In 1882 a man named Luigi Rissotto submitted plans for a family crypt to be built in the Monumental Cemetery of Staglieno. He was a merchant (and presumably a successful one) who had volunteered to serve in the army despite being exempted from mandatory service.
The design for his tomb includes an Egyptian winged sun, a choice that makes it part of the Egyptian Revival Architecture movement. The tomb also features an inscription:
Based on context and its own internal features, it seems likely that this inscription is meant to read "?F?AMILIA RISSOTTO", but what script is it?
In fact, it looks surprisingly like demotic Meroitic. The letter for M looks quite a lot like Meroitic m(a), and the letter for I looks like Meroitic y(a). Given that Meroitic did not have an /f/ sound, the use of Meroitic p(a) combined with some other letter to represent F is not outrageous. The other letters are more of a stretch, but you can kind of see Meroitic a in the letter for A (though the Meroitic letter is properly only word-initial).
The choice of Meroitic fits well with the Egyptian Revival theme of the tomb, but there's a problem: as far as I can tell, demotic Meroitic had not yet been deciphered at all when the crypt was designed. While it is true that six or seven characters from the (quite different) hieroglyphic Meroitic script had been identified by Karl Richard Lepsius, the decipherment of the demotic script was not accomplished by Francis Llewellyn Griffith until 1909.
So who composed the inscription on the Rissotto family crypt, and how did they manage to get some of the letters right more than a quarter of a century before Griffith's decipherment?
A clue probably lies in this sentence from Griffith's 1911 book on Meroitic inscriptions:
The discovery at Berlin, in 1908, of a funerary text in Meroite hieroglyphic (Inscr. 60), parallel to those in demotic, gave several exact equations, letter for letter, between the hieroglyphic and the demotic signs.
If this inscription was "discovered" in Berlin, then it had previously been "discovered" by someone else and brought to Berlin. The simplest explanation for a partially correct Meroitic inscription in 1882 is that Lepsius had access to Inscription 60 in the late 19th century and had already completed a partial decipherment of demotic Meroitic that was never published. Being well-known for his work documenting Egyptian monuments, it's easy to imagine that architects of the Egyptian Revival movement would ask for his advice on matters of design. In this case, he presumably offered up an inscription based on his decipherment in progress.
Lepsius died in 1884. Whatever work he may have done on the decipherment of Meroitic has been lost.
