Meroitic was the language of the kingdom of Kush, in ancient Sudan. It was not written until the last stage of the Kushite civilisation, namely the kingdom of Meroe (270 BCE–330 CE). Itstwo scripts, cursive and hieroglyphic, were deciphered in 1911. However, the language they convey still resist complete translation, but progress is constant. The recent identification of the language family to which Meroitic belongs is a major step forward. The Meroitic corpus includes some 2300 texts, mainly written on stone and ostraca. The corpus includes a variety of genres such as funerary inscriptions, royal stelae, religious texts, graffiti, accountancy ostraca, etc. Although the characters of both scripts were borrowed from complex Egyptian scripts, the Meroitic writing system was an alphasyllabary with a limited set of signs, 23 in all. Recent advances in the palaeographical study of the cursive and hieroglyphic script represent an important contribution to the chronology of the Meroitic kingdom.