The study of Meroitic personal names reveals the
simple, but nevertheless important, fact that they are not mere
meaningless words but that they can, in most cases, be divided into
recognizable components that, though mostly of unknown meanings,
can yet be parsed. Owing to the liberty scribes enjoyed in
spelling, each one of these component parts was found written
in more than one form, and consequently even the name of one
and the same person, when found more than once, sometimes had
variant spellings.
As is the rest of the language, Meroitic personal
names are built by the agglutination of one word to another,
a, word to a compound or one compound to another, yielding
longer complexes. This is described in the present thesis
as Permutation. In this process one notices a remarkable
Mobility of Components, Association between one component
and another, or others, in appearing often together, Parallelism
between one or more components in occurring with the same
additional components, and Versatility of Components in performing
more than one function. The two featured of Mobility of Components
are a mere change of position by one component, or two, and
a complete change of order by reversal of the sequence of all
or the main components, or rearrangement of the entire structure,
of a complex.
According to content, the Meroitic personal names may
be classified into two categories: names of a religious
content and names of a secular content. The relationship
between the names of each category and Meroitic funerary and
other inscriptions indicates that the personal names must
reflect the people's culture.
About a tenth of the names are theophorous, containing
names of Egyptian deities. These and a few versions of
recognizable Egyptian names connect the Meroitic personal
names with the Egyptian.
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