE.

Writing in the exhibition catalogue, itself a kind of summary of everything that is known about Meroe, French academic Claude Rilly summarises current knowledge of the Meriotic language. This uses a restricted set of 23 hieroglyphs together with a cursive alphabet, the hieroglyphs being used for religious and royal purposes as in ancient Egypt. However, Meriotic hieroglyphs are purely phonetic signs, unlike Egyptian ones, and while they can be read from right to left or left to right, as is the case for Egyptian hieroglyphs, unlike the latter the figures and animals of which they are composed face towards the end of the line and not towards its beginning, as in Egyptian hieroglyphs.

Of the 2,000 or so texts written in Meriotic that have thus far been discovered, 90 percent are written in cursive characters. And while the language was deciphered in 1911 by the British scholar Francis Griffith, in the absence of any equivalent of the Rosetta Stone, which gives the same text in different writing systems, it has not been possible to work out what Meriotic words mean. Rilly suggests that the situation of Meriotic is similar to that of ancient Etruscan, a language that also has no descendants and seems to be only ambiguously related to other ancient ones.

Comparative study of Meriotic and other languages has allowed some fragmentary translations to be made, but the Meriotic grammar and tense system is still unknown, and future advances will depend on new discoveries being made.

A FINAL SECTION of the exhibition deals with the possibility of such discoveries, notably through excavations currently being carried out by the Louvre at Mouweis, in cooperation with the Sudanese National Corporation for Antiquities and Museums in Khartoum. This is described as an average-sized Meriotic settlement some 50 km south of Meroe. The exhibition ends with a video presentation of the excavations of the Mouweis palace and temple areas and includes many atmospheric images of this part of Sudan.