Constructing word similarities in Meroitic as an aid to
decipherment
Reginald Smith
Meroitic is the still undeciphered phonetic
script of the ancient civilisation of Kush. Various techniques for
decipherment have been tried with limited success, including
seeking bilingual texts, or attempting to identify cognates from
modern or other ancient languages in the Sudan and surrounding
areas. 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.
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Meroitic as an aid to decipherment
To reference this article we suggest:
Smith, R. 'Constructing word similarities in Meroitic as
an aid to decipherment', BMSAES 12 (2009), 1–10.
www.britishmuseum.org/research/online_journals/bmsaes/issue_12/smith.aspx