Cathedrals, monasteries, and capital cities: Christian Nubian archaeology and architecture

12Faras cathedral is certainly one of the crucial buildings for understanding Nubian church architecture and its history. Surprisingly, it took more than forty years after the discovery for a complete publication of its archaeological record to appear, authored by W. Godlewski, who did not even take part in the excavations.11 His book is an excellent example of archival archaeology and shows how it can and should be done. But at the same time it also highlights one of the key problems in archaeology, not only in Christian Nubia: archaeologists tend to excavate as much as they can, but it all too often takes them a lot of time to publish the results, if they ever do it at all.12

13More than a century of archaeological work in the Middle Nile Valley brought to light roughly two hundred churches.13 Many of them, unlike Faras, were never properly published or even documented. W. Adams did a huge job of collecting, classifying, and dating all northern Nubian churches, and finally published them in one place.14 While W. Adams’s linear model of development of Nubian ecclesiastic architecture —to which his book is an illustration—, is generally contested,15 and while drawings included in the book (ground plans and cross-sections) do not meet modern standards, the publication is indeed a compendium of information and point of departure for research into Nubian churches.

14Ecclesiastic archaeology, just like the archaeology of pharaonic temples in Egypt, can be boring at first sight due to its repetitiveness and predictability. However, as in many other aspects, here too Nubia does not cease to surprise us. The case in point are two unparalleled buildings. One is the Upper Church at Banganarti (Fig. 4), discovered and recently published by B. Żurawski, which was a vivid centre for the cult of the Archangel Raphael in the 13th and 14th centuries.16 The other is an unusual six-apse edifice (NB.2.2) unearthed by W. Godlewski in the monastery on Kōm H at Dongola (Fig. 5), whose function and history has yet to be studied in detail.17 Such discoveries clearly show the ingenuity of Nubian master builders, their independence from external canons, and skills in introducing innovative solutions.

Figure 4

Figure 5

15Considerable progress has been made in Nubian monastic archaeology in recent years, mainly thanks to the efforts of A. Obłuski. Admittedly, very few monasteries have so far been identified in Nubia and even fewer comprehensively excavated,18 which makes any attempt at drawing general conclusions on the nature of Nubian monasticism quite risky. Nevertheless, A. Obłuski, taking advantage of the fact that he personally excavated one of these sites, the monastery at Ghazālī, and that he had at his disposal the documentation from another excavated monastic site, Qaṣr al-Wizz, managed to squeeze the available evidence, both archaeological and textual, into a reasonable synthesis in his 2019 monograph.19 In this book, making use of the available textual (literary, epigraphic, and papyrological) and (bio)archaeological sources, A. Obłuski follows in E. Wipszycka’s footsteps, the greatest authority in Egyptian monasticism,20 and discusses the monastic habitat in the Middle Nile Valley, Nubian monastic hierarchies, and the life of Nubian monks, both mundane and spiritual. While his considerations suffer in many places from the scarcity of source material and from our lacunary knowledge of Nubian culture and history in general, they are an important voice in the discussion and will definitely constitute food for thought for future generations of scholars. Lastly, the first part of the book, a richly and beautifully illustrated catalogue of (potential) Nubian monastic sites, is certainly valuable, and it will undoubtedly become a starting point for further research on Nubian monasticism.

16Faras and nearby Qaṣr al-Wizz offered invaluable information to archaeologists of sacred spaces but, unfortunately, Faras urban tissue is utterly unknown.21 Luckily, Nubian cityscape can be studied in other major sites, Qaṣr Ibrīm, Dongola, and Soba.

17Before his death in 2019, W. Adams managed to publish three volumes on the post-Meroitic, early and classic Christian, and Ottoman occupation phases at Qaṣr Ibrīm.22 The books supplement his earlier volume on the late Christian remains23 and the set now provides a complete chronological overview of the site. Each volume is structured in the same fashion with chapters on architectural, artefactual, and textual records from the subsequent phases of the city’s life, and it is conveniently equipped with a set of tables listing the artefacts, all for the reader’s better orientation in the material.

18After sixty years of Polish research on the most important medieval Nubian site, Dongola, the capital of Makuria, we still know very little about the city. Admittedly, the site is immense and extremely varied, but archaeologists’ efforts have, until recently, concentrated mostly on public buildings of representative character with a potential for great discoveries: churches, palaces, monastery. With hardly any final publication of any given feature excavated since the 1960s, W. Godlewski’s popular archaeological guide24 is as close as we can get to an overview of the site without having to work through countless preliminary archaeological reports.25

19A gamechanger for urban archaeology in Nubia were two research grants obtained by Polish scholars for studying two medieval Nubian capitals. In 2017 A. Obłuski was awarded an ERC starting grant for excavating post-Christian Dongola26 and in 2019 M. Drzewiecki received financing from the Polish National Science Centre for his research in Soba, the capital of the kingdom of Alwa.27 While we still have to wait for final results of both projects, already at this point, one cannot deny the effectiveness of their methodology. By combining methodical stratigraphic digging with large-scale non-invasive survey with the use of newest technologies, the urban tissue of both cities is finally being revealed.28

Painting a church and spinning a potter’s wheel: Christian Nubian arts and crafts

20Surprising as it may appear, despite the abundance of material provided by decades of archaeological work, the first ever attempt at a synthesis of Christian Nubian arts and crafts, penned by D. Zielińska, appeared only in 2021 in the Oxford Handbook of Ancient Nubia.29 In this concise overview of the material, divided geographically and chronologically, D. Zielińska focuses on Nubian ecclesiastical architecture and its painted and sculpted decoration, certainly the most widely known and the best researched domains of Nubian arts and crafts. However, entirely praiseworthily, she also takes under consideration pottery and what little has been preserved from other works of Nubian artists and craftsmen.30 There can be no doubt, however, that two categories of material play the first fiddle for studying Christian Nubian arts and crafts, wall painting and pottery.

21The greatest achievement in the realm of Christian Nubian wall painting is by all means the publication by S. Jakobielski, with a number of contributors, of a complete catalogue of murals from Faras cathedral.31 This volume was long overdue, but it was definitely worth waiting for. Not only do we gain, for the first time, access to the entire collection,32 but also the format of the publication is outstanding. Numerous high-quality illustrations, tables, charts, and concordances greatly facilitate orientation to the complex matter of chronology and spatial distribution of murals, and make using the volume a pleasant and rewarding experience. It is to be hoped that this book will be a trendsetter and that future publications of Nubian wall paintings will take an identical or at least similar form.

22Another important volume appeared in 2019, edited by D. Zielińska.33 The book presents an entirely novel approach to Nubian wall painting, showing that not only the function or meaning of a mural is important, but also its technological aspects. Thanks to numerous physical and chemical analyses, D. Zielińska and her team managed to show that, while iconographic and stylistic patterns may have come from abroad, the materials and techniques of execution were definitely local, not infrequently dating back as far as the Meroitic period.

23A change of guard caused major progress in studies on Christian Nubian pottery. The young generation of ceramologists represented by K. Danys and A. Cedro rejected the old ways of collecting only the interesting pieces and started to treat their material as a whole, thus arriving at more reliable conclusions on ceramic production. Moreover, thanks to their interest in the function of vessels and their actual everyday use, they managed to show the enormous value of pottery for studying Nubian society and economy.34 Last but not least, they engage in fruitful cooperation with specialists of texts and art —a collaboration all too rare in our environment— demonstrating that such a joint work is mutually inspiring and beneficial.35

Writing, reading, understanding: literacy and language in Christian Nubia

24While wall paintings made Faras famous, its textual record is no less impressive. This important corpus significantly contributes to our understanding of medieval Nubian literacy. It covers both epigraphic (stelae and wall inscriptions) and papyrological sources (mainly ostraca, but also several literary texts on parchment) in all languages of written communication in use in Christian Nubia: Greek, Sahidic Coptic, Old Nubian, and Arabic. Thus, Faras —pars pro toto— can be viewed as medieval Nubia in a nutshell, providing as it does material for studying the linguistic situation of the land. While attempts at the assessment of Nubian multilingualism (or more precisely multiscripturalism) date back to the beginning of the 20th century,36 comprehensive research on this subject was made possible only some ten years ago with the launching of the online version of my Database of Medieval Nubian Texts (DBMNT), an entirely new version of which has recently been inaugurated, updated and enriched.37 In its present form, DBMNT covers the following components: Texts, Identity Markers, Names, and People, and opens new possibilities for studying issues such as Nubian state and Church apparatuses, naming practices, and prosopography. However, already in its original form, comprising only the “Texts” element, the database allowed synchronic and diachronic studies of the corpus by A. Łajtar and myself, which provided a state-of-the-art overview of the status of the languages of Christian Nubia,38 which confirmed, updated, or reject previous views.39

25Faras yielded an important collection of episcopal funerary stelae in Greek and Coptic. Whereas all of them were expertly published by A. Łajtar and J. van der Vliet twenty years ago,40 a new approach to funerary epigraphy calls for their study not as single objects, but as a coherent group. I have developed this approach in my latest study of the corpus of Greek and Coptic funerary inscriptions from the monastery at Ghazālī.41 It both follows and expands on two influential publications: A. Łajtar and J. van der Vliet’s catalogue of inscriptions from Qaṣr Ibrīm42 and J. van der Vliet’s seminal article on the formulary of Nubian funerary stelae.43 In the former, contrary to epigraphic tradition which tends to present inscriptions in different languages separately, the authors grouped the texts not according to their language, but their type and formulary. J. van der Vliet’s article, in turn, introduces to Christian funerary epigraphy of the Nile Valley the concept of centonization, that is putting together different textual formulae to form a new whole.44 This approach, as my publication clearly shows, makes it possible to observe similarities and differences between the structure and contents not only across different textual types, but also across different languages, and contributes to understanding Nubian scribal practices.

26The corpus of wall inscriptions from Faras cathedral has yet to be published, and A. Łajtar and myself slowly work on this task.45 Recent years have nevertheless been more than rewarding for writing on walls in Nubia. In his article, programmatic for studying wall inscriptions in the Christian Nile Valley, J. van der Vliet has clearly shown that the sense of a text is defined not only by its content, but also the context and perception of the audience, an approach that has gained momentum in mainstream Mediterranean “graffitology.”46 This approach was subsequently put into practice in A. Łajtar and J. van der Vliet’s publication of certainly the most astonishing Christian Nubian textual discovery to date, the crypt of Archbishop Georgios of Dongola under the Northwest Annex of the monastery on Kōm H, the walls of which were inscribed with numerous literary and subliterary texts of ritual power (Fig. 6).47 The authors not only offered a masterpiece of philological and text critical work, but, following the functional principle, they also tried to understand why so much effort was put in executing inscriptions that no one would ever read. Taking into account multiple interpretative layers of this intricate composition, they argued that it served as a burial shroud protecting the deceased during his passage to the other world.

Figure 6

27In another groundbreaking publication, a corpus of wall inscriptions from the upper church at Banganarti, A. Łajtar has masterfully shown how more typical instances of wall epigraphy should be treated.48 In this impressive collection of almost a thousand texts in Greek and Old Nubian —mostly visitors’ mementos—, A. Łajtar does not limit himself to philological work on these very often hardly intelligible inscriptions, but he also provides an extensive introduction, which constitutes a stand-alone study of late Nubian society, its linguistic choices, scribal practices, literacy and literary background, religious attitudes, onomastics. He also addresses in detail the function of both the inscriptions and the edifice.

28Not much has been done in recent years when it comes to literary and sub-literary manuscripts from Nubia. The only major publication is P. Hubai’s edition of the Coptic codex from Qaṣr al-Wizz containing two apocryphal texts, Words of the Saviour under the Cross and Dance of the Saviour around the Cross.49 Apart from occasional publications of single sources, like a hymn to Mary by A. Łajtar50 and a sticheron on John the Baptist by A. Deptuła,51 both from Qaṣr Ibrīm, or a set of ostraca with Psalms from Meinarti by G. Ruffini,52 only some general remarks reach every now and then the academic community at large about definitely the most impressive and important collection of such texts in Coptic, the so-called library of Qaṣr Ibrīm. And the importance of this material is sufficiently shown by fragments of what seems to be the Second Book of Enoch in Coptic, which apparently predates the oldest known Slavonic version of the work by almost half a millennium.53 While many of us have already lost hope of ever seeing the publication of (at least a part of) the Coptic collection, the fate of Greek literary fragments lies now in good hands, those of A. Łajtar and A. Deptuła. They have embarked on a new research project aimed at identifying, deciphering, and ultimately publishing all instances of (sub-)literary manuscripts in Greek from Qaṣr Ibrīm.54 Judging by their successful work on Banganarti inscriptions,55 the team will certainly ensure a swift and expert publication of the material.

29The only category of written sources that the excavations at Faras did not yield are documentary texts. The biggest find of such sources comes from Qaṣr Ibrīm, not so far up north. Unfortunately, just as with the literary manuscripts from the latter site, their state of publication leaves much to desire. Old Nubian documents are definitely in the best situation. Thanks to G. Ruffini’s continuation of G.M. Browne’s work on this material,56 we now have slightly more than a hundred edited texts, legal and economic documents, as well as private letters.57 Owing to our imperfect knowledge of Old Nubian, its lexicon and morphosyntax,58 G. Ruffini’s analyses are very often mere conjectures and his translations unintelligible. However, at the very least, the material is now available for everyone to work on.59 The situation with medieval Arabic documents from the site has recently improved, as G. Khan has prepared edition of some fifty texts from the Fatimid period, along with extensive historical commentary.60 This publication brings crucial contribution to our understanding of Fatimid-Makurian relations in many different aspects, diplomatic, legal, economic, and social. The documents shed new light, among other things, on the question of the baqṭ, land tenure, or Islamisation of Nubian society. Unfortunately, the situation is quite different as far as the Coptic part of the Qaṣr Ibrīm documentary sources are concerned, which have enormous historical value, as we learn from extremely scant and laconic reports,61 but this is as far as we can get.

30Faras yielded also a good deal of sources in Old Nubian, providing material to study this language.62 Since his first publication in 2011, the edition of the famous Greek and Old Nubian epitaph of King Georgios from Wādī al-Naṭrūn,63 the star of V. van Gerven Oei has been shining bright in Old Nubian studies. As if to celebrate a decade of his work on the language, in 2021, V. van Gerven Oei published a new grammar of Old Nubian.64 While there is still much to be done, especially in the areas of lexicography and the language of documentary texts (see above), V. van Gerven Oei armed us with an effective weapon to fight this uneven fight.

Interpreting the evidence, filling in the gaps: history of Christian Nubia

31Faras discovery has renewed an interest in Christian Nubian history that has not waned ever since and has brought considerable development, at least in some subjects, although not necessarily connected with Faras. Two books by A. Obłuski and J.H.F. Dijkstra, reassessing the textual and archaeological sources, shed light on the formative period of Nubian statehood and the beginnings of Christianity in the region.65 On the opposite side of the chronological scale, G. Ruffini and R. Seignobos, the former studying the Old Nubian documentary evidence from Qaṣr Ibrīm,66 the latter delving into the realm of Arabic historical sources,67 greatly contributed not only to clarifying late Nubian dynastic succession, but also to understanding Nubian economy and social structures.

32Yet, due to the scarcity and laconism of written sources, and the accidental character of their discovery and preservation, writing a general political, social, and economic history of medieval Nubia still remains an extremely demanding task. To do so, one has to master not only the multifaceted textual evidence in different languages and of different genres, but also archaeological and art historical data. In this respect, R. Werner’s book appears as a missed chance.68 Despite the subtitle, Geschichte und Gestalt einer afrikanischer Kirche, R. Werner treats in his book a whole range of non-religious subjects as well. Thus, the first half of the book is devoted to the political history of the region, and its second part, dealing directly with religious aspects, has subchapters on the linguistic situation, the civil state apparatus, secular economic issues, or even on the position of women in Nubian society. R. Werner’s broad approach and attempt to encompass different aspects of Christian Nubian civilisation, while admirable and praiseworthy, unfortunately hardly meets expectations, and the book, however useful as a collection of information, is actually scarcely more than that, a compilation of (partly outdated) data, interpretations, and hypotheses from previous scholarship, without a proper critical historical approach.

A window on the world: connecting Christian Nubia and the rest of the world

33Last but not least, Faras is a window through which Christian Nubian studies became connected with other regions of the medieval world. Students of Nubia have always sought analogies, parallels, and inspirations for Nubian art, architecture, and literary tradition in other cultures and civilisations.69

34Their first and most natural choice fell on Nubia’s closest neighbour, Coptic Egypt. However, it has hardly ever been reciprocal. Most Coptologists do not seem to be interested in or even aware of what was going on south of the First Cataract. Only Coptic literature from Nubia tends to be noticed, alas, not very frequently, which is probably due to the fact that so little of it has so far been made available (see above).70 Fortunately, some scholars can think outside the Coptic box, most notably J. van der Vliet. In his work on Coptic inscriptions and literature, he has been trying to show that Egypt and Nubia shared common traditions or even formed a kind of cultural unity, at least as far as Upper Egypt and Lower Nubia are concerned.71 The same scholar, together with A. Delattre and J.H.F. Dijkstra, has also inaugurated in 2014 annual reports on “Christian Inscriptions from Egypt and Nubia,” which consist of an extensively annotated bibliography of editions and publications on Christian epigraphy of the Nile Valley.72 As the authors put it in the introduction to their first report, “Greek and Coptic inscriptions are an essential source of evidence for Christian Nubia, and its epigraphical record shows many commonalities with that of Christian Egypt,” scoring a bullseye.73 In a similar vein, G.J.M. van Loon has also recently joined forces with D. Zielińska, A. Łajtar, A. Deptuła and myself, and embarked on a study of northern Nubian churches, especially those installed in pharaonic temples. Her Egyptian perspective is undoubtedly a major asset for the reinterpretation of these edifices and will serve to strengthen the connection between the north and the south.74

35Whereas the role of Constantinople in the Christianisation of Nubia has recently been deemphasised in favour of Egypt,75 the presence of “byzantinisms” in Nubian culture cannot be denied. Such elements have long been sought in Nubian wall painting, mostly on the basis of Faras material.76 A new exciting connecting point between Nubia and the wider Byzantine world has recently been discovered by A. Deptuła in her study of Greek Nubian hymnic poetry.77 She managed to trace back the origin of the extant Nubian hymns to the Byzantine hymnographs of the 7th and 8th centuries, noting —at the same time— the complete absence of Coptic hymnic tradition in Nubia. However, all of this surprisingly finds little resonance among Byzantinologists, perhaps because Nubian scholars have so far been publishing mostly in their own backyard. Although one swallow, or in this case three, do not make a summer, there is a hope for breaking through to the awareness of scholars of Byzantium, as three of the most prominent Byzantinologist venues recently published Nubian articles: T. Derda and A. Łajtar’s edition of a dipinto from Dongola recording a synod of Makurian bishops, with their extensive commentary on the Nubian episcopacy, was printed in Jahrbuch des österreichischen Byzantinistik;78 M. Łaptaś’s study of the iconography of archangels appeared in Byzantinische Zeitschrift;79 and my own analysis of Faras cathedral complex as a memorial monument can now be read in Dumbarton Oaks Papers.80

36As has become apparent in recent years, Egypt and Constantinople are not the only directions on which we should focus in order to better understand Christian Nubia. While R. Seignobos has been doing a tremendous job trying to connect the history of Nubia to that of the Islamic world from the perspective of Arabic sources,81 it seems that indigenous texts also have something to tell us in this respect. In my work on Nubian onomastics, I have identified a good number of Arabic names in Old Nubian documents from Qaṣr Ibrīm.82 Since in all cases we know nothing more than the names of these individuals, we cannot say whether they were outsiders, Arabic-speakers coming from Egypt or elsewhere, or Nubians speaking Arabic and/or converted to Islam. In any case, however, their occurrence sheds new light on the processes of Arabisation and Islamisation of Nubia and calls for a renewed discussion.

37The discovery at Banganarti of an inscription in Latin script in what appears to be the Provençal language directs our eyes to the West.83 Whereas it has long been acknowledged that medieval Europeans knew of Nubia’s existence,84 this is the first time that we actually witness a European visiting the Middle Nile Valley. Finally, the expert study of beads from Christian Nubia undertaken in recent years by J. Then-Obłuska85 as well the work of K. Danys86 on glazed pottery have shown the presence of materials from Yemen, Iran, or even as far as India. All of this clearly shows that Nubia was not as isolated as one may tend to think, but that it was in fact part of an international network, which we finally start to see and understand as Nubian studies is becoming a part of international scholarly network itself.