Millet (1970) proposed that Meroitic e was in fact an epenthetic vowel used to break up Egyptian consonant clusters that could not be pronounced in the Meroitic language, or appeared after final Egyptian consonants such as m and k which could not occur finally in Meroitic. Rowan (2006) takes this further and proposes that the glyphs se, ne, and te were not syllabic at all, but stood for consonants , , and at the end of a word or morpheme (as when followed by the determiner -l; she proposes Meroitic finals were restricted to alveolar consonants such as these. An example is the Coptic word prit "the agent", which in Meroitic was transliterated perite (pa-e-ra-i-te). If Rowan is right and this was pronounced , then Meroitic would have been a fairly typical abugida. She proposes that Meroitic had three vowels, , and that was raised to something like or after the alveolar consonants , explaining the lack of orthographic t, s, n followed by the vowel letter e. Very rarely does one find the sequence CVC, where the C's are both labials or both velars. This is similar to consonant restrictions found throughout the Afro-Asiatic language family, suggesting to Rowan that there is a good chance Meroitic was an Afro-Asiatic language like Egyptian. Rowan is not convinced that the system was completely alphabetic, and suggests that the glyph te also may have functioned as a determinative for place names, as it frequently occurs at the end of place names that are known not to have a /t/ in them. Similarly, ne may have marked royal or divine names. Unicode Meroitic scripts, both Hieroglyphic and Cursive, were added to the Unicode Standard in January, 2012 with the release of version 6.1. The Unicode block for Meroitic Hieroglyphs is U+10980–U+1099F. The Unicode block for Meroitic Cursive is U+109A0–U+109FF. As a Meroitic Unicode font you may use Aegyptus which can be downloaded from Unicode Fonts for Ancient Scripts. See also Afro-Asiatic Languages References Sources Török, László (1998). The Kingdom of Kush: Handbook of the Napatan-Meróitic Civilization (Handbook of Oriental Studies/Handbuch Der Orientalistik). New York: Brill Academic Publishers. . External links Meroitic - AncientScripts Meroitic at Omniglot Meroitic font Examples of Meroitic script Leclant Jean, Heyler André, Berger el Naggar Catherine, Carrier Claude, Rilly Claude. Répertoire d'épigraphie méroïtique, Tome I - REM 0001 à REM 0387, (2000), pp. 1-713 Leclant Jean, Heyler André, Berger