Towards Ancient Meroitic Decipherment: A Computational Approach

Joshua N. Otten; Antonios Anastasopoulos

doi:10.18653/v1/2025.alp-1.11

Towards Ancient Meroitic Decipherment: A Computational Approach

Joshua N. Otten, Antonios Anastasopoulos

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Abstract

The discovery of the Rosetta Stone was one of the keys that helped unlock the secrets of Ancient Egypt and its hieroglyphic lan-guage. But what about languages with no such “Rosetta Stone?” Meroitic is an ancient lan-guage from what is now present-day Sudan, but even though it is connected to Egyptian in many ways, much of its grammar and vocabu-lary remains undeciphered. In this work, we in-troduce the challenge of Meroitic decipherment as a computational task, and present the first Meroitic machine-readable corpus. We then train embeddings and perform intrinsic evalu-ations, as well as cross-lingual alignment ex-periments between Meroitic and Late-Egyptian. We conclude by outlining open problems and potential research directions.

Anthology ID:: 2025.alp-1.11
Volume:: Proceedings of the Second Workshop on Ancient Language Processing
Month:: May
Year:: 2025
Address:: The Albuquerque Convention Center, Laguna
Editors:: Adam Anderson, Shai Gordin, Bin Li, Yudong Liu, Marco C. Passarotti, Rachele Sprugnoli
Venues:: ALP | WS
SIG:
Publisher:: Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:: 87–98
Language:
URL:: https://aclanthology.org/2025.alp-1.11/
DOI:: 10.18653/v1/2025.alp-1.11
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):: Joshua N. Otten and Antonios Anastasopoulos. 2025. Towards Ancient Meroitic Decipherment: A Computational Approach. In Proceedings of the Second Workshop on Ancient Language Processing, pages 87–98, The Albuquerque Convention Center, Laguna. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):: Towards Ancient Meroitic Decipherment: A Computational Approach (Otten & Anastasopoulos, ALP 2025)
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PDF:: https://aclanthology.org/2025.alp-1.11.pdf

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@inproceedings{otten-anastasopoulos-2025-towards,
    title = "Towards {A}ncient {M}eroitic Decipherment: A Computational Approach",
    author = "Otten, Joshua N.  and
      Anastasopoulos, Antonios",
    editor = "Anderson, Adam  and
      Gordin, Shai  and
      Li, Bin  and
      Liu, Yudong  and
      Passarotti, Marco C.  and
      Sprugnoli, Rachele",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the Second Workshop on Ancient Language Processing",
    month = may,
    year = "2025",
    address = "The Albuquerque Convention Center, Laguna",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://aclanthology.org/2025.alp-1.11/",
    doi = "10.18653/v1/2025.alp-1.11",
    pages = "87--98",
    ISBN = "979-8-89176-235-0",
    abstract = "The discovery of the Rosetta Stone was one of the keys that helped unlock the secrets of Ancient Egypt and its hieroglyphic lan-guage. But what about languages with no such ``Rosetta Stone?'' Meroitic is an ancient lan-guage from what is now present-day Sudan, but even though it is connected to Egyptian in many ways, much of its grammar and vocabu-lary remains undeciphered. In this work, we in-troduce the challenge of Meroitic decipherment as a computational task, and present the first Meroitic machine-readable corpus. We then train embeddings and perform intrinsic evalu-ations, as well as cross-lingual alignment ex-periments between Meroitic and Late-Egyptian. We conclude by outlining open problems and potential research directions."
}

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%0 Conference Proceedings
%T Towards Ancient Meroitic Decipherment: A Computational Approach
%A Otten, Joshua N.
%A Anastasopoulos, Antonios
%Y Anderson, Adam
%Y Gordin, Shai
%Y Li, Bin
%Y Liu, Yudong
%Y Passarotti, Marco C.
%Y Sprugnoli, Rachele
%S Proceedings of the Second Workshop on Ancient Language Processing
%D 2025
%8 May
%I Association for Computational Linguistics
%C The Albuquerque Convention Center, Laguna
%@ 979-8-89176-235-0
%F otten-anastasopoulos-2025-towards
%X The discovery of the Rosetta Stone was one of the keys that helped unlock the secrets of Ancient Egypt and its hieroglyphic lan-guage. But what about languages with no such “Rosetta Stone?” Meroitic is an ancient lan-guage from what is now present-day Sudan, but even though it is connected to Egyptian in many ways, much of its grammar and vocabu-lary remains undeciphered. In this work, we in-troduce the challenge of Meroitic decipherment as a computational task, and present the first Meroitic machine-readable corpus. We then train embeddings and perform intrinsic evalu-ations, as well as cross-lingual alignment ex-periments between Meroitic and Late-Egyptian. We conclude by outlining open problems and potential research directions.
%R 10.18653/v1/2025.alp-1.11
%U https://aclanthology.org/2025.alp-1.11/
%U https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/2025.alp-1.11
%P 87-98

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Markdown (Informal)

[Towards Ancient Meroitic Decipherment: A Computational Approach](https://aclanthology.org/2025.alp-1.11/) (Otten & Anastasopoulos, ALP 2025)

Towards Ancient Meroitic Decipherment: A Computational Approach (Otten & Anastasopoulos, ALP 2025)

ACL

Joshua N. Otten and Antonios Anastasopoulos. 2025. Towards Ancient Meroitic Decipherment: A Computational Approach. In Proceedings of the Second Workshop on Ancient Language Processing, pages 87–98, The Albuquerque Convention Center, Laguna. Association for Computational Linguistics.