Joshua N. Otten
2025
Towards Ancient Meroitic Decipherment: A Computational Approach
Joshua N. Otten
|
Antonios Anastasopoulos
Proceedings of the Second Workshop on Ancient Language Processing
The discovery of the Rosetta Stone was one of the keys that helped unlock the secrets of Ancient Egypt and its hieroglyphic lan-guage. But what about languages with no such “Rosetta Stone?” Meroitic is an ancient lan-guage from what is now present-day Sudan, but even though it is connected to Egyptian in many ways, much of its grammar and vocabu-lary remains undeciphered. In this work, we in-troduce the challenge of Meroitic decipherment as a computational task, and present the first Meroitic machine-readable corpus. We then train embeddings and perform intrinsic evalu-ations, as well as cross-lingual alignment ex-periments between Meroitic and Late-Egyptian. We conclude by outlining open problems and potential research directions.