When Greek was an African Language | Page 9

History was repeating itself. Just as the invention of the Meroitic script marked the beginning of the end of the use of Egyptian in Hellenistic and Roman Kush, so the invention of the Old Nubian script was inexorably leading to the marginalization of Greek in Medieval Nubia. That process had not yet been completed, however, when Nubian Christian civilization came to an end in the late 14 &supth; th or 15 &supth; th century AD.
The end was gradual and the process complex. The replacement of the Fatimid rulers of Egypt with the more aggressive Ayyubids and Mamlukes, increasing Muslim settlement in Nubia and intermarriage with the local population, and endemic dynastic strife in Makuria all played a part. In any event, by the early 14 &supth; th century AD the kings of Makuria had converted to Islam, and the kingdom itself disappeared soon afterwards. Alwah in the south and a fragment of Makuria called the kingdom of Dottawo with its capital at Qasr Ibrim, however, survived probably for another century. Even more remarkably, so did Nubian Greek.
One of the most important discoveries of the UNESCO salvage campaign was the tomb of probably the last archbishop of Qasr Ibrim, a Nubian named Timotheus. He had been consecrated by the Patriarch of Alexandria in 1372 AD and sent to Nubia. When he died, he had buried with him his consecration documents. These were in Coptic and Arabic. The Coptic text, however, was preceded by the Patriarch's greeting to Timotheus' Nubian congregation, which was composed in halting Greek and followed by a postscript in equally unsteady Greek written by an Egyptian bishop explaining that he had witnessed Timotheus' consecration. [47] ? Greek remained the official language of Nubian Christianity right to the end of its long and remarkable history.

CONCLUSION
The survival of Greek and Greek culture in ancient and medieval Nubia is unique. Many cultures on the periphery of the Greco-Roman world used Greek and adopted aspects of Greek culture in antiquity, but they gradually disappeared when these cultures lost contact with the Roman Empire. For a good example of the normal pattern we need only look to Nubia's eastern neighbor, the kingdom of Axum in northeastern Ethiopia and Eritrea.
Greek was used in Axum for diplomacy and commerce with the Roman Empire from at least the first century AD to the end of antiquity and is found on inscriptions and coin legends. When, however, the Arab conquests severed ties with Rome, Greek disappeared, being replaced by Ge'ez for literature and Arabic for diplomacy and commerce. Why the difference?
A first step on the road to an explanation is the recognition that Nubia was probably never totally isolated from the Byzantine Empire. Sporadic contact occurred, probably with Islamic Egypt as intermediary, and Nubian pilgrims are attested at Jerusalem where they could have met visitors from Byzantium. Some may even have visited Constantinople themselves. So, the French chronicler Robert of Clari describes a meeting in 1204 between the leaders of the Fourth Crusade and a Nubian "king" who had come to Constantinople with ten companions��he had started with sixty��as part of a pilgrimage that was supposed to include Rome and the shrine of St. James of Compostella in Spain. [48] ?
Whether or not Robert of Clari's Nubian king completed his ambitious journey is unknown, but there is no reason to assume that he was unique. Such occasional contacts combined with imports of Byzantine goods could account for the knowledge of Byzantine artistic and architectural trends archaeologists have documented in Nubia. They would not, however, be sufficient to account for the survival of the Greek language. For that more would have been required, especially since obvious alternatives with apparent advantages were readily available, namely, Coptic, which was the language of the Nubians' co-religionists in Egypt and was used in Nubia by Egyptian priests, and, of course, Arabic, the language of the Islamic rulers of Egypt. Two factors can be suggested.
First, unlike the situation in Axum, there was no local written language in Nubia for the Nobatai and Blemmyes to use after the collapse of the kingdom of Kush. As a result, they were forced to turn to Greek or Coptic, the two foreign languages in use in Nubia in late antiquity, and Greek had significant advantages over Coptic in this regard, since it had been widely used for public purposes in northern Nubia for centuries and was, therefore, integrated into the life of the region. Moreover, Greek also enabled the Nobatai and Blemmyes to conduct diplomatic relations with Roman Egypt in particular and the Roman Empire in general. In addition, as a papyrus letter discovered at Qasr Ibrim and written in startlingly ungrammatical but still intelligible Greek has revealed, Greek also served as a neutral vehicle for Nobatai and Blemmyes to communicate with each other. [49] ? Second,