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.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bl.uk/oai:ethos.bl.uk:242973 |
| Date | January 1969 |
| Creators | Abdalla, A. G. M. |
| Publisher | Durham University |
| Source Sets | Ethos UK |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Source | http://etheses.dur.ac.uk/988/ |
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