Constructing word similarities in Meroitic as an aid to decipherment

Abstract

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.