Christian Nubia

Christian Nubia -- the medieval kingdoms of the Middle Nile, in what is now Sudan -- is documented through a small set of unusually rich finds: the Database of Medieval Nubian Texts, the multilingual archive recovered at Qasr Ibrim, and the pilgrim graffiti left on the walls at Banganarti.

Because Nubia's dry climate and its habit of writing in several languages side by side (Old Nubian, Greek, Coptic, Arabic) both concentrated in these few sites, the corpus is well placed to test questions about institutional survival and language change together. Three tongues, three addressees and Greek that stopped meaning both ask what the mix of languages used for a given document -- three tongues serving different addressees, Greek surviving as a formula after its meaning was lost -- reveals about who these documents were actually for. The priest holds the pen and the deed and The paperwork outlived the cathedral test whether administrative paperwork continued to function after the institutions that generated it, church and kingdom alike, had already declined.