Constructing word similarities in Meroitic as an aid to decipherment

Meroitic is the still undeciphered language of the ancient civilization of Kush. Over the years, various techniques for decipherment such as finding a bilingual text or cognates from modern or other ancient languages in the Sudan and surrounding areas has not been successful. Using techniques borrowed from information theory and natural language statistics, similar words are paired and attempts are made to use currently defined words to extract at least partial meaning from unknown words. This paper addresses a technique using a combination of known words and techniques from information theory to try to decipher the meanings of additional words in the extinct and undeciphered language, Meroitic. First, I will give a short history of the language and the problems translating it and next describe the statistical techniques and their results and implications. 1 A Short History of Meroitic (Török, 1997; Lobban, 2004) Meroitic was the written language of the ancient civilization of Kush, located for centuries in what is now the Northern Sudan. The word ’Meroitic’ derives from the name of the city Mero, which was located on the East bank of the Nile south of where the Atbara River flows off to the east. It is the second oldest written language in Africa after Egyptian hieroglyphs. It is a phonetic language with both a hieroglyph form using some adopted Egyptian hieroglyphs and a cursive form similar to Egyptian Demotic writing. The language had one innovation uncommon in ancient written languages such as Egyptian hieroglyphics or Greek in that there was a word separator, similar in function to spaces in modern