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At the time of its conversion to Christianity Nubia was, divided into the three independent kingdoms of Nobatia, Makouria, and Alwa. A short time later, under circumstances which are not recorded, the two northern kingdoms merged into a kind of confederation in which Makouria was politically dominant. The united realm belonged nominally to the Makourian king, whose chief residence was at Old Dongola. His domain extended at least from Aswan to the vicinity of Abu Hamed, and possibly considerably farther to the south.The ideological and legal basis of the Nubian monarchy seems to have been little different from that of other medieval states. The temporal power of the king was, in theory, absolute, and his subjects were regarded as his slaves. He was the sole landowner of the kingdom, conferring and revoking tenures at his pleasure. Whether the royal power was limited in practice by any sort of governing council is uncertain; no formally constituted body of the kind is attested in contemporary documents. However, the conclave of 'bishops and scholars' which was called together to discuss the embassy of Ibn Selim would appear to have functioned at least informally as an executive council. According to Abu Salih the king had religious as well as secular powers; he could enter the sanctuary area of the church and celebrate the liturgy like any priest. However, this privilege was withdrawn if he had shed human blood. It is apparent in other respects that the king's power in the religious sphere was far from absolute, for he could not appoint the bishops in his realm. They were nominated by the Patriarch of Alexandria, who was regarded as the king's superior in religious matters. Arabic writers refer to the principal Nubian monarch as the 'King of Makouria and Nubia', or sometimes as the 'Great King'. These are evidently descriptive terms, and do not appear in the official royal protocols. A few sources also speak of the Nubian king as bearing the hereditary title Kamil or Kabil, but this too is unrecorded in native documents. Those Nubian texts which make any reference to the monarchy are conspicuously lacking in the magniloquent protocols of earlier times; they employ simply the Greek title Basileos (king") or its Nubian equivalent, Ourou. According to Monneret de Villard the royal insignia consisted of throne, parasol, and crown." Of these we know of the throne and the parasol onlyfrom somewhat dubious historical accounts. On the other hand some of the Nubian church paintings recently found at Faras portray actual rulers in their royal garb." The kings are shown wrapped in richly embroidered gowns and crowned with wide bands of gold encrusted with gems. The style of both robes and crowns is unmistakably Byzantine-so much so as to suggest that the artists may have been inspired more by contemporary canons of mural decoration than by actual models. It seems clear from a number of records that in early Medieval Nubia the royal succession passed from father to son in the usual Christian fashion." After the eleventh century, however, we can perceive a curious reversion to a much older practice. 'It is said to be the custom among the Nubians, when a king dies and leaves a son, and also a nephew, the son of his sister, that the latter reigns after his uncle, instead of the son; but if there is no sister's son, then the king's own son succeeds. According to Ibn Khaldun, who records the same custom, it was the rule of matrilineal inheritance which led to the wholesale Islamization of Nubia after Christian women began marrying Moslem immigrants. Old Dongola was certainly the most important if not the only royal residence throughout the Middle Ages. It was a sizeable town spread along the top of a low bluff immediately above the Nile, on its eastern shore. Although there is no evidence of settlement here before the Christian period, the situation of Old Dongola was exceptionally favourable from the standpoint of agriculture, for it was immediately upstream from the Letti Basin, one of the few areas in Nubia where natural basin irrigation can be practised. Whether this factor influenced the selection of Dongola as the royal residence is not known. The ruins of the city, which cover an area of several hundred acres, are only beginning to receive the attention of archaeologists; in time they may add much to our knowledge of secular organization in Medieval Nubia." One large decorated building, long identified as a church, is now believed by the excavators to have been a royal residence, though this is not yet confirmed by positive evidence. The building was re-dedicated as a mosque in the fourteenth century, according to an inscribed tablet which may still be seen in one of the rooms. After its union with Makouria the formerly independent region of Nobatia still retained an identity and a political status of its own. In later Arabic documents it is usually referred to as the Province of Maris, from a Coptic word for 'south." It was governed, from the eighth century on, by a special royal deputy bearing the Greek title of eparch." He is frequently referred to by Arabic writers under the title 'Lord of the Mountain" (Sahib ej-Jebel), although a recent find at Qasr Ibrim suggests that his name could also be rendered as 'Lord of the Horses.

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It is important to notice that the political distinction between the buffer zone of Lower Nubia and the remainder of the Dongola kingdom does not correspond to the geographical distinction between Maris (or Nobatia) and Makouria which is made by most Arab writers. According to Ibn Selim, whose geographical information was often accurate and explicit, the boundary between Maris and Makourial lay somewhere to the south of Sai Island and in the vicinity of a great cataract, which can only have been the Third Cataract. The author was evidently describing an ethnic and linguistic boundary rather than a political one, however; he speaks of the inhabitants of Maris and of Makouria as different peoples speaking different languages, but does not mention any customs post or military installation at the frontier between them. It is noteworthy too that the modern dialect boundary between Mahasi-speaking and Dongolawi-speaking Nubians is very close to the frontier identified by Ibn Selim. From this and many other examples, it seems clear that the toponyms employed by medieval Arabic scholars had ethnic and linguistic rather than political significance. Throughout the Middle Ages political frontiers fluctuated according to the fortunes of individual rulers; only cultural boundaries had permanence.

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The Christian kingdom of Makouria, with its capital at Dongola, persisted at least until the fourteenth century. Its frontiers extended from Aswan in the north to and perhaps beyond the Fifth Cataract in the south. Lower Nubia remained under the control of Makouria until the end of the Middle Ages, but after the ninth century it was given a special status as a kind of free-trade zone between Christian Nubia and Moslem Egypt. Here foreign merchants were allowed to travel and settle, goods were freely exchanged, and money was in circulation. As a result the Lower Nubians seem to have enjoyed a considerably higher standard of living than did their southern neighbours. Town life was more highly developed in the north, churches were more numerous and richer, and medieval art and literature also seem to have reached their peak of development in Lower Nubia. In the meantime Upper Nubia was more directly and perhaps more oppressively governed by its king, and trade remained a royal monopoly. In sum, Lower Nubia seems to have witnessed something like a revival of the urban civilization of late Meroitic times, while Upper Nubia was characterized, as in so many earlier ages, by a court civilization.

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Arabs and Arabized Beja in time became politically dominant in the old Nubian kingdom of Makouria, resulting in the conversion of its raling family from Christianity to Islam in the fourteenth century. The tide of Arab migration resulted eventually in the even more complete Arabization of the southern Nubians, who lost not only their religion but their Nubian language as well. These people today are the Ja'aliyin tribes.

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- William Y. Adams, Nubia: corridor to Africa, 1977

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The unification of Makuria and Nobadia must have taken place at some point between the reign of King Orfiulo and the reign of King Merkurios. One the one hand, given his prominence in the evidence, and his unique epithet, Merkurios himself is a tempting candidate to credit for the unification. On the other hand, the silence of Nobadian evidence after Orfiulo and the clear evidence for direct ties between Egypt and Makuria suggests a much earlier date for unification. An earlier date would also explain the narratives of the Arab invasion, which focus on direct Muslim strikes on Dongola, bypassing Nobadia as if it were not even there.The unification obviously has significant political and cultural impact. Its cultural impact is clearest in church architecture. The churches of Nobadia are quite unlike those of Makuria prior to unification. This changes at the beginning of the 8th century, and a Makurianization of architecture impacts new and renovated churches in Nobadia. And yet, doctrinally, the arrows of influence may point in the other direction. In the 6th century, Makurian delegates to Constantinople "stated their friendship with the Romans". This may indicate ecclesiastical loyalty to Chalcedonian Christianity rather than to the nascent miaphysite church in Egypt, which apparently commanded the loyalty of Nobadia and Alwa. And yet, by the 8th century, Makuria too is loyal to Alexandria, having oddly adopted the ecclesiastical allegiances of the northern Nubians they have absorbed. But in practice, the theological niceties of Chalcedon probably weigh little on Nubian Christians. As the Islamic conquest of Egypt pushes the Roman Empire into the distance, the Makurian church likely moves seamlessly into the Coptic hierarchy, perhaps without any real awareness of a meaningful change.Literary evidence suggests that internal disputes destabilize Nubia in this period. After the reign of Merkurios, his son Zacharias "occupied himself with the word of God and the salvation of his soul". Choosing not to take the throne himself, he appoints several kings in succession. The second of these, King Abraham, has an ongoing dispute with the bishop of Dongola and even threatens to return Nubia to idolatry if the Coptic patriarch does not excommunicate the bishop. This conflict ends with the bishop's forced retirement to a Nubian monastery and Zacharias's decision to remove Abraham from the throne. Whether these internal disputes are purely personal or cultural and theological ripples from the unification of Nobadia and Makuria may never be clear…. Whatever the exact situation, this unified Nubia is a single state, but not a tightly centralized one.

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Scattered sources from earlier centuries indicate that Makuria was sometimes subordinate to Alwa, its neighbor to the south, and sometimes ruled over it. In the 11th century, a marriage alliance between the royal families of Makuria and Alwa results in the unification of the two powers. For the first time in seven hundred years, a single state rules all of Nubia. The Nubian kingdom of Dotawo appears in our sources rather abruptly, as if it emerges from nowhere. The name does not appear at all before the middle of the 11th century CE.16 Dotawo was known first from sources in Nobadia, specifically the texts from Qasr Ibrim. The name's apparent regionalism and late appearance created the impression that Dotawo was some sort of sub-kingdom or local power, perhaps a splinter kingdom emerging from the chaos at Dongola in later centuries. Now it seems clear that Dotawo is the indigenous name for the Nubian state in the later medieval period. Its appearance solely in a Nubian-language context, where Makuria does not appear, suggests that we should prefer Dotawo when looking at the Nubian state through native eyes. Power struggles and abdication punctuate the history of the Nubian crown from this point on. But the two phenomena may not be related. Both documentary and literary sources repeatedly describe a general, matrilineal principle of succession to the throne by the king's sister's son and provide ample specific examples. And yet, earlier centuries show royal succession both by the king's son and the king's nephew, and later centuries show coup attempts by fratrilineal nephews and others with less obvious claims to the crown. Some of this may indicate a change in the succession system, perhaps related to the unification of Makuria and Alwa. But we should resist the temptation to create too rigid a scheme. The power struggles prove the opposite: that Nubia has no clear system of succession and that court consensus on the successor could easily falter. The abdications may prove something else entirely. Solomon-perhaps the first man to rule over a united Nubian state-abdicates prior to 1072 and withdraws into a life of prayer at a church of Saint Onnophrios some ten days from Aswan. Summoned to Cairo by the vizier, he lives there for a year before his death in the late 1070s, having earned a reputation for his piety and religious learning. King George, who takes the throne in 1132, also abdicates, and likewise dies in Egypt, in the late 1150s, in a monastery in Wadi en-Natrun. Another king-perhaps the great Moses George, who resists the invasion of Saladin-appears in Constantinople in 1203 after a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, reportedly on his way first to Rome and ultimately to Santiago de Compostela. These examples, generations apart, may prove only that a strain of personal piety ran through the Nubian royal line, a piety shown in Solomon's own reported belief that a king cannot "be saved by God while he still governs among men”

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- Giovanni R. Ruffini, The Oxford Handbook of Ancient Nubia, 2020

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People that inhabited Nubia in Late Antique and medieval times made use of several different languages. This multilingualism, observed along both the diachronic and synchronic lines, was a consequence of factors of ethnic, political, and cultural nature. The principal element of the ethnic landscape of the Middle Nile valley in the period under consideration were Nubians, an ethnic group speaking a language of the Nilo-Saharan family, closely related to Meroitic.

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Six languages are attested in Makurian written sources of medieval times: Greek, Sahidic Coptic, Nubian, Arabic, Syriac, and Provençal. Of these, the two last have only a single attestation each. The remaining four have a rich documentation stretching over centuries.

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Introduced still in the pagan phase of the Nubian kingdoms and reinforced by Christianization, Greek remained in use almost until the end of the independent Nubian Christian statehood... Greek was the primary sacred language of medieval Christian Makurians. By sacred language we understand a language used in religious discourse, that is in and around sacral practices. Greek was the principal language of the performative part of the liturgy including the Divine Liturgy, Liturgy of the Presanctified Gifts, baptismal liturgy, and the funerary liturgy... Greek is the main language attested for the creeds, a kind of text closely related to liturgy too.

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The first attestations of Sahidic Coptic, the only dialect of the Egyptian language used in the Middle Nile valley, are dated already to the period of three kingdoms. The character of the earliest sources composed in this language is basically retained in subsequent centuries, when we find both texts commemorating the erection of buildings and letters. To them other categories, especially religious texts, were added.

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The Nubian language of medieval Makurian texts is frequently called Old Nubian, sometimes also Medieval Nubian, to distinguish it from modern Nubian languages spoken in the Nile valley: Nobiin, Dongolawi (Andaandi), and Kenuzi. The relation of Old Nubian to these modern languages is described in various ways in the scholarship. According to one hypothesis, Old Nubian is just an earlier form of the present-day Nobiin. This, however, seems to be an oversimplification. More properly it should probably be designated as a literary language, a written variety, which coexisted with at least two spoken varieties corresponding with Old Nobiin and Old Dongolawi, whereby Old Nubian would be closer to the former. Elements of these spoken varieties are detectable in informal inscriptions, for instance those from Banganarti, and in the onomastics.

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From among other languages that occur in written sources originating from Christian Nubia, Arabic is certainly the most prominent one. The Database of Medieval Nubian Texts lists forty-eight sources, including a document of unknown contents found in Egyptian Edfu and mentioning King Siti reigning in Makuria in the first half of 14th century, but excluding a large collection of Arabic funerary stelae discovered in Khor Nubt in the Eastern Desert. The number will be significantly increased when a large group of Arabic documents found at Qasr Ibrim has been made available. Also, it is possible that many Arabic inscriptions dated to the period in question escaped the attention of archaeologists due to the fact that they can be easily mistaken for modern texts.

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- Adam Łajtar and Grzegorz Ochała, The Oxford Handbook of Ancient Nubia, 2020

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Using archaeological and linguistic data, we are able to show that the Tunjurs come from the Christian kingdom of Makouria, and colonized Darfur and Ouaddaï, where they spread many terms borrowed from Old Nubian, their original language, now lost. Their very name, is nothing but a variant of the Old Nubian name of Dongola, namely Toungoul. The remains of one of their former establishments in Darfur, Ain Farrah, yielded remnants of Christian iconography. The "Arab" origin of the Tunjurs is therefore a myth.

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Within the Nile Nubian language group, Old Nubian is closest and indirectly ancestral to Nobiin and Shaiqi. Main points of evidence are the Old Nubian and Nobiin accusative case in -ga, where Andaandi and Mattokki have -gi, and postpositions (with a few exceptions) following a locative case, where Andaandi and Mattokki prefer the accusative case (Jakobi and El-Guzuuli 2016). Furthermore, there are a large number of pre-Nubian substrate words that are part of the Old Nubian and Nobiin lexicon but which do not appear in Mattokki or Andaandi. The genetic relationship between Nobiin and Old Nubian, however, tells us little about the linguistic reality of the Makuritan kingdom, where, besides Old Nubian, Greek, Coptic, and Arabic were in use as written languages, while traces of Old Dongolawi in Old Nubian texts suggest it was a spoken language in the region even when Old Nubian was used in written communication. At the same time, we should not conflate the written Old Nubian with the 'Old Nobiin' that was no doubt spoken by the inhabitants of the Kingdom and later Eparchate of Nobadia. In the first linguistic description of Old Nubian, Schäfer already remarks, 'Ob in früheren Jahrhunderten das ganze Nubian eine einheitliche Schriftsprache besaß, oder ob die gewiß schon vorhandenen Dialekte sich in der Schrift bemerkbar machten, muß die Zukunft lehren' (Schäfer and Schmidt 1906, 780). The question how close the relatively uniform Old Nubian written language was to the vernacular(s) remains open for speculation. Many of the aspects of the written language appear to be either conservative or innovations to fit certain formal ideals, and it stands to reason to think that in its later phases written Old Nubian already diverged considerably from spoken 'Old Nobiin'. Rilly speaks in this regard of Old Nubian as a koinè littéraire' (Rilly 2010, 166).

'Ob in früheren Jahrhunderten das ganze Nubian eine einheitliche Schriftsprache besaß, oder ob die gewiß schon vorhandenen Dialekte sich in der Schrift bemerkbar machten, muß die Zukunft lehren'

'Whether in earlier centuries the entire Nubian had a uniform written language, or whether the dialects that were certainly already present were noticeable in the writing, the future must tell' 

It remains a matter of debate as to why an ancestral language to Nobiin man- aged to become the language of the unified Makuritan kingdom with its capital at Touggoul (Old Dongola). Adams (1982, 28-35) suggests that because the current language border between Nobiin and Andaandi does not coincide with any clear geographic border, it must be of a later date than the split between the two languages. He thus suggests that the geographical distribution of Noba- dians and Makuritans during the formative period of the Makuritan kingdom may have been different from the current distribution of Nobiin and Andaandi speakers. Thus the capital of Old Dongola may have been more 'central' to the kingdom than current distribution of Nubian speakers may suggest. Ali Osman has also cautioned that the current size and distribution of Nubian-speaking communities should not be confused with the distribution of Old Nobiin, Old Dongolawi, and perhaps other Nubian-speaking communities in the Makuritan period and that demographics may have looked considerably different (Spaulding 1990, 288). However, excavations at Banganarti and Touggoul clearly show onomastic and lexical evidence of Old Dongolawi users in the region by the time Old Nubian was used as written language (Lajtar 2020). A solution may perhaps be found in the realm of sociolinguistics. It appears that Old Nubian literacy developed earliest in Nobadia through its contact with the monastic culture of Upper Egypt. It may therefore be that upon incorporating Nobadia as eparchate around 700 CE, the elite of the Makuritan kingdom adopted Old Nubian as the language of culture and religion, and therefore prestige (cf. Thelwall 1982, 48). A parallel could be found in the Qing dynasty, where Manchu speaking Jurchen overtook the much larger and more developed Chinese empire and adopted Chinese as an official language.

The Old Nubian language did not develop in isolation, but was the result of and affected by both the slow and unstoppable change that is inherent to any language and the context of that change: the languages that surround it and the tradition in which it is used. In the case of Old Nubian, this was a remarkably varied linguistic environment, which included representatives from the Nilo- Saharan (Meroitic, C-Group, Old Dongolawi), Indo-European (Greek), and Afroasiatic phyla (Egyptian-Coptic, Arabic). As systematic comparative gram- matical accounts of the Nubian language family are still a desideratum, the best way to explore the different interactions and developments is through the composition of its lexicon.

Makuritans lived in a multilingual and multiliterate society in which various languages were written and most likely spoken on a daily basis (Shinnie 1974; Ochała 2014a, 2016). Makuritan society was exposed to and interacted with the broader world, as may be gathered from evidence as varied as Italian traces at Qaşr Ibrīm (Ruffini 2012a, 262), Axumite bishops in Sonqi Tino Ochała 2017a), Syriac ostraca (Van Ginkel and Van der Vliet 2015), Provençal graffiti at Banganarti (Łajtar and Płóciennik 2011), a Rechenpfennig from Nuremberg in Touggoul (Idzikowska 2018), records of Nubians visiting Santiago de Compostela and Jerusalem (Seignobos 2012; Simmons 2019), and Chinese travel accounts (Schmidt 2001). Makuria was anything but the 'cultural wasteland' imagined by Browne (1985d, 296).

Several layers of external influence can be distinguished in the Old Nubian language in terms of its lexical inventory. Its foundation is the inherited proto-Nubian lexicon, with cognates in the other Nubian languages. Rilly (2010, 285) proposes a 'pre-Nubian' substrate layer comprising material from at least two related languages, Meroitic and a language close to Nara, referred to as 'C-Group'. Furthermore, we can distinguish four main non-Nubian languages from which Old Nubian has borrowed words: Egyptian-Coptic, Blemmyan/Beja, Greek, and Arabic.Finally, there are also a number of 'loans' from Old Dongolawi - lexical items which are only found in contemporary Andaandi/Mattokki, but not in Nobiin.

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Faras was a major city located in Lower Nubia along the Nile River near the border of modern Egypt and Sudan. Following the collapse of the Kingdom of Kush, the nomadic Noba people settled into the area - this is the origin of the term Nubia. In 543 AD, the city adopted Christianity after encountering a mission dispatched by Byzantine Empress Theodora. The cathedral shown here was founded by bishop Aetious in 620 AD. The paintings found therein are the best surviving examples of Christian Nubian art, as well as depict portraits of monarchs and bishops providing us a treasure trove of historical evidence regarding this period of Medieval Nubia. The inscriptions record the names and dates of the 30 Bishops and Metropolitans of the Diocese from 620 AD to 1372 AD.



Shown here is Bishop Petros with Saint Peter the Apostle. This mud plaster is dated between 957-999 AD and is considered one of the best portraits found in Faras. The dark-skinned bishop is wearing his liturgical robes with a white handkerchief wrapped around the index finger of his right palm which points at a Gospel Book. His long white robe has vertical green stripes his vestments are adorned with green and red jewels. His head is wrapped in a turban typical of the Coptic Church hierarchs. The greek inscription above states: Saint Peter the Apostle Martyr of the Cross Abba Petros Bishop and Metropolitan of Pachoras may he live many years. The portrait originally appeared as part of a larger composition next to King Georgious II of Makuria.



This striking image produced on mud plaster shows Christ and a young Nubian ruler and dates to the mid 12th century AD. It was discovered on the southern chapel at Faras. The Makurian Kings ruled from Dongola which became the capital in the mid 6th century with the arrival of Christianity. Initially there were several independent kingdoms which gradually merged into a single one over time. The throne room located in Dongola has provided some information as to the names of these kings but archaeological work remains underway today in the region to uncover this lost history. The Nubian ruler shown here has not yet been identified but based on the dating could be related to King Georgios V who ruled a single united kingdom from 1130-1155 AD.



This image depicts Bishop Marianos and dates between 1005-1039 AD. This is one of the most beautiful and well-preserved portraits of ecclesiastical officials in Nubia. Marianos was bishop of Faras between 1005-1036 AD and is shown as a middle-aged man with a dark, wide and short beard. He is wearing flamboyant liturgical vestments. This portrait was discovered on the eastern wall of the Southern Chapel and found alongside images of other Nubian clergymen. In 1964 the cathedral of Faras disappeared forever under the rising waters of Lake Nubia. Of the 169 uncovered paintings found in the sands of Sudan, 120 were recovered with 67 on display in the Polish National Museum / Faras Gallery in Warsaw - thanks to the generous efforts of Wojciech Pawlowski - and the remainder on display in the Sudan National Museum in Khartoum.

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