Updated 17 October, 2025
This page brings together basic information about the Meroitic Cursive script and its use for the Meroitic language. It aims to provide a brief, descriptive summary of the modern, printed orthography and typographic features, and to advise how to write Meroitic using Unicode.
Richard Ishida, Meroitic (Cursive) Orthography Notes, 17-Oct-2025, https://r12a.github.io/scripts/merc/xmr
𐦥𐦣𐦯:𐦥𐦡𐦴𐦪𐦤𐦢𐦪𐦳𐦡𐦬𐦢:𐦳𐦫𐦢:𐦨𐦡𐦴𐦫𐦫𐦢𐦳𐦣:𐦴𐦨𐦡𐦤𐦡𐦳𐦣𐦥𐦢:𐦤𐦢𐦳𐦫𐦡𐦲𐦤𐦡:𐦵𐦫𐦢𐦲𐦡𐦬𐦢 𐦵𐦫𐦢𐦲𐦡𐦬𐦣𐦥𐦢𐦲 𐦷𐦢𐦡𐦫𐦤𐦡:𐦵𐦷𐦭𐦡𐦬𐦢 𐦵𐦷𐦭𐦡𐦬𐦣𐦥𐦢 𐦯𐦣𐦯𐦣𐦪𐦵𐦡𐦬𐦦 𐦤𐦡𐦴𐦨𐦷𐦡𐦬𐦣𐦥𐦢𐦭𐦫𐦧 𐦭𐦪𐦲𐦡𐦯𐦣𐦤𐦡 𐦤𐦡𐦴𐦨𐦷𐦡𐦬𐦣𐦥𐦢𐦧𐦡 𐦫𐦢𐦵:𐦠𐦷𐦦𐦡𐦢𐦯 𐦱𐦳𐦴𐦢𐦲𐦬𐦤𐦡 𐦴𐦨𐦷𐦡𐦬𐦣𐦥𐦢:
Source: Text from Lost Languages by Andrew Robinson, and regularized by Ian James, in Omniglot
Meroitic Cursive was an African abugida used by the Kush (Meroë) people for the Meroitic language. Centred in Sudan, this Nile kingdom moved 600 kilometers upriver to Meroë around BCE 850. The extra distance eroded the use of Egyptian language and script and led to the development of Meroitic cursive and hieroglyphic replacements. After the 4th century CE the language was replaced by Nubian, and by the 6th century the Meroitic scripts were superceded by Coptic.
Unicode 17 has 1 dedicated Meroitic block for the cursive forms, comprising 90 characters, however 62 of those are for writing numbers and fractions.
More information: Unicode proposal • Wikipedia
The Meroitic Cursive script is an abugida, ie. each consonant contains an inherent vowel sound. See the table to the right for a brief overview of features for the Meroitic Cursive orthography.
Text runs right to left in horizontal lines, including numbers. There is no case distinction. Words or phrases are separated using a colon-like glyph.
Consonant sounds are written using 15 consonant letters. One additional letter is an archaic form for s.
Four additional letters incorporate both a consonant and possible vowel, although there are theories that in fact these represent syllable codas, ie. with no vowel sound.
❯ basicV
Meroitic Cursive is an abugida where consonants carry an inherent vowel a. Post-consonant vowels are written by adding one of just 3 vowel letters after a consonant. These are all letters; there are no combining marks, pre-base positioning, etc.
On the face of it, Meroitic vowels are very straightforward. However, this is a reconstructed script and there are still a number of unanswered questions about how the vowels were used, especially related to why there are 4 ‘syllabic’ letters and how to pronounce 𐦡.
Wikipedia presents a number of alternative perspectives on the use of Meroitic vowels.
A fourth vowel letter, 𐦠, is used only for standalone vowels.
Meroitic uses a non-decimal counting system and has 64 characters to represent numbers and fractions.
The following represents the repertoire of the Meroitic language.
Click on the sounds to reveal locations in this document where they are mentioned.
Phones in a lighter colour are non-native or allophones. Source Wikipedia.
| labial | alveolar | palatal | velar | uvular | glottal | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| stop | p b | t d | k | q | ʔ | |
| fricative | s | x ɣ | h | |||
| nasal | m | n | ||||
| approximant | w | l | j | |||
| trill/flap | r ɾ | |||||
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Meroitic is not a tonal language.
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This table summarises only basic vowel to character assignments. Click on the phonetic transcriptions for more detail.
ⓘ represents the inherent vowel.
| post-consonant | standalone | |
|---|---|---|
| Simple: | ||
For additional details see vowel_mappings.
𐦲 ka U+109B2: LETTER KA
The inherent vowel for Meroitic is pronounced a. So ka is written by simply using the consonant letter.
𐦨𐦲𐦷𐦢
| 𐦨,𐦲,𐦷𐦢 |
Since Meroitic consonants normally include an inherent vowel, the orthography has ways to indicate a consonant that is not followed by a vowel sound. See novowel.
𐦲𐦢 ki U+109B2 U+109A2: LETTER KA, LETTER I
Since a is the inherent vowel, Meroitic only writes 3 vowel letters after consonants.
It has been suggested by Milletws,#Millet_and_Rowan that the vowel 𐦡 often functions as an epenthetic vowel ᵊ between consonants.
A few consonants have an e or o vowel built in. They are shown just below. The panel shows both the suspected pronunciation and the standard romanised transcription.
𐦧𐦡𐦱𐦶
𐦵𐦥𐦢𐦱𐦴𐦢
Building on the idea that the vowel 𐦡 often functions to indicate a killed inherent vowel at the end of a word or an epenthetic vowel between consonant clusters, Rowanws,#Millet_and_Rowan goes further, to propose that the letters with a following -e were not syllabic letters at all, but that rather they represented Meroitic codas (which are restricted to alveolar sounds).
This would therefore point to the pronunciation shown for the following word, transcribed as perite:
𐦧𐦡𐦫𐦢𐦵
Meroitic has one more vowel letter, 𐦠, which is used to represent the same sound as the inherent vowel when it occurs as a standalone.
𐦠𐦦𐦫
𐦠𐦨𐦩𐦢
Other words in Wiktionary that begin with a vowel sound appear to be written with an initial 𐦤.
𐦤𐦡𐦫
𐦤𐦡𐦶
This section maps Meroitic vowel sounds to common graphemes in the Meroitic Cursive orthography.
vowel 𐦢
vowel 𐦣
vowel 𐦡 Pronunciation is not clear. In some cases this may actually be a silent inherent vowel killer, in others an epenthetic vowel between what would otherwise be consonant clusters.
inherent vowel eg. 𐦨𐦲𐦷𐦢 makaɾi goddess
vowel 𐦠 Only used as a standalone vowel.
Vowel absence principally occurs either when a consonant is a syllable coda, or when a consonant is part of a consonant cluster.
There are words in Meroitic that it is thought ended with a consonant coda and no following vowel. It was suggested by Milletws,#Millet_and_Rowan that in these cases the vowel 𐦡 acts to kill the inherent vowel, like its equivalent in Ethiopic. Possible examples of this from Wiktionary include:
𐦥𐦬𐦡
𐦧𐦮𐦣𐦨𐦡
There are no conjuncts.
This table summarises only basic consonant to character assignments. Click on the phonetic transcriptions for more detail.
The right-hand column contains letters that are thought to be either complete syllables or syllable codas.
| post-consonant | syllable/final | |
|---|---|---|
| Onsets | ||
For additional details see consonant_mappings.
The following is the list of basic, alphabetic consonant letters found in Meroitic.
Click on each letter for more details and for examples of usage, especially where more than one sound is indicated.
There is also a set of 4 syllabic letters, representing a consonant plus vowel; see syllabic.
The pronunciation of some of the consonants is not 100% sure. For example, 𐦷 appears to be closer to d when initial, but r between vowels.ws Also the pronunciations x and ɣ are estimates.
𐦰 is an archaic letter used for s.
Meroitic doesn't appear to naturally have consonant clusters in onsets. There is, however, a train of thought that suggests that 𐦡 may represent an epenthetic vowel between consonants that cluster in the language a word was borrowed from. The example used before was,
𐦧𐦡𐦫𐦢𐦵
It is thought that when an n coda occurs it is not written.
𐦧𐦡𐦱𐦶
Rowan suggests that the following letters representing alveolar sounds are actually syllable codas where the e is a vowel killer, rather than a vowel.
𐦧𐦡𐦫𐦢𐦵
This section maps Meroitic consonant sounds to common graphemes in the Meroitic Cursive orthography.
Sounds listed as 'infrequent' are allophones, or sounds used for foreign words, etc. Light coloured characters occur infrequently.
consonant 𐦧
consonant 𐦦
consonant 𐦴
syllable/final consonant 𐦵 Thought to be either a syllable or a final consonant.
syllable/final consonant 𐦶 Thought to be a syllable.
consonant 𐦷 when initial.
consonant 𐦲
consonant 𐦳
consonant 𐦯
consonant 𐦰 Archaic form.
syllable/final consonant 𐦱 Thought to be either a syllable or a final consonant.
consonant 𐦭
consonant 𐦮
consonant 𐦨
consonant 𐦩
syllable/final consonant 𐦪 Thought to be either a syllable or a final consonant.
consonant 𐦥
consonant 𐦫
consonant 𐦷 between vowels.
consonant 𐦬
consonant 𐦤
logogram 𐦾
logogram 𐦿
Meroitic cursive has 2 logograms, thought to be derived from Egyptian hieroglyphic.
The Meroitic Unicode block has a large set of number characters. These are only used in the cursive script, and not in the hieroglyphs. Numbers from 1 to 9 are as follows.
These numbers all have strong right to left directionality, so they are read from right to left.
Not all higher numbers are known. The following are listed in the Unicode block.
Another range of code points is set aside for fractions.
These also all have strong right to left direction.
Meroitic Cursive text runs right to left in horizontal lines. Numbers are also written right to left.
Unicode provides a set of formatting characters that can be used to control the direction of text when displayed. These characters have no visual form in the rendered text, however text editing applications may have a way to show their location. Since Meroitic text is not bidirectional, most of these formatting characters will be used around the Meroitic text when it is embedded in text using another writing system.
202B (RLE), 202A (LRE), and 202C (PDF) are in widespread use to set the base direction of a range of characters. RLE/LRE comes at the start, and PDF at the end of a range of characters for which the base direction is to be set.
In Unicode 6.1, the Unicode Standard added a set of characters which do the same thing but also isolate the content from surrounding characters, in order to avoid spillover effects. They are 2067 (RLI), 2066 (LRI), and 2066 (PDI). The Unicode Standard recommends that these be used instead.
There is also 2068 (FSI), used initially to set the base direction according to the first recognised strongly-directional character.
200F (RLM) and 200E (LRM) are invisible characters with strong directional properties that are also sometimes used to produce the correct ordering of text.
For more information about how to use these formatting characters see How to use Unicode controls for bidi text. Note, however, that when writing HTML you should generally use markup rather than these control codes. For information about that, see Creating HTML Pages in Arabic, Hebrew and Other Right-to-left Scripts.
Experiment with examples using the Meroitic character app.
Meroitic has no combining marks, so context-based positioning is not needed.
Most letters have no connecting behaviour, but 𐦢, i, is shaped to connect with the preceding consonant. The following is a list of examples; note especially the last one, where the horizontal bar runs through 𐦤 rather than just touching it.
In later cursive writing words are separated using two vertical dots. For this the Unicode Standard recommends :. Apparently this word divider was used irregularly.
Earlier texts 3 vertical dots were used, for which ⁝ can serve.
Graphemes in Meroitic consist of single letters. This means that text can be segmented into typographic units using grapheme clusters.
The only punctuation mentioned in the sources for Meroitic is a two vertical dot separator used to demarcate phrasal elements such as noun phrases within a sentence. For this the Unicode Standard recommends the use of :.
| phrase |
: |
|---|
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