[3] Before the Meroitic Period, Egyptian hieroglyphs were used to write Kushite names and lexical items.

Though the Kingdom of Kush ended with the fall of the royal capital of Meroë, use of the language and Cursive script continued for a time after that event.

During the 6th century Christianization of Nubia, the Kushite language and Cursive script were replaced by Byzantine Greek, Coptic, and Old Nubian.

[5][6][7] The script was deciphered in 1909 by Francis Llewellyn Griffith, a British Egyptologist, based on the Meroitic spellings of Egyptian names.

In late 2008, the first complete royal dedication was found,[8] which may help confirm or refute some of the current hypotheses.

Monumental letters were oriented to face the beginning of the text, a feature inherited from their hieroglyphic origin.

Some scholars, such as Harald Haarmann, believe that the vowel letters of Meroitic are evidence for an influence of the Greek alphabet in its development.

An additional series of characters is understood to represent consonants with inherent vowels other than /a/: These values were established from evidence such as Egyptian names borrowed into Meroitic.

Ḫ is thought to have been a velar fricative, as the ch in Scottish loch or German Bach.

Comparing late documents with early ones, it is apparent that the sequences sel- and nel-, which Rowan takes to be /sl/ and /nl/ and which commonly occurred with the determiner -l-, assimilated over time to t and l (perhaps /t/ and /ll/).

All other vowels were overtly written: the letters mi, for example, stood for the syllable /mi/, just as in the Latin alphabet.

An example is the Coptic word ⲡⲣⲏⲧ prit "the agent", which in Meroitic was transliterated perite (pa-e-ra-i-te).

Meroitic scripts, both Hieroglyphic and Cursive, were added to the Unicode Standard in January, 2012 with the release of version 6.1.