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Article Dans Une Revue (Article De Synthèse) Der Antike Sudan Année : 2022

Graffiti for Gods and Kings. The Meroitic secondary inscriptions of Musawwarat es-Sufra: a preliminary study

Claude Rilly

Résumé

The Meroitic graffiti from the Great Enclosure in Musawwarat es-Sufra rank among the first Meroitic texts ever recorded in publications, starting with F. Cailliaud's Voyage à Méroë and C. R. Lepsius' Denkmäler aus Aegypten und Aethiopien. Cailliaud himself and his fellow Frenchman Linant de Bellefonds even added to the corpus in 1822 by engraving two large graffiti in French in the southern wall of Complex 100. The Great Enclosure is a vast architectural complex that has been variously interpreted: a training centre war elephants, a royal residence in the middle of a hunting "paradise" or a temple compound that was at some periods of the year a pilgrimage centre. 1 It is this latter hypothesis, defended first by Fritz Hintze and more recently evidenced by Pawel Wolf, which seems more likely and the present article is a further contribution to this theory. The Great Enclosure is stunningly rich in both iconographic and scriptural graffiti. Among the latter, many languages are attested, namely Meroitic, Greek, Latin, Old Nubian, Arabic, French and unexpectedly, Provençal in a brief inscription left by a medieval visitor. Meroitic is present in 131 graffiti, to which five from the Lion Temple can be added. Only twenty-five of them have been published. 2 As the excavations of this site were carried out since the end of the fifties by the team of the Humboldt-Universität in Berlin, its director, Fritz Hintze, himself the foremost expert of his day on Meroitic language, planned a thorough publication of these texts. A small black notebook entitled Musawwarat Sekundär-Inschriften MS 1 ff is kept in the archives of the mission. For each graffito, it includes one or two photographs, a hand-copy of the text when it is legible, occasionally, a real facsimile,
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hal-03956626 , version 1 (25-01-2023)

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Claude Rilly. Graffiti for Gods and Kings. The Meroitic secondary inscriptions of Musawwarat es-Sufra: a preliminary study. Der Antike Sudan, 2022, 33, pp.7-18. ⟨hal-03956626⟩

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