Commemoration of Kajbar

We have often commemorated persons and events from our blog. This week is a really special one. I could write about my own five-years’ adventure since I came to Bergen, which coincided with a commemorative seminar for Tomas Hägg, both on the 11th of June 2008. Or about the fact that our second son is already one month old – on the 11th of June again!!

But I am afraid that today I cannot write about happy commemorations. The reason is that six years ago, at Kajbar, in the Third Cataract region of the Sudanese Nile, that national security forces shot to death four demonstrators against the plans to build a dam in their land. The plans for this and other dams are still on the agenda of the Sudanese government, so the Nubia Project and the Sudanese Marginalized Forum invite to a demonstration in front of the Sudanese Embassy in Washington between 14:00 and 15:00 local time on Friday. For more details, see HERE.

Strangely enough, the solution to the dams’ crisis might be given by a … dam in Ethiopia: the building of the Renaissance dam can provide the energy that Sudan seeks to produce by damming the Middle Nile. This is perhaps why the Sudanese do not disprove officially of the project, but invite to an international dialogue. This, however, irrespectively of whether the governments of both North and South Sudan cannot come to a dialogue but are accusing each other for supporting rebel groups in the neighbor’s territory, to the extent that recently Al Bashir threatened to close the oil-pipelines and the Southerners denied the accusations and warned that such acts would cause irreversible damages to the natural environment…

Egypt’s reactions to the Renaissance dam are more like the belligerent face of the politics in the Sudan: the “gift of the Nile” is extremely “thirsty” and the fears for a dam in Ethiopia are perennial in the downstream end of the River Nile. Anwar Sadat had already threatened with war if anyone would “deprive” the Egyptians from the life-giving water of the Nile! This time again, the Egyptian reactions touched the grotesque: threats of going in war against Ethiopia from members of Mursi’s cabinet in Egypt aired live on TV!

It is clear that there is a lot of work to be done before stability prevails in the region. The role of inter-regional and inter-national affairs is very crucial. On the topics of the preservation of the cultural landscape that concerns us here most, what strikes us is the way the experience from the past dams has not taught much to the stakeholders of the cultural heritage in Sudan. In our next entry, we will see such a paradox in the planning of archaeological work along the Middle Nile. And this will bring us back to the discussion of the principles of funding fieldwork in the Sudan.

Manuscripts of Timbuktu in Exile

I closed the previous entry with a reference to my job in Bergen regarding the archives of Sean O’Fahey. Among the various contributions to the history and heritage of Sudan and Africa, O’Fahey has been the editor together with John Hunwick of the series of volumes titled Arabic Literature of Africa (ALA). For the four volumes published to date, see the related page at Brill’s.

Another major contribution by John Hunwick is his work on the manuscripts from Timbuktu, latest outcome of which was The Hidden Treasures Of Timbuktu, published by Thames & Hudson in 2008.

The Timbuktu Manuscripts have come this year at the center of world attention due to the Mali conflicts. The story can be summarized thus: following the insurgence of Islamist groups in Northern Mali, the collections of Timbuktu were claimed attacked and destroyed on the grounds of the heretical content of the works preserved in the manuscripts. Later on, however, it was reported that the Timbuktu manuscripts had already been moved to safe locations before the attacks and in anticipation of the threat pending. Subsequently, campaigns for their salvation, preservation, and rehabilitation have been undertaken.

A major role in these campaigns was naturally assumed by the Tombouktou Manuscripts’ Project supported by the Ford Foundation and the University of Cape Town that had already started working with the collection since 2004. Nonetheless, it was very recently announced that another sort of danger is now threatening the manuscripts, namely the climate of Southern Mali, where the manuscripts were evacuated in metal boxes, packed tightly and therefore increasing the risks of destruction by humidity, raising significantly during the summer months. An initial announcement at CNN was followed by a fund-raising campaign that is what pushed us into publishing the present entry.

Moreover, its title “Timbuktu Libraries in Exile” reminded us vividly of other exiled libraries, first and foremost the collection of Old Nubian documents, which after destructions during the centuries of the Islamization of the Middle Nile Valley and the violent deracination of the Nubians from their ancestral lands caused by the building of the Aswan High Dam, were lost forever or spread in various places around the world (mainly Egypt, Sudan, England, and Germany). The Nubia Museum in Aswan and the building of its sister-institution across the border at the Sudanese town of Wadi Halfa should become the natural homesteads of the collection that can be gathered in these two museums after being digitalized in the various places where it is hosted now. The moving of all the Old Nubian manuscripts to their region of origin should subsequently function as a tool for the education of the local population in the language, the literature, and the cultural heritage of their ancestors. Finally, the compromises needed to be made by the present-day owners of the manuscripts should be a paradigm for similar political resolutions, indigenous peoples’  rights’ recognition, dialogue on and across cultures, religions, ethnicities, and states.

…in the Nilo-Saharan Linguistics’ Colloquium

A week has passed since the Nilo-Saharan Linguistics’ Colloquium in Cologne was concluded. Life in Bergen is not boring us at all, but it is also true that the contacts with the colleagues from the colloquium are still very heated with lots of plans await ahead.

To start with, and as promised in the previous entry, I attach hereby a copy of the pamphlet presenting in more details the new online journal “Dotawo”:

It would be difficult to predict either what sort of publications will characterize the journal or how it will find its place among the several printed periodical publications on Nubian and Sudan Studies already available. For what concerns Old Nubian texts, though, an idea of the sort of publications one would expect to see has been given by the book on the Miracle of Saint Mina by Vincent van Gerven Oei: together with the original text and the translation in English (or another modern language), a translation in a modern Nubian language is strongly wished by those working with Nubian and Old Nubian texts and languages. The example given by El-Shafie El-Guzuuli in the aforementioned Saint Mina publication has set very high standards. His presentation in Cologne last Friday was also warmly welcomed.

And he was not the only one to enlighten the interested researchers present with in depth analyses of the Nubian languages (Shafie spoke about Andaandi, the correct term for what has been called the Dongolawi Nubian dialect). Both local and foreign scholars had very useful contributions to make on Tabaq, Nobiin, Dongolawi, Kenzi, Uncunwee, Kadaru, on proverbs and on loanwords, on nouns, verbs, and terminology. All useful for the understanding of both modern Nubian languages and for throwing of course light on elements of Old Nubian too. An important note: in total, there were more Sudanese contributors in the panels of the colloquium’s program than there were foreigners!

However, it should also be noted that in the studies of Old Nubian the contributions by locals have remained marginal. Or at least not accessible to non-Arabic speaking researchers. We hope that both conditions in Sudanese universities, efforts by the diaspora and online venues like our blog, the journal Dotawo, and the reopening of the webpage arkamani will help towards this direction.

In the framework of our blog, it is important also to commemorate the very vivid presence and the high-quality interventions of ustaz Mohamed Jalal Hashim from Sai Island. We are very much looking forward to seeing how and when his book on folk tales from Sai Island will become available to a wider public and perhaps also in an English translation (from Arabic).

It is always fine to remember that all these studies do not take place in a vacuum, but that they are well anchored in a still lived experience, that of the Nubian natural and cultural landscape. In this frame of mind, it was a fine coincidence that at the same time with the Nilo-Saharan colloquium there took place in the Kölnisches Stadtmuseum an exhibition titled “Köln/Nil“.

It dealt with the adventures of the architect Franz Christian Gau, who traveled between 1818 and 1820 from his home town in Cologne, through his beloved Paris, then from Italy south to Egypt, and finally upstream the Nile until the Sudanese Nubia (he returned to Europe through the Holy Land). The outcome of Gau’s travels was a very interesting publication titled “Antiquités de la Nubie ou monuments inédits des bords du Nil, situés entre la premiére et la seconde cataracte, dessinés et mesurés, en 1819“. We were guided through this exhibition by the Egyptologist Heinz Felber, whom we knew from the 2006 Cologne Fourth Nile Cataract Archaeology Conference.

Last but not least, a great “thank you” goes to professor Angelika Jakobi who made our stay in Germany last week so pleasant and productive! We can only hope that we get similar treatment in the future and in such a beautiful city like Cologne.

Returning to Bergen and walking over Puddefjordsbroen on the way to the University, one can see these days again like every year the cruise ships that bring tourists to the beautiful coasts of Western Norway. I was reminded of last year, when I was working for Bergen Sykkeltaxi and I found this photo, a nice way to bring the present blog entry to an end.

Nevertheless, the most appropriate way to conclude this entry is by reference to my present job: the organization and cataloguing of the archive of professor O’Fahey, the most renown specialist on the history of Darfur who retired today leaving Sudan Studies in Bergen poorer and in want for future recruitment…

Fascinating days…

As one can imagine, the absence from the blog the last two weeks meant everything else but laziness and empty times…

I could easily dedicate not just an entry but an entire book to the experience of becoming a father for a second time However, this is not the right place to do so – on the other hand, I could not refrain from making a reference to this most happy event

As for the continuation of the discussion started in the previous entry, this will have to wait although the material is ready. The reason is that this week I participated in one of the most important meetings that have ever taken place regarding the studies of both Old Nubian and the modern Nubian languages! The venue was the Nilo-Saharan Linguistics’ Colloquium held at the University of Cologne between the 22nd and the 24th of May.

In the previous meetings, Old Nubian was represented solely by Gerald M. Browne, the great pioneer of the study of this language and compiler of both grammar and dictionary of Old Nubian! But this time things had obviously changed…

The general improvement of Nubian Studies affected inevitably the study of Old Nubian too: in the last couple of years, new researchers became interested in this challenging to tame language and seem able to change rapidly and radically the way we approach and understand Old Nubian.

Undoubtedly, the main agents of this change are the eight participants of the panel, plus a couple of more individuals, first and foremost among those Jacques van der Vliet, who taught Old Nubian to Vincent van Gerven Oei, key person in the new dynamic approach to the language and organizer of the Cologne panel together with Giovanni Ruffini.

Giovanni is known to the readers of this blog from a presentation of his wikipage medievalnubia.info that he set up with the help and input of Grzegorz Ochala.

After publishing one of the more exciting books ever written about medieval Nubia (Medieval Nubia: A Social and Economic History, Oxford 2012), Ruffini came back to the front line of activities regarding Old Nubian with three things:

1. The draft of the fourth volume of Old Nubian texts from Qasr Ibrim that will throw ample light to the documentary evidence discovered at that site and remaining unknown to both specialists and the general public.

2. The announcement of an online open access journal on Nubian Studies generally, called “Dotawo” (details on that to follow).

3. And of course  the organization together with Vincent of the Cologne panel itself. Let’s turn to that in more detail:

The first speaker was Van Gerven Oei. Some months ago very few people would link this name with anything Nubian. But the last year, Vincent did with Old Nubian as much as nobody else had managed until then and since the era of Browne: he re-edited one of the firs texts in Old Nubian ever found and analyzed, namely the Miracle of Saint Menas, and accompanied the edition with full grammatical commentary; then he also re-edited the round marble stela of Bishop Georgios (found at Wadi Natrun) which preserves the lengthiest funerary text in Old Nubian known to date (published in Nubian Voices: Studies in Christian Nubian Culture, pp. 225-262). In his presentation in Cologne, titled “Notes towards a Revised Grammar of Old Nubian”, he proposed to abandon the classicizing and idealizing approaches that Browne introduced with his book on Old Nubian grammar and rather to allow the Old Nubian scribes to be heard as they build up the words and sentences of their own language, much in the same manner as a linguist would do approaching a modern Nubian language. In order to do that, Vincent turns his attention to the documentary evidence, the most difficult of the two categories of the existing textual corpus in Old Nubian.

It is with this material that Giovanni Ruffini works. His analysis of the land sales from 12th century Qasr ibrim has already produced the afore-mentioned publication on A Social and Economic History of Medieval Nubia. In the conference, he described characteristic cases of “Idiomatic Language in Old Nubian Correspondence” that he wishes to see as revelatory of an otherwise hidden world of medieval social practice.

At the same time, the school of Nubian Studies from Humboldt presented approaches to similar problems but from the perspective of the literary works in Old Nubian.

Kerstin Weber and Petra Weschenfelder shared their “Reflections on Old Nubian Grammar”. Working on the level of the phrase of literary texts that – at first sight at least – do not present serioues difficulties to the translator, they find their way to the core of the elements upon which Old Nubian grammar is structured. In comparison with the work of Van Gerven Oei, it seems as if the two approaches try to pierce from two sides the same mountain. We are looking forward to the revealing moment of their meeting in the heart of the Old Nubian language!

The other presentation from Humboldt was the one that I had prepared on the Liber Institutionis Michaelis (LIM).

In my talk, I tried to:

a. summarize the present state of our knowledge on the LIM pinpointing the necessity of annotated bibliographies accompanied by texts and images. The wiki page medievalnubia.info and the online Data Base of Medieval Nubian Texts (DBMNT) prepared by Grzegorz Ochala are surely the closest we have come to such achievements.

b. present in detail two new finds in Greek from Qasr el Wizz that I demonstrated were free creations in Greek by Nubians. Creations that might stem from a now-lost Nubian synaxarion.

c. introduce some codicological remarks on the basis of unpublished documents from the site of Attiri.

d. invite all participants to collaborate on the publication of the fourteen manuscripts in Old Nubian unearthed at that site of Lower Nubia and housed at the Sudan National Museum. It was and is my strong belief that working together on unpublished material will provide the best platform for the exchange of ideas and opinions not only regarding grammar and lexica, but also the more general aspects of the Christian Nubian civilization.

Lower Nubia has of course produced most of the textual finds in Old Nubian known to date and two sites have been privileged with special talks in the panel.

Joost Hagen updated us on his research on “Church Names in the Old Nubian Documents from Qasr Ibrim”, a paper that provided information on both language, religion, and administration in the region around Qasr Ibrim.

The other privileged site was Gebel Adda.

Adam Lajtar has been working with the material from that site a couple of years now and the results produced are very rich and informative about religion and society in that splinter state of Late Christian Nubia. I recollect from his talk: among 57 finds in total, 12 are unidentified, 3 are in Coptic, 13 in Greek, one is bilingual (Old Nubian-Greek), and 28 are in Old Nubian.

Talking about statistics, I can complete the picture of the Old Nubian panel at the Nilo-Saharan Linguistics’ Colloquium by the presentation by Grzegorz Ochala, “Languages of Christian Nubia: quantitative and qualitative approach”.

The interesting statistics given by Adam were, however, not yet included in the data base that is under preparation by Grzegorz, because the DBMNT includes only the published material. Grzegorz presented to us in his talk the hard evidence of numbers, tables, and graphs deriving from his data base, and attempted at answering who, when, where, and why used each of the languages used in Medieval Nubia. A first step towards his major work in preparation on Multilingualism in Medieval Nubia.

It is worth noting here that in the call to participate in the panel, its aim was defined as the establishment of “a central online database containing all texts, published and unpublished, including metadata on location, dating, etc.”. Therefore, one can conclude that the preliminary decision to use for reference system in all future publications the data base created by Grzegorz makes the meeting at Cologne a successful beginning of a collaboration to build up from the DBMNT this essential tool in Old Nubian scholarship.

I am sure that we are all looking already forward to the next steps in this fascinating new era in the studies of both Old Nubian in particular and Medieval Nubia in general.

_______________________________________

As for our blog, it will soon be updated with further details from the Cologne meeting…

Sai Island – the last three field seasons

The last three field seasons (2011-2013) we did not open our excavation at the site of the so-called Cathedral of Sai Island. Many things have changed since then, not only in and around the site, but also in the dig-house, the direction of the Université Charles de Gaulle Lille 3 mission, the main aims of the fieldwork, and the funding channels for the implementation of the major project. That means that although Lille 3 continues to hold the concession and to welcome foreign expeditions to move ahead with their individual research projects, the core of the activities has returned – perhaps even more acutely than in the first years of the French expedition on Sai – to tasks regarding the Egyptological interest on the island, namely the archaeological investigation of the Pharaonic town right between the fortress of Sai and the dig-house.

The whole project is now under the direction of Julia Budka who was honoured with the START-Preis 2012 of the Austrian Science Fund (FWF) and a ERC Starting Grant 2012. Her project is titled “Across ancient borders and cultures: An Egyptian microcosm in Sudan during the 2nd millennium BCE”. It aims to illustrate that it is timely to strengthen settlement archaeology in Egypt and Nubia (Ancient Northern Sudan) in order to achieve a more balanced view of ancient life independent from mortuary-based and elite-biased approaches. For more details, see the blog AcrossBorders.

It is perhaps difficult to accept that the Sudanological projects (on the Meroitic and the Medieval period) have not found a place in the schedule of the busy Egyptological program run by Budka. There are clearly limitations both of space (how many people can be accommodated in the dig-house and how many researchers can work in the labs) and of time (the opening of the dig-house and the presence of an inspector of antiquities from Khartoum is taking place only for the period that the Lille 3 mission is at place) that explain the situation. And the Medieval Sai Project could not be present on the island for much simpler reasons of family logistics. So, we hope that in the future the Greek-Norwegian Archaeological Mission to Sudan will add to the variety “across borders” of the existing teams investigating the so-rich in antiquities Sai Island.

And there is clearly a very positive aspect with Budka’s project: it seems that it is one of the few in Sudan nowadays that is not depending on financing from the source that most missions are waiting for in order to implement their archaeological agendas: the Qatar-Sudan Archaeological Project, about which we will be writing in the very near future, since news have appeared that it is finally coming to fruition!

Videos from Sai

The last entry created a sort of nostalgia for Sai Island. Images do better than words to describe such feelings while they also recomfort by offering the illusion of a direct contact with the object of the nostalgic sentiment. So, here follow three videos from Sai Island, two from YouTube and one from our collection.

The first one was made by Rafael Cubí who has uploaded an interesting set of videos from a recent trip to Sudan. In the one embedded here, note sign-posts that the Greek-Norwegian Archaeological Mission put up on the island:

The second video was made by Mary Simmonds and proves the fame of Sai Island regarding the Nile crocodiles:

Finally, a video made by Henriette during the 2009 season. It is from the top of Jebel Adou and shows the view of the eastern half of the island from south to north:

Early descriptions of the so-called Cathedral of Sai

Since the early 1800s, Sai Island and its antiquities have been attractive to European explorers. The first to successfully cross over to Sai and to describe the antiquities there was Frédéric Cailliaud, as we wrote in the newly published report from the second fieldseason on Sai. Cailliaud later published his journeys in four volumes:

His impressions from visiting the so-called Cathedral of Sai on the 2nd of January 1821 were expressed in the following paragraph:

When I arrived on land, I mounted a donkey; after riding for a league and a half in the north east of this island, I saw four small columns in grey granite, arranged in a square; one can think that this is a work by the Copts; its style is very bad and with no proportions. The capitals, of a baroque taste, are surmounted by the Greek cross; some rubble of earth that neighbour these columns, indicate that these belonged to a small Christian church (Cailliaud 1826, vol. I, 366; translated from French by A. Tsakos).

Lepsius visited Sai on the 13th of July in 1844. He described the “Coptic church” there in the following terms:

Drei Säulen stehen noch mit ihren Kapitälen, eine vierte ist schief; andere Kapitäle liegen umher (Lepsius, Denkmäler, volume V, p. 226).

His description thus informs us that the fourth column at Sai was tilted already in the mid-19th century with the fourth capital nearby.

Lepsius also noted the old town and fortress on the Nile, but he focused on the pharaonic inscriptions there and added no information on the medieval remains.

The oldest photograph of the so-called Cathedral of Sai was taken in 1859-1860 by Francis Frith and published in a volume by Joseph Bonomi and Samuel Sharpe in 1862. We are grateful to Michael Zach (see interview no. 14 HERE) for this reference.

Another interesting reference to the so-called Cathedral of Sai is by Ernest Alfred Wallis Budge, who described the cathedral in the following words:

[T]owards the middle of the island are four gray granite pillars, which mark the site of a Coptic church. Each pillar is a monolith, and has the Coptic cross cut on its capital. A few heaps of rubbish indicate where stood other portions of the church to which these pillars belonged, but every stone of any value for building purposes has been removed (Budge, 1907, The Egyptian Sudan, volume I, p. 463).

Both the photograph and the description of Budge inform us that all other architectural spolia had been removed. We have observed that a nearby saqia-well is lined with sandstone blocks – some of them with engravings of Christian symbols.

These stone blocks must have come from the church. But our search through the old descriptions of the site has not yet revealed any information on when the stone was taken – so it probably happened before the mid-19th century. This is  interesting, because there is a ruined house and an abandoned saqia-well next to the columns. Obviously, the house and the saqia-well were used contemporaneously and in the period after the church was abandoned and before the visits by modern travelers.

We have also not yet found any information about the column bases that are situated at some distance from the columns.

Our excavations at the site started around these bases, and they have never been part of a building at their current position.

Can we conclude that the bases have been in the present location since the columns (and the church) was erected at this spot – probably after being moved from their original location at the fortress of Sai, as we suggest in the second report? We have no evidence yet for when the church was moved, but a good guess would be when Muslim rule was established on the island. Written sources inform that the Ottomans captured Sai in 1584, but the kingdom of Makuria was overthrown by muslims much earlier, when a muslim prince accended the throne of Makuria in 1323. The finding of a muslim grave next to the column bases (see photo above) suggest that Sai may add information on the two centuries between these two events. We hope to return to Sai in order to find answers to these questions and many others.