Nubian and Axumite Intellectual Legacies

South of Egypt, the kingdom of Kush developed one of Africa's oldest literate civilizations, with its capital initially at Napata and, from around the sixth century BCE, at Meroë, further south along the Nile. Meroitic Kush developed its own script, the Meroitic alphasyllabary, adapted partly from Egyptian hieroglyphic and demotic signs; its phonetic values were largely deciphered by the British Egyptologist Francis Llewellyn Griffith in 1909, though the Meroitic language itself remains only partially understood, which has limited scholars' ability to reconstruct any explicit Meroitic philosophical or ethical argumentation comparable to the later Ethiopian Hatatas. Meroitic religion blended indigenous deities, above all the lion-god Apedemak, with the Egyptian cult of Amun, reflecting Kush's long and often politically dominant relationship with pharaonic Egypt, which Kushite kings of the twenty-fifth dynasty ruled directly in the eighth and seventh centuries BCE.