A language is one of the most important inventions of a people. And written language is so important that many Western scholars divide human history into two distinct phases-pre-history, the period before written languages, and history, the period that begins with the emergence of a written language. What does it say about the intelligence of a people that they created a language that has still not been translated? Further, what does it say about how tentative our statements must be about the history of Nubia's cultures and civilizations, and all of the ancient world, when we cannot read what the Nubians themselves wrote and said?

Written Egyptian--in the form of hieroglyphics--appears around 3100 BC. Despite their close relationship to the Egyptians and their obvious awareness of hieroglyphic writing, the Nubians do not appear to have had a written their language of their own until the second century B.C., during the Meroitic era. As early as the mid-second millennium and continuing to the second century B.C., they had written all their inscriptions in the Egyptian language and had used the Egyptian hieroglyphic script-much in the way Europeans, until the late Middle Ages, always wrote in Latin rather than in their own languages.

By the second century B.C., however, very few people in Nubia still retained knowledge of the Egyptian language or writing system, which by then had long been superceded by much more efficient and simple alphabetic scripts such as Phoenician, Hebrew, Greek, and Roman. To keep up with their neighbors, thus, the Nubian rulers must have specifically authorized the creation of a special alphabetic script by which their own national language, now known as Meroitic, could be expressed. This greatly streamlined record keeping and literacy could be much increased throughout the kingdom. Today thousands of Meroitic documents - both carved on stone stelae, scratched on temple walls, written in ink on papyrus - are preserved. The sad thing is that, while the sound values of the letters of the Meroitic alphabet are known, the meaning of the words still eludes us, for the Meroitic language ceased to be used after the fourth century A.D. and was forgotten. Despite all efforts to find a "Rosetta Stone" for Meroitic, in which a Meroitic text will appear side by side with a translation in a known language (such as Greek or Egyptian), none has been found, and the language still remains undeciphered except for about thirty words.

A similar problem existed in the study of Egyptian herioglyphics. It was solved by the discovering of what is now known as "The Rosetta Stone." This tablet from 196 BC, was found by Napoleon's soldiers at Rosetta near the Mediterranean Sea in 1799. It contained a proclamation from 196 BC written in three different languages. Now housed in the British Museum, it was used in 1822 by Jean Francis Champollion to decipher Egyptian heiroglyphics and solve a perplexing 1,400 year old mystery.

The decipherment of the values of the Meroitic letters was made by the British Egyptologist Francis Llewellyn Griffith in 1909. Finding a text inscribed in Egyptian and Meroitic with the names of the great Meroitic royal couple, Natakamani and Amanitore, who lived in the early first century A.D., Griffith was able to identify the values of the Meroitic letters from the Egyptian. Then, by transcribing a n umber of Meroitic inscriptions, he was able to prove that Meroitic was language unlike the later Nubian language spoken in the region and different from any other known African language. He determined that two alphabets were in use: a cursive alphabet for rapid writing and a formal hieroglyphic alphabet for formal writing. He also made the unexpected discovery that whereas the Egyptians read their hierogyphs against the direction in which the small pictures of birds and animals faced, the ancient Kushites read theirs in the opposite direction: in the same direction that the symbols of men, animals, and birds faced. The accompanying chart provides the eqivalences of Meroitic heiroglyphs, cursive script, and their English phonetic or sound value.