Meroitic Cursive Letter Ta

It is a Meroitic letter, not a translated word.

“Ta” is its scholarly reading label: it identifies the consonant sign’s reading, not a word meaning. In Meroitic, basic consonant signs carry an unwritten “a” unless another vowel is written, so 𐦴 contributes to a word rather than naming an idea on its own.

The letter values were deciphered around 1911. As of 2025, Meroitic was still only partly understood: names and a few other words could be read.

Where did Meroitic cursive come from?

Kush developed native scripts to write the Meroitic language.

Kush arose south of Egypt around 850 BCE, in the Nile Valley of what is now Sudan. After its rulers lost Egypt in the 7th century BCE and returned to the Middle Nile, Egyptian language and writing remained in use; as those traditions declined farther from Egypt, Meroitic was developed for the local language. The capital moved from Napata to Meroë around 560 BCE.

Meroitic cursive was the general-use form and drew partly on Demotic, an Egyptian script used for everyday writing. A separate hieroglyphic form drew on Egyptian hieroglyphs and appeared on temples and royal monuments; its signs corresponded in value to cursive signs.

The earliest datable cursive text is around 200 BCE, though other inscriptions suggest the script was in use by the 3rd century BCE. The last dated cursive text is from 410–420 CE. After the fourth century CE, Meroitic was gradually replaced by Nubian. By the sixth century CE, Coptic writing had superseded the Meroitic scripts and borrowed three cursive signs for writing Nubian.

How do I type 𐦴?

Use a Unicode hex-entry tool if your editor offers one.

Horizontal Meroitic text runs almost entirely right-to-left. Use an editor that handles Unicode direction and a font with Meroitic coverage; without one, the character may appear as a replacement box.