Chairman : Vinciane Pirenne-Delforge
Meroitic was the language spoken in ancient times in the land of Kush, north of present-day Sudan. During the last phase of this civilization, strongly influenced by Pharaonic Egypt, known as the kingdom of Meroe (270 BC /330 AD), an alphasyllabic script was created to transcribe the language. Some two thousand texts, often long and varied, are known to this day. Meroitic disappeared without descendants in the early Middle Ages. The writing was deciphered in 1911, but the language still resists translation after a century of investigation. Recent progress, due in part to the identification of its linguistic family (North Eastern Sudanic), nevertheless allows us to look optimistically to the future of research into Meroitic, the oldest written language in sub-Saharan Africa.
Born in 1959, Claude Rilly first studied and then taught ancient Greek and Latin in secondary schools, before turning to Meroitic, the ancient language of Sudan, written with a specific syllabary between the 3rd century BC and the5th century AD,
In his doctoral thesis in Egyptology and Linguistics (2003), he demonstrated that Meroitic belonged to a specific family within the Nilo-Saharan languages, putting an end to a century-old debate. Shortly afterwards, he joined the CNRS (Centre national de la recherche scientifique), as a research fellow at LLACAN (UMR 8135), a unit that is now the leading laboratory for the study of African languages at international level. He will be appointed Director of Research in 2019.
From 2009 to 2014, he was Director of SFDAS (Section française de la direction des antiquités du Soudan), the French Archaeological Institute in Khartoum. Since 2008, he has been director of the French archaeological mission in Sedeinga, Sudanese Nubia. In 2017, he was awarded the Prix Jean-et-Marie-Françoise-Leclant, which each year rewards the efforts of an archaeological team working in Egypt and Sudan.
He is the author of three monographs on the Meroitic language : La Langue du royaume de Méroé (2007), Le Mérotique et sa famille linguistique (2010), Meroitic Language and Writing System (with A. De Voogt, 2012) and a monumental Histoire du Soudan, des origines à la chute du sultanat Fung (2017). His bibliography also includes over sixty articles in French and English on various subjects related to Meroitic language and writing, or to his various archaeological works in Sudan.
As a visiting professor, he has given several seminars on Meroitic at the universities of Cologne, Munich, Heidelberg and Paris-Sorbonne. He received his habilitation to direct research in 2018. In 2019, at the École pratique des hautes études (IVe section, Sciences historiques et philologiques) in Paris, he inaugurates a directorate of studies entitled " Meroitic language and civilization ", the first chair in the world entirely devoted to teaching and research on the language of Meroe.
