t. The Kharamandoye Inscription (MI 94) revisited

The thoughts expressed below are intended as further suggestions to an article on the same inscription that I published in 1973 in MNL nO 13. A new transliteration of the text is included to begin with, employing the conventions which are now in use. The superscript numbers indicate the lines of the inscription; numbers on the left are those of the clauses (stiches, or tactical groups) into which the text might properly be divided, at least as I see things at present. The writer, it should again be pointed out, believes that this text provides the best likelihood of understanding of the few " historical " inscriptions which have come down to us from ancient Meroe. The text shows every sign of being the narrative of a single episode, or series of connected episodes, in the history of Lower Nubia; it is not a question here of the listing ofgifts to various temples, nor of a king's serial record of the events of his reign, but of something resembling the description of a single historical happening. The personages and peoples introduced in the early part of the inscription continue to appear; although their actions may be obscure, they remain the dramatis personae throughout- in fact, from lines 8 to 28. This being the case, one has every right to expect some sort of narrative progression which might be followed. A further aspect of the text which ought to offer hope to the would-be interpreter is relatively high number ofwords for wich some kind of meaning can be suggested. It might be pointed out that the American-codebreakers of the Second World War claimed to be able to divine the sense of many messages if they knew the significance ofonly twenty per cent of the groups. It is at least clear that the text can be divided into several sections. The remarkably extended protocol which begins the inscription (here " tactical groups " 1 to 15) comprises the first of these. The second and perhaps the most important of all (and certainly the most impenetrable) is that which in contained in TGs 16 to 20, where apparently the story prope