When Greek was an African Language | Page 8

but with its own distinctive characteristics such as the inclusion of elements of portraiture in its depiction of contemporary figures.
Even more remarkable is the survival of the Greek language after the Arab conquest of Egypt. [38] ? Arab geographers claimed that the Nubians possessed books in Greek and prayed in Greek, and their claims have been fully confirmed by he UNESCO archaeological salvage campaign. We now have hundreds of Greek inscriptions and graffiti as well as the tattered remains of the cathedral library at Qasr Ibrim, which was destroyed in an Egyptian raid in 1173 AD led by Shams ed-Dawla Turanshah, the brother of the famous Saladin. [39] ? The most spectacular and revealing find, however, is the 12 &supth; th century tomb of Archbishop Georgios from Old Dongola, the capital of Makuria. [40] ? The texts on the tomb's walls include religious formulae, magical signs, the beginnings and ends of all four gospels, the Greek text of an extra-biblical text known as the "Speech of Mary to Bartos," and Coptic homilies. Taken together with the manuscript remains and inscriptions, Archbishop Giorgios' tomb leaves no doubt that cathedral libraries at major centers such as Faras, Qasr Ibrim, and Old Dongola possessed a wide variety of religious texts including bibles, church canons, saints' lives and homilies, hymnals, and other liturgical texts, and even magical texts.
Greek was not confined to books, however, but was a living language, at least as far as the clergy and governing class was concerned. So, numerous graffiti painted or scratched on the walls of pilgrimage churches--over 650 such graffiti--many written in the first person--have been counted on the walls of one such church��point to widespread functional Greek literacy in these two groups. [41] ? For evidence of more than this minimal literacy, however, we have to turn to funerary stelae, the most common form of Greek inscription found in Nubia.
Hundreds of these stelae have been discovered from all over Nubia. [42] ? They seem to be unique to Nubia and began to appear in the 8 &supth; th century AD. They contain versions of a Byzantine prayer for the dead that was probably introduced into Nubia then or a century earlier and were made for all sorts of people from kings and bishops to common men and women. That the Nubians were not simply mechanically copying empty formulae but understood these texts and their theology is clear from the freedom with which they modified the basic prayer to suit the individual being commemorated. Particularly interesting in this regard are these two stelae from Nuri near the fourth cataract. They date from the late 9 &supth; th or 10 &supth; th century AD and contain abbreviated versions of the standard prayer. [43] ? The first reads:
John, the servant of Christ, fell asleep by the order of God the Lord, the omnipotent One; in Pachon, 28th day. And now You, Good God, rest his soul in the bosom of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob��.
And the second:
By the inclination and will of God the creator of everything who has arranged disorder into order. Elisabeth died in the month of Choiak. (God) rest (her).
What sets these two inscriptions apart from all other Nubian funerary inscriptions is the fact that both contain phrases translated from Coptic. [44] ? So, in the first the vocative "You, Good God", is modeled on Coptic grave stelae; while in the second the usual description of God as "the omnipotent One", pantokrator, has been replaced by pantotektor, "the all builder," a unique word that is virtually unattested in either classical or medieval Greek but is, however, a perfect translation of the standard description of God in Coptic grave stelae, damiourgos m pterif, "creator of everything". In other words, the provincial priest who wrote these texts was probably trilingual, understanding Greek, Coptic, and, of course, Nubian. Ironically, the most important example of these clerics' linguistic virtuosity ultimately threatened the survival of Greek in Nubia.
The 10th century AD Arab geographer al-Aswani observed that the Nubians possessed Greek books, which they translate into their own language. [45] ? Contemporary Nubian is no longer a written language, but sometime in the 8 &supth; th or 9 &supth; th century the Greek alphabet, supplemented by signs borrowed from the Coptic alphabet and even one from the old Meroitic script, was adapted to write Old Nubian. [46] ? A religious literature composed primarily of translated patristic texts gradually developed. Less than a hundred pages from Old Nubian books survive, but they confirm al-Aswani's claim that the Nubians translated Greek religious texts directly into Old Nubian.
At first, Old Nubian was used only for religious purposes, but by the 12 &supth; th century AD, it was being used for legal and commercial texts, and Old Nubian vocabulary was making its way into Nubian Greek texts.