When Greek was an African Language | Page 8

fresco fragments
were known prior to the discovery by a Polish expedition of the main
cathedral of Faras, the principal city and one time capital of Nobatia,
buried to its roof in sand. Excavation revealed that the cathedral and its
decoration were largely intact and, more remarkable, that the cathedral
was an artistic palimpsest with multiple layers of frescoes preserved.
Careful separation of the different layers has allowed the reconstruction
of a detailed history of Nubian fresco painting from the construction of
the cathedral in the 8 &supth; th century AD through its peak in the 12
&supth; th century to its abandonment in the 15 &supth; th century.
Themes include episodes from the Old and New Testaments, saints,
and Nubian political and ecclesiastical figures. Technically, stylistically,

and thematically, Nubian Christian art has clear connections to
Byzantine art 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.