Meroitic Cursive Letter O

It replaces a consonant’s unwritten “a” with another vowel.

It follows the consonant sign; Meroitic text runs right to left.

Meroitic developed to write Kush’s language as Egyptian writing declined there. Cursive drew partly on Demotic, a cursive Egyptian script, and appeared in private, funerary, and official texts; hieroglyphic Meroitic drew on Egyptian hieroglyphs for royal and temple inscriptions. The earliest dated cursive text is about 200 BCE; less-evolved signs suggest use by the third century BCE. After the fourth century CE, Nubian gradually replaced Meroitic. By the sixth century, Old Nubian writing combined Greek letters and Coptic, a Greek-based Egyptian script, with three Meroitic cursive signs.