Medieval Nubia: A Social and Economic History [1 ed.] 9780199891634, 019989163X

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Medieval Nubia

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Medieval Nubia A Social and Economic History

z

GIOVANNI R. RUFFINI

1

1 Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford New York Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto With offices in Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press in the UK and certain other countries. Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016

© Oxford University Press 2012 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by license, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reproduction rights organization. Inquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above. You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data [Ruffini, Giovanni, 1974– Medieval Nubia : a social and economic history / Giovanni R. Ruffini. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978–0–19–989163–4 1. Nubia—History—Sources. 2. Nubia—Civilization. 3. Land tenure—Nubia— History. 4. Qasr Ibr?m Site (Egypt)—Antiquities. I. Title. DT159.6.N83R85 2012 962.5022—dc23 2012002820] ISBN 978–0–19–989163–4 1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

tô elenê, anye anna onalo, kai tô dotauon ngopigou, tilli oun jemilika dieigramê.

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Contents

Acknowledgments

ix

Map of Medieval Nubia

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Introduction: Qasr Ibrim and Christian Nubia

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1. Qasr Ibrim’s Land Sales

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2. Mashshouda and Archive 3

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3. The Historiography of Nubian Land Tenure

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4. Nubian Land Sales as a Legal Genre

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5. Nubian Land Sales as Ceremony

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6. Nubia’s Legal Tradition

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7. Money, Rent, Taxes, and Investment

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8. Qasr Ibrim’s Other Archives

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Conclusion

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Appendix 1: The Chronology of Archive 3

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Bibliography

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Index

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Acknowledgments

my first and greatest thanks are due to Roger Bagnall, who encouraged my initial interest in Christian Nubia during my stay as a visiting research scholar at New York University’s Institute for the Study of the Ancient World (ISAW) and who is, for that reason, directly responsible for this book’s existence. I would also like to thank William Y. Adams, Nivin el Asdoudi, Stephen Bay, Michael Cancella, Joost Hagen, Adam Łajtar, Joseph Manning, Martin Nguyen, Grzegorz Ochała, Pamela Rose, Jason Shanfield, Jay Spaulding, Bruce Swann, and Jacques van der Vliet, all of whom provided me with welcome assistance either in Nubian studies generally or in the preparation of this volume specifically. I also give special thanks to Pamela Rose for sharing her database of Qasr Ibrim object finds and her pictures of the Qasr Ibrim cathedral. I am in debt to the British Museum and the hospitality of my friends and colleagues on its staff, particularly Julie Anderson and Elisabeth O’Connell, for the opportunity to study unpublished material from Qasr Ibrim and its excavation archives in the summers of 2008, 2009, and 2010 and to ISAW and my home, Fairfield University, for funding these trips. I am also in debt to Dobrochna Zielinska and Alexandros Tsakos of the Corpus of Wall Paintings from Christian Nubia for the digital images of wall paintings included in this volume. I thank the Institute of Mediterranean and Oriental Cultures of the Polish Academy of Sciences and the Polish Center for Mediterranean Archaeology for permission to publish these images. I am particularly grateful to William Bonds, Adam Łajtar, Grzegorz Ochała, and Pamela Rose, who read an earlier draft of this book, giving me much welcome advice and correcting countless errors. All that remain are those of Adama the eparch.

Medieval Nubia

Aswan Hierasykaminos NOBADIA Africa

Debeira West

Faras

Kulubnarti Sai

Red Sea

Qasr Ibrim Meinarti

MAKURIA Dongola

ALODIA Soba Kordofan Sinnar Nuba Mts

ETHIOPIA

Medieval Nubia

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INTRODUCTION

Qasr Ibrim and Christian Nubia A Brief Introduction to Nubia The place is Qasr Ibrim, a hilltop fortress settlement central to the administration and defense of Lower Nubia. In the medieval period, it was a regional capital of the independent Nubian kingdom of Dotawo, whose power extended as far south as central Sudan.1 Today the site is an island peeking through the waters of Lake Nasser in southern Egypt. It is the beginning of November in 1190 ad, when Moses George is king of Dotawo. The speaker is Kapopi, whose name means “pearl” in Old Nubian. Her voice survives in the text of an Old Nubian land sale written for her by scribes named Aera and Loukasi.2 “I, Kapopi, daughter of Toungngesi, [am] competent in my eyes, in my hands and in my feet.”3 In short, she is of sound mind and body but is “barren in respect to daughter and son.” We do not know why she includes this personal detail in her land sale, but we can guess. She sells what appear 1. In this study, I use the terms medieval Nubia and Christian Nubia more or less interchangeably and despite the fact that neither term is completely satisfactory. I take both to refer roughly to the period from 500 to 1500 ad. The bulk of this study focuses on the twelfth century ad, the end of the Classic and the beginning of the Late Christian period. For the narrow chronological periods—for example, Early Christian 2 and Classic Christian (700 to 1172 ad) and Late Christian (1172 to 1400 ad)—I follow Adams 1996, 3. These dates in the context of Qasr Ibrim do not correspond to the dates generally used for these periods elsewhere in Nubia: see Adams 1996, 20, note 79. At the heart of Ibrim’s different periodization is Adams’s belief that the “one clear-cut indication of violent destruction” at Ibrim, the “mass of burned brick and other debris” (Adams 1996, 10) was the result of the sack of Ibrim by Shams ed-Dawla in 1172. This view represents interpretation rather than fact, and the decision to label postsack Ibrim “Late” and presack Ibrim “Classic” is, as Adams notes, “purely heuristic” (Adams 1996, 20). 2. P.QI 3.36. In this volume, I cite texts from P.QI volumes 1, 2 and 3 by providing their text number only, in bold face. Thus P.QI 3.36 will be cited as 36. 3. Unless otherwise indicated, translations of texts from P.QI provided in this volume are those of the ed.pr. Where I provide transliterations of the original Old Nubian, typesetting

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to be no fewer than eleven different plots of land that she inherited from her mother, and she wants to be clear that she has no children who might expect to inherit that land. Kapopi sells her mother’s land to a third woman, Neuesi, daughter of Adama and Anenikoli. We cannot be certain, but it seems likely that Adama is the man who was then eparch of Nobadia, or provincial governor of Lower Nubia.4 If so, then Kapopi would have been in close contact with the political elite of her day. And her land sale to Adama’s daughter did not go unnoticed. The names of no fewer than twenty-four witnesses follow her declaration. Of those two dozen names, ten are either priests or deacons, suggesting that either Kapopi or Neuesi had close social connections to the local Christian church. These witnesses did more than lend Kapopi their names: They ate, at her expense, “five pati of touskil, one komi of wine, one komi of anapiti, one hundred loaves, one jar of gide.” We do not always understand these units or their worth, but they were significant enough for Kapopi to make a point of recording her generosity. Kapopi’s voice is unusual for African history. Documents showing this degree of immediacy are rare enough in premodern Africa. Such documents are rarer in indigenous languages, and those that give a glimpse of the social and economic world of women in the period are still more rare. But this is precisely the unrealized value of Qasr Ibrim: It gives us dozens of published and dozens more unpublished Old Nubian documents from the late medieval period that reveal the vitality of a society previously known only from mute archaeological remains.5 The date of Kapopi’s land sale is interesting. She speaks to us in 1190, not quite two decades after a pivotal turning point in Nubian history. In 1172/1173, Nubia had suffered a damaging raid by Shams ed-Dawla that broke over five centuries of peace between Christian Nubia and Muslim Egypt. This was an ominous event, heralding an ongoing deterioriation in relations between the two powers and the ultimate collapse of Christian

convenience has led me to make slight alterations. Where the Old Nubian original has used a supralinear stroke above a letter to indicate an absent preceding iota, I have inserted that iota in my transliterations. Where the Old Nubian has used a supralinear stroke for other purposes, I have omitted it as unnecessary. For these strokes, see Browne 2002, 12–13. For the grammar and lexicon of Old Nubian, see Browne 1996a and 2002. See Jakobi and Kümmerle 1993 for an annotated bibliography to Nubian languages generally. 4 For Adama, see below, 33. For this identification, see 45. 5 . Dozens: For the size of the corpus used in this study in comparison to the size of the corpus excavated on site, see below, 11.

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Nubia in the face of Islamization.6 But in the short term, Kapopi’s land sale and the other Old Nubian documents from Qasr Ibrim reveal her society’s remarkable resilience. Two decades after the raid had devastated Qasr Ibrim, Kapopi and her Nubian peers continued to maintain social, economic, and legal traditions with deep roots in Nubia’s past. Throughout that past, Nubia’s history was intertwined almost inextricably with that of ancient Egypt. Pharaonic Egypt had dominated Lower Nubia for substantial periods in the second millennium bc. Under the Eighteenth Dynasty (1550–1292 bc), Egypt ruled over the regions called Wawat and Kush, extending their control as far south as the third cataract of the Nile. With the eventual weakening of Egyptian control, an independent kingdom emerged in Kush in the eighth century bc. Its ruling dynasty conquered most of Egypt in turn, becoming that country’s Twenty-Fifth Dynasty, the so-called Black Pharaohs. While ultimately unable to hold its Egyptian possessions, the Kushite kingdom would rule over the Nile valley south of Egypt until the fourth century ad, first, from Napata and, later, starting around 300 bc, from Meroë, some 200 kilometers northeast of Khartoum. The prolonged period of contact between Pharaonic Egypt and Lower Nubia had profound influences on the development of the Nile Valley south of Egypt. Egyptian material culture, religious beliefs, and architectural forms had a long presence in what is present-day Sudan.7 This close relationship continued even when the military victories of Alexander the Great and Augustus brought Egypt under Greek and Roman rule. Ptolemaic trade and exploration and Roman Egypt’s considerable economic growth fueled the spread of Greek language and culture into the kingdom of Kush.8 Yet by the fourth century ad, Kush had entered a period of fatal decline. Epigraphic and literary evidence appears to reveal Meroë’s inability to defend itself in the face of successive invasions from Axumite Ethiopia and from the nomadic tribesmen of the eastern and western deserts, the Blemmyes and Nobadae.9 The exact details and, in some cases, even the veracity of these invasions are disputed, but the final result at the end of the fourth century is clear: the destruction of Meroë and temporary 6. See the conclusion below, pages 233 to 235. 7. For the Egyptianizing impact of Pharaonic rule in Nubia, at least among the local elites, see Adams 1977, 271–245. 8. See e.g. Hägg 1990, Hägg 1998 and Burstein 1993. 9. For a recent survey of the question, see Edwards 2004, 182–185.

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Blemmyan and Nobadian dominance in Lower Nubia.10 How much impact these changes had is debatable. A recent reinterpretation of the archaeological remains from this period suggests that the Blemmyes “may have had no influence on the everyday lives” of the region’s inhabitants and that the Nobadian kings used royal iconography highlighting their own claim to be “heirs of the Kushite state.”11 This claim to Kushite inheritance among the elite of Nubia’s postMeroitic period is crucial. Nubia’s considerable level of contact with Egypt, the resulting levels of cultural transmission, and the realities of modern colonial-era archaeology meant that, for many generations, the leading archaeologists and historians of ancient Kush saw it primarily through the lens of Egyptology. For these scholars, Pharaonic and Greco-Roman Egypt were the driving engines of Kushite history. Only recently have David Edwards and others issued calls to interpret Sudanese archaeology in a different light, by “looking to models of state formation encountered in Sudanic Africa, rather than Ancient Egypt,” and engaging in “attempts to locate the Middle Nile within its wider Sudanic context.”12 A generation of intense archaeological work in Nubia and the accompanying leaps in our understanding of Nubian material culture have resulted in a historiographical turn from visualizing Nubian history in terms of waves of invasions and outside influences. This scholarly revolution is best exemplified by William Adams’s seminal 1977 work, Nubia: Corridor to Africa, in which the author develops what he calls “a continuous narrative of the cultural development of a single people.”13 While acknowledging the significance of invasions in the late antique period, Derek Welsby’s 2002 study of medieval Nubia points to considerable archaeological evidence for continuity between the Kushite period and the post-Meroitic period.14 David Edwards’s 2004 survey of Nubian 10. For the most recent treatment of this period, see Török 2009, 515–530. 11 . Welsby 2002, 20 and 21, respectively. 12 . Edwards 2004, 20 and 9, respectively. 13 . Adams 1977, 5 and quoted approvingly in Spaulding 1981, 61. This turn toward continuity is apparent as early as Haycock 1972, where we see reference to the “fundamental continuities of Sudanese history” (18). 14 . Welsby 2002, 20–24. Edwards 2004, while focusing on late antique and medieval Nubia for only two chapters in his sweeping survey, also follows this historiographical turn, citing “considerable evidence for cultural continuity” between Meroitic and postMeroitic Nubia (204). He dismisses previous interpretations of settlement “decline” by

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archaeology largely agrees, noting that “if there were any significant population movements in the late Meroitic period they have left little obvious trace archaeologically.”15 This continuity between ancient, late antique, medieval, and even Islamic Nubia is critical for understanding the texts coming to us from medieval Qasr Ibrim. The Old Nubian documentary tradition with its evident borrowing of Greco-Roman forms makes little sense in a model of invasion, rupture, and discontinuity. But Adams’s historiography of continuity shows that the practitioners of Old Nubian documentary forms in the late medieval period are culturally the same people who had a millennium of proximity and exposure to Greco-Roman Egypt, a factor crucial to understanding those forms. This vision of continuity also strengthens the claim—put forward throughout this study—that historical and anthropological parallels from later Sudanese history can illuminate medieval Nubian society. The undeniable transformation that we see in Nubian society in the late antique period is the turn toward Christianity. Travel and trade between Egypt and Nubia may have given Nubia its first exposure to Christianity as early as the fourth century ad. Modern archaeological studies have found some indication of a Christian presence in Nubian material culture in the fifth century.16 Literary sources from Mediterranean late antiquity focus on large-scale missionary efforts to Christianize Nubia in the sixth century. By this period, centralized political authority had returned to the Nubian Nile valley in the form of three distinct kingdoms: Nobadia in the north, bordering Roman Egypt; Makuria, in Upper Nubia from the third to fifth cataracts; and Alwa, governing the region south of the fifth cataract. The process of Christianization in these kingdoms is as obscure as the process of political unification that ultimately brought them together.17 Although the sources are unclear, it seems that when the Muslims first conquered Egypt in the 640s ad, they encountered Nobadia and Makuria united under a single Nubian king ruling from Dongola, between the third arguing that the agricultural revolution spurred on by the introduction of the waterwheel brought new forms of agricultural settlement into the region and that settlements once thought to be “barbarous” evidence of decline are in fact evidence of this form of growth. Haycock 1972, 22 conceptualizes “medieval Nubia” as “the whole long period from the end of the Meroitic Empire … to the end of the Funj in 1821.” 15 . Edwards 2004, 210. 16. See the qualified discussion at Edwards 2004, 217–218. 17. See generally Siegfried Richter 2002; see also Dijkstra 2008.

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and fourth cataracts.18 Nobadia, once an independent kingdom and the location of Qasr Ibrim, remained an administrative unit within Christian Nubia, under a viceroy or agent of the king at Dongola, a viceroy modern scholars most often call by the Greek form of his title, eparch. The eparch’s territory in Lower Nubia continued to be called Nobadia but also appears in sources as Maris or Migi alternatively.19 The third kingdom, Alwa, retained its independence for some time, but evidence from the tenth century suggests that intermarriage between the royal families of Alwa and Makuria united the two kingdoms under the rule of a single king.20 In the seventh century, the Muslim encounter with united Nubia represented the first military setback for the rapidly growing Arab empire in its early stage. Arab historians record two major battles in the 640s and 650s between Arab invaders and Nubian defenders. Despite advances deep into Nubian territory, the Arab armies were unable to secure decisive gains. The Arabic literary evidence indicates that Muslim soldiers were deeply impressed with Nubian bravery and particularly wary of the Nubians’ ability with bow and arrow, which prompted their nickname, the “pupil smiters.”21 After the second of these two engagements, negotiations resulted in the so-called baqt treaty, in which the Nubians agreed to pay more than 400 slaves to the Muslims on an annual basis and the Muslims

18. For a discussion of Nubia’s first contact with Muslim Egypt and the unification of Nobadia and Makuria, see Welsby 2002, 68–73 and 83–84, respectively. For an alternate interpretation, dating the unification to events in the late seventh and early eighth centuries, during the reign of King Merkurios of Makuria, see Monneret de Villard 1938, 78–83. 19. Nobadia: See, for example, the twelfth century eparchal letters 46, 48, and 49, in which the abbreviation Nob(adia) or Nob(a)d(ia) appears. Welsby 2002, 84 cites Plumley 1978, 236 for 1186 ad as the last known use of the term Nobadia. This is a reference to Plumley’s summary of the one Coptic scroll in Archive 3 (see below, page 255), which remains unpublished. Browne’s partial translation of that text at Adams 1996, 228 does not include the geographical terminology or dating criteria, and Plumley’s partial edition at Plumley 1978, 238 includes only the royal protocol, where “b(asi)l(eo)s … Nobadion” for “basileus (king) of Nobadia” is clear but the date lacking. More work on this text is still necessary: see Hagen forthcoming. For Migi: see Browne 1996, 248, and Grzegorz Ochała’s “Toponyms and Ethnonyms Occuring in Nubian Texts,” online at www.medievalnubia.info. The equivalence between Migi and Nobadia is clear from comparison between legal protocols and epistolary addresses, in which various men styled “Eparch of Nobadia and Domestikos of Pachoras” are described using both terms; see Browne 1989a, 217–218. See also page 34 below. For Maris: see the early discussion at Monneret de Villard 1938, 134–139. 20. Welsby 2002, 89 and Godlewski 2008, 271–273. 21 . Welsby 2002, 69.

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agreed to pay specified amounts of wheat, barley, and other goods to the Nubians.22 As recent historiography sees Nubia more in the broader cultural context of northeast African civilization, parallel historiographical developments have altered our understanding of the baqt treaty and Nubia’s relationship to Muslim Egypt. Some modern scholars have continued to view the baqt as a type of subordinating agreement. William Adams, the great Nubian archaeologist and expert on Qasr Ibrim, has described the treaty as requiring “an annual tribute.”23 But as Derek Welsby has pointed out, this treaty is “described as a gift exchange, an exchange of goods of equal value, rather than as tribute, and its terms did not imply that [Nubia] was anything but an independent sovereign state.”24 Al-Khordadhbeh, a ninth-century Persian author, explicitly describes the goods exchanged between Egypt and Nubia under this treaty as being “of equal value.”25 One scholar has recently suggested that the terms of this gift exchange, as renegotiated with Muslim Egypt, were a renewal of terms once extant between Nubia and Roman Egypt in centuries past.26 Jay Spaulding’s work on Sudanese history is crucial to understanding the significance of this exchange. Spaulding has stressed how much we can learn about medieval Nubia by placing it in the more general context of northeastern African statecraft. Nubian history can be clarified “through comparison with the corresponding institutions of the better-known kingdoms that surrounded and succeeded” it.27 Seen in this light, from the Nubian perspective, the baqt treaty was no sign of Nubia’s subordination to Muslim Egypt but a legitimate process of gift exchange: The monarchs of old agrarian Northeast African states engaged in an endless cycle of royal reciprocity that included frequent 22 . Baqt is typically taken as a distortion of the Greek pakton or Latin pactum; for the minority position, favoring an Egyptian etymology deriving from a term for “tribute payed by foreign peoples,” see Zaborski 1982, 403–404. For a survey of sources on the baqt and the argument that later sources include considerable embellishment, see Hasan 1967, 20–26. 23 . Adams 1996, 22. 24 . Welsby 2002, 70. 25 . Vantini 1975, 69. 26. Shinnie 1996, 124. 27. Spaulding 1995, 581.

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communication by letter or courier, occasional diplomatic marriages, extended visits by foreign noblemen or officials and not least, the periodic exchange of gifts. . . . It was considered appropriate to express politely one’s own special preferences to guide a friendly foreign king in his selection of suitable counter-gifts; the specific content of exchange was thus eminently negotiable.28 Nubia’s periodic decisions to cut off baqt payments were thus less acts of defiance than recognition that Egypt’s own payments were sometimes not forthcoming.29 Seen in this light, Nubia’s baqt payments are a manifestation of the same public gift giving apparent in the Qasr Ibrim land sales: where Nubian kings gave slaves and luxury goods to fellow kings in diplomatic exchange, the Nubian land sellers gave food and drink to the witnesses and scribes of their legal exchanges.30 Modern scholars typically imagine Lower Nubia to be an economic and cultural buffer zone between its northern neighbor, Muslim Egypt, and the rest of Nubia to the south. One modern scholar writes that long after the northern kingdom of Nobadia had “ceased to exist as an independent political unit . . . the territory of Nobadia appears to have been retained as a distinct territorial unit.”31 Some scholars envision this distinct territorial unit as a sealed economic zone, where trade remained tightly controlled on terms different from those prevailing elsewhere in Nubia.32 To a large degree, this image of Lower Nubia as a buffer zone stems from the work of al-Maqrizi, an Egyptian historian of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, who reported that no one could proceed south past the second cataract without the permission of the Nubian eparch, or Lord of the Mountain.33 Whether al-Maqrizi’s impressions reflect the reality of the situation is an open question. Equally uncertain is whether the social, legal, and economic practices documented in the Qasr Ibrim texts reflect the situation farther south, in Upper Nubia, if Lower Nubia was indeed

28. Spaulding 1995, 584–585, citing diplomatic examples ranging from late antique Nubian diplomacy with Rome to diplomatic correspondence from early modern Darfur. 29. Spaulding 1995, 586. 30. See below, 90–98. 31 . Welsby 2002, 84. 32 . So e.g. Edwards 2004, 248. 33 . Vantini 1975, 603. For discussion of the titles Lord of the Mountain and Lord of the Horses, each found in Arabic sources concerning the eparch, see Adams 1996, 245.

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such a distinct entity. Due to a lack of comparable levels of Old Nubian documentary evidence from elsewhere, we cannot draw generalizations about Nubian society from the Qasr Ibrim material without first establishing Ibrim’s relationship to Nubia’s heartland and to its central authority. The Old Nubian legal texts from Qasr Ibrim typically begin with complex protocols identifying the highest-ranking officeholders known to the scribe, at both the local level and in Nubia as a whole. These protocols locate Qasr Ibrim in a kingdom named Dotawo, subordinate to its kings. No higher political figures ever appear. Modern scholars have typically considered Dotawo, and thus Qasr Ibrim, to be subordinate to the kings of Makuria ruling from Dongola, the capital of Christian Nubia, in what is present-day Sudan. Dotawo would thus be a later or alternative name for Nobadia, the once independent smaller kingdom in northern Nubia. These conclusions have been based in part on reports by Arab historians that the kings at Dongola ruled over many lesser kings.34 Equally compelling are apparent contradictions between the kings known from the Qasr Ibrim protocols, on the one hand, and those known from Arab historians, on the other.35 However, these contradictions are an illusion based on out-of-date readings of the Old Nubian documents and a misunderstanding of earlier scholarship.36 The kingdom of Dotawo—of which Qasr Ibrim was a part— was another name for the kingdom of Makuria, the kingdom ruled from Dongola at least until it was sacked in the 1360s. This conclusion should soften the older image of Lower Nubia’s general isolation from the rest of Nubia. The discovery that Dotawo and Makuria are one and the same kingdom sheds new light on earlier literary evidence. We now know from Arab historians that the high-ranking officials—particularly the eparchs—whose business dealings figure prominently in the Qasr Ibrim documents were active in Dongola court politics throughout this period.37 The two Old Nubian royal decrees that survive from Qasr Ibrim, from the 1150s and 1330s, respectively, each concern property rights at Qasr Ibrim.38 Since the

34 . Vantini 1975, 333 and, for example, Welsby 2002, 92–93. 35 . Welsby 2002, 259–261, based on large part on Munro-Hay 1982–1983. 36. Ruffi ni forthcoming c. 37. See Ruffi ni forthcoming c for the cases of Marturokoudda and Gourresi. 38. See below, pages 28 and 31.

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kings of Dotawo who issued these decrees were not local subkings but kings of Dongola, the drafting officials at court must have been thoroughly familiar with the legal systems that prevailed at Qasr Ibrim, because the same legal systems would have held throughout the kingdom. Despite the lack of comparable documentary finds from further south in Nubia, the conclusions we draw from the texts found at Qasr Ibrim can hopefully teach us something about medieval Nubian society more generally. The subtitle of this study on medieval Nubia—“A Social and Economic History”—may be immodest, but it represents the logical implications of the connections between Qasr Ibrim and the Nubian heartland. Arab historians and geographers, writing at a significant chronological and geographic distance, picture a Lower Nubia existing in economic isolation from the rest of Nubia.39 But there is nothing in the indigenous documentary evidence to support this picture and quite a bit to refute it. Unless better evidence should one day come to light, Qasr Ibrim provides our clearest glimpse of the social and economic history of medieval Nubia.

The Excavations and Texts of Qasr Ibrim The site of Qasr Ibrim might still be obscure even in Nubian studies were it not for the salvage operations that the United Nations Education, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) began throughout Lower Nubia in the 1960s. Excavation of the medieval Christian remains at Qasr Ibrim continued under the direction of the Egypt Exploration Society from 1963 to 1984, and exploration of earlier periods of the site’s history continued into the first decade of the twenty-first century. For much of the first twenty years, excavations were under the direction of J. Martin Plumley at Cambridge University. William Adams, present on site for more than half of this period, ultimately served as excavation codirector and published major monographs on the archaeological finds from the site, Qasr Ibrim: The Late Mediaeval Period and Qasr Ibrim: The Earlier Medieval Period. Reading these works and the preliminary reports published from the site on an annual basis, we are struck by the sheer bulk of the discoveries from medieval Qasr Ibrim. One of the most important structures from the period, House 763, produced “1530 potsherds, 98.5 pieces of cloth,

39. See, for example, al-Maqrizi in Vantini 1975, 603–604.

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.7 registered objects of stone, .7 objects of metal . . . and 57.8 whole and fragmentary inscriptions” for every 10 cubic meters of excavated structure.40 The last of those categories, the textual finds from Qasr Ibrim, receives the most thorough treatment in Adams’s excavation report of the site’s late medieval period.41 Only by comparing this excavation report to the published texts do we realize the amount of work that remains undone. Adams reports a total of 716 texts—fragmentary or complete—from late and terminal Christian Qasr Ibrim, in various mixtures of Greek, Coptic, Arabic and Old Nubian, including 302 in Old Nubian alone.42 Yet the last publication in Plumley and Browne’s series of Old Nubian texts from Qasr Ibrim stopped with text number 62, leaving the vast majority of the texts unpublished. Of the total of 716 texts, nearly half—349 in total, including 169 in Old Nubian and 118 in Arabic—come from a single structure, House 763, which Adams takes to be “the residence of a wealthy and influential family, one of whose members achieved the office of Eparch of Nobadia in the twelfth or thirteenth century.”43 The contents of some of these texts led Adams to conclude that the house belonged to a man named Israel, who held the position of domestikos of Faras and eparch of Nobadia. But only a small handful of the published documentary texts from Qasr Ibrim come from this large collection from House 763, and they are all undated and relatively terse.44 (An equally small group of the published documentary texts comes from scattered find spots excavated primarily during the 1978 season.45) Preliminary work on the unpublished material from this archive of Israel has only just begun. Further work on other unpublished texts has uncovered further documentary subgroups, including a dossier

40. Adams 1996, 8. For further discussion of House 763, see Adams 2010, 39. 41 . See, particularly, the summary of the legal documents from Archive 3 in table 18 at Adams 1996, 232. 42 . Adams 1996, 217. 43 . Adams 1996, 47 for House 763 and Adams 1996, 217, table 13 for the textual figures. 44 . 21, 26 and 27 are from Qasr Ibrim find number 82.1.25/19, which comes from House 763 (Adams 1996, 45). 45 . 22, 23 , 24 and 29. Cross-checking their excavation numbers against the “Qasr Ibrim Running Register of Textual Finds 1978–1980” housed in the British Museum Qasr Ibrim Archive shows their find spots to be the West Plaza, northeastern section; the West Plaza, northwestern section; the West Plaza, northeastern section, fill of pit 102; and Street D room 127.a, below floor 2, respectively.

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centered on a tax collector named Dauti. Discussion of the evidence from these texts will appear in chapter 8.46 Lacking systematic publication of this material—the rest of the texts from House 763 and elsewhere in Qasr Ibrim—we can look to two groups of texts from that site, the published religious and ecclesiastical texts in Greek, Coptic, and Old Nubian (perhaps part of the library at the Qasr Ibrim cathedral: see figure I.1) and the Old Nubian documentary texts from Archives 1, 2, 3, and 4. The Old Nubian religious texts are a mixed lot, including a liturgical text on the archangel Michael and translated excerpts of the writings of Cyril of Jerusalem and the Liber Institutionis Michaelis Archangeli.47 Significantly for the history of the Bible, Qasr Ibrim’s religious texts also include considerable portions of the Old and New Testaments in Old Nubian.48 Curiously, several of these biblical texts are bilingual, with Old Nubian and Greek passages in alternating sequence.49 While the Old Nubian religious texts have received some systematic attention, thanks largely to Plumley and Browne, Qasr Ibrim’s Greek and Coptic religious texts remain scattered in isolated publications, without synthetic study.50 Since these religious texts tell us relatively little about the social and economic history of Qasr Ibrim, we must rely more heavily on the four Old Nubian documentary archives.51 The first archive consists of nine leather scrolls rolled up and sealed in a pot found under the staircase of a Christian house.52 Despite the good state of preservation of many of these texts, none of the texts from Archive 1 was ever published. Plumley’s seminal 1978 study on the kingdom of Dotawo was the only attempt to use the contents of these scrolls as evidence for Nubian history. His efforts focused on the officeholders named in the introductory protocols to each 46. See below, 212. 47. 11, 16, and 19. For all literary texts in Old Nubian, including those from Qasr Ibrim, see the collection in Browne 1989b with revisions in Browne unpublished. For further discussion of the religious texts, see below, 220. 48. Browne 1994a. 49. See Ruffi ni 2009a for a recent example of this phenomenon, with further discussion below at 223. 50. For the Greek material, see, for example, Frend et al., 1992. For the Coptic material, see Hagen 2010 and Hagen forthcoming b. 51 . For general notes on these archives, see Plumley 1978; Adams 1996, 214–216; Browne 1994b. 52 . Plumley 1964, 5, but see also Ruffi ni forthcoming c on the exact number of texts in this archive. For the fi nd spot of the archive, see page 59 below.

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figure i.1 The Cathedral at Qasr Ibrim (Courtesy of the Egypt Exploration Society and Pamela Rose)

text as a means to establish Nubian political chronology.53 The archives of the Qasr Ibrim excavations, now housed at the British Museum, include photographs and transcriptions of each text made by team members after their initial excavation. Study of these photographs and transcriptions makes clear that most of the texts in Archive 1, which date from the thirteenth to the fifteenth centuries ad, are Old Nubian land sales, described in detail in the next chapter. A decorated vase found under House 171 from Qasr Ibrim’s late Christian period held Archive 2.54 The smallest of the four archives, it held only four leather scrolls of Old Nubian, the leather of which “had become 53 . Take Plumley 1978 with Ruffi ni forthcoming c for corrections to several of Plumley’s readings. I have examined photographs and transcripts of the texts of Archive 1 in the British Museum Qasr Ibrim Archive and am in the process of preparing an edition of these texts. Discussion of unpublished material in this study is based on scans and photographs I took of material in these archives in June 2009 and August 2010. For the circumstances of Archive 1’s find and preliminary analysis of its contents, see Plumley 1978. See also Adams 1996, 60–61 for uncertainty in regard to the find spot. 54 . For Archive 2, see Adams 1996, 214 in which his footnote 12 refers to Plumley JEA 50 (1964), 9–10 when JEA 52 (1966), 9–10 is meant. House 171 was formerly known as LC2–4; see Adams 1996, 40 for a conspectus of late and terminal Christian houses at Qasr Ibrim, including their old and new numbers.

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very hard and brittle and could not be unrolled for study.”55 However, as Adams notes, since all other leather scrolls from Qasr Ibrim are official or legal in nature, the contents of Archive 2 may be presumed to be similar. The archives at the University of Oxford’s Sackler Library, which house Browne’s papers, contain photographs of a leather scroll from the 1966 season that may be from Archive 2, but the scroll is fragmentary and the photographs do not permit any further comment. House 177, the find spot of the better-known Archive 3, also produced a smaller group of texts, Archive 4.56 The texts had perhaps been sealed in a jar just like Archive 3, but the jar had been crushed and the texts damaged in the process. This group includes three largely complete Old Nubian letters, several highly fragmentary Old Nubian letters, and eight Arabic ones.57 These texts remain unpublished. Transcriptions of the Old Nubian letters, housed in the British Museum’s Qasr Ibrim Archive, show them to be similar to the letters already published from Archive 3: one from a bishop of Ibrim, for instance, to an unnamed eparch, another to an eparch from a lower official named Shouda. One letter addressed to a Bishop Mena perhaps comes from the eparch named Adama who is so prominently featured in Archive 3. Since Adama was contemporary with a Bishop Mena in the twelfth century, the appearance of these figures in Archive 4—if identical—would indicate that the Old Nubian contents of Archive 4 date to the second half of the twelfth century. (The Arabic contents seem to range from the late eleventh to the early twelfth centuries.) Archive 3 is the most important of Qasr Ibrim’s archives, both because it is the largest and because it is the only one to receive systematic publication and translation.58 For these reasons, it receives the bulk of the attention in this study. The contents of this archive are, with one exception, purely Old Nubian.59 The exception is the sole text concerning

55 . Adams 1996, 214. 56. Adams 1996, 214, where his footnote 16 refers to the initial 1964 publications of the scrolls of Bishop Timotheos. See instead Plumley 1975b, 6–7. House 177 was formerly known as LC1–6. 57. The contents of the Arabic letters are summarized at Adams 1996, 237. For the Old Nubian letters, see also Ruffi ni forthcoming a. 58. For notes on and corrections to the published edition of the texts, see Browne 1996b and the “Nubian Berichtigungsliste” found online at www.medievalnubia.info. 59. Adams 1996, 214 footnote 13 assigns Egyptian Museum registration numbers 90225– 90232 to Archive 3, but those registration numbers belong to the scrolls from Archive 1, on which see note 53 above.

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international relations, a Coptic paper scroll in which the Nubian king submits to the Coptic patriarch in Egypt a recommendation that a certain individual be ordained a bishop.60 A considerable proportion of the other texts in Archive 3 is legal documents. The land sales, described in detail in the next section, are the most detailed of this group and make up the majority of their number. But other legal documents show that these land sales did not exist in a vacuum: The archive includes structurally similar legal devices achieving different legal ends, including notarized and witnessed descriptions of land sales (as opposed to the actual sales themselves), a land cession, an act freeing a slave, and the acknowledgment of a donation. Archive 3 also includes more than a dozen Old Nubian letters. Some of this correspondence involves various eparchs of Nobadia. The rest involves other secular officeholders or religious officials, including a letter between two Nubian bishops.61 Much of this correspondence is cryptic to the modern reader, involving passing reference to affairs presumably well known to the correspondents. Generally, the letters cover business affairs, as in 46 in which the eparch writes to Mashshouda, “Keep the new grain, and sell 37 (artabs) of his old (grain),” or in 52 in which Mashshouda is told, “[S]ell in exchange for grain the 2 (bottles[?] of) wine which he had sought to give to me.” Some letters may remain mysterious in their particulars, for instance, the claim in 51 that “I took the dates and gulped them down” or the query in 58 whether “[d]uring the winter (?) month . . . you fail[ed] to find justice.” However, the nature of the archive, in which these letters were stored with land sales and other legal texts, suggests that these obscure passages may have some legal import, perhaps referring to legal action taken in forms not yet recognizable to us.62 Finally, Archive 3 includes three itemized lists. Only 60 includes an internal explanation of the contents of its list, “the lands of the JesusChurch of Touggili that are in Nobadia.” Touggili is probably a variation

60. See discussion at Plumley 1978, 236–238 with a discussion and partial translation at Adams 1996, 227–229. 61 . It is the appearance of eparchs and bishops in these letters that first led modern excavators to interpret the Old Nubian documentary evidence from Qasr Ibrim as having “originated in most instances either from the archive of the Eparch of Nubia or from the archive of the Bishop of Ibrim” (Plumley 1975a, 103). 62 . See below, page 98.

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of the place name Touggoul, now recognized as the indigenous Nubian name for the medieval capital at Dongola. Thus, this text is important for its glimpse into the economic reach of that capital and the interconnectivity between Qasr Ibrim and the Nubian heartland.63 The second list, 61, includes sixteen personal names, the same people recurring in several cases, followed in each case by amounts of money in gold and dirhems and wine (e.g., “Papasi’s and Isou-Aggikouda’s: 36 dirhems”). Another list, 62, is similar but much longer, including many entries with names and numbers (e.g., “Papasi’s: 26”) without any indication of units. A handful of other itemized lists, similar in form to those from Archive 3, are found in the unpublished material from Qasr Ibrim. Taken as a group, these texts permit us to make preliminary statements about the nature of Nubian accounting, taxation, and currency, all topics that have remained nearly unstudied by modern scholars.64 Discussing the Old Nubian texts in Archive 3, Plumley wrote that “further study of these documents will go some way to filling up the gap in our knowledge of Nubia in that period.”65 Yet so far, over a generation since the discovery of these texts, this task remains unfinished. The most progress has been in chronology: The protocols in many of these texts and the absolute dates contained in some of them have contributed to our knowledge of Nubian officeholders in the twelfth century. As Plumley pointed out, “[I]t has been possible by a process of cross reference to assign to them a tentative order” based on the “names of persons and their offices.”66 This tentative order appears in Browne’s publication of the text; further improvement of the sequence is possible but does not produce any major changes in our understanding of the texts. (Appendix 1 presents an analysis of this chronology.) This study approaches the texts of Archive 3 by treating it as an organic whole. The land sales, land cessions, and other legal devices in the archive did not exist in social isolation. The individuals appearing in each text had either direct or indirect social ties to nearly every other individual referenced in the archive. The resulting network gives us a glimpse of Qasr Ibrim’s Nubian elite. Their legal acts gave rise to a secondary set of supporting texts. The archive’s letters, often so opaque, have on closer inspection 63 . For Touggili, see Łajtar 2003, 143–144. 64 . See below, pages 174 and 184. 65 . Plumley 1978, 232. 66. Plumley 1978, 233.

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a direct connection to the archive’s sales. In some cases, the social connections between the people mentioned in the sales and the people in the letters suggest that the sales were contested or legally incomplete. The variations in the form of the land sales are evidence of the existence of complex financial instruments—loans, credit, brokerage, and estate management—hitherto unexpected in medieval Nubia. These financial instruments, in turn, explain some of the contests and complaints made in the letters and provide a logical explanation for a tertiary set of supporting texts. The property lists are evidence of cadastral systems of property assessment and revenue collection that go hand in hand with an organized state’s fiscal interest in the private property in its territory. The lists reveal moreover the existence of the monetization of the Nubian economy at exchange rates comparable to those found in contemporary Muslim Egypt. Thus, a synthetic approach to Archive 3 is central to one of this book’s aims: to show that Qasr Ibrim was part of a society with close connections to its Mediterranean neighbors, an African society receiving and adapting late antique Greco-Roman legal forms and practices.

Goals of This Study This is the first full-length study of the social and economic life of late medieval Nubia based on the Old Nubian documentary evidence from Qasr Ibrim. When the waters began to rise behind Egypt’s High Dam, Qasr Ibrim and all of Lower Nubia received unprecedented international archaeological attention. The UNESCO salvage operations saved much of Nubia’s history from obliteration under Lake Nasser. At Qasr Ibrim, the results were striking: The excavations of the Egypt Exploration Society uncovered thousands of texts and fragments from the Roman, late antique, and medieval periods, written in Latin, Greek, Demotic, Coptic, Arabic, and Old Nubian. Much of this evidence remains unpublished. What has been published from the medieval period—only four slender volumes of editions by Plumley and Browne—has not received the attention it deserves from the academic world. Scholars studying Christian Nubia have remained occupied with Greek and Coptic epigraphic remains surfacing at other sites—Banganarti, Faras, and Old Dongola, in particular—in astonishing numbers.67 Only recently have Adam Łajtar and Jacques van der Vliet 67. See e.g. Łajtar 2003 (Banganarti) and 2011 (Dongola).

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published Qasr Ibrim’s medieval epigraphic remains, largely epitaphs that naturally lack the level of detail found in the documentary texts.68 While the Old Nubian texts from Qasr Ibrim are a tremendously rich source for the social and economic history of Christian Nubia, they have so far received only cursory summaries in more general surveys of the period.69 In part, this is because Old Nubian texts are beyond the reach of most classicists and Africanists. Yet, since the Greek texts tend to be primarily liturgical in nature and the Coptic texts primarily from an earlier period, it is the Old Nubian texts that can enlighten us the most about everyday life in the later centuries of medieval Nubia.70 No one has written a scholarly synthesis of the Old Nubian documentary material from Qasr Ibrim or attempted to analyze specific aspects of its content.71 This study examines this documentary evidence with a specific eye on land sales. The Nubian land sales published to date come from Archive 3 found in Qasr Ibrim’s House 177. While these land sales—nearly a dozen transactions—will occupy most of our attention, this small corpus from the twelfth century ad does not exist in isolation. Other Nubian land sales and similar legal texts have been found, including published examples from Dirr, Kulubnarti, and elsewhere. A handful of unpublished examples from Qasr Ibrim, the site’s Archive 1, extend the corpus from the thirteenth to the fifteenth centuries ad, giving us several centuries of Nubian legal tradition to study. The remaining documentary evidence from Qasr Ibrim—including both published and unpublished letters, payment orders, property inventories, and accounts, chiefly from the twelfth century—can help us better situate the land sales from Archive 3 in their full social, economic, and administrative context. This study has four main aims: first, to advance our understanding of the published Old Nubian land sales and their accompanying documentary evidence; second, to place these land sales in a broader social context and thus arrive at a better understanding of medieval Nubian social history more generally; third, to place medieval Nubian land tenure in its longue 68. I. Qasr Ibrim. 69. See Welsby 1998, 238–239, where discussion of Old Nubian appears as part of a larger discussion of art, language, and literacy; specific reference to the Qasr Ibrim texts appears throughout the volume. See also Edwards 2004, 239–240 for discussion of Old Nubian, with the Qasr Ibrim texts given no separate treatment. 70. For the Coptic material, see Hagen forthcoming b. 71 . Indeed, Shinnie 1978b, 574 describes “the corpus of Nubian writing” as “of no great directly historical value.”

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durée context—the Old Nubian documents studied here cannot be understood without recourse to evidence ranging from Greco-Roman Egypt to the Ottoman Empire; and finally, to show that medieval Nubia was a society both African and Mediterranean, both indigenous and Byzantine. The following paragraphs elaborate on these four aims. 1) We are in a position to advance our understanding of Qasr Ibrim’s land sales, specifically, and its documentary corpus, more generally. Modern scholars have argued that Archive 3 found in House 177 belonged to a local notable and regional governor named Adama the eparch. (As a corollary, the house itself is believed to have been his as well.) Scholars have also argued that private land tenure rights were nonexistent in Christian Nubia and that land tenure was the sole prerogative of the king of Nubia. Scholars conceding the existence of de facto private land tenure have argued that it existed only in defiance of de jure restrictions. This study reconsiders both of these claims. It proposes that Adama the eparch is not the most central figure in the archive from House 177. Prosopographical analysis of these texts shows that Mashshouda the choiak-eikshil has that role instead. In light of this conclusion, it is no longer clear that either the archive or the house in which it was found ought to be given Adama’s name. This study also suggests that evidence from this archive firmly establishes the existence of private land ownership in Christian Nubia. The evidence from this archive urges a reconsideration of the evidence for land tenure in Christian Nubia; the notion of royal land monopoly in Nubia seems to be a modern academic myth. 2) The land sales from House 177 and their unpublished parallels from later periods of Qasr Ibrim’s history illuminate the social and economic history of medieval Nubia. This study uses these land sales and the material from other Ibrim archives to produce a microhistory of Qasr Ibrim’s elite in the twelfth and early thirteenth centuries ad. This elite formed a tightly clustered social network, in which nearly every major figure can be connected to one another through very few degrees of separation. This social elite was both secular and clerical, male and female, local and tied to the wider world. These ties to the wider world are crucial. Given the powerful economic influences of nearby Egypt, the claim that the Nubian economy was not monetized should be reconsidered. This claim was based at

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least in part on the same theories that have misled previous scholars about the existence of private land tenure in Nubia. It should be enough to demonstrate the active role of money in the land sales themselves. But the supporting documents permit further progress: Previously misunderstood lists are the vestigial remains of a wider system of cadastral assessment and cash collections of rent and tax. More strikingly, if we take the documentary terminology literally, we see that the Nubian cash economy is tied directly to that of its Egyptian neighbor to the north and that medieval Nubia thus shared the same exchange rates and market fluctuations as its Mediterranean neighbor. 3) This study argues that the documentary evidence of the Nubian legal tradition represents a fusion of Greco-Roman legal traditions with African prestige and consumption practices. First, it is increasingly clear that Christian Nubia had a robust legal tradition with continuity of practice reaching from its earliest centuries to the period of its final disappearance at the hands of Ottoman invaders. Second, it seems likely that this legal tradition had its roots in or at least connections to Greco-Roman antecedents learned from Nubia’s extended proximity to Greco-Roman Egypt. But, third, far from being trapped in archaic legalisms, Nubian land sales were a vibrant social institution, crucial for the community’s ability to create social legitimacy. First, the legal practice. The genre of the Old Nubian land sale did not emerge fully formed from the ether. Nubian exposure to GrecoRoman legal forms dates back to the Ptolemaic period, when Nubians were residing in southern Egypt under Greek rule.72 Old Nubian legal and administrative vocabulary includes terminology clearly borrowed from Greek and Latin. The late medieval documents reflect a much earlier adoption of legal and administrative forms from Greco-Roman Egypt. Nubia’s peculiarity in this regard is heightened by contemporary parallels: Arabic sales from the same period are different in several regards. Nubian land tenure did not survive in its medieval form. Under Ottoman rule, the Old Nubian documentary record ceases. Ottoman-era texts from Qasr Ibrim show different concerns and clearly emerge from a new and transplanted legal tradition.

72 . For Nubian settlement in Upper Egypt and ties between Upper Egypt and land at Ibrim, see the remarks at Manning 2003, 80–81. For a more detailed look at the attestations of Nubian people and toponyms in Egypt in this period, see Winnicki 2009, 465–488.

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Secondly, the prestige and consumption practices. Land sales were not simply legal and economic transactions. The number and social status of the witnesses produced for a land sale served dual functions: They heightened the owner’s security in the validity of the sale, and they enhanced the social prestige of the seller. The food and drink these witnesses consumed on the spot—in some cases recorded with meticulous detail—were indicators of the social prestige of the participants. Nubian land sales were social ceremonies for gift giving and conspicious consumption, ceremonies without parallel in the GrecoRoman antecedents that lent them their legal form. Thus, their social function was the creation and maintenance of networks of prestige. The existence of private land tenure in Christian Nubia highlighted the community’s lines of authority. 4) Finally, this study argues that medieval Nubia was a Mediterranean society in Africa. Its cash economy was tied to that of the larger Mediterranean. Its methods of self-expression—in art, letters, legal texts, and liturgical rites—were fundamentally Byzantine. Its documents show demonstrable Greco-Roman antecedents. Its approaches to taxation, accounting, and legal title make the most sense if understood through the conceptual framework of late Roman Egypt. Its titles and administrative structures copy Byzantine analogues. Its religious texts show ties to Byzantine civilization long after those ties had weakened in Egypt. Its defensive magical practices parallel those found throughout the Christian East. Yet this integration with and borrowing from the Byzantine world was not a mindless act. Nubian adaptation and alteration of the forms they followed reveals a conscious process of cultural appropriation. When Qasr Ibrim’s archives reveal land sales culminating in public feasts, they reveal a documentary tradition and a larger society that fused Greco-Roman legal forms and indigenous African social, cultural, and ceremonial practices.

1

Qasr Ibrim’s Land Sales Published Material Gerald Browne’s Old Nubian Texts from Qasr Ibrim III presents all of Archive 3’s Old Nubian texts in rough chronological order, continues with a translation of these texts, and then provides line notes focusing chiefly on Old Nubian grammar and definitions. Indices and select plates conclude the volume. There are no general introductions to or commentaries on the individual texts, so we must rely solely on the translations themselves as a guide to how the translator understood the texts. Subsequent discussions—particularly those by William Adams in his publication of the Qasr Ibrim excavations—have set these land sales in a more social context, but we still lack a detailed commentary on each text. This prevents further study of Christian Nubia, since it is often unclear what is taking place in each land sale. Here, I present a brief summary of each of the published land sales, which I divide into three distinct categories.

Type 1 The first type of Old Nubian land sale is the most basic, a direct sale of property from one person to another. The four published examples of this form require the least amount of explanation here, as they are the easiest to understand. In 32, Shirepi sells to Nasri part of a plot of land in Koupanni and Amikke East.1 In 36, the land sale with which we began this study,

Note Browne’s doubtful translation of the toponyms at lines 13–14, koupanni amikke | matto, where no conjunction is found. Amikke is otherwise unknown, but Koupanni appears as Koupandi in a ninth-century Coptic contract perhaps from Lower Nubia; see the guide to toponyms cited at note 19 in the introduction above.

1.

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Kapopi sells her maternal inheritance to Neuesi, the daughter of Adama and Anenikoli. In 37, Engngaeil sells a share of land to Mashshouda the choiak-eikshil and his wife, Pampigon. This land sale is complicated by the history of the property, which Engngaeil purchased from Papasinen. The property is described as “the share of the Mary-Church of Ibrim”2 and belonged to the Mary-Church before it came into the possession of Papasinen, Engngaeil, and Mashshouda or was the Mary-Church itself. Church ownership is a widely documented phenomenon in medieval Nubia, and 37 may well present us with evidence of how such church ownership worked in practice.3 In 44, Enomariamê sells her share in a palm grove to a collective group of eight men and women.4 All of these eight are described as tounyilo pelên, “being from her children.” Since one of them is described as a daughter of Papsinen and another as the son of Dollisil, they may be Enomariamê’s children from two different marriages. Alternatively, we may conclude that tounyilo pelên describes these eight as being her descendants more generally. In either case, we have an example of a pattern in which land sales involving inherited family property require particularly close legal attention.5

Type 2 The second type of land sale, which is more complex, involves a sale between two parties in which a third party makes the payment. In 34i, Mouna (in apparent partnership with Manyi6) sells land he inherited from his mother, Mashankisse, to Eionngoka and Mena. Soueti, described as daukatt (possibly headman or meizoteros) of an unnamed village, pays

2 . 37.15: silimin marian pakkattika. 3 . For church ownership, see Łajtar and van der Vliet 1998 and page 259 below. 4 . See Browne’s commentary: reference at lines 2 and 3 to an “addokkinika pak|katti” could indicate a share in a palm grove, related to dokna, a Dongolawi term for a type of date, or it could indicate a share at an otherwise unknown toponym. 5 . See page 88. 6. 34 .18–20: “ai | ou mouna silmin tauon mashalkon ngal on | manyilo,” which Browne renders as “I, Mouna, of Lower Ibrim, son of Mashalko(l), and Manyi” without comment. No explanation of Manyi’s identity or relationship to Mouna appears in the text. Nor is it clear that Browne has rendered the postposition on (“and”) correctly. Browne 2002, 73 gives no instance of the postposition preceding the term it conjoins. Does “I, Mouna, of Lower Ibrim, and Manyi son of Mashalkol” make more sense? Patronymics are by no means required of the main sellers in Ibrim land sales, so Mouna need not have one here.

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them the sale price. In 34ii, Pongita, her daughter Persi, and Ngonnen sell what appears to be the same parcel of land to Mashshouda. His daughter Songoja-Piki, Soundin-Ngal, and Ourtikashshi pay them the sale price. Clearly, we are missing a step between 34i and 34ii: The second text describes the plot in question as “land which Mashankisse, Mena, Pongita and Eionngoka bought.” The text thus condenses several consecutive sales into a chain of ownership: Mashankisse’s land was sold by Mouna and Manyi to Mena and Eionngoka, who in turn must have sold it to Pongita in a transaction undocumented in the record. In 38, Ngonnen, the daughter of Mena, sells a plot she inherited from her father to Mashshouda. Darme the timmakis pays her the sale price.7 In 39, Aggestotil, the son of Pesi, sells a plot he inherited from his father to Mashshouda. In this case, Marieio pays the sale price. 45, the last land sale appearing in the published Old Nubian volumes, deviates from the normal land sale formula by omitting any first-person speaker. According to Browne’s translation, it records Apa Pan’s sale of a “share in Tamit, from the plot that lies north of Ibrim.” Browne was puzzled by the word order of the Old Nubian, and since Tamit lies to the south of Ibrim, this translation makes little sense as it stands. Perhaps “Tamtin pigita” is more accurately rendered as “the share of Tamit” or “Tamit’s share,” instead of “share in Tamit.” Tamit appears as part of a personal name elsewhere in the Qasr Ibrim texts, and could be a person here instead of a place.8 45 is peculiar for another reason: Oeilan-Nga(l), Amse, Agara, and Eisto appear as the purchasers, but it is Pongita “who gave the gold to [Apa Pan’s] hand.” While 45’s deviation from the normal sale formula obscures the inherent similarity, Pongita is presumably playing the role of an intermediary like those found in 34, 38, and elsewhere. The role of these intermediaries is discussed in more detail in chapter 5.

7. It is not obvious precisely what connection the appendix of the text has to the main sale. The appendix describes Ngonnen’s testimony to the sale of the (same?) plot to Persi and her mother and, in turn, the plot’s sale (by Persi and her mother?) to Mashal. Browne in his commentary writes that the appendix is Ngonnen’s “affidavit to the fact that the actual purchasers of the plot involved in the main text were Pongita and her daughter Persi, who presumably acted as Mashshouda’s representatives.… Pongita and Persi further attest that they in turn sold the plot to Mashal.” This interpretation is possible but cumbersome, since it leaves two separate groups of intermediaries, Darme in the main text and Pongita and Persi in the other. Since Ngonnen speaks in the main text of selling one plot “which consists of the 4th plot,” it may be easier to suppose that the appendix refers to another of Ngonnen’s four plots. 8. 60, but for the personal name, see Satzinger 2004, 532 adducing tamet- for “furnace.”

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Type 3 Text 40 presents a third type of land sale, a sale of one person’s land to another by a third party. This is one of the more difficult cases. Here, in August 1199, Adama the eparch makes a series of statements: that he sells a place in Ibrim to the Church of the Holy Trinity, “establishing it with my piety”; that he “sold Kapopi’s land, which is under my control”; that he set it “aside for the Church of the Holy Trinity”; and that he “gave” that land “in my piety (?) for the foundation of the church.” The simplest assumption is that all four statements refer to the same act and that Adama sold Kapopi’s land to the Church of the Holy Trinity under terms establishing that land as a pious foundation for the church. Why Adama would have been in a position to do this is discussed later in the volume.9 At first glance, text 41 seems to provide another example of this third type of land sale. Yet it does not appear to be a land sale per se: It lacks a protocol, a description of the land put up for sale, and any discussion of the sales price. Rather, the text appears to be a notarized statement describing the sales in question. Isakê states that he has sold the possessions he has in common with Maia and explains that Maia’s husband has sold the possessions he and Maia have in common. This complicated scenario also requires a more detailed discussion, in chapter 4.10 Finally, one typological variation appears in multiple types: Texts 41, 44, and 45 lack the protocol and more detailed descriptions of the property and sales price that seem typical of the standard land sales. Thus these texts seem to be akin to notarized or witnessed statements describing a sale after the fact, rather than the legal text finalizing the sale itself. Generally, Old Nubian land sales present the first-person voice of the land seller speaking according to a fixed formula, “I, X, sell plot Y to Z.” Grammatically, the seller, X, appears in Old Nubian’s subjective case, and the purchaser, Z, appears in Old Nubian’s directive case, with -ka as the standard directive ending attached to the purchaser’s name. The Old Nubian verb jana tir- appears in nearly every case. Thus, 32, which presents Shirepi selling land to Nasri, reduces in its essence to “Ai Shirepi . . . Nasrika jana tira,” or “I Shirepi sell to Nasri.” Importantly, this basic form holds even when intermediaries are involved, the scribe simply retaining the formula but supplying additional information. Exceptions to 9. See page 120. 10. See page 87.

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this basic form exist, but they are rare: In 45, the purchaser, rather than the seller, appears in the first person, and in 44, the entire transaction is rendered in the third-person. Significantly, these two exceptions appear in witnessed texts describing land sales, rather than in land sales per se.

Unpublished Material Most documents from Qasr Ibrim are unpublished in storage in Egyptian museums. This material includes hundreds of complete or fragmentary Old Nubian texts. Of this material, only one group of texts, Archive 1, has received any scholarly description, which was provided by Plumley in 1978.11 This work—published fourteen years after the discovery of Archive 1—relied on photographs and transcripts of the texts in question. The difficulty of this work, coupled with the rudimentary state of Old Nubian studies at the time, meant that Plumley could do little with the texts beyond glean the names and approximate regnal dates of several of the later kings of Dotawo. Now, renewed study of the photographs and transcripts, coupled with Browne’s advances in Old Nubian, makes clear that the bulk of Archive 1 consists of land sales similar in form to those of Archive 3.12 In most cases, these land sales are less well preserved than their twelfth-century counterparts, despite being of a later date. Two of these sales survive only in long, narrow leather fragments, the text of which cannot be translated.13 Only specific terms in these fragments—the verbs meaning “to sell” and “to witness” in conjunction with the noun parre (meaning “land,” “field,” or “plot”)—makes it clear that we are dealing with land sales in these two cases. One of these fragments also includes an apparent witness payment, a feature found in other land sales. A third text, dating from the 1270s ad, survives with a large tear down the middle, which prevents a complete translation.14 Nonetheless, enough 11 . Plumley 1978; cf. Frend 1969, 537–538 for an earlier description of the archive’s discovery. 12 . For Archive 1, see note 53 at page 13. 13 . Unpublished EA 90232B and 90232C. It is unclear from what little of these texts survive whether they belong with EA 90232A, which is much better preserved and dates to the 1280s ad. That text is also most likely a land sale, but it is not discussed here. While the protocol is intact in places, the rest of the text is so badly abraded that no determination of its nature is possible. 14 . Unpublished EA 90231.

Qasr Ibrim’s Land Sales

27

details of the sale, including the relevant parties (an eparch named Marturokoudda who buys land from someone named Eida) and boundaries of the plot, still survive. A fourth text, from the reign of King Siti in 1333, is the worst preserved in its most important passage, in the first-person declaration of someone named Rali.15 He refers to a price of 15 gold pieces, but it is not clear whether the purchase is for land or something else. The remaining four land sales from Archive 1 are more informative. The first three, which I have already discussed in a previous article, provide a tantalizing glimpse into Nubia’s late thirteenth-century political and economic situation.16 At some point after 1272 ad, Kammeti sells land to Marturokoudda.17 In or around the 1280s, Eishkil sells land to Gourresi.18 In 1286, Iosshsha sells two plots of land to Gourresi.19 Some of these individuals are members of Lower Nubia’s elite. Marturokoudda and Gourresi each held the rank of eparch of Nobadia, Gourresi having first served as Marturokoudda’s deputy. Gourresi appears in the Arab literary sources as Jorais, a Nubian “Lord of the Mountain” whose changing allegiances track the ebb and flow of a dynastic struggle between the king at Dongola and an alternate candidate for the Nubian throne favored in Cairo. These pieces of Archive 1, thus, reveal the economic foundations of the political strength of the eparchs of Nobadia as well as the resiliency of a legal system that continued to function even in times of crisis and war.20 The last of the land sales from Archive 1 is the most complete and is the only text in the archive published so far.21 Its chief interest is its late date, 1463 ad, which makes it the last text dated with certainty from Qasr Ibrim’s Christian period and one of the latest Old Nubian texts in existence.22 Its protocol names Joel as king of Dotawo: He is the last known king of Nubia and the only one mentioned by name since the 1330s. This

15 . Unpublished EA 90230. 16. Ruffi ni forthcoming c. 17. Unpublished EA 90229. 18. Unpublished EA 90227. 19. Unpublished EA 90226. 20. For more on Gourresi, see Ruffini forthcoming c. 21 . EA 90225: Łajtar and Ruffi ni 2011, 121–132, with an image of the text on the plate prior to Frend 1996, 317. 22 . For a later text from Gebel Adda, see page 152.

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long period of Nubian documentary silence makes the text all the more remarkable for its continuity of form. In broad outline, the text is nearly identical to Ibrim’s twelfth-century land sales. It begins with a protocol and follows with a first-person declaration of the land sale. A description of the plot follows, along with the sale price, the witness list, and a description of the food paid to the witnesses. Thus this text is striking evidence of the continuity of Old Nubian legal forms over several centuries, up to and including Nubia’s final generation of independence. The one quirk in this text is subtle: If the editors have understood the text correctly, it is not simply a general declaration of sale by Eismale to Eionngoka and Kasla but one directed by Eismale specifically to his daughter Ajeje.23 As this survey makes clear, the bulk of Qasr Ibrim’s Archive 1 consists of land sales much like those published from Archive 3. The exception here is a decree published by King Siti in or around the 1330s.24 This text is badly faded in places, the ink almost completely rubbed off at the beginning of the protocol, where the date would be found, and at the end of the text. Unfortunately, this damage also affects the crucial sentence, in which Siti speaks: “Ai Siti Dôtauon ourou ein . . . ouroun parre . . . okkerêga ngag[k]nynyeilo . . . goselo oron . . . ende kanyelo kalon koulon aptallalo.” Some of the words are unknown, and interlinear notes added by the scribe are all but unreadable. Siti seems to say that he will “without denial” go to meet or join the inhabitants (okkerêga) of the king’s land in the places in the north and the south.25 The interpretation of the verb is uncertain, and crucial details are missing. Nonetheless, part of the text’s significance is clear: Siti owned land in Lower Nubia, presumably near Qasr Ibrim, and issued decrees on its management—on the activities of its inhabitants—from his capital at Dongola. (The text’s protocol names Keddi, the bishop of Touggil, or

23 . See page 86. 24 . Unpublished EA 90228. Unpublished EA 90230, also from the reign of King Siti, dates to 1333, so EA 90228 should date from the same period. Against Plumley’s adoption of a wider date range for Siti, see Ruffini forthcoming c. 25 . The crucial word is aptallalo, which seems securely read but is not known in Old Nubian. Is it perhaps related to abiddi in modern Kenzi, meaning “begegnen, entgegengehen” (Hofmann 1986, 18)? I take the -lo as an emphatic partical in postposition; see Browne 1997, 8–10. The form might be a future predicate with consonantal alteration of lambda for rho.

Qasr Ibrim’s Land Sales

29

figure 1.1 Moses George, King of Dotawo, in the bottom left of a wall painting at Faras. Published courtesy of the Institute of Mediterranean and Oriental Cultures of the Polish Academy of Sciences.

Dongola, and says nothing about the bishop of Ibrim.26) Siti is the most frequently attested Nubian king after Moses George in the late 1100s.27 In addition to the texts from Qasr Ibrim, he appears in texts from Edfu; in graffiti from Banganarti, near the capital of Dongola; and even in an Old Nubian graffito at Abu Negila, in Kordofan. Contrary to what we might expect after the turbulence in Nubia in the 1200s, Siti emerges in the 1330s as “a powerful king of a strong and large state.”28 26. Compare unpublished EA 90230, the other text from the reign of King Siti found at Qasr Ibrim: It contains nothing about the bishop of Dongola but names the bishop of Ibrim and, thus, was presumably drafted locally. 27. Ochała 2011b. 28. Ochała 2011b. See also the discussion in the conclusion below, page 253.

Table 1.1 Checklist of Land Sales from Qasr Ibrim. The following list provides a summary of the known Qasr Ibrim land sales that form the basis of this study. Published Material 1. P.QI III.32 2. P.QI III.34i 3. P.QI III.34ii 4. P.QI III.36* 5. P.QI III.37 6. P.QI III.38 7. P.QI III.39 8. P.QI III.40 9. P.QI III.41 10. P.QI III.42 11. P.QI III.44 12. P.QI III.45

Type 1. Type 2. Type 2. Type 1. Type 1. Type 2. Type 2. Type 3. Type 3? Notarized statement describing land sales. Land cession rather than land-sale proper. Type 1. Witnessed statement describing land sale. Type 2. Witnessed statement describing land sale. Unpublished Material†

13. EA 90225 14. EA 90226 15. EA 90227 16. EA 90229 17. EA 90230? 18. EA 90231 19. EA 90232 B 20. EA 90232 C

Complete; witness payments. Eismale sells to Eionngoka and Kasla. Complete; no witness payments. Largely complete; no witness payments. Damaged at bottom: witnesses missing; possible witness payments. Uncertain text: witnesses and a price of 15 gold pieces. Fragmentary; witness payments. Eida sells to Marturokoudda. Fragmentary. Insufficient text survives. Fragmentary; witness payments.

*

Note the suggestion cited at Browne 2002, 2 that the language used in this text has certain similarities to the modern Nubian language Dongolawi/Kenzi.

†

I do not include in this summary a document on paper I have also tentatively identified as an Old Nubian land sale. I have not yet identified any inventory number for this text and know it only through a photograph in the British Museum. The photograph indicates that the text came from photo contact sheet C25, but the excavation year remains unknown. This document, written on paper, is badly damaged, with large gaps missing from the text that prevent drawing any conclusions about its contents. Moreover, as a land sale on paper rather than leather, this text is clearly exceptional.

Qasr Ibrim’s Land Sales

31

This text from Qasr Ibrim’s Archive 1 confirms that characterization, showing that Siti pursued economic interests in Lower Nubia. This evidence is almost unique. Only one other legal text from Qasr Ibrim adopts the first-person voice of a Nubian king, a decree issued by Moses George (see figure 1.1) in the 1150s.29 In that decree, the king gives a favorable response to appeals from some of Ibrim’s local notables, “asking [him] to free from servitude the Epimachus-Church,” whose gift obligations to the bishop had become too severe.30 These two examples make clear that the Nubian king could be intimately involved in Ibrim’s economic affairs. But this is not quite the same claim made by earlier generations of scholars, arguing that the Nubian king owned all Nubian land and was thus directly or indirectly involved in all transactions concerning it. In the corpus of Qasr Ibrim land sales used throughout this study (see table 1.1 for a complete list), the king appears only as a name in a protocol; the real players are the men and women of Qasr Ibrim.

29. 30. 30. This seems to be the gist of the text, but the particulars are obscure and have not yet received full study.

2

Mashshouda and Archive 3 the excavations at Qasr Ibrim uncovered five distinct caches of texts, in addition to a high number of complete and fragmentary texts from isolated finds.1 Archives 1 and 2, from Houses 169 and 171, respectively, yielded a total of thirteen Old Nubian documents the contents of which remain unpublished.2 Archives 3 and 4 come from House 177. Archive 4, which remains only partially analyzed, contains a number of texts in Arabic as well as Old Nubian.3 Archive 5 is the well-known pair of scrolls buried with Bishop Timotheos in the 1370s.4 Archive 3 appears to have been the property of a private individual named Mashshouda the choiak-eikshil. This suggests a relatively limited role for the state in Nubian archival practices and in the legal proceedings detailed in the archive itself.

House 177 and Adama the Eparch Archive 3 consists mostly of Old Nubian documentary texts on paper, parchment, and leather scrolls “all found in a large sealed jar” in House 177 during the 1974 excavations at Qasr Ibrim.5 These texts appeared in edition and translation in Browne’s 1991 volume, Old Nubian Texts from Qasr Ibrim III. Thus, all of these are taken to be from a single group assembled and sealed together for a specific purpose. According to the evidence Adams presents in his publication of Qasr Ibrim’s late medieval

1 . This summary follows Adams 1996, 214–218. 2 . See page 12 above with Adams 1996, 214 with Plumley 1975a, 104–106 and Plumley 1978, 235. House 169 was formerly known as LC2–2. 3 . Adams 1996, 214–216 with references passim in part 4, chapter 3 and 5. 4 . Plumley 1975c. 5 . Quoting P.QI vii. For the archive’s Coptic text, see page 15 above.

Mashshouda and Archive 3

33

period, the creation of this archive was likely a multistep process. Several of the texts were drafted before the raid on Qasr Ibrim by Shams ed-Dawla in 1172/1173, and the archive was buried in a house apparently constructed after that raid. Documents from an earlier period were consciously retained and brought together with documents from a later period to create Archive 3.6 Initially, Archive 3, found in the pot numbered 74.1.30/6, seemed to belong to Adama the eparch. The excavators argued that several of the buildings at Qasr Ibrim were central to the governance of the site. “Five Late Christian structures . . . stood out from the others by virtue of their unusual construction, interesting contents, or both. . . . Four of them can be specifically associated with Eparchs of Nobadia.”7 One of those four, House 177, belonged to a tight cluster of structures “built early in the LC1 [Late Christian] period but not actually at its beginning. A date around 1175 ad, immediately following the Shams ed-Dawla raid and the rebuilding of the girdle wall, seems most likely.”8 Because Archive 3 refers so frequently to Adama, the eparch of Nobadia, and because the archive was found in a house of considerable importance, it seemed likely to the excavators that the house and the archive belonged to Adama.9 Later authors follow this designation in linking the archive to Adama the eparch.10 It is possible to refine this conclusion. Adama the eparch is not the central figure of Archive 3. Moreover, other aspects of the argument identifying House 177 as an eparchal residence can be reassessed. In that house, “loose fill beneath the floor of Room 1” yielded “several small folded papers which appeared to be letters to the Eparch.”11 This find was initially seen as further proof that the house was an eparchal residence. These texts remain unpublished, but recent study of them indicates that they are a

6. Note discussion on this point at Adams 1996, 218. 7. Adams 1996, 42–43 with discussion at 43–58 of Houses 172, 177, 178, 763 and 849; cf. Adams 1996, 217 for a breakdown of the textual fi nds from each house. 8. Adams 1996, 48. 9. Adams 1996, 50. 10. When Welsby’s discussion of the eparch Adam and the eparch Adama (thus distinguished in his index) refers to “the eparch’s archive” and its handling of “confi rmation of land title and a problem relating to land rentals,” he is following Adams 1996, which he cites directly in this section; see Welsby 2002, 94–95. 11 . Adams 1996, 49.

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mixed group: several accounts, several letters written from eparchs rather than to them, and several letters not involving eparchs at all.12 Nonetheless, scholars who assigned House 177 to Adama the eparch made him into a crucial figure in the history of Qasr Ibrim, once the site was reoccupied after the destructive invasion of Lower Nubia by Shams ed-Dawla in 1172/1173. “Within a short time of the reoccupation, a new eparchal residence (177) was constructed.”13 This chronology relies on the discovery under the house of a “small amount” of late Christian deposit, suggesting the construction of the site relatively early in the late Christian period.14 The construction of the new eparchal residence “was probably the work of Adam, who served as Eparch during the last twenty years of the twelfth century. He and his successors continued to live in House 177, and to receive visitors in House 172, at least until the end of the thirteenth century.”15 Modern publications often use the Greek term eparch without explaining its origins. Plumley, in an early survey of Qasr Ibrim’s textual finds, noted that “[o]ne of the most frequently recurring names is that of Adam. . . . It appears that he held the Office of Migin sonoj [sic] for nearly forty years.”16 Plumley drew attention to letters in the same find that address Adam as eparch of Nobadia and reached a reasonable conclusion: “The fact that his name should appear so often holding this Office shows that he was a person of some consequence and that his Office was important. Might not the Office of Migin sonoj [sic] be the Medieval Nubian equivalent of the Greek Eparch?”17 At the time Plumley wrote these words, the significance of many Nubian titles remained obscure, and the situation is only slightly better today. Nonetheless, Plumley’s decision to equate the office of migin songoj with that of the Greek title of eparch was sound. Adama’s titles are given in their Old Nubian form in land sale protocols and in their Greek form in his own letters. For example, he appears in 49 as the addressee, Adama the eparch of Nobadia and domestikos of Faras (“Adam eparch()

12 . Ruffi ni forthcoming a. 13 . Adams 1996, 253. 14 . Adams 1996, 47–48. 15 . Adams 1996, 253. House 172 was formerly known as LC1–7 and LC2–5. 16. Plumley 1978, 241. 17. Plumley 1978, 241.

Mashshouda and Archive 3

35

Noba() dôm() Pach()”) and in the protocol of 36 apparently holding the same titles, “Adamê migitin goun songojil Paran samettildal.” The Greek and Old Nubian forms of the titles appear to be interchangeable. The Old Nubian term songoj is a combination of the two Old Nubian words meaning “lord” and “mountain,” respectively.18 This shows the term to be the equivalent of the Arabic sahib al-jabal, or Lord of the Mountain, a title often given, along with Lord of the Horses, to the Nubian eparch when he appears in Arabic texts. The toponym migi- evidently refers to Nobadia and in the genitive combines with songoj to indicate the Lord of the Mountain of Nobadia. Adama the eparch is also sometimes styled eikshi. He appears in the protocol to 31 as eikshi and eparch of Nobadia (“Adama eikshiadenou migin songojadenou ein”) and in his own address of letter 51 as eparch and eikshi (“Adam eparch() (kai) eikshi”). Fatimid-era Arabic letters from Qasr Ibrim show a similar situation for earlier eparchs, who are addressed with the series of titles eikshil, Lord of the Horses, and vizier.19 The meaning of the term eikshil is important to the discussion. In his commentary to these letters, Adams writes that “[i]ksil [eikshil] is the standard Arabic title for the Eparch of Nobadia. It is followed sometimes by the honorific Lord of the Horses and sometimes by Lord of the Mountain.”20 But does this interpretation make sense? Since the term eikshi can also appear on its own and in conjunction with components of other titles, Browne’s index to Old Nubian Texts from Qasr Ibrim III and his Old Nubian dictionary render it only as a “title of [an] official.” In one unpublished Old Nubian text from Qasr Ibrim, an eparch, possibly Adama, also appears as an eikshildoug().21 Adama’s appearance in 31 as “Adama eikshiadenou migin songojadenou ein” proves that eikshil and migin songoj are two distinct titles: the Old Nubian suffices

18. Browne 1996a, 160 19. Adams 2010, 252. The Arabic na’ib for “representative” or “vizier” appears as standard in the Arabic historians for the eparch of Nobadia; see, e.g., An-Nuwayri at Vantini 1975, 480 discussing the eparch Gourresi. 20. Adams 2010, 251 note 44. I am grateful to Adams for sharing with me portions of an earlier draft of this publication. 21 . P.QI inv. 74.1.29/11d, a letter from an eparch to Bishop Mena, who may be the same bishop as the one appearing in Qasr Ibrim in P.QI 3, therefore dating the text to the second half of the twelfth century. Łajtar informs me that doug()eikshil also appears in the wall inscriptions from Banganarti.

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-denou and -denou at the end of both terms indicate “and,” showing that no equivalence between the terms is indicated.22 All of this must be taken with considerable caution. As Adams notes, “the mediaeval Nubians had a passion for collecting titles.”23 There is no indication anywhere that migin songoj (Lord of the Mountain), mourtin ngodal (Lord of the Horses), eparch, and eikshil were the sole right of only one person at a time.24 The opposite seems to have been the case. In land sale 37, Adama appears in the protocol as migin songoj and Chaêl appears in the witness list as mourtin ngodil. Modern scholarship may have placed too much emphasis on the notion that one person held sole responsibility for the office of eparch in Lower Nubia. Given the complicated interchangeability of these titles, more than one person at a time could most likely hold a position granting him some ineffable sort of lordship, as an eikshil or eparch. The lordship or authority conveyed in the term eikshil can appear in a wide range of circumstances.25 Modern scholars have seen the role of the eparch as chiefly economic. For Laszlo Török, the eparch was “chief treasurer in Nobatia.”26 Earlier scholars suggested that the eparchs were hereditary princes appointed to the office, whose “strong tendency towards political independence” ultimately resulted in a decision to claim the title of king.27 Their autonomy seems to have been considerable, but they never claimed the title of king. This assertion is based simply on the failure of earlier scholars to recognize the Kingdom of Dotawo as the central Nubian kingdom of the medieval period.28 Adams sees the eparch as responsible for a “fair amount of both local and international trading activity,” as well as potentially responsible for some of Ibrim’s manufacturing activities.29 Derek Welsby also sees the eparch as responsible for “facilitating trade on behalf of the Makurian 22 . Browne 1996a, 41. 23 . Adams 1996, 245. 24 . For his part, Osman 1982a, 191 took eparch to be the equivalent of the Old Nubian title gouttamet, on the basis of a comparison to the modern Nubian term got, “to stand for” someone else. 25 . See page 50. See also the appearance of another term, terieikshil, in the wall inscriptions at Banganarti (Łajtar, personal communication). 26. Török 1978, 298. 27. Žabkar 1963, 217. 28. On which, see Ruffi ni forthcoming c. 29. Adams 1996, 254.

Mashshouda and Archive 3

37

king.”30 This modern impression of the duties of the eparch comes from the Arabic letters found at Qasr Ibrim and the medieval Arab historians and geographers whose work is discussed in more detail in chapter 3. Modern scholars have taken Qasr Ibrim’s Archive 3 to come from the house of Adama the eparch and have, by implication, understood its contents to relate to the eparch’s administrative, fiscal, and economic functions. Terry Wilfong’s review of Browne’s third volume of Qasr Ibrim texts hits the lone dissenting note: “Most of the texts [in Archive 3] concern church property and religious officials,” he writes. “Many of the same individuals reappear in several of the texts, showing this to be some sort of ecclesiastical archive rather than a miscellaneous collection of documents.”31 The point is not a minor one. Church ownership of land would not be a challenge to the putative absence of private land ownership, the church being an established institution recognized by the crown. Church land, however, does not seem to be typically involved here. In some cases, the opposite seems to be true: in Christian Nubia, generally, and at Qasr Ibrim, specifically, private individuals owned churches and conducted land transactions outside an ecclesiastical milieu.

Qasr Ibrim’s Social Network Archive 3’s Central Figures The social connections in House 177’s Archive 3 show that Mashshouda the choiak-eikshil is the leading figure in that archive. Not only is Mashshouda the most central figure in a web of land sales, he is also likely the central figure in that archive’s network of correspondence. These conclusions make it less likely that Adama was the owner of Archive 3. By extension, they also make it less likely that House 177 was an eparchal residence or that the eparch had any role in the reconstruction of the site we know took place in the late twelfth century. Adama appears in more of the Qasr Ibrim documents than any other figure, a dozen of the archive’s thirty-three texts.32 Yet the significance of

30. Welsby 2002, 205 citing “letters from Ibrim” based on descriptions in Plumley 1975a, 106 and Plumley 1983, 162. 31 . Wilfong 1995, 147. 32 . Excepting Mashshouda from this analysis for the time being, the next most attested figures in the archive, Mari the queen mother and Papo Mena the bishop of Ibrim, each

38

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these attestations diminishes when we consider the scribal practice of filling each document’s initial protocol with a list of current officeholders. Of Adama’s twelve attestations, six of them are documents naming him only in the protocol, as eikshil, migin songoj of Nobadia, or domestikos of Faras.33 In two more texts, 37 and 44, he appears only as a witness to a land sale. In a third, 31, he appears as an absentee witness, the deacon Ajola signing for him. Only in three of his twelve attestations does Adama play an active role, as the author of two letters (49 and 51) and the vendor (40) of land under his control originally belonging to Kapopi.34 Many other figures in Qasr Ibrim’s Archive 3 emerge as more active players in the transactions the archive documents. Consider the several men named Darme. Darme the timakkis appears seven times in the archive: He witnessed five distinct sales, wrote and witnessed a release of a servant, and issued the sale price to Ngonnen in her land sale to Mashshouda.35 Other attestations of a Darme—variously described as priest, ouataphil, priest and ouataphil, and great priest—likely refer to one man at various stages of an extended career.36 Each of these men is as active in the archive as Adama the eparch, witnessing the release of servants and slaves, offers of grain, and land sales and cessions. Comparable or even greater levels of activity are not hard to find. Dollitakil, chief (ouranno) and sometime Tot of Toshka and of Ibrim, appears four times, as a witness to three land sales and a gold donation.37 Iesousinkouda, who appears to progress from deacon to archdeacon and liturgist, then to great deacon and priest, is—if each attestation is the same person—equally active, receiving a letter and witnessing the release of a servant, the release of a slave, and a land sale.38

appear eight times. Mashshouda’s fi nal attestation count depends on the identification of various homonyms: see below, page 46. 33 . Specifically, 33 , 34, 35 , 36, 38, and 39. 34 . For further discussion of this transaction, see below, page 119. 35 . Darme the timakkis: 33 , 34, 35 , 38, 40, 41, and 45 . 36. I consider Darme the great priest in 33 and 35 the same; Darme the priest and ouataphil in 34 to be the same as the ouataphil in 36, 42, and 44; and Darme the priest in 36, 40, and 49 to be the same. Either the first and second or first and third could, in turn, be identical. 37. Dollitakil: 32, 37, 43 , and 44 . 38. Iesousinkouda: 33 , 35 , 36, and 58. Is he possibly the same as the priest Iesousinkouda in 34?

Mashshouda and Archive 3

39

While other examples are easy to find, Adama the eparch has no particularly prominent level of activity in the documents of Archive 3. His dozen appearances in that archive seem more important than they actually are, owing to his role as eparch of Nobadia in texts found in a house thought important to the governance of Nobadia. Adama may well have been the eparch responsible for the construction of the houses in question—and may therefore have played some role in whatever process brought Archive 3 to rest within its walls—but he is no more central to the archive than Darme, Dollitakil, and several others.

The Ties within and between Each Documentary Genre What emerges from Archive 3 is a social network constructed around local land sales and other transactions. None of the Qasr Ibrim land sales is in social or economic isolation. Each land sale includes at least one person also present in another land sale. Table 2.1 illustrates this point. Its examples are representative, not exhaustive; each of the land sales it lists has several more certain and many more possible prosopographical connections to the other texts in the list. This situation is only possible because a number of the archive’s secondary characters had wide-ranging social networks. Darme the priest and outaphil served as a witness to land sales by Mouna and Manyi, by Kapopi, and by Enomariamê, as well as to a land cession by Mouhoumeti.39 None of these texts shares any central actors, which suggests that Darme appeared as a witness not because of his ties to a buyer or seller but because of his own generally rich social connections. Likewise, Ajola wrote and witnessed a purchase release for Adama, a land sale by Aggestotil to Mashshouda, and a cession by Mouhoumeti to Mashshouda, and witnessed a land sale for Kapopi.40 Ajola was thus connected to several major figures in the archive, not working for one exclusively. Darme the timakkis served as a witness to five different land sales, each one involving a different pair of buyers and sellers, as well as a witness to two different releases, of a servant and a slave.41 Thus Darme, too, appeared as a witness because of his extensive social connections throughout Qasr Ibrim society.

39. 34, 36, 42, and 44 . 40. 31, 39, 42, and 36. 41 . Sales: 34, 38, 40, 41, and 45 . Releases: 33 and 35 .

40

medieval nubia Table 2.1 Land Sales and Social Connections in Archive 3. Document Number

Social Connections

32

Dollitakil witnesses this text, 37, and 44. Some of the same land appears in parts i and ii. Part ii’s scribe appears in 37, 38, and 40. Adama acts in 40 on behalf of Kapopi, the vendor in 36. Mashshouda the choiak-eikshil, the purchaser, appears in 34, 38, and 39. Ngonnen is the vendor in both 38 and 34. Ajola writes and witnesses 39 and appears in 34 and 36. Darme the timakkis witnesses this text, 34, and 45 and appears in 38. Darme the outaphil witnesses this text, 34, and 36. Tapara witnesses this text and 36.

34

36 37 38 39 40 44 45

Consider the nature of these connections. Witnesses appear in several land sales, despite no apparent connection between the scribes, vendors or purchasers in the sales. Scribes draft multiple land sales involving different vendors and purchasers. Some vendors and purchasers appear more than once in each capacity, at times in texts with scribes in common and at times in texts without scribes in common The same is true of the other texts: the land cessions and the correspondence. Each documentary genre in Archive 3 shows some prosopographical connection to the other documentary genres therein, further strengthening the impression that this archive, far from an accidental collection of records perhaps put aside solely for safe keeping, is instead the deliberate collection of a single figure active in each of the social activities it records. If the letters, the land sales, and the other legal texts feature an overlapping cast of characters and if each genre has the same central person—Mashshouda—he becomes the unifying figure connecting everyone in Qasr Ibrim’s Archive 3. Consider these examples of connections between the different genres in the archive. Iesousinkouda, whose career can be traced from deacon to

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archdeacon to great deacon and priest, appears as a witness in several legal documents, including Kapopi’s land sale to Neuesi.42 He also appears as the recipient of correspondence from Mineria concerning a series of business transactions.43 Mashshouda the choiak-eikshil and Adama the eparch likewise appear in both the archive’s correspondence and its legal texts. Iesou the priest is both a witness to a grain order and author of one of the archive’s letters.44 Browne published three texts in the archive under the headings “List of Church Holdings” and “Itemized List.” Chapter 4 argues that these lists are cadastral in nature, the basis of a taxation system.45 There is prosopographical overlap between these lists and the rest of the archive as well. Titta, daughter of Ngaei, appears “living with her mother” and witnessing Tiri’s release of Eigali from a purchase agreement in 31. She also appears in itemized list 61 followed by the entry “37 and a half.”46 Moushen-Asti appears as a landholder whose plots mark borders in both 60, the list of church holdings, and 36, Kapopi’s land sale to Neuesi. Likewise, AnionAsti appears in 62, an itemized list, followed by entries recording payments of 13 and 8, and appears elsewhere in the archive as a land owner whose property marks the borders of land sold by Kapopi and Adama.47 These interconnections among each genre present in Archive 3 suggest that the archive presents a map of Qasr Ibrim’s overall social network. The central figure in the major documentary genres present in Archive 3 and thus of that social network is Mashshouda the choiak-eikshil. He is both the central social figure in the archive’s correspondence and the central figure in its web of land sales and land cessions.

Mashshouda’s Centrality in the Correspondence Browne described two of the fourteen letters in Archive 3 as orders and another as a request. Some of these letters involve neither Adama nor

42 . 33 , 35 , and 36. 43 . 58. 44 . 49, 50, and 55 . 45 . See below, page 85. 46. 61.7. She may also be the Titta appearing in the same text at lines 2 and 4. 47. 62 .2−4 with 36.25 and 27 (where the Einon-Asti in line 26 seems like a mistake for the same person) and 40. See also Anion-Asti’s land’s appearance as a border mark in 60.

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Mashshouda. Letter 57, which does not appear to have any connection to the rest of the archive, is a letter from the bishop of Faras to the bishop of Sai. Letter 58, Mineria’s business letter to Iesousinkouda, does not involve anyone we can connect with certainty to anyone else in the archive.48 Isou the priest appears in two letters discussed in more detail later in the chapter. While it is far from apparent from the table of contents, a Mashshouda writes, appears in, sends, or receives seven of the surviving fourteen letters in the archive (46−59). A Mashshouda is the recipient of 46, 48, 52, 54, and 59; an intermediary in 47; and the sender of 53. The Mashshouda who receives 52 is explicitly described as Mashshouda the choiak-eikshil. The remaining correspondence includes five letters to, one letter from, and another letter mentioning men named Mashshouda. That man receives two sets of orders from two different eparchs, Tamsi and Nad().49 He receives a notice from Oliti in regard to a grain distribution.50 He receives a letter about money and wheat from Alpha the priest.51 He receives a sales order from someone named Ammetti.52 He also writes a letter to Marigaji concerning the Epimachus Church.53 (In 47, a payment order without a named sender or recipient, Mashshouda appears again as the intermediary of a grain payment.) All of these men are not necessarily the same. Ammetti’s correspondent is addressed as choiak-eikshil and is thus the same as the Mashshouda appearing in the land sales. Tamsi addresses his Mashshouda as gort() (“elder”?). The author of the letter to Marigaji calls himself Mashshouda the Lord of the Elders (gort() ngo()).54 The other letters simply address him as Mashshouda, with no qualifying title or epithet. But two factors indicate that we are dealing with the same man throughout. First, probability: If the same name appears as a sender, recipient, or intermediary in seven of fourteen letters, how likely could it be that most of 48. Papasa, appearing therein, is a relatively common name and cannot be identified with certainty with the Papasas appearing in 30, 31, or 34 . 49. 46 and 48. 50. 54 . 51 . 59. 52 . 52 . 53 . 53 . 54 . This corrects the first edition at the suggestion of Łajtar via personal communication; the new reading has been verified by the author via unpublished images held in the

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these names refer to different people? The different titles he is given may indicate that the correspondence covers the course of his career. Second, content: Mashshouda plays the same role in almost all of these texts, receiving grain payments, receiving orders for such payments, receiving instruction to make grain sales, and requesting food delivery. A single man named Mashshouda buying, selling, and shipping food emerges as a central figure in half of the archive’s fourteen letters. By contrast, Adama appears only twice in this body of letters. In each case, he is giving instructions about the distribution of food.55 In 51, he writes to Douddil with a request to give out 6 artabas of dates. Other aspects of the letter are less clear; the mothers of each man make an appearance, as does the agent of Adama’s mother, with whom Adama seems reluctant to conduct business.56 In 49 he writes to Soueti, a vice eparch, with a more complicated set of instructions about the distribution of 5 artabas and 5 bushels of grain in one oupri and 2 artabas of barley and 8 bushels of wheat in another. While these letters make Adama seem active, at least in terms of ordering food distribution, secondary features diminish his importance somewhat. First, letter 49 was “found rolled up with 38,”57 a land purchase by Mashshouda in which Adama plays no active role. Secondly, that letter is one of four that seem more concerned with the affairs of Isou the priest. In 49, Adama informs Soueti that he has “offered” (doukkisil) some of Soueti’s grain and that Isou is one of the men who witnessed this fact. Isou, in turn, receives some of the grain, which he deposited (outissanon), the rest going to Soueti. In letter 50, Soueti informs Ajjaji of this transaction, confirming that Isou kept 1 artaba “as Anna’s offering” and that Soueti now has the rest. Perhaps 49, including a witness list as it does, is a receipt of some kind, drafted in epistolary form and intended to inform Soueti that he has been paid a certain sum in kind.

British Museum and available online at www.medievalnubia.info. Łajtar reports that the title gort() ngod() is widely attested at Banganarti. 55 . A genre of Old Nubian texts known from elsewhere: see Ruffini forthcoming a and Adams 1996, 226 citing other (unpublished) examples from Qasr Ibrim; Griffith 1928, 129; and Zyhlarz 1932, 189–190. 56. 51.4–5: “aiei kiddiwi tannika tiri mona pet|tika ngola,” where “her (agent) who was about to come” is more abstract in the Nubian. Kiddiwi tannika: “her person or thing who is coming.” 57. P.QI 3 page 99.

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Obscure as all of this is, we get the impression that Isou the priest is an important player in this miniature network. He is an intermediary in this transaction of Adama’s. Secondly, he appears in his own right as the author of a letter to Eiongoka, 55, whom he urges to “come out to (see) the asousi” before adding that he, Isou, will “call the King to my land.”58 Eiongoka receives a similar letter, 56, at what must have been roughly the same time, from the Great Priest Tapara, who advises him that if he takes the asousi, to “come out and eagerly (?) call the King.”59 Whatever the significance of the asousi, a garment of some kind, it was important to several people who had access to the king. The correspondence preserved from Qasr Ibrim represents a complicated social web that is not easily connected to the activity of just one individual. At least twelve different authors address at least eight different addressees.60 Clearly this collection of letters was not the work of a single individual keeping track of his own letters sent and received. There appears to be no common denominator shared by all of these letters.61 The official positions of the correspondents include various offices both secular (eparch, vice eparch, Lord of the Elders, and kash) and ecclesiastical (great deacon, priest, great priest, and bishop). Whatever social decisions brought all of these letters together to be sealed in a jar in House 177 are now lost in time. It is not obvious that these letters were assembled by the owner of the house, but if they were, then Mashshouda, who appears in nearly three times more of the letters than Adama, must emerge as the favored contender.

Mashshouda’s Centrality in the Land Sales Mashshouda emerges with much more certainty as the center of the Qasr Ibrim land sale network. Adama appears in four land sale documents that

58. “Come out”: “asousia… pileso.” “Call the king”: “parre annido ourouka ogirelo.” 59. “pileso ourouka oga moukkeso.” This Tapara the Great Priest might also be the Tapara the priest who appears as a witness in two earlier land sales (36 and 45) and a release of a slave (33). Interestingly, none of these three texts appears to have anything to do with either Adama or Mashshouda, unless the latter is the Ngeshsh of Koudketi in 33; for this possibility, see note 62 on page 46 below. 60. Letter 47 lacks a proper addressee, and the author is not identified. 61 . And, as Adams 1996, 229 remarks in reference to two of them in particular, “the reason for their deliberate preservation is obscure, since they do not appear to deal with matters of great consequence.”

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record five land sales. One of these, the second recorded in 37, does not involve Adama at all. In two of these five sales, the first recorded in 37 and 44, he appears only as a witness. In one of them, 36, he may be the father of the purchaser, a daughter named Neuesi, although we cannot be certain. Only in 40 is Adama a primary player, selling Kapopi’s land to the Church of the Holy Trinity. Mashshouda, for his part, appears in five land sale documents that record seven land sales. Two of those seven sales, the first of the two sales recorded in 34 and 37, respectively, do not involve him at all. In one of them, 42, Mashshouda receives a nominal cession of land that, specifying a cash price as it does, must have been a de facto sale. Mashshouda is the purchaser in all of the remaining four texts, the second sales recorded in 34 and 37 and in 38 and 39. Mashshouda appears as a primary player in the Qasr Ibrim land sales no less than five times and each time acquires new land. Adama, however, appears as a primary player in the Qasr Ibrim land sales records only once, selling someone else’s land. Archive 3 reveals Qasr Ibrim in the midst of a large-scale transfer of landed wealth and prestige to Mashshouda from multiple different sources. The only land sales involving Adama the eparch result in a slight diffusion of land-based wealth. In 1190, Kapopi sells land to Adama’s daughter; the following decade, some of that land, under Adama’s control, is sold off to the Church of the Holy Trinity. Did Adama’s family need to liquidate part of its investment for ready cash? Meanwhile, Mashshouda’s investments grew. Mouhoumeti ceded some of his land to Mashshouda. Mouna and Manyi sold land to Iongoka and Mena. Pongita, Persi, and Ngonnen, Mena’s daughter, later sold the same land to Mashshouda. In 1198, Ngonnen, Mena’s daughter, sold more land to Mashshouda. Aggestotil sold some of his father’s land to Mashshouda. Papasinen, daughter of Magosi, sold land to Engngaeil, who sold it to Mashshouda and his wife in turn. Adama the eparch appears as a witness to this last transaction, proof that these two major figures knew each other. His appearance as a witness for Mashshouda comes between his daughter’s purchase of Kapopi’s land and his later liquidation of some of that land. One wonders whether this sequence suggests a deeper transition at work in Qasr Ibrim. This may be the trace of an acknowledgment by one generation of Ibrim’s elite of the next generation’s rising economic star, a shift of land-based wealth to Mashshouda’s family while Adama’s family loosens its grip on its own landholdings.

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Mashshouda the Choiak-Eikshil If Mashshouda the choiak-eikshil is the central figure of Qasr Ibrim’s Archive 3, who was Mashshouda, and what was a choiak-eikshil?62 Unlike Adama, Mashshouda is a typical Nubian name. The first element, mash-, probably derives from the name of Nubia’s indigenous sun god, Mash or Mashal.63 Medieval Nubia records more than half a dozen different names with this component.64 The second component, -shouda, may derive from souda-, an Old Nubian word meaning “staff.”65 We may well imagine that Mashshouda had a distinguished or noble sound to it (“staff of the god”), even in Christian Nubia. As for the title choiak-eikshil, Mouhoumeti’s land cession to Mashshouda, 42, demonstrates that more than one person could hold it at once. Mashshouda possesses the title in that text, as does one of the witnesses to the cession, Petri the choiak-eikshil. Yet neither man has his title qualified in any way, to clarify over what or whom they are choiak-eikshil. If the title represented a real political office, it could have been—much like the office of Augustus in Roman late antiquity—an infinitely divisible office. But there is no real evidence that this was the case. Alternatively, choiakeikshil could have been an honorific designation that, once awarded, the recipient was entitled to hold for life. Petri suggests this, appearing again as a witness, in land sale 32, a text most likely from the decades preceding his appearance in the cession to Mashshouda.66

62 . For holders of the title choiak-eikshil and for the only substantial discussion of the office, see Łajtar 1992, 123–124 and the commentary to I.Khartoum Greek 9.26, concluding that the term’s “Greek counterpart—if it existed—is unknown.” I find Mashshouda the choiak-eikshil in 34, 37, 38, 39, 42, and 52, and think it highly likely that he is the addressee in 48, 54, and 59. He may also be the correspondent in 46 and 53 , designated as an elder ( gort()), but this is less certain. The Mashshouda who appears in 33 as ngeshsh of Koudketi may be the choiak-eikshil at an earlier stage of his career, as Mashshouda the choiak-eikshil had a known connection to another ngeshsh of Koudketi in 52 . For a possible identification with the Mashshouda in 61 and 62, see below, page 188. Other men of the same name appear in 31, 36, 37, 38, 42, and 47. See Łajtar 2006a, 95, note 33, on the Mashshouda in 37 and whether his patronymic is instead a title and toponym. 63 . Rose 1996, 108. 64 . Mashal[, Mashane, Mashanngal, Mashalkol, Mashankisse, Mashekko, Mashenka, Mashnga. For references, see the article on Nubian names at www.medievalnubia.info. Łajtar suggests to me that the last two names are merely spelling variations of the same name. 65 . Browne 1996a, 161. For the s/sh alternation in Old Nubian, see Browne 2002, 18. 66. For the date of these texts, see appendix 1 below.

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What of the actual meaning of the term choiak-eikshil? Based on its appearance in a literary text with the month name Choiak, Griffith had originally taken eikshi as a possible Old Nubian word for “month.”67 Because he did not recognize choiak-eikshil as a title, its holder in that text, Doukasi, went unrecognized as a personal name. In 1989, Browne published a revision of the text and argued that choiak-eikshil was a title by comparison to its appearances in then forthcoming Qasr Ibrim texts.68 When Łajtar assembled the five examples of choiak-eikshils yet known in 1992, he concluded that The preceding examples demonstrate that Choiak-eikshil was either a honorary title or the name of an office. Both priests and secular officials could bear it. The documents from Qasr Ibrim indicate that at least two persons could have been Choiak-eikshil at the same time. In two cases . . . the term applies to people holding the highest offices in the land: Songoj and Neshsh of Atwa . . . and Eparch of Nobadia. In the first case the term Choiak-eikshil appears in the first place, suggesting that it was the most important among the titles borne by the person in question. On the other hand, Choiak-eikshil does not appear in the . . . protocols . . . from Qasr Ibrim. . . . This would indicate that Choiak-eikshil was rather a prestigious honorary title then an office in the court or administration hierarchy.69 His conclusion—based on the tombstone of a priest named Istephanou who held the title of choiak-eikshil and died in 797 ad70 and on the tombstone stela of a priest named Papasa who also held the title and died in 1181 ad71—that a choiak-eikshil could be lay or ordained is highly significant.

67. Griffith 1913, 95. 68. Browne 1983a, 117. 69. Łajtar 1992, 124–125, sic. 70. SB 20.14176, to date the earliest known text with Old Nubian vocabulary and most recently published as I.Varsovie Greek 110. 71 . I.Tib. 16 = Bernand 1992 no. 115; see below, page 49.

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Martyrophoros Martyrophoros confirms that religious figures can hold the title choiakeikshil. Martyrophoros is an exceptionally rare name, known only in Nubia. Łajtar has credibly demonstrated that the three previously known attestations of the name all refer to the same person, who died in 1159 ad.72 A Martyrophoros also wrote two unpublished letters from Qasr Ibrim to a man named Papasa.73 We cannot be sure that Łajtar’s three attestations are the same man from the unpublished Qasr Ibrim letters, but the rarity of the name supports the identification.74 Łajtar’s Martyrophoros appears in Sabagura as a priest and in Debeira as a bishop. The Martyrophoros from Qasr Ibrim appears as a choiak-eikshil. If the two men are the same, we have further support for the impression that the choiak-eikshil could be a religious figure, not necessarily a court officeholder.

Tidawa and Oukka An unpublished account from Qasr Ibrim includes two entries that read “Tidawa choiak() two dirhems” and “Oukka choiak() two orp,” listed among several dozen men and women with similar payments.75 The most obvious interpretation is that we have a choiak-eikshil named Tidawa either paying or receiving 2 dirhems and another choiak-eikshil, named Oukka, either paying or receiving 2 orp. The appearance of a choiak-eikshil named Tidawa as a witness in 38 supports this reading. The account gives no context for us to learn more about Tidawa and Oukka, but this is further proof that the title choiak-eikshil could be held by more than one person at once. If it was an honorific, it was perhaps held for life. It is alternatively possible to interpret these entries as payments to Tidawa and Oukka for the month or in the month of Choiak.76 Under this interpretation, there might be something significant about Choiak that warrants payment being made.

72 . See I.Khartoum Greek 6 with commentary at 43–44. 73 . P.QI inv. 74.2.13.3 and 74.2.2.14. For more on these letters, see Ruffini forthcoming a. 74 . See Ruffi ni 2006 on name rarity as a factor in prosopographical identifications. 75 . PQI inv. 66/26.7 = 69/26.7 (Photo 69.3/19–20). 76. Łajtar informs me of a forthcoming text from Gebel Adda perhaps relevant in this context, recording deliveries on six consecutive days beginning with Choiak 11 but also apparently recording deliveries on other days and in other months as well.

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Papasa the Priest Papasa the priest, son of Maranya, died in November 1181. His tombstone, acquired in Luxor in 1909, is now in the Louvre.77 The inscription does not tell us everything we would like to know. Where did he live? In which church was he a priest? Still, the inscription gives us a valuable detail, the note that he was choiak-eikshil and died at the age of 60 (“kei|akshshi etê tês zôês | autou x”).78 The inscription does not tell us his age when he held the title. Unless he happened to earn it in the year of his death, this tombstone and that of Istephanou from the eighth century further strengthen the likelihood that choiak-eikshil was an honorific held for life. As a direct contemporary of Mashshouda and Petri, Papasa may provide further indirect evidence for multiple simultaneous holders of the title.

The Son of Mashshouda An eleventh-century tombstone from Meinarti may hold a further clue.79 The Greek on the sandstone dates from 1084 ad and has posed some problems of interpretation. Crowfoot, publishing its last lines more than eighty years ago, thought that the name of the deceased was Mashshouda Eisminna and could not explain why the tombstone read “ana|pauson Xeiakishishi” (“give rest to Cheiakishshi”). He speculated that Cheiakishshi might have been the name of the text’s inscriber or of someone else buried in Mashshouda’s grave.80 Łajtar, the text’s most recent editor, understood the inscription’s deceased to be a son of Mashshouda Eisminna, rather than Mashshouda himself. Noting that, “strangely enough,” the son’s name has been left out of the text, Łajtar concluded that whoever he may have been, he held the rank of choiak-eikshil.81 It is “impossible to state” whether this son of Mashshouda, a choiak-eikshil, was in any way connected to our Mashshouda

77. Bernand 1992 no. 115. For the name Maranya, see Łajtar 1992, 118. 78. Leaving out the invocation to the Archangel Michael appearing in the middle of these lines; see Łajtar 1993, 246. 79. I.Khartoum Greek 9, with full bibliography at 58 and text at 58–59. 80. Crowfoot 1927, 231. 81 . I.Khartoum Greek page 60.

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the choiak-eikshil.82 The possibility is intriguing, if purely speculative. Names run in families; it would not be too strange to imagine two men of the same name holding the same title in the same family, a century apart, particularly if our Mashshouda in the late twelfth century holds his title by virtue of the prestige of an illustrious ancestor.

Joassê An epitaph found at Meinarti records the death of an eparch of Nobadia named Joassê.83 If the inscription is believed, this eparch lived to be 95, and thus his life spanned from 1065 to 1161 ad, the date of his epitaph. The only other detail recorded about him, besides his father’s name, Sentikol, is the fact that he was also a choiak-eikshil.84 This is revealing. We have focused on whether Adama the eparch or Mashshouda the choiak-eikshil is more important in twelfth-century Qasr Ibrim. The epitaph of Joassê is proof that one man can hold both titles and thus suggests that Adama and Mashshouda, who knew each other, came from the same social milieu.

The Title Eikshil The title eikshil can refer to an abstract form of lordship or authority. The publication of P.QI 2 confirmed that eikshil- was a “title of [an] official,”85 one that could appear alone, without the Egyptian month name choiak modifying it. In P.QI 2, letter 24 includes an address to Elonngal from Masi, eparch of Nobadia, domestikos of Pachoras and eikshi (Masi eparch() no(ba)d(ia) (kai) dêm() Pach(oras) (kai) eikshil). But this limited context does nothing to illuminate the nature of the term eikshi, whether it is title or an office, or its responsibilities if the latter. Browne made no attempt to solve that puzzle, content in his commentary to cite his earlier notes in which he corrected Griffith’s understanding of the choiak-eikshil Doukasi’s role as the patron of an Old Nubian literary text.86 82 . I.Khartoum Greek page 63 note to line 26. But note in regard to the Qasr Ibrim Mashshouda that “the difference in time precludes an identification with the person of the same name” from Meinarti (Łajtar 1992, 123–124). 83 . I.Khartoum Greek 8. For more on Joassê, see page 246 below. 84 . Thus Łajtar’s reasonable interpretation of the epitaph’s kuagisushil in line 26. 85 . Browne 1996a, 68, with the entry for choiak-eikshil at Browne 1996a 185. 86. P.QI 2 page 59 citing his note to St. 33.7−35.2, where “St.” refers to his revisions of the stauros text in Studia Papyrologica 22 (1983) 75–119.

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The unpublished correspondence from Qasr Ibrim provides further examples of the title eikshil. This material includes additional letters from the eparch Masi, a potential letter from the eparch Adama, and a letter from an eparch named Ourouel. Every one of these eparchs is also attested as an eikshil.87 The term cannot be the same as migin songoj or eparch of Nobadia; Masi appears as the former in the same text in which Adama is the latter. There is only one uncertain case: an unpublished letter addressed from an arch-Meizoteros Kosma to an arch-Trikliniarios and eikshil named Ourouwi.88 The recipient may be the same man appearing in another unpublished letter, addressed to an eparch named Ourouwi.89 This consistent association of eparchs with the title eikshil indicates that the latter term applied to men of considerable power and prestige. Adama’s potential appearance is curious, for it gives us another variant of the term. In the address of a letter to Bishop Mena, we read “ada]m eparch() nobad() k(ai) eikshildoug().”90 The restoration of the name Adam for Adama the eparch is compelling, because of Adama the eparch’s known connections to Bishop Mena.91 The component doug here may have some relation to the Old Nubian verb “to worship.”92 This may indicate that the term eikshil can have some sort of religious authority attached to it under certain circumstances. Without further attestations of the term in this form, this evidence is too slender to lend certainty. The first component of the term eikshil may be related to the Old Nubian word eig- or eik-, meaning “fire.”93 In 35, Mena’s release of a servant named Gaweson, one of the witnesses is a man named Orinourta, eigl mosil, which Browne took to mean “fire sacrificer (?).” Alternatively, eik- may relate to the Old Nubian word eikk-, êkk-, “to lead, bring, 87. Adama: 31. Masi: 24 . Ourouel: unknown find number, photographs V.66.19/8 P3v and V.66.19/7 P3r. The same is true of Gabrielinkouda, attested with both titles in 32 . 88. P.QI inv. 66/109 = 66.7/16 1966 R. 109. Photographs V.66.19/6 P2v and V.66.19/5 P2r. Łajtar suggests in personal communication that Ourouwi the eparch and Ourouel the eparch may be the same person, his name appearing with phonetic variations. 89. P.QI inv. 74.3.10/9 IV. 90. P.QI inv. 74.1.29/11d. 91 . In, for example, 40. 92 . Browne 1996a, 52. 93 . Browne 1996a, 64.

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move, direct, instruct.”94 This word is at the root of, for instance, eikkid(d)att-, the Old Nubian word for “prophet.”95 The second component of eikshil, -shil, is common in Old Nubian titles.96 It appears in choiak-eikshil, joknashshl and epirshil, all titles we do not yet understand.97 The component thus appears consistently in terms indicating some sort of office, power, or authority. It may be related to the terms shal- and shêkk- (“administrative district”) and shikeri- (“ruler”).98 A -shil title may simply indicate someone who has power or control over the initial components of the title. This fits with our conclusion that eikshil may be less a term referring to a single, distinct position and more an epithet indicating lordship or command of a general kind, a ruler, leader, or lord. In analyzing the titles eparch and migin songoj, which are synonymous, we see that eikshil can appear in conjunction with these titles, further indicating some sort of power or authority or lordship.99 But lordship over what?

Choiak A choiak-eikshil is an official whose authority relates in some way to Choiak. It stands to reason that the title of choiak-eikshil related in some way to the month of Choiak. Mashshouda’s title may indicate that he held lordship over the month of Choiak and thus, by implication, lordship over a particularly significant event in the month of Choiak. The most logical event is the Choiak festival, preserved from antiquity and transformed into a medieval Christian context. Modern scholars have suggested that the role of the Choiak festival in “popular consciousness” survived in the liturgical practice of the Coptic Church, which intensifies at the end of Choiak 94 . Browne 1996a, 66. 95 . Browne 1996a, 67. 96. See the discussion at Łajtar 2003, 151. 97. joknashil: I.Varsovie Greek 110 and unpublished texts from Old Dongola and Qasr Ibrim’s Archive 1, with discussion of the term at Łajtar 1992, 125. Epirshil: Łajtar 2003, 150. 98. Browne 1996a, 185–186. Browne’s unpublished marginalia to Vantini 1975 indicate at 483 that he suspected a relationship between shikeri and the Arabic sawkarī (“prince”). 99. See above, page 36. As an alternative etymology for eikshil, consider the Demotic term ’Ikš/’Igš, which “appears to designate the inhabitants of Kš [Kush], or Nubia, and the Sudan in general” (Winnicki 2009, 465). The term for Nubian may have been transferred by the Nubians themselves and become an abstract honorific of some sort.

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with the celebration of Christmas.100 Some aspects of modern Coptic religious festivals are believed to be direct continuations of ancient Egyptian Osirian rites from the month of Choiak.101 Chronologically, the assimilation of the Choiak festival with Christmas would have been easy: Celebration of Osiris’s victory over death on 30 Choiak fell shortly after the ultimate date for Christmas, December 25 or 28 or 29 Choiak, and celebration of the Choiak festival continued at Philae in southern Egypt into the fourth and fifth centuries.102 December 25 proper was the date of the Kikellia, the celebration of the birth of Horus, the son of Isis and Osiris. The Kikellia is frequently attested in the third and early fourth centuries and is documented as late as the writings of Epiphanios of Salamis at the end of the fourth century.103 Meanwhile, the date of December 25 for Christmas did not enjoy universal acceptance in the early church.104 In late antiquity, John Chrysostom knew that the date had only lately been accepted in his own church and outlined arguments in favor of its validity.105 Thus, a date for Christmas at the end of Choiak gained more universal acceptance in the same period when traditional religious celebrations of the end of Choiak began to wane. The festival of Choiak had deep roots in Egyptian antiquity. Considerable evidence from Deir el-Medina during the New Kingdom records feasting—bread and beer receive particular mention—in Choiak to commemorate the resurrection of Osiris and the attainment of eternal life.106 At an early stage, an independent festival of Sokar, celebrated in the Egyptian season of Akhet, assimilated increasingly during the Old Kingdom into the Choiak feast in honor of Osiris.107 In Greco-Roman celebrations of Choiak, Sokar was nothing but a form of Osiris, but particular attention

100. Daumas 1975, 959. 101 . Wassef 1971, 52 following Sauneron, cited at note 1. 102 . Dijkstra 2008, 203–206. See Bainton 1923, 110 rejecting a connection between the Osiris festivals and the conception (rather than birth) of Jesus. 103 . PG 41, haeres. 51.22. 104 . Merkelbach 1963, 36–39 for the Kikellia. For assimilation of Egyptian religion in the Feast of the Epiphany, see Merkelbach 1963, 55–57. 105 . Bainton 1923, 130. 106. Jauhiainen 2009, 112–118. See Chassinat 1966 (volume 1), 9–21 for further discussion of the Choiak festival. 107. Gaballa and Kitchen 1969, 34–36.

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to Sokar is still found in the second and first century bc in the funerary scenes of Meroitic rulers.108 Celebrations of the Osiris Choiak feast continue in the Roman period as Sarapia, festivals of Sarapis serving as a latter-day embodiment of aspects of Osiris.109 Temple accounts record the amounts spent by the priests in celebration of Choiak.110 A recent study of the Choiak rituals noted that their forms—transmitted, for example, through Greco-demotic magical papyri— were known throughout Egypt in late antiquity.111 Most dramatically, we see the ironworkers of Hermonthis leaving a series of inscriptions at Deir al-Bahari, near Thebes, recording their overnight vigils and feasts inside the temple.112 These inscriptions, spanning the period from the 280s to the 330s, date in some cases to early in the month of Tybi, suggesting that the ironworkers were celebrating the end of the previous month of Choiak.113 More significantly, the celebration of the Choiak feast is attested in preChristian Nubia. A third century ad demotic graffito from the temple of Isis at Philae provides a compelling first-person example of Choiak piety from ancient Meroe. It is worth quoting the translation extensively for its potential connection to the later title of choiak-eikshil. The author is Pasan, son of Paese, the Meroitic king’s Great Envoy of Rome, who writes: I came to Egypt and fulfilled the orders which my master had commanded me . . . He commanded me to cause the entire nome to celebrate, and we did it in his good name, and made a fine festival for the nome . . . Year 3 Choiak, day 1 . . . in spite of my being poor, in the name of the king my Master, I gave my tithe. . . . From Choiak day 1 to Pharmuthi day 1, we made festival in the temple of Isis with our brethren. . . . We spent eight days feasting . . . on wine, beer and flesh. The people of the whole city made merry. . . . In spite of our poverty, we also made our own banquets in the name of the king our master.114

108. Gaballa and Kitchen 1969, 33–34. 109. For Sarapia, see Perpillou-Thomas 1993, 129–136. 110. See, for example, P.Tebt. 2.298.70, where the amount is missing. 111 . Ciampini 2007, 287. 112 . Łajtar 2006b, 96–97. 113 . Łajtar 2006b, 98–99. 114 . Translation from Burstein 2009 text no. 15. For discussion, see Dijkstra 2008, 135–136 adapting the translation found at FHN 3.260.

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This graffito is striking: It shows us that in pre-Christian Nubia a royal official held a religious festival at the order of the king, gave a Choiak feast for the people in the name of the king, and made a point of proclaiming his pride at accomplishing these deeds—a nice rhetorical flourish!—in spite of his poverty. Is it too much of an interpretive stretch to imagine that, when Christianity came to Nubia, royal officials continued to hold Choiak feasts in the name of the king but in a context instead imbued with Christian significance?115 We know little about the annual rhythm of holy days in Nubian Christianity, but we may suppose that they closely followed those of the Coptic calendar.116 The Feast of the Nativity is a major feast in the Coptic Church, celebrated on 29 Kiyahk (Choiak).117 Choiak would then have been the month for Nubian Christmas. In this context, we should note that one of the Arabic synaxaries indicates that 23 Choiak is intended for the commemoration of an unnamed nephew of the Nubian king. One modern scholar has suggested that this celebration of Nubian royalty may have been connected with Nubia’s official conversion to Christianity.118 The month of Choiak may have held a special position in Nubia’s Christian self-identity, as the month commemorating the royal family’s embrace of the religion of Constantine. In the first three centuries ad, the feasts of the Nativity and of the Epiphany were celebrated on the same day.119 Only from the fourth century on were they differentiated. The Feast of the Epiphany in its Coptic form had assimilated earlier pharaonic religious practices. The Coptic procession to the Nile on Epiphany—described in detail by al-Mas’ūdī in the tenth century—culminated in submersion in the river’s waters, “in the belief that its sanctified water would heal them from all ailments. This is reminiscent of an ancient Egyptian legend, when people reenacted the search of Isis in the waters of the Nile.”120

115 . This possibility is somewhat strengthened by the fact that the earliest attestation of a choiak-eikshil (see above, page 47) dates to the late 700s, much closer to the transition from pagan to Christian feasts than our later medieval examples. 116. Although Łajtar notes in personal communication that a fragment of an apparent liturgical calendar found at Gebel Adda has Byzantine rather than Coptic influences. 117. Basilios and Gregorios 1991, 1102. 118. Danneskiold-Samsøe 1978, 61–65. 119. Basilios and Gregorios 1991, 1102. 120. Basilios and Gregorios 1991, 1103.

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In antiquity, the Choiak festival had an agricultural element, celebrating the sowing of new crops and, by logical extension, celebrating a good supply of food.121 A choiak-eikshil, a lord of Choiak, might be the patron responsible for sponsoring the Nubian form of this Nile procession and the celebratory feasts to accompany it. The title need not be exclusive: More than one person could hold it at once. Even if the title is not held for life, we may suppose that Choiak celebrations took place at more than one place at a time. Mashshouda is the best-known choiak-eikshil, the figure responsible for ensuring the celebration at Qasr Ibrim. It is telling that he, and not the region’s governor, is the most central figure in Archive 3 and that we see him so active in buying, selling, and distributing food. His lordship of Choiak might be a sort of Christian Nubian liturgy, a dual honor and civic obligation in which Mashshouda earns great prestige and reinforces his social prominence through financing the Choiak celebrations. Until more of the texts from Qasr Ibrim are published, this conclusion must necessarily remain speculative. However, this speculative model has the virtue of finding parallel in other forms of Nubian conspicuous consumption documented in the Ibrim texts. Religious liturgies under this model can be seen as a form of taxation. Perhaps more importantly, the obligation to host feasts can be seen as a form of enforced wealth redistribution. It is another variation of the gift-exchange structure we see in the public feasting that accompanied medieval Nubian land sales and is discussed in detail in chapter 5.122

Nubian Archival Practices Earlier studies assigning both Archive 3 and House 177 to Adama the eparch permit revision. Adama is by several measures not the most socially important or the most central person in Archive 3. Nor, despite his prominence in that archive, is there any other feature of its contents demanding that he be understood as its owner. In each case, Mashshouda the choiak-eikshil is a more likely candidate. This conclusion has implications for the archaeology of late Christian Qasr Ibrim. The five structures designated as eparchal houses—Houses 121 . For the “corn mummy” constructed to celebrate the month’s agricultural component, see Dijkstra 2008, 203–204. 122 . On which, see 90 herein.

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172, 177, 178, 763, and 849—earn the honor for similar reasons.123 Adams believes that four of these houses “can be specifically associated with Eparchs of Nobadia.”124 But in House 177, a more specific association belongs to Mashshouda instead. House 172 “yielded no significant documents,” but Adams argues that part of it “was built to serve as an audience chamber for the Eparch who lived in the adjoining house,” 177.125 With Mashshouda living next door, not Adama, this argument is no longer as strong. House 849 produced “no textual finds to identify this structure as an eparchal residence, but it was certainly larger and better furnished than were the typical Late Christian houses” at Qasr Ibrim.126 The final examples, Houses 178 and 763, each produced textual finds including letters addressed to specific eparchs.127 This may be enough to propose the designation of these two houses as eparchal, but the composite picture is no longer reassuring. At least two of the five examples may no longer be taken with such confidence. At a more general level, Archive 3 raises a number of questions about the social structure of twelfth-century Qasr Ibrim. A high level of social connectivity among the individuals referenced appears in these Old Nubian texts. All of the land sales can be connected to one another through a tightly knit social network. The same connections bind the land sales to the administrative letters and the other genres of documentary evidence found in this archive. Every person attested in this archive can be connected to every other person through joint appearance in the texts. Such an extreme level of interconnectivity may be an intrinsic feature of the archival nature of the find. Adams notes that “the legal texts [ from Archive 3] found in a jar beneath House 177 . . . date from both before and after the Shams ed-Dawla raid (that is, from a.d. 1156 to 1199). The house itself was almost certainly built after the raiders had departed, but the jar with its earlier contents must have been transferred from some earlier location where it escaped destruction.”128 This means that someone with an interest in the earlier texts in the archive safeguarded them through

123 . House 178 was formerly known as LC1–8 and LC2–11. 124 . See above, 33. 125 . Adams 1996, 52. 126. Adams 1996, 53. 127. Adams 1996, 45 and 53. 128. Adams 2010, 246. See appendix 1 for corrections to the dates as given.

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the crisis and then continued to add to them and keep them safe after that crisis had passed. Qasr Ibrim’s Archive 1 presents a rather different picture and provides further grounds for speculation about Nubian archival practices. Where Archive 3’s texts span roughly half a century, Archive 1’s texts span nearly two hundred years, from the 1270s to 1463 ad. Their contents reveal nothing like the social unity found in Archive 3. The texts from similar periods naturally name some of the same people in their protocols, but such names are part of legal formulas, not evidence of social connections. None of the key actors recurs in more than two of the texts, which is not surprising given the length of time between some of the sales. What binds Archive 1 together? Of the eight texts in question, two are fragmentary, and all that can be said with certainty is that they were, given their protocols, likely to have been legal texts and possibly land sales. Another text is a sale of some kind, and four more are land sales much like those from Archive 3 in their structure. The last of the eight texts is a royal land decree. Thus, all of the texts in this archive that can be discussed with certainty concern individual plots of land. The descriptions of the plots make it clear—or at least highly likely— that they do not all concern the same parcel of land. One sale mentions only one plot with two others marking its borders.129 Another sale mentions two plots, each with two other plots marking their borders.130 A third sale mentions one plot but with many other plots used to mark its borders.131 None of the border plots mentioned indicates that the main plots in Archive 1 are in the same area or geographically connected in any way. Two possibilities for the origins of the archive present themselves. First, it served a state function and was intended to document land sales that were of particular interest to the state or its representatives at Qasr Ibrim. Second, it served a private function and was intended to document land sales that were of particular interest to a specific person or family. Of the two possibilities, the second seems by far the more likely. Lacking any apparent commonality running through all of the archive’s land sales, there is no state interest that is served by collecting solely these sales, and the archive could not represent every land sale in the Qasr Ibrim area in the

129. EA 90225. 130. Unpublished EA 90226. 131 . Unpublished EA 90227.

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time covered, forming a complete government record. This would mean that Qasr Ibrim saw half a dozen such sales in the half century covered by Archive 3 and barely that number over the next two hundred years. Archive 1 might be a single family or individual’s archive. W.H.C. Frend wrote that the archive was found in “a jar protected from damage by a fallen palm beam.”132 Plumley described the jar that housed the archive as “under the stairway of a Christian house” where the scrolls had been “hidden away in a sealed pot.”133 This pot might then represent storage for the records relating to all of the landholdings of a single person or family. The buyers of the land, in the instances when they can be identified, are highly suggestive.134 The two land sales from the 1270s each record purchases by Marturokoudda, then the eparch of Nobadia. Likewise, the two land sales from the 1280s each record purchases by Gourresi, then Marturokoudda’s successor as the eparch of Nobadia. Ironically, then, Archive 1 may be more of an eparch’s archive in origin than Archive 3. We can easily imagine a scenario in which Gourresi, as the incoming eparch, took control of papers belonging to Marturokoudda, his predecessor. Equally, we can imagine him taking control of Marturokoudda’s land and thus retaining an interest in the legal documents recording that land’s pedigree. The archive’s surviving sale from the 1330s is in a poor state of preservation and gives us no clue to the purchaser’s identity.135 That unknown buyer may—hypothetically—be the same person who inherited the land purchased by Marturokoudda and Gourresi two generations before. Thus, Archive 1 could be an assemblage created by the ancestors or relatives by blood or marriage of the people who ultimately hid the final product in a pot under their stairway. (The obvious alternative, that Archive 1 was a state product, cannot explain why so few transactions are preserved over such a long period.136)

132 . Frend 1968, 324. See also Frend 1972, 228–229. 133 . Plumley 1964, 5. 134 . For discussion of what follows, see Ruffini forthcoming c. 135 . Unpublished EA 90230, a text exceptional for its legal protocol’s omission of the identity of the eparch of Nobadia. 136. Nor do we have any sense of why unpublished EA 90228, King Siti’s land decree, was included in Archive 1. That text gives no indication of any addressee or potential audience. It could thus just as easily have been meant for an eparch in an official capacity as for a private citizen acting as the king’s agent or estate manager in the region. We simply do not have enough information to tell.

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This theory, if true, suggests a lot about Nubian recordkeeping practices. It is remarkable that a single archive could contain texts spanning two centuries, for that implies an active process of preserving legal records, much less that a single family—or lineage group or extended set of family relations—could preserve records of its transactions extending many generations into the past. This process of recordkeeping over prolonged periods shows how important these land sales were as proof of legitimate ownership. If Archive 1 is a private archive, then it provides further circumstantial evidence refuting the theory that Archive 3 belonged to an eparch. This does not mean that there were no state archives, as chapter 6 presents evidence suggesting that medieval Nubia had a formal process for the deposition of legal texts.137 But it appears that the cases we have fit a private model better than a public one and that the burden of legal proof, and therefore the burden of legal recordkeeping, in Nubian society rested with the property owners and not with the state.

137. See page 99.

3

The Historiography of Nubian Land Tenure Modern scholars have doubted the existence of private property in medieval Nubia. In a classic formulation of this theory a generation ago, one author wrote that only Nubian priests stood as a sort of “middle class between the eparch and the peasant-producer.”1 The priests undertook the local administration necessary to oversee “the absolute land rights of the king [through] . . . a [putative] ‘law’ which laid down that the people are ‘tenants’ of the land-units that are property of the king.”2 Because all land was the property of the king, taxation must have relied on assessments of this land, and because medieval Nubia had no money, “it can be taken for granted that only tax in kind existed in Nubia.”3 Under this model, Nubia’s inherently conservative government stifled the emergence of “a more sophisticated financial system and staunched any attempt at private enterprise,” and was thus ultimately responsible for the collapse of the Nubian state.4 Among those who have written general works on Nubia, Adams and Edwards have suggested that the documentary evidence from Qasr Ibrim challenges this picture.5 Discussing the twelfth century land sales, Adams notes that “it is evident that husbands, wives, and even children could own and even sell land and other property independently of one another.”6 1 . Török 1978, 299. 2 . Török 1978, 299. 3 . Török 1978, 300. 4 . Török 1978, 310. 5 . Edwards 2004, 238–239, where the author does not seem to accept previous scholarship on the subject of private land tenure in Nubia. 6. Adams 1996, 251.

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Despite this concession, Adams does not completely abandon earlier theories of Nubian land tenure. Elsewhere in the same discussion, he writes that “[d]espite the legal fiction that all land belonged to the king, it seems that in fact plots were freely salable, though it is possible that the consent of the eparch or some other official may have been required. This at least is suggested by the retention of land sale contracts in the eparchal archives.”7 Adams highlights a historiographical contradiction, a “legal fiction that all land belonged to the king” side by side with legal texts showing otherwise. We can solve this contradiction by exploring its origins. Consider, for example, Stefan Jakobielski’s statement that in medieval Nubia, most land “was in small holdings, but in practice Nubians were tenant farmers, since according to law all land was owned by the king. Taxation in Nubia was based on land tax (and possibly other taxes) and the clergy most probably served as tax-collectors.”8 For these assertions, he cited work by Laszlo Török and Adams from the 1970s.9 Consider also Welsby’s approach, reaffirming the absence of private land in Nubia on the strength of two distinct arguments. First, he applied Karl Polanyi’s concept of the redistributive economy to Christian Nubia and wrote that “[s]uch a system is essential to the maintenance of an elite, although it can be cloaked in a different form by such legal fictions as the state ownership of land whereby the subjects are seen to be paying a rent rather than a tax.”10 Next, he cited both Adams and the tenth-century Arab historian al-Mas’ūdī to note that “the inhabitants of Makuria were, under the law, the slaves of the king and that all their produce, therefore, legally belonged to the state.”11 Earlier, discussing the rights of the king, Welsby wrote that It is possible that the subjects of the king of Makuria were legally regarded as his slaves and, therefore, that they had no right of land ownership, being technically, as slaves of the king, his tenants. 7. Adams 1996, 249. 8. Jakobielski 1988, 204. 9. Specifically Török 1978, 296–299 and Adams 1977, 503. 10. Welsby 2002, 203, citing Polanyi 1968 on the previous page. If previous generations of Nubian scholars (e.g., Török: see note 9) influenced Welsby’s decision to cite Polanyi, he does not say so here. 11 . Welsby 2002, 203, citing Adams 1977, 476 and Vantini 1975, 134 (al-Mas’ūdī).

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However, in the early ninth century this status was successfully challenged in the Egyptian courts by a number of Muslim residents of Aswan who had bought land in northern Makuria from citizens of that country. The Makurian king claimed that this land had been sold illegally and that it really belonged to him. As a result of this ruling the status of Maris [Lower Nubia] was different thereafter than that of the rest of Makuria. In Maris estates could be passed on by inheritance while elsewhere the inhabitants remained technically the slaves of the king.12 Török, one of Welsby’s guides on this issue, in turn bases his claim that “the king had absolute proprietary rights” on the writings of al-Mas’ūdī, who was born in Baghdad and died in Egypt.13 Török states that his discussion of “the fiction of land leased out by the king” and clergy-driven registration of taxpayers is “influenced by the description of the economy of Dahomey,” the powerful West African kingdom in what is now the Republic of Benin.14 For his comparisons to Dahomey, he cites Polanyi’s Primitive, Archaic and Modern Economies.15 Ultimately, then, modern claims by Adams, Jakobielski, Török, and Welsby that medieval Nubia lacked private land tenure rest on comparison to Polanyi’s work on Dahomey and on the literary evidence of al-Mas’ūdī.

Polanyi, Dahomey, and Nubia Polanyi’s ideas are a distinctive product of early twentieth-century European intellectual and historical conditions. Early in life, Polanyi associated with a socialist student movement founded by his older brother Adolf.16 His own progressive student organization, the Galilei Circle, saw socialism as far more than an economic system: To Polanyi, socialism pertained “to the wider field of knowledge and the realm of moral issues in modern industrial society.”17 Polanyi remained a committed

12 . Welsby 2002, 92, citing Vantini 1975, 134–135 (al-Mas’ūdī). 13 . Török 1978, 297. 14 . Török 1978, 290 note 4. 15 . Polanyi 1968. 16. Gábor 2006, 298. 17. Gábor 2006, 299.

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socialist throughout his life. “For many years he struggled to construct a socialist economic model,” an effort he only abandoned to explore the role of the economy in society through the disciplines of history and anthropology.18 One of Polanyi’s most influential works came from these forays into history and anthropology, Dahomey and the Slave Trade. This work provides the parallels to Dahomey employed in Nubian studies. This study of “the economic achievements of a preliterate society” focuses on the independent West African kingdom of Dahomey in the eighteenth century.19 In Polanyi’s words, “Dahomey’s economy was based on the balance of a redistributive administration and local freedom mediated through a tissue of reciprocating and householding institutions supplemented by local markets.”20 Polanyi argued that Dahomey’s economy consisted of two distinct spheres, “a centralized domain of the state proper, and alongside it a fairly state-free body of society.”21 It is easy to see why an earlier generation of Nubian scholars might have called Dahomey to mind. In his introduction, Polanyi describes Dahomey’s trade as “mainly foreign trade . . . institutionally distinct from markets and . . . within the state sphere.”22 Whydah, the great slave-trading post so crucial to Dahomey’s economy, was treated by Dahomey as a separate currency zone, deliberately kept in cultural isolation from the main body of the kingdom.23 Here we might think of the Nubian state’s control over trade and merchant traffic back and forth across the border with Egypt.24 Despite the use of money in Dahomey, it was “largely an economy ‘in kind’ where even staple finance played a subordinate part.”25 By comparison, we might think of the occasional evidence for money in Nubian texts contrasted with the near total lack of any supporting evidence in the archaeological record.26

18. Levitt 2006, 380–381. 19. Polanyi 1966, xv. 20. Polanyi 1966, xx. 21 . Polanyi 1966, 32. 22 . Polanyi 1966, xxiv. 23 . Polanyi 1966, 29. 24 . See above, 8. 25 . Polanyi 1966, xxiv. 26. Note Török’s observation on this question cited below at page 171.

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Polanyi’s discussion of trade focused on three categories of reciprocity, redistribution, and exchange.27 But his lifelong commitment to socialism and his accompanying ideological predisposition toward state-controlled economies created biases that ought to caution us when following his models of redistribution. Polanyi’s introductory section on “Perspectives” is forthright and worth quoting extensively: Fear, that architect of power, is swinging in our days the axis of men’s lives away from the economic order of things and toward the political and moral order. Bare physical survival, freedom, and amorally meaningful existence are the imperatives of the immediate future. Contrary to appearances, it is not material livelihood, but survival and human integrity that are the emergent issues. The magnitude of the shift sets the perspective of this book.28 He goes on to call our “out-of-date market mentality” an “impediment” and asserts that a “new perspective calls for a different set of priorities, in which the economy must be relativized in regard to society.”29 Perhaps modern scholars embracing Polanyi’s Dahomey as a meaningful parallel have been unaware of these biases. Modern scholars of Christian Nubia must ask themselves whether they share this perspective and, perhaps more importantly, whether its conclusions can fairly be inserted into a discussion of Christian Nubia. Even absent this closer examination, modern scholars who bring Polanyi’s economic theories to the study of Nubia should consider subsequent criticisms suggesting that Polanyi’s vision of Dahomey, specifically, and archaic economies, generally, is untenable. Polanyi argued that certain features of advanced economies—for instance, loan markets, marketbased risk bearing, and supply-demand price mechanisms—were absent from archaic economies.30 Modern scholars challenging Polanyi have demonstrated that all of these features were present in some economies—for

27. While Welsby notes that “[e]ach of these types of trade can be observed in the historical record in Nubia,” he chooses to focus solely on redistribution: see Welsby 2002, 202. 28. Polanyi 1966, xv. 29. Polanyi 1966, xvii. 30. Silver 1983, 795, presenting and challenging ideas found throughout Polanyi 1977, and summarized in its conclusion, “market methods are not in evidence” in the ancient world (Polanyi 177, 276).

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example, the ancient Near East—where Polanyi had denied their existence.31 In absence of these features, Polanyi argued for the centrality of the state as the primary price-setting instrument. This centrality of the state intrudes on the application of Polanyi’s models to medieval Nubia. Polanyi entertained some odd ideas about the nature of ancient economies. This is never more clear than when he writes that “in antiquity, prices were fixed largely by custom, statute or proclamation, and . . . never fluctuated.”32 Students of Roman antiquity will quickly see that this generalization does not hold. The attempt by Diocletian to set prices at the imperial level—an attempt that was an exception, not the rule—was a widespread failure.33 The evidence from the papyri well attests to marketbased price fluctuations in basic commodities in Roman Egypt.34 While Polanyi’s misunderstanding of archaic economies should weaken our confidence in the applicability of his models, it is not the only problem. A greater problem is the false parallel drawn between the forms of land tenure in Dahomey and Nubia. In Dahomey, land inheritance concerned its use, not its ownership; owners of land could not sell the land, and owners of slaves could not sell the slaves without the king’s approval.35 This is unlike the situation in Nubia, where the available documentary evidence for land sales and the release of a slave makes no reference to the king’s approval.36 The king of Dahomey had legal title to property and land.37 But what scholars make of this depends to a considerable degree on their background and intellectual predelictions. Consider the royal injunctions issued by the court of Dahomey, for example, “The King has said that . . . everyone must confine his work to the place where he lives. . . . The King has said that . . . he has forbidden his people to migrate from one part of the country to another.”38

31 . Silver 1983. 32 . Polanyi 1966, xix. 33 . Williams 1985, 128–132. See also Lactantius de mortibus persecutorum 7. 34 . See, in particular, Rathbone 1997, 211 and the conclusion that “the prices for wheat, wine and donkeys were basically formed by the operation of free-market forces, that is the fundamentals of supply and demand in a monetized economy.” 35 . Polanyi 1966, 76. 36. Land sales: P.QI passim. Slave release: 33 . 37. Polanyi 1966, 48. 38. Polanyi 1966, 38.

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An anthropologist or archaeologist familiar with primitive societies might consider this as a feature of the centralized control of those societies, an example of Dahomey’s redistributive economy. But a historian trained in Roman late antiquity, for instance, might regard these injunctions as little different from the Roman institution of the colonate, a highly complex state’s method of control over the agricultural economy and its tenant farmers. How one interprets Dahomey and, in turn, how one uses it as a comparandum for Christian Nubia, depends considerably on one’s perspective. If Dahomey’s economy is a meaningful parallel for Christian Nubia, it is not in the way previous scholars have meant. Dahomey had local markets, money, and foreign trade, as appears to have been true of Nubia.39 Its king played a strong role in its economy, as appears to have been true of Nubia as well. But royal control in Dahomey was made manifest through mechanisms wholly lacking in Nubia. Dahomey’s royal Annual Customs involved an active and meticulously calculated process of wealth redistribution, in which gifts were received by the court and then dispersed in a recurring cycle of exchange.40 We have no evidence to suggest that the Nubian kings acted in this way in the Christian era. The evidence we have for gift giving in the Christian period is specifically in the private sphere, as acts by private citizens in the act of land purchasing and pious self-promotion.41 Modern scholars have turned to Dahomey’s state sphere for parallels but have neglected Dahomey’s private sphere. This is selective use—willfully or through ignorance—of data that may not fit well in any case. A central part of the thesis of Polanyi’s The Great Transformation is the claim that the nineteenth-century liberal economic order introduced a relationship between economy and society that was fundamentally new to world history. One aspect of this new relationship, subordinating society to the market economy, was “the commodification of land, labour and money.”42 Because Polanyi believed that the rupture of the nineteenth century was profound, he thought that in the preindustrial world land as a commodity and money as a means of exchange were insignificant. This approach made Polanyi predisposed to downplay the role of the land market and 39. For foreign and domestic trade in Nubia, see Welsby 1998, 201–215 and Edwards 2004, 247–248. For the role of money in Nubia, see the discussion herein, 171. 40. Polanyi 1966, 33. 41 . See below, 102. 42 . Levitt 2006, 383.

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money when and where he found it. Consequently, using his parallels may lead us to adopt his biases and thereby cloud our own vision of private land ownership and currency—even when evidence for it, in the Nubian case, sits in plain sight.

al-Mas’udı, the Arabs, and Nubia Leaving Polanyi aside, any use of al-Mas’ūdī to assert that Nubian kings had absolute ownership rights over land in Nubia is unwarranted. To get a better sense of what his testimony actually supports, I quote the most relevant passage in full: Muslim citizens resident in Aswan, own many estates (diyâ’) in the Nubian territory and pay a tax on their income to the king of Nubia. These estates were bought from the Nūba many years ago, sometime between the dynasty (dawla) of the Omayyads and the Abbasids. When the Caliph al-Ma’mūn visited Egypt, the king of Nubia submitted a complaint against the holders of these estates. He sent a delegation to Fustāt to inform the Caliph that some Nubian subjects who were his slaves (‘abīdu-hu) had sold the lands to the Aswan citizens but those lands were property of the king and not property of the tenants; the tenants held those farms only in the capacity of slaves who work them.43 First, nowhere does al-Mas’ūdī say that the Nubian king held all land in his territory. He states only that “those lands” sold to the Muslims of Aswan were “property of the king.” Second, nowhere does al-Mas’ūdī mention any fictional land leases by the king to circumvent the fact of royal land ownership. Such fictional land leases are a modern historiographical invention. Al-Mas’ūdī nowhere mentions any law undergirding universal royal land ownership or the collection of a nominal rent in lieu of a tax. If we saw such references, we would still have to proceed with caution and remember al-Mas’ūdī’s own cultural context: Islamic law posited that land was the collective possession of the Muslim community, managed for it by the caliph.44

43 . Vantini 1975, 134. 44 . See Frantz-Murphy 1999 generally for land tenure concepts in Islamic Egypt and Frantz-Murphy 1999, 238 on the role of the caliph in Islamic jurisprudence.

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It would be better to read al-Mas’ūdī not through the eyes of Polanyi and Dahomey but by using a more geographically and chronologically proximate parallel, the late Roman Empire. Historians of Roman late antiquity are used to thinking of the Roman emperor as the owner of tremendously large landed estates. Leasing plots from these estates to private tenants is well attested. The phenomenon of the enapographos georgos or enrolled farmer—the protoserf of the modern feudal model of Roman late antiquity—is also widely known. These enrolled farmers were legally bound to their plots and could readily have been described as “slaves” by a foreigner unfamiliar with the Roman legal system. But these factors do not make the Roman emperor owner of all land in the empire. By way of analogy, imagine the Roman imperial government’s reaction in the fifth century ad if it belatedly discovered that land belonging to the imperial household had been sold in the previous century by its tenants or managers to citizens of the rival Persian Empire. Then consider how the resulting tension might have looked through the eyes of, for example, a sixth-century Gothic historian. Imagine the misunderstandings that could result. Similar misunderstandings would be a weak historiographical tool with which to abolish private land tenure in early medieval Nubia. If anything, the evidence from al-Mas’ūdī seems instead to support the notion that some peasants in early medieval Nubia were only too familiar with the language and practice of private land sales and took advantage of the practice to sell land at any opportunity. The evidence from later medieval Nubia only strengthens that picture. At any rate, al-Mas’ūdī’s image of Nubians as unpropertied slaves is simply part of a larger Arab literary topos, in which blacks more generally are fit only for slavery and Nubian is interchangeable with slave. Abu Shama’s description of the Nubian raid on Aswan in the 1170s first calls the raiders “blacks and slaves” (as-sūdān wa-l-’abīd) before going on to identify them simply as “slaves” for the rest of his narrative.45 Yaqut b. Abdalla ar-Rumi, a thirteenth-century geographer of Greek Christian origin, cites the prophet Muhammad’s remark that “[t]he best slave for you is the Nûba.”46 Moreover, the repeated assertion on the part of Arab historians and geographers that Nubia was impoverished and worthless

45 . Vantini 1975, 368. Compare Maqrizi’s comparable use of the term slaves in reference to the same raid: Vantini 1975, 673. 46. Vantini 1975, 346.

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is fundamental to Islamic historiography for justifying the baqt treaty that governed relations between Egypt and Nubia. Arab authors can cast a blind eye on unconquered Nubia’s anomalous position by dismissing its worth. This dismissal of Nubians as slaves in an impoverished land is in keeping with a more general Arab dismissal of Africa as a whole. The word ’abid or “slave” remains a common way to refer to black Africans in Arabic today.47 In the Muslim scholarly worldview of the time, African civilizations were considered less worthy of attention. They fell outside recognized categories, which reserved most interest for the Islamic world and the great empires that preceded or survived alongside it, such as Persia, India, China, and Rome.48 Al-Mas’ūdī passes on remarks from Galen that black Africans have “imperfect composition” of the brain and “poor intelligence.”49 Al-Mas’ūdī has been called “the Herodotus of the Arabs” and “the Muslim Pliny.”50 His vision of a universal history encompassing material ranging from Christian Europe to the Far East, coupled with his claims to have traveled broadly throughout the lands he discusses, would appear to bolster his credibility. But some modern scholars have argued that al-Mas’ūdī’s eyewitness claims are rhetorical tropes—fictions, in essence—that he adopted under the influence of classical historiography.51 Modern scholars consider his research “superficial” and note that he “accepted tales and legends without criticism.”52 Mas’ūdī’s information on Africa tends to focus more on the natural world than on Africa’s social and political condition, suggesting his reliance on merchants and other commercial sources.53 While al-Mas’ūdī has a reputation has a well-traveled writer, he never went to Nubia. He collected information on Nubia while traveling through Egypt and staying in Fustat in 944. He cites as a particular source of information an earlier interview he had with an envoy of

47. Hunwick and Powell 2002, xix with note 14. 48. Shboul 1979, 151. 49. Vantini 1975, 124. 50. Shboul 1979, xviii. 51 . Radtke 1990/1991, 12. 52 . Brockelmann 1993, 403. 53 . Khalidi 1975, 99–100.

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the ruler of the Great Oases during the envoy’s visit to Fustat in 942.54 This informant might have been well positioned to report on a number of aspects of Nubian life and certainly could have given al-Mas’ūdī the name of Nubia’s current king, if al-Mas’ūdī had not gleaned it from other sources. But how reliable would this envoy have been on other aspects of Nubian life? Other eyewitness accounts of Nubian life are also suspect: Abu Shama, for instance, ignores Dongola’s monumental brick buildings, claiming there are “no brick houses, except the royal residence of the king.”55 This offhand remark may betray a more general Arab literary tendency to focus on the Nubian king to the detriment of the rest of Nubia. Equally significant is the Arab historiographical tendency to draw parallels between Nubia and Rome.56 Al-Umari, a qadi and state secretary in Cairo in the first half of the fourteenth century, wrote about the Nubian kingdom based at Dongola in two works, an encyclopedia called Masâlik al-absâr and a guide to epistolography called At-Ta’rîf. In the first work, describing the borders of Egypt, he writes that its southern frontier “passes through the country of the Badâriba and the Rûm [Romans] of Nubia.”57 Only Monneret de Villard has noticed this reference in alUmari.58 Ibn Hawqal, writing much earlier in the tenth century ad, says that the Nubians and Ethiopians (i.e., the Habasha) “are Christians and conform to the manners of life of the Rûm.”59 Al-Istakhrî makes similar remarks, also in the tenth century.60 Even earlier, a ninth-century legal scholar, Abu-l-Qasim ‘ar. b. ‘al. b. ‘abd al-Hakam, also compared the Nubians to the Romans. Discussing the first conflicts between Islam

54 . Shboul 1979, 194. 55 . Welsby 2002, 119 attributes this quote to al-Mas’ūdī, but Abu Shama (Vantini 1975, 370) quotes Mas’ūd the Aleppin, an ambassador from Shams ad-Dawla to the Nubian king in the 1170s. Al-Mas’ūdī died in the 950s. 56. See also comparisons between the Sudanese horsemen called the Balliyyîn and the Rûm in al-Idrisi: Vantini 1975, 276. For these horsemen as the Beja, see Cuoq 1986, 52 note 162. In this context, as in the Nubian examples previously discussed, “Roman” simply means “Christian.” 57. Vantini 1975, 516: ilà ar-rûm min bilâd an-nûba. 58. “Anche al-‘Omari cita a sud dell’Egitto i ‘Rûm di Nubia dopo la cataratta’,” at Monneret de Villard 1938, 221. 59. Vantini 1975, 150. 60. Vantini 1975, 111.

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and Christian Nubia and setting the scene for the baqt settlement, Abul-Qasim writes that Muslim “cavalry entered the land of Nubia like the summer expeditions of the Rum (sawa’if ar-rum).”61 This is part of a pattern in which Muslims saw Nubia and thought of Rome. We would do well to join them and ask how that perspective altered Muslim understanding of Nubia. Modern scholars of the Arab view of Byzantium have traced its evolution. This view, initially in sympathy for Roman monotheism, soon turned to “scorn of Byzantine wealth and luxury.”62 To many Arab writers, “the Byzantines were the opposite of all that was Arab or Islamic.”63 For being Christian, for remaining non-Muslim, Nubia might well have been seen as Roman. Nubia and Rome remained independent, defying Muslim rule. From a Muslim perspective, man’s proper place is in subservience only to God. From this perspective, the late antique Roman East might well be mystifying. Its complex legal and economic instruments governed peasant relations to land owner and state that have been described as feudal in many modern works. If Nubia displayed the same economic patterns, Muslim writers might easily dismiss it with generalizations about slavery and royal ownership. Nubian studies scholars who rely on al-Mas’ūdī’s testimony in writing Nubian history have shown no awareness of this larger context. Ahmad Shboul, author of a monograph on al-Mas’ūdī and his view of non-Muslims, argues that it is not possible to understand al-Mas’ūdī’s remarks on any single country without understanding his attitudes toward nonMuslims generally.64 Nubian archaeologists willing to follow al-Mas’ūdī without understanding these attitudes have given his testimony too much credit as a result. The sole attempt among modern authors to refute the evidence of al-Mas’ūdī comes from a modern Nubian scholar, Ali Osman. Noting al-Mas’ūdī’s claim that a ninth-century Nubian king protested to the caliph al-Ma’mum that all Nubian land was his property and all Nubians his slaves, Osman asserts, without doubting the veracity of al-Mas’ūdī’s account, that “the statement of the king was not factual but rather a legal

61 . Vantini 1975, 56. 62 . Shboul 1978, 50. 63 . Shboul 1988, 126. 64 . Shboul 1979, xxiv.

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argument on behalf of the Nubians” losing land to Arabs at Aswan.65 Then, from his own perspective as a Nubian, he adds: In present day Nubia land possession is of the utmost importance. Its essential importance is not based on any productivity value, but on the prestige which ownership bestows. Ownership of a piece of land, however small and seemingly insignificant, is in essence proof of Nubian citizenship. Any Nubian who is known not to own even the smallest plot of land is referred to as an ‘Arab,’ meaning ‘stranger.’ . . . Thus, it is that in present day Nubia land is never sold except in the most exceptional and extreme cases. Even when a sale is made, land is only sold to fellow Nubians and never, under any circumstances, to non-Nubians.66 The circumstantial explanation Osman provides for this attitude, “the simple fact that good arable land is scarce in Nubia,” would have been as true in the Christian period as it is today. From Osman’s perspective, then, we may imagine that al-Mas’ūdī’s version of the story is a distorted reflection of the fact that in medieval Nubia private land tenure existed but only for Nubians.

An Alternative View of Nubian Historiography Earlier interpretations of Nubian land tenure and the monetization of the Nubian economy in the Christian period share a tendency to look for parallels to Christian Nubia in eighteenth-century Dahomey. This work proceeds under the assumption that a better place to look for such parallels is, first, in modern Nubia and, next, in Egypt and Sudan more generally. This assumption follows the line taken by Adams, Edwards, and others previously discussed (pp. 4–5) that a presumption of continuity should guide our understanding of the flow of Nubian history. This presumption should include the study of postmedieval and even modern Egypt and Sudan as useful sources for understanding Christian Nubia. Osman and Jay Spaulding have been two leading advocates of this approach. Osman has argued that “many of the indigenous political,

65 . Osman 1982a, 195. 66. Osman 1982a, 195.

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economic, and religious organizations and institutions of present-day Nubia are a continuation of earlier practices. Almost all these practices show Christian and sometimes even pre-Christian features.”67 Logically, this means that scholars of Christian Nubia cannot rely on the tools of a single discipline but must engage archaeology, ethnography, linguistics, and even folklore.68 The validity of this approach seems demonstrated by the topography of the area. As one modern scholar has put it, “[t]he names of most twentieth-century settlements in Lower Nubia can be traced back to the medieval period and patterns of settlement seen in the region in recent centuries seems likely to have much in common with those established in the medieval period.”69 Other indications of cultural continuity abound. Students of modern Nubian oral literature record stories with strong Christian elements. Similarly, Nubian agricultural and chronological vocabulary displays links to Greek and Coptic predecessors.70 Qasr Ibrim’s demotic material is sparse, but limited indications suggest cultural continuity between its contents and later aspects of Nubian life. A woman’s letter requesting advice from an oracle, which may date to the late Ptolemaic period, includes a cryptic reference to “the room in which the thread is” and asks “if I am to leave it in there, or the one which is behind it.”71 This text’s editor has suggested that this is a reference to “some matter of feminine status” and notes that “sewing plays a major role in the preparation for modern Nubian marriage ceremonies.”72 Thus, certain cultural practices in modern Nubia might conceivably have antecedents from more than two thousand years ago. Similarly, this sort of cultural continuity allows us to look elsewhere in early modern Sudan for practices that illuminate medieval Nubia. Ample traces exist of Nubian migration from the Nile Valley to Darfur in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.73 Modern scholars have argued that Ain Farah in northern Darfur was in much earlier periods a Christian monastery,

67. Osman 1982b, 74. 68. Osman 1982b, 74. 69. Edwards 2004, 228, sic. 70. Kronenberg 1979, 173–174 for oral literature and 175 for vocabulary. 71 . Ray 2005, 8. 72 . Ray 2005, 13, citing Kennedy 1978, 171–202. 73 . MacMichael 1918.

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with material remains imported from the Nubian Nile Valley.74 A short list preserving words from an extinct Nubian language in Kordofan shows clear affinities to forms of Nubian spoken in the Nile Valley; Hill Nubian, a family of related dialects, still survives in Kordofan’s Nuba Mountains.75 If there has been a significant turning point in Nubian cultural life other than the introduction of new religions in the last two millennia, modern scholars agree that it came with the introduction of the saqiya or waterwheel, which became widespread in the post-Meroitic period. Discussing the impact of the saqiya on Nubian agriculture, David Edwards wrote that “[w]e must also suppose that the Nubians themselves underwent major transformations during this period as they learned new ways of farming, developed new notions of land ownership, and began to live according to new agricultural calendars.”76 But this is a turning point that allows us to understand medieval Nubia by studying the saqiya in modern Nubia and neighboring Egypt from the ancient to the modern periods (see chapter 4). We have seen how modern scholarship has argued for the absence of private property in Nubia. Since the counter-argument to that case— namely, the existence of Nubian land sales—has not persuaded everyone, it is worth making it in more detail, by demonstrating the existence of private land tenure rights and a monetized economy in Christian Nubia. This alternative vision is not of a free market with unfettered private land tenure. Such a vision would also ignore both the documentary evidence immediately at hand and the comparisons available to us from other places and times in Sudanese history. One feature we find in both Nubia and other Sudanese parallels is a certain level of conspicuous consumption. In our Nubian documentary evidence, public feasting at the conclusion of land sales is thoroughly documented. In the following two chapters, we will explore the structure of the land sales and consider the social meaning of these feasts. Comparison to other Sudanese cultural practices will show that these feasts are part of a Sudanese tradition of wealth redistribution, an indigenous African cultural practice onto which Greco-Roman legal forms have been grafted.

74 . Arkell 1959. 75 . For the extinct language (“haraza”), see Bell 1973, Bell 1975 and Rilly 2010, 166. For more general discussion of Nubian in Kordofan (“Hill Nubian”) in its context in the larger family of Nubian languages, see Rilly 2009, 163–165. 76. Edwards 2004, 203. See also the discussion of the saqiya at Welsby 2002, 184.

4

Nubian Land Sales as a Legal Genre The Structure of the Nubian Land Sale The majority of Nubian land sales come from the Qasr Ibrim finds. The entire corpus is made up of just more than twenty sales, sixteen of them from Qasr Ibrim. Of these sixteen land sales, a dozen are from the twelfth century, in Old Nubian. Qasr Ibrim’s Archive 3 also includes land cessions and donations directly related to the transactions described in the sales. The evidence for land sales found in this corpus reveals that private land tenure and the associated rights of purchase and alienation were deeply embedded in Nubian society. Of the few Nubian land sales from sites other than Qasr Ibrim, one is from Dirr, a Nubian village north of Qasr Ibrim.1 This text was originally published nearly one hundred years ago by Griffith and dated by him to the tenth century ad. It was subsequently redated by Plumley to the late 1190s.2 This, too, proved to be in error, as Browne’s ultimate edition of the text showed that its protocol named a king who had held the throne of Nubia at some point before 1155.3 This Dirr land sale is thus a slightly earlier parallel to the Ibrim texts.

1 . Griffith 1913’s text no. IV is Berlin Museum P. 11277, reportedly from the Borchardt 1908 purchase. For Dirr in the twentieth century, prior to its flooding, see Hopkins and Mehanna 2010, 199–207. 2 . Plumley 1978, 239–240 redates this text to a year or so before 1199 and prints a new text for lines 2–4. 3 . See Browne 1992a for discussion and revision of this text; see also below, page 131. The divergence from Plumley’s redating comes from a rereading of line 2 to include reference to the dad ourouel (King David) known from the earlier twelfth century rather than the basa ourouel (King Basil) known from the late twelfth century. See also Browne 1989a for Browne’s earlier attempt at revising the text’s protocol.

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Török’s discussion of the Nubian economy4 drew attention to three other relevant documents from sites other than Qasr Ibrim: a land mortgage5 by a woman named Thekla, from the reign of the Nubian king Merkurios (early eighth century) and two Coptic-language land sales6 from the reign of Ioannes (early ninth century). An Old Nubian text found at Kulubnarti contemporary to the Qasr Ibrim land sales is too fragmentary to be a demonstrable land sale but has a number of structural similarities to the other surviving examples.7 An Old Nubian legal text from Nauri gives us yet another example.8 The Qasr Ibrim land sales and these other parallels reveal the prototypical form of land sales in Christian Nubia. These texts typically begin with an invocation of the Holy Trinity, followed by some indication of the date, with considerable variability in precision. Then, a protocol follows listing an unfixed number of current high-ranking officeholders. The formal body of the text contains a statement by the seller naming the purchaser and describing the land, its price, and the circumstances of its sale. Those circumstances sometimes include an explanation of previous transactions involving the same plot and frequently include a description of how much food and drink was consumed by the witnesses to the sale. A witness list completes each sale. Despite this consistent structure, considerable flexibility appears at each step of the process. There appears to have been no set rule concerning the dating formula, the number of officeholders listed in the protocol, or the amount of detail necessary to describe the plot in question. Equally, there seems to have been no set rule over how land was valued or paid for, how many witnesses were necessary to formalize the transaction, or how much food and drink those witnesses were to be given. The sections that follow will explore several of these features in turn. The results will show that, while Nubian land sales may adhere to a general legal structure, the variations within that structure are crucial for understanding the society of Christian Nubia. Particularly, the variations in the number of witnesses and the amounts of food and drink given to them, which is discussed in

4 . Török 1978, 294. 5 . Crum 1905 no. 447. 6. Crum 1905, nos. 449 and 450; for the protocols of these texts, see Griffith 1928, 132. 7. Browne 2000 and 151 below. 8. Griffith 1928, 128–130 and 151 below.

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chapter 5, reveal Nubian land sales to be, in large part, social ceremonies in which the participants reinforce their own place in the social hierarchy.

Paying for a Land Purchase Nubian land sales give us no way to determine the absolute price or value of land, because they provide no indication of the amounts of land involved. The recorded sale prices range (see table 5.1 in chapter 5) from 1 piece of gold and a dart() to 20 pieces of gold.9 Of the eight land sales and one land cession specifying a price, eight give that price in gold, ngapi or ngapil, before which Browne invariably supplies “(pieces of)” in his translations. Only one land sale, 36, specifies a different purchase price, “1 male camel named ‘Nubian,’ 1 ornamental precious stone, 1 silver ring . . . 1 slave.” This last text led William Adams to conclude that land in Nubia was not expensive.10 To be sure, we would like to know the size and location of the plot or the relative value of the average camel or the average slave. Since Kapopi’s release of one slave, detailed in 33, needed as much documentation as a number of the land sales, we cannot assume that the land in 36 was cheap or that the same held for Nubia generally. Sale 36 tells us only that gold was the standard method of payment but not a necessary one: Slaves and other commodities could work as well. We see this in the sale to Neuesi, the daughter of Adama and Anenikoli. Given Adama the eparch’s prominence in the Qasr Ibrim texts and given the appearance of other eparchs as land purchasers in these same texts, I have suggested that Neuesi, the purchaser in 36, is the daughter of Adama the eparch. Two other land sales are connected in some way to the eparchate in which slaves make up part of the purchase price.11 In one, Gourresi the eparch buys a parcel of land for 2 silver dirhems, forty pigs, and ten slaves. In another, Marturokoudda the eparch buys a parcel of land for ten gold coins and one slave.

9. See 39 and 40, respectively. (In the latter, Browne supplies ngapil for “gold” at line 16, with a note citing the former for comparison.) For darti or dart() as “one half” in the first edition, see Browne’s note to 39.16. Darti - indicates, rather, an unknown commodity. An unpublished account from Qasr Ibrim, P.QI, inv. 64/26.8 shows that darti - cannot indicate a half, since its presence in line 4 of the recto modifies no other commodity or unit; since the preceding lines indicate numbers of dirhems; and since the same text uses pakkat - to indicate where half a dirhem is intended. 10. For this conclusion, see below, 180. 11 . Unpublished EA 90227 and unpublished EA 90229, respectively.

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We may suppose any eparch to be wealthy, either by virtue of his position or as a requirement for it. Eparchs were, historically, the officials tasked with fulfilling Nubia’s responsibilities to Egypt under the ancient baqt system, the agreement calling for the transport and payment to Egypt of hundreds of slaves per year.12 This official responsibility would make any eparch well positioned to increase his own slaveholdings with relative ease. It is even possible to imagine that our eparchs (and in one case, an eparch’s daughter) include slaves in their purchase prices because the eparchs are, in essence, skimming off the top of the baqt slave trade for their personal gain. This speculation may reveal how payment methods were determined. There is no apparent connection between the size of the plots for sale and the price of land in each sale. This may simply be because we remain uncertain of the size of the plots. The educated guesses made in the next section about the size of the plots do not change this picture. If eparchs paid for land with slaves because slaves were a commodity readily available to them, this suggests that the nature of payment was negotiable. If the buyer and seller could not agree on a certain price in gold or silver, other items might substitute to fit the seller’s needs or the buyer’s capacity. This flexibility in the price of land is an indicator of the open nature of the Nubian land market.

Plot Size and Land Surveys in Nubia How Large Were Nubian Landholdings? None of these documents gives any indication of the size of the land plots. Old Nubian does not seem to have a term to describe land area nor do we get any sense that such terminology is required in the text of the sales themselves. Here, I propose two complementary ways to calculate—or at least guess—the size of Nubian landholdings. First, external literary evidence provides guidance. Ibn Selim Al-Aswani, who traveled to Dongola on official business in the tenth century, left a description, preserved by al-Maqrizi, of the agricultural conditions in the regions south of the first cataract: It is a poor and rocky area. It is narrower than the upper part. Its villages are right on the banks of the Nile. . . . The Nile does not flood 12 . Although see Spaulding 1995, 591–593 for a challenge to the claim that these hundreds of slaves were ever actually delivered.

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its lands because the banks are very high, so they are divided into blocks of one, two or three feddans and irrigated by water wheels driven by oxen.13 If al-Maqrizi’s transmission of al-Aswani is trustworthy on this point, the Qasr Ibrim land sales treat plots just large enough to be served by a single saqiya (waterwheel) or larger plots built up from such component units.14 The topographical descriptions of the plots appearing in these sales provide a way forward. Consider the sale by Aggestotil of a garden plot to Mashshouda the choiak-eikshil in 39. Aggestotil describes his parcel as bordering the lands of Abba Ngal and the Michael Church to the west and the land of the people of Faras and additional lands of the Michael Church to the east. If we follow al-Aswani, the two plots to the west and the two plots to the east of Aggestotil’s garden plot were at least 1 feddan (or 0.64 acres) each, possibly as large as 3 feddan. This means that on the eastern and western borders of Aggestotil’s plot were parcels of at least 2 feddans, if not as many as 6. This requires a comparable size of at least 2 feddans and as many as 6 feddans for Aggestotil’s own plot: at 0.64 acres to the feddan, he could have been selling 1.28, 2.56, or 3.84 acres.15 This approach is highly speculative with a wide range of error and can be tested against a second approach for consistency. The obvious starting point is the saqiya, or the waterwheel, the innovation that produced such a change in Nubian agriculture in antiquity.16 The saqiya can refer to either the wheel itself or the field it irrigates.17 The watering capacity of a saqiya can vary, based on “variables such as the height of lift, type of lifting element, number of draft animals,” and so forth.18

13 . Translation from Osman 1982b, 77. Cf. Vantini 1975, 601–602. 14 . This accords with the situation later, during the Funj sultanate, in which the length of landholdings parallel to the Nile “tended to be drawn at the limits of the irrigating capacity of a waterwheel” (Spaulding 2007, 54). 15 . See Hinz 2003, 95–96 for the medieval feddan at 6,368 square meters, for our purposes 0.64 acres. 16. For a discussion of the redating of the introduction of the saqiya to late antiquity (the so-called X-Group period), see Edwards 1996, 80–81. For the saqiya generally, see Wikander 2000, 267–272, Bonneau 1993, 220–234, and Oleson 1984, 370–385. 17. A point I owe to Adam Łajtar, whose observations inspired the subsequent discussion. 18. Oleson 1984, 385.

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A saqiya could water as much as 4 feddan (2.56 acres), but when the Nile is at its lowest, this figure could go as low as 1.5 feddan per saqiya (0.96 acres).19 (Nearly half the agricultural output might go to maintaining the animals necessary to make the saqiya function.20) As a conservative average, irrigating capacity per saqiya could be estimated at 2 to 3 feddans. This plot size, of 1.28 to 1.92 acres, would be the basic unit of measure, a plot of one saqiya. This range parallels the testimony of al-Aswani, whose plots of 1 to 3 feddans would be 0.64 to 1.92 acres. If al-Aswani’s description of the plot sizes of 1, 2, and 3 feddans is taken as an approximation rather than an exact figure, he may be describing plots of half the area irrigated by one saqiya, plots of the full area irrigated by one saqiya, and plots of 1.5 times the full area irrigated by one saqiya. Alternatively, al-Aswani’s mention of 1, 2 or 3 feddans may simply be a reference to the saqiya’s seasonal range. With Aggestotil’s garden plot, the two plots to the west and the two to the east might indicate two separate saqiyas to the west and two more to the east. Aggestotil’s garden plot would, in turn, be at least two saqiyas in size. Remembering a saqiya’s watering capacity (0.96 acres at the low end and 2.56 acres at the high end), a plot would be about 1.92 acres to 5.12 acres in size. This overlaps well with the results of the first approach. Both approaches support the conclusion that Aggestotil’s two-saqiya garden plot was roughly 2 to 4 acres in size, and other plots comparably described in the Nubian evidence were most likely the same size. A closer look at the saqiya in a Nubian context can help test this hypothesis. The Old Nubian term for a saqiya is oskale, which appears in only three of the published texts from Qasr Ibrim. The first case is a letter from Masi, eparch of Nobadia, instructing the letter’s recipient, Elonnga, to “look for a water-wheel and bring it.”21 The second case is an account of “the lands of the Jesus-Church of Touggili that are in Nobadia,” which is discussed in more detail in chapter 7.22 This account lists five waterwheels,

19. Herzog 1957, 136. Compare the fi gures given at Bonneau 1993, 221: The average irrigation speed of a saqiya was 330 square meters per day. Cf. Oleson 1984, 369, citing figures from nineteenth-century Egypt for “a pot-garland driven by two oxen,” sufficient to water 2 to 2.5 hectares of land, or 4.94 to 6.18 acres. For the waterwheel in Adindan, in modern Nubia, see Hopkins and Mehanna 2010, 123–139. 20. Herzog 1957, 136. 21 . 24 . 22 . See below, 189.

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each of which it describes by giving northern and southern boundaries. Here, waterwheels are clearly synonymous with the plots they irrigate. The third case is the land sale of Kapopi, discussed at the beginning of the chapter. Her sale includes boundary descriptions for eleven separate plots. In the first four, she describes the plots in part by reference to nearby waterwheels (oskale): in three cases, a neighboring plot has one waterwheel, and the final case has “two water-wheels in a plot of golden millet (?).”23 This is hardly a large sample, but it gives us something to work with. Three of the four border plots Kapopi describes with precision are watered by only one saqiya and are thus not likely to have been larger than the 1 or 2 acres estimated as the typical plot size. Larger plots such as Aggestotil’s—with two waterwheels instead of one—would appear to have been in the minority. If this is true, why were plots so small? The narrow Nile riverbank in this region is one factor potentially limiting the size of Nubian landholdings. Partible inheritance is another. Nubian legal documents suggest the impact that their respective sales and cessions would have on the inheritance of affected parties was a concern, the legitimacy of which is clear from other parallels. Centuries later, the application of Islamic laws of inheritance in Ottoman Sudan would result in what one author has called “a spectacular fractionalization of land.”24 While Sudan’s postmedieval Funj sultanate of Sinnar recognized no share smaller than the produce of one-twelfth of a saqiya, twentieth-century British authorities faced resistance to attempts to impose a legal minimum of 1/576th of a saqiya, “a plot about the size of a billiard table.”25 This process of extreme land fragmentation had not yet begun in Christian Nubia, but there is some evidence for a decrease in plot size through partible inheritance. In several cases, Kapopi from text 36 holds only one-third of a given plot. In one case, she states that “in the acacia plantation one third is

23 . 36.20: “ngapin eimlaeia oskale blo.” Łajtar and Ruffi ni 2011, 169 reject “millet” as the meaning of eimil in EA 90225, but “one hundred” will not do in all of its other attestations. What, in this case, would be meant by describing a boundary plot as “two water-wheels, one hundred of gold”? Could Kapopi be describing the purchase price of the neighboring plot? 24 . Spaulding 1982b, 5. 25 . Spaulding 1982b, 5–7. By contrast, note the modern example of the Nubian cited at Herzog 1957, 142, whose holding of 700 feddan was considered exceptionally large. See also Fernea 1973, 18 for partible inheritance of shares of a saqiya or a date tree in the Fedija area of preresettlement modern Nubia.

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mine, in the thorn patch one third is mine, in the dried up water course one third is mine, in the plot of Douwwi a half is mine (I hold it together with Enomedjou).” In another case, she notes that “there is 1 plot in the cotton field (?), one third is mine.” In a third case, she states that “there are 2 plots in . . . of the orchard of tashshi-trees, one third is mine.” She never indicates who holds the other two-thirds of the plots in question. Relatives—aunts, uncles, cousins—most likely hold their shares of land through inheritance from one of Kapopi’s ancestors. If so, this is an indication of several generations of inheritance. Since she holds most of her plots in their entirety, she most likely has no siblings and inherited her plots from her mother. Thus, the plots she holds one-third of are the plots her mother also held one-third of, presumably split with her relatives after they inherited the land from one of Kapopi’s grandparents.

The Case for Government Land Surveys Other than the owners, the one party with an interest in the size of a landholding would have been the government. The complex descriptions of individual holdings could easily complement a formalized government land survey. Other texts from Qasr Ibrim explicitly refer to such a survey system. Aggestotil’s land sale to Mashshouda (39) describes the plot in terms of its specified borders “according to the great survey of ChaêlSongoja” (“mashshide dau|eilla Chaên Songojan”). The stem for “survey” is mashe-, mash-, meaning “measure” or “bushel.”26 That mashshide conveys a more abstract sense of survey and not a more concrete meaning, for example, as a unit of land measure, is strongly suggested by the fact that no numbers are given to describe the size of the plot, either in this text or any of the others from Qasr Ibrim. Who was Chaêl-Songoja, and how did the “great survey” measure the plots in question? Browne identified the Chaêl-Songoja in 39 with the Chaêl in 37, therein described as mourtin ngod, Lord of the Horse.27 The basis for this identification is not solid. It rests on an association between the title Lord of the Horse and songoj in another Nubian land sale not found at Qasr Ibrim.28 This association led Browne to propose that the

26. Browne 1996a, 113, from the Sahidic Coptic mashe for “balance.” 27. Note to 34 .ii.20. 28. Note to 34 .ii.20, citing Browne 1989a.

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great surveyor Chaêl-Songoja in 39 is, literally, “Chaêl who is songoj” or eparch.29 However, the recurring references from Qasr Ibrim to individuals whose proper names appear to be Songoja prevents this hypothesis from being advanced too far.30 In any case, Adama appears in the same text as songoj, or Lord of the Mountain,31 usually translated as “eparch.”32 Chaêl the surveyor merely had a name that would have sounded odd to modern ears, something like Chaêl-Governor. As for his survey, Egyptian parallels may give a sense of how medieval Nubia worked. Cadastral operations are known in Egypt as early as the Third Dynasty.33 One such operation—that of the Ptolemaic village of Kerkeosiris—is known in great detail from the surviving records of the village scribe, Menches.34 This operation had two parts, a February survey recording all land currently under cultivation and a September survey noting all village land regardless of its cultivation status. This tradition—indigenous to Egypt and not imported by its Ptolemaic overlords—served practical purposes, to delimit land and help in legal disputes, but was first and foremost fiscal in purpose, serving the state’s revenue interests.35 A similar tradition emerged in Egypt after the GrecoRoman period. Every year in medieval Egypt, there was a preharvest survey, a document called the qundāq (through Syriac from the Greek kontakion or “small rule”) which “was supposed to contain the exact geometric description of the plot in question, copies of all the calculations, the names of the cultivators and of the crops,” and the amount owed in tax on each kind of crop.36

29. But Browne further proposed (note to 34 .ii.20) that the title may have been honorary, as he is not so described in any of the protocols found at Qasr Ibrim. This is not necessary, given the extent to which Nubian scribes seem to have felt comfortable adding or omitting names at will; see below, page 114. For the name Chael, see Monneret de Villard 1938, 100, considering it short for Michael, citing the case of the Nubian king of the late eighth and early ninth centuries ad. 30. See P.QI 3 Index I s.n. with P.QI 2 note to 22 .3 and Browne 1996a, 160–161. A similar problem exists with the title ngonnen (queen mother) and the name Ngonnen: see below, page 239. 31 . P.QI 3, xi. 32 . A point discussed at Browne 1989a, 217–218 and above at 34. 33 . Crawford 1971, 5. 34 . See Crawford 1971, 5–38 and Verhoogt 1998, 131–142. 35 . Crawford 1971, 6–7 and 36–38. 36. Rabie 1972, 73–74. Cf. Frantz-Murphy 1999, 249–250.

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Did a similar process exist in medieval Nubia? Text 60, the list of properties held in Nobadia by Dongola’s Jesus-Church, may be an example of a land owner’s self-declaration, required by the state as part of the cadastral process. Browne thought he detected further hints of a cadastre in Ngonnen’s 1198 ad land sale to Mashshouda of “one plot which consists of the fourth plot” (“aka parrela dlo pelin”), a cryptic phrase perhaps suggestive of the plot’s identification in a local survey.37 The unpublished Qasr Ibrim text NI 73 may be a fragment of such a land survey. According to the description of the text, it is a fragment of parchment in which “[b]oth sides are laid out in a series of rectangles, and there is diagonal writing in each of them. The writing is alternately in black ink and red, the black going downwards, the red upwards on one side and vice versa on the other.”38 I have been able to study this text only through a hand-drawn copy, and little of it is complete: It is impossible to tell whether the extant Old Nubian is individual words or proper names. Arranged as it is in a regular, gridlike format, it is highly suggestive of a land survey. No other genre for this text seems possible. It bears none of the ring letters, nonsense words, or repeated syllables typical of magical texts nor does it have any apparent religious phrasing, as could be expected given the alternating colors of ink. The isolated letters—an epsilon in one grid, a beta in another—might be numbers indicating the size of the respective plots. This approach in land sales of describing a plot not by any measurement of its area but simply by the names of its neighbors would be well suited to a gridlike cadastral system. This assertion is speculative, and admittedly, the exact function of the text remains unknown. However, if we are right, the Qasr Ibrim evidence contains vestigial traces of a cadastral process, the existence of which requires a state interest in land and its proceeds. This state interest, in turn, gives us insight into Nubia’s land taxation process, an exploration made in greater detail in chapter 7.39

Land Sales, Guardianship, and Inheritance Law As chapter 5 reveals, land sales in medieval Nubia required complex social ritual. Land sales were momentous social events taking place with the 37. Browne’s commentary to 38.15–16. 38. Unpublished description of Old Nubian textual finds from Qasr Ibrim from the British Museum Qasr Ibrim Archive. 39. See below, 184.

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participation and consent of the community. But subtle signs suggest that certain sales took place without the consent of specific interested parties or in anticipation of their objection. Consider 42 (a land cession, not a sale) and EA 90225, Qasr Ibrim’s last land sale.40 In the latter text, from 1463 ad, Eismalê, about whom we know nothing, declares, “I, Eismalê, say to my daughter, my child Ajejê, being full in age and power (?), (having) four cornfields I sell one to Eionngoka and Kasla.” In the former text, the author declares, “I, Mouhoumeti, with his friend Teulote, say to his son: regarding his land . . . giving it to Mashshouda . . . I cede it to him for 5 years.” Why should these parents have addressed their land sales and cessions specifically to their children? In Mouhoumeti’s case, the question turns on whose land appears in this cession. He describes the land in question as parre tanni (“his land”) rather than parre anna (“my land”). The first possibility is that the land belongs to an otherwise unexplained party in the text, Teulote. Why does Mouhoumeti mention his friend Teulote before even stating the terms of the cession? Maybe Mouhoumeti is ceding Teulote’s land to Mashshouda, but this is hardly a simple solution and does not explain how or why Mouhoumeti is ceding Teulote’s land in the first place. Teulote may appear simply as a witness of sorts. Alternatively, his appearance may be crucial for understanding which specific plots are part of the cession. Nubian land sales usually give specific borders, but here we learn only that the land is on both the east and the west (“tinokon mattokon”). On the east and west of what? Perhaps Teulote’s own land is the implied boundary here. Still, this indication of boundaries does not tell us who owned the land. The second option is that Mouhoumeti is ceding his own land and simply referring to himself in the third person. In this case, his son needs to know that the land is being ceded to Mashshouda for practical reasons: If Mouhoumeti dies and his son comes into his inheritance, part of that inheritance will not be available to him for the duration of the cession. The third option in Mouhoumeti’s case appears to be the most likely: From roughly the last decade of the twelfth century, he seems to be exercising control over his son’s land. Mouhoumeti’s ngal (“son”) is the most immediate antecedent to parre tanni. This is not a case of agency or indirect representation as it is, for instance, in Adama’s sale of Kapopi’s land

40. For which see Łajtar and Ruffi ni 2011.

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in 40. There, the seller addresses the general public and identifies the land he sells as someone else’s. Here, Mouhoumeti’s son needs to know that his land is being ceded to Mashshouda. In this case, Mouhoumeti presumably has the legal power to cede this land. If his son is a legal minor, Mouhoumeti, as his father, might be, in essence, legal guardian of his property. A more permanent alteration of an inheritance is hidden in the confusing terms of 41. In this text, Isakê, representative of Maia, writes a declaration that he has “sold that which is the possession of [Maia’s] and mine” to Mariamê.41 Isakê also states that “[Maia’s] husband sold that which is from the children” to Oeila.42 The text gives no explanation of the connection between Maia and Isakê, her representative. They may be siblings and, thus, co-owners of inherited land, but this is simply a guess.43 The text also does not explain whose children are involved, although Maia and her husband are the likely parents. Thus, both sales Isakê describes, to Mariamê and to Oeila, involve land in which the children would have a potential inheritance. Under this model, his declaration of both sales notifies his sister’s children that they will not receive his, their mother’s, or their father’s share of the land. The children will never have legal claim to the two plots in any way. Perhaps a similar situation occurred in Eismalê’s case in 1463. If the expression jellelêkon ertakon—“being full in age and power (?)”—is correctly interpreted, then Eismalê’s daughter Ajejê has no need for a legal property guardian, being a legally autonomous adult. Eismalê’s sale of one of the four plots directly, however, impacts her eventual inheritance. Eismalê’s declaration, without any indication of Ajejê’s explicit approval of the sale, serves to provide legal, implicit approval of the sale after the fact, by making her the recipient of the sale declaration. In essence, Qasr Ibrim’s last land sale also serves as an alteration to Eismalê’s unwritten will. The story with which this book begins, Kapopi’s land sale to Neusi in 1190 ad, provides further support for this model. 36 is unusual for Kapopi’s initial declaration of various conditions that appear necessary for her sale

41 . 41.4: “tadde aïdeken ourta einin janara.” 42 . 41.5–6: “tounyilo pelin. ogoji tannillo | janara.” 43 . I would like to thank Grzegorz Ochała for giving me his interpretation of this text, more convincing than the one I offered in earlier drafts.

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to be valid. She asserts that she is “competent” (eiril), “not being subject to litigation (?)” (kirtikounminil), acting “without denial” (ngaggikinynylo), and “barren in respect to daughter and son” (aslo ngallo mirena). The purpose of these assertions is clear: to reassure the purchaser—and the community at large—that the land being sold will not be encumbered by inheritance demands upon Kapopi’s death. The inverse situation may be evident in 44, a witnessed description of Enomariamê’s land sale. Enomariamê, daughter of Pella, has “inherited her share in the palm grove,” amounting to one palm tree, and sells it to a collective group of eight men and women described as “being from her children.”44 Whether these eight are her children or represent her descendants or extended family more generally, the group seems aware of the dangers of partible inheritance.45 These eight may all stand to inherit a portion of that single palm tree. But with an eye to ensuring that Enomariamê does not alienate the property before her death and that they all benefit from the property, they buy the tree preemptively. (Compare the solution in modern Nubia, where one study records that certain date palm groves “were bequeathed from generation to generation since ancient times.”46) The sales price of the tree is notably not given. Maybe this witnessed description of a land sale—without the full form of an actual deed of sale—is merely to mask a generational transfer of property while Enomariamê is still alive. Clearly, the stakes were higher than we might gather from the fact that only one tree is mentioned: The document records no less than fourteen witnesses, including Adama the eparch, affirming Enomariamê’s sale to her descendants. The rights of one’s extended family continue to play a role in land ownership in modern Nubian society. A recent study of Nubians in West Aswan records “two bitter internecine quarrels over land, both of which arose from the members of a nuclear family seeking to appropriate what was considered to be undue amounts of land for their own private use.”47 In each case, conflict stemmed from one family member wanting to make

44 . See above, 23. 45 . See also above, page 82, the discussion of modern British attempts to deal with partible inheritance in the Sudan, to the extreme case of a notional plot of land the size of a billiard table. See also Herzog 1957, 138 and Dafalla 1969, 64 for the calculation by a land clerk that “his own share … realized only half a square metre of land.” 46. Dafalla 1969, 72. 47. Jennings 1995, 148.

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alterations to family property and running afoul of the “Nubian tradition [which] stresses the common ownership of property—land, houses, crops, animals—by every member of the extended family, each person having rights in and obligations toward the whole.”48 It is this sort of conflict that Mouhoumeti, Isakê, Eismalê, and Kapopi were trying to avoid in their own legal declarations five to eight hundred years ago.

48. Jennings 1995, 148.

5

Nubian Land Sales as Ceremony Nubian land sales are more than economic transactions. The Qasr Ibrim texts—and parallels from elsewhere in Christian Nubia—suggest that Nubian land sales are potent social ceremonies in which local notables display their place in Nubian society. The two most important components of these land ceremonies are the witnesses and the food. The number of witnesses one brings to a land sale—and their rank—is a measure of one’s prestige. In turn, the ability to lavish food and drink on those witnesses is a measure of one’s wealth. Other factors play important roles as well. The scribes, for instance, are crucial, not simply for producing legitimate documents but also for producing some of the witnesses. Family-groups witness land sales en masse, their appearances recurring in concert with those of the scribes drafting the documents. In sum, Nubian land sales do more than mark the exchange of money for land; they consciously recreate the social structures and connections in Nubian society.

Feeding the Witnesses The Nature of the Tradition The role of the participants, particularly the scribes and witnesses, is central to understanding the social function of Nubian land sales. Scribes and witnesses are themselves unremarkable, a standard feature of many legal genres in the ancient and medieval worlds. What sets Old Nubian examples apart is the role of food. The record in many of these texts of food and drink paid to the scribes and witnesses raises the possibility that they were professionals. The food and drink dispensed to them would be payment for services rendered. As Adams has noted, it is possible to interpret the witness payment lists as having some sort of legal force: “Interestingly, several of the sales contracts include a detailed listing of payments in food

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or wine that were made to the scribe and/or the witnesses, as if to suggest that these were among the provisions of the contract.”1 The best example for exploring this issue is the land sale with which this study began, 36, in which Kapopi sells her land to Neuesi, daughter of Adama and Anenikoli. The relevant passage is worth quoting in full. The witness list for that sale is followed by several clauses Browne translates as follows: What they [the witnesses] ate and drank is: 5 pati of touskil, 1 komi of wine, 1 komi of anapiti, 100 loaves, 1 jar of gide in . . . of one kettle. I, ordering Aera and Loukasi son of Zôsima to write this certified document, witnessed it. I, Mashshouda, Deacon, who has the George-Church of the West, sitting in assembly with my Elders, wrote and witnessed. If one writes, deposits and proclaims the certified document, (his fee) is 1 roast of lion (?)2; if he does not eat, it is 1 komi of anapiti, 1 pati of touskil. Under Adams’s reading, these food-related clauses have the force of contract, guaranteeing payment to the participants. It is easy under this scenario to imagine that we are dealing with professional scribes and witnesses. Certainly, professional witnesses are known from contemporary Muslim comparanda.3 Ibn Khaldûn wrote that professional witnesses had their own shops and benches in every city.4 The qadi Ibn Fudala introduced the practice to Egypt in the late eighth century ad.5 In medieval Cairo, both students and scholars were able to make a living simply from serving as professional witnesses; their social networks spread from the

1 . Adams 1996, 231. 2 . Where Browne translates “roast of lion” perhaps read “gazelle” throughout; see “Corrections and Additions to Browne’s Old Nubian Dictionary,” found online at www. medievalnubia.info. 3 . Frantz-Murphy 1981, 205 note 4 cites Tyan 1960, 243–44 for discussion of the trustworthiness of professional witnesses. 4 . Ibn Khaldûn, The Muqaddimah (trans. F. Rosenthal, Princeton, 1958) 462 a reference I owe to Constable 1997, 64. 5 . Thung 1996, 6 citing Khan 1993, 173. Khan for his part suggests that witnesses in Arabic documents, “which have no validity in Islamic law, are a direct continuation” of preIslamic (e.g., Aramaic and Demotic) practices. The introduction of professional witnesses at a relatively late date is, by contrast, evidence suggesting against this continuity.

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law schools to the judges and the deputies of the Islamic judicial system.6 Some scholars regard these shuhūd (sing. shāhid) as “a revival of the Roman Byzantine notaries.”7 The practice was still seen in Egypt as late as the nineteenth century.8 The practice of professional witnesses could have entered Christian Nubia through prolonged exposure to such legal practices in neighboring lands.9 Yet scribes and witnesses in medieval Nubia receive food payments that do not seem to be consistent from one transaction to the next. Table 5.1 (page 93) shows no correlation between the number of witnesses and the amount fed to them.10 Similarly, table 5.2 shows no apparent correlation between the sale price of a plot of land and the number of witnesses brought to recognize the transaction. While the witnesses represent an expense, how great an expense one might be willing to incur depended—as far as we can tell—as much on the prestige one wanted to purchase as on the amount of the land in the transaction. This lack of a fixed price would at least caution against believing that Nubian witnesses were professionals. Whatever the witnesses’ status, evidence of witness payments shines light on an altogether different Nubian phenomenon, that of social competition for legitimacy and prestige. The absence of a set payment rate for witnesses allows those holding the witness feast to say to the public, “I feed my witnesses more than you do.” This competitive flexibility is the very point: The absence of a set rate of payment means that feeding the witnesses to a legal transaction becomes a consumption spectacle. As with so many other aspects of Qasr Ibrim’s land sales, these witness payments have received relatively little attention. When Browne inserted “his fee” into the translation previously quoted, he was generalizing based on references to witness payments in other texts. For the first appearance of witness payments in his publication of Archive 3, Browne wrote the following short note: “These are presumably the charges and gratuities referred

6. See Berkey 1992, 80 and 90. 7. Heffening 1993, 262. 8. Lane 1954, 116–117. 9. Stewart 1994, 372 noting that the study of professional witnesses “deserves a more systematic treatment.” I have been unable to determine, for instance, whether these witnesses had any expectation of a set rate of payment. For a general survey of the system of witnesses in the Islamic judiciary, see Tyan 1960, 236–252. 10. See below, 93.

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Table 5.1 Expenses Incurred in Sale and Cession Ceremonies. Text Number Number of Witnesses

Sale Price

32

11 (10 and a witnessing scribe)

6 gold pieces

34

14 (13 and a witnessing scribe); 30 (29 and a witnessing scribe)

36

26 (25 and a witnessing scribe)

37

16 (14, a witnessing scribe, self); 14 (13 and a witnessing scribe) 13 (12 and a witnessing scribe); 7 9 (8 and a witnessing scribe) 22 (21 and a witnessing scribe) 12 (11 and a witnessing scribe) 13 (12 and a witnessing scribe) 14 (13 and self) 6; 8

38 39 40 41 42 44 45

Expenses Incurred

4 merrina of wine 3 touskil 100 loaves 4 bushels of onions 4 dourini 1 bowl of gyde 12 gold pieces 29 loaves 4 anati 1 jar of gide 4 bushels of grain 1 anapiti 4 loaves 1 palal of gide For the letter writer: 2 anapiti 10 loaves 1 palal of gide 5 pati of touskil 1 male camel 1 precious stone 1 komi of wine 1 komi of anapiti 1 silver ring 100 loaves 1 jar of gide 20 gold pieces None specified

6 gold pieces

None specified

1 gold piece and None specified 1 dart() 1 gold piece and None specified 1 dart() None specified None specified 2 gold pieces

None specified

None specified None specified

None specified None specified (Continued)

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Text Number Number of Witnesses

Sale Price

Expenses Incurred

90225

11 (10 and a witnessing scribe)

9 gold pieces*

90226

2? (text is uncertain)

90227

1? (text is uncertain)

90229

None extant

90230

At least 3 (text is uncertain)

for two plots: 1) 13 pieces of gold; 2) 6 pieces of gold 10 slaves, 40 pigs, and 2 dirhem two plots: 1) 13 pieces of gold; 2) 1 slave and 10 pieces of gold. Other sums of gold appear, but text is lacunose down its center. 15 gold and other unknown commodities

2 wine 2 anapiti 100 loaves 4 kettles 4 bushels of grain None specified

Text is damaged, but none appears to be specified Fragmentary reference to 30 komi

Text is damaged, but none appears to be specified

*

With 120 “at face-value” where no units are specified, but gold is presumably implied. On “face-value” see below, page 178.

to as sag- (‘tariff’) in 35.16; they also include payment for the ‘letter writer’ in 34 i 30 and 40.23 (cf. also 34 i 26–27).”11 Browne then drew further attention to a similar appearance of witness payments in an Old Nubian legal document from Nauri,12 and this observation by an earlier scholar commenting on that text: “That the notary and the witnesses receive a fee after the conclusion of a legal transaction is still a standing tradition today.”13

11 . Commentary to 32 .25–28. 12 . For which, see below, page 151. 13 . Commentary to 32 .25–28, quoting Zyhlarz (“Dass der notar und die Zeugen nach Abschluss eines Rechtsgeschäftes eine ‘Zehrung’ zu bekommen haben, ist heute noch stehende Tradition.”).

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Yet Browne may have been hasty in connecting notary and witness payments with the term sag- or “tariff.” The appearance of the term he cites, in 35, is the only attestation of the term in the Old Nubian legal corpus.14 It appears in no other land sales, in relation either to witnesses or to anything else. It is not at all clear from the text that sag- is a tariff for the witnesses. In that text, Mena releases his servant Gaweson (?) to Papsil (?), Mena’s father being a witness. (Further discussion of Mena and Papsil follows; see page 117.) Five witnesses, including Kapenê, who may be a female scribe, also appear at the end of the text.15 As for the sag- in this text, “[t]he charge [sag-] that I paid on the 7th of Pachon is 1 loaf of bread.” This payment, a single loaf for five witnesses, is nowhere in keeping with the scale of witness payments we see in other texts (for which, see table 5.1). To be blunt, divided among five people, it seems unlikely to have satisfied any of them as a payment for their services. It seems rather more likely that the sag- or charge indicated here refers to something else entirely. Given the small amount of payment and the term’s absence from all other documented cases of witness payments, it seems safer to conclude that sag- is not the term describing these payments.16 No such specialized term seems to have existed at all. Medieval Nubians adopt specific legal terms from the Greco-Coptic tradition when their own language is inadequate to the task.17 In aspects of legal practice more closely aligned with their own cultural practices, Nubians had no need for specialized vocabulary. That may be precisely what we see here with the absence of a specific term to describe these witness payments. The Old Nubian texts use the same phrase to describe witness payments in all three published examples: “what they ate and drank is,” with a list of food and drink payments following.18 The Old Nubian term—kapa ngisannon—for “what they ate and drank” is consistent and clearly not borrowed from Greco-Coptic legal terminology. The phrase derives from kap-, kip(p)-, kop-, “to eat” and ge(i)-, gi-, “to drink.”19 The two words appear in 14. Browne 1996a, 155. The only other example he cites of the term appears in the longest Old Nubian text from Tamit, the inscription of the Church of Saint Raphael. Continuous sense is not possible in this case, but sag- does not appear to relate to scribal or witness payments. 15 . For Kapene, see below, 237. 16. For further discussion of this text, see below at 100. 17. See below, 158. 18. In 32, “kapa ngisannon”; in 34i, “kapa ngisan”; in 36, “kopa ngisan.” 19. Browne 1996a s.v.

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Old Nubian texts in other contexts without any legal connotation, in religious texts, for example. Kap- is also the root for the word kap(p)al- for “food” or “loaf of bread.” Kap- and ni- still have the same basic meanings, “to eat” and “to drink,” in modern Nubian.20 The presence of this phrase in these legal texts would appear to be nothing more than the scribe using common words to describe what must have been a common tradition.

The Future of the Witness Feeding Tradition One puzzling aspect of this land sale food tradition is its absence from Archive 3’s later texts at the end of the twelfth century. Qasr Ibrim’s Archive 3 includes several land sales—37, 38, 39, and 40—that do not include any record of food or drink given to the witnesses during the course of the sale. All of these land sales are, according to their protocols, from the reign of King Basil of Dotawo. Two of these sales (38 and 40) date to year 915 of the Era of the Martyrs, or 1198 and 1199 ad. All of the land sales in which food and drink are given to the witnesses date to the preceding reign of Moses George, also called variously Moses and George.21 Of these, only one (36) has an absolute date, the year 907 of the Era of the Martyrs (1190 ad). This apparent abandonment of the feeding component of Nubian land sales is not a change over time but simply a matter of scribal practice. Three scribes record feasting at the end of the land sales they describe: Dauti, in the retinue of the priest of the king (32); Papon, a priest and

20. Fadidja/Mahas: Khalil 1996, 57 and 76. 21 . This king has been the source of some confusion in the modern scholarship: MunroHay 1982/1983, 115–116 creates three men out of one, Moses George, Moses, and George, while admitting that these men might be the same. Welsby 2002, 260–261 takes the same approach. See also Godlewski 2008, 277, where Moses and two kings named George continue to have a separate simultaneous existence. 30, Moses George’s royal proclamation, calls the king “Môusês Geôrg(iou) ouroua.” He appears in 31 as “Môusês Ouroueil,” in 32, as “Geôrgi Ouroueil,” and so on. For the identification of all of these men as one, see Łajtar 2009, 89–97, arguing on the basis of his revision of a Faras inscription also naming him “Môusês Geôrgiou.” Further evidence comes from an unpublished text, QI inv. 78.2.8/49 A-C = NI 37, which includes the address side of a letter from Moses George. Excavation notes in the British Museum incorrectly describe the text as “from a certain Moses to one George the king, but the address clearly reads “Môusês (kai) Geôrg(ios) B(asi)l(eo)s Arou (kai) Makrout() tô M[.” The abbreviation for (kai) is indicated by a kappa with a curving slash through its bottom right stroke. This is essentially a rendering of the Greek “Môusês ho (kai) Geôrg(ios)” (“Moses, also known as George”) as implemented by a Nubian scribe unaccustomed to working in a language with definite articles; the ho has vanished. Nubian inheritance of Greek onomastic practice is, thus, responsible for modern scholarship’s confusion over the identity of Moses George.

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chief of the king and tot of Ibrim and Kisdauoul (34); and Mashshouda the deacon and owner of the Georgios church, who describes himself as “sitting in assembly with my Elders” (36). These texts all date to some point between 1155 and 1190, and all belong to the reign of King Moses George. None of these three scribes is still active during the subsequent reign of King Basil. The later land sales, from Basil’s reign, are the product of Kapenê, the scribe of Kaki West (37); Eiodisi/Iôdisi (38 and 40), the Great Priest and timakkis; and Ajola the deacon (39). Two of these scribes, and possibly all three of them, were active prior to the reign of Basil as well. Ajola also drafted 31, a release from purchase. Iodisi was the scribe of the second land sale recorded in 34. Kapenê may also be the scribe of a release of a servant, 35, who apparently describes herself as the “daughter of the Priest Makari.”22 Two of these scribes, Kapenê and Ajola, appear to be of relatively low status, at least in comparison to the previous trio of scribes, which included two men described as part of the king’s circle. To summarize the key points: 1) all three scribes who include feeding information in their land sales wrote under King Moses George and are unknown afterward; 2) all three scribes who omit feeding information did so under the reign of his successor, King Basil; and 3) when those three scribes worked for the earlier king, they were either writing documents other than land sales or, in the case of Iodisi, Papon, and land sale 34, writing only part of the text, in which another scribe has already included the discussion of food and drink. For reasons unknown to us, the recording of food consumption in land sale documents became less important under King Basil. This may have been a matter of pure chance, of practice dictated by the change of king, or of scribal choice driven by the status of the scribes. If Nubian consumption practices were based on gift exchanges between elite families, scribes of a higher status may have had a greater interest in recording this feature of Nubian legal practice. In any case, the absence of food consumption records in Archive 3’s later texts does not seem to indicate a long-term trend. The evidence from Archive 1, as poorly preserved as it is, makes this clear: One sale from the 1270s may preserve traces of a food consumption record, and another,

22 . For further discussion of Kapenê see below, 237.

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Qasr Ibrim’s last land sale, from the 1460s, clearly does.23 After the scribe names himself and ten witnesses, he closes with a sentence that reads, “First: 2 wine; 2 anapiti; 100 loaves; 4 kettles; 4 bushels of grain.” This level of consumption is in keeping with that recorded in the twelfth-century land sales and suggests that those sales and their accompanying witness feasts were part of a long-lasting tradition.

Food Consumption in Legal Transactions The impression fostered by these land sales, that food consumption accompanies or solidifies Nubian legal transactions, receives reinforcement from two other Old Nubian texts from Qasr Ibrim. One, letter 51 from Adama the eparch to Douddil the architriclinus, was discussed in chapter 2.24 In it, Adama mentions one “(bale of) hay that Kettoudi gave to my mother” and another “new (bale) belonging to Argate, your mother.” Adama expresses his reluctance “to give (them) to her (agent),” and in an apparent non sequitur notes that he “took the dates and gulped them down.” It was presumably obvious to Douddil which dates were meant and what they had to do with the proper treatment of the two bales of hay, but nothing is quite so clear to the modern reader. A potential answer to this puzzle may be in another Old Nubian text from Qasr Ibrim, 21, a deposition not part of Archive 3, found in the 1982 season.25 In it, Iôsêphi the Great Scribe and six others witness testimony given by Kosma through his daughter to Iôsêphi. Following Kosma’s testimony that he sent and received letters concerning the horn dealers (?), he notes that he “sold it to Israel,” without telling us what it was.26 He then

23 . Unpublished EA 90229 and EA 90225, respectively. For the latter, see Łajtar and Ruffi ni 2011. 24 . At page 43. 25 . Browne’s commentary to 51 noted the parallel to 21 but went no further. For further discussion of 21, see below, page 210. 26. Horns: timmil, attested only here, is doubtfully rendered as “antelope horns.” Browne’s commentary to line 8 thinks that these horns are what is sold. Is there some connection possible to the symbolism of horns in Nubian art? Consider the role of horns in the headgear of the eparch in Žabkar 1963 and Welsby 1998, 94. (But see, in dissent, Godlewski 2008, 271–274.) For similar horns in modern Nubian art, see Veillon 1994, 138. Žabkar 1963, 218 suggests a direct continuity of tradition from the medieval Nubian eparch’s headgear to “the petty kings subject to the Funj Dynasty of Sennar who inherited a portion of the Christian kingdom of Nubia” to the cotton caps with two straw-stuffed horns found as symbols of kingship even in twentieth-century Rashad, in the Nuba Mountains. On the

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explains that “after [Israel] deposited it in the village, sitting for 2 months, he eats dates, gulping them down.”27 Only at the end of the text do we learn the ultimate nature of the complaint, that Kosma “did not receive the price.” In each case, an otherwise opaque reference to date gulping follows immediately after remarks about the proper disposition of property. Although this is obscured by Browne’s translations, the phrase is the same in both cases, pettika ngola, “gulping dates.” The expression appears in these two texts alone in the published corpus of Old Nubian. In both cases, the date gulping appears to indicate the conclusion of a transaction. Adama gulps dates when his mother has received the bales of hay. Israel gulps dates when he has taken an unknown item and deposited it. Thus these two texts may give further evidence that eating played a role in finalizing Nubian property exchanges. This conclusion earns further support when we compare the word choices of Kosma’s testimony with those of the land sales. In Kosma’s testimony, we read that before Israel gulped his dates, he “deposited it in the village” (eirkilalon kenon), but what precisely was deposited goes unstated. The verb Browne renders as “deposit,” ken-, also appears in land sale 36, which the scribe, Mashshouda the deacon, concludes by writing, “If one writes, deposits and proclaims the certified document, (his fee) is 1 roast of lion (?).”28 The key part of the phrase for our purpose is sigelêka . . . kena: “if one deposits the document,” he can eat the roast. It seems likely that Israel, too, deposited an understood sigen- or document of some kind that formalized his purchase of an unknown item from Kosma. This deposition of a document is why he now eats his dates. Further, this process of purchase, deposition, and food seemingly confers legal recognition. This, in turn, allows Kosma to take action against Israel by testifying in front of seven witnesses that he has not yet received the purchase price from him. Thus we can conclude that some sort of formalized consumption process played a role in medieval Nubian sales and exchanges of many kinds and was not limited to the land sale alone. horned cap in Funj regalia, see also Robinson 1931. Rose also notes that the Christian finds from Ibrim include horn bracelets: see, for example, object registration numbers 64/171, 64/172, and 66A/333. 27. “osarralo eriklalon kenon souaeiou B aka petika ngola.” Note here the verb ak- for “to sit, remain, live” (Browne 1996a, 8) and contrast tik-, ting- (“to sit, remain,” Browne 1996a, 171) discussed below at page 113. 28. Or “gazelle”; see note 2 on page 91 above.

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A similar process may be evident in 35, Mena’s release of the servant Gaweson to Papsil.29 After declaring the release of the servant, Mena adds that the “charge that I paid on the 7th of Pachon is 1 loaf of bread.”30 This loaf is much too small to have been a payment to the witnesses present for the release. In any case, Mena paid the loaf on the Seventh of Pachon but did not have the release drafted until the Sixth of Mesore, three months later. The payment of the loaf may be unrelated to the drafting of the release. It may have been in compensation for the contractual terms of Gaweson’s servitude, for instance. Or a food deposit may have been necessary to begin the legal process formalizing that release. This may be the more accurate legal sense of the term sag-, which Browne took to refer to the witness payments. It may instead refer to a sort of legal filing fee, paid in kind, in which the one loaf plays a role analogous to the dates in other texts. Those involved in the deposition of legal texts may face a cultural expectation that they produce food to eat—dates, a loaf, or some other form of sag—at the actual moment of deposition. This picture, of a ritualized role for food consumption in medieval Nubia, finds support in later Nubian and Sudanese parallels. Consider the work of al-Bakuwi, who died in the early fifteenth century but transmitted earlier traditions about medieval Nubia. He writes that the Nubian Christians “worship their king as a divine being and . . . believe the fiction that he does not eat. Therefore, food is brought to him secretly.”31 Similarly, in the Funj kingdom of Muslim Sinnar, which dominated the former Nubian kingdom of Alwa from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries, the kings were also not seen to eat.32 As Spaulding has argued, “the rationale given for the subordination of subjects to his rule was explicitly couched in terms of food.”33 The king is the guarantor that all of his people will eat. According to legend, kingship came to Sinnar when the first king prevented the nobles from allocating all of the food to themselves.34

29. For discussion of this text, see above at 95. 30. Specifically, kapit, which—if Ochała forthcoming is correct—is a smaller, cheaper kind of bread, in contrast to shadi bread. 31 . Vantini 1975, 565. 32 . A restriction that loosened over time: Spaulding 1973c, 27. 33 . Spaulding 1981, 62. 34 . Spaulding 1981, 62.

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The term kore-, kora, korê-, korre-, indicates “feast, sacrament” in Old Nubian.35 The term may be the root of the court title karalrau, an official serving as “a quartermaster for goods received in payment of taxes” in the Funj kingdom.36 The term may also be the root of the karāma, “a kind of communal meal which is given or put on by an individual as a ritually meritorious act” in modern Nubian traditional festive practices.37 With medieval Nubian date gulping in mind, other modern Nubian comparanda take on a new significance. An analysis of the modern Nubian agrarian economy in Wadi Halfa revealed a disproportionate role for the date palm: The Nubians find in their date trees a compensation from heaven for the scarcity of their land. They consider them as their most cherished possession and an invaluable gift of nature. They are the social backbone of their local economy and the only reliable source of cash return. In fact, they are the only sign of wealth.38 The same study noted that date trees “are also paid as gifts on marriage occasions.”39 One recent study of modern Nubian ceremonial life noted that “[i]n many Fadija areas, women carried a kind of date soup (fenti shorba) to the Nile, where they ritually drank some and offered the remainder to the river spirits.”40 In modern Nubian fiction, date throwing is an act of celebration, in one specific case on the return of a long-absent loved one.41 In the Sukkot region of Sudan, a birthing ritual recorded by modern scholars involved “a little child of a good character” being “offered seven dates to bite” and kissing with date-wetted lips the mouth of the newborn baby, in hopes of passing his or her good character onto the newborn.42 The appearance of food in otherwise cryptic contexts 35 . Browne 1996a, 99. See also the remarks at Spaulding 1981, 68. 36. Spaulding 1973b, 35. 37. Kennedy 1978, 14. 38. Dafalla 1969, 69. 39. Dafalla 1969, 73. 40. Kennedy 1978, 14. 41 . Ali 1998, 26. Cf. also Ali 1998, 98. 42 . Vantini 1982, 26. See also the role of dates in the modern Nubian poem recorded at Hale 1973, 38–39.

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figure 5.1 A Nubian Dancing Scene from the Wall Paintings at Old Dongola (Published courtesy of the Polish Center for Mediterranean Archaeology.)

in the Old Nubian texts may be the vestige of similar ritual moments in earlier Nubian culture. (See figure 5.1 for a wall painting from Old Dongola depicting a dancing scene, perhaps an unknown medieval Nubian ceremony.)

Gift Exchange: The Cost of a Land Sale Ceremony Food plays a dual role in Nubian transactions: It has legal significance, as found hidden in the medieval references to date gulping, and it has social significance, as found in modern Nubian rituals and celebrations. The evidence in several land sales of the costs incurred in the drafting of the text shows where those dual roles intersect. Bringing witnesses to a signing

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ceremony and feeding them in reward for their presence uses the food to legitimize the legal transaction and to create social capital in the eyes of the community. As table 5.1 makes clear, there is no apparent correlation between the land sale price, on the one hand, and either the number of witnesses or the cost of the signing ceremony on the other. The number of witnesses attested in our Qasr Ibrim land sales ranges from six in one text (45) to thirty in another (34). This level of extreme variability might lead us to wonder whether more expensive transactions required more witnesses, but a quick glance at the sales prices suggests otherwise. Sale 38 has a dozen witnesses and a witnessing scribe, as does sale 42, but the former plot of land cost six gold pieces, the latter only two. The plots in sales 39 and 40 each sold for one gold piece and one dart(), yet the former has eight witnesses and a witnessing scribe, the latter twenty-one witnesses and a witnessing scribe. Our lack of familiarity with Nubian weights and measures complicates our understanding of the cost of these signing ceremonies. There is no obvious way to compare the relative values of the food payments. How, for instance, do 4 bushels of onions, 4 dourini, and 1 bowl of gyde compare to 1 komi of anapiti, 100 loaves and 1 jar of gide? We simply have no way of knowing. Even so, no correlation between the number of witnesses needed for a sale and the expenses incurred during the ceremony is apparent from the available data. First, the expense lists available to us show no consistency in the nature of the expenses: Loaves appear in all four lists; gide/gyde (?) wine and anapiti appear in three lists; touskil and grain in only two; and onions and dourini in only one. Where sale 32 has ten witnesses and a witnessing scribe and one hundred loaves were needed, the same number of loaves appear in sale 36, which has twenty-five witnesses and a witnessing scribe. The amount of food and drink given to the participants in a land sale signing seems to be at the discretion of the donor. This means that the amount of food and drink involved was irrelevant to the legal structure of the sale itself and that we should not see this food and drink as formal payment for professional scribes and witnesses. The absence of any apparent fixed rate of payment for scribes and witnesses and the absence of any correlation between the value of the land and the number of witnesses or the amount of food provided for them opens the door to other interpretations of the role of food payments in Nubian land sales.

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The most likely interpretation is that these food payments are a form of gift exchange or conspicious consumption. We may imagine the written records of food payments to be the trace remains of public rituals, in which the giving of food is an assertion of wealth or of social primacy and prestige. To explore this possibility, we must first ask who actually brings the food and drink. The land sales leave curiously unstated precisely which party was responsible for providing the food and drink. The answer can be found implicitly, if we take the first-person voices of each text literally. The normative legal form of these sales seems to have required that they assume the first-person voice of the seller. This is true for 32, 34, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, and 42 (a cession). 44 and 45, the last two sales in chronological sequence, are the only exceptions. (These two texts are also exceptional in their omission of the opening protocols, which suggests that they are not standard land sales but notarized descriptions of them.) The first three in sequence, 32, 34, and 36, explicitly describe food and drink consumption related to the land sale. In 32, the last first-person voice in the text prior to the description of the food and drink is that of the scribe. The seller is the only other first-person voice in the text. In 34, the first-person voice immediately prior to the description of food and drink consumption is that of the seller, Mouna, who says that the participants “ate and drank within the writing office (?).”43 In 36, the first-person voice immediately prior to the description of the food and drink consumption is again the seller, Kapopi, whose words appear immediately after the description as well. The conclusion from this relatively thin evidence is that, when gifts of food and drink to the participants accompanied a land sale, the seller provided them. We must next explore the intent behind these food gifts.

Gift Exchange Theory Modern scholarship on gift giving and consumptive practices can illuminate this Nubian practice in more detail. The leading figure in gift exchange theory is Marcel Mauss. The nephew and student of Émile Durkheim, Mauss is notable, above all, for his work, The Gift: The Form and Reason for

43 . 34 .i.26–26: “kapa ngisan soueinin | toula,” doubtfully translated, with Browne’s commentary taking souein- as possibly a location (“writing office”) related to sountouwe- or “scribe.”

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Exchange in Archaic Societies.44 But for some time before this work, Mauss concerned himself with archaic forms of the contract. Among “primitive” peoples, exchanges do not take place between individuals but in a “total” context, between collectivities such as the clan, tribe, or village.45 The result of exchanges between these groups is the emergence of competitive gift giving, in which “exchanges and contracts take place in the form of presents . . . given and reciprocated obligatorily.”46 Mauss saw competitive gift exchange as a feature of societies making a transition from the phase of “total services . . . from clan to clan, and from family to family” toward the phase of the individual, private contract, the phase of price being reckoned in universally recognized coinage.47 The Gift is a classic of modern anthropology. It has influenced Marxist and poststructuralist thought, and played a role in shaping the work of Jacques Derrida, Pierre Bourdieu, and Karl Polanyi. One fundamental contribution of Mauss is his emphasis on the impact of gift giving on one’s public image. In his own words: To give is to show one’s superiority, to be more, to be higher in rank, magister. To accept without giving in return, or without giving more back, is to become client and servant, to become small, to fall lower (minister).48 Recent scholarship has expanded on the importance of the gift as a tool in the creation of elite identity. This identity has a competitive aspect. As Claude Lévi-Strauss put it in reference to the potlatch of Native Americans in the Pacific Northwest, one function of the ceremony is “to surpass a rival in generosity, to crush him if possible under future obligations which it is hoped he cannot meet, thus taking from him privileges, titles, rank, authority and prestige.”49 Other scholars, while embracing the concept of the gift, have criticized Mauss for omissions or ambiguities in his typology

44 . For Mauss’s relationship with Durkheim, see Fournier 2006, part I. 45 . Fournier 2006, 238–241, with the basic statement at Mauss 1990, 5–7. 46. Mauss 1990, 3. 47. Mauss 1990, 46. Mauss even argues that traces of this transition are available in, for example, “very ancient Roman law,” on which see Mauss 1990, 48–52. 48. Mauss 1990, 74. 49. Lévi-Strauss 1996, 19.

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of the gift.50 Marshall Sahlins, for instance, advanced a typology of the gift that included a generalized reciprocity, in which goods are exchanged without expecting an immediate and direct return.51 This is significant for Nubian studies, because the kind of food giving we see in these land sales does not quite fit Mauss’s initial description of the gift. Under Mauss’s vision of gift exchange, reciprocity and the passage of time are necessary. A gift cannot be met with an immediate countergift, or the long-term investment in communal respect cannot bear fruit. Nubian land sales meet the requirement of time passing if we suppose that previous sales of the same property involved the same sort of public giving. Those funding the feast in Nubian land sales are in essence gifting forward. Nubian land sales thus fail to meet the requirement of reciprocity, but in a way that raises the stakes: The seller displays his wealth to the community and challenges the next seller, of that property or any other, to give the community a gift more impressive than his. According to one modern scholar, gift giving is discursive. It asserts wealth, independence, and access to a robust social network. It is a denial of subordinate status.52 One purpose of gift giving is “to convert material wealth into immaterial prestige.”53 This point is crucial to understanding the Nubian context as well. To understand why land sellers would feel obliged to produce food for their scribes and witnesses, we must understand the social importance of land ownership. The extreme reluctance to sell land among modern Nubians is discussed in chapter 3.54 To become landless is to become an outsider and, therefore, a social inferior. A land sale may have given rise to similar social anxiety in medieval Nubia. The performance of witness feeding may have been a way to address that anxiety, for the seller to deny his social subordination to the buyer, and to manifest his continued wealth before the community. Useful parallels in archaic and classical Greece are suggested. The relevant term in Greek is megaloprepeia, often translated as “grandeur.” The

50. See Krausman Ben-Amos 2008, 5–9 for a brief survey of the reception and critique of Mauss. 51 . Sahlins 1965, 147–149, a reference I owe to Cam Grey at the University of Pennsylvania. 52 . See the extended discussion of wedding gift exchange in Hausa culture at Cooper 1997, 90–109. 53 . Stewart and Strathern 2000, 52. 54 . See page 73 above.

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term—which appears numerous times in Plato’s Republic—appears first in Herodotus.55 Its earliest appearances clearly indicate grandeur intended for someone else’s benefit, to obtain a certain effect, such as the grandeur of the banquet held by Cleisthenes of Sicyon.56 As Xenophon’s Socrates puts it in the Oeconomicus, “[I]t is your duty to entertain many strangers, on a generous scale too . . . you have to give dinners and play the benefactor to the citizens, or you lose your following.”57 The Greek city-state appropriates aristocratic megalopropeia for the well-being of the community.58 The city-state relied on aristocratic philotimia—the love of honor or status—for its greatest accomplishments.59 Equally useful parallels present themselves closer to home, in ancient Kush.60 More than twenty years ago, Török argued that many of the luxury items known from Meroitic archaeology had been acquired through embassy trade, an elite form of gift exchange. More recently, David Edwards has applied the logic of Mauss to this process and argued that this embassy trade should be understood in a political light. Literary sources attest to gift exchange between the Meroites and their neighbors. As Edwards sees it, the “dispatch of gifts . . . by the great imperial powers to their peripheral states such as Meroe . . . may thus be seen as an alternative to more coercive inducements.”61 In turn, the redistribution in Meroe of imported prestige goods to regional elites was an important part of the maintenance of central prestige and authority.62 Under a model of cultural continuity between ancient and medieval Sudan, we can easily imagine Qasr Ibrim’s elite laying claim to the respect of their peers through a potlatchlike display of food giving, in this case attached to the legal ceremony of a land sale. This is, in essence, a Nubian form of conspicuous consumption or megaloprepeia.

55 . Kraz 1985, 70–71 for references. 56. Kraz 1985, 71. 57. Xenophon Oeconomicus 2.5, a reference I owe to Howe 2008, 105. Translation from Marchant in the Loeb Classical Library, 1979. 58. Howe 2008, 104. 59. See Whitehead 1983 on philotimia. 60. This paragraph follows Edwards 1996, 29–30. For gift exchange and the “official gift” in ancient Egypt, see Bleiberg 1996. 61 . Edwards 1996, 29. 62 . See figure 4 at Edwards 1996, 21.

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Mauss’s claim that gift rituals indicate societies not yet fully immersed in a system of private contracts fits the Nubian cases perfectly. The gift element of the land sales presumably predates the adoption of formal legal texts to make the sales official: A record of the gift is merely grafted onto Greco-Roman legal forms that the Nubians have adopted. The presence of food payments in Nubian land sales is thus a remnant of an earlier phase, what Mauss might call the “total” phase of Nubian culture. In that phase, the transfer of land might have been even more of a full community event than it is in these land sales. The land sales as texts are the evidence of the transition to monetization and the private contract. Public displays of food consumption are seen in other Nubian contexts. In 2002, Oxford’s Bodleian Library acquired an Arabic manuscript with a previously unknown treatise, the Book of Curiosities. The text is a late twelfth- or early thirteenth-century copy of an anonymous cosmography from the early tenth century. Its material on Nubia contains a description of a tree “one hundred cubits tall” producing fruit large enough to kill animals taking shelter beneath the tree. That fruit “ripens and falls down on its own accord. It is then carried to the king of the Nubians, who then gives it as presents to the officials of his government.”63 From this passage, it seems that the ceremonial role of food in Nubian political life was so prominent, notice of it even found its way into contemporary Arabic accounts. Other examples abound. Consider two dipinti uncovered on the walls of the Nubian cathedral at Faras.64 These dipinti, found on the third layer of plaster, date between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries and are thus roughly contemporary with the archives from Qasr Ibrim. The two texts— one nine lines long, the other nineteen—have a parallel in a twenty-line dipinto from a small church in the cemetery at Sonqi Tino, apparently addressed to Bishop Aron (aron papasika). These texts name nearly ninety people among them. According to Ochała, “Judging by the lack of occupation or position indicated after the names, the vast majority . . . appear to be ordinary citizens.”65 These three dipinti appear to be lists of food donors. Most of the entries record loaves of kapa and shadi, two different types of bread. Less 63 . Savage-Smith and Rapoport 2007, chapter 2.23, folio 48a, lines 7–12. For further discussion of this text, see also Rapoport 2010. 64 . This discussion largely follows Ochała forthcoming. 65 . Ochała forthcoming.

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frequently, the entries record anapiti, a beverage, and touskil, an unknown term also presumably indicating some sort of food or drink.66 A recent study of these dipinti argues for a liturgical role for this food and suggests a parallel to an early Christian practice in which the faithful “attending the liturgy brought with them a certain amount of bread and wine.” Some of this offering would be consecrated, the rest distributed among the poor. Under this argument, “it seems reasonable to think of these texts as a kind of commemoration of the persons who offered certain amounts of products to the church, either for liturgical purposes or for further allotment.”67 These dipinti record the same practices and hint at the same motives found in the land sales. We can never discount the motive of personal piety on the part of the donor and should expect it, but this explains the donation itself, not the later record of it. For further explanation, we may turn to an unexpected source, the Old Nubian version of the Nicene Canons. The fourth-century Council of Nicaea issued twenty canons intended to be authoritative guides to church life and governance. Yet the prestige of the council was so great that, soon, spurious canons were added to the twenty to use the name of the council to promote later legislation as canonical. An Arabic manuscript from Egypt includes no less than eighty Nicene canons.68 Nubia seems to have inherited at least some aspect of this tradition: The Old Nubian manuscript claiming to be a text of the canons put forward by the fathers at Nicaea appears to present eighty canons as well.69 But for nearly a hundred years, it has been recognized that the Old Nubian canons are not the same as the Arabic and are otherwise unknown.70 The exact provenance of their text is unknown, but the original manuscript came to the British Museum with tenth- and eleventh-century Coptic manuscripts apparently deposited at Serra, near Faras, in Lower Nubia.71 The canons are thus not too far in date from the Sonqi Tino and Faras dipinti.

66. Note also other terms: pala (“onion”?); aggo (“lupine”?); parniacci (“a measure of capacity”). See Ochała forthcoming. 67. Ochała forthcoming. 68. Labbei and Cossartii Concilia 2.291–318. 69. See Browne 1983b, 106 on this reading of 80 in preference to 85. 70. Griffith 1913, 23. 71 . For this argument, see Griffith 1913, 4.

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The Old Nubian canons are unmistakeably about food.72 They are concerned first with the sanctity of the Eucharist and begin with an injunction against those who deny transubstantiation.73 But they move quickly on to those who present “an offering in the church, be it wine or wheat” and complain “when the priest does not give him compensation.”74 Next a warning is issued against those who say that “[t]he sons of the church eat” the offerings left in the church.75 Near the end of the text, we read that, of the offerings to the church, “with the priest his share is this: one loaf and one finger of wine.”76 Just before this note is praise for one who “presents an offering in the church,” for “while he himself yet lives, God inscribes his name in heavenly (?) Jerusalem.”77 The interests at play in these canons are clearly the same as those in the dipinti from Faras and Sonqi Tino. This is a world where food gifts can lead to commemoration, and thus to prestige, where failure to give that prestige (the priest who “does not give compensation”) is a recognized affront. Food gifts to the church, in turn, become gifts to both the church priest and the community. This indicates an attitude similar to that found in the Ibrim land sales, whose scribes make such a point of commemorating food gifts to themselves and the gathered community precisely for the prestige these gifts gave to their givers. The centrality of food gifts and food consumption is only one aspect of a larger but much less visible patronage system in medieval Nubia. Modern scholars have already noted the centrality of patronage in the Nubian art world.78 Unsurprisingly, eparchs and bishops played a starring

72 . To my knowledge, no full commentary on this text exists. See Griffith 1913, 15–24 and Browne 1983b for editions and linguistic analysis. 73 . Browne 1983b, 98 lines 19.7–14; the lines specifically condemn anyone who says that the sacrament (kore) is “only bread, only wine” (“artosa jôlam. orpa jolama.”). 74 . Browne 1983b, 98, lines 19.18–20.8, with “wine or wheat” (“orpa enkan. elle enkan.”) in 20.1 and “compensation” (oueiska) in 20.2–3. 75 . Browne 1983b, 98–99, lines 20.18–21.1: “kissen tounyillo kapijraa.” 76. Browne 1983b, 104, lines 31.10–13: “iereosilotjo tan jannon einno. artosi ouerou. orpê sarpê oueralo.” 77. Browne 1983b, 104, lines 31.5–10. The translation given there is supplemented by subsequent handwritten revisions by Browne on his own off print of the article, in the possession of this author. 78. Rostkowska 1982b.

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role in this system: Their names appear on the foundation inscriptions of the churches at Faras and at Abd el-Qadir.79 Somewhat lesser officials played this role as well: Doukasi the choiakeikshil appears as the patron of the so-called stauros text, the Book of the Cross commissioned at some point after the ninth century.80 Patronage was not limited to officeholders or title holders: Mariame, daughter of Mariata, appears as a patron in a mural in the cathedral at Faras.81 It may be true, as one scholar has suggested, that donors appear in these contexts to receive protection from the sacred figures portrayed in the murals.82 But this sacred motive does not exclude a more secular one, that these patrons funded art for the same reason they gave food, for the connections it built for them and the public recognition it afforded them.

African Comparanda A historiographical approach to medieval Nubia foregrounding continuity with later Sudanese comparanda helps us place medieval Nubian food payments within a wider range of gift exchange and ritual practices in the region over the millennia. Gift exchange is a documented aspect of diplomatic relations between historical monarchies of northeastern Africa.83 Recent reinterpretation of the baqt treaty between Christian Nubia and Muslim Egypt suggests that the Nubians saw their annual payment not as tribute but as part of an ongoing cycle of gift exchange with their neighbors.84 Sudan’s later Sinnar sultanate had “forms of taxes or tribute reciprocated by gifts. . . . Finds of large gold were dispatched directly to the sultan . . . the finders being rewarded with modest gifts.”85 The coronation

79. Rostkowska 1982b, Texts 1–4 (three foundational inscriptions from the Faras Cathedral and one from the church on the south slope of the kom) and Text 8. 80. For patronage and the stauros text, see Rostkowska 1982b, 210, relying on an obsolete translation of the text. For a more recent translation, see Browne 1989b, 22–28. Rostkowska 1982b, 210 dates the text to 973 ad, citing Griffith 1913, 41–53, but see Browne 1983a for new readings eliminating the putative martyr-era date in the text. 81 . Rostkowska 1982b, 211. 82 . Rostkowska 1982b, 211. 83 . Spaulding 1995, 587. 84 . Spaulding 1995, 588. 85 . Edwards 2004, 265.

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of the kings in the postmedieval Nubian kingdom of Kokka was marked by “continuous feasting.”86 The food payment ceremonies we see in the Qasr Ibrim land sales indicate that such a practice was deeply engrained in Nubian society. These ceremonies may mirror at a more modest level in the social hierarchy the sort of royal gift exchange being acted out at the state level.87 We may expect signs of this sort of feasting to appear in the material remains. As a recent survey of Sudanese archaeology has observed, [t]he function of some pottery forms, such as jars called ‘vases,’ remains obscure. That they were used with other drinking vessels seems likely and may well relate to socially important activities centred on communal drinking and perhaps feasting, maintaining long-established social practices.88 We see this sort of communal feasting as early as the Meroitic period: The vast number of empty jars deposited after funeral banquets at royal tombs “reflect[s] the ability to accumulate and dispense and the interrelation of economic and political power. . . . Such rites demonstrate the familiar practices of conspicuous consumption and conspicuous destruction.”89 If ritual feasting and gift giving were common at a popular level, they may have survived Nubia’s Christian period and be reflected in more recent Nubian popular practice. Modern Nubian culture is punctuated by ceremonies of extreme expense.90 One of the most important is marriage, a ceremony marked by an elaborate gift-giving procession.91 These modern Nubian gift-giving ceremonies have etymological ties to medieval Nubia. The modern Nubian word to describe receiving these gifts is tigir,

86. Osman 1982a, 187. 87. Similarly, we see evidence of gifts as social expectations at lower social levels. Consider the Arabic letters from Qasr Ibrim’s early medieval period published in translation at Adams 2010, 249–254. A number of these letters appear to mention gift giving as a standard part of social interaction. 88. Edwards 2004, 236. 89. Edwards 1996, 45. 90. Kennedy 1978. 91 . See Fernea 1973, 27–31 for a discussion of the role of karray (“gifts”) in the modern Fedija marriage ceremony.

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“sitting” for gifts.92 Compare this term to its Old Nubian antecedent, tik- or ting- (“to sit, remain”), used, for instance, to indicate a king sitting on his throne: “thronosou ngokindô tika.”93 We can equally picture the scribes and witnesses “sitting” in the midst of a land sale ceremony, receiving the gifts they have coming to them. Another Sudanese parallel is the Nuba people of Kordofan in southern Sudan.94 Early anthropological descriptions of the Nuba marveled at their “contempt for economics.” One chief example of this “contempt” is the socalled Ceremony of the Full Granary, which “maintains a true democratic equality of wealth by arranging for its dissipation.”95 Filling one’s granary after a successful harvest “becomes an occasion for a great feast, to which the whole village may be invited.”96 This example is only a specific manifestation of a general tendency among the Nuba, “to prevent the accumulation (and thus inequality) of wealth.”97 These modern Nubian and Sudanese parallels make us more comfortable with the emergent picture of food as a social tool in medieval Nubia. Giving food is an assertion of wealth and prestige. It helps compensate for the loss of land to a now apparently wealthier party. It also has a consumptive aspect, destroying accumulated wealth and creating a social expectation of further reciprocal events of wealth destruction in the future. If all of this is correct, the record of food payments in Nubian land sales is not quite how I described it in previous pages. The witness payments grafted onto Old Nubian land sales are not incidental or trivial deviations from some ideal Greco-Roman or Coptic legal type.98 On the contrary, the legal texts themselves are the graft, an imported form of transaction imposed on preexisting forms of exchange. Mauss would recognize this situation: It is a snapshot of his proposed transition from archaic economies with primitive exchange contracts between groups, on the one hand, 92 . Kennedy 1978, 184. 93 . Browne 1996a, 171, citing st. 11.4. 94 . For recourse to the Nuba to understand the late antique Dodekaschoinos, see Dijkstra 2008, 169–170. 95 . Nadel 1947, xii. 96. Nadel 1947, 49. 97. Nadel 1947, 50. 98. I would like to thank my colleague David Crawford of Fairfield University for his observations on this point.

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and more advanced economies with formal contracts between individuals on the other.99

The Participants as Social Capital The previous sections have argued for the role of food in Nubian cultural and legal practice, generally, and for the role of food giving as an assertion of social status more specifically. But a social statement is worthless if no one sees it. Here, the role of the other participants in the land sale, including the scribes, is crucial.

The Protocol Each land sale document begins with a protocol naming various officeholders in power in Nubia, starting with the king. Scribes had considerable flexibility as to which officeholders they included in these protocols and how many. As Adams noted, “The largest number of officials named in any one document is nineteen, and the average number is about ten.”100 To some degree, the overlap among officials named in each protocol permits the establishment of a relative chronology; that chronology, in turn, guided the sequence of texts presented in the publication of Archive 3. (For further elaboration on that chronology, see appendix 1.) But it is not obvious that the protocols had any chronological function for the scribes themselves, who were perfectly capable of providing absolute dates based on the Era of the Martyrs.101 The officeholders in these protocols vary considerably from text to text. Adams points out that: The reason for these citations is not clear, since the named officials were not actually witnesses to the documents, and in many cases can hardly have been aware of their existence. Perhaps the protocols 99. Łajtar informs me of a more modern parallel, writing in personal communication about the Polish tradition of the litkup: “Until quite recently any serious contract of sale [in Poland] was concluded with an obligatory litkup in the Polish countryside. This litkup consisted mostly of vodka with some simple food.” 100. Adams 1996, 231. 101 . As in 30, 35 , 36, 38, and 40, with the standard phrase “apo mart() NN einin,” with variants. For the chronological systems of medieval Nubia more generally, see Ochała 2010 and 2011.

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were meant to demonstrate that the scribe was well-informed and reliable.102 This is true, but the exceptions are interesting. In some cases, the omissions show gaps in scribal knowledge. It is striking, for instance, that Papo Thoma does not appear as bishop of Ibrim in 32, Shirepi’s land sale to Nasri, when he appears consistently in other texts written during his episcopacy. But 32’s scribe is David, “in the retinue of the Priest of King George” and thus most likely from Dongola, not Ibrim. Indeed, David’s protocol is the only one in the archive to name an official from Arminna, a detail missing from more local scribes. The omission of the bishop of Ibrim is most likely simply because the scribe is not familiar with the ecclesiastical situation there. In other cases, the omissions are more curious. One land sale from the 1280s ends with the statement, “I, Merk(), Bishop of Faras, wrote and witnessed this.”103 The protocol for the text dutifully records the king, the queen mother, the grain keeper, the eparch, the great scribe, and other figures but omits the names of the bishop of Ibrim and the bishop of Dongola. The bishops of Ibrim make regular occurrences in Ibrim’s legal protocols, and even the bishops of Dongola make occasional appearances in Ibrim’s unpublished protocols. But if anyone was in a position to know the names of these bishops, it would have been the bishop of Faras. He may have been writing at a time when one or both of these sees were vacant. Alternatively, he may have been engaged in a quiet snub, leaving unmentioned figures who might easily belong in the text. In another curious case, Aggestotil’s land sale to Mashshouda, a more experienced scribe picks up where a novice left off. As the plate for 39 makes clear, the text was begun by a scribe with poor use of space and overly large letters. This scribe, unnamed in the text, got no further into the protocol than naming the king, the eparch, and the bishop before abandoning the task. Ajola, a more experienced scribe with a more practiced hand, completed the rest of the document, adding nothing to the first scribe’s protocol. Yet we know from 31, Tiri’s release of Eigali, that Ajola had no difficulty including a further handful of officeholders in his protocol.

102 . Adams 1996, 231. 103 . Unpublished EA 90227.

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This may suggest the existence of predrafted protocols, written with the main body of the text left blank in anticipation of future need. If so, we would expect to see more texts change hands after the protocol. Alternatively, it is possible to imagine a scenario in which the unnamed scribe took too long and seemed too uncertain as he began to draft Aggestotil’s sale, and Ajola took over the task mid-draft. Adams is right that protocols could demonstrate scribal knowledge; they could equally demonstrate the lack of it or demonstrate, through their silences, political trends otherwise hidden from our view.

The Scribes These scribes, whose role was clearly professional, could expect to receive contractual fees for their services. When the scribe is included in the witness list, he assumedly collected food payment with those witnesses. Only 34 expressly states that the scribe, Papon, collected a fee for services separate from the food paid to the witnesses. That text, Mouna and Manyi’s land sale to Iongoka and Mena, specifies that the letter writer receives “2 anapiti, 10 loaves, 1 palal of gide.” The text records more than a dozen witnesses who receive as a group one anapiti, twenty-nine loaves, one jar of gide, four anati, and four bushels of grain.104 Admitting our ignorance of the worth of these items, the scribe’s proportion is still comfortably in excess of the portions each witness would receive, a logical result given the specialized training his labor requires. Kapopi’s land sale to Neuesi in 36 presents a more complex picture, with three scribes appearing in the text. Mashshouda wrote and witnessed (“paeise matarangiselo”) it. Mashshouda also ordered the others, Aera and Loukasi, to write the certified document themselves (“keleua ein sigerinka paeianason”). The final clause clearly stipulates a connection between the act of writing, depositing, and proclaiming, on the one hand, and receiving payment on the other: “sigelêka paa kena ougga triwi koln tewiti alo,” “If one writes, deposits and proclaims the certified document . . . 1 roast of lion (?).” But who receives that payment, Mashshouda or Aera and Loukasi?

104 . But the four bushels of grain are qualified: “takka tissou eiou mashe | d” (“which we gave to him,” lines 28–29). Who is “him”? It may be the scribe, but this would be premature: The scribe has not yet been mentioned. Could it be Soueti, the intermediary for the cash in the transaction and the last person mentioned in the text? If so, this payment may be part of his commission on the transaction; see below page 122 and 124.

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The phrases use the same verb (paa, paeise and paeianason from par-, “to write”) to describe the actions of all three men.105 Perhaps Mashshouda’s statement that he is “sitting in assembly with my Elders” (papigouddal106) simply means he was not present. This could be why he delegated scribal duties to Aera and Loukasi and could also explain the specific reference to a fee of anapiti and touskil to be paid “if he does not eat.” Mashshouda was not present to eat with the witnesses, but his scribal delegates were. That equivalency, between food eaten on the spot and payment taken away by those who do not eat (“kala minil”), suggests that the participants in this ceremony expected scribes to collect a standard amount, whether they were present to do their duties or not. These payments to the scribes were certainly due to their literacy, the skill necessary to create a legal text, but the scribe’s role was not limited to the creation of a legal text. In several cases the scribes were needed for their social connections as well and were responsible for producing at least some of the witnesses to the transactions at hand. For this reason, we may imagine a market in scribes, in which the best connected or those able to produce the best witnesses could expect to receive preferential business. Certainly, an author or initiator of a new text need not use the same scribe every time. Two letters from Adama the eparch appear in the publication of Archive 3, 49 and 51. From the available images, it seems reasonably likely that two different hands are at work, neither identified by name in the text.107 Adama’s own hand may be evident in either case, or each text may be the work of different scribes Adama chose for the task. Some scribes were not simply chosen for their work but were ordered to do it, as is evident in 36, in which Mashshouda ordered Aera and Loukasi to write. Consider also the case of 35, Mena’s release of the servant Gaweson, which ends with the eye-catching line, “I, Kapenê, daughter (astillo) of the Priest Makari—Papo Mena the Bishop (papo mêna papsil)

105 . Note the heavy intrusion throughout these passages of Greco-Roman vocabulary: keleua from the Greek keleuô, “to order,” matarangiselo from the Greek martureô, “to witness,” and sigelêka (possibly) from the Latin sigillum (with entries at Browne 1996a, 88, 112 and 158, respectively). For discussion of these terms in Old Nubian, see below, page 159. 106. From pap- (“father”) + -gou (the plural marker) + dal (“with, against”). 107. Images: for 51, see the plates in the first edition, and for 49, see the image published online at www.medievalnubia.info.

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having ordered me—wrote and witnessed,” an apparent attestation of a female scribe.108 But why is Kapenê ordered to write? The answer is hidden in Browne’s doubt about his own translation of the text’s first-person introduction, “I, Mena, released the servant Gaweson (?) to Papsil (?).” The Old Nubian (“ai mêna papsikka gaweson gawa eisogga tisse”) is ambiguous. It could, as Browne took it, indicate a man named Papsil as the recipient of the release. It could, alternatively, indicate that a bishop (papsil) is the recipient of the release. Given the context, this option makes more sense, as it simplifies the scenario. The bishop Mena, who otherwise has no business being in the text, is both the person benefiting from the release and the one who orders Kapenê to draft it.109 Presumably, Kapenê, asti or daughter of the priest Makari, was known to the bishop because of his own association with that priest. One striking aspect of Kapenê’s record of the bishop’s order is her word choice: I, Kapenê, “papo mena papsil aïka keleuon paeiselo.” Note the keleuon: To describe the bishop’s order, Kapenê uses a Greek loanword. One other scribe explains his presence in a text as a response to an order as well: Iôdisi in 38, a great priest who was “ordered to write, wrote and witnessed.”110 One prosopographical detail ties Iôdisi’s text to Kapenê’s: Mena is not only bishop of Ibrim in both, but the first-person voice in Iôdisi’s text is Ngonnen, daughter of a man also named Mena. The identity of this Mena is not specified. It may have been obvious to everyone involved that Ngonnen was the daughter of the bishop. Equally, it may have been obvious that the same bishop was the only person in a position to “order” Iôdisi the great priest to write his daughter’s land sale. If this model is correct, something new about the Nubian scribal system has been revealed. Two scribes make a point of noting that their role as a scribe is due to an order they receive. In each case, if we are right, the order came from the bishop. The bishop’s authority or prestige presumably gave him this right, not ascribed to anyone else at Ibrim. In other cases, no such order is specified, and whenever the text records that the 108. See page 237. 109. This leaves us only with the peculiar coincidence between the bishop’s name, Mena, and that of the man releasing the servant to the bishop. But the name is known from other Ibrim texts, for example, 34 and 38, and the coincidence may be just that. 110. “aï ïôdisi sort() daueillon timakkisil paeison paeise matarangiselo.” But has Browne’s transcript omitted something? Where is the verb “to order”? Did Browne mean to print keleuon for paeison? Unfortunately, a plate of this text is lacking from the volume, and I have not yet located one in the British Museum Qasr Ibrim Archive.

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witnesses receive payment for their efforts, the scribe does as well. No fixed rate of scribal payment is apparent from the texts. When he is not ordered to write, the cost of the transaction between him and those who need his services would appear to be negotiable.

The Intermediaries According to the typology established in chapter 1, Nubian sales fall into one of three basic types: 1) a direct transaction in which the buyer presents the seller with the purchase price for the seller’s property; 2) an indirect transaction in which someone other than the buyer presents the seller with the purchase price for the seller’s property; and 3) an indirect transaction in which the buyer presents the seller with the purchase price for someone else’s property. (A hypothetical fourth type, in which someone other than the buyer presents the seller with the purchase price for someone else’s property, is not attested.) Archive 3 includes four sales of the first type (32, 36, 37, and 44), four sales of the second type (34i, 34ii, 38, and 39111), and one sale of the third type (40). The intermediaries in the indirect transactions are mysterious and warrant further attention. The intermediaries in the third type provide payment to the seller of what is described as someone else’s land. The only example of this form, 40, is an intriguing case and worth quoting in detail. The text, which dates to 1199 ad, has two sections, in two distinct hands. Browne’s translation of the first-person narrative of the first section reads: I, Adama, Eparch of Nobadia and also Domesticus of Faras, and also holding the office of Scribe, selling a place (?) in the town of Ibrim to the Church of the Holy Trinity, establishing it with my piety, (I) sold Kapopi’s land, which is under my control and which lies in Lower Oudji, setting it aside for the Church of the Holy Trinity. This section gives the description of a single plot of land and ends with the signature of Eiodisi, Great Priest and scribe of the text, before a second hand continues: It is the land in Lower Oudji that I gave in my piety (?) for the foundation of the church, and accordingly I set aside 4 plots of reed land and one plot in which there is a stone. 111 . 45 may also belong in this group; see above, page 24.

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More detailed descriptions of four plots follow, to conclude the text. The author of the second section does not name himself, but he seems likely to be Adama, thus continuing the first-person voice of the first section and providing more detail that Eiodisi left out of that portion of the text. Why does Adama sell Kapopi’s land? Kapopi is a known female name.112 Women may have needed male guardians to act as their agents to conduct valid legal transactions. Such a phenomenon is well known from Greco-Roman legal parallels. But this theory must be quickly discarded: In 38 Ngonnen sells to Mashshouda without any intermediary, and she is explicitly described as Mena’s daughter (“Mênan asil”).113 More to the point, Kapopi is known from 36, in which she sells land to Neuesi and is explicitly described as Toungngesi’s daughter (“Toungngesin asil”). Kapopi clearly needed no guardian in that case. Kapopi’s appearance in 36 and 40 holds the key to Adama’s apparent role as her intermediary in 40. In 36, which dates to 1190, Kapopi sells what would appear to be a considerable amount of land to Neuesi, the daughter of Adama. The text includes detailed descriptions of the boundaries of eleven separate plots. At the end of the decade, nine years later, Adama himself sells one and gives away four plots of land in 40. Three of these five plots are demonstrably the same as those Kapopi sold to Adama’s daughter earlier in the decade: 1) the plot described in 36 as having the land of Asti on the north and the land of the ApostleChurch on the south, which is described in 40 as the plot with the land of Aneion-Asti on the north and the land of the Apostle-Church of Ibrim on the south; 2) the plot described in 36 as having the land of Enon-Asti on the north and the land of Anieion-Asti on the south, which appears in 40 as the plot with the land of Anion-Asti on the north and the land of Anion-Asti on the south; and 3) the plot described in both 36 and 40 as having the land of the Peter-Church on the north and the land of Anieion-

112 . Cf. Kapopi, daughter of Papsinen, (“Kapopi Papsinen asil”) in 44 and Kapopi, daughter of Toungngesi, (“Kapopi Toungngesin asil”) in 36, the same woman here in 40. 113 . Consider also 34ii: Pongita, Persi, and Ngonnen sell land to Mashshouda, and two of the three are certainly female. Persi and Ngonnen are therein explicitly described (lines 3–4) as “daughters”: “an asi Persilde Ngonnen Mênan | asildekello.” Pongita we know from 38 and 40, where she and Persi reappear as “Pongitalo tan as Persillo” (line 19) and “Pangitalo tan as Persillo” (lines 22–23), respectively. The genitive pronoun tan is grammatically ambiguous, but Browne rendered it as “her” (Pongita and her daughter Persi) in each case.

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Asti on the south. When Adama described himself as selling “a place (?) in the town of Ibrim,” simplicity dictates that he was referring to all of these plots “in Lower Oudji,” an otherwise unknown place name in the area of Qasr Ibrim.114 But these plots should have belonged to Adama’s daughter, Neuesi, who is no longer to be found in 40 . Surely, if she were legally capable of purchasing land at the start of the decade, she would not have needed her father’s mediation to sell the land at decade’s end. She may have died in the meantime, leaving Adama with the inherited deed to the land, but without any land sale to support that deed, leading him to make it clear that the land in question had once been Kapopi’s. The Old Nubian is not very helpful. Line 14 of sale 40 includes the phrase “parre Kapopin jana dissil eiraula pil,” which Browne translates in his main text as “(I) sold Kapopi’s land, which is under my control” and in his commentary as “it is Kapopi’s land that I sold.”115 The verb jana den-, “to sell,” appears here with the present verbid ending. The noun eiraula means “power,” and pi- is the verb “to be.” Adama thus states that he is in power over Kapopi’s land. How could this have happened in the time since she sold the land to his daughter? Adama’s inheritance of his daughter’s land is one possible explanation. But why would he not simply say that he owned the land? Other explanations fit the situation faced in 40.116 Given Neuesi’s absence from the text, ownership of these plots may have reverted to Kapopi due to intervening events. Even though Kapopi does not need a guardian as a female, she may have Adama acting as her agent for unknown reasons. But Adama’s motives for making the sale in 40 would appear to rule out the possibility that he is acting as Kapopi’s agent. In the second section of the text,

114 . There is no other obvious solution: Adama describes plots in Lower Oudji but says nothing about any other “place” in Qasr Ibrim. The relevant phrase appears at 40.13: “phrim dippla goudka,” where goud-, goud- can mean “earth, ground, place; weather, time” (Browne 1996, 33). 115 . His commentary cites Browne 1988, 46–48 a discussion of substantival cleft sentences, of which he takes this to be an example. 116. Ochała suggests that in calling it “Kapopi’s land,” Adama is simply using a conventional nickname in which the property is named after a previous owner. This is plausible: We see parallels in Greco-Roman Egypt. But why do we see no parallels in Qasr Ibrim’s medieval texts? This is the only sale in which the first-person agent uses this circumlocution. In the other cases from Qasr Ibrim, the sellers simply state from whom they inherited or purchased the land in question.

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perhaps written in his own hand, he writes that he gave the land “for the foundation of the church” (“kissen simpoutka”).117 Adama would presumably have been in no position to sell someone else’s land for his own pious interests, unless extraordinary circumstances applied. For example, Adama may have lent money to Kapopi at some point in the past and held a lien on the plots in question. In the event of a default by Kapopi on the loan in question, Adama may have been entitled to sell her property as he saw fit. His pious sale and donation to the Church of the Holy Trinity in 40 may then have been the result of a failed loan to Kapopi. The role of the intermediaries in the second form of land sale points in a similar direction. In 34i, Mouna and Manyi sell land to Iongoka and Mena, and Soueti, the meizoteros of the village (“Soueti irkin daukattin”118), gives them the gold. This Soueti is presumably the same man appearing in that transaction’s witness list as Soueti, the meizoteros of Ibrim (“Soueti silmin daukattillo”119). In 34ii, Pongita, Persi and Ngonnen sell land to Mashshouda, and Songoja-Piki (“his daughter”), Soundin-Ngal, and Ourtikashshi give them the gold. Ourtikashshi is described as the tot of Sai, but neither of the other two intermediaries has a title.120 When Songoja-Piki is described as “his daughter” (“tan astilde”), who is meant? Browne’s translation alters the order of the names listed in the text to retain sense in English. In the Old Nubian, Mashshouda is the last name mentioned and clearly the antecedent of “his” (tan). Thus Songoja-Piki is one of the intermediaries paying gold for her own father’s land purchase. In 38, Ngonnen sells land to Mashshouda, and Darme the timakkis gives her the gold. Darme the timakkis is widely attested in texts from Qasr Ibrim, appearing as a witness in several texts and even as a scribe in one.121 In 39, Aggestotil sells land to Mashshouda, and Marieio gives him 117. It is possible that the second hand in 40 is Kapopi’s herself and that she is explaining her own motivation for having Adama sell her land. But this complicates the situation unnecessarily, as it introduces a second first-person voice without any indication of a change in speaker. 118. For daukatt- as a possible equivalent to the Byzantine meizoteros, see P.QI 3 xii. 119. He may also be the same man who appears as a meizoteros and witness in 31. Note, however, that Ibrim (silmi) is never a “village” (irki), only a “town” or “city” (dipp), in the known source material. 120. However, another Soundin-Ngal appears as tot of Sai in 37. If these two people are the same, it strongly suggests that the position of tot of Sai passed from Ourtikashshi to Soundin-Ngal because of the connection between them document in 34 . Perhaps they were blood relatives. 121 . See 33 , 34, 35 , 38, 40, 41, and 45 .

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the gold. Marieio may appear again in the witness list to the same transaction, but the absence of a title or further descriptor in either case prevents certainty. The first logical suspicion—that these intermediaries are acting as agents of the purchaser—finds no support in the texts themselves. If these individuals were deputized to act on behalf of the purchasers or had some sort of legal authority to conduct the transactions for them, we might expect the texts to say so. Although several of these intermediaries hold titles or offices in their own right, none of them is described in any way reminiscent of the Greek boêthos (“assistant”) or pronoêtês (“administrator”), for example. Further, it seems unlikely that Mashshouda—the purchaser in three out of four of these cases—would be represented by different agents in all three cases. This is particularly telling in the cases of 38 and 39: The two sales were likely within a year of each other, and a change of agents between the two transactions seems unlikely.122 Maybe Mashshouda had different agents for purchases in different geographic regions: Text 38, for example, concerns Mosmosi, while 39 would appear to concern Ibrim. But all of Mashshouda’s transactions in these cases—wherever the property being purchased—were concluded in Ibrim: This much is implied by Bishop Mena of Ibrim’s presence as a witness to all three transactions. One might also argue that Songoja-Piki, described as Mashshouda’s daughter, most likely appears in 34ii because she is acting as her father’s agent. But why then would she pay the sale price with two other intermediaries? If she were simply her father’s agent, her presence alone would suffice, without the other intermediaries. Other explanations for these intermediaries can be found. First, we may imagine that they paid the price on behalf of the purchasers who lacked the funds to do so. Their presence in these texts may suggest an otherwise unseen loan they made to the purchaser in the form of payment for these land sales. Second, we may imagine that they paid the purchase price for the purchasers because they were in debt to the purchasers. Assistance to the purchaser in these land sales would be a way to discharge their debt in full or in part. Finally, we may imagine that they paid the purchase price for the purchasers because they have some future or pre-existing relationship to the purchased property not specified in the text. They may have been leasing 122 . For the relative chronology of 39 in relation to 38, which dates to 1198, see appendix 1, page 268.

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the plots in question. Paying the purchase price for the purchaser may have ensured continuity of their leasehold. They do not gain any legal title to the land because their intermediate purchase is essentially a bundle payment toward their future lease. Alternatively, by helping the purchaser pay the price, they may have been securing some unspecified share of ownership over the land in question. The presence of Mashshouda’s daughter as one of the intermediaries may make this alternative more plausible: The purchase could be seen as, to some degree, a family venture. These possibilities are all necessarily speculative. They do, however, have a circumstantial attraction, reinforcing, as they do, the already robust picture of a private land market that these texts provide for us. Hidden behind the regular purchase and sale of private land in Christian Nubia may have been even more complex economic instruments, including loans and leases to provide capital and incentive for these purchases and sales. An alternative possibility, just as speculative, has the same net effect, of creating a more complex picture of Nubia’s economic structures. Polanyi has noted that, in archaic economies, “[s]ales were ensured even in the absence of markets.”123 As he points out, “in parts of the Sudan sales were regularly held through brokers and even auctioneers were employed who often were also the brokers.”124 In essence, these brokers act as middlemen vital to expanding the capacity of a market or in creating a virtual market where a real one does not exist. In this scenario, Soueti, Darme, Marieio and the others might be Nubian land brokers, arranging a transaction between buyer and seller and—behind the scenes—receiving a commission of some kind when the deal is done. In chapter 7, several theories are explored in an attempt to explain the reference to face value in the land sales and other Old Nubian texts.125 The most likely of these explanations seems to be that this vestigial terminology survives from much earlier Coptic references to coins with imperial images. But another possibility has bearing here, that a transaction’s face value may indicate its capital value and thus implicitly mask a larger amount, including interest or commissions to a broker or some other kind of intermediary. All of this is speculative and must await new documentary evidence for confirmation.

123 . Polanyi 1966, 174. 124 . Polanyi 1966, 174. 125 . See below, page 178.

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The Witnesses The witnesses to the Qasr Ibrim land sales are the most interesting aspect of the genre. On the one hand, the apparent presence of a witness requirement for any Nubian sale or cession would suggest a legal explanation for the practice, one perhaps connected to the Greco-Roman legal tradition at the origin of the genre.126 On the other hand, several features of the witness lists suggest a social explanation for their presence in the texts. An examination of the witness lists suggests the following arguments: 1) there was no set requirement for how many witnesses were needed to make a transaction legal; 2) instead, these witnesses were produced for the weight of their social status; and 3) their role was less legal than social, to act as enforcers of public will, to represent the community eye on the transaction. Finally, a crucial question: Who was responsible for producing the witnesses, the buyer, the seller, a connected third party such as the scribe, or some combination of all of these figures? The available evidence suggests that the seller—or more generally, the initiating party in a legal transaction—did not produce the witnesses. Consider the case of Kapopi. A release of a slave (33) and two land sales (36 and 40) feature women named Kapopi. She is the first-person voice in the first two cases and sells land through Adama in the third case. The name is not common, appearing in only one other published text from Qasr Ibrim, and it seems likely that the same woman appears in all three cases. These three transactions include more than twenty witnesses each. But the overlap in these lists is relatively small: Ajola, Iêsousinkouda, the bishop’s son Songoj and Tapara the priest appear in 33 and 36, and Tapara may appear again in 40.127 This overlap is a relatively low proportion of the witnesses appearing in each text. Since Kapopi is the only common denominator in these three texts, we may conclude that she as the initiating party probably did not produce the witnesses. The available evidence also suggests that the buyer did not produce the witnesses. Consider the case of Mashshouda. Mashshouda the choiakeikshil is the buyer in 37, 38, and 39. Far fewer witnesses occur in these

126. On witnesses in the Greco-Roman legal tradition, see below, page 143. 127. Contrary to Browne’s translation, I take “silmin papasin ngal songojalo” in 33 and “songoja thôma papsin ngallo” in 36 to refer to the same person, Songoj, son of Bishop Thoma, who appears in the protocol of each text. Thus Papsi in 36 ceases to exist.

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texts than in Kapopi’s. Here, the witness lists only include sixteen, thirteen, and nine names respectively. But the overlap in these lists is equally small: Only Tapara the meizoteros and Mena, bishop of Ibrim, appear in more than one list. This overlap is also a relatively low proportion of the witnesses appearing in each text. Again, since Mashshouda is the only common denominator in these three texts, we can conclude that he, as the buyer, probably did not produce the witnesses. The evidence seems strong that the scribes were responsible for producing the witnesses for legal documents. Consider the two certain cases of recurring scribes.128 Ajola the deacon wrote 31, 39, and 42. Bishop Mena, Tapara the meizoterus, and Ourinourta appear as witnesses in 39 and 42, accounting for one-quarter of the witnesses in the latter case and nearly one-third in the former. Eiodisi the Great Priest wrote 38 and 40. Bishop Mena, a woman named Enoeionngoka, a man named Theodore, and the mother-daughter pair Pongita and Persi appear as witnesses in both texts, accounting for one-quarter of the witnesses in the second case and nearly one-half in the first. Browne drew attention to the similarities between the witness lists in 40 and 34, another text written by Eiodisi the Great Priest.129 Bishop Mena and priests named Darme and Ournourta head both lists. The two lists have nearly ten more likely matches, including Tidaua and Milinkouda, appearing in sequence in both lists, and Petri and Aggeloskol also appearing in sequence in both lists. This level of convergence between witness lists when the only apparent shared variable is the scribe makes one thing clear: Even if the witnesses were well known to the buyer and seller (as Bishop Mena surely was), the scribes deserve significant credit for their presence in any given transaction.

By Gender Perhaps it is unsurprising that women could serve as legally effective witnesses to Nubian legal transactions. A number of women were involved in buying and selling property. Without a study of Nubian onomastics, it is not always possible to tell whether a name appearing on a witness list is

128. I omit 35 and 37, each drafted by a Kapenê, as the two scribes identify themselves differently in the two texts, in the fi rst as “daughter of the Priest Makari” and in the second as “Scribe of Kaki West.” Pictures of neither text are available to me. 129. 40.17–23n.

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male or female. Some Nubian names seem to be flexible in that regard.130 However, enough women are described as the wives or daughters of others for us to be certain of their gender: At least one female witness is documented in 32 and 39; two in 31, 33, 35, 37, 41 and 45; three in 38 and 40; and six in 34. Other women are certainly hidden among those not so specified. While these women are clearly in the minority, it does not appear to have been remarkable for a woman to appear as a witness in a Nubian context. The one uncertainty among these female witnesses is Kapenê, the apparently female scribe encountered in 35, the release of a servant. She explains her presence in this text by noting that the bishop ordered her to write it, which could be taken as an admission that a female scribe was an irregularity but this would be a misreading of the evidence. Male scribes could be ordered to their work as well. Text 37, a land sale, was drafted by the Scribe of Kaki West, also named Kapenê, perhaps the same woman. Browne did not include plates of 35 and 37 in his publication; they would have potentially represented visual evidence of female literacy in Christian Nubia.131

By Number The number of witnesses present in each text is another feature of the Nubian land sale that suggests that something more than legal formality is present. As table 5.2 shows, there was no fixed number of witnesses needed to make a land sale valid. The number found in Qasr Ibrim land sales ranges from a low of seven (in the appendix to 38) to a high of 30 (in the second part of 34). Whether there was any sense of a legally permissible minimum number of witnesses, the participants in our Qasr Ibrim land sales frequently found it advisable to produce many more. In previous chapters, the relative roles of Mashshouda the choiak-eikshil and Adama the eparch in the texts of Archive 3 were discussed. The number of witnesses in these land sales may provide another way to compare the place of Mashshouda to that of Adama in twelfth-century Qasr Ibrim. Tables 5.3 and 5.4 list the land sales involving both men and record the number of witnesses listed in each sale. The land sales involving

130. See 239 below. 131 . But see 237 below.

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medieval nubia Table 5.2 Witness Counts and Sales Prices.

Text Number

Sale Price

32

6 pieces of gold

34

36 37

38 39 40 41 42 (cession) 44 45

90225 90226 90227 90229

90230

*

Witness Count

11 (10 and a witnessing scribe) 12 pieces of gold i. 14 (12 and a witnessing 12 pieces of gold scribe) ii. 30 (29 and a witnessing scribe) plus “the people of the town” a camel, a stone, a ring, and a 26 (25 and a witnessing slave scribe) 20 pieces of gold i. 16 (14, a witnessing scribe, self) ii. [[14 (13 and a witnessing scribe)]] 6 pieces of gold 13 (12 and a witnessing scribe) App.: 7 1 piece of gold and 1 dart()* 9 (8 and a witnessing scribe) 1 piece of gold and 1 dart() 22 (21 and a witnessing scribe) 12 (11 and a witnessing scribe) 2 pieces of gold 13 (12 and a witnessing scribe) 14 (13 and self) 6 to the receipt of gold 8 to the purchase of the share 9 pieces of gold 10 + 1 scribe For two plots: 1) 13 pieces of gold; 2? (text is uncertain) 2) 6 pieces of gold 10 slaves, 40 pigs, and 2 dirhem 1? (text is uncertain) None extant Two plots: 1) 13 pieces of gold; 2) 1 slave and 10 pieces of gold. Other sums of gold appear, but text is lacunose down its center. 15 gold and other unknown At least 3 (text is uncertain) commodities

Not 1.5 pieces of gold, as in Browne’s translation; see note 9 on page 78 above.

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Table 5.3 Adama’s Witnesses by Number. Text Number

Number of Witnesses

36 (Adama is the father of the purchaser) 26 (25 and a witnessing scribe) 37 (Adama witness a purchase)

i. 16 (14, a witnessing scribe, self) ii. [[14 (13 and a witnessing scribe)]]

40 (Adama is the seller)

22 (21 and a witnessing scribe)

44 (Adama witnesses a purchase)

14 (13 and self)

Total Number of Witnesses

78 (92)

Total Number of Unique People

approximately 65

Mashshouda include a cumulative 109 witnesses, amounting to more than fifty separate individuals when repeat witnesses and uncertain identifications are accounted for. The land sales involving Adama, which have far fewer recurring witnesses, include a cumulative ninety-two witnesses, amounting to nearly as many separate individuals. Since Mashshouda appears in five land sales and Adama only four, Adama’s appearances had a higher average number of witnesses per sale than Mashshouda (twenty-three versus just less than twenty-two). But Mashshouda is the purchaser (or recipient) of the land in all five cases, while Adama is the purchaser in only one and merely a participant in the other three cases. It is hard to know how to judge these numbers. As a preliminary hypothesis, a concern for one’s prestige seemingly motivated Table 5.4 Mashshouda’s Witnesses by Number.* Text Number

Number of Witnesses

34 (Mashshouda is the purchaser)

i. [[14 (13 and a witnessing scribe)]] ii. 30 (29 and a witnessing scribe)

37 (Mashshouda is the purchaser)

i. [[16 (15 and a witnessing scribe)]] ii. 14 (12, a witnessing scribe, self)

38 (Mashshouda is the purchaser)

13 (12 and a witnessing scribe); 7

39 (Mashshouda is the purchaser)

9 (8 and a witnessing scribe)

42 (Mashshouda is the recipient of cession)

13 (12 and a witnessing scribe)

Total Number of Witnesses

79 (109)

Total Number of Unique People

approximately 55

*

See note to table 5.3.

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the number of witnesses asked to a sale. Land sales involving Adama may have had slightly more participants, in part because of Adama’s higher rank and greater prestige.

By Family The witnesses in the Qasr Ibrim texts also shed light on the role of the family as a social unit in Christian Nubia. Noting that Nubians in the modern era place great importance on a “modified version of the patriarchal extended family,” Adams thought it natural to look to Qasr Ibrim for evidence of such a prominent role for the family unit among Nubians of an earlier period. Looking solely at land ownership, he came up empty: [T]here is no hint of any such corporate unit in the mediaeval texts. Land and other property holdings are always listed in the name of individuals, not families . . . Notable too is the general absence of patronymics in the documents. . . . This suggests that the ideology of familism was not particularly prevalent among the mediaeval Nubians, again in contrast to the situation in more recent times.132 This is an incomplete examination of the role of the family in the Qasr Ibrim texts. When we look beyond land ownership to the social event legitimizing that ownership, the Nubian family plays an important role. When the community gathers to recognize a land sale, the family plays as large a role in providing that social recognition as the individual does. Text 34, which combines a land sale and a land cession, provides multiple examples of family groups as witnesses. The land sale therein, by Mouna and Manyi to Iôngoka and Mêna, provides the most striking example. The fifth name on the witness list, Songoja,133 is followed by a Daut (David), described as his representative (“tan pesillo”) and son of Ouattal. The next witness is Orôsel, “his uncle” (“tan gi”). Which antecedent is meant—Daut or his father Ouattal—is not obvious, but Daut makes

132 . Adams 1996, 250–251. 133 . Songoj is, of course, a title as well, the Nubian equivalent of eparch; see above, page 35. It might be possible to imagine that “the eparch” (Adama, in this case) is appearing as an anonymous witness, but no clear cases of this can be found in other witness lists. Why and how some titles become names (or vice versa) is a question for future research in Nubian onomastics.

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the most sense. This text would then show two generations of the same family (rather than the less likely scenario, three generations) serving as consecutive witnesses.134 Four more witnesses intervene before Iôminne, who is described as the daughter of Ouattal (“ouatta asillo”), and Shipopi, described as “tan asillo.” Browne’s translation renders this as “his daughter,” Ouattal’s.135 Since the scribe does not distinguish one Ouattal from the other and almost all the other witnesses receive some distinguishing label, we are likely dealing with one man. Under this reconstruction, 34’s witnesses include three siblings and their father’s brother. Text 34 includes several other witnesses with family relations. Ngissitikol and his two daughters, Iôla and Iôkaja, appear as three consecutive witnesses between Orôsel and Iôminne.136 The second document included in 34, the land cession from Pongita, Persi, and Ngonnen to Mashshouda, has two further pairs of related witnesses: Tapara and his son Marieio are the first; Einyitta and his children Eionngoka and Douriketil are the second.137 The pattern is present in other Qasr Ibrim land sales as well: Dollitakil, a chief, and three of his children witness 32; Pongita and her daughter Persil witness 38; Marinkouda and his daughter Eirotatoungngilki witness 39; four parent-child pairs witness 40; and a single father-child pair witness 44 and 45. Parallels from other sites affirm that the presence of family groups on witness lists was not limited to Qasr Ibrim. The land sale from Dirr published by Griffith in 1913 also includes families in its witness list.138 Two of the witnesses are Angeshouda and Sagari. Orinourta, appearing immediately after Angeshouda, is described as “his son” (“tan-ngal”). Eisou and Papi are both described as “the son of Sagari” (“Sagarin ngal”), although 134 . Taking Orôsel as Ouattal’s brother is the easiest interpretation, but (see note to line 37 in the first edition) gî in modern Nubian dialects refers to a maternal uncle. If the word had the same force in these texts, then the two men may have been brothers-in-law instead. 135 . Old Nubian personal pronouns did not distinguish by gender: Tan could refer just as easily to Iôminne, making Shipopi “her daughter,” that is, daughter of Iôminne and granddaughter of Ouattal. Perhaps Browne rejected this reasoning by the same logic followed in note 134 above, that it is more plausible to have two generations of witnesses from the same family than three. 136. With the same ambiguity present here as in note 113 above: tan asillo in lines 1.38–39 obviously refers to Ngissikitol, but tan asillo in line 39 may refer either to him or his daughter Iôla. 137. With the same grammatical ambiguity in lines 2.19–20 as noted in the two preceding notes. For the name Einyitta (“wealth”), see Satzinger 2004, 531 and Łajtar 1992, 117–118. 138. For the Dirr land sale, see note 1 on page 77 above.

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neither of them follows Sagari immediately in the witness list. The Old Nubian legal text from Kulubnarti also shows evidence of family groups in its witness list, with the appearance of Mamel and his father, Eisi.139 How do we account for so many parents and children appearing together as witnesses? It is unlikely that these land sales involved professional witnesses, and there was no apparent need to make a legally recognized minimum number of witnesses. The presence of these family pairs may be further indication that land sales in Christian Nubia were social events. A witness, when invited to attend, might bring his or her children along to participate, and in some cases enjoy the free food and drink that attended the ceremony. It is hard to imagine that the examples cited could appear without some social acceptance of family participation in land sale ceremonies.

By Group A comparison of land sale 37 and text 43, which Browne described as a “donation,” gives a further example of witnesses appearing together in groups but in this case without apparent family ties. In 37, Engngaeil records and has witnessed both his purchase from Papasinen, daughter of Magosi, and his sale to Mashshouda of a share of the Mary-Church of Ibrim, described as a share of land. Curiously, the two transactions have different witness lists, which may suggest that, while recorded in the same text, the purchase from Papasinen and the sale to Mashshouda took place at different times. Text 43 provides a cryptic description of a related transaction, in which Pasine (presumably the same person as Papasinen in 37) says that she has given eight gold pieces to Engnga(l) (Engngaeil) and his wife, at the request of the Mary-Church.140

139. Browne 2000. 140. Browne’s simple description of this text as a donation is insufficient and hides 43’s deeper relationship with 37. It is left unclear in 37 how Papasinen had control over land of the Mary-Church and in 43 why the Mary-Church sought Papasinen. But the cases taken together describe a sequence of connectivity proceeding in chronological order from the Mary-Church to Papasinen, from Papasinen to Engngaeil and from Engngaeil to Mashshouda. In one case ( 37), Papasinen gets land from the Mary-Church, gives it to Engngaeil, and receives an unspecified amount of gold. In the other case (43), Papasinen has some unknown interaction with the Mary-Church and then gives eight gold pieces to Engngaeil. It seems inescapable that a single transaction is at work here, not two. Perhaps the Mary-Church and/or Papasinen were in debt to Engngaeil, and the otherwise

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Pasine’s gift of eight gold pieces to Engngaeil in 43 and Engngaeil’s sale of the land in question to Mashshouda in the second half of 37 have nearly identical witness lists.141 Compare the two columns in table 5.4a: Table 5.4a Witnesses in 37 and 43.

37

43

Ngapre, son of Kesiami Iereosi, chief

Ngapre, son of Kesiamê Iereosi, chief

Istotil

Isto(til)

Douddil

Douddil

Aura

Aura

Oilan-Nga(l)

Oilan-Nga(l), Asti of Nga(l)

Minne, Tot of Tamit Dollitaki, Tot of Toshka, chief

Dollitakil, Tot of Toshka, chief

Doukasi, Goush of Tharmousi

Doukasi

The lists are identical, save for Minne, Tot of Tamit, missing from the second document. Since Doukasi is the scribe for that section of 37 and for 43, he may have provided this group of witnesses in bulk for both transactions. Alternatively, this list, including Doukasi, may be seen as Engngaeil’s entourage or social allies. The witness list in 37 includes five additional names absent from 43, but that list begins with Mashshouda and specifically mentions his weighing of gold for Engngaeil. This portion of the witness list may then be taken as listing Mashshouda’s own entourage present at the sale. The evidence of 37 and 43 suggests that, under rare circumstances, contracting parties might provide their own witnesses in bulk. The scribe Doukasi may simply have been the figure responsible for assembling the group as a whole on both occasions. Each transaction may have been witnessed and recorded at the same time.142 Doukasi, through his social connections to Engngaeil, may have known implicitly which witnesses to unexplained gift of eight gold pieces to Engngaeil and the undisclosed initial purchase price for the land from the Mary-Church mask that debt, discharged in these two texts. 141 . A fact Browne recognized in the commentary to 43 for its orthographic utility. He drew no further connections between the two texts. 142 . An observation made via personal communication to me by Ochała.

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supply for the event. This reinforces the growing impression that far from representing mere legal formalities, the witnesses were consciously chosen for their ability to provide social recognition and security.

By Status Witnesses to Nubian legal documents make a point of recording their official position or title. Witnesses who appear without titles probably had no title to give. If the scribes were usually instrumental in producing them, they most likely made a point of mentioning which of their witnesses had prestigious social roles and also of trying to produce as many such witnesses as possible. Gourresi the eparch is a classic case of a land owner whose purchases involved prestige witnesses. Gourresi, whose turbulent political career is known from the Arab historians, is one of the rare figures known from both documentary and literary sources.143 He appears twice in Qasr Ibrim land sales from the 1280s, as the purchaser of land from Iôoshsha and Eishkl. In the first text, Kosma, bishop of Ibrim, is the chief witness to the transaction.144 In the second text, Merk(), bishop of Faras, is the chief— and perhaps the only—witness to the transaction.145 This latter case is particularly important: Bishops of Faras make hardly any appearance in the Ibrim documentary record and appear nowhere else in the Ibrim land sales. But bishops from other sees are well known in Ibrim’s epigraphic record: Perhaps they gathered there to meet one another or came individually to see the eparch.146 Gourresi’s position as an eparch made him a public figure known to all the region’s leading ecclesiastical figures. If the buyers in the land sales supplied the witnesses, Merk()’s appearance in the second text tells us more. We could imagine that Gourresi had a personal connection to Nobadia’s highest-ranking bishop and could call on him to witness his legal transactions. We could also imagine that Merk() was in Qasr Ibrim on other business and witnessed Gourresi’s purchase as a personal favor. But Gourresi would have no reason to ask for such a favor unless Merk()’s

143 . For Gourresi, see Ruffi ni forthcoming c. 144 . Unpublished EA 90226. 145 . Unpublished EA 90227. 146. See Łajtar and van der Vliet’s remarks at I. Qasr Ibrim page 8.

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rank and the prestige coming with it were not part of the value of his signature. Otherwise, anyone would do. But the scribes were responsible for producing the witnesses. This leads us to ask, who chooses the scribes and why. The prestige of the witnesses each scribe can bring to the table might be part of the commodity that scribes offer to their customers. As with letter writers, speaking in the first person through their scribes, it may be the land sellers, speaking in the first person in these sales, who select the scribe for each event. The sellers produce the food that allows them to assert their wealth and prestige to the community, even in the face of a potentially more prestigious and wealthier purchaser. Perhaps the same phenomenon is at work with scribal selection: Scribes are chosen who can bring the most prestigious witnesses to the transactions, allowing the purchaser to better assert his or her social parity with the eparchs and the choiak-eikshils of the world. In this scenario, the two bishops do not appear in Gourresi’s purchases because of his social connections. They appear because the sellers need to assert their social connections. This reinforces our impression of Nubian land sales as prestige-driven events. The number of witnesses to a sale, the prestige of those witnesses, and one’s ability to feed them are all elements of social capital enhancing the importance of the event and the seller in the eyes of the community. These factors working in conjunction can strengthen the security of the sale: The more people at a witness feast and the larger the feast, the more people will talk about it afterward. The more important those people are, the more robust the social network of information about the sale and the feast that accompanied it.147 With this theory in mind, the logical question is how to measure the prestige of the witnesses. Our ignorance of Nubian titles and of Nubian church and secular hierarchies makes assessing these witness lists a difficult task. It would appear that the lists are not ordered on the basis of rank. Thus in 41, for example, Masê the meizoterus appears ahead of Tapara the chief, while in 42 Mashshouda the chief appears ahead of Tapara the meizoterus. In 34 Iêsousinkouda the priest appears before Parin-Ogja the deacon but after Ajola the deacon. In 32 Petri the choiak-eikshil appears after Dollitakil the chief, while in 38 Tidawa the choiak-eikshil appears after Teeita the chief. Rank may not have a direct correspondence to social 147. I would like to thank my colleague Jinyu Liu of DePauw University for suggesting these points to me.

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medieval nubia Table 5.5 Adama’s Witnesses by Rank.

Text Number

Titled Witnesses

36 (Adama is the father of the purchaser)

12: a makihil, an ouataphil, five priests, four deacons, and one archdeacon

37 (Adama witnesses a purchase)

18: an eparch (himself), a bishop, a Lord of the Horse, two chiefs, a great priest, a timakkis, two chief and tots, two ngeshshs, a meizoterus, four tots, a goush, and a choiak-eikshil (Mashshouda)

40 (Adama is the seller)

6: a bishop, one priest & timakkis, two priests, a meizoterus, and a great priest 12: three ngeshshs, five chiefs, two chief and tots, an ngeshshigaueikkol, and an eparch (himself)

44 (Adama witnesses a purchase)

status. Our witness lists may have been arranged according to criteria of social prestige unknown to us, but there is no way of confirming whether this is the case and no particular reason to think so. Since the witness lists are not ordered by rank, other ways of measuring the relative importance of our witnesses are required. One way is to compare their titles to the titles appearing in the introductory protocols, which offer snapshots of the Nubian political and religious elite. Witnesses who hold offices appearing in those protocols are therefore more likely to be of higher status than witnesses who hold offices not appearing in those protocols. The first conclusion to draw from the titles given in these witness lists is that the buyers and sellers were very well-connected people. Witnesses include one bishop of Ibrim (the same man in 34, 38, 39, and 40), two bishops of Kourte (37 and 41), one bishop of an unnamed see (42), and one son of a bishop of Ibrim (33 and 36).148 Witnesses also include an eparch (37), Nobadia’s highest-ranking political official. Protocols also occasionally list men with the office of meizoteros, tot, and triklinarios. Our witness lists include men holding all three titles. Consider tables 5.5 and 5.6, the witnesses in transactions involving Adama and Mashshouda: The witness lists are a compendium of Lower Nubia’s high-ranking elite. Further evidence reinforces the idea that witnesses were more important for their social than their legal power. The second document in 34, a

148. For the last case, see note 127 above.

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Table 5.6 Mashshouda’s Witnesses by Rank. Text Number

Titled Witnesses

34 part ii (Mashshouda is the purchaser)

11: a bishop, a priest and ouataphil, four priests, a timakkis, two deacons, an arapil, and a great priest 18: an eparch (Adama), a bishop, a Lord of the Horse, two chiefs, a great priest, a timakkis, two chief and tots, two ngeshshs, a meizoterus, four tots, a goush, and a choiak-eikshil (himself) 3: a bishop, a tot, and a great priest and timakkis

37 (Mashshouda is the purchaser)

38 (Mashshouda is the purchaser) 39 (Mashshouda is the purchaser)

8: a bishop, an ouataphil, a meizoterus, a chaerimataeil, an eisol, an atparkit, a suppliant, and a deacon 42 (Mashshouda is the recipi- 7: a bishop, a choiak-eikshil, a chief, a meizoterus, ent of cession) two ouataphils, and a deacon

sale and cession of land from Pongita to Mashshouda, concludes its witness list with the claim, “And the people of the town who have heard are witnesses.”149 The scribe of this second text, Iôdisi, does not tell us which town is meant, but Ibrim is the most likely candidate: One of his witnesses is Papo Mêna, bishop of Ibrim, and the first text, related to the second, was drafted by Papon, tot of Ibrim. Text 44, a sale of land from Enomariamê to “her people” (“tannigoul janeissanalo”) concludes its witness list with the claim, “Each and everyone who is in the town of Addo are witnesses; all the people of the town are witnesses.”150 While the document was prepared in Addo, it is not clear whether the land was there, in Ibrim, or elsewhere—though Enomariamê’s “palm grove” (addokkinika) may be a toponym related to Addo.151 The clauses claiming an entire town as witnesses, or those of the town “who have heard,” lend themselves to several interpretations.152 In 149. 34 .21–22: “dipin kipti | oulgourolgoullon mataragouelo.” 150. 44 .19–22: “addon dip|pila pin siletitan mishshan mataragou|elo dippin kipta mishshin mataragoue|lo.” 151 . See Browne’s note to 44 .2. 152 . A similar claim may be at stake in 41, a sale of unspecified property, in which Isakê interrupts his words with the phrase “the nation have taken [witnesses?]”—“sippil

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some cases—for example, when dealing with sales of out-of-town land or of sales of land with out-of-town owners—participants likely felt that further social insurance, such as laying claim to the entire community’s stake in the sale, would strengthen that sale’s validity. These claims on the community may have been meant literally, that many other townsmen and women were gathered around the signing of the document, beyond those named in the witness list. Finally, these claims on the community may suggest a figurative truth, that those explicitly named in the witness list are recognized to be agents acting on behalf of the entire community. These interpretations need not be mutually exclusive. Further statements appended to the witness list by the scribes suggest that members of Nubian society occasionally anticipated challenges to the validity of their legal documents. Text 31, a release from purchase issued by Tiri and Eno to Eigali, ends with the phrase, “I, Ajola, Deacon, wrote and witnessed on behalf of Adama. And whoever will deny this utters a denial against God. Let him be cursed and not blessed.” Text 35, a release of a servant, includes the phrase, “Whoever will deny this, together with my statement, utters a denial against the Holy Trinity.” Text 41, sales to Mariamê and Oiela described by Isakê, ends with the phrases, “I, Tillinminne(l), wrote and witnessed. Whoever of Mariami’s scribes will disparage me by saying that I am not the writer (?) of my document, may he become estranged from God, and may what is in the 7th seal (?) of the Apocalypse come forth against him.”153 Text 43, a record of an eight gold piece payment, may be a variant on this theme: Pasine, the payer, not the scribe, states, “Let whoever will deny this give 20 (pieces of) gold.”154 Such a steep penalty, two and a half times the original payment amount, would presumably deter Pasine’s detractors from denying the validity of his payment. All of these phrases hint at the most likely challenge to the validity of legal documents in Nubia, and do not protect against denials that the

doum|mon” (lines 3–4). Comparanda attesting to the presence of anonymous groups of witnesses can be found from legal documents in modern Egypt and Sudan. See, for example, the records of hearings and judgments in a land dispute in the Darfur sultanate: O’Fahey and Abu Salim 1983, nos. 14, 20, 22, and 23. 153 . For Browne’s “I am not the writer (?) of my document” the original at lines 15–16 has only “aïokalo | anna minnea” (“I am not of mine”) where Browne understood an implied “anna (kartena paeiera) minnea.” 154 . P.QI 3 has no plate of this text, but an image of it can be found online at www.medievalnubia.info.

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release or the sale took place at all. The phrases also do not protect against denials that the terms of the transaction were not ultimately fulfilled or that proper legal forms were not obeyed. Rather, they protect against claims that the document describing the transaction was not in fact the work of the scribe named in the text. This practice may indicate some suspicion of the written word in Nubian culture. Any society with a substantial degree of illiteracy is likely to see challenges to claims that a text is what its owners say it is. This phenomenon is not uncommon in the Sudan. The nineteenth-century land charters from Darfur include repeated judgments that previous land charters have been found authentic and their owners confirmed in their privileges.155 Alternatively, the production of fraudulent legal documents in the name of other scribes may have been a threat plausible enough to warrant pleas for divine protection. The fact that Tillinminne(l) anticipates the challenge to his scribal work coming from other scribes—who are otherwise uninvolved in the transaction at hand—suggests that scribes might be called on officially to certify the validity of a legal document, perhaps by asserting that the document was actually rendered in the hand of the specified scribe. This validating may have put scribes in a considerable position of authority. We may imagine scenes of bluffing among illiterate disputants, in which denials of a land sale’s legitimacy may have been countered only by divine invocation or reliance on the good will and literacy of another scribe. This, too, may be a sign of Mauss’s transition, a sign of a society experiencing an evolution from archaic to more legalistic forms of contract. In the past, inviting the community to witness the exchange and feasting with them to celebrate the event would have been sufficient. But in this new phase, with instruments of the written word grafted onto older traditions, the legitimacy of the transaction relied not simply on the witnesses but on the scribe’s ability to invoke the power of God.

155 . See, for example, O’Fahey and Abu Salim 1983, nos. 8 and 10.

6

Nubia’s Legal Tradition The Historical Origins of Nubian Legal Writing Introduction Qasr Ibrim’s Nubian land sales are clearly complex. They challenge the earlier scholarly opinion that private land tenure in Nubia did not exist. They also give a wealth of information about social relations in twelfthcentury Qasr Ibrim, revealing the ties between its key players and in turn forcing a reinterpretation of some of the archaeological remains thought to be associated with them. Finally, the land sales provide evidence that behind their legal forms stood a ceremony that imbued the economic transaction with social significance and allowed the participants to engage in conspicuous consumption designed to reinforce social hierarchies. Absent from this discussion so far and absent from all modern commentary on these texts is any sense of how the Nubians came to develop a land sale genre at all. As is clear from other Nubian texts, the land sale was part of a larger legal documentary genre: Rent and sublet agreements and other contractual documents appear in the Nubian textual record, along with witness lists similar to those in the land sales previously discussed. Several explanations for the existence of this legal documentary genre suggest themselves: 1) that it is sui generis, emerging more or less fully formed with the birth of medieval Nubian civilization; 2) that it represents the latest form of a legal process inherited from pre-Nubian, Meroitic civilization; 3) that it represents the grafting of Greco-Roman legal forms, perhaps transmitted through the Coptic language, onto existing Nubian practices. Of these three options, the last is by far the most compelling. The first option, that medieval Nubia develops its own legal forms with close parallels to the forms found in neighboring countries in earlier periods but without influence from those countries, is unlikely on the face of it. The

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second option, that Nubian legal forms emerge from Meroitic antecedents, fails due to the absence of comparable Meroitic legal forms. The third option, that Nubian legal and documentary forms are essentially Greco-Roman in origin, seems unlikely only if we insist on seeing medieval Nubia as a civilization in isolation or seeing it through the distortions of Arab historians and Polanyi’s primitivism. If we discard these paradigms, Nubia is a logical recipient of GrecoRoman influence. Other scholars have made this claim. Adams wrote of the “charisma which still attached [in Nubia] to Byzantine institutions long after the collapse of Byzantine power in the Near East.”1 Papadopoullos, in his 1966 study of Byzantine influences on African culture, wrote: [A Nubian] notarial act of the middle of the 8th century edited by Krall testifies to an advanced assimilation and competent practice of the Roman-Byzantine law, and presupposes economic relations and institutions having attained a certain degree of development.2 But the amount of evidence available has increased considerably since he wrote, and we are now in a better position to prove his point. Nubia in the Meroitic period had no indigenous equivalent to its later, medieval land sales. Evidence of the spoken form of the Meroitic language goes back to the second millennium bc.3 We can follow the written language from the second century bc to the fifth century ad, although the appearance of Meroitic characters in Old Nubian implies its survival later than we can document.4 To date, we have several thousand texts in Meroitic, including royal and funerary inscriptions, proskynema or proclamations of religious adoration, magical and oracular texts, and owner identifications on objects.5 None of these texts is anything like the Old Nubian land sales, and we appear to have nothing in Meroitic dealing with property law. The

1 . Adams 1977, 467. 2 . Papadopoullos 1966, 32. See also Papadopoullous 1966, 34–38 for Byzantine ecclesiastical and ceremonial influences on Nubian practice. 3 . For a history of Meroitic, see Rilly 2010, 11–17. 4 . Rilly 2010, 17. 5 . For a more complete typology, see Rilly 2010, 20–22. See also Jochen Hallof’s forthcoming publication of the Qasr Ibrim Meroitic ostraka. Qasr Ibrim’s Meroitic papyri and texts on wood await their first edition.

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only Meroitic genre of comparable interest is the numeric ostraka, which appear to be administrative or commercial accounts.6 These ostraka may provide indigenous antecedents to Nubia’s medieval accounts (discussed in chapter 7), but they get us no closer to understanding the origins of medieval Nubian legal practice. The more satisfactory explanation—the Nubian adoption of Roman practices—has immediate parallels. We have a collection of late antique texts—the Blemmyan archive from Gebelein—that shows other people in the region adopting Greco-Roman legal forms.7 The Blemmyes, notorious in late antiquity as Egypt’s nomadic and predatory border barbarians, appear in this archive as a relatively settled people partially assimilated to Roman ways. Modern scholars have considered this indicative of their status as Roman federates subsidized by the Roman Empire and taken as allies into that empire.8 These texts, most likely from the sixth century, clearly spring from the late Roman notarial tradition. As one author put it, their scribes “are guilty of both Greek and Coptic of a sort.”9 While the scribes have GrecoEgyptian names, they are writing for and about Blemmyes, including Charachen, “basileiskos tôn Blemuôn,” or “king of the Blemmyes.” They show a barbarian people’s adoption of Roman coinage: references to gold solidi abound in the texts, including one describing the solidi as “kermatôn Noubaritôn,” or “Noubadian” coins.10 The texts include acknowledgments of debt in Greek and Coptic, including one that, if correctly restored, includes a use of homologô, the classic verb of acknowledgment in late antique papyri.11

Greco-Roman Origins If the Blemmyes could adopt Greco-Coptic terms, the Nubians certainly could as well. As the discussion of Old Nubian legal vocabulary

6. Rilly 2010, 22 and the work of Hallof presented at the 2009 Qasr Ibrim symposium in Leiden. 7. Text nos. FHN 3 331–343. 8. See the introductory remarks at FHN 3 pages 1200–1202. 9. FHN 3 p. 1199. 10. FHN 3.337. 11 . FHN 3.337.

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in the next section shows, Old Nubian legal documents are similar to Greek and Coptic ones and reveal an affinity that goes beyond shared vocabulary and extends to more general structures. Although we have relatively few land sales from late antique Egypt,12 those we have use a form of homologô (“I acknowledge”), newly dominant in sales documents over the earlier katagraphê.13 This form revolves around the subjective, first-person declaration of the seller: “homologô peprakenai kai parakechôrêkenai soi,” “I acknowledge that I have sold and ceded to you.”14 This form has several other typical elements. It requires a continuation of the first-person declaration, in which the seller describes the land in question and acknowledges receiving the payment price in full. Later examples of these land sales begin with a Christian cross, an indication of the reigning emperor, and various indications of the date such as the consulate and indiction year.15 These sales always conclude with a series of first-person witness declarations (marturô) by a number of witnesses frequently in excess of the legally required minimum. Old Nubian land sales possess almost all of these elements; the missing elements were lost in the genre’s transmission from Greek to Nubian through Coptic. Old Nubian texts are similar to Greco-Roman antecedents not simply in legal texts but in other text genres as well. Literary Old Nubian shows close ties to its Greek models. Browne has demonstrated that “Nubian translators [of Greek texts] were capable of skillful interpretation, at times making explicit the implication of their original.”16 Some Nubian translations of Greek exemplars suggest “that the Old Nubian translators had some training in philological method.”17 As discussed in chapter 8, bilingual Greco-Nubian texts of portions of the Bible appear to have been common.18

12 . Johnson and West 1948, 74–75 with a list of examples at 78–79. 13 . Rupprecht 1994, 115–116; Wolff 1978, 211; Taubenschlag 1955, 337–331. 14 . Lapses into an objective, third-person form are very rare; see P.Col. 8.244 (VI) with remarks at Berger 1946, 35. 15 . For all of these elements, see, for example, P.Lond. 5.1686. 16. Browne 1987a, 323. 17. Browne 1985, 295. 18. See below, page 223.

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This intimate relationship between Nubian genres and their Greek predecessors appears in the epistolary realm as well.19 The majority of Old Nubian letters uncovered at Qasr Ibrim have addresses written in Greek, with the titles of their sender and recipient rendered in Greek, even where Old Nubian equivalents are available. The majority of Old Nubian letters begin with a benediction similar to those found in Greek letters, either doukmmelo, “I pay homage (to you),” or daoummelo, “I greet (you).” Many Old Nubian letters include a variation of the disclosure formula also common in Greek letters, in the form of variations of iarilgirmmelo, “I inform you.”

Inheritance through Coptic While Greco-Roman forms may be the ultimate root of Nubia’s legal system, Nubia inherited these forms via two Coptic-language predecessors, Egyptian and Nubian. First, the Egyptian predecessors proved influential. The greatest source for Coptic land sales, if not for Coptic documentary evidence more widely, is Jeme, a village near Thebes in southern Egypt. Its documentary record, spanning the period from 600 to 800 ad, has received growing attention in recent years.20 Jeme’s land sales reveal what must have been a standard Theban form for this genre. Given southern Egypt’s proximity to Nubia, this Theban form is the first place to look for similarities to later Nubian forms. Boulard’s century-old study of Coptic land sales still provides a fundamental analysis of the basic components of this Theban form of land sale.21 It reduces the Coptic sale to three basic parts: the protocol, the text, and the eschatocol. The protocol has six parts: the invocation, the date, an

19. See Ruffi ni forthcoming a for further discussion of what follows. See also Müller and Khalil 1994/1995, 21 where the authors cite unpublished Old Nubian letters (from Qasr Ibrim?) by Coptic Museum inventory numbers, without further identification, for example, excavation numbers. I am unable to identify these texts. Old Nubian epistolary forms may have been mediated through Coptic predecessors, as with Old Nubian legal forms, but here, too, they would owe an ultimate debt to Greek forms. For discussion of Coptic epistolary practice as inheriting from both earlier Egyptian and Greek practice, see Choat 2010, particularly the conclusion at 176–178. 20. For published translations of Jeme’s land sales, see MacCoull 2009. For Jeme more generally, see Wilfong 2002 and recently Cromwell 2008, with discussion of Jeme and unpublished translations of its land sales by the scribe Aristophanes. 21 . Boulard 1912. What follows is somewhat abbreviated. See Cromwell 2008, 53–54 for a recent summary of variations on Boulard’s analysis.

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indication of the identity of the seller, a declaration of the validity of the text, the address, and the salutation. The text also has six parts: the preliminary clauses, the declaration of sale, the price, the rights of the purchaser, the guarantee, and the final clauses. The eschatocol has three parts: the subscription of the seller, the subscriptions of the witnesses, and the subscription of the scribe. Schiller thought Coptic law a fusion of “Egyptian, Greek, Hellenistic, Ptolemaic, Roman, Byzantine and Arab elements.”22 But this is almost too open minded. Boulard recognized Coptic law’s direct inheritance of Greek-language forms in Egypt.23 Certain parts of the text—the protocol, in particular—are direct inheritances from Byzantine practice.24 More recently, Tonio Richter has drawn attention to Coptic law’s considerable debt to Greek, whose loanwords were of “paramount importance” for the correct turn of phrase in Coptic law.25 Coptic law and its format is the product of “three reception waves” of Greek law, of Roman law, and of Justinian’s Corpus Iuris Civilis.26 Old Nubian land sales follow this Coptic format to a considerable degree but are by no means identical to their Coptic predecessors. Some of the features we expect in late antique Egyptian texts are missing in later medieval Nubian texts. Inclusion of a date is irregular in Old Nubian land sales and seems to have been at the discretion of the scribe.27 In most cases, the protocol’s final four parts collapse almost completely into a single first-person declaration of the seller’s identity.28 In the text, Nubian sales include the declaration of sale and price but rarely have little to say about the rights of the purchaser or a guarantee of any kind.29 In the

22 . Schillar 1932, 4. 23 . Boulard 1912, 6–8. 24 . Boulard 1912, 11. 25 . Tonio Richter 2002, 81: “überragender Bedeutung.” 26. Tonio Richter 2002, 81: “Drei Rezeptionswellen.” 27. See Ochała 2010 and 2011. 28. Kapopi’s land sale, 36, in which she declares her own legal competency and lack of heirs, is an exceptional extended form of this portion of the Nubian legal protocol. See above, 1. 29. Note in this context only 42, the land cession discussed below at 182, in which Mashshouda’s rights receiving the cession get specific discussion and 31, a release from purchase in which the seller acknowledges the purchaser’s right to return the purchase for a loss.

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eschatocol, Nubian examples never include a seller’s subscription, apparently considering the seller’s first-person declaration in the text sufficient for this purpose.

The Genre’s Evolution in Nubia Qasr Ibrim’s Old Nubian land sales are thus an abridgment or atrophying of earlier forms. But this process had already begun before the genre’s transition into the Nubian language. Coptic-language sales known from earlier periods in Nubian history show the same abridgment. A pair of Coptic texts described by their modern editor as “from Aswan” clearly deal with business south of Aswan, in Nubia.30 One, a deed following a successful lawsuit, mentions the eparch and “the men of Kourte.” The other is a grammation confirming that Maria of Faras has won her lawsuit. Another, more substantial text—dating to the ninth century, the first year of the reign of King Ioannes—is a land sale in which Menanta and Abraham sell five portions of land to their son Abraham and his wife.31 These ninth-century Coptic-language legal texts from Nubia have a very brief invocation and lack the salutation typical of their closest Egyptian parallels.32 In the text of the sales, Nubia’s earlier Coptic sales state the newly acquired rights of the purchaser in language more abbreviated than typical in earlier Egyptian cases.33 This suggests that we are dealing with a threefold historical process: the emergence in late antique Egypt of full-form Coptic land sales based on Greek antecedents; the eighth and ninth century development in Nubia of abbreviated forms of these same Coptic sales; and finally, the translation in the later medieval period of these abbreviated forms into Old Nubian. The features of these land sales to which attention is drawn can be viewed as the nearly universal features of sale documents of almost any kind, but this is because written legal traditions share a genealogical relationship to one another, some more closely related than others. Late antique Egypt is medieval Nubia’s closest ancestor. Material still forthcoming from Qasr Ibrim will help confirm or deny this theory. An unpublished tenth-century

30. Crum 1905 no. 452. 31 . Crum 1905 no. 449, with Abraham again at Crum 1905 no. 450. 32 . Boulard 1912, 78–79. 33 . Boulard 1912, 79.

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Coptic land sale from Qasr Ibrim represents a missing link in this process.34 It might share structural similarities to Crum’s ninth-century sales while pointing in the direction of the further abbreviations evident in Ibrim’s twelfth-century Nubian texts. Legal texts such as those found at Aswan must have been standard until Old Nubian replaced Coptic as the chief documentary language. This process of replacement can be mapped in the surviving documentary evidence. Nearly two decades ago, Browne described a bilingual Coptic and Old Nubian papyrus. Although he was reluctant to assign a precise date, he thought the text might be from the seventh or eighth century. It was “clearly one of the earliest speciments of Old Nubian” and the only papyrus in the language.35 Although “probably the remnant of a private letter . . . [c]onceivably it could be a contract.”36 The bilingual document struck Browne, who cited a much later Old Nubian and Arabic letter from Qasr Ibrim for comparison.37 If this bilingual papyrus is a contract, it could represent a very early stage in the development of Old Nubian legal writing, when scribes who were still thinking at least partly in Coptic adapted certain forms and applied them to the earliest known cases of Old Nubian. A series of Coptic protocols from other Nubian texts shows similar aspects of the transition to later medieval forms.38 The bulk of these texts came from between the first and second cataracts and date from about 750 to 850 ad. The protocols are purely Coptic, with clear evidence of that language’s own adoption of late Roman titles in Greek form. Another series of Coptic protocols—this group from Qasr Ibrim—shows the evolution of forms at a later stage, closer to our period.39 One such protocol dates to 1071/1072 ad, to the reign of a King George.40 Its editor described this

34 . See Hagen 2010 and Hagen forthcoming a. I have not been able to consult this text or Hagen’s edition of it. 35 . Browne 1993, 29. 36. Browne 1993, 31. 37. P.QI inv. 82.1.25/20, from the Israel dossier, on which see below, page 207. Browne reported (1993, 31) that he was preparing this text for publication, but to my knowledge no edition was ever completed. A copy of Browne’s photograph of the Coptic/Nubian papyrus is in my possession. 38. Griffith 1928, 131–133. 39. Hagen 2010, 722–724 with earlier remarks at Hagen 2009, 117. 40. P.QI.inv. 72.10.24/13 = Plumley 1981; see now Hagen 2010, 722–723.

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fragment as one of “the precursors of Medieval Nubian legal texts.”41 In this case, the transition from late antique to Nubian forms is nearly trilingual: the invocation of the Holy Trinity is in Greek, as are the dates; the text of the protocol appears in Coptic; and where one of the officeholders held a title without Coptic or Greek equivalent, a fragmentary Old Nubian title intrudes, foreshadowing the Old Nubian terms that would dominate legal protocols in the following century.42 The other Coptic protocols from Qasr Ibrim show the middle stages in the family tree of Nubian documentary history.43 One leather document from 941 ad is so damaged that only the beginning of the text survives, with indications of a dating protocol. A more important find, a complete leather scroll, dates to 925 ad and deals with the ownership of a slave.44 The first fifteen lines of the text are a protocol similar to the twelfth-century examples. The opening invocation of the Holy Trinity is in Greek, virtually identical to the one appearing in land sale 32, more than two hundred years later. The rest of the protocol proceeds in a mixed Greco-Coptic. King George is alternately prro (king) in Coptic or b(asi)l(eu)s in Greek. His officials appear in Greek forms (meizôt(eros) tou b(asi)l(eu)s) or Coptic (sulentiarch() mprro) with no apparent reason for the alternation. Only when the protocol ends does the scribe continue in uninterrupted Coptic. This text was accompanied by a leather strip in Old Nubian.45 Without full editions of the Coptic or Old Nubian texts, we can only speculate about the relationship between the two texts. But we might suppose that these two texts from 925—much like the later protocol from the reign of the other King George in the 1070s—represent the development of Old Nubian legal forms accompanying and modeled on Coptic exemplars. Both forms may have continued in simultaneous use because of the reluctance to abandon widespread Coptic forms.

41 . Plumley 1981, 6. 42 . P.QI.inv. 72.10.24/13 line 6, ending ereraphaêl anya[, for which Plumley 1981, 6 suggests a parallel to the Nubian title anyojoknashi appearing in various texts from Qasr Ibrim’s Archive 1; see Łajtar and Ruffi ni 2011. 43 . Hagen 2010, 723. 44 . See Hagen 2010, 723 and Hagen’s forthcoming edition of this text. In the absence of that forthcoming edition, I rely on a transcription of the text in a handout prepared by Plumley in the 1970s and reproduced for me by Grzegorz Ochała. I thank Adam Łajtar for bringing this handout to my attention. 45 . I was unable to study the Old Nubian text in any form.

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Comparable data available from Debeira West suggest that the penetration of Coptic legal forms into Nubia was deep. The Debeira West excavations uncovered Christian-period remains dating from circa 750 to 1100 ad. Among the finds were twenty-one ostraka, the large majority of which were written in Coptic. They are nearly all in a poor state of preservation, but the extant texts are suggestive. At least four of the ostraka, if not more, contained witness lists, one dated to 980 or 981 ad.46 Technical vocabulary in the texts—including a restored Coptic form of the homologô—suggests that all of these are legal agreements. These small ostraka are a far cry from the large leather prestige documents we find in the Qasr Ibrim archives. This suggests that Greco-Coptic legal forms had permeated more deeply into casual, day-to-day use in medieval Nubia than we might gather from the Qasr Ibrim texts alone. One consequence of this documentary penetration is that Nubian legal documents show a number of structural similarities to Coptic legal documents.47 The occasional occurrence of a penalty clause in Nubian legal texts is one such commonality. Pasine’s payment of gold to Engngal and his wife includes a 20 gold piece penalty for anyone who denies the payment.48 Isakê’s sale includes a more spiritual penalty of estrangement from God against those who deny the scribe’s record of the sale.49 A similar penalty appears in Mena’s release of the servant Gaweson and Kapopi’s release of the slave Apa, in which a claims rejecting the authenticity of the release is “a denial against the Holy Trinity.”50 The directly comparable penalty clauses in late antique Coptic legal texts are another notable element. The fine of a pound of gold is threatened in a business agreement from Jeme in the first half of the eighth century.51 A dual penalty, of 36 gold coins and the fear of being “a stranger to the Father and

46. Shinnie and Shinnie 1978, 95–101. See also the discussion of these texts in Ochała 2009, 148–149 and Ochała 2010, 109–110. In the latter case, Ochała takes the Debeira ostraka as evidence for contact between Egypt and Nubia in this period. 47. See Müller and Khalil 1994/1995 for the relationship between Old Nubian and Coptic legal texts. 48. 43 . 49. 41. 50. 35 and 33 . Compare against all of these cases the extravagant penalty invoked by the king of Dotawo in 30. 51 . P.KRU 55; MacCoull 2009, 70.

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the Son and the Holy Ghost,” is then threatened in a Jeme land sale of the same period.52 The eleventh-century Coptic property sales from Teshlot, the most chronologically immediate Egyptian antecedents to our Nubian sales, do not name the currency in the sales.53 They typically refer only to a sales price in nouf or “gold,” just as the Nubian sales refer only to a sales price in ngap or “gold.” This is an important point. As broached in the discussion of Nubian currency systems in chapter 7, modern scholars have assumed that Old Nubian references to gold and silver had unminted metal in mind.54 These scholars have based this assumption expressly on the seeming vagueness of such words as ngap (“gold”). Yet this vagueness has direct parallels in earlier Coptic texts clearly deriving from a monetized milieu. Several European currencies have taken their names from nothing more than words meaning “gold” or “golden” as well.55

The Spread of Old Nubian Forms Coptic legal forms penetrated Nubia much more widely than the Ibrim material alone prepares us to expect. This is true not simply for the earlier Coptic forms of legal texts but for their later Old Nubian forms as well. Old Nubian legal texts appear at enough medieval sites for us to argue that the rich finds from Qasr Ibrim were typical of Nubian legal culture more generally. For instance, the Dirr land sale, a near contemporary to those from Qasr Ibrim but from slightly earlier in the twelfth century, gives every indication that the Ibrim sales are typical of a more widespread genre. It begins with a protocol, includes a first-person explanation by the seller of the sale in question, concludes with a witness list, and even mentions a—now lost—payment for the scribe.56

52 . P.KRU 10; Cromwell 2008 vol. 2 no. 2 and MacCoull 2009, 81. The same penalty recurs at P.CLT (Schiller 1932) 2; MacCoull 2009, 52. 53 . See the examples cited at 199 below. 54 . See page 173. 55 . Łajtar draws my attention to the Polish zloty (“golden”) and the Dutch guilder (from gulden for “golden”). 56. See Browne 1992a for the latest edition of Berlin manuscript P. 11277. For the date of the text, see page 76 note 3 above. For further discussion of the structure of the Dirr sale, see Muller and Khalil 1994/1995, 19–20.

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This genre did not begin as a twelfth-century phenomenon. Earlier examples exist. One text, published by Francis Llewellyn Griffith in 1928, came from Nauri, below the third cataract. Its protocol skips the invocation of the Trinity typical of many of the Ibrim documents and proceeds directly to the list of officeholders, beginning with King Basil and Simeon, bishop of Sai. Griffith supposed King Basil to be the same man known from literary sources to have reigned in the late eleventh century, and this view has not to my knowledge been challenged.57 Large parts of the meaning of the text eluded Griffith, who could tell only that it was a legal text. This was one of the first purely documentary examples of Old Nubian. It gave the first hints that “the view that [Nubian] literacy was only a function of religious activity was not entirely correct.”58 With the Qasr Ibrim examples at hand, more of the Nauri text makes sense. After the opening protocol, the speaker seems to say, “I, Thadeos, divide my farm.”59 Lines five through seven describe the boundaries of the farm to the north and the south. Much of the rest is unclear, including who is to receive which parts of the farm. A reference to 1 artaba and 40 bushels suggests a price, but the usual terms for a sale are absent.60 Perhaps “to divide” is to rent and the artaba and bushels are the expected rent payments. A scribe’s signature follows, as do those of the witnesses. The final lines, “a loaf and five touskil” (“kapallo touskil elo”) are clearly witness payments.61 Thus the Nauri text is a legal document nearly identical in structure to those from Qasr Ibrim, and it shows that Qasr Ibrim’s legal practices were not merely local. The same patterns hold true for Old Nubian material contemporary to and later than the Qasr Ibrim material. The most obvious parallel is a poorly preserved leather manuscript from Kulubnarti, an island in Sudanese Nubia excavated in the 1960s and 1970s.62 Parallels in the protocol between this manuscript and those from Qasr Ibrim, including the appearance of Mari as the queen mother, allow us to date it to the second

57. Griffith 1928, 129. 58. Shinnie 1974, 43. 59. Griffith 1928, 129, lines 3–5: “aiou thadeosilo … torpaki annika … tomtatera.” 60. Griffith 1928, 129, line 7: “mor.a rou mashe mlo.” 61 . The reading follows Zyhlarz to correct Griffith’s original; cf. Browne’s commentary to 32 .25–28. 62 . The following discussion is based on the text and commentary in Browne 2000.

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half of the twelfth century.63 The surviving text mentions “all that I inherited” and refers to receipt of a landholding, before appending a witness list. The second half of the text mentions receipt of “what Goulanye inherited” before appending another witness list. Most of the details of the text are lost, but as Browne noticed, it is a contract similar to the type found at Qasr Ibrim.64 This fossil record—of texts from Dirr, Kulubnarti, Nauri, and Debeira West—shows that what we see in Qasr Ibrim was typical of Lower Nubia more generally, at least through the twelfth century. What happens later is less clear. The texts from Archive 1 show that Nubia’s legal tradition survives until the reign of King Joel in the late 1400s. But the documentary record over this several-century stretch is nearly silent from elsewhere in Nubia. Only in Gebel Adda can we resume the story and only in the reign of King Joel. Gebel Adda has been proposed by some scholars as a likely site for the capital of the Kingdom of Dotawo after the collapse of the royal court at Dongola.65 There, excavators discovered the latest known Old Nubian documentary text, a leather scroll dating to 1484.66 The text remains unpublished but is almost certainly a legal text, in keeping with every other leather text in Old Nubian. The excavator’s initial report indicates that the scroll’s introductory protocol includes a priest named Urtigaddi, a name unknown from elsewhere in Nubia. Yet the report also notes that the “name turns up on an ostracon draft of a similar document found in one of the storerooms of the [Gebel Adda] palace.”67 If this ostrakon is accurately described and if Urtigaddi can help date it to the reign of King Joel as well, we have an intriguing picture. Nubia’s legal tradition survived into the late 1400s, into the reign of its last-known king, both at Qasr Ibrim and at Gebel Adda. Equally, it survived in both final or archival form and draft or disposable form. Even at this final stage in Nubian legal history, its scribes had the time to produce

63 . Browne 2000, 177: “between 1156 and 1191.” But here Browne gives the most narrow possible range. The terminus ante quem is some point between 1190, when Moses George is on the throne, and 1198, when Basil is; see appendix 1, page 266. The terminus post quem is the reign of King David, or that of King Giorgios, whichever came last. 64 . Browne 2000, 177. 65 . See, for example, Welsby 2002, 251 and Adams 1996, 254. 66. See originally Millett 1967, 62 with a brief discussion at Łajtar and Ruffini 2011. 67. Millett 1967, 62.

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draft or practice texts, which indicates a much greater depth to the practice than the surviving evidence would have led us to guess. The resulting picture of Nubia’s legal system is that of a tradition essentially Greco-Roman in origin, widespread throughout the major sites in Lower Nubia and visible, if only in fragmentary traces, from the 800s to the 1400s. The claim that Old Nubian legal forms had classical origins is not new. In his review of Browne’s publication of Archive 3, Wilfong wrote that the Old Nubian land sales “bear certain similarities to comparable Coptic and Arabic documents.”68 This study merely adds a genealogy tracing Nubia’s inheritance from late antiquity to the twelfth century and beyond. This alone is not enough, though, as it is also necessary to demonstrate that Old Nubian legal forms do not stem from their nearest parallels, contemporary Egypt’s Arabic land sales.

Arabic’s Related Legal Forms Several modern scholars have argued that early Arabic legal structures paralleled their Greco-Egyptian legal predecessors.69 Egyptian contracts in the Greco-Roman period express the seller’s satisfaction with receipt of the sales price in similar terms in Demotic, Greek and Coptic, terms that appear in Arabic sales contracts as well.70 Arabic formulas for the sale of residential property shared idiomatic expressions and clause structures with similar texts in Byzantine Greek.71 This shared relationship with classical predecessors would make Nubian and Arabic legal forms cousins in an intellectual family tree. But we must be sure that they are cousins and that Nubian legal forms are not instead descended from Arabic forms. All Arabic sales are objective, written in the third-person voice, while Greco-Roman sales and their Nubian offspring are generally subjective or first-person.72 Fatimid-era Arabic

68. Wilfong 1995, 147. 69. Thung 1996, 10 cites the work of Hoenerbach and Frantz-Murphy. 70. Frantz-Murphy 1988, although noting (111–112) that the satisfaction idiom has a broader Near Eastern context. For a study of Egyptian and other Arabic examples of debt acknowledgments and sales on future delivery, see Diem 2006, with the criticism at Frantz-Murphy 2007, 244 that the author does not address what is for us the crucial question: “[D]oes the Arabic bear any relation to pre-Islamic formulary in such documents?” 71 . Frantz-Murphy 1985. 72 . A point I owe to Geoff rey Khan. See the remarks at Frantz-Murphy 1989, 105.

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sales also refer to the property in question “as the property that the seller had declared was in his possession.”73 This precaution, taken to prevent a defective sale in which the seller was not the property’s owner, never appears in medieval Nubian texts. The witness lists are another difference between Nubian legal documents and their Arabic contemporaries. The Nubian sales simply include the names of the witnesses at the end of the text, appended by the notary in his own hand. Early Arabic contracts followed this form as well, but this practice died out in Arabic texts from Egypt in the late seventh century, with the introduction of professional witnesses capable of adding declarations in their own hand.74 While this practice continued in the Arab world, it is not evident at any point in the Nubian texts of the medieval period. Medieval Islamic deeds of sale typically describe the border plots beginning with the southern border and proceeding on to the northern, eastern, and western borders.75 The Nubian sales have several border descriptions beginning with the southern plot and proceeding to the northern.76 But no eastern or western borders appear, since the presence of the Nile and the desert are presumably implicit. These cases thus do not indicate any Islamic influence on the structure of the plot description. By contrast, Kapopi’s considerably more complicated set of plot descriptions begins with the eastern and western borders before describing the northern and southern. This is more in keeping with typically Christian legal texts in the Mediterranean world.77 Another crucial distinction between Old Nubian land sales and their Arabic contemporaries is the role of the state in the transaction. Sales in the Cairo geniza, that rich archive of medieval Mediterranean Judaism, have official agents fulfilling a government role. As Shelomo Goitein observed, “The ends of the documents . . . are cosigned by one or several Muslims whose handwriting betrays them as professional `udûl, or adjuncts of a qâdî”78 or Islamic judge. This parallels the language of the texts themselves,

73 . Khan 1993, 174. 74 . Thung 1996, 6. 75 . Constable 1997, 75. 76. 32, 39, and 40. 77. Constable 1997, 75. 78. Goitein 1999, 63.

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in which we can interpret the objective, third-person voice as that of the state observing the transaction from a neutral perspective. There is no government or official agent mentioned in Old Nubian land sales. The Nubian king—historiography’s mythical de jure owner of all Nubian land—is absent from these texts, except for a nominal appearance in the protocol. The Nubian land sales are strictly private documents detailing a transaction between private individuals, solely for the use of those individuals. There is no indication that the state monitors these sales (although the sales may ultimately be registered or deposited with the state for cadastral purposes). State officials appear in these texts as witnesses and scribes, but there is no indication that they appear in an official capacity. Their high ranks may make them valuable to the credibility of the legal process, but they are not necessary to it. This much is clear from the sales and cessions in which no participants have any particular title or state position.79 Similarly, Old Nubian letters also differ from Arabic-language letters in Egypt and do not owe their form to these epistolary cousins. Consider, for example, the dozens of letters found in the Fayum archive of the Banū ’Abd alMu’min family from the ninth century ad. These letters invariably begin with an Islamic invocation, “In the name of God, the Beneficent, the Merciful.”80 The business letters from Quseir follow a clear formula, beginning also with the invocation and moving on to an introductory announcement of “what I would like to make known to” the addressee.81 Egypt’s Arabic letters do not bear any of the Greek trace elements so apparent in Nubian forms. Clearly, then, Old Nubian documentary genres owe little to their intellectual cousins, contemporary Arabic epistolary and legal texts. Both Nubian and Arabic legal forms may, however, been in use in medieval Nubia. Preliminary analyses of Qasr Ibrim’s documentary Arabic material note a lease agreement between a Muslim tenant and a Nubian official in the mid-1120s.82 But lacking full publication of these texts, we have no 79. See, for example, 36, in which none of the many witnesses holds a secular title with the possible exception of Darme the ouataphil, and 45 , in which only Pauouta out of nearly twenty participants in the land sale has any official title, that of tot of Umô. The witness lists of other documents are full of chiefs and other tots, but the fact that they hold these titles is not necessary for the legal functionality of the text. 80. See Ragib 1985 with the introduction to Ragib 1982. 81 . Kaplony 2010, 97. 82 . Adams 2010, 250, with slightly different dates given at Adams 1996, 237. Note also that evidence exists for local Arabic-speaking communities following Islamic law: see

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way to tell whether Arabic and Nubian legal forms had any similarities in this period. In keeping with a model of continuity throughout Nubian history, we should also ask whether Nubian land sales have anything in common with other indigenous practices in the Sudan, among neighboring peoples. The most obvious place to look is in the postmedieval world, particularly in Sinnar. The Funj Kingdom of Sinnar—home of the so-called Nubian Renaissance in the 1600s and 1700s—was essentially feudal in its economic and political structures.83 It controlled central and southern Nubia, south of the Ottoman border at the third cataract, in the postmedieval period.84 The reality of land tenure under the Funj in this period resembles the myth of land tenure in the medieval period: The sultan (“king of the Nubian Muslims”) held ultimate rights to all land. He distributed this territory in its greatest parts to the nobility in fiefs that family heads could, in turn, distribute in smaller parts to subordinate figures.85 Similarly, Nubia under the Funj lacked a currency: transactions took place through bargaining, through the exchange of commodities and local currencies, including grain, iron, and salt.86 There is no evidence that the Funj created written documents for the first 150 years of the kingdom’s existence.87 A later collection of public documents produced in Arabic between 1702 and 1820 is predominately legal texts, mainly charters.88 While the formal structure of these charters remained largely unchanged over time, variations led their editors to suppose that they drew on “a tradition of chancery usages preserved orally within the ruling institution.”89 These characteristics suggest that no single “donor culture” contributed models for these Funj charters.90 These Ochała 2010, 118 discussing a tenth-century Arabic-language tadbir (release of a slave) found in Nubia. 83 . For a brief summary, see Spaulding 2007, 29–34 with earlier remarks at O’Fahey and Spaulding 1974, 54–56. 84 . See Alexander 2000 for Funj-Ottoman relations. 85 . Spaulding 2007, 29–30. 86. Spaulding 2007, 66. 87. Spaulding and Abu Salim 1989, 2–3. 88. Spaulding and Abu Salim 1989, 9. 89. Spaulding and Abu Salim 1989, 10. 90. Spaulding and Abu Salim 1989, 10, with medieval Nubia implicitly included in this conclusion at note 25 on page 28.

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texts cite two sets of legal authority, Islamic sharia in some cases and Funj customary law in others.91 When a legal tradition reemerges in the postmedieval world, it has little to do with its medieval Nubian predecessors.

Conclusion We can say little about the death of the Old Nubian legal tradition. The last two Old Nubian legal texts known to us are from the reign of King Joel in the late fifteenth century, one from Qasr Ibrim in the 1460s and the other from Gebel Adda in the 1480s. These two striking examples appear to survive in a vacuum. The most proximate examples we have are a land decree and an apparent land sale from the reign of King Siti in the 1330s. Before that, no legal texts since the reign of King Simon in the 1280s exist. But these long gaps are clearly accidents of the archaeological record. It is unlikely—nearly impossible even—that Lower Nubia passed half a century or more at a time without producing one of these texts. The later scribes show no less competency at the genre than those of the twelfth century. Without evidence of model texts that they copied to produce new sales, we must assume that the genre was a living one and that Nubian scribes produced enough of these documents on a sufficiently regular basis to keep a tradition of competency alive to such a late date. Statistically, it is highly unlikely that the last Nubian legal document ever written would happen to be the latest one we have. We should assume, given this statistical point and the apparent level of missing evidence, that the Old Nubian legal tradition survived at least briefly after the 1480s, perhaps as late as the early sixteenth century. Łajtar and I have written of a brief Nubian renaissance under the reign of King Joel in the late fifteenth century.92 It also seems unlikely that a king known from multiple texts at multiple sites would be the last person to claim the Nubian throne. Rather than imagining the scribes at Qasr Ibrim and Gebel Adda under King Joel as the last men to write in Old Nubian and under the last Nubian king, it may make more sense to imagine a gradual process extending into the next generation. Scribes not known to us, living under shadow or claimant kings whose names are lost to us, wrote fewer and fewer of these texts over

91 . Spaulding and Abu Salim 1989, 12. 92 . Łajter and Ruffi ni 2011.

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time, before the art of the genre was lost at some point prior to the dawn of Ottoman rule in the 1560s.

Nubian Legal Vocabulary An examination of the Old Nubian vocabulary used in land sales and other legal documents shows two chief characteristics: (1) a tendency to use loanwords for terms with solely legal connotation and (2) lexical overreliance on a narrow range of native words for other terms needed to describe the transactions at hand. Both characteristics are what we would expect of a language altered for use with legal forms imported from a foreign linguistic context. Similarly, the mix of Greek, Coptic, and Old Nubian terms reveals the extent to which the Nubian legal tradition emerged not from an indigenous context but from the cultural mélange of the Nile Valley in late antiquity. First, a few items of indigenous Nubian terminology need to be examined. “Date gulping,” petika ngola, is a term not used in Old Nubian land sales but in letter 51 and deposition 21, in both cases apparently to indicate the conclusion of a property transaction.93 The definition of both words is based on comparanda from modern Nubian dialects.94 If my arguments about this term are correct (see chapter 3), we have an idiomatic expression with a hidden legal meaning. Something similar appears with the verb meaning “deposit,” used in 21 to describe what Israel does to “it” after he makes a purchase from Kosma, and the verb used in 36 to describe what one does to the land sale document. This verb, the Old Nubian ken-, can in other contexts mean nothing more than “to place” but receives legal force through idiomatic usage. In both cases, eating is the subsequent action, of dates in 21 and of either a gazelle or a roast of lion in 36.95 Several other terms in the Old Nubian texts suggest the appropriation of common vocabulary for legal uses. This would appear true of the term for gold, ngapil. I argue in chapter 7 that references to gold must refer to gold coinage, most likely the gold dinar.96 But here, rather than borrow

93 . See discussion above at 98. 94 . Browne 1996a, 150 and 203. 95 . See note 2 on page 91 above. 96. See specifically page 175.

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the term dinar itself, Nubian merely expands the scope of its word for “gold.” Two more specifically legal terms show a similar expansion of their root meaning. In his analysis of the legal text found at Kulubnarti, Browne renders “Pongitalo senolngollo” as “Pongita, who posed the question.” The larger legal question at stake is unclear, but according to Browne, if “senolngol- is correctly interpreted it may reflect some aspect of Old Nubian contract law, perhaps distantly comparable to the Roman stipulatio.”97 The root of the term is simply sen-, the verb “to ask.” Likewise, the verb ngagg(“to deny”) goes through a subtle shift into a legal term. The word that Browne rendered as “without denial” (ngaggikeinynyalo) appears in land sale 36, the release from purchase published as 31, and the unpublished decree by King Siti circa 1333 ad.98 The term appears not only in land sales but in a legal context more generally, in which the speaker asserts that the party in question takes an action knowingly and without making any objection. Even in cases in which native words are already at hand, Greek loan words are readily apparent in Nubian legal texts. The verb “to order” is keleu- in Nubian, coming from the Greek keleuô. In chapter 5, the use of this verb in a legal context was discussed: “I, Kapenê, daughter of the Priest Makari—Papo Mêna the Bishop having ordered me—wrote and witnessed” and “I, ordering Aera and Loukasi son of Zôsima to write this certified document, witnessed it.”99 We see other examples of Greek loanwords: Old Nubian uses etymological variations of the same term to indicate both the noun “witness” (matar-) and the verb “to witness” (matarang-). Browne took these forms to be related to the Egyptian mtr and Bohairic methre, with their ultimate origin in the Greek verb martureô.100 A less certain example of Nubian borrowing from Greek vocabulary is the term kirtikoun, which Browne took to be a technical word for “litigation.” If he was right, kirtik- came originally from the Greek kritos, and kirtikounminl would be the equivalent of the Greek akritos, or “free from judicial verdict.”101 When Kapopi describes herself as “not being subject to

97. Browne 2000, 181 note to line 8. 98. Unpublished EA 90228. 99. 35 .23 and 36.ii.5, but see note 110 at page 118. 100. Browne 1996a, 112. 101 . Commentary to 36.i.14.

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litigation,” she is, by this argument, expressing an idea not native to the Nubian language, an idea borrowed from Greek predecessors. The Old Nubian term for a “legal document” is karte-, deriving from the Greek chartês. The term appears to have two analogous uses in Old Nubian legal documents, first to refer to a scribe as one who writes a karteand, secondly, to refer to the physical product of that process. In 33.19 “this document” refers to the release of a slave at the end of its witness list; in 34.i.30 “the letter writer” refers to the payment of a scribe of a land sale; in 38 App. 7 “this document” refers to a land sale at the end of its witness list; in 40.23 “the letter writer” refers to the payment of a scribe of a land sale that is also described as a “certified document” or sigeli102; and in 45.17 “this document” refers to a land sale at the end of its witness list. But this term carries more weight in Nubian than it did in Greek. It can also mean “letter” more generically, in the sense of a communication between two individuals. Thus we see it in 52.4 (“write a letter to me” in a letter from Ammetti to Mashshouda103), 58.10 (“write a letter to me” in a letter from Mineria to Iêsousinkouda104), and perhaps also in 59.i.5 (a fragmentary letter without continuous sense in the relevant passage). Note that the Greek loanwords chartion and chartês make frequent appearance in the eleventh-century Coptic Teshlot archive.105 With the term appearing so late in Coptic documentary evidence, it is easy to see how it made a transition into twelfth-century Nubian texts. Old Nubian used the same term, parre, to refer to both “land,” generally, and a “plot” of land specifically.106 Old Nubian does not appear to have had a specific term to refer either to the genre or the document of the land sale. In three places, Old Nubian land sales are described using a word Browne renders as “certified document”: sigerin (34), sigenil (36), and sigelin (40). This term is also used to describe Moses George’s royal decree.107 Browne thought that the term derived from the Latin sigillum.108 (The term 102 . 34 .ii also refers to itself as a “certified document” but the term letter writer appears in 34 .i, essentially a separate document by a different scribe. 103 . “karte|ka annikille paeso.” 104 . “annigil kart(eka) paeso.” 105 . See the index at Tonio Richter 2000, 146. 106. See Unger 1990 for discussion of the etymology of parre and its specific application in the phrase “parre-n kojr-.” 107. Cf. also EA 90225 in Łajtar and Ruffi ni 2011. 108. 30.36 note.

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also appears as sijill for “transcript of a court hearing” in Arabic land documents.109) The fact that sigeli appears in 40, which also describes its scribe as the writer of a karte, suggests that the two terms had a certain level of interchangeability in Old Nubian legal vocabulary. This fits with the evidence from Tamit, where an inscription in the Church of Saint Raphael from the late 1400s ad describes the text of the inscription itself somewhat inappropriately as a sigeli.110 Likewise, a church graffito in Abu Hoda from the same period also describes itself as a sigeli.111 Thus, a term whose Latin origins are long since lost covers a range of official texts for which no term exists in Nubian. The Old Nubian terms for “price,” “sale,” “to buy,” and “to sell” all show the extent to which a single term could cover a range of concepts adapted from Greco-Roman forms. Old Nubian uses etymological variations of the same stem jan- to indicate not only the nouns for “purchase,” “price” and “sale” but also the verbs for “to sell” and “to buy.”112 Thus the verb jan- might have originally indicated the simple action of exchanging something for something else, and the noun jan- might have indicated the thing being exchanged. This would be enough if the context were clear. But often, Old Nubian needs help from other words. It combines jana with den- and tir- (“to give”) when it needs to render the concept “sell” more explicitly and combines jana with eit- (“to take”) when it needs to render the concept “buy” more explicitly. Together, all of these examples suggest the process through which medieval Nubia developed a legal vocabulary. Nubians took their own term for exchange and stretched it to cover the concepts of buying and selling. They took mundane verbs—“asking,” “denying,” “placing,” and “eating”—and widened their meanings, giving them idiomatic legal force. They took a known noun—“gold”—and applied it to a more specific form of currency when they adapted that currency for exchange. When the legal forms they appropriated called for technical concepts for which no indigenous term seemed to fit, they borrowed a range of terms—karte, keleu,

109. O’Fahey and Abu Salim 1983, 9. 110. See Łajtar and Ruffini 2011, commentary to line 3, 169–170. 111 . See Łajtar and Ruffi ni 2011, commentary to line 3, 169–170 112 . See the entries at Browne 1996, 187–188. Note also the considerable range of meanings conveyed by words with the root gian- in Carradori’s seventeenth-century Nubian dictionary: see Hofmann 1983, 119 (= Spaulding 1975, 55–56, 94, 152, 206, 234, 249, and 276).

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kirtik, matar, and sigeli—to create a Greco-Roman legal graft resting on top of their own forms of public ceremony and exchange.

The Future of Nubian Land Tenure Viewing Christian Nubia through Later Sudan What we might consider to be medieval Nubian customs survived into the early modern era. For this reason, study of postmedieval Sudan and its kingdoms is a viable approach to illuminating medieval Nubia’s land tenure and social practices. Other authors have demonstrated potential linguistic and cultural continuities between, for example, ancient Meroe and the court rituals and oral traditions of the Kingdom of Sinnar.113 This approach has also been used to clarify Nubia’s early medieval history. As Jay Spaulding has pointed out in reference to the problem of the baqt treaty: Medieval Nubia participated in an older and wider Northeast African tradition of statecraft that survived the collapse of Makuria and continued to serve the Sudanese kingdoms that followed up to the eve of the modern colonial era. Many imperfectly documented aspects of medieval Nubian culture and policy may be clarified through comparison with the corresponding institutions of the better known kingdoms that surrounded and succeeded Makuria.114 The most important of those kingdoms is the Funj sultanate of Sinnar, which dominated large parts of the Sudan from 1500 to 1800 ad. Spaulding has argued that we need to abandon attempts to identify the Funj as external invaders: “[T]he Funj are best understood as heirs to the institutions of medieval Nubia.”115 Spaulding is thus part of the more general historiographical trend, inclined to see Nubian history not as a story of disruptive external invasions but as a story of continuity and survival.116 Certainly, the Nubian language has survived. Even in the territory of medieval Nubia where Nubian is no longer spoken, it took longer to die 113 . Spaulding 1973a and Spaulding 1974. 114 . Spaulding 1995, 581. 115 . Spaulding 1972, 39. 116. See above, page 4.

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out than previous scholars supposed. Recent studies have suggested that in the territory south from Dongola to Soba, Nubian only died out two to three hundred years ago, with Nubian personal names and quirks in Arabic reflecting earlier Nubian usage surviving in later documentary evidence.117 Cultural continuities between medieval Nubia and the region’s later history reinforce this picture. Modern scholars have recorded a ritual once practiced just south of the second cataract, in which newborn babies are taken to the Nile accompanied by chants invoking the angels and “the Mariya,” an obvious survival from Christian times.118 One informant also reported a ritual of immersing babies into the Nile “with the plunge of John (the Baptist).”119 This continuity is evident in political terminology and historical memory as well. The Funj court retained official positions whose titles date from the Christian period.120 The makks or local kings of Fazughi in the Funj period retained memory of descent from the kings of medieval Alwa.121 The Funj regalia included a horned cap, a survival from the regalia of high officials in medieval Nubia.122 Nineteenth-century Catholic missionaries at Dilling, in the Nuba Mountains, recorded traditions then current among the local people claiming that their ancestors had originally come from the Nile Valley and that they were descended from Christians in Lower Nubia.123 But the Nuba Mountains and the Funj heartland were far from Lower Nubia. Ottoman rule in Lower Nubia never extended farther south than Sai, near the third cataract.124 The semi-independent kings of Kokka maintained a buffer state in between Ottoman Nubia in the north and Funj territory in the south.125 For this reason, evidence from Upper Nubia cannot

117. Spaulding 2004, 83. 118. Vantini 1982, 26. 119. Vantini 1982, 29: “ughattisuka ghitas Yuhanna.” 120. O’Fahey and Spaulding 1974, 49 on the sawākira. 121 . Spaulding 2007, 31. 122 . Robinson 1931, 368, with an earlier, erroneous derivation of the origin of the cap. For this cap, see note 26 at page 98 above. 123 . Vantini 1998, 241–242. 124 . See Alexander 1997 for the Ottoman fortress at Sai. 125 . Alexander 1997, 19 and Alexander 2000, 54–56.

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answer all of our questions about the development of events in Lower Nubia, even with considerable cultural continuity from the medieval to the postmedieval periods. All of this evidence for cultural continuity tells us nothing about legal practice. Did the medieval Nubian legal tradition leave any legacy? Is there any hint of medieval Nubian legal culture to be found in later periods of Nubian history? Three discrete types of evidence will help answer these questions, at least as far as the situation in Lower Nubia: 1) literary evidence generated by travelers through Ottoman Nubia, 2) fiscal evidence from centralized Ottoman records, and 3) the Arabic and Turkish documentary records excavated from Qasr Ibrim. The literary evidence is disappointing. The celebrated Turkish traveler Evliya Çelebi wrote extensive accounts of his travels throughout the Ottoman Empire, extant in his Seyahatnamesi.126 The portions of this travelogue covering Upper Egypt and the Sudan have been translated into German.127 They give an eyewitness account of Qasr Ibrim in the seventeenth century. Unfortunately for the modern scholar, Çelebi’s interests in Nubia more generally were limited. In his discussion of Ibrim, he confines himself to notes on the climate and a brief description of his stay at the fort under the care of the kashif and his men, who procured the letters necessary for Çelebi’s travels on to Funj territory. The results have been called “mainly haphazard notes of little importance.”128 A number of crucial locations are missing from his description, and other locations appear out of sequence, as if his notes had been shuffled or misplaced over time.129 Central Ottoman fiscal records are more promising. With Qasr Ibrim’s inclusion in the boundaries of the Ottoman Empire, we enter a realm of fiscal documentation far more robust than for any previous period. We know that there was a former governor of Qasr Ibrim by 1563 and an Ottoman military presence there by 1570.130 Control over Qasr Ibrim took on a new importance for the Ottomans during their activity in the

126. Dankoff 2006. 127. Prokosch 1994. 128. Bosayley 1967, 182. 129. Bosayley 1967, 181. 130. See Ménage 1988, 145 for discussion of the Ottoman archival material authorizing troops and rations from Cairo for the sanjakbey of Ibrim in 1570 and Ménage 1988, 146 note 35 on the former governor. See Holt 1967 correcting earlier historiographic myths about the presence of the Ottomans in Nubia earlier, under Sultan Selim.

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Red Sea in the 1570s.131 Anxious to secure their southern flank against the Funj kingdom and expand in the area they called Habesh (Abyssinia), the Ottomans sought effective redistribution of their resources in this region. In 1573, the Ottoman beylerbey of Habesh requested the transfer of Qasr Ibrim from Egypt’s jurisdiction to that of the territory of Habesh. This administrative transfer was justified, in part, by the claim that the “revenue raised there [in Ibrim], four or five thousand gold pieces,” was inadequate to support the garrison already stationed there, but Ibrim could be helpful in provisioning Ottoman forces in Habesh if under its direct control.132 This arrangement proved transitory, Ibrim reverting to its status as a sanjak of Egypt in 1585.133 This brief episode suggests that when portions of Nubia fell under Ottoman control, they were not regarded as highly productive or profitable territories. Detailed figures of land taxes collected in Egypt and Nubia by the Ottoman government in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries survive to qualify this impression.134 From the 1660s on, figures for Ibrim province are, like those of Asyut in southern Egypt, typically subsumed under Jirje province in these records. Prior to the 1660s, the picture is irregular, only sometimes consistent with the impression that Ibrim’s land taxes did not cover Ottoman expenses in the region. Later budgetary figures show that the level of profit from Nubian land varied from year to year.135 The earliest surviving budget from Ottoman Egypt, that for the year 1596/1597 (Islamic years 1004 and 1005), records the amount of land tax (“mahsul-i harac-i arazi”) collected from the province of Ibrim to have been 249,767 paras, made up of 149,371 paras collected in the year 1005 and 100,396 collected in the year 1004.136 Expenses on “the men of the fort of Ibrim” in the year 1005 came to 143,435 paras.137 This would have represented a slight profit for that year, but the same rate of expense would have resulted in an operating loss in the previous year. But when we next have figures for both land tax collections and

131 . See Ménage 1988 for the following discussion. 132 . Ménage 1988, 147–148. 133 . Ménage 1988, 134 . Shaw 1962, appendix I.I. 135 . I owe the approach taken in this paragraph to Hinds and Sakkout 1986, 3. 136. Shaw 1968, 92–93. 137. Shaw 1968, 152–153.

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payments to the Ibrim garrison in the same years—Islamic years 1009 and 1024—Ottoman tax collections comfortably exceed their annual expenses.138 Clearly, agricultural life in the Ibrim area continued and was at least occasionally profitable for governing authorities. The documentary texts from Ibrim’s Ottoman period are perhaps more illuminating than the centralized Ottoman revenue records. Martin Hinds and Hamdi Sakkout published a volume of just more than sixty Arabic texts excavated from Ottoman-era Ibrim.139 This volume treats “part of a corpus of Arabic material found in a large sealed pot at Qasr Ibrim in 1966.”140 That find, which contained texts ranging from 1620 to 1769 ad, included fifteen sales transactions, eleven of which concerned land and/ or palm trees.141 These Ottoman-era Ibrim sales show no evidence of continuity in legal practice between Ottoman and medieval Ibrim.142 On the contrary, features typical of Islamic land sales are present: objective, third-person descriptions of the relevant parties and descriptions of the border plots proceeding from south to north, then east and west. These archives reveal some features found in agricultural practice from an earlier period: saqiya irrigation, inheritable land, and coinage.143 But coinage plays a much-reduced role in these texts compared to those from Ibrim’s medieval period: Only three of the fifteen sales and four of the twelve pledges involve cash. In any case, these features tell us only about the practices of the area’s Turkish elite and reveal nothing about the Nubian experience in this period. Hinds published a second volume of Ottoman-period texts from Qasr Ibrim in 1991, this time with Victor Ménage.144 These texts—two dozen in Arabic and 168 in Turkish—provide considerable detail about the affairs of

138. Shaw 1962, 358 for the collection figures and 395 for the expense figures, which are less than collections even if the expenses of the garrison at Sai are included. 139. Hinds and Sakkout 1986 with a review at Rogers 1991 and a slightly less favorable review at Wansbrough 1988. 140. Hinds and Sakkout 1986, 4. 141 . Hinds and Sakkout 1986, 4 142 . Not commanding Arabic, I make my observations based on text number 3, the only land sale in this volume given a full translation. Hinds and Sakkout 1986 simply summarized the content of the bulk of the texts. 143 . Alexander 1996, 24 notes a continuity with the later, nineteenth-century observations by Burckhardt. 144 . Hinds and Ménage 1991 with a review at Rogers 1994.

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Ottoman troops for a 140-year period from 1589 to 1739.145 The bulk of the Turkish texts deals with payment of the garrisons of Ibrim and Sai, often in arrears. The Arabic texts contain a number of business transactions and resulting disputes, including disagreements over ownership shares of various female slaves.146 One reviewer of that volume points to its “picture of a forgotten garrison gradually ‘turning native,’” as revealed through a decline in the ability to compose proper Turkish.147 We do not know how we would recognize ethnic Nubians in these texts. It is not enough to say that we see no Nubian names in them. Nubian names in the medieval period were either so-called Christian names or names based on indigenous Nubian linguistic elements.148 These names do not appear in later periods. The vast majority of the names in these texts are Muslim. The remainder are unvocalized, their exact forms unknown. Yet most of the people in this group had parents or children with distinctly Muslim names. Some of these are most likely ethnic Nubians whose ancestors adopted Islam. Still, our strong presumption has to be that most of the people appearing in these Ottoman-era land sales were Ottoman troops. Some personal names in these texts contain a nisba, an indicator of tribal or geographic origin.149 Where the editors identify a nisba as geographically Nubian—for instance, al-Ibrimi—we have no reason to assume that it has any ethnic implication.150 The apparent absence of Nubians in the Ottoman texts may simply be a matter of archaeological chance survival. Ibrim was, after all, a garrison, a center of Ottoman power. Contemporary Arabic-language Nubian land sales from this period may have been produced in large numbers in the river valley below. The last Old Nubian land sale—which is, in turn, the last precisely dated Old Nubian text of any kind—is from the 1480s.151 The Ottoman-era documentation at Ibrim begins in the 1620s, and the first

145 . Hinds and Ménage 1991. 146. See, for example, Hinds and Ménage 1991, text 71 and text 84. 147. Rogers 1994, 270. See also the remarks at Alexander 1996, 22 on “how garrisons of professional soldiers stationed in Egypt, came to be Nubian-speaking, local land-owning élites.” 148. See the checklist of medieval Nubian names at www.medievalnubia.info. 149. Hinds and Ménage 1991, 12. 150. Although for two possible exceptions, individuals described as Kenzi (al-Kanzī), see Hinds and Ménage 1991, 112–113 citing texts 31 and 64. 151 . See Łajtar and Ruffini 2011.

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Ottoman-era land sale dates to 1627/1628.152 There is thus a gap of some 140 years from the last Old Nubian land sale to the first Arabic land sale in Lower Nubia. Somewhere in this gap, Old Nubian died as a written language. Whatever the cause, this death of written Nubian would have had a number of logical consequences. First and foremost, Nubians would have had no legal mechanisms for maintaining traditional forms of land tenure and land lease. We have no way of knowing whether they adopted Islamic forms nearly at once under Ottoman administration or only after a prolonged transition; nor do we know what happened in the areas south of Ottoman administration. The land sales from twelfth-century Sicily show that Muslim legal forms can survive in cross-cultural transactions involving Christians as the purchasing parties.153 The reverse process might have held true for a brief period in an Islamizing Nubia. In either case, loss of Nubian-language literacy ultimately required Nubian society to undergo an accompanying shift in legal practice. Land tenure in later Nubian history was fundamentally different.154 Economic and political relationships in the Funj sultanate of Sinnar were essentially feudal. A nāz.ir or tribal chief “reserved the right, possibly to be exercised in the name of the sultan, to expropriate any plot of land from its incumbent cultivator and to bestow it upon someone else.”155 Even in the early twentieth century, observers of the Blue Nile regions close to the Funj capital reported on the prevalence of the “idea that no title to land is really valid unless it is derived from the Sultans.”156 A study of land sales by women during the Funj sultanate of Sinnar shows the differences between medieval Nubia and later periods.157 In the 1700s, we see the collapse of the Funj sultan’s control over the economy 152 . Hinds and Sakkout 1986, 9. 153 . Constable 1997. 154 . Although here, too, Spaulding and others have seen continuity with the medieval period. Note Kapteijns and Spaulding 2005, 28 remarking on “the few extant charters surviving in medieval Nubian.” Their note cites Osman 1978 (non vidi) and his unpublished translations of unspecified Old Nubian texts. Adams 1973, 222–223 has suggested that Burckhardt’s description of Nubian taxation in kind in the nineteenth century presents a system “which probably persisted in Nubia from the days of the Pharaohs.” For Ibrim in the early nineteenth century, see Burckhardt 1819, 33–35. 155 . Spaulding 1979, 335. See also Spaulding 1979, 343–346 for taxation in this period. 156. Spaulding 1979, 335 note 30. 157. Spaulding 1982a.

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and land tenure. The emergence of private property and coinage as a means of exchange accompanies this collapse of central authority.158 The result is the reemergence of the land sale as a new genre in Upper Nubia, approximately three hundred years after the last examples from the medieval period.159 The sheer novelty of the land sale genre is shown by the use of cotton cloth or gold as the exchange medium in early sales, before the adoption of coin. The author’s interests in this study focused on gender issues and revealed a striking gender disparity in this reemergent land sale genre. Women tended to sell land, not to buy it, and men tended to buy.160 The study’s author concluded that this revealed the economic weakness of women in this period of the Funj and post-Funj history.161 For our purposes, these land sales show something further, the relationship between legal genre, legal concept, and central authority. In medieval Nubia, where the king did not control land tenure, the concept of private land tenure created the need for a legal genre to handle private transactions, thus the Nubian adoption of late Roman legal forms. When the Nubian literate culture maintaining those forms collapsed, the concept of private land could have continued in oral culture but without any written vehicle. When that written vehicle reemerged, it needed new legal forms, and turned to new sources to find them.162 The private papers of ‘Abd Allah Bey Hamza comprise more than a thousand documents and include considerable documentation of legal and business practice during his time spent in the region around Dongola.163 As with our much older Nubian documents, the land sales from this archive mask much of the information necessary to trace the history of land pricing and value. Unsurprisingly, however, the parallels between these land sales and the model contracts of medieval Islamic jurors show that Islamic notarial practices had penetrated this region by the nineteenth century. 158. Spaulding 1982a, 7–14. 159. Spaulding 1982a, 14 table II for thirty-two examples from 1792/3 to 1825. 160. Spaulding 1982a, 15–17. 161 . Spaulding 1982a, 17. 162 . Note Kapteijns and Spaulding 2005, 30, describing the emergence of this new legal genre in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries “under intrusive and corrosive Mediterranean influence.” Indeed. 163 . Bjorkelo and Ali 1990, particularly 35–36.

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On the question of continuity in Nubian history, all of this amounts to a split decision. We have ample evidence for the continuity of Nubian cultural practices, political terminology, folk traditions, and so on. We have ample evidence for the continuity of indigenous cultural characteristics. Nubian legal history and land tenure practices are precisely the one place where we do not see continuity but instead note the adoption of practices attending a new language and a new religion. This had happened once before, with Coptic and Christianity. The Greco-Roman legal forms grafted onto Nubian cultural practice die out. In this sense, at the end of the medieval period, Nubia becomes less Roman.

7

Money, Rent, Taxes, and Investment Money in the Nubian Economy In chapter 3, the argument that private property was forbidden in medieval Nubia was discussed. A comparable argument about medieval Nubia bans money from the Nubian economy. Modern scholars have long noted an apparent paradox in the evidence of Nubian monetization. More than thirty years ago, Peter Shinnie cited Ibn Selim as textual evidence that Lower Nubia used coinage but noted that archaeology lended Ibn Selim no support.1 In the same year, Török wrote that “none of the historical states on the territory of Nubia had their own coins.”2 Since Nubian land sales, debts, and mortgages with explicit monetary sums challenge this picture, Török noted, “Thus on an archaeological routine basis we can say that money did not exist in Christian Nubia, but according to textual sources it did exist.”3 Later scholars have also noticed this paradox. Writing a decade after Shinnie and Török, Jakobielski asserted that “[t]rade in Nubia was largely carried out through the system of barter. There was no monetary system, with the exception of the northern parts of Nubia where Egyptian coins were used in trading with the Arabs.”4 This tendency to treat monetization in Nubia as an exception has influenced interpretation of the archaeological evidence that supports its existence. The excavator of Gebel Adda, who found “several small bronze coins of the Mameluke period” during surface

1 . Shinnie 1978a. For further discussion of the passage from Ibn Selim, see below, page 172. Shinnie’s view of trade in Nubia more generally was minimalist: “except perhaps in Lower Nubia, it was not of such importance for our area” (Shinnie 1978a, 263). 2 . Török 1978, 291. 3 . Török 1978, 294. 4 . Jakobielski 1988, 207, providing no citations.

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cleaning, argued that their presence on site was evidence of an otherwise unknown Mamluk occupation of the site.5 The only medieval coins found in excavation prior to these at Gebel Adda were two Umayyad coins from Aksha.6 The latest general survey of Nubian archaeology, David Edwards’s The Nubian Past, does not dwell long on the economy of medieval Nubia. Edwards contents himself with reference to Ali Osman’s unpublished dissertation on the subject and notes simply that “local systems based on barter are likely to have fulfilled most needs” relating to the circulation of goods.7 Adams has also argued for a prominent role for barter in the Nubian economy. His most recent statement on the subject claims that Nubia’s economic systems “operated without the medium of coinage, which did not come into use in Nubia until Ottoman times.”8 He did not discuss the five bronze coins from the Islamic period found in early medieval Ibrim or the slightly greater number from later periods, which will be discussed later in the chapter; he would likely argue that the size of these finds is insignificant or that the finds themselves do not indicate monetization.9 If modern scholars have admitted a role for coinage in Nubia, they have limited it (as Shinnie did) to Lower Nubia, citing the tenth-century Arab diplomat and historian Ibn Selim el-Aswâni as evidence that Egyptian currency circulated there alone.10 This is part of a historiographical model in which the second cataract formed an economic border between Lower Nubia and the rest of the country. This theory—which also follows Ibn Selim el-Aswâni—argues that trade south of the cataract required royal permission, given through the eparch.11 Ibn Selim’s writing—filtered, as it is, through al-Maqrizi—is not as clear as it may seem. He states that past the second cataract, “neither the

5 . Millet 1964, 11. 6. Shinnie and Shinnie 1965, 272. 7. Edwards 2004, 250. 8. Adams 2010, 240. 9. Adams 2010, 209; see page 192 below. 10. Welsby 2002, 203. See also Shinnie, cited above at note 1, and Adams 1996, 196, citing J. L. Burckhardt. 11 . See Adams 2010, 255 for the most recent restatement of this opinion, with the translation of the Arabic letter given at Adams 2010, 252 as the best evidence for Arab trade into Makuria and the kingdom of Alwa beyond.

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dinar, nor the dirham were of any use because [the Nubians] do not use money in their transactions, except with the Muslims beyond the cataract.”12 As Shinnie saw, this implies that the dinar and the dirhem were useful north of the second cataract. Excavations of the late Christian period at Qasr Ibrim uncovered a small coin weight bearing the inscription “eparchoub noub,” an apparent reference to the eparch of Nobadia.13 This weight might have been a standard by which the eparch could weigh and certify the value of coins in circulation in his territory. If this is what Ibn Selim meant, little of this currency has been found in the archaeological record. As Adams has pointed out, documentary and literary attestations of coinage are tempered by the fact that “the use of coinage is not very well confirmed by archaeological finds, from Qasr Ibrim or any other mediaeval Nubian site.”14 From this archaeological result, Adams concluded that “it is evident that [Nobadia] did not have a fully monetized economy.”15 This dearth of coinage, coupled with the textual record’s lack of specific indication that the words for “gold” and “silver” referred to dinars and dirhems, led Adams to suggest that “the pieces of gold and silver [mentioned in Nubian documents] were not coins at all, but were unminted ingots of metal.”16 This theory, that medieval Nubia’s economy was undermonetized and relied on unminted precious metals as a measure of value, raises certain questions. If Adams is right, we have no way of knowing what land—or property of any kind, for that matter—was actually worth. Adams formed his judgment of property values based on the sales prices recorded in the Qasr Ibrim archive: “The price of land was evidently rather low, since in two cases a plot was exchanged for one piece of gold and one piece of silver, and one woman exchanged a whole series of parcels for a camel, a ring, a jewel, and a slave.”17 This is a reasonable argument but hinges on the relative cost of items with considerable potential for cost fluctuation—camels, slaves, and such—and what one considers to be “rather low.”

12 . Vantini 1975, 604. 13 . Adams 1996, 196. 14 . Adams 1996, 196. 15 . Adams 1996, 249. 16. Adams 1996, 250. 17. Adams 1996, 249.

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A reassessment of these issues—and the role of coinage—is in order. Published evidence indicates Nubia’s integration into a wider monetized economy. When Nubia adopted Coptic legal forms, it adopted Coptic terms for money as well, including the equivalent for the Roman solidus, holokottinos. One Nubian text in Coptic from the time of King Merkurios (the late seventh and early eighth centuries) specifies a payment of 19 holokot(tinoi) for a landholding (ktêma) containing 17 shipa (?).18 Unpublished Coptic documents from Qasr Ibrim provide other examples. In one text, dating to the early eleventh century, an unknown bishop—probably of Ibrim itself— receives word from a Nubian who “suffered a great loss in the district of Egypt” and is forced to sell some unknown product, making explicit reference to coins of the Caliph al-Hakim.19 While not evidence for economic conditions within Nubia in general, it shows that Nubians in our period were familiar with monetized transactions and connected to the region’s wider monetized economy. Lacking full publication of the Old Nubian texts from Qasr Ibrim, scholars have argued from silence, pointing to the absence of coinage in the material remains. A reappraisal of the later texts in light of several unpublished accounts will provide an alternative approach. Qasr Ibrim’s documentary evidence will demonstrate that textual references to gold and silver do refer to minted coin. More specifically, patterns in these references suggest that medieval Nubia used Egyptian coinage and valued its gold and silver at rates directly in keeping with those current in medieval Egypt. Finally, these accounts provide quantifiable, objective support for Adams’s judgment that the price of Nubian land was low, a conclusion that deserves further attention.

Nubia’s Gold to Silver Exchange Rate Ten Old Nubian accounts from Qasr Ibrim contribute to our understanding of the late Nubian economy.20 They provide us enough raw data to test the two hypotheses advanced by Adams: 1) that gold and silver in Old Nubian texts referred to unminted precious metal rather than coinage, 18. Crum 1905 no. 447, discussed at Monneret de Villard 1938, 86. Note also the appearance of the term in no. 448, which involves some of the same characters, and an unpublished reference to three solidi in no. 453. 19. Hagen 2009, 116–117. 20. For more on these texts, which I call secular accounts, see below, page 186.

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and 2) that Nubian land was not very expensive. These accounts provide sufficient raw data to refute the first claim but support the second. Nubian documents mentioning gold and silver refer to the same gold dinar and silver dirhems found in neighboring Egypt. We can measure the gold and silver payments recorded in these texts to show that Nubian land was indeed inexpensive. The first step in this argument is to clarify our terms. Nubian documents have a number of terms for precious metals. As Adams observed, “Units of currency which are mentioned in the land sale documents and property lists include ‘pieces of gold,’ ‘pieces of silver,’ and dirhems.”21 The dirhem, the contemporary Islamic world’s standard for silver coinage, appears in Old Nubian as tiram-.22 Some documents use the Old Nubian term for “silver,” shoggid- or soggid-, which parallels the modern Nubian shongir. Browne renders that word as “silver” or “money” depending on context.23 He consistently renders the Old Nubian word for “gold,” ngap-, as “(pieces of) gold.”24 Browne’s Old Nubian dictionary records no attestation of the term dinar, the standard unit of gold coinage in the contemporary Arab world, nor do the unpublished Old Nubian documents appear to attest the term. However, dinars appear in the Arabic documents from Qasr Ibrim during the Fatimid period.25 The diversity in this terminology led Adams to believe “that these are not interchangeable terms.”26 The truth is more complicated. The Old Nubian tiram- and shoggid- never appear in the same text. Similarly, the Old Nubian ngap- and the Arabic dinar appear in texts written in different languages.27 All we can say with certainty is that ngap- (“gold”) and tiram- (“silver dirhem”) appear in the same texts and thus are not interchangeable. Christian Nubia clearly had two distinct metallic units of exchange. One unpublished land sale from the 1270s shows that these

21 . Adams 1996, 249. 22 . Browne 1996a, 175. 23 . See 36.1.32, where soggid- modifies koulel (“silver ring”) and 59.i.4, where it appears in a fragmentary context which Browne takes to refer to money, presumably since it accompanies a reference to the face value of wheat: “ellen konypak[.” (For “face-value” see 178.) 24 . P.QI 3 passim. 25 . Adams 1996, 250. 26. Adams 1996, 249. 27. Although full judgment as to how the term dinar is used must await publication of the Arabic texts from Qasr Ibrim’s Christian era.

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two units could be used as part of the same transaction, presumably when the amount in smaller units did not equal the value of one larger unit.28 The repeated references to ngap- and tiram- in the Old Nubian accounts probably relate to the same potential equivalency. A closer look at the payments in these accounts supports Ibn Selim’s indirect claims about the role of Egyptian currency in Lower Nubia. Two published texts, 61 and 62, are each described as an “Itemized List” in Browne’s translation. They appear to be accounts of some kind, measuring payments from individuals.29 Some entries include payment sizes alone, without any commodities specified (e.g., 61.9 “Ngilêsa’s: 12”). Others name the commodities but give no units (e.g., 61.8−9 “Ngilêsa’s: 35, wine”). But about one-fifth of the entries give amounts in either gold, dirhems, or both. The payment amounts in dirhems usually far exceed the payment amounts in gold in these two accounts, which suggests that dirhems were worth less than gold, whatever unit of gold was used. The amounts in dirhems in these published accounts range from 7 to 36. The Qasr Ibrim excavation archives housed in the British Museum have transcripts and photographs of eight unpublished texts similar in structure to 61 and 62 that also provide relevant data. These eight texts are accounts of gold, dirhems, measures (mash), and wine (orp()).30 These accounts list payments of gold, dirhems, and the other commodities in no apparent order, with amounts of gold and dirhems varying considerably. The unpublished accounts include a much greater number of payments of gold and dirhems than the published texts. The ten published and unpublished accounts taken together provide more than 120 payments in dirhems and more than forty in gold, a sample large enough for us to determine a relationship between the two. A statistical analysis of this data shows that these references to gold and silver must indicate actual coinage.31 Our starting point is the amounts

28. See unpublished EA 90229, where a passage in line 27 reads “ng]ap-h-tiram-[,” “8 gold pieces and NN dirhems,” unfortunately leaving the latter amount in a lacuna. 29. See page 189 herein on the relationship between these texts and possible land surveys and tax payments. 30. Unpublished Qasr Ibrim texts P.QI inv. 64/26.8, 66/26.7, 69/26.9, 72.10.24.2, 72.10.26/3a, 78.3.1/6 = NI 57 and 82.2.24/36. I also include a 1964 text of unknown find number. 31 . I would like to thank my colleague at Fairfield University, Stephen Sawin, for discussing with me some of the statistical issues related to my treatment of Ibrim’s secular accounts.

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paid in dirhem in each entry. One noticeable limit to the variation in payment amounts is that the vast majority of the dirhem payments—119 out of 121—total less than 40 dirhems.32 (See figure 7.2, page 192.) This apparent cap on payments in dirhem has a striking implication for the Nubian economy’s relationship to the wider world. These accounts from Qasr Ibrim are compatible with Ibn Selim’s implicit claim that Egyptian gold and silver circulated north of the second cataract, because their data match Egyptian exchange rates. In the wider Mediterranean world, the exchange rate between the gold dinar and the silver dirhem varied naturally from time to time.33 One document from the Cairo geniza records an exchange rate of 40 dirhem to 1 dinar in Fustat in the 1190s.34 Other recorded exchange rates in Egypt in the mid- to late twelfth century range from 34.3 to 1 to 42 to 1.35 If the two metals in Nubian accounts were not true coinage, the joint attestations of gold and dirhems in Old Nubian texts would pay no particular regard to a limit on the number of dirhems per entry. If the two metals in Nubian accounts were true coinage, no payment amount in dirhems should exceed any attested exchange rate of dirhem to gold. With more than 120 data points in ten accounts from the mid- to late twelfth century, we have hardly any payment in dirhems higher than 40. This would suggest an exchange rate of dirhem to gold of roughly 40 to 1, which, in turn, indicates that Nubian currency exchange rates tracked those of contemporary Islamic Egypt. This leaves one final puzzle, Old Nubian’s adoption of dirhem but not dinar. We can draw two conclusions from this situation, one about the chronology of Nubia’s monetization and another about the relative importance of

32 . Two of the 121 are drastic outliers, attested payments for 49 dirhems, both from 62 . With a nearly continuous set of dirhem amounts attested from 1 to 37.5 and no payments between 38 and 49 dirhems, it is hard to escape the conclusion that the two payments for 49 dirhems are smaller amounts combined, with the scribe simply neglecting to convert the amount to 1 dinar and dirhems in change. There are outliers in the Egyptian data as well, which may simply mean that our two exceptions represent a temporary aberration in the exchange rate. Goitein 1967, 379 records a gold-to-silver exchange rate in Fustat c. 1080 as high as 1 to 50, which would accommodate the outlying data here as well. 33 . See Goitein 1967, appendix D for a full discussion of the evidence of the exchange rate as found in the Cairo Geniza. For a discussion of the relationship between dinar and dirhem in Egypt, see Schultz 1998, 321–323. 34 . Goitein 1967, 382. 35 . Goitein 1967, 381. See also the earlier history of medieval Egyptian money in Balog 1961.

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the currencies in circulation. First, it seems likely that the adoption of the dirhem as a price unit came with extended contact to the Arab world, particularly after the regularization of political and trade relations with Islamic Egypt. The silver dirhem was widely used in the Arab world. Earlier monetization of Nubia through contact with Roman Egypt might well have resulted in the adoption of Greco-Roman terms for silver currency. Second, Old Nubian’s adoption of dirhem but not dinar suggests that, for practical purposes, the former was more important than the latter. The accounts support this, showing a ratio of payments in silver to payments in gold of 3 to 1.36 We may suppose that Lower Nubia became accustomed to payment in silver in the Christian period and that payment in gold remained somewhat less usual. When encounters with the Arab world brought economic change to Nubia, they did not make the term ngap- obsolete but nearly drowned the word for “silver,” shoggid-, in a sea of dirhem. This linguistic transition makes the most sense in the context of monetization: Nubians started using the word dirhem in preference to shoggid- because it referred to a specific physical object, the money in their pockets.

The Face Value of Coinage This hypothesis—that the Nubian documents refer to gold and silver coins known from contemporary Egypt—may receive support from otherwise obscure references to face value found in these texts. The Old Nubian word for “face” (kony) occasionally appears joined to the Old Nubian word for “share” (pag) to form a term, konypaga, which Browne supposed might mean “face-value.”37 This term appears in an Old Nubian land sale from the late fifteenth century at the point in the document where the actual cash transaction is described: “I received the price at face-value (?) 120, 9 gold pieces I received.”38 It also appears in a number of letters in regard to sales already or about to be conducted.39 In one letter, there is an instruction to sell in gold “or at

36. That is, the accounts used for my analysis include 42 payments in gold and 121 payments in dirhems. 37. Browne 1996a, 100. 38. Łajtar and Ruffi ni 2011. 39. 46, 52, 58 and 59. We also see the term in the unpublished texts P.QI inv. 69/26.2 = 69.2.8.8, 78.3.11/50 = NI 71 and 64/26.8, and other texts whose find numbers are yet unknown to me.

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face-value.”40 In other letters, there are transactions for millet at face value and wheat at face value and a search for justice centering on the face value of some unspecified item.41 Unpublished texts from Ibrim include reference to wine (orp) purchases at face value and payments of bushels (mash) at face value.42 In the latter case, the same account also includes payments of bushels without any notice of face value specified. Presumably, some distinction exists: One could pay, buy, or sell normally or via face value. Yet it is not obvious what Browne’s doubtful English rendering of the phrase as “at face-value” might mean in actual terms. One modern scholar has noted a role the word konyi (“face”) plays in modern Nubian idioms. The words for “wet” and “dry” equate to the concepts of honor and shame, and one’s konyi or face is, in essence, one’s self. Thus, to have a wet konyi or face is to be honorable and thus, by extension, a Nubian, and to have a dry konyi or face is to be shamed.43 This idiomatic use of konyi in modern Nubian would lead us to think that a konypaga is an honorable or honest price. This might mean that a face price is the actual amount paid by the individual, at the moment of the transaction. Alternative possibilities exist. It is tempting to suppose that konypaga is the Old Nubian equivalent in legal texts of the Coptic nkefalaion, the term specifying that the coin involved in the transaction has the correct markings on its head or face (kefalaion or kony). This is Coptic’s tertiary use of the Greek loanword kefalaion, appearing primarily in eighth-century Coptic property sales to indicate that the payment is made in gold (noub) that is “coined” or “stamped.”44 This Coptic legal usage may be at the heart of the “face-value” expression that puzzled Browne in his translation of the Old Nubian texts. A recent dissertation on Aristophanes, a Coptic scribe from the village of Jeme in the early period of Arab rule in Egypt, draws attention to the various formulas used to describe financial transactions in Coptic legal documents. One such formula records the actual moment in a sale in which money is transferred: “The price thusly has come to me from 40. 46.3: “ngapira gren konypaga gren,” literally “if you cause to be gold, if you cause to be face-value.” Browne’s commentary does not explain why he takes these two phrases to be in opposition, rather than referring to the same transaction. 41 . 52 .6, 59.1.4, and 58.2. 42 . P.QI inv. 69.2.8.8 = 69/26.2 and 64/26.8 respectively. 43 . Kronenberg 1987, 413 note 11. 44 . Förster 2002, 410.

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you [name] from hand to hand, from one’s own resources, of tested and headed gold” (“nnoub ndokimon auô nkefalaion”).45 Jennifer Cromwell takes the final word of this phrase, nkefalaion, to indicate that the coinage in the transaction “bears the correct markings—is headed,”46 which is to say that the coins have been legitimately minted. If this speculation is accurate, it provides both further links between the Old Nubian legal documentary tradition and its late antique predecessors and further evidence of the monetization of the economy of medieval Nubia. What, after all, can it mean to require that a sale take place with legally marked (“faced”) gold, if actual coins were not involved? The importance of the face or the head appears in other legal contexts in medieval Nubia. A Nubian text dating to the reign of Egypt’s Fatimid caliph al-Hakim includes a Coptic oath sworn on the “head of this king, sitting today,” presumably referring to an unnamed Nubian king.47 This oath may show the same attitude as legal references to duly “faced” gold coins, that reference to the head or face of the sovereign lends legal authority to a transaction. The original Greek term kephalaion appears in Coptic as ape, meaning “head,” “capital,” or “gross amount.”48 This could refer simply to the entire amount of a loan, or it could refer to the principle amount of a debt as opposed to the interest due on it. If this concept made its way into Old Nubian, Nubia’s face share could indicate a distinction in these land sales between an amount due in total (the capital or gross amount) and the amount paid up front, as a deposit or downpayment. In chapter 5 I suggested that the intermediaries in some of the land sales might have been Nubian land brokers. The face share may have been the gross sales price they arranged between buyer and seller, minus a share they could take for their own commission.

Nubia’s Low Land Prices To return to the price of land in medieval Nubia, Adams, the only scholar to venture an opinion on this subject, noted the apparent contradictions in the evidence. He wrote that, on the one hand, the “price of land was 45 . Cromwell 2008, 72, citing examples at P.KRU 11, 14, and 15. 46. Cromwell 2008, 71. Contrast MacCoull 2009, 142, with a translation of the relevant portion of P.KRU 27: “its price has come to my hand from your hand, from hand to hand, in tried gold and a capital sum.” 47. Hagen 2010. 48. Tonio Richter 2002, 78 and 184.

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evidently rather low,” an opinion he based on recorded land sale prices of one piece of gold and one piece of silver appearing twice for a single plot, and a camel, a ring, a jewel, and a slave appearing once for a series of plots.49 On the other hand, he noted that gold and silver “seem moreover to have been of rather considerable value, since in two instances a parcel of land was exchanged for one of each.” Was Nubian land cheap because one gold piece was a low sales price, or was Nubian gold valuable because a single piece could purchase an entire plot of land? Lack of known prices for other commodities in medieval Nubia presents an obstacle. Here, too, the Old Nubian accounts may provide the answer. In almost every case, they do not specify their own intended use but a number of obvious possibilities present themselves. They are most likely either tax registers or records of estate management, recording accounts receivable or received by the state apparatus or by large private land owners. In either case, the figures in these accounts leave us with a puzzle: Some of them are rather high when compared to the sales prices we find in the Ibrim land sales. Consider the highest amounts in the two published accounts, 61 and 62. Between the two texts, we see four entries in excess of a gold piece, one entry in excess of two gold pieces and another entry of three gold pieces. The seven published land sales have cash prices ranging from one gold piece to twenty, with three of these seven being for only one or two gold pieces.50 The lowest amounts in the published accounts are not too far behind. If my arguments earlier in this chapter are correct, then payments of, for example, 12, 24, or 36 dirhems are substantial proportions— roughly one-third, two-thirds, and so forth—of a single gold piece. Thus, even these smaller payments in the accounts are not too far in scale from the smallest of the land sale prices. Examples from other sites do little to change our sense of scale. The land sale from Dirr transfers one-quarter of a larger plot from a father to his son for four gold pieces.51 This presumably means that the full plot was

49. Adams 1996, 249. But Adams must have been working with an earlier translation of the documents in question. Browne’s eventual translation of “ngapl arou darti alo” in 39 and 40 would read “1 (piece of) gold and 1 half(?),” not one piece of gold and one piece of silver. For darti see note 9 on page 78 above. 50. With the qualifier in regard to the presence of a darti in two of these transactions, see page 202 below. 51 . Browne 1992a, 455.

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valued at sixteen gold pieces, a sum comparable to the higher sales prices we see at Ibrim. The smaller transaction, for four gold pieces, is only one-third larger than the largest payment figure in the Ibrim accounts. Thus, in Dirr, too, the total value of the transaction is not dauntingly large compared to the payment figures in Nubian accounts. Whether these accounts record taxes, rents, or something else altogether, the sense of scale is striking: Dozens and dozens of people were, in presumably short periods of time, making payments not too much smaller than the price of a full land sale. The figures in Mouhoumeti’s land cession to Mashshouda in text 42 pose a comparable puzzle. Why would a five-year cession cost Mashshouda two gold pieces, a price that might not have been out of place in one of Mashshouda’s full purchases? It may be that this “cession” is a de facto sale or some other kind of transaction. The Old Nubian verb gappra terparallels the modern Kenzi Nubian verb gafree tir, which can mean “to award,” “to assign,” “to contract out.”52 No Old Nubian lease agreement or verb for “lease” exists. Perhaps this is what is really going on in this “cession.”53 The possibility that this cession is actually a lease might also help explain another puzzle in the text. Mouhoumeti’s cession concludes, “afterwards, giving [Mashshouda] his wages (?), I shall release him from any other work (?) that arises thereafter (?) from this land.” Browne was right to indicate a level of doubt in his translation. His individual word choices are defensible, but taken as a whole, they form a phrase without much sense. Mashshouda’s social status makes it highly unlikely that he was a wage earner. Korpa-, the term Browne takes as “wages (?),” is related to terms for “work” or “toil.”54 The word might easily mean something closer to “profits” or “proceeds.” And eisselo, the word for the further “work” from which Mashshouda is released, may not stem from is- (“to work”) but the identical is- (“to take, bring”).55 Here, we may be closer to a translation that makes real social and economic sense: “giving [Mashshouda] his profits [ from my land], I shall release him from any burden that arises from this land.” This seems to

52 . Hofmann 1986, 66: “verzeihen, vergeben.” 53 . Although note my suggestion about the verb for division above at 151. 54 . Browne 1996a, 99. 55 . Browne 1996a, 76.

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be a plausible closing clause to a five-year lease, but we are still left with the striking point that two gold coins for a five-year use is not so different from the prices of permanent sales. This brings us back to the relative size of the typical sales price when compared to the gold totals in the Nubian accounts. If these accounts were recording taxes or rental income, these rates indicate considerable profitability to be had from land investment compared to the purchase price. This leads us to the conclusion that Adams’s initial assessment was correct: The purchase price of land in medieval Nubia was relatively low. Medieval Egyptian evidence describes house sales for prices as high as 14 dinars.56 We have no direct way to compare the properties involved in these sales, but by purchase price alone, the Nubian cases once again appear to be relatively cheap. The price of land in Nubia can also be compared to the price of slaves in Egypt. A modern survey of twenty-one slave sales in Egypt from the late eleventh to the middle of the thirteenth century ad shows a range of prices from 10 to 40 dinars per slave. In Egypt, slaves specifically described as Nubian sold for 15 to 20 dinars.57 Those people profiting from the Nubian slave trade could have bought all of the land assigned a cash price in Qasr Ibrim’s Archive 3 with the gross receipts from the sale of as few as three Nubian slaves. If supply and demand are assumed to be the only variables affecting land prices, some interesting conclusions can be reached. Supply would have remained relatively fixed and relatively limited. Lower Nubia was known for its scarcity of arable land.58 Occasional alterations in the physical landscape—through construction of a new waterwheel, for instance— might open up new plots but not to an extent so great as to depress purchase prices. Supply would also not have been increased in a virtual sense by high levels of turnover. The level of social ceremony apparent in the legal texts suggests that land was not sold lightly. The gravity of losing one’s land in more recent Nubian culture also suggests that high market turnover was unlikely.59

56. See page 199 below. 57. See Ashtor 1969, 209–210 for these figures. 58. Arab historians comment on this feature of Lower Nubia frequently: Al-Maqrizi describes parts of the region as “narrow and uneven . . . situated exclusively on the Nile,” and notes that “the cultivated area is narrow” (Vantini 1975, 601–602). 59. See page 73 herein.

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The logical conclusion is that land in medieval Nubia was simply not in high demand. Any attempt to explain why this was the case would go well beyond the present evidence, but there seems no harm in speculating. We may be seeing the effect of unspoken expectations about social class and land tenure. The tenant farmers and small land owners remain largely invisible except through payments we take to be theirs in these recurring accounts. Were these payments punitively high, preventing the lower classes from ever amassing capital adequate to the cost of a land sale? Or did the lower classes simply see these sale transactions as irrelevant to their social and economic worlds? Nubian land sales were a social performance, a chance to create a network of elites and display one’s wealth to that network. Land may have remained cheap in medieval Nubia because the vast percentage of its population saw no need or had no ability to participate in the social ritual associated with possessing and transferring it.

Nubian Accounting: Taxation or Estate Management? The archives from Qasr Ibrim preserve two different types of accounts in Old Nubian. The first type—church accounts—records nothing but the name and location of individual churches followed by payment amounts of one or two komi, a measurement of wine.60 The second type—secular accounts—records individuals followed by payments in any number of units: gold, silver, wine, slaves, and so on. These two types of accounts served patently different purposes, and a closer look at both will further clarify our understanding of the Nubian economy.61

Church Accounts Joost Hagen has recently provided the first detailed study of the Nubian church accounts.62 His interpretation of the relevant texts is definitive. Three unpublished Old Nubian texts excavated in the 1964 season 60. For komi, still “unidentified” to Browne 1996a, as a measure of wine, see Hagen 2009, 118. 61 . I omit consideration of two Arabic texts from Qasr Ibrim (British Museum Qasr Ibrim Archive, photo sheet of text finds from the 1976 season) that appear to include a series of multiplications. These texts may be remnants of a third sort of account in medieval Nubia, but no certain claims can be made without further analysis. I thank my colleague Martin Nguyen of Fairfield University for discussion of these texts. 62 . Hagen 2009, 118–119.

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appear at first glance to be topographical registers, recording towns and the churches in those towns. The three texts are so close in content that they are multiple versions of a single list. One text names only the churches. The other two name the churches and include with each entry payments of one or two komi. A royal decree from 1155 ad (30), apparently absolving one of those churches from its obligation to pay the bishop (presumably of Ibrim) one unit of wine in the month of Thaboti, leads to a logical conclusion: These texts are records of which churches under the jurisdiction of the bishop of Ibrim owe him one or two komi of wine each year.63 Further elaboration on these conclusions is possible. First, we should note the provenance of the texts. The excavators for the earlier seasons at Qasr Ibrim did not assign individual find numbers to each object uncovered nor were specific notes on find spots preserved for any but the most remarkable ones. Still, an educated guess is possible. According to Plumley’s initial report of that season, only two parts of Qasr Ibrim saw any work in 1964, the cathedral and the podium in the fortress’s south wall. Each site produced Old Nubian text finds.64 Frend’s more detailed discussion of the podium site, published a decade later, provides more details on a number of the text finds from the podium but mentions nothing like these accounts.65 The podium texts from Frend’s report match texts known from the British Museum archives to be unrelated letters.66 It is then more likely that these church accounts, recording amounts of wine owed to the bishop of Ibrim, were excavated in Ibrim’s cathedral.67 Second, these texts presumably represent the lone survivals in what must have been a long sequence of comparable texts. If Hagen is correct to connect these accounts with the royal decree in regard to wine sent to the bishop of Ibrim each Thaboti, then these are most likely annual lists. The one text naming only the churches, without any payments attached, may have been the prototype, an inventory of churches subject 63 . See Hagen forthcoming a for the proposal that Thaboti is a form of the Coptic Tapsate or Tausati, an alternative name for the better-known month name Epeiph; on this form, see Drescher 1960. 64 . Plumley 1964. 65 . Frend 1974. 66. See page 231 for a discussion of the two letters in find number 64/35. 67. For the cathedral itself, see Aldsworth 2011, non vidi.

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to this collection.68 The full list, with payments attached, represents one year of collections from those churches.69 The third text is shorter than either, overlapping in three jurisdictions and naming new churches from several other towns.70 It may be evidence of a substantial change in the churches subject to this collection, or it may be record of a different collection entirely. The point is minor but worth making explicit. Interest in the evidence excavated from the cathedral focused on the religious texts, dramatic testaments to Nubian reception of Mediterranean Christian traditions. Interest in the documentary texts excavated from elsewhere at Qasr Ibrim focused on the legal texts well edited by Browne and discussed in detail in previous chapters. But the cathedral’s documentary tradition is also revealing. Interspersed throughout the church’s liturgical calendar was its daily business calendar. The scribes who produced the church’s religious texts were also needed for more mundane affairs, the management of collections needed to maintain the livelihood of the bishop and his church hierarchy. These are probably the same sort of scribes responsible for recording the liturgical food offerings found in the dipinti at Faras and Sonqi Tino, discussed in chapter 5.71

Secular Accounts The extant accounts that suggest the Nubian monetary system featured gold to silver exchange rates comparable to those found in Egypt at the time have still more to tell us. First, these documents are likely the vestiges of medieval Nubia’s taxation and cadastration system.72 Second, certain patterns in these accounts may reveal hidden details of this taxation system. Finally, find spots of the accounts also impact our understanding of their purpose. Previous scholarship has had little to say in regard to the accounts’ purpose. Browne presented 61 (see figure 7.1) and 62 only as itemized

68. P.QI inv. 64/24. 69. P.QI inv. 64.24/3 with P.QI inv. 78.3.7/5 = NI 67. The latter of the two texts, from the 1978 season, was an unstratified surface find. 70. P.QI inv. 64/5 fragment 12. 71 . See page 108. 72 . A proposal first raised in tentative form in the spoken version of Ochała forthcoming, with reference to two unpublished documents from Gebel Adda in preparation for publication by Łajtar. The Gebel Adda finds contain perhaps as many as seven such accounts.

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figure 7.1 P.QI 3.61, a Secular Account from Qasr Ibrim (Published courtesy of the Egypt Exploration Society and the British Museum Qasr Ibrim Archive)

lists. Adams took a stronger position, writing that these documents and text 60 “appear to be property lists . . . [and] should probably be classed in the broadest sense as legal documents.”73 He is almost certainly correct on the second count but his first claim, that 61 and 62 are property lists, seems less likely. The units in the lists—gold, dirhem, and wine—are commodities, more likely to be payments than property. For anyone to have drafted a list detailing how much gold or silver belonged to a series of unrelated individuals would have been strange and lacking in obvious parallels. Three other possibilities present themselves. These accounts may be registers of land sales, rental income, or tax income. The small size of Nubian land purchase prices compared to the entries in these accounts shows that Nubian land was inexpensive. Possibly the purchase amounts and the account amounts are proportionate simply because the accounts are registers of land sales. Yet from a recordkeeping standpoint, recording land sales in this way would be horribly inefficient. The account entries record only a single personal name and a price. This is not enough information for a sales register, which would require at least the names of both parties, if not some further indication of which plots of land were meant and when the transaction took place. One clue to the purpose of the accounts is their layout. They are not, like so many Greek-language accounts known from Greco-Roman Egypt,

73 . Adams 1996, 235.

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arranged in tidy columns, with the payer (or payee) on one side and the amount of the payment on the other side, each entry immediately below the preceding one. They are rather arranged in paragraphs, much like other Old Nubian documents, with each entry following the other without separation or regard for layout. This structural decision has a practical impact: It makes adding the entries exceptionally difficult, since they are not lined up in a single column. None of the accounts found at Qasr Ibrim appears to make any attempt to add the payments listed within, as this was not part of the purpose of these accounts. The two previously published texts, 61 and 62, do not give a heading to indicate the purpose of the accounts. The entries are extremely spare. Each list includes both people and institutions, for example, Peter-Church and Mary-Church. In their minimum form, more common in 62, each entry closes with a number, for example, “Petrsinil lblo,” “Peter-Church’s: 32.” At their more generous, these entries, particularly in 61, specify units of assessment, for example, “Taparanil ngapil arou tirami k orpalo,” “Tapara’s: 1 (piece of ) gold, 20 dirhems, wine.” These texts are possibly fiscal registers based on a type of cadastral land survey. The items may indicate the payment of taxes due on each plot owned by the people or institutions in the list. Alternatively, they may indicate rental payments. The considerable prosopographical overlaps between Archive 3’s secular accounts and the participants in the Qasr Ibrim land sales support the first alternative. The man named Einyitta appearing as a land sale witness described as the one “who has the Jesus-Church of the Mountain” was clearly a land owner and may be the same Einyitta appearing in account 61.74 Accounts 61 and 62 each name an unidentified Mashshouda who might be the man well known from the rest of Archive 3. His payments are among the largest in both accounts, which encourages this identification. The Songoja who appears in 61 could be one of the archive’s witnesses of the same name or one of the buyers of the property for sale in 44. The Anion-Asti making payments in 62 appears—with spelling variations—as a land owner in 36 and 40. The Eionngoka in 62 could be the same person who purchased land with Mena in 32. The Pongita in 62 could be the same person who sold land with Persi and Ngonnen in 34.

74 . 34 and 38.

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Likewise, the Souddingal in 62 could be the same person who was an intermediary for the cash in Pongita’s sale. The Ngejin Asi in 62 could be same person who appears as a land owner in 36. None of these identifications is certain, but taken together, they form a compelling composite picture. The names on these lists are most likely land owners, and the numbers next to their names are assessments or payments on their land. Account 60, an itemized list of “the lands of the Jesus-Church of Touggili that are in Nobadia,” includes several plots described as belonging to other churches.75 While there is no correspondence between the names and plots in 60 and those in 61 and 62, the latter texts are possibly the institutional or private records of rental income from property not managed directly by the owner. The Jesus-Church at Dongola would, under this interpretation, be responsible for managing property in Tamit, Ibrim, and elsewhere. Some of that property was its own, and other parcels belong to other churches—the Michael-Church of Ibrim in one case, the Andrew-Church of Dongola in another—for which the Jesus-Church oversaw revenue collection. Yet this still does not tell us whether these accounts relate to taxes or rents. Only one of the unpublished accounts has any kind of label, one that is conclusive in determining the nature of these accounts.76 This text has nineteen lines on the first side and twenty on the second. From one side to the other, thirty-six lines appear in the same hand, before a second and then a third hand appears in the account. This change in hands allows us to determine which side of the account is the front. The front side begins with the words ngapil eitsan, and the back side begins with the words songoja eitsil. The key to the interpretation of these texts are the words recurring in each phrase, eitsan and eitsil, from eitr-, eitar- (“to send”). Browne’s Old Nubian Dictionary cites e[i][tissou and eitasse as renderings of the Greek apesteilas, from apostellô (“to send off”) and also cites eitissikon (24) and eitissil (30).77 The final example is the most relevant: “papasin eitissil,” “anyone whom the bishop sent.” Eitsan, a subjunctive form, and eitsil,

75 . 60.1–2: “einingoullo einnana tougglin ïsousin. parre migtin goulla | pilgoul.” See above, pages 15 and 81. 76. P.QI inv. 66/26.7 = 69/26.7 (Photo 69.3/19–20). 77. Browne 1996a, 79.

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a verbid form, appear in the unpublished account, giving us the labels “Gold. He sent:” and “The eparch sent.”78 These labels are not as forthcoming as we might like, but they are better than the other accounts, which have no labels at all. They are enough, at any rate, to support the conclusion that one side of the account records gold sent by an eparch, while the other notes gold sent by someone unnamed. The eparch could easily be involved in each case. What we cannot tell is the account’s vantage point. Is the scribe working for the eparch, describing how much gold the eparch sent out? Or is the scribe working for the recipient of that gold, describing what the eparch sent to the recipient? Alternatively, the labels could be reflexive, the scribe describing gold the eparch collected and sent to his own central accounts. This final option may seem counterintuitive, but internal evidence offers some significant support. The extant secular accounts give us enough payment amounts to make some quantitative observations to support this proposal. The accounts listed in table 7.1 and analyzed in figure 7.2 record forty-two gold and 121 silver (or dirhem) entries that can be read with confidence.79 The gold payments are not random. These payments, typically only one or two gold pieces, rarely go much higher than four or five gold pieces. Twenty-two of the forty-two payments recording ngap or gold are for one gold piece only. Eight of the forty-two are for two gold pieces only. Only one payment of the forty-two exceeds six gold pieces, a single entry for eight gold pieces. This suggests that there was an outer limit past which these payments were not likely to go. What conclusion can be drawn from this is not immediately obvious. The records may give us an indication of what might have been considered a large amount of money in medieval Nubia. Alternatively, if these sums are assessments, tied in some way—either as tax or rent—to the value of corresponding landholdings, they may give us an indication of the maximize size of Nubian landholdings. If we knew anything about standard

78. The fi rst example appears to have a subjective noun followed by a verb requiring a different subject, so the two words must form separate, if related, thoughts. The second example uses a predicative noun as the antecedent of a verbid, for which see Browne 2002, 36. 79. This count includes doubted or doubtful readings but omits entries which are lacunose or extant but illegible. It also separates for sake of clarity entries that contain payments in both gold and silver. For example, in the analysis that follows, an entry for payment of “one gold, 12 silver” is counted twice, once as a payment of one gold, and again as a payment of 12 silver.

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Table 7.1 Secular Accounts from Qasr Ibrim. Account

Find Spot

Notes

1

P.QI 3.61

Archive 3 (House 177)

Chiefly gold and dirhem

2

P.QI 3.62

Archive 3 (House 177)

Most items unspecified

3

1964, unknown find Unknown number

Gold, wine and slaves

4

64/26.8

Unknown

Gold, dirhem, measures, and wine

5

66/26.7 = 69/26.7

Unknown

One side labeled ngapl eitsan; the other labeled songoja eitsil

6

69/26.9

House 177

Chiefly gold and dirhem

7

72.10.24/2

Unknown

Gold, dirhem and wine

8

72.10.26/3a

House 174 (formerly LC2–7) Chiefly dirhem

9

78.3.1/6 = NI 57

Unit B1–2

Badly worn; mentions various commodities; contains scribal notes

House 848

Chiefly gold and dirhem

10 82.2.24/36A

assessment rates, we could estimate the size of the holdings behind these payments. One hint comes in the silver payments, which are also far from random. Certain sums appear much more often than others. Payment amounts of 12 dirhems appear with disproportionate frequency. Of the 121 legible payments in dirhems noted in these secular accounts, no fewer than thirty-six are payments of 12 dirhems, nearly 30 percent. Payment amounts of 6 dirhems appear less often, seven times out of the 121, for nearly 6 percent. Payment amounts of 8 and 24 dirhems each appear six times, or nearly 5 percent each. Thirtyeight different amounts make up the remaining 54 percent of the payments. As the graph in figure 7.2 makes clear, these leading payment amounts—12 dirhems, in particular—were somehow significant in medieval Nubia. The graph in figure 7.2 omits payments in fractions of dirhems, for readability. These payments follow no apparent pattern but are worth discussing in passing. Sixteen of the 121 dirhem payments, or approximately 13 percent, are of a given number of dirhems and a half. The half dirhem is generally indicated by the Old Nubian pakkattalo, which can indicate a half or a share or division more generally.80 It is interesting that we see only half dirhems,

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40

Number of Payments

35 30 25 20 15 10 5 0 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36

Amount in Dirhem

figure 7.2 Frequency of Payments in Dirhem

and no other fraction, and that we do not see more of them in relation to whole dirhems. This pattern perhaps indicates one limit to Nubian monetization: Notional units smaller than the dirhem were relatively rare. Studies of Egyptian currency in the Fatimid period indicate the existence of half, quarter, and eighth dirhem pieces and further indicate that “relatively few entire dirhems circulated, and that the bulk of the coinage consisted most of the time of half dirhems.”81 While I have argued for a generally close relationship between the monetary system of Lower Nubia and that of Egypt, this relative scarcity of half dirhems in Lower Nubia suggests that that this close relationship only extended so far. The Nubian currency market may have used Egyptian dinars and dirhems but have had relatively little use for coins of smaller denominations. The material remains present a slight challenge to this interpretation. Excavations at Qasr Ibrim found approximately seventy-five medieval Islamic coins, the majority of which were Mamluk issues from the thirteenth to fifteenth centuries.82 Not one of the coins was silver or gold. An archaeologist might argue that if these coins indicate the monetization of the Nubian

80. Browne 1996a, 142. 81 . Balog 1961, 122. 82 . This count includes one lot of 21 coins in which all of the coins that could be identified were Mamluk. It also includes individual finds, which included twenty-four Mamluk coins, one Ayyubid coin, and twenty-eight only identified as “Islamic” or probably Islamic. I am grateful to Pamela Rose for sharing her database of Qasr Ibrim coin finds.

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economy, they point only to a role for smaller denominations and only in later centuries. We still see no gold or silver coins present; but consider the counterargument. Dozens of American pennies end up in our couches and under our beds. No one would argue that this demonstrates their centrality to the economy of the United States, quite the contrary. Something can be common without being particularly important. The textual evidence and the material evidence may simply deal with two separate economic spheres: the first, a land market supporting an estate administration and government taxation scheme reliant on gold and silver, and the second, for much more modest and unrecorded expenses in coins of smaller denominations. The relationship between gold (ngap) and silver (dirhems) in the Old Nubian accounts supported a silver-to-gold exchange rate usually in a range of 30 to 40 dirhems to 1 gold dinar. The bulk of the evidence seems to come from a specific period in which a rate of 36 dirhems to 1 gold dinar held the market. If this theory is correct, we would expect the most common payments in dirhems to represent the most easily negotiable fractions of a dinar. On this theory, the common payment figures of 6, 12, and 24 dirhems represent the most common fractions of a 36-dirhem gold dinar or ngap. These figures are compatible with precisely that conclusion. The most popular silver payment figures would be 6 dirhems as one-sixth, 12 dirhems as one-third, and 24 dirhems as two-thirds of a 36-dirhem dinar. These payment amounts account for a disproportionately high forty-nine of the 121 extant dirhem payments and are consistent with fractional payments within an exchange rate of 36 to 1. This exchange rate, in turn, is compatible with 117 of the 121 extant dirhem payments.

Nubia’s Tax on Land What would account for such a disproportionate role for payments of 6, 12, and 24 dirhems, particularly for payments of 12 dirhems? If these are assessments of a tax or a rent, then 12 dirhems may have been the assessment rate for the most common unit being assessed, a plot of land. Yet this brings us back to the question addressed in chapter 4: What was the size of a plot of land? The basic agricultural unit would have been an area equivalent to that irrigated by a single saqiya or waterwheel, which would have been just more than 2 feddans, a meaningful figure given Al-Aswani’s report that Nubian plots were 1, 2, or 3 feddans in size.83 83 . For this argument, see above at page 79.

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These figures may be a perfect fit with the payment figures provided in our secular accounts. If the basic size of a plot of land was that irrigated by a single saqiya, then 12 dirhems—the most common payment amount— might be the taxes paid on that most basic plot. The second most common payment amount, 6 dirhems, might then represent the taxes paid on a plot of land equivalent to half that irrigated by a single saqiya, or the output of that saqiya during low season. The third most common payment amount, 24 dirhems, might then represent the taxes paid on land irrigated by two saqiya, or the output of a single saqiya during peak season. The nonrandom payment amounts in figure 7.2 above might then be the trace remains revealing medieval Nubia’s rate of tax on land, roughly one-third of a dinar (12 dirhems) per saqiya. (The Funj sultanate of Sinnar, which later controlled a more southern portion of Nubia, also had a land tax of a fixed amount per saqiya, which tends to support this picture.84) Admittedly tenuous calculations can then be made as to whether the tax burden was onerous. Egyptian parallels can be used to get a sense of scale. During the 1180s and 1190s, an Egyptian laborer might expect to receive 5 dirhems as a day’s wage.85 In early thirteenth-century Egypt, 1 dirhem could buy about five loaves of bread.86 A 12 dirhem per saqiya tax would be the equivalent of sixty loaves of bread, or a week of manual labor at contemporary Egyptian prices. This does not make the Nubian tax burden seem very heavy, if calculated correctly. What about the rate of contemporary Egyptian taxes?87 We do not know of a tax on houses in Egypt until 1252, with the introduction of a tax “equivalent to the rent of two months per year.” In 1259, “a property tax based on the rent of one month was levied on property. The tax burden does not seem to have been easy to bear.”88 The situation with rent on agricultural land may have been somewhat different. An Abbasid-period tax contract assesses 50 feddan in the Fayum at 50 dinars, that is, at a rate of

84 . O’Fahey and Spaulding 1974, 50–51. 85 . Abdel-Rahman 2000, 5, citing Goitein 1967, 95. 86. Cohen 2005, 164. See also the comparable prices discussed at Ashtor 1964, 140: a half kilogram of bread for 0.0035 to 0.004 dinar. 87. For Egyptian agrarian tax administration in the Islamic period, see Frantz-Murphy 1999, 242–244, with a collection of tax receipts in CPR 21, where the texts record the amount paid in dinars but not the size of the property being taxed. For specific focus on cash taxes in the early Islamic period, see Simonsen 1988, 85–106. 88. Rabie 1972, 107.

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a dinar per feddan.89 Ibn Mammāti, writing under Saladin’s son, al-Aziz Uthman, records tax rates per feddan ranging from 1 to 5 dinars depending on the crop.90 Compared to these contemporary Egyptian property tax rates, Nubian rates again seem low.91 If the payments in these Nubian accounts are consistent with payments of tax on land, this conclusion complicates the archaeology of the accounts. While the find spots of only half of these secular accounts are known (see table 7.1), they tend to suggest a private milieu. House 848 was the site of two fetal burials, discussed in chapter 8, which may suggest that the house was primarily private in function, neither public nor ecclesiastical.92 House 177 is the house Adams thought was an eparchal residence, particularly belonging to Adama the eparch, a characterization disputed throughout this study. If my alternative interpretation of Adama’s role is correct and Archive 3 at least is the archive of Mashshouda, a private citizen, then there is no reason to take any of the other texts from House 177 to be public or ecclesiastical in nature either. We know little about House 174, but have no reason to think it is much different from the other examples.93 Evidence exists of a “great survey” of land undertaken by an eparch, and there is the potential evidence of cadastral lists based on the results of this survey. We have seen lists of gold payments collected by the eparch and orders by eparchs of payments made from the amounts collected. There is also the occasional appearance in Old Nubian legal protocols of the position of ourtasheia. The meaning of this term is unknown, but it may designate a property manager for royal estates.94 These conclusions all point in the same direction, as evidence of the Nubian state’s centralized revenue collection system, organized (in Lower 89. Frantz-Murphy 1999, 246. Note that this is a contract formulated as a lease, but the lessor “remains liable for its taxes” even if he sublets. As in late antique Egypt, the categories of rent and tax blur together in many of these early Arab contracts, in contrast to later documents: Frantz-Murphy 1999, 247–249. 90. Rabie 1972, 75. 91 . For rental rates on land in Egypt, see below, page 200. 92 . Adams 1996, 41. In dissent, Pamela Rose draws my attention to Structure 785, a building associated with the Qasr Ibrim cathedral, but with a fetal burial in it. 93 . Adams 1996, 40 notes no excavation report for House 174, and no further description of the text is found in the volume as a whole. For its location, see the map at Adams 1996, 33, to the north of Church 287. 94 . See below, page 204.

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Nubia, at least) around the eparch. But more may be at stake here. The size of the payment amounts in these accounts, when compared to the purchase price of land, demands that some of these entries cannot have been tax payments, unless Nubian land was taxed at 100 percent of its purchase price or higher. Some of these entries must have been for something else, rent for profit being the most obvious conclusion. The following section will outline the logical result of this conclusion, that the land sales are most readily understood as evidence of investment property.95 Whether the secular accounts are evidence of state administration or estate management, whether they are evidence of taxes or rents, either scenario gives us a sense of the high levels of profitability in this sort of investment. The payment figures in these secular accounts, when compared to the purchase prices for landed estates, can only indicate that land owners might at least expect a high gross return on their investment. Whether they had a high net return as well depends on whether their collections were for taxes or for rents. Students of Byzantine Egypt will likely see where this line of speculation is heading. In 1985, Jean Gascou’s study of the great estates of Byzantine Egypt revolutionized the way we understand the relationship between those estates and the central government.96 Far from being understood as feudal lords contributing to the weakening of central authority, the owners of these estates are now seen as public servants providing services once part of the more general system of civic liturgies.97 One crucial element of the burden on the owners of these great estates was the collection of what amounted to a rent tax. Tenants paid rent to their owners as a matter of course, but the owners, filling the void created by the weak or nonexistent state apparatus, would also collect taxes from nontenants. The two forms of payment blend indistinctly in the accounts of these estates, which would, in turn, pay taxes to the central government from this collective income pool. If this model held in medieval Nubia, we would expect to find two different types of payments in the Nubian accounts but recorded within those accounts without apparent distinction. This is exactly what we see. Payments of 6, 12, and 24 silver dirhems make up 40 percent of the 121

95 . See below, page 202. 96. Gascou 1985. 97. For recent discussions of Gascou’s case, see Hickey 2008 and Ruffini 2009b.

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recorded payments in silver. No less than forty different payment amounts account for the remaining 60 percent of the recorded silver payments. There are, then, two clear groups of payments in these accounts. If the argument that 6, 12, and 24 silver dirhems were standard tax payments on saqiya-related units of land size is correct, then this first group of entries records tax payments and the second group of entries records rent payments. There is little explicit evidence for this hypothesis, but the account payments fit this model well. A wide range of payments for rent is what would be expected.98 Any individual tenant might be able to arrange a different rate of rent based on the location of his land, the nature of his relationship with the land owner, or other traditional factors unknown to us. Equally, any individual tenant might pay all or some unknown fraction of his rent at any one time. This practice might also explain the payments in kind found in these accounts. The frequent occurrences of payment in mash() (bushels)— nearly thirty separate payments in one account alone—along with various entries for payment in orp() (wine) or darti (an unknown commodity) could easily be rent in kind. The payments in kind and the putative tax payments hardly ever overlap. Of the forty-nine payments of 6, 12, or 24 silver dirhems, only one is accompanied by a payment in kind. This strengthens the impression that two separate types of payments are found in these secular accounts, payments collected by a single source and recorded in a single accounting pool. The payments in kind may have further significance. The economy of medieval Nubia was monetized but not fully, in all ways at all times. The payments in kind may well represent a certain level of undermonetization in the absence of sufficient levels of circulating currency. The payments in kind may also represent some sort of transaction cost as part of the revenue collection process. The occasional payment in food or drink to tax or rent collectors might have been a processing fee of sorts, the kind that might be classified as a form of bribery in some countries today. Evidence exists—from multiple different eparchates—of eparchs with landed estates. There is Dauti, thel() of Kaktine, who features in chapter 8, and others like him subordinate to those eparchs whose titles may stem from a much older term for tax collector. There are accounts of gold

98 . Consider the list of Byzantine land leases from Egypt at Johnson and West 1949, 80–93 and the multiplicity of rates and arrangements in cash and kind that list presents.

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collected by or for these eparchs, depending on how their labels are interpreted. Two different kinds of payments are found among those accounts, one kind too large to seem like a tax and another too consistent in rate to seem like a rent. This paints a picture of the eparch as land owner similar to the role played by the choiak-eikshil as discussed in chapter 2. Nubian eparchs collect rent taxes as a public burden on their private wealth, in much the same way that Nubian choiak-eikshils held religious festivals as a public burden on their private wealth.

Investment Income and the Purpose of Land Purchase The land sales from Qasr Ibrim are evidence of investment property in medieval Nubia. The purpose of these purchases was to profit from the produce of the land. They are demonstrably not for subsistence land. It is inconceivable that Adama, Gourresi, or Marturokoudda—men entrusted with Lower Nubia’s highest political office—should have needed to buy new land to keep themselves fed during their time in office. The demands of that office may have required them to maintain a higher standard of living or to pay for certain expenses out of their own pockets. If that is the case, the conclusion remains the same: these Nubians bought land to increase their cash flow. They, therefore, expected a certain return on their investment. If we are willing to be adventurous with the limited evidence, we can calculate the relationship between investment and return.

The Cost of Rent Nubian currency exchange and taxation rates can be derived, in part, by considering contemporary Egyptian parallels. We can take the same approach to the cost of rent, and a land owner’s potential rate of return. Here we may consider the Teshlot archive, a group of eleven paper and parchment texts from the period 1022 to 1063 ad. These are Coptic texts, with one bilingual Arabic and Coptic text, from the modern village of Dashlut, near Bawit in southern Egypt. In the words of Leslie MacCoull, these documents “are the archive of Raphael, son of the deacon Mina . . . a man of property and local entrepreneur in the Hermopolite nome.”99

99. MacCoull 1989, 202 writing of the Teshlot archive in language she or James Keenan could have easily used to describe the Dioskoros papyri written in Byzantine Egypt five centuries earlier.

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These texts are highly interesting to social historians, but for our purposes they are most useful for their price data. A number of the texts in the archive are sales: We read of a sale of an unspecified amount of elevated land for 2 dinars, the sale of a house for 14 dinars, a land sale for 2.5 dinars, a house sale for 9 dinars, a share of a bakery for 4 dinars.100 The sales amounts are most frequently described simply as “gold” or nouf and less frequently as holokottinoi, the Coptic loanword originally used for the Roman solidus.101 Other documents provide supplementary data. Two ninth-century Arabic papyri from Egypt record one house selling for “three dinars unadulterated, minted gold of full, new weight” and another house selling for “two dinars and a sixth, minted gold of full, new weight.”102 Two tenth-century Arabic parchment pieces from the Fayum record the sale of “level land” for 2 dinars and the sale of a house for 8 dinars, “of which one dinar is debased and seven dinars unadulterated.”103 As with the Nubian examples, the Egyptian parallels lack information about the size of the relevant properties. But the range of prices—from 2 dinars to 14—can be noted and compared against typical income.104 As Goitein once observed, “Several direct and indirect testimonies of the Geniza [archives of Cairo] prove that 2 dinars were regarded as a monthly income sufficient for a lower middle class family.”105 We are thus talking about contemporary Egyptian land sales never much in excess of half a family’s annual income. We can also note the order of magnitude. As with the Nubian examples, we are dealing with transactions on the order of single gold pieces and tens of gold pieces, not tenths of a gold piece or hundreds of gold pieces.106 100. Tonio Richter 2000 for new editions and translations of P.Teschlot 1–3 and 5–6; cf. Tonio Richter 2002, 157–160. See MacCoull 1989 for a discussion of the social history of the individuals in the archive. 101 . Förster 2002, 569–574. 102 . Frantz-Murphy 1981, 212 and 217. 103 . Abbott 1937, 12–13 and 16. 104 . Ashtor 1969, 184–189 provides further instructive parallels: a table of house sales from 1000 to 1250 ad and a table of house sales in the provinces during the same period. The former table lists house prices far in excess of what we see in the Teshlot archive, while the latter table gives prices much more in keeping with those in both that archive and the Nubian examples. 105 . Goiten 1967, 359. The Geniza texts are a mine of economic and pricing data, but typically on commodities (pepper, silk, flax) not helpful for direct comparison to our Nubian texts. See Goitein 1967, 209–229. 106. See also the comparable land sale prices in twelfth century Sicily: Constable 1997, 70 and 73, where the quarter dinars indicate a coin issued in wide quantities by Fatimid Egypt

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Once this money has been spent, what could the purchasers expect to get in return? To better understand the relationship between investment and return on land in medieval Nubia, we should turn again to Egyptian parallels. Documentary evidence from Egypt provides some data, but rent agreements are scarce from this period in Egyptian history.107 A six-month lease of a house in downtown Cairo in 1172 ad left its editor uncertain whether 6 or 60 dirhems per month was the more plausible reading for the cost of rent, and he opted for the former figure in his edition of the text.108 A series of ninth-century Egyptian contracts record rent rates of 2–2/3 dinars for 2 feddan, 4.5 dinars for 3 feddan, and more than 4.5 dinars for 2 feddan, a range of just more than 1 to just more than 2 dinars per feddan.109 The work of Abu al-Makarim on the value of revenue from land in Egypt gives us more data for comparison.110 Al-Makarim was a Coptic priest who had valuable sources, perhaps even including the archives of Egypt’s Coptic patriarch.111 He seems to have written his work in the early years of the 1200s after a long life, thus providing a perspective on Egyptian affairs nearly contemporary to the central period of Qasr Ibrim’s Archive 3.112 The surviving excerpts from his original text begin with reference to an Egyptian vizier apparently in power in the late eleventh century, who “received a monthly revenue of ten dinars from the lands [of the monastery] which he held in fief.”113 We have no way of knowing how much land and widely used in Sicily in this period. The duqiyya used in the other land sales—where the prices are sometimes much higher—is a Norman Sicilian version of the same coin, slightly reduced in weight (Constable 1997, 79). 107. See the brief remarks at Abdel-Rahman 2000, 3. 108. Abdel-Rahman 2000, 5. 109. Frantz-Murphey 1999, 252. The texts Frantz-Murphy publishes in CPR 21 often omit information crucial to our purposes, but consider also CPR 21.20 (882/883 ad) and 21.28 (922 ad), where land lease rates are at 1 feddan for 1.5 dinars and 2 feddan for 2 dinars respectively. 110. Abu al-Makarim is the author of the “History of Churches and Monasteries” attributed in previous generations to Abu Salih the Armenian: see Atiya 1991, 23. 111 . Vantini 1975, 323 on the author he thought to be Abu Salih. Vantini translates the portions of the text relevant to Nubian history. For a full translation of the extant material, see Evetts 1895, which remains standard. For a brief discussion of Abu Salih (now Abu al-Makarim), see Dadoyan 1997, 102–103. 112 . For dating Abu Salih (now Abu al-Makarim), see Evetts 1895, x–xi. 113 . Evetts 1895, 2 with the comment on dating the events in this passage to the period of the administration of Badr, at note 4 of the preceding page.

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this revenue represented. Nonetheless, it gives us a sense of scale: A highranking member of the Egyptian elite might expect more than 100 dinars in rental income from his land per year. Abu al-Makarim’s description of the churches and monasteries of Egypt includes the following note, describing the church’s land in a period exactly contemporary to Qasr Ibrim’s Archive 3: The sum of the revenues of the churches and monasteries in the two regions of the North and South [of Egypt], according to the estimate made of them for the year 575 (A.D. 1180), was 2,923 dinars in ready money, and 4,826 ardabs of corn in produce; while the landed property amounted to 915 feddans.114 If the grain was an accompanying collection of rent in kind, Egypt’s church land earned roughly 5.3 artabas of grain per feddan per year, a rate with ample parallel in late Roman and Byzantine Egypt.115 If the amount Egypt’s church land produced in “ready money” was rental revenue, it earned roughly 3.2 dinars per feddan per year, or 2,923 dinars divided by 915 feddans. This rental rate of just more than 3 dinars per feddan is not much higher than the other Egyptian data we have just seen, for rates of 1 or 2 dinars per feddan. Educated guesses can translate this into approximate Nubian terms. Nubia’s land was less productive than Egypt’s, so it would have fetched lower rent prices. Even as we assert that Nubia’s economy was monetized, we can concede that it was not completely so: Full or partial payments in kind continue to appear throughout the record. If Nubia’s economy was less monetized than Egypt’s, this, too, would drive Nubia’s rent prices lower than Egypt’s contemporary norm. We cannot be precise here, but we are correct within orders of magnitude. By comparison with contemporary Egyptian data, Nubian land rental prices are likely to have been closer to 1 dinar per feddan per year than one-tenth of a dinar or 10 dinars per feddan. The second type of payment present in the secular accounts,

114 . Evetts 1895, 15. 115 . At 2,756.25 square meters to the aroura, this rate is 2.3 artabas per aroura per year. Compare the Byzantine lease list at Johnson and West 1949, 80–93, where we see both higher and lower rates. For a modern Sudanese comparison, consider Dongola Province in the early twentieth century, where a landlord could expect anywhere from one-tenth to one-quarter of his land’s agricultural output paid to him in rent: Nichols 1918, 24.

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in which no patterns are apparent, could be the fractions of this dinar per feddan paid out in multiple installments over time.

Property as Investment The evidence of the Nubian accounts combined with literary evidence about the size of Nubian landholdings suggested a tax rate on land in medieval Nubia on the order of one-third of a dinar (or roughly 12 dirhems) per saqiya. Our guesses about Nubian land rental suggest rent on the order of 1 dinar per feddan per year. Since saqiyas could irrigate 2 or 3 feddan, we may suppose that 2 or 3 dinars per saqiya per year was a reasonable rental rate, allowing for fluctuations based on productivity of the saqiya, the nature of the crop being grown, and so on. These tax and rent figures in tandem give a sense of the potential profit margins on land in medieval Nubia. On present evidence, we have no way of knowing how much of the tax burden was borne by tenants, how much of the putative rent payments in these accounts ultimately serviced land owner obligations to the state. The worst case for the land owner—in which the tenant held none of the tax burden—would see the land owner clearing between 1 and 2 dinar per saqiya per year, the calculated cost of rent minus the calculated tax rate. This rate of return compares favorably to what we know of a land owner’s initial investment. Here, it is best to consider the plots purchased only in cash, since the value of a dart(), found in 39 and 40, or even its meaning, remains unknown. Of these plots, we should consider only those with descriptions, which gives us a reasonable chance of controlling for their size. This leaves only 32 and 38, Shirepi’s sale of a share of a plot to Nasri and Ngonnen’s sale of a plot to Mashshouda. Shirepi’s holding has only one plot on its northern boundary and only one plot on its southern boundary and, thus, may have been a single-saqiya property. Ngonnen’s plot has no borders given but appears to have been centered on the Stauros Church of Mosmosi.116 The decision to omit boundaries may mean that it, too, was a single-saqiya property, but we cannot be sure. Both plots sold for six gold pieces. If they faced tax rates and earned rental income comparable to our earlier estimates of 1 to 2 dinars per saqiya per year, they would earn their new owners profit in three to six years.

116. See Browne’s commentary to lines 38.15–16.

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If so, one purpose of Nubian land purchase was clearly the desire for investment property that would yield profitable returns. The land cession (42) granting Mashshouda his korpa (“profit”) may show this process at work, with Mouhoumeti receiving gold for the cession and Mashshouda expecting to keep korpa for his effort. Rental contracts would have worked the same way. This is an underattested transaction in the Old Nubian documentary evidence. However, an unpublished Arabic contract found at Qasr Ibrim, dating to the period from 1124 to 1126 ad, is a land rental agreement between a land-owning Nubian official and a Muslim renter.117 The contract is accompanied by a letter from the renter to the Nubian official concerning problems with the rental agreement. In this case, we know about the land rental only because of an accompanying dispute. We may imagine that a large number of land leases—the silent majority—are lost from the surviving record, because they were dispute free. These leases would have been the normal way a land owner would expect to gather profit on his investment property. The possibility of land intended as investment property and the certainty of owners who held multiple plots implies the existence of an estate management system. Certain peculiarities in the unpublished land sales from the 1280s suggest that the purchaser need not be present for the drafting of the land sale to still secure legal title to newly purchased land. Specifically, the eparch Gourresi purchased land through a sale naming as king of Dotawo the very king other sources say he was then fleeing.118 Implicit here is the possibility that someone else, an authorized agent, purchased the land in Gourresi’s name. The existence of property managers working for the eparchs is purely hypothetical, but we may have evidence for the existence of property managers at the royal level in the otherwise unknown Nubian title ourtasheia. The title appears in the legal protocols of several of the unpublished land sales from Qasr Ibrim.119 It does not seem to have been required for inclusion in these protocols, but when it appears, we see it with the shoungira

117. Adams 2010, 250. 118. Ruffi ni forthcoming c. 119. EA 90225 (1463 ad): ourteshsha, cf. unpublished EA 90229. Unpublished EA 90226 (1286): ourtasheia; cf. unpublished EA 90227, 90228. Unpublished EA 90230: ourt()sheia. For the first of those texts, see Łajtar and Ruffi ni 2011, where the editors took the term to be related to the Old Nubian ouer- for “mountain” (Browne 1996a, 134) and tishsh-, “irre gehen, herumirren, abirren” (Khalil 1996, 111).

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(granary keeper) and the joknasheia, another unknown title, all of which usually appear immediately after the ngonnen or queen mother. The ourtasheia was, therefore, a high-ranking official at the central court official. Old Nubian titles ending in -shil may relate to the components shal- (for “administrative district”) and shikeri- (“ruler”) and thus indicate an office with some sort of lordship or control.120 Here, -sheia may be a variation of this component. If so, it could combine with the Old Nubian ourt- (“possession”) to produce the title of “property manager.”121 We would, therefore, have evidence in these protocols for the existence of royal estates. Yet the title ourtashsheia does not appear in the published texts from the twelfth century. In the protocols to the published texts, we find the title ngok er and its variants, including ngokkeidnyil.122 Seeing the root ngok as the Old Nubian word for “house” or oikos, Browne guessed that the title was the equivalent to the ancient Greek oikonomos, for “steward” or “property manager.” This conclusion makes sense: In 1155, Papasa the oiko(nomos) drafted Moses George’s royal decree, in which a Papasa appears as ngok irnyi-. The two men and the two titles are the same, expressed in Nubian in the protocol and Greek in the signature.123 Both titles are also similarly lacking in the unpublished material, from the 1200s to the 1400s. Perhaps ourtashsheia came to replace oikonomos and its Nubian equivalent in later centuries. King Siti’s decree issued in the 1330s appears to be directed at the inhabitants of the king’s land (ouroun parre). This further strengthens the picture provided by the legal protocols, that the king of Dotawo was a property owner with estates under management of high-ranking court officials. Here again, late Roman parallels emerge. The late antique comes rei privatae’s jurisdiction over imperial landed properties would be a close equivalent.124 The Arab misunderstanding of Nubian land tenure as

120. See above, page 52. 121 . For discussion of this point, I would like to thank Roland Werner, who also points to the meaning “sheep, small cattle” for the modern Nobiin component úrti. 122 . Browne 1996a, 201 s.n. ngog- for references. 123 . 30. For a discussion of Greek titles in the addresses of letters, see Ruffini forthcoming a. 124 . For this office, see Jones 1964, 412–418. In this context, an inscription found at Banganarti from earlier in the medieval period may be relevant. See Łajtar 2007, 146–152 for a discussion of the title epitropos appearing on the funerary inscription of a certain Aberkios, who may have been either a local governor or administrator or an estate manager or steward of some kind.

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apparent in the writings of al-Mas’ūdī is easy to understand if we visualize Nubian kings in a dual capacity, as ruling sovereign and private land owner.125 The same dual capacity holds in the case of Gourresi and other Nubian eparchs. Everything we know about his life and career suggests the need for private income, independent of reliance on state revenue.126 He serves as deputy to an eparch who ends up executed; he switches allegiance from one branch of the royal family to another; he flees to Cairo; he returns with an army and secures the allegiance of local elite; and finally, he is executed just like his predecessor. Our chronology cannot be precise enough to place his land purchases at specific points in this sequence, but it is easy to imagine him spending his gold on land in anticipation of the future expenses of his office. This expectation of future profit—the investment motive—may explain the purpose of land purchase, but it does not explain the purpose of land sale. Why would anyone divest themselves of land, particularly if it could be profitable relatively quickly? Land ownership as wealth could represent a debt to the community, and selling land divests oneself of liturgical responsibility to the community. The wealth of many land owners in Roman Egypt burdened them with involuntary officeholding. Pasan was ordered by the Meroitic king to celebrate a religious feast despite his “poverty.” Someone like Pasan in medieval Nubia may have eagerly liquidated his assets at the end of a demanding time in office. We get the sense that Kapopi may have engaged in just such a liquidation. First, she frees one of her slaves, Apa.127 Then, several years later—if the chronology in appendix 1 is correct—she sells significant chunks of land to Adama’s daughter Neuesi.128 One wonders why she freed a slave, only to accept one as part of a later sales price. Personal motives may have been at work. Kapopi must have still retained some measure of wealth. Several of the plots she sold to Neuesi were bordered by other plots in which Kapopi retained a one-third stake. Before her liquidation, she must have owned at least several dozen acres and had sole stake in nearly a dozen waterwheels.

125 . See above, page 69. 126. For the reconstruction that follows, see Ruffini forthcoming c. 127. 33 . 128. 36.

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This gives us an interesting sense of scale. In modern Nubia prior to its flooding, the villagers of Adindan—where the saqiya had survived longer than in other Nubian districts—were proud of their large number of waterwheels, thirty-three in their village and six on the nearby island.129 By this measure, Kapopi would have been a dominant figure on the economic landscape. Ibrim would have been much bigger. But Kapopi’s wealth was still substantial enough to demonstrate that both men and women could hold land as investment in medieval Nubia.

129. Hopkins and Mehanna 2010, 124.

8

Qasr Ibrim’s Other Archives Israel the Eparch, House 763 Qasr Ibrim’s other archives give us a broader sense of the period’s political history and accompanying social tensions. The first relevant batch of texts concerns Israel the eparch. According to Adams, Qasr Ibrim’s House 763, “excavated in its entirety in the 1982 season, was the oldest of the five buildings which could be identified as eparchal.”1 Rooms 7 and 8 had “1279 individual pieces of paper bearing text. . . . None of this material showed any evidence of intentional or careful deposition; it was simply a part of the refuse deposited in the pits. . . . The textual finds from Rooms 7 and 8 identify House 763 as the residence of a certain Eparch Isra’il.”2 In the published texts, men named Israel appear in two texts without any title3 and in two others as domestikos of Pachoras.4 Browne identifies all of these four men as one and noted that Israel appears “as well as in texts still unedited.”5 The impressive numbers of textual finds recorded for House 763 suggest the level of documentation we have lost: Adams records 604 Old Nubian fragments, 396 Arabic fragments, and a number of fragments in both languages, with an admixture of Greek and Coptic.6 Here, museum archaeology only gets us so far; reconstruction of any meaningful text from most of these fragments is simply impossible. The usable material available to me for analysis of House 763 is much more modest. I have identified a number of the unpublished texts from Rooms 7 and 8 and 1 . Adams 1996, 43. 2 . Adams 1996, 45. 3 . 21 and 27. 4 . 25 and 26. 5 . Browne, note to 21. 6. Adams 1996, 45.

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present them here, with those already published, as the dossier of Israel the eparch.7 I have identified more than a dozen other texts from House 763 (see table 8.1) but have been unable to consult most of them.8 The few available to me are highly fragmentary and have no apparent onomastic material or other identifying characteristics. Israel appears in Text F as the addressee of a letter, bearing the titles of eparch of Nobadia and domestikos of Pachoras. Adams describes one text as “a letter from the son of Isra’il, congratulating his father on his appointment as Eparch.”9 This description does not appear to match any of the Old Nubian texts mentioning Israel and may refer to one of the Arabic texts discussing him instead.10 Text A contains an Arabic signature from a David, son of Israel, who may be the same man. Israel also appears in Text G, a letter addressed to Israel, domestikos of Pachoras, from Iesou, bishop of Ibrim, found with two other texts. The find card for those texts gives their find spot as House 763, Room 8, West End, Floor 2, from the late Christian 1 period.11 One fragment of Text H is a letter from Einakêssê, daughter of Ounna[. This same woman appears as the author of a second letter, Text I, which gives her name as Enakissil, daughter of Ounnam(). Text J, found with Enakissil’s second letter, mentions both Israel and a date in the reign of King Basil (“basilê ourou ein[n”). There was a King Basil on the throne in the 1190s, after King Moses George.12 If the Israel appearing in Text J is the same Israel known from Texts B through E, he and Einakêssê can be dated to the same period as King Basil, from the 1190s on. None of them appears in the published texts stretching from the 1150s through the 1180s. In this scenario, Israel was Adama’s successor to

7. For another text relating to an eparch named Israel, see note 10 below. 8. P.QI inv. 82.1.25/27, 82.1.25/38 (= NI 134), 82.1.25/56, 82.1.25/59, 82.2.1/62, 82.2.3/61, 82.2.3/62, 82.2.3/73, 82.2.8/58, 82.2.8/59, 82.2.8/60, 82.2.8/61, and 82.2.8/62 (= part of 16, part of an Old Nubian version of Cyril of Jerusalem’s In quattuor animalia). 9. Adams 1996, 45. 10. Adams 1996, 45 cites P.QI inv. 82.1.25/49 for Israel in an Arabic text. 11 . Based on the discrepancy in dates, this would appear to be evidence against the suggestion by the editors of I. Qasr Ibrim 19 that the author of the letter to Israel in Text G, a bishop of Ibrim named Iêsou, is identical to the bishop of Ibrim named Iêsou (d. 1110 ad) commemorated in their inscription. The Iêsou in Text G is perhaps a better match for the later bishop whose ordination is requested by the Nubian king Moses George in the Coptic text from Archive 3, for which see Adams 1996, 227–229 and Hagen forthcoming a. 12 . 38 dates to 1198. Other kings named Basil reigned too early to be at stake here, for example, the Basil known on the throne in the 1080s; see Vantini 1975, 217.

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Table 8.1 References to Israel and Related Texts, With Find Spot. A) 82.1.25/20

House 763 Letter from Merkê, domestikos of Pachoras, to Merki the priest. Arabic signature of a son of Israel. Arabic also mentions a man named Merki.*

B) 82.1.25/19A P.QI 2.26, addressed to Israel as domestikos

House 763

C) 82.1.25/19B P.QI 2.21, mentions Israel

House 763

D) 82.1.25/19C P.QI 2.27, mentions Israel

House 763

E) 82.1.25./49

Adams 1996, 45: Arabic text mentions Israel

House 763

F) 82.2.10/69

Addressed to Israel as domestikos and eparch

Unknown

G) 82.2.3/60A

P.QI 2.25, Iesou, bishop of Ibrim, addressed to Israel as domestikos

House 763

H) 82.2.3/60B

First letter of Enakissil

House 763

I) 82.2.3/67A

Second letter of Enakissil

Unknown

J) 82.2.3/67B

Mentions Israel and King Basil

Unknown

*

An observation I owe to Alexandros Tsakos based on the image of the text found online at www.medievalnubia.info.

the eparchate of Nobadia. Adams’s conclusion that the “deposition of the Isra’il letters belongs to a relatively late period in the occupation of House 763” supports this interpretation.13 We can improve our understanding of one of the published texts from this group, Text B, published as 26. Confronted in that text with a letter to Israel addressed from “Basileio Phil() e. . . . ,” Browne chose to take this as “Basileio(s), friend—,” a reasonable interpretation. But fragments of Text I, the text find including Enakissil’s second letter, include references to Israel and a portion of a letter addressed from a baseiloph.[). It seems unlikely that Basil would twice identify himself as “friend,” an epithet not typically found in Old Nubian letter addresses. It is more likely that, in each case, we have fragments of a larger name, Basilophilou or perhaps Basilophorou. Text D, Browne’s publication of 27, a letter from Mariomê, may also be subject to some improvement. In his edition of this highly fragmentary text, Browne read israêli in the first line and described the letter as addressed from Mariome, “son of (?) Kattitinnga.” Although it is hazardous to argue from tracings, the only source available to me for this text, it seems that Israel’s appearance in the text is in the genitive form israên, 13 . Adams 1996, 47.

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not israêli and that the letter is addressed from Mariomê to Kattitinnga (?) totl. Tot, which also means “son,” is an official title recurring throughout Nubian texts.14 Judging from their find numbers, the letter to Israel (Text B) and the letter from Mariomê (Text D) that mentions Israel were found with Text C, the deposition about Israel Browne published as 21. This deposition’s reference to date gulping suggests a form of ritual food consumption in a Nubian legal context.15 Further discussion clarifies other aspects of the text, which records “the testimony to Iôsêphi, the Great Scribe in Kush (?), which Kosma gave, and which his daughter Marimê spoke.” The testimony begins with the assertion that Kosma had written to Megali, apparently eparch at the time, asking for the price of some unstated commodity.16 Megali responded “with orders to receive the horn-dealers (?).” This may mean that Megali was instructing Kosma to conduct the transaction first and expect payment later, but the context is unclear. This is merely the backstory. Kosma’s main complaint is that “I sold it to Israel,” who then fails to fulfill the expected terms of the transaction. Israel “had taken it away,” whatever it was, “deposited it in the village, [and after] sitting for 2 months, he eats dates, gulping them down.”17 Kosma wrote to Israel, asking after his whereabouts. Israel had gone to the ngonnen, the queen mother, and then on to the ninth village. Kosma wrote Israel again but “did not receive the price.” A witness list of seven names follows, including Kosma, the scribe Iôsêphi, and a man named Tokinnaue. This deposition is evidence of a Nubian dispute resolution system. The only obvious function of this text, other than letting Kosma vent his frustration, is to initiate legal proceedings against Israel to recoup Kosma’s lost sales price. We do not know whether the main sequence of events took place before, during or after Israel’s time as eparch. Megali appears to have held the office at the start of the action. Either way, Israel was clearly an important man when Kosma testified against him: His access to the ngonnen makes this much clear. 14 . P.QI 3 passim. See below, page 239, for a discussion of gendered titles. 15 . See above, page 98. 16. 21.6–7 describes Megali as “Megali | songojinennigille,” which Browne’s commentary took to be a periphrastic way of rendering, for example “Megali songoj einn,” which we might see in a legal protocol. 17. For this deposit, see note 27 on page 99 above.

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What about Kosma? The name appears in one other contemporary Qasr Ibrim text, but there is no way to connect the two figures.18 Without any clues in Kosma’s deposition, we can only assume that he was a man of relatively little consequence, perhaps a merchant or middleman involved in transactions between members of the Lower Nubian elite. This makes his deposition rather striking. We do not know Israel’s side of the story, whether he was guilty of an act of bad faith or was misrepresented by Kosma. The episode may have been a simple misunderstanding facilitated by all of the letter writing and the traveling described in the text. This deposition—reminiscent of innumerable petitions from GrecoRoman Egypt—shows an otherwise nondescript medieval Nubian pursuing a grievance against someone in the highest reaches of political power. Thanks to the appended witnesses, he was able to do this in full view of the community. This aspect of the text becomes more interesting when we consider the letter to Israel from Iesou, the bishop of Ibrim. Iesou concludes by saying, “I pay homage to the son of Tokinnaue, your glorious fathership.” The apparent meaning of this phrase is that Israel is the son of Tokinnaue. If David is the son of the same Israel here, the texts from House 763 give us the names of three consecutive generations of this family. But Tokinnaue is a rare name. It appears only one other time in the texts from Qasr Ibrim, as the name of a witness to Kosma’s deposition. This deposition—although far from clear—appears to be a complaint against Israel: Kosma has sold something to him but has not received the price. We might speculate that Tokinnaue appears in this text, in the absence of his son Israel, so that he might witness Kosma’s complaint against him. The argument that House 763 belonged to Israel the eparch parallels the argument that House 177 belonged to Adama the eparch. In essence, the two structures belonged to the two men because their names appear to be the most frequently found in the texts therein.19 We can refine this conclusion in the case of Israel much as we did in the case of Adama. Some of the texts found in House 763 are letters to Israel. One is a deposition against Israel. Others merely mention him, and others appear to have nothing to do with him. These texts support the assertion that Israel, or

18. 35 , in which a Kosma is listed in the protocol as being ngeshsh of Atwa. 19. Compare Adams 1996, 45 with Adams 1996, 50.

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someone having to do with him, was associated with the house in some way, but little more can be said with certainty. Another hypothesis can account for the presence of all of these texts in the same structure. How certain can we be that these structures were houses at all? In the case of House 763, the excavated remains were only ground-level cellars; the second floor, where Adams believed the residential spaces to have been, was not extant.20 The letters found in House 763 are not particularly forthcoming: Most of them are generic exchanges of greeting, accompanied by various admonitions more clear to those involved than to us. The people in these letters could have something in common unknown to us. The only helpful text—Kosma’s deposition against Israel—seems more likely to belong where the deposition took place, or in the hands of the person handling the case, than in the private residence of the person accused of wrongdoing. There is nothing here to exclude the possibility that these are not houses but administrative buildings. House 763 may not be a house but a court building. The presence of other texts, several of which have nothing to do with Israel, may be only an archaeological accident. Or these texts may be in House 763 because their owners (perhaps high-ranking political or judicial officials) all had business in that building throughout the course of their careers. The presence of correspondence from Merkê, another eparch of Nobadia, in the same structure (Text A) supports this hypothesis. Again, as throughout this study, there is reason to view the archives of Qasr Ibrim less as the work of a single powerful official and more as the product of a complex network of Nubia’s elite in social and economic interaction.

Dauti thel() and the Texts of Tomb Two Another group of documentary texts so far unstudied by modern scholars came from the Ibrim cathedral cemetery and appears to concern a tax collector named Dauti. Plumley’s excavation report for the 1966 season at Qasr Ibrim describes “five complete funerary stelae in Greek and a great quantity of manuscripts” found in the “second tomb south of the Great Church,” Tomb T2.21 He thought these texts were “the remains of one

20. Adams 1996, 47. 21 . For a more recent discussion of the cathedral cemetery, see Adams 2010, 54–56 with the map in figure 14.

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period of the library and archives of Ibrîm,” including both ecclesiastical works and letters. It is not clear from his report which registration number was assigned to this text find, one of several that season, but a find card from that season indicates that Tomb T2 was the find spot for find 66A/109, a collection of Old Nubian manuscripts. Since the tomb texts were described as “for the most part on paper” and since the other text finds from the 1966 season were on leather, I have assumed that otherwise unnumbered Old Nubian paper finds from 1966 were from this tomb find. A substantial portion of the documentary texts from this collection are a dossier of letters addressed to a man named Dauti, given the title thel() of Kaktine. Dauti, the thel() of Kaktine, is the recipient of unpublished letters from two eparchs. Masê calls himself eparch of Nobadia, domestikos of Pachoras and eikshil.22 He is also known from another unpublished letter addressed to the Great Eparch Tenyrei23 and a published letter to someone without a title named Elonnga.24 Masê ends all three letters with a greeting to Eisakê, whose identity is otherwise unknown. (The Great Eparch Tenyrei also writes to Dauti on at least one occasion.25) Soukousapa, who writes to Dauti on multiple occasions, calls himself great eparch on every occasion. Archaeological context can help to date the Dauti dossier. The letter from Masê, who appears in that dossier, to Elonnga was found in Qasr Ibrim’s west plaza in a context that excavation records describe as either late or classic Christian.26 The letter from Masê to Tenyrei was found in a context that dates to the period ending in 1172 ad.27 This letter was

22 . Find number unknown, but believed to be a part of 66A/109; photograph numbers V.66.19/10 C1v and V.66.19/9 C1r. 23 . P.QI inv. 78.3.11/50 = NI 71. 24 . 24 . Note also Frend 1974, 41, with the report of the discovery of a text in a late Christian house excavated in the 1964 season bearing the address masepachri, for which perhaps read “Mase eparch().” I have been unable to locate any further information on this text. 25 . Find number unknown but believed to be a part of 66A/109; photograph numbers V.66.19/21 P7r and V.66.19/22 P7v. 26. The “Qasr Ibrim Running Register of Textual Finds 1978–1980” housed in the British Museum Qasr Ibrim Archive records the find spot of 24 (78.1.19/14 = NI 15) as the west plaza, northeastern section, from the fi ll of pit 102, probably late Christian. But Rose’s Qasr Ibrim finds database records other finds from the same pit fi lls in the northeastern section of the plaza as classic Christian in date. As she informs me, “This suggests that the pit may have been fi lled in over a period of time or was partly dug out and refi lled later.” 27. Qasr Ibrim finds database by Rose, in possession of the author. For “classic Christian” dates at Qasr Ibrim, see note 1 on page 1 above.

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not found in the Dauti dossier, but its writer and recipient both appear therein. The texts of the dossier were “on the floor of the tomb, and [were] separated from the stelae above them by a few centimetres of debris.”28 This arrangement reflects the disruption of the stelae—presumably during the raid by Shams ed-Dawla on Qasr Ibrim in 1172/1173—and their later redeposition with other material in the tombs.29 The stelae were uniformly those of high-ranking ecclesiastics with distinguished careers behind them: bishops of Ibrim, Kourte, and Faras. The last of these stelae with a fixed date in its text is that of Marianou, bishop of Kourte, who died in December 1154. There is some ambiguity in this situation. The datable figures in the Dauti dossier are found in texts both classic and potentially late Christian in date, that is, from both before and after 1172. If Adams has interpreted the impact of the Shams ed-Dawla raid correctly, the Dauti dossier would have been deposited (or redeposited) in or after 1172, under stelae of church leaders from earlier in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. The safest conclusion is this: Nothing requires that the Dauti dossier date to any period much after 1172, and our evidence is perfectly compatible with dating the Dauti dossier to any period earlier in the twelfth century. This presents a reasonably tidy scenario. Adama is eparch of Nobadia in the 1180s to 1199. His colleague Gabrielinkouda appears to have preceded him slightly.30 Israel may have succeeded them both at the start of the thirteenth century.31 Darme appears as eparch of Nobadia in 1155.32 Masê, found in a dossier compatible with a date before 1172, may have held the office after Darme in the 1150s but before Adama and Gabrielinkouda in the 1180s. Alternatively, a date before Darme cannot be ruled out. In either case, it seems reasonable to suggest that Dauti, thel() of Kaktine, and his frequent correspondent, Soukousapa the Great Eparch, belong to a period prior to the eparchates of Adama and Gabrielinkouda and most likely to the generation of Qasr Ibrim’s elite in the early to mid-twelfth century.

28. Plumley 1966, 11. 29. Adams 1996, 82–83 with I. Qasr Ibrim 18–23 and 23 and their introduction at pages 53–56. 30. See appendix 1 for further elaboration of this proposal. 31 . See above, page 11, and below, page 251. 32 . 30.

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Earlier in the excavation report discussing the discovery of the Dauti dossier, Plumley describes finding in a tomb in the cemetery sealed by a portcullis a “finely carved pectoral in the form of an angel . . . on the body of its owner.”33 Precisely which tomb in the cemetery housed this wooden angel is not clear; somewhere near Tomb T4 seems the most likely location.34 Nonetheless, both the Old Nubian manuscripts and the wooden pectoral were clearly excavated in the same area of the same cemetery, just to the west of the small church excavated in 1966. An inscription carved on the back of the pectoral gives the name of the deceased as Tapara. Who was Tapara? The documents from Qasr Ibrim provide many examples. (I have not yet found any in the Dauti dossier.) Early members of the Qasr Ibrim excavation team clearly thought that the owner of the pectoral was the Tapara appearing as a priest in 36, a land sale from November 1190.35 The Qasr Ibrim texts attest to other men named Tapara. Published examples include a ngeshsh of Atwa, a meizoteros of Ibrim, a tot of Ibrim, and a great priest.36 Another attestation comes from an unpublished letter not part of the Dauti dossier.37 In a brief published reference to this text, Plumley mistook the recipient of the letter, Tapara thel(), for a part of the titulature of Adama the eparch, not yet having enough parallels to recognize it as a name in its own right.38 Adama the eparch of Nobadia, the author of this letter, is well known to us. The Tapara thel() to whom he writes is presumably the same as Tapara the thel() of Kaktine receiving a letter from Gabrielinkouda the eparch of Nobadia in 23. However, we cannot tell whether that Tapara is one of the people by the same name appearing in Archive 3.

33 . Plumley 1966, 11. 34 . See Adams 2010, 196 (figure 51) and 201 (plate 38). The object is now housed in the British Museum as EA 71952, with the registration number 1971, 0801.2. Adams 2010, 302 records the object’s find number as 66.2.23/5 and its provenance as Burial 372. Adams 2010, 195 records its provenance as Burial 5. The two numbers are intended to indicate the same provenance, either a pit grave cut into the fi ll of Tomb T4 or a burial in fi ll west of Tomb T4. 35 . The association between the pectoral and 36 appears in a notebook labeled “NB 10 Plumley Archive” housed in the British Museum’s Qasr Ibrim Archive. 36. 36, 37, and 56. These examples are selective. For a full list, see P.QI 3 Index I s.n. 37. P.QI inv. 72.10.31, with no further subnumber given at Plumley 1978, 241. I have been unable to locate a fi nd spot for this text. 38. Plumley 1978, 241.

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Thus we do not, at first glance, have enough information to identify Tapara the thel() of Kaktine with the Tapara buried in the cemetery or to connect them—or the high-ranking ecclesiastical figures in the same cemetery—with the papers found in that cemetery relating to Dauti, also thel() of Kaktine. The company Tapara keeps in this cemetery would indicate he came from a high status milieu. Tomb T2 revealed the Greek epitaphs of no less than nine bishops from the tenth to the twelfth centuries, including three from Qasr Ibrim, two from Kourte, and one from Faras.39 Could someone who kept this company in the afterlife have once been a thel() of Kaktine? To proceed further, we must identify the nature of that position. Browne speculates that thel() stands for the Greek telônês, or “tax collector,” and cites also the term’s appearance in another unpublished text.40 The occasional spelling of the word in other unpublished documents as tel() instead of thel() would appear to support this conjecture.41 If this proposal is correct, the Dauti and Tapara texts could relate to tax collection in some way. As so often with letters in general, Dauti’s correspondents already knew the context and were guarded with their secrets. Masê the eparch told Dauti to travel downstream and pick up his property.42 Tenyrei the Great Eparch’s letter to Dauti is fragmentary but seems to include an order to deliver some unknown commodity.43 Soukousapa the Great Eparch wrote to Dauti no less than five times, which makes their correspondence the most prolific yet known from medieval Nubia. Several of these letters exchange generic greetings, particularly with an unnamed priest.44 Several more instruct the dispatch of letters to third parties. Almost all of them instruct Dauti to send or receive specific commodities. 39. See the introduction to I. Qasr Ibrim 18–26, pages 53–56. 40. Note to 23 , citing P.QI inv. 84.1.21/13A, which I have been unable to study in either transcript or photograph. 41 . The abbreviation tel() appears in an unpublished letter from Souksapa the Great Eparch to Dauti tel() in a Qasr Ibrim text for which I have only a British Museum photograph and no find number. It also appears in another letter to Dauti from Tenyrê in British Museum photographs numbered V.66.19/21 P7.r, V.66.19/22 P7.v. The name Tapara also occasionally appears as Thapara: see P.QI 3 Index I s.n. See Browne 1989a, 218 on this variant. 42 . Unknown find number, 1966. Photographs V.66.19/10 C1v and V.66.19/9 C1r. 43 . Unknown find number, 1966. Photographs V.66.19/21 P7.r, V.66.19/22 P7.v. 44 . See Ruffi ni forthcoming a.

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The one published letter to Tapara thel() is consistent with this picture. Gabrielinkouda, who—as eparch of Nobadia—would have overseen all tax collection in Lower Nubia, gives Tapara thel() precise instructions on the distribution of 56 artabas of millet. He is to give 10 artabas to Loukasi and 1 artaba to Atareti, to keep 5 artabas for himself and is instructed to “be glad” to have the remaining 40 artabas.45 The context is obscure, but this could easily be a set of instructions for making salary or expense payments out of tax revenue. The remainder, for which Tapara is to “be glad,” might be the amount that he, much in the fashion of a tax farmer, is to split between the government’s expected share and his own profits. Whatever the case, these texts can be interpreted as essentially secular in context. But how then do we explain their presence in an ecclesiastical cemetery near a church, with fragments of the church’s literary holdings? Łajtar and van der Vliet have recently provided a discussion of the cursus honorum of Nubian bishops that can help give an answer.46 Their study of inscriptions from Qasr Ibrim includes the epitaphs of two bishops of Ibrim named Georgiou, who died circa 1125 ad, and Marianou, who died in 1132.47 As the authors note, the similarities between their epitaphs “are important enough to suggest a close relationship. . . . The close similarity of the careers of Georgiou and Marianou seems to suggest that one of these two men followed in the steps of the other.”48 Both men began their careers as a notary of the eparch (not(arios) tou eparch(ou)) before becoming archimandrites of the monastery of Raphael and then bishops of Qasr Ibrim. Presumably, they had both received scribal training that recommended them for this career path or had received scribal training because they were destined for this career path. In either case, their essentially secular positions in the employment of the eparch were considered a noteworthy part of their route to the episcopacy. There must have been considerable intermingling among secular and ecclesiastical officeholders in medieval Nubia’s elite, if not a virtual revolving door between the two spheres. The epitaphs of both men were found in Tomb T2. Admittedly, there may not be any relationship between the documentary evidence found in

45 . 23 . 46. See I. Qasr Ibrim 20.10n. 47. I. Qasr Ibrim 20 and 21, respectively. 48. I. Qasr Ibrim page 72.

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the cemetery and the people buried in it, nor need there be. It is enough to point out that texts buried together probably belonged together. I have argued in chapter 2 that Archive 3, the source of Qasr Ibrim’s twelfthcentury land sales, seems more likely to have been a private than a state collection. The same is likely true of the Dauti dossier, made up as it is of correspondence addressed to him. A tax collector such as Dauti, working in a state capacity at one stage in his career, might easily become a high-ranking church official later in life, just as Georgiou and Marianou went from being notaries to bishops. His papers may have ended up intermingled with the wreckage of the church library for precisely this reason. Alternatively, we might guess that the Tapara buried with his pectoral in Tomb T4 is the same man as the Tapara thel() of Kaktine. On a whim, we might speculate that he inherited papers belonging to his predecessor Dauti. He kept these papers with him as he proceeded through an ecclesiastical career, earning the title great priest and ultimately going to his grave in the company of bishops. His papers, still stored in the cathedral, join him in the tomb in the haphazard destruction caused during the raid of Shams ed-Dawla in 1172/1173.

The Papers from House 177 Room 1 As Adams wrote, House 177 (the putative house of Adama the eparch) “yielded a treasure trove of documents.”49 This “treasure trove” divides into three groups: Archives 3 and 4, which have already been discussed in previous chapters and “several small folded papers” found “beneath the floor of Room 1.”50 Lacking a full publication of this last group of texts, Adams could only describe them as letters to the eparch.51 I have been unable to identify two of the groups of texts Adams assigns to Room 1.52 We can now, however, give the third group a more complete description.53 Six of the eight texts in this group are letters, and two are accounts. Two of the six letters are anonymous, and three of the remaining four

49. Adams 1996, 49. 50. Adams 1996, 49. I have been unable to study a fourth group, P.QI inv. 72.11.4/7, Old Nubian fragments on paper from below floor 1 in Room 4. 51 . Adams 1996, 49. 52 . P.QI inv. 69.2.8/3, 7 and 8, and 74/12. 53 . P.QI inv. 69/26.

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are letters from eparchs, not to them.54 The two accounts were discussed in greater detail in chapter 7.55 One of the accounts from under Room 1 begins with payment from a man named Tenyri. This account—which I argued is evidence of the eparch’s revenue collection system—is crucial for understanding the structure of Nubian accounts more generally. The name Tenyri in this account is so rare that he is almost certainly the man appearing as great eparch in the Dauti dossier discussed in the previous section. If Tenyri is the same person in each set of texts, a nice chronological picture forms. Adams noted that House 177, one of the “earliest houses to be built” in the late Christian period, was nonetheless “underlain by a small amount of LC1 deposit.”56 This led him to place the construction of the house circa 1175 ad. The documents from Room 1, found under the floor, would predate that period. I argued that the Dauti dossier likely dated from an earlier period in the twelfth century. The Tenyri found in both the account from House 177 and the Dauti dossier would also fit into an earlier period in the twelfth century, one at any rate predating 1175. The three complete letters from Room 1 are straightforward business letters. Iarisê the eparch writes to someone perhaps named Narinêi announcing delivery of wine with the letter.57 Mousi writes to Mashshouda—neither man can be identified with other figures from Qasr Ibrim—requesting a series of payments in gold and other items.58 Similarly, a proclamation by an anonymous eparch concerns the shipment of a slave and payment of other commodities.59 One fragmentary letter from an eparch to someone named Parune makes several references to notarized documents or sigl-.60 These documents, coming from under House 177, cannot shed any further light on Adams’s thesis about the nature of that house, but they can add to our impression of Nubian archival practices. The letters are from

54 . Accounts: P.QI inv. 69/26.7 and 69/26.9. Complete letters: P.QI inv. 69/26.1 (= 69.2.8.3), 69/26.2 and 69/26.4. Fragmentary letters: P.QI inv. 69/26.3 (= 69.2.8.7), 69/26.5 and 69/26.6. I gave a preliminary discussion of this group in Ruffi ni forthcoming a. 55 . See above, page 189. 56. Adams 1996, 47. 57. P.QI inv. 69/26.4. 58. P.QI inv. 69/26.2. 59. P.QI inv. 69/26.1. 60. P.QI inv. 69/26.6.

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multiple eparchs to many different people. This is not, in other words, likely to be the remnants of a single person’s archive and is thus less likely to have been kept in any person’s residence. As with the Israel dossier, these letters, in tandem with their accompanying accounts, instead give the impression of being the product of an administrative milieu. They are probably the remains of the archive of an unknown public official.

Nubian Religion and Magic Qasr Ibrim’s Old Nubian religious texts reveal an entirely different set of interests. The majority of the published religious texts come from what is believed to have been the cathedral library.61 Of the eleven texts in this group, nine are biblical: half a dozen from the New Testament and three from the psalter.62 The other two texts are excerpts from a sermon attributed to Saint John Chrysostom and the Liber Institutionis Michaelis Archangeli. We do not know the extent of our losses or what proportion of the cathedral library these texts comprise. The original editors thought that the lost works must have been “impressive.”63 The fact that most of these fragments came from different books in different hands supports this conclusion. But this impressive collection in the cathedral hardly means that the community’s reading public was limited to that site. The Old Nubian religious texts recovered elsewhere at Qasr Ibrim come from a variety of locations.64 One was found under the remains of the later Ottoman ruins.65 Two were found in Qasr Ibrim’s western plaza.66 One text came from Room 8 in House 763, the same house that yielded the Israel archive.67 Another text came from Room 4 in Structure 785, a Meroitic or late antique building of unknown function that continued in use through the 61 . See the introd. to P.QI 1. 62 . P.QI 1.1–9. 63 . P.QI 1 page 2. For a similar judgment, see Frend 1972, 226–227. 64 . I was unable to determine the find spots of 12 (78.1.31/6), 15 (78.1.21/32), and 18 (78.1.21/31 A-C). Shinnie 1974, 44 refers to a 1964 Qasr Ibrim discovery of a text that is “perhaps a song.” I am unable to identify which text is meant, but a religious or magical text from the cathedral library seems likely. 65 . 13 (78.1.31/1), below the east side of the Ottoman complex. 66. 17 (78.3.13/12) and 19 (78.1.23/11). 67. 16 (82.2.8/62 + 82.1.25/21 D).

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early and classic Christian periods.68 Archaeological provenance may not reveal a text’s original place of use. Nonetheless, these find spots suggest that a private or domestic readership existed. One of the more intriguing finds from the early years of the Qasr Ibrim excavations is what Browne called the Archbishop Text.69 The find was a fragment of a double-sided manuscript leaf. The front and back appear to be labeled gamma and delta, or pages 3 and 4, respectively. On the back, the text is accompanied by an illustration highly unusual for an Old Nubian literary text, a picture of a bearded man in a hood, sitting on a chair and holding what appears to be a book (see figure 8.1). Frend thought that the seated figure “must represent a bishop exercising his office of preaching, and [that] the text may be that of a sermon.”70 Browne’s later edition of the text, which apparently mentions an archbishop, confirmed Frend’s inference. Browne, who usually located the source of Old Nubian literary texts without obvious difficulty, could not find the source of this text and published it “in the hopes that someone will locate the source.”71 This hope presupposes that medieval Nubia produced no original literature of its own, but this need not be the case. Consider the content of the Archbishop Text. The fragment begins with a first-person speaker: I beg, O glorious father, establish a king for us, for the throne has been without an occupant (?) for six months. . . . And the archbishop said: Being ignorant in regards to God’s command, I will not fulfill establishing a king, for it is not acceptable to him, but God will choose. The archbishop in this story is not as secure as Browne’s translation suggests. The restoration arch[êepisko]|posillon (“archbishop”) is suggested by the mention of a papa on the first line of the front page. But this restoration spans the two pages, requiring that arch[ be on the last line of the

68. 24 (84.1.24/15 A-B). For the structure, see Adams 1996, 42 and Adams 2010, 25. See also the Aia amulet, the wooden plank and the book page, found in the same structure, below at pages 226, 233, and 229 respectively. 69. So called in Browne unpublished. For the first edition of the text, see Browne 1992b. The find number of the text, excavated in the 1963/1964 season, is unknown. 70. Frend 1972, 228 (cf. also Frend 1969, 536). For pictures of the text, see Arberry 1969, plate 13b (partial) and Browne 1992b, 290. 71 . Browne 1992b, 289.

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figure 8.1 A Nubian Archbishop on His Throne: The “Archbishop Text” Excavated at Qasr Ibrim in 1963/1964. (Published courtesy of the Egypt Exploration Society and the British Museum Qasr Ibrim Archive)

front page, on line 16, while the back has at least twenty lines. Text may well be missing here, disrupting Browne’s otherwise elegant restoration.72 Nor, contrary to Frend’s assertion, does this text seem like a sermon. It 72 . The restoration appears again in Browne’s later version of this text in Browne unpublished.

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reads more like an anecdote from a saint’s life or even some sort of ecclesiastical or political history. This leads us to consider the purpose of reading religious texts in medieval Nubia. It has been tacitly assumed that the function of the religious texts found at Qasr Ibrim was liturgical. There are some obvious exceptions—for example, a long Old Nubian religious text found in a tomb on a torn linen shroud was not meant for reading at all.73 But there are also some less obvious ones: religious texts with features making them impractical for liturgical use. For instance, the Old Testament psalm excerpts we have from medieval Nubia typically alternate verses in Greek and Old Nubian.74 These passages are not Old Nubian glosses or translations of preceding Greek verses. Rather, readers would have to understand both the Greek and the Old Nubian to make continuous sense of the verses in question. This unusual feature of Nubian psalms is another indication of the survival of Greek as a living literary language in late medieval Nubia.75 It does not make much sense to imagine these alternating bilingual texts being read aloud in church. If one wanted to preserve the word of God by keeping it in what was perceived to be the Greek original, one would not do so only with alternate verses. These bilingual texts make the most sense as products of a private scholarly milieu, meant for personal edification.76 This phenomenon was not limited to Qasr Ibrim: We know of two examples, perhaps by the same scribe, from Old Dongola, a passage from a psalm and a portion of the book of Daniel.77 This phenomenon of Greek-Old Nubian bilinguality also appears in texts inscribed on wooden planks. We know of several examples of this

73. Tomb shroud: P.QI inv. 78.1.24/53 (= NI 46), found in Tomb T9 possibly from the terminal Christian period. 74 . A phenomenon I discuss at Ruffini 2009a, 119–121 with references. Łajtar also informs me of unpublished alternating Greek and Old Nubian psalms from the northwestern annex of the monastery at Dongola’s Kom H. 75 . For Greek as a living language in medieval Nubia, see Hägg 1998, 114–115 with important reappraisal of the presence of Greek in Alwa (southern Nubia) as well. For brief remarks on the importance of Greek in medieval Nubia, see Müller 2000, 205. 76. Browne did not agree, arguing that they implied “an audience . . . fully conversant with Greek and Old Nubian” (Browne 1987b, 76). Note also, in a wildly different context, the combination of, for example, Hindi and Farsi verses in Sufi Qawwali poetry in India and Pakistan, a reference I owe to my colleague Martin Nguyen. 77. Browne 1987b.

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type of text from Qasr Ibrim; one is a portion of Psalms 149 and 150, found in the cathedral’s south crypt.78 (I have argued elsewhere that this text was most likely hung around the neck of someone buried in that crypt.79) The remaining examples are religious texts that so far escape identification. The second example of a bilingual wooden plank known to me comes from the classic Christian period, slightly earlier than the other examples.80 This plank appears to be a mere fragment of a larger original, broken on all sides. Eight lines survive on one side, two lines on the other, and in each case only a few words are extant per line. But the text is still striking for one feature, the use of the word sarkika. This is the Old Nubian directive case applied to the Greek word sarx or “flesh.” It is interesting that the Nubian translator imported the Greek word into a Nubian form, when the Old Nubian word for “body” or “flesh,” gad-, might have done just as well. The two remaining texts were each found in the same place. The third wooden plank was found “in very fragile condition as the result of burning.”81 The middle portion of some twenty-one lines survives. Most of the content is Old Nubian, with some Greek admixture. The fourth wooden plank, with ten lines of text on one side and twelve on the other, is also described as “considerably damaged by fire.”82 The text was initially classified as Old Nubian but is in fact predominantly Greek, with only occasional Old Nubian words and phrases. These two texts were found in Room 6 of House 202, from the classic Christian period.83 Here we are in 78. EA 71892 (1990 1–27 75): QI 64.2, QI 64.81 = Ruffi ni 2009a. Adams 2010, 305 gives the provenance of this plank simply as the cathedral itself. 79. Ruffi ni 2009a. This argument was based on the pair of holes found in each of these planks, from which the planks might have been hung. Adams 2010, 210 argues that the holes, being “made after the inscriptions had been written . . . [suggest] some secondary use” unrelated to the text on each plank. He does not venture an opinion on their primary use. 80. Qasr Ibrim inv. 84.2.21/23, found in level 10 (CC2?) of Room 8 in House 785. For this house and other texts therein, see note 68 above. 81 . P.QI inv. 78.2.26/24: NI 55. For the find spot, see note 83 below. According to Adams 2010, 305, this find included eight such wood tablets, a–f. It is not clear whether the transcript available to me comes from one of these eight fragments or an attempt to restore all of them together. 82 . P.QI inv. 78.2.26/23: NI 60 (the source of the quote provided here) = GI 29(c). For the find spot, see note 83 below. The text is religious in nature, but I have been unable to identify its source. 83 . House 202 was formerly known as CC1–6 and LC1–25. See Adams 2010, 37 and 305 for the find spot of these texts. Published discussion of House 202 is full of contradictions

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interesting territory: Adams described this as “the most interesting of the Cathedral Street houses, and considerably the best preserved,” noting that its apparent connection to the cathedral made it possibly “the residence or the office of the bishop.”84 These wooden planks presumably served a protective purpose, analogous to magical amulets. Psalm 150 is a communion hymn in Coptic liturgy, chanted during religious feasts.85 It focuses on praise of the Lord: “Praise him with the sounding of the trumpet . . . praise him with the clash of cymbals.”86 Its presence in the cathedral crypt—if it had actually been hung around the neck of one of the deceased—may have been intended to transfer onto the deceased the blessings earned from these praise hymns. The two planks found under the floor in House 202 may have been intended to protect that house and its inhabitants. Placing apotropaic magical tools under a house is known from other sites in Nubia.87 The exact form of these tools might vary from site to site. I have recently argued that particularly large Nubian ostraka found at Meinarti bearing portions of Psalms 90 and 100 may have been intended for house-protecting magic.88 The use of wooden planks for religious purposes at Qasr Ibrim appears to have ancient antecedents. Excavations at Ibrim have uncovered several monolingual Greek planks with liturgical and Biblical content, apparently much older than the twelfth century.89 These planks are quite similar in that we cannot expect to reconcile. In struggling to do so, one sympathizes with Adams, whose discussion of this housing cluster (Adams 2010, 36) relies on notes by the original excavator that are marred by “arbitrary” differentiation between structures, “brief notes” on only a selection of the structures, and maps “which appear to be both inadequate and inaccurate.” 84 . Adams 2010, 37. But see also note 83 for some of the confusion in modern records about this structure. 85 . For Psalm 150 in the Coptic horologion see Zanetti 1990, a reference I owe to MacCoull. 86. Two of the verses still extant on EA 71892: see note 78 above. 87. Consider Hughes 1963, 126 for an example at Serra East, and Hägg 1998, 116–117 and Hägg 1993, particularly 391–393, for a discussion of three bowls found buried as foundation deposits at Hambukol in northern Sudan. The bowls are covered with Greek names that Hägg understands to be those of the Twelve Apostles and the 70 or 72 Disciples of Jesus. For earlier discussion, see Żurawski 1992, with the argument (99) that the practice shows Nubia’s connections to the late antique Near East. The quality of evidence has improved somewhat in the two decades since Żurawski wrote (87) that the “lack of literary sources . . . leaves the frustrated student of Nubian magic in a state of insatiability.” 88. Ruffi ni forthcoming b. 89. Adams 2010, 210 with plate 43.

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form to Meroitic planks of obviously even greater age.90 Excavations of a possible Isis temple from the pre-Christian period at Qasr Ibrim uncovered a group of twenty-four wooden plaques—in size and shape much like those from Ibrim’s late medieval period—covered with painted depictions of animals.91 In six cases, these plaques had accompanying Meroitic text. All of the plaques were pierced in the top corners, and some still retain “their cotton suspension cords.” While our relative ignorance of Meroitic keeps the purpose of these objects obscure, their religious import seems clear from their presence in the Isis temple. These wood pieces—burial objects in the late medieval case—thus seem part of a continuity of Nubian cultural practice spanning the millennium from the ancient world to the late medieval period. Their use for the dead may serve the same protective purposes as religious amulets for the living. The use of protective amulets appears to have been common at Qasr Ibrim.92 In one of his preliminary reports on the Coptic contents of the archives from Qasr Ibrim, Hagen noted that they “include a paper amulet with some Greek formulas and many magical names, invoking, among others, five named ‘guardians of the incense tree’ (the only Coptic words in the text) for the protection of one Aia daughter of Amma. This piece was found inside its original leather bag in 1984.”93 Another amulet, excavated in 1964, contains a series of magical ring letters interspersed with repetitions of gunê, the Greek word for “wife,” and eirênê, the Greek word

90. Adams 2010, 210 with plate 43. 91 . Driskell et al., 1989, 20 with plates VI, VII, and XVI. 92 . This practice extended to Qasr Ibrim’s Muslim community. Three Arabic texts excavated in the 1976 season are relevant here, but I have been unable to identify their fi nd numbers or find spots. One (Photo Sheet 76V4, Photos 4A–6A) begins with a pious invocation of Allah and Muhammad before repeating two names of God for several lines, which are in turn followed by repeated invocations of an unknown name and a grid of glyphs. The second (photo sheet 76V5, photo 18) divides into boxes on a grid a verse from the Qur’an famous for its use on healing amulets, Surah 17:82, and continues with some of the huruf muqatta’a, the Qur’an’s “disconnected” or “mysterious” letters. The third (photo sheet 76V14, photo 24) is a pair of grids fi lled with Arabic numbers, also probably an amulet. I would like to thank my colleague Martin Nguyen of Fairfield University for discussing these texts with me. Note also the Arabic higab on papyrus at Adams 2010, 219 plate 44c. Rose informs me that Ottoman levels at Ibrim excavated in 1978 and 1980 also produced many higabs in leather cases for hanging around one’s neck. 93 . Hagen 2010, 721. This is P.QI inv. 84.2.2/29 (=84/204), shown in plates 44a and 44b at Adams 2010, 219. Its find spot is Room 5 of House 785 from the classic Christian 2 period. For this house, see note 68 above. For further description of this text, provided by Łajtar, see Adams 2010, 244.

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for “peace.”94 A third amulet also mixes Greek words, including an invocation of the Holy Trinity, with magical ring letters, ending with a call for Jesus Christ to guard his servant, the daughter of Raei.95 The word for servant is given in both Greek and Old Nubian. The fourth amulet is the longest and perhaps the most remarkable.96 It is almost entirely in Greek but a version full of peculiar grammar and spelling. Its context indicates that it was written at some point before the late twelfth century ad. The text is a version of the story of Saint Sisinios, a Christian warrior-saint common in the folklore of the eastern Mediterranean.97 In the Nubian version of the story, Sisinios confronts a baby-killing princess from atop his white horse. The story is similar to versions known from an Arabic synaxary (derived from a Coptic original) and a Coptic wall painting from Bawit. Sisinios is a Christian version of a protective hero invoked in amulets designed to protect against baby-killing demons since before the Hellenistic era. In this case, the amulet ends with a call for Jesus Christ to guard his servant, the daughter of Tittiko. As with the amulet for the daughter of Raei, the word for servant is given in both Greek and Old Nubian. Here, we have discovered a gendered element to Nubian magic. Three of the four protective amulets were made for women, all described as daughters of their respective fathers. Two of these women remain anonymous, perhaps to protect them further from the demons who threaten them. One of these women is either pregnant or has just given birth. The fourth amulet is less clear: Its reference to a gunê may be designed to protect someone’s wife or to procure someone a wife. The conclusion is striking: All of these amulets are intended to work magic on women. If the gunê amulet is for someone’s wife, then all of these amulets were meant to protect women. Men appear absent as beneficiaries of the apotropaic arts.98 The material remains provide a graphic illustration of the larger context. In his description of Qasr Ibrim’s House 848, Adams noted the construction of an additional doorway in the classic or late Christian period. 94 . P.QI inv. 64/40 (2). 95 . P.QI inv. 76.2.14/12. 96. P.QI inv. 80.3.11/2 = NI 113. 97. With origins in seventh-century bc West Semitic sources: see Stol 2000, 228–230. 98. Here we might also point to Łajtar and van der Vliet 2011, the text of an apotropaic ostrakon from Dongola in the thirteenth or fourteenth century, intended to benefit a woman named Arinyji.

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Inside that doorway, under the floor, two fetal burials were discovered, “sealed in pottery jars.” His note accompanying this description adds that “Foetal burials of this kind were very common in the Late Christian levels at Qasr Ibrim.”99 This was not a society that took high infant mortality casually. Miscarriage or the death of a newborn was commemorated with a residential burial, keeping the deceased close to home. At the same time, women fought this outcome with the aid of Saint Sisinios and a host of other supernatural weapons. These apotropaic texts may be part of a more general form of personal piety, a popular Christianity practiced by the Nubian people outside the bounds of the four walls of the church.100 Evidence for pilgrimage practices in the Ibrim area is also part of this picture of personal piety. The Qasr Ibrim hinterlands bear a number of Christian inscriptions, particularly along the main road and the heights of Gebel Maktub.101 There, Coptic and Greek graffiti with Old Nubian elements are common, dating from the tenth and eleventh centuries ad, most indicating little more than the authors’ names.102 Among all of the elements in these religious and magical texts, the use of Greek stands out as particularly interesting. It is too simple to say that Greek retained importance as a prestige language or as the language of the Christian commonwealth in the East, although these factors no doubt contributed. The numerous examples of failure to translate biblical passages out of Greek and completely into Old Nubian are suggestive. This habit may have been motivated by a desire to remain in close contact with the original word of God. Greek may have been not simply a prestige language but a divine language. Phrases that Nubians would have been perfectly capable of expressing in their own tongue would have had more divine power in Greek. Thus, the very language of the text, its Greekness, is a weapon in the Nubian struggle against supernatural evil. The struggle against evil is found in Ibrim’s horoscopes as well. The one published example, an incomplete parchment, is a tantalizing example. It

99. Adams 1996, 41. 100. See Żurawski 1992 for remarks on Nubian popular religion more generally, including (105) potential links between ancient and medieval taboos and folk beliefs still remembered in the Dongola region in the twentieth century. 101 . See Rose 1996, 1, 114 and 142 and Plumley and Adams 1974, 235 for general discussion of Christian inscriptions in Ibrim’s hinterlands. 102 . See Łajtar and van der Vliet’s forthcoming work on these inscriptions.

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seems to be pieces of three or perhaps four different horoscopes, organized by birth sign.103 A woman “whose birth is in Thoth and who is born in the time of the sign of Libra” will learn that she will have a joyful face and receive power but “succumb to the illness of women.” The text on the back side warns of trouble, envy, and sickness. Its reader, another woman, is advised that if she survives the ages of 19, 58, and 77, she will live to be 80 years old. These two examples, the most complete, might suggest another gendered element to Nubian religious and magical texts. However, the extant fragments before and after these cases each refer to men. Browne argued that our Nubian astrologer based this text on an Egyptian Greek original.104 This is consistent with the impression from the amulets, of a Nubian adaptation of Greco-Roman, Mediterranean protective practices. Another group of unpublished Nubian magical texts serves a similar purpose. Medieval Nubians had a fascination with the names of the archangels and other higher powers. The result is a group of texts with a rhythmic feel to their lists: “Armouel, Erasabael, E.chael, Proel, Ariel, Roel,” for example.105 A recent publication citing similar lists of names from Kulubnarti and Dongola shows that this interest was not limited to Ibrim.106 The numeric values of the letters in these names were particularly powerful. A text excavated in the west front of Ibrim’s cathedral in 1964 has twenty-four cryptograms. The parallel to the number of letters in the Greek alphabet suggests that the text—like so many other Nubian religious texts—is of Greek origin. The decipherable cryptograms include consecutive reference to Michael, Gabriel, Raphael, and Ourouel.107 A lavishly illustrated parchment book page has a compendium of thirty-seven names, including those of the archangels, the beasts of the Apocalypse, and the Twenty-Four Elders of the Apocalypse.108 103 . Taking 20.i.1–5 as the end of an entry preceding that in i.6 for the woman of Thoth, and ii.14 and following as the start of a new entry. Whether we are dealing with three or four depends on whether we take the bulk of ii to be a continuation of the entry making the bulk of i or a new entry whose beginning lines are lost. 104 . See commentary at P.QI 2, page 57. 105 . From an unnumbered text found in the 1966 season, known from a photograph in the Qasr Ibrim archive on sheet V.66.19/25 C6.r. See also P.QI. inv. 82.1.23/27 A&B = NI 123. 106. Łajtar 2009, 115–119. 107. P.QI inv. 64/40(1). See Plumley 1982a. 108. Adams 2010, 217 and 244 with Plate 44d. The object is P.QI inv. 84.2.15/35 (=84/743), found in Room 5 of House 785. For that house, see note 68 above.

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Other magical texts have no discernible meaning at all. In keeping with a magical practice from Greco-Roman Egypt, Nubian magical texts often use ring letters, mentioned in our discussion of protective amulets. In these ring letters, each stroke in the letter ends with a carefully drawn circle at its tip. Ring letters often appear to gain their magical power simply through repetition. One ostrakon found at Meinarti repeats ring letter variations of the Greek chi several times in a row.109 What the letter might have meant, if anything, is not obvious. But the same ostrakon also repeats a pair of ring letters that appear to be the Greek upsilon and sigma, perhaps for u(io)s, or “son.” With chi and uios, we may have ring letters invoking Christ, the son of God. In other cases, ring letters seem intended to spell entire Greek words, as in one text where seven ring letters appear to form some word based on the Greek stem keleu-.110 The scribes responsible for this magical and religious textual production typically remain anonymous. If we want to learn more about them, the best we can do is turn to the personal letters written by ecclesiastics, and assume that the same type of people wrote the amulets and spells. Consider the Qasr Ibrim texts grouped under the registration number 64/40. One of the texts in this group is the amulet for a wife, calling for peace.111 Another is the list of twenty-four cryptograms, also just mentioned.112 The third text in this group is a letter, frustratingly incomplete, from an exasperated man named Merkê, who begins with an unclear reference to an archbishop before writing, “I did not worship, I did not praise, I did not sing hymns of praise.”113 The letter cuts off before explaining the object of Merkê’s protest. What is striking is the man’s word choice: His negative outburst, while grammatically in Old Nubian, is exclusively in Greek loanwords.114 Like the other texts in the group, it uses its Greek in a religious context, despite the obscurity of the details. We have Greek in a magical amulet, Greek in a spell, and Greek in a religious letter. We 109. For the Meinarti ostraka see Adams 2002, 91 and Ruffi ni forthcoming b. 110. Unknown find number; transcript found in British Museum Qasr Ibrim Archive notebook labeled “NB 10 Plumley Archive.” 111 . See page 000 above. 112 . See page 000 above. 113 . P.QI inv. 64/40(3). For further discussion, see Ruffini forthcoming a. 114 . P.QI inv. 64/40(3) lines 4–6–: “proskunoumense eulogoumense umnoumense,” where the final word should rather be umnologoumense.

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cannot tell from the registration number whether all three texts were found together, but they were almost certainly produced in the same intellectual environment.115 Another glimpse at Nubia’s ecclesiastical milieu comes in a letter addressed to Ioannes the Great Bishop (episk(opos) krat()), from Apa Padigê, mei(zoteros) of the town of Faras (“paran mei() dip()”). This is presumably the letter that Frend misread and described as addressed to “apapa gêparanmei,” “perhaps a senior monk.”116 The find spot is what Adams calls House 183, occupied from the classical to the late Christian periods.117 If Ioannes’s title, great bishop, is intended to indicate the rank of archbishop, he was presumably the bishop of Dongola, the capital of medieval Nubia.118 House 183’s occupation spanned the classic Christian and late Christian periods. This letter to the archbishop of Dongola from an official at Faras may mean that Qasr Ibrim’s House 183 held a highranking ecclesiastical delegation at some point in that period. These letters between high-ranking ecclesiastical officials are only one part of the written output of Qasr Ibrim’s religious milieu. The Greek Sisinios amulet—and a Coptic version of the Book of Enoch whose publication is forthcoming119—are medieval Nubian versions of Christian traditions that, prior to the excavations at Qasr Ibrim, had been known in sub-Saharan Africa only through the Ethiopic. In the case of Enoch, the text had been lost everywhere but Ethiopia. One effect of these discoveries at Qasr Ibrim is to make Ethiopia seem a little less exceptional. Nubia now stands by its side, transmitting African versions of stories that, in the case of Sisinios, were known throughout the Christian East as far as Russia and Armenia. These texts are further evidence of Nubia’s place in medieval Mediterranean ecumenism.

115 . One other set of texts from this group available to me via photograph, 64/40(5), is too fragmentary to provide any useful content, although one of the pieces appears to be the address of a personal letter to someone in Qasr Ibrim. 116. Frend 1974, 42. 117. Adams 1996, 40 lists House 183 (formerly known as LC1–3) as the house discussed at Frend 1974, 42. 118. For other references to archbishops in the Ibrim documents, see Ruffi ni forthcoming a. The modifier krat() is unusual in Nubia, and may admittedly be only an honorific, not an indicator of a higher rank; see a parallel in the tombstone of the Great Eparch Marianou (d. 1091) published by Tonio Richter 1996, 297–299. 119. Hagen forthcoming b.

Conclusion A Future Research Agenda The level of detail covered in this study of the Qasr Ibrim archives perhaps masks the amount of work left to be done. I have presented this study— somewhat rashly, I fear—despite being an expert neither in Old Nubian, specifically, nor in Nubian archaeology more generally. I have based this study, just as rashly, on comparisons to civilizations—medieval Egypt and early modern Sudan, for example—far outside my area of expertise. Bibliographical gaps and leaps of both logic and faith will be readily apparent to any experts in these fields. Still, I believe the effort worthwhile for the roadmap it may provide for future scholars. The first step on that roadmap is the study and publication of the remaining Old Nubian evidence from Qasr Ibrim. My work here would have been greatly enhanced by the existence of editions for the remaining material at the level of quality and detail of those produced by Browne for the earlier material. Such work will both expand on and challenge many of my conclusions. The second step on that roadmap is the comparable treatment of future Old Nubian material from other sites in Nubia. It is not likely that any excavation will produce the wealth of evidence found at Qasr Ibrim, but the well is not yet dry. Other sites may prove my generalizing assumptions or temper them with more localizing trends. Next, and crucially: One of the chief challenges posed by the study of medieval Nubia is the issue of multilingualism.1 Only now has Hagen’s study of Qasr Ibrim’s Coptic material begun to fill that pressing gap. Scholars have also now begun to lay the most basic groundwork for study of Qasr Ibrim’s Arabic material.2 My study has focused primarily on the 1 . See Shinnie 1974 for early remarks on medieval Nubian multilingualism. 2 . Khan forthcoming. Adams 1996 and Adams 2010 are reliant on translations and summaries of Arabic material provided by Elizabeth Sartain in absence of any reliable published editions. In a previous generation, Plumley 1975a, 106 refers to a pending thesis on the Arabic sources from Christian Qasr Ibrim by Ahmed Al Bushra at Cambridge and cites information provided by him. See also Plumley’s foreword to Hinds and Sakkout 1986 for

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Old Nubian material from Qasr Ibrim, and most of that material seems to be twelfth century in origin. But even the most casual levels of exposure to that Old Nubian material highlight the danger of studying Old Nubian documents without command of Arabic. I have been unable to avoid this danger and have repeatedly been forced to remark on the contents of Old Nubian documents without any sense of the contents of the accompanying Arabic. My only excuse for this, beyond ignorance, is a sense, based on the physical appearance of the paper, that the two sets of texts are often unrelated. Old Nubian documents appear often to have been produced on paper cut from larger pieces, with Arabic already on it, and only partially preserved in the cutting.3 This means that the Arabic texts predate the Old Nubian ones in many cases. It is also a revealing glimpse at the medieval Nubian paper supply. In many cases, Nubian scribes must have been reliant on a flow of Arabic correspondence—perhaps through merchants coming south from Egypt—to provide an adequate amount of writing material. Nor is the frequent presence of Arabic in the Qasr Ibrim archives any indication of the progress of Islamization in twelfth-century Nubia.4 Nubia’s conversion to Islam is a process still poorly understood and needs more research.5 To my knowledge, Joseph Cuoq’s 1986 study is the only full-length treatment of the subject and relies almost entirely on Arabic a frustrating glimpse at the difficulties in store for those attempting to understand the provenance of the Arabic material in the future. 3 . I cite only for the sake of example the find photographed as V.66.19/17 C3v and V.66.19/16 C3r. But compare the eleventh-century Egyptian Teshlot archive, with its Coptic text on the back of an Arabic letter: see MacCoull 1989, 205–206. Łajtar informs me that the Gebel Adda finds also include Old Nubian documents on paper previously inscribed with Arabic. 4 . For comparative purposes, see Tonio Richter 2009 on the evolution and death of Coptic and the transition to Arabic and Sijpesteijn 2010’s study of multilingual archives in Islamic Egypt, with conclusions at Sijpesteijn 2010, 121–124. Note that individuals with Arabic names could use Coptic in their private communications. 5 . There has been relatively little discussion of the phenomenon of Islamization. See the following summary of Cuoq 1986. See also the remarks on Islamization in the final chapter of Edwards 2004, 256–287. Hagen 2010, 724 mentions in passing a Coptic text in which an Israel appears as eparch, and a Muhammad appears as his doorkeeper, “a sign of the encroaching Islamization of Nubia.” This Israel the eparch may be the man whose dossier is discussed above at page 207. However, Hagen suggests that the text’s reference to a king Zacharias may instead place the text much earlier, in the tenth century. Absent full publication of this text, its role in the Israel dossier and the debate over Islamization remains unclear.

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literary rather than indigenous documentary sources.6 The new documentary evidence discovered since his study changes the nature of the question considerably. For Cuoq, the Islamization of Nubia was dramatic: How, he wrote, could a country calling itself Christian fall into the Arab and Muslim world in less than a generation?7 His answers are all reasonable: external pressure from the Mamluks, an unprecedented crisis in the Coptic patriarchate, demographic challenges, and so forth.8 But the transition was much less abrupt than Cuoq imagined. The shortened time period he sought to explain—beginning with the enthronement at Dongola of Nubia’s first Muslim king in the early 1300s—is a phantom of the Arab historical narrative. The documentary record now shows us a much longer historical time frame, through the 1400s; the challenges Cuoq cites were relatively brief compared to the more prolonged and gradual accompanying processes of religious and linguistic change. Comparison to neighboring Egypt shows that the transition to Arabic need not accompany the transition to Islam. Bilingual Coptic and Arabic Christian archives are known even from early periods of Islamic Egypt, and the process of transition from Coptic to Arabic as a literary language had begun in Egypt by the tenth century.9 The parallel tracks of linguistic and religious change could proceed at a different pace in Nubia. As one scholar pointed out, the author Ibn Selim “Al-Aswan mentions Muslims living in Lower Nubia adding that ‘none of them speaks Arabic’.”10 Spaulding’s study of the earliest Nubian dictionary, compiled by Arcangelo Carradori for Kenzi Nubian in 1635, analyzes the dictionary’s core and peripheral vocabulary for evidence of the linguistic influence of Arabic on Nubian.11 According to his conclusions, “one would expect the pattern of word borrowing attested by the Carradori dictionary to be the result of demographic interactions between a minority [Arabic-speaking]

6. See Munro-Hay 1988 for a highly critical review of Cuoq, in part for precisely this weakness. 7. Cuoq 1986, 91 with qualifying reference to two or three generations of change in the same paragraph. 8. Cuoq 1986, 91–102. 9. For a brief discussion, see Wilfong 1998, 185–186. 10. Zaborski 1982, 408. The reference to al-Aswani is found in al-Maqrizi: see Vantini 1975, 601. 11 . Spaulding 1988.

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ruling community and a subordinate majority over a period of at least two centuries.”12 More recent discoveries refine this conclusion: A Christian, Nubianspeaking elite continued to rule in Lower Nubia through the 1400s. The linguistic influence Spaulding uncovered is more likely the result of considerable cultural and economic influence wielded by Arabic speakers in this period. Nonetheless, the situation in the 1500s was clearly quite different. Takla Alfa, an Ethiopian monk, left a description of his return home from Jerusalem via Nubia in 1596. His brief notice of Dongola notes that “the men of Dongola, both Nubians and Arabs, are all Muslim.”13 We should, however, remember the recent trend toward viewing Nubian history as fundamentally continuous. In keeping with this trend, some modern scholars have doubted whether the introduction of Islam had much impact on Nubia’s basic social structures.14 Studies of urbanization in northern Sudan in the Islamic period have concluded that Sudan’s Muslim cities had relatively little in common with Muslim cities of the Middle East: “Islam in Sudanese cities was in some respects only a veneer over a Black African base.”15 In most ways, Nubians remained unchanged.

Gender in Medieval Nubia One obvious avenue for future research is the role of gender in medieval Nubia. The remarkable role of women in medieval Nubia has earned some attention in the past.16 A study of patronage of the arts in Nobadia noted that women are the patrons “in about half of the dedications” to murals at the cathedral at Faras.17 As examples throughout this study have shown, private land tenure in Nubia was open to both men and women.18

12 . Spaulding 1988, 128. 13 . Ceccarelli-Morolli 1998, 68. 14 . Haycock 1972, 21. 15 . Winters 1977, 500. 16. Łajtar and van der Vliet 1998, 35 on “their independent status.” 17. Rostkowska 1982b, 211 citing two specific examples. Łajtar and van der Vliet 1998, 35 make a similar point. 18. As recognized by, for example, Wilfong 1995, 147 and Edwards 2004, 238–239. Note also the role of mothers in the Ibrim sales: see page 236.

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There seems to have been no legal differentiation between the sexes. As one reviewer of the Qasr Ibrim texts noted, “Striking features in the legal texts are the independent roles of women in transactions involving real estate and the frequent transfer of land from mother to daughter.”19 It is worth detailing the examples to demonstrate the point. Here, I summarize the genders involved in Archive 3’s land sales. Unfortunately, Nubian onomastics is not a well-advanced field, and some of the names present ambiguities. In 32, Shirepi, a man, sells land to Nasri, another man.20 In 34, Mouna and Manyi sell land to Iôngoka and Mêna. The land came (presumably via inheritance) from Mouna’s mother, Mashankissi. Mouna is specified in the text as male, and Mêna is presumably a male name in Nubia as it was in Egypt. Manyi is of indeterminate gender, but Iôngoka is probably female.21 In 36, Kapopi, explicitly described as “daughter of Toungngesi” (“Toungngesin asil”) sells to Neuesi, explicitly described as “daughter of Adama” (“Adamade . . . as-”). In 37, Papasinen, daughter of Magosi (“Mago|sin asil”), had sold land to Engngaeil, a male, who then sells it to Mashshouda the choiak-eikshil and his wife.22 In 38, Ngonnen, daughter of Mêna (“Mênan asil”), sells land to the same Mashshouda; the appendix to the text affirms that Persi and her mother sold land to Mashal, a name of indeterminate gender.23 In 39, Aggestotil, son of Pesi, also sells land to Mashshouda. In 40, Adama the eparch sells to the Church of the Holy Trinity land of Kapopi (presumably the same woman in 36), which he describes as “under my control.”

19. Wilfong 1995, 147. 20. The name Shirepi appears in 30 and 34 attributed to a ngeshsh of Nobadia and a domesticus of Faras, respectively, and is therefore presumptively male. 21 . Spelling variations of the same name appear in 33 as a daughter of Papasi (“Papasin asillo,” “Papasi’s daughter”), and in 37 and 38 as a daughter of Chaêl-Songoja (“Chaêl Songojan asil-,” “Chaêl-Songoja’s daughter”). But the same spelling attested in 33 as a daughter appears again in 34 as a son of Einyitta (“tan ngal,” “his son”). Is the name gender neutral, or did the scribe of 34 err? Iôdisi is the same scribe who mentions the daughter of Chaêl-Songoja in 38 and in 34 follows mention of Einyitta’s son with reference to his daughter and then to “the second daughter” (“as blo”; beta here is simply the number two) of Chaêl-Songoja. Perhaps he got confused when enumerating the family. 22 . Engngaeil appears again in 43 , this time with his wife; the same man is clearly meant in 37, as each text involves Pasine and the Mary Church of Ibrim. The transaction is very confusing; see above, page 23. 23 . “Persi and her mother” are presumably Pongita and her daughter Persil, who appear as witnesses in the main section of the same text.

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Both men and women could own, buy, and sell land. Excluding institutional purchasers (the Church of the Holy Trinity) and names of indeterminate gender, we find five male and five female sellers. The same set of sales give us six male buyers and three female buyers, but these results are slightly skewed in the direction of males because of Mashshouda’s central role as buyer in several texts. These are, in short, striking figures of gender equity in both the sale and purchase of land.24 But one caveat is in order. Consider again the sales prices for land listed in table 5.1. The only sale by a woman to a women, from Kapopi to Neuesi, is also the only sale in which no gold figured in the sales price of one camel, one precious stone, and a ring. We cannot know whether this was a mutual decision and cannot generalize based on a single example, but it may be a hint that the buyer lacked access to cash or that the seller lacked the need for it. This, in turn, could indicate a gendered access to coinage in Lower Nubia. I have throughout this study made cautious reference to an apparently female scribe named Kapenê in text 35. Kapenê’s gender would seem to be clear: At first glance, her self-description as “pre(sbuteros) Makarin astillo” (“daughter of the Priest Makari”) can be read only one way. But Łajtar has recently cast Kapenê into doubt, and so she needs closer examination. Łajtar makes the following points: A female scribe seems unlikely on the face of it; the word for “daughter,” asti-, appears as a title in other texts from Qasr Ibrim; Kapenê is therefore more likely to be a male scribe, holding the unknown office of asti- for the priest Makari.25 Nothing is inherently wrong with this argument; neither is it necessary. The apparent attestation of the title asti- in another text is in itself unconvincing.26 Mouna and Manyi’s land sale, 34, includes a witness described as “Iôkaja motikon astillo,” or asti of Motiko. Both Łajtar and Browne took this to be a title, rather than reading it as “Iôkaja, daughter of Motiko,” because Motiko appears as an apparent place name in another text.27 But nothing prevents place names from being personal names as

24 . Compare the results of Spaulding’s study of a later period, discussed above at page 168. 25 . Łajtar 2009, 101–102. 26. Łajtar 2009, 102 note 45 cites 34 and 40, when 34 line 40 is meant. 27. So Łajtar 2009, 102 note 45. Browne’s note to 34 .40 does not explain his reasoning. He may have noted that “daughter” is spelled asillo in 34 .38, 39, 41, and 42 and concluded that astillo in line 40 must have meant something else.

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well, and the one time we see Motiko as a place name is far from clear. King Moses George’s royal decree notes information he received from “the Tot of Michaêlko(l) and (?) Motiko(l) in Ibrim.”28 Michaêlko(l) is a personal name known from both sites.29 An equally plausible translation would have the king receive his information from “the son of Michaêlko Motiko.”30 This would dispense with Motiko as a place name and any need to see asti- (“daughter”) as a title or office. In any case, the improbability of a female scribe is something to be proved, not assumed. If the scenario arose in Greco-Roman Egypt, the sight of a female scribe might legitimately cause some concern, but the sight of a literate female writing and signing an entire text is not unheard of. Roger Bagnall and Raffaella Cribiore’s study of female letters in GrecoRoman Egypt has identified a number of cases in which women appear to have written entire letters in their own name.31 Given their position in Nubia—as land owners, church owners, patrons of the arts, and the matrilineal channel of succession in the royal house—women in medieval Nubia are just as likely to have been as literate as their Egyptian counterparts, if not more so. Until better evidence to the contrary surfaces, we should regard Kapenê as Nubia’s first known female scribe.32 Naming habits, in general, can also shed light on gender in medieval Nubia.33 First, name frequencies can illuminate gender roles. To calculate name frequencies accurately requires a data set with no possibility for duplicate names. Here, the archives from Qasr Ibrim are a poor fit, because we can seldom be certain we have eliminated duplicates. But the names from cemeteries are a perfect fit: Hopefully, no one appears on a tombstone more than once. The largest data set available to us is from the cemetery at Sakinya, where we have more than three hundred published tombstones from the

28. 30.17: “silmia michaêlko motikon totil,” where the absence of any conjunction “and” in the original troubled the translator. 29. Meinarti: I.Khartoum Copt. 18. Tamit: Monneret de Villard 1935, 152. 30. Ochała suggests “Michaelko, son of Motiko” as an alternate translation. Either option supports my main point. 31 . Bagnall and Cribiore 2006, 48–53. 32 . Finding images of 35 is an important goal for future work in the British Museum Qasr Ibrim Archive. 33 . Nubian onomastics are understudied. See the remarks at Satzinger 2004 and the checklist of medieval Nubian names online at www.medievalnubia.info.

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eighth to the tenth centuries.34 Consider the gender gap in the names found on the tombstones at Sakinya. Out of 193 distinct names, the most common male name from Sakinya is Ioannes, which appears only seven times. The most common female names are Mariham at seven attestations, Anna at nine, Elisabet at ten, and Maria at twenty. (See figure C.1 for a Nubian wall painting of Anna, mother of Mary; both women must have been important in Nubian Christianity.) Four female names thus account for nearly 24 percent of the deceased, both male and female. This is an interesting gender imbalance, suggesting that Nubian women had a much more narrow range of naming options available to them than men did. This may represent a deliberate limiting of the range of female role models acceptable to Nubian women. Secondly, there are occasional cases of gender blurring. Eionngoka, for instance, is both a male and female name. It appears to have two Old Nubian components, eiono- “right” and ngok or “glory.”35 People with this name appear as witnesses in Archive 3, described as sons and as daughters.36 We have seen Papasinen, daughter of Magosi, in a land sale. Another Papasinen held the office of ngash in several texts from Archive 3. Only ngonnen, queen mother, is known as a female title. Unless ngash proves to be another female title, Papasinen would also appear to be both a male and female name.37

34 . But were the deceased in these graves all Nubian? Adams 1998, 25 assumes that the Coptic tombstones at Sakinya would have been Egyptians resident in Nubia. Shinnie 1996, 131–132 makes a similar assumption about the tombstones at Ghazali, restated at Shinnie 1978b, 580. This remains something to be demonstrated, not assumed. In addition to the issue of gender and naming options, the issue of name frequency is interesting. In my count of the 193 names at Sakinya, 155 appear only once, another seventeen only twice. Fifteen names appear three, four, or five times. This is a rate of nearly 95 percent rare or unique names. Compare these to the results from Byzantine Egyptian parallels in Ruffi ni 2006, in which no single site breaks the 90 percent barrier. 35 . Browne 1996a, 72 and 202. 36. Daughter: “[ei]onngoka papasin asillo” (33 .18) and “iongoga chaêl songojan asil” (37.38). Son: “eionngokalo tan ngal” (34 .19). But this example seems troubled. Iodisi is the scribe in 34 and 37. In the latter case, Iodisi names Eionngoka as the daughter of Chael Songoj, and in the former case, Iodisi names Eionngoka, then “Douriketil his daughter” (“douriketillo tan asillo”), and then the unnamed second daughter of Chael Songoj (“chaêl songojan as blo”). The scribe appears to have left out some necessary information. Why leave the second daughter unnamed? Who is the first daughter? Could Eionngoka and Douriketil be the two daughters of Chael Songoj? The lack of gender markers in Old Nubian pronouns contributes to the ambiguity. Lack of an image of the original text keeps us from verifying Browne’s text and thus his translation. 37. Papasinen the asil (daughter): 37. Papasinen the ngash: 37, 38, 40.

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figure c.1 Anna, the Mother of Maria, from the Wall Paintings at Faras (Published courtesy of the Institute of Mediterranean and Oriental Cultures of the Polish Academy of Sciences)

Names with the final component -kol also raise interesting gender issues. It may be related either to kon- (“to have”) or koul- (“to be like”).38 The name Iesousikol is thus either a claim of faith in Jesus or an admonition to be like Jesus. The name is found both at Qasr Ibrim and another site nearby, Meinarti, and “always for women.”39 Meinarti also gives us a woman named Michaelikol, in other words, a woman named “like the archangel Michael.”40 We know relatively little about personal piety in medieval Nubia, and in any case, names tell us only about the preferences of the parents, not the children. 38. van der Vliet (I.Khartoum Copt. page 67 note 309) takes -kol as an adjectival suffi x, citing Browne 1989c, 11 and Browne 1996a, 95. Satzinger 2004, 531 simply follows Browne’s terminology and calls -kol a verbid of kon-, but a claim to possession of Jesus or Michael from kon- (“to have”) seems less likely to me than encouragement to model Jesus or Michael. 39. I.Khartoum Copt. 71 note 329. 40. I.Khartoum Copt. 18, a remarkable text, a funeral stela found on Meinarti, the “Island of Michael” (Michael-n-arti), for a woman named after Michael, who was the owner of a church of Saint Michael. Is this purely coincidence or evidence of a more deeply running

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But these cases are interesting nonetheless: As we have just seen, Mary is the predictable choice for a female role model, and yet Nubian women might be called to look to Michael or directly to Jesus as well. The name Tapara also poses a challenge. Nowhere in the many attestations of the name, including priests, great priests, chiefs, and others, do we see any indication that the appellation could be female.41 But the eparch Gabrielkouda’s letter to Tapara, the thel() of Kaktine, complicates matters.42 Halfway through the letter, Gabrielkouda addresses a woman (eitta) and switches to imperatives in the second-person plural. Browne explained the plural imperative by supposing that Gabrielkouda addressed an unnamed woman and Tapara together.43 But who is this woman, and why would she read a letter not addressed to her? It might be possible that Gabrielkouda is calling Tapara a woman, not because he is one but because Gabrielkouda the eparch is enforcing his own superiority as eparch over his subordinate, the thel() of Kaktine. This is purely conjecture, but it would suggest that gendered language may have helped solidify social hierarchies in medieval Nubia. Finally, no discussion of gender in medieval Nubia is complete without examining a crucial feature, the role of matrilineal inheritance.44 No discussion of the Nubian royal family proceeds far without noting that succession proceeds not through the king’s son but through his sister’s son.45 Occasional evidence for the centrality of matrilineal descent appears in the documentary evidence as well. The two Coptic-language land sales from ninth-century Nubia have subscriptions quite close to the standard type from Egyptian Thebes, with the exception that the one Nubian sale providing legible filiation identifies Maria of Faras not by her father’s name but as the daughter of Susanna.46

family piety? Michaelikol’s father was a priest. For both Iesousikol and Michaelikol, “rich ladies of Meinarti,” see Łajtar and van der Vliet 1998. 41 . P.QI Index I s.n. The name is not yet attested in published material from elsewhere in Nubia. 42 . 23 . 43 . 23 .13 note. 44 . See Spaulding 2007, 118–119 for the ultimate ascendancy of patrilineal descent reckoning under the Funj in the 1700s. 45 . Explicitly stated in contemporary sources, for example, Severus in his biographies of the Alexandrian patriarchs: see Vantini 1975, 217. 46. Crum 1905 no. 452; cf. Boulard 1912, 79.

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Anthropologists have argued that matrilineal structures create particular social strains. For instance, in matrilineal societies, the emotional interests of a father in his child create strain, because those interests are in conflict with those of the child’s matrilineal descent group.47 We see the political consequences of this strain in medieval Nubia. Consider the succession struggles at Dongola in the 1200s and 1300s. In the 1270s and 1280s, we see three separate revolts, by King David’s sister’s son Shekanda, by King Simeon’s anonymous sister’s son, and by a second of King David’s sister’s sons.48 The scenario replays itself in the 1360s, when the dynasty at Dongola collapses amid conflict between the ruling king and his sister’s son.49 Modern scholars have frequently commented on the monotonous nature of these revolts but have never said a word about their social and political peculiarity. If Nubian royal succession was indeed matrilineal, passing to the king’s sister’s son, each of these rebels was the legitimate matrilineal claimant to the Nubian throne. Controlling for the opportunistic meddling of Egyptian authorities—which seems to be a constant in all of these cases—we can only assume that the royal nephews rebelled because they felt their claims to be insecure, their legitimacy not universally recognized. The frequency of revolts by the king’s sister’s sons suggests the hidden presence of some challenge to the principle of matrilineal succession.50 This, in turn, has implications for gender in medieval Nubia. The royal nephews may have been open to revolt because they knew that succession claims based on their mother’s status as the king’s sister would face a challenge. Comparative studies of matrilineal descent among settled, agrarian societies may provide insight into the Nubian case. Generally, the higher the level of food productivity in a settled matrilineal society, “the more likely it is that formal legal authority will be vested in one male head of the

47. Schneider and Gough 1962, 21–22. Although see Peters 1997 for a survey of more recent anthropological work on matriliny, critiquing as androcentric some of the assumptions embedded in earlier research. 48. See below, page 252 with Vantini 1975, 648, 685, and 687. 49. See below, page 254 with Vantini 1975, 698–699. 50. To my knowledge, only Vantini 1970, 271 has made this suggestion before, arguing for the influence of “the establishment of Islamic law in Nubia.” Alternatively, Rose observes that such instability might equally come as a consequence of a lack of clear systems of precedence when the king had multiple sisters with multiple sons.

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group or in a hierarchy of heads having clearly defined powers.”51 Similarly, greater levels of food productivity in a settled matrilineal society lead to greater subordination of women, with the caveat that “senior women of descent groups may retain a formal role in the selection or installation of male heads.”52 The role of women in matrilineal societies weakens— culminating in legal guardianship of the female by the male—as the productivity of the society and the power of the state grow stronger. Here, too, we may see parallels in medieval Nubia.53 Despite Arab accounts of the poverty of Nubia, Nubian agriculture was clearly productive enough to permit some degree of specialization. The church hierarchy and Nubian monasticism would not have survived otherwise. On current evidence, we have no way of knowing whether this agricultural productivity resulted in greater subordination of women, but there is evidence of “senior women of descent groups” maintaining a role in the succession of male leaders. This is the role of the ngonnen or queen mother whose name appears in the majority of the legal texts in Archives 1 and 3.54 The ngonnen is presumably the king’s sister through whom succession passes on the death or abdication of the king. Her constant presence in the protocols attests to her public importance, even if it was only at a ceremonial level. Further evidence of their prestige is the fact that the title ngonnen was in use as a proper name: Ngonnen, daughter of Mena, and Ngonnen, daughter of Chael, are known from the Ibrim texts and may well have been named in honor of the queen mother or in recognition of the importance of daughters in a matrilineal society. The role of gender in the process of Islamization is another area worthy of increased study. To my knowledge, only one modern scholar, Robert Fernea, has explored the intersection of gender and Islamization in Nubia.55 He argues that the Dongolawi form of the Nubian language and accompanying Nubian cultural practices came from the Dongola region to southern Egypt (that is, to the modern Kenuzi Nubians) through the

51 . Schneider and Gough 1962, 519. 52 . Schneider and Gough 1962, 519. 53 . For a cross-cultural perspective on the circumstances in which matrilineal societies arise, see Schneider and Gough 1962, 655–727. 54 . Note Hagen 2010, 723 for the queen mother in Ibrim’s earlier Coptic texts. 55 . Fernea 1979.

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matrilineal line of Kanz al-Dawla, who retired to estates near Aswan during his struggle for the Nubian throne in the 1300s.56 The Kenuzi Nubians may have their origin in a relatively large-scale pattern of marriage of Dongolawi Nubian women to Arab tribesmen. If this argument is true, the Kenuz Nubianized under the influence of their Nubian brides.57 In this sense, gender played a crucial role in the survival and transference of Nubian culture into new spheres at the same time that Nubian political independence was collapsing in the face of Islamization.

Historical Synthesis It is not possible to use the archives of Qasr Ibrim to write a narrative history of Lower Nubia in the late medieval period, but the data in these archives enhance our understanding of Nubia’s social and political structure in this period. Modern scholars have never had the impression that Lower Nubia was densely populated.58 The physical remains at Qasr Ibrim, Meinarti, and other major sites suggest rather low populations, especially compared to major regional sites in Egypt. Consequently, the attestations of nearly 480 men, women, and children in the published Ibrim documents alone suggest that a fairly large sample size is involved, one representative of Ibrim’s twelfth-century elite.59 We should visualize this medieval Nubian elite as a nexus of secular officials, religious officials, land owners, and bureaucrats accountable to all three groups and in training for elevation to higher levels. Both men and women could own land, purchase it as investment property, endow that land to a church of their choosing, or perhaps even own that church as investment property.60 The fluidity of land and property rights, used

56. Fernea 1979, 42–43. 57. Fernea 1979, 46. 58. Adams 1977, 346 writes that the introduction of the saqiya drove the population of Lower Nubia “from near zero to something like 60,000.” See also Welsby 1998, 152 on the comparatively low population of Lower Nubia in the Roman period. Cf. also the remarks at Cuoq 1986, 99–100. 59. A prosopography of P.QI 3 created for this study produced 478 separate entries, but some of these entries may be identical to others. If all of the prosopography’s suspected connections were true, the total would likely be closer to 450 separate individuals. 60. This last point is nowhere established herein, but seems to follow logically: If churches could own land, owners of churches could expect income from their ownership, only part of which need go to service the needs of their pious foundation.

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for both religious and secular purposes, mirrors the fluid relationship between the secular and religious officeholders. There was, in essence, a constant rotation between these groups, even at the level of the royal family. Abu al-Makarim, writing at some point before 1200 ad but using older sources, wrote that the “number of kings in Nubia is thirteen . . . and all of them are priests, and celebrate the liturgy within the sanctuary.”61 The letter to Archbishop Ioannes, discussed on page 231, from Apa Padigê, mei(zoteros) of the town of Faras, illustrates this fluidity. Padigê was a monk, or perhaps a priest, holding a presumably secular position in the administration of Faras. Yet perhaps the terms themselves are anachronistic and without meaning, and perhaps the point is not that church officials could hold secular positions, and vice versa, but that the Nubians saw no such distinction. In this regard, they would again be late manifestations of a trend in Byzantine Egypt. Łajtar has recently published a thirteenth-century Greek epitaph from Dongola, the capital of medieval Nubia.62 In this epitaph, we meet Iesou, also called Eittou, a deacon, joknashil and archistablitês, or chief stableman. The position of archistablitês is well known from Byzantine Egypt in the fifth through eighth centuries.63 There, the position was a state function; the officials ensured the maintenance of the public post by providing letter carriers with fresh horses for the next leg of their journey. If the position had the same function in medieval Nubia, Iesou was a deacon who held state office, like the priests and deacons in Byzantine Egypt who served as tax collectors, public grain officials, and so forth.64 Equally 61 . Vantini 1975, 333 (Abu Salih). However, suspicion of this claim is certainly reasonable, as Abu al-Makarim repeats the same remark (Vantini 1975, 339) about the kings of Abyssinia. This part of al-Makarim’s text is particularly confused, as he refers to the king of Al-Mukurrah as an Abyssinian, when the name seems to refer to the Nubian kingdom of Makuria. See Abd el-Shaheed 1998, 14 for an interpretation accepting Abu Salih’s (alMakarim’s) claim and linking it to seventeenth-century sources listing thirteen bishoprics in Nubia, proposing that “we should think of each of the thirteen priest-kings as the head of a bishopric which he ruled autonomously.” Consider also the curiosity that among the Nuba of Jebel Daier, each section worships a particular spirit or uru, and the center of their religious life is the beit el uru: Bolton 1936, 102–102. This phrase—recalling the Old Nubian term for king, ourou —could be taken as a vestigial reference to church as the “house of the king.” 62 . Łajtar 2011. 63 . See references collected at Łajtar 2011. 64 . See again Łajtar 2011, with brief discussion of Iesou in the context of earlier work by Ewa Wipszycka.

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revealing, this attestation of the office of archistablitês is the only apparent piece of evidence we have for the existence of the Nubian postal system. Abundant correspondence was sent not only between leading figures at Qasr Ibrim but also between Ibrim and Faras, Ibrim and Dongola, and so on. All of this correspondence was made possible through figures such as Iesou.65 The Dirr land sale mentions an eparch named Orounkouda and a vice eparch named Milinkouda, holding office during the reign of a King David, when Mari was queen mother.66 David is presumably the former king described as uncle of then king Moses George in his royal decree, dating to 1155 ad.67 David’s eparch and vice eparch, about whom we know nothing, thus belong to a slightly earlier period of Christian Nubia’s political history, the first half of the twelfth century. If our chronological guesswork is correct, the archives from Qasr Ibrim reveal a number of officials from this earlier period. A central figure in this group is Dauti, the thel()—perhaps tax collector—of Kaktine, whose dossier of letters we discussed in the previous chapter. His correspondents included Masê, an eparch of Nobadia; the Great Eparch Tenyrei; and Soukousapa, another great eparch. Dauti probably served as thel() before Tapara, as a correspondent of another eparch, Gabrielinkouda. This brief survey puts little flesh on the bones of these figures. The epigraphic record, which gives the ages at death of some of medieval Nubia’s elite, provides a little more perspective. Consider the case of Joassê, who died and was buried at Meinarti in September 1161, at the age of 95.68 Joassê, son of Sentikol, held the title of choiak-eikshil and had served as an eparch of Nobadia. We do not know when he was eparch, but his case would seem to prove that the office was not held for life. Darme is attested in office as eparch in August 1155. This means that Joassê could have died in office only had he received the appointment at the age of 89 or older. It seems a more likely scenario that he received the appointment in the prime of his life, a half century ago or more. Under this model, he might

65 . The only other apparent reference we have to the process of postal delivery comes in 24, in which Masi, songoj or eparch of Nobadia, notes that “the deputy of the songoj delivered the 5 letters to me.” 66. Browne 1992, 455. 67. 30. David also appears in an Old Nubian inscription from Faras commemorating the reign of Moses George and perhaps accompanying his royal portrait: see Jakobielski 1978 (non vidi) and references at note 78 below. 68. I.Khartoum Greek 8.

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have been long out of office by the time his successors, Masê and Darme, dominated the scene. Most of his contemporaries would have been long dead. One of them was Iesousinkouda, who held the church of Gabriel at Ibrim through inheritance from his father.69 Iesousinkouda had been eparch and navarch of Nobadia and domestikos of Faras.70 If the information on their epitaphs is correct, Iesousinkouda and Joassê had been born in roughly the same year, 1066 ad. Yet Iesousinkouda had died nearly sixty years before, in 1102, at the age of 36. In those six decades, Joassê saw the enthronment of at least four bishops of Ibrim: Iesou, who died in 1110 after nine years on the throne; Georgiou, who died circa 1125; Marianou, who died in 1132; and Mena, on the episcopal throne from 1155 on.71 Everything we know about Nobadian eparchs and Ibrim’s bishops suggests that these people moved in the same social circles, even if the eparch was often at Meinarti, as Joassê was.72 In his childhood, the king of Makuria was a man named George, who reigned from at least 1072.73 Joassê may have been old enough to remember when King Solomon, George’s abdicated predecessor, left Nubia for Egypt, where he retired to a monastery and died later in the 1080s or 1090s.74 He would have certainly been old enough to remember the reign of King Basil.75 If we are right about his political career, he could have served as eparch under King David or perhaps under the next King George, who was born when Joassê was already 40.76 When that King George also abdicated and 69. I.Khartoum Greek 5.7 note. 70. I.Khartoum Greek 5. For the case that his eparchate is hidden in the Greek exousia, see the note to lines 8–10. 71 . Iesou: I.Qasr Ibrim 19. Georgiou: I.Qasr Ibrim 20. Marianou: I.Qasr Ibrim 21. Mena: P.QI 3 passim. 72 . For the eparch at Meinarti, see Adams forthcoming. 73 . 1072: see the Coptic protocol published at Plumley 1981. The date of 1079/1080 for the abdication of George’s predecessor Solomon (see Munro-Hay 1982/1983, 111) misunderstands Severus, who says only that Solomon had already abdicated in 1079/1080: see Vantini 1975, 215. 74 . Abu al-Makarim (Abu Salih in Vantini 1975, 331–332) records Solomon’s death in the patriarchate of Cyril, which ran from 1078 to 1092. For Solomon’s relationship with Badr, the Egyptian vizier, see Dadoyan 1997, 123–124. For the succession struggle following Solomon’s abdication, see Abd el-Shaheed 1998, 15. 75 . Vantini 1975, 217 with Munro-Hay 1982/1983, 112–113. 76. Here, we speculate. There may easily be several unknown Nubian kings in the early twelfth century. David is attested as a former king in 30 (1155) and George, born in 1106, is attested as ascending to the throne in 1132: see van Gerven Oei 2011. Cf. Lobban 2004, 168.

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left Nubia for an Egyptian monastery, it must have stirred memories of Solomon’s example more than half a century before.77 The reign in which Joassê died, that of King Moses George, is Qasr Ibrim’s best-documented period. While the Ibrim texts rarely shed light on the politics of Nubia’s central government, even the smallest word choice may provide a clue. To my knowledge, no one has asked why Darme, the great priest and scribe in 33, calls King Moses George “Papelli.” Browne’s translation seems to take Papelli simply as another personal name for the king, and his commentary adds nothing. The published image of the text makes it clear that the reading is correct, but that does not mean that the scribe was. To my knowledge, Papelli is not attested anywhere else in the Nubian corpus, as either a word or a name. It is, however, only one extra stroke away from papslli, bishop. To assume scribal error is always dangerous, but papelli alone, if correct, could readily be a derivative of pap- or papl- for “father,” the ultimate origin of the Nubian word for “bishop.” This one word may be Darme’s recognition of the king’s ecclesiastical authority, the domestic equivalent of Abu al-Makarim’s claim to priesthood for all Nubian kings. Whatever the exact significance of this term, the reign of Moses George seems to have been a period of relative stability for central authority. What we know of the man suggests a striking sense of self-confidence. After his raid into Nubia, Shams ad-Dawla sent an emissary to the Nubian king, who goes unnamed in the report; Moses George is the only logical candidate.78 The emissary describes the king as completely hairless, nearly naked, “mounting a horse without a saddle and being wrapped only with a robe of satin.” When the emissary greeted Moses George, the king “burst into wild laughter” and “ordered (his men) to stamp a cross on my hand with red hot iron.” This was not a man troubled by the defeat of his forces at Ibrim but a man confident in his ability to resist Egyptian aggression. The half century he spent on the throne compares favorably to the shorter reigns of his predecessors and certainly to those of his successors in the turbulent thirteenth century.

77. For the retirement of King George, see van Gerven Oei 2011. For speculation about a Nubian monastery in Wadi al-Natrun, citing George’s marble plate from the monastery of al-Suriani in Wadi al-Natrun, see Martyros 2007, 118–119. 78. Abu Shama: Vantini 1975, 369–370. If Łajtar 2009, 90 is correct, we also have a wall painting of Moses George himself from the cathedral at Faras: see Michalowski 1967, 70. In dissent, see Godlewski 2008, 271.

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But this stability did not hold more locally in Nobadia. If we understand Ibrim’s Archive 3 correctly, the eparchate of Nobadia was held first by Gabrielinkouda and next by Adama, who, in turn, delegated the position back to Gabrielinkouda in 1187 before resuming the office more permanently in the 1190s.79 On present evidence, we have no way of knowing what caused this curious sequence. There is no evidence to suggest that the two men were political rivals. But the situation does have an unsettling similarity to the eparch shuffling that occurred in the following century under political pressure from neighboring Egypt. Gabrielinkouda’s period as eparch provides another example of the blurred line between secular and religious in medieval Nubia. Adams draws attention to the description of Gabrielinkouda’s appointment to the position in one of the published Ibrim texts.80 He is described as “holding all authority over Nobadia, Adama the eparch establishing him in the Church of the Holy Trinity in the Town of Ibrim.” Adams took this to mean “that the acting eparch used the church [of the Holy Trinity] as his official headquarters.”81 This is possible, but something else may be going on. “Adama songojil gonya” (“Adama the eparch establishing” him) can have other meanings. The root verb gouny-, gony- can mean “to build, raise, establish.”82 In this sense, the phrase may mean that Adama appointed or elevated (gonya) Gabrielinkouda to the position in a ceremony held specifically in the church. Here again, we are not too far from Byzantine ceremonial practice. Whatever the exact relationship between Gabrielinkouda and Adama, the latter has received the bulk of modern attention. In part, he owes this attention to the tumult then sweeping through the Middle East. In the 1160s, Saladin emerged as a powerful figure attacking the European crusaders and interfering in Fatimid Egypt. His abolition of the Fatimid caliphate in 1171 marks the end of several centuries of reasonably peaceful relations between Egypt and Nubia. Maqrizi speaks of a Nubian attack on Aswan in 1172.83 We have no way of knowing whether this was a small raid by local leaders or Moses George launching a full-scale invasion. The

79. For this chronology, see appendix 1. 80. 35 . 81 . Adams 1996, 245–246 with note 21 on 245, where 1188 ad is meant rather than 1288. 82 . Browne 1996a, 34. 83 . Vantini 1975, 673. Cf. Welsby 2002, 75.

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former seems more likely, since the invaders were already gone by the time Saladin’s armies could respond.84 In the following year, 1172/1173, Saladin sent his brother Shams adDawla to march against Nubia.85 Qasr Ibrim fell to Shams ad-Dawla’s troops. Negotiations between the invaders and the Nubian king collapsed, and Shams ad-Dawla gave Ibrim in fief to Ibrahim al-Kurdi.86 This arrangement proved to be a temporary measure: The Kurdish garrison abandoned Ibrim when Ibrahim drowned in the Nile.87 The Shams ad-Dawla raid seems to have been an exploratory expedition, as Saladin and his brother sought potential safe havens should their rival Nureddin enter and conquer Egypt.88 Only their disappointment at the apparent poverty of Nubia’s resources led them to abandon the attempt. That appearance of poverty may owe something to the resistance of the locals. According to Abu al-Makarim, during Shams ad-Dawla’s sack of Ibrim, a bishop “was found in the city; so he was tortured; but nothing could be found that he could give to Shams ad-Daulah, who made him prisoner with the rest, and he was cast with them into the fortress.”89 Abu al-Makarim does not specify, but we may guess that he means the bishop of Ibrim. A man named Mena appears in the Nubian protocols as bishop of Ibrim both before and after the raid on Ibrim. We cannot tell whether it is two men named Mena or the same man in both cases, surviving his ordeal and restored to the bishop’s throne.90 It is in this period, after the raid, that Adama the eparch becomes such an important figure in Lower Nubia and that Qasr Ibrim enjoyed a wave of new construction. We will likely never know whether Adama was responsible for this construction, as Adams has argued, but one thing seems

84 . Although note the ambiguity in the Arabic narrative of Abu Shama, whose claim that the Nubians had “the aim of conquering Egypt” can also mean that they had “the aim of assisting the (Fatimite) king of Egypt” (Vantini 1975, 368 note 5). 85 . See, for example, Maqrizi (Vantini 1975, 673) and Abu al-Makarim (Abu Salih: Vantini 1975, 327). Cf. Welsby 2002, 75–76. 86. Maqrizi: Vantini 1975, 673–674. 87. Abu Shama: Vantini 1975, 369. 88. Maqrizi: Vantini 1975, 674. 89. Vantini 1975, 328. See also Adams 2010, 37. 90. Complicating the chronology is the appearance throughout this period of a bishop of Ibrim named Thoma. Were Mena and Thoma the same person? See appendix 1 on chronology below.

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clear: Adama may have been the most politically powerful figure in the region, but he was not—judging from the texts of Archive 3—necessarily the most socially or economically powerful figure in the region. Mashshouda the choiak-eikshil emerges as Qasr Ibrim’s economic powerhouse in this period. If am I right about the function of that title, he would have been choiak-eikshil because of his economic importance. Whether he was a festival liturgist, or something else, such as a tax collector, he needed financial capital to fulfill the responsibilities of the position. Nor would his economic prominence have been devoid of political significance. In a recent study of the sequence of eparchs in the 1270s and 1280s, I argued that Gourresi’s ascension to the position in the 1280s represented the return to power of a faction whose previous eparch, Marturokoudda, had been killed in the early 1270s.91 But both men, known or hinted at in the literary evidence, survive in the documentary evidence only because of their land purchases. In other words, land ownership and political power often went together. Archive 3 shows Qasr Ibrim in the course of an ongoing transfer of wealth and prestige to Mashshouda through multiple transactions. Mashshouda’s economic and social centrality in this archive might have marked him as a viable candidate to one day become eparch. In the event, Adama’s ultimate successor as eparch of Nobadia was a man named Israel. (Depending on the interpretation of Kosma’s deposition against Israel, his eparchate came either before or after that of a man named Megali.92) King Moses George also disappears from the records in the 1190s, a man named Basil succeeding him as king of Nubia.93 Robert de Clari’s chronicle of the Fourth Crusade describes a meeting in Constantinople in 1203 between the crusaders and a king of Nubia who had come to the Byzantine capital after making a pilgrimage to Jerusalem.94 To my knowledge, no one has guessed at the identity of this Nubian king. Given the chronology, it seems tempting to suppose that it was Moses George, who followed the example of several of his predecessors and left the throne in search of monastic, or at least pious, retirement.

91 . Ruffi ni forthcoming c. 92 . 21, on which see above, page 98. 93 . See further discussion on chronology in appendix 1 below. 94 . Rostkowska 1982a. See also the discussion at Welsby 2002, 76–77.

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At this point, we face one of Qasr Ibrim’s periods of documentary silence. We have no securely dated texts until the period of the eparchs Marturokoudda and Gourresi in the 1270s and 1280s. This is a period of considerable instability in Nubian history, a period of royal usurpers and Egyptian invasions. Here, only a greatly simplified version of the main events is needed.95 David, the Nubian king in the 1270s, attacked southern Egypt and the Red Sea port of Aidhab. Arab historians attribute this bold move to his personal wickedness.96 Modern scholars have more plausibly guessed that David felt threatened by Egypt’s growing influence over the Red Sea trade.97 King David’s maneuver failed and exposed considerable internal divisions in Nubian politics. David’s sister’s son, Shekanda, appealed to Cairo for help against his uncle and was placed on the Nubian throne with Egyptian help. The Arab historians and texts from Qasr Ibrim’s Archive 1 name the eparchs caught up in this international drama: Marturokoudda, Qamar, and Gourresi.98 Archive 1 preserves two land purchases by Marturokoudda, eparch in the reign of King David, one of which names Gourresi as his deputy.99 Marturokoudda may have been the eparch executed—sawn in half, to be precise—by Egyptian invaders in retaliation for David’s attacks. Qamar, who does not appear in the Ibrim archives, was eparch under King David and his usurping nephew, Shekanda. Only during the reign of a later successor, King Simeon, is Gourresi, Marturokoudda’s deputy, able to return to power as eparch of Nobadia. It is in this position, in the 1280s, that we find him buying land in Ibrim’s Archive 1. These internal conflicts—between specific members of Nubia’s royal family and the local elites in Nobadia who supported them—made themselves heard even in Mediterranean diplomacy. When the Mamluk Sultan al-Mansur negotiated a treaty with King Alfonso of Aragon in 1290, the treaty explicitly describes him as the sultan of the Nubians (the territory of King David).100 This is a claim he could make and make a European

95 . See Ruffi ni forthcoming c and Welsby 2002, 243–246. Contrast the older narratives, for example, O’Fahey and Spaulding, 1974, 15–24. 96. Maqrizi: Vantini 1975, 648. 97. Welsby 2002, 244. Cf. Lobban 2004, 129–130. 98. See Ruffi ni forthcoming c for the following reconstruction. 99. Unpublished EA 90229 and 90231, discussed above at page 27. 100. Holt 1995, 132. Vantini 1978, 341 claimed that the same sultan conceded via treaty with Genoa the latter’s right to trade with Dongola. But this is a misunderstanding: The

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power tacitly accept, largely because of the internal tension dividing Nubia in this period. This wider background makes the land purchases by Marturokoudda and Gourresi intriguing. In Gourresi’s case, his long-term investment in land in Lower Nubia continues even at the height of a political crisis that drives him from office.101 When Gourresi returns to the region from Egypt in 1289, Maqrizi writes that he stopped “to reassure the (Nubian) population,” and that the “chieftains” and “most prominent people” came out to meet him.102 We can suppose that Gourresi’s reassurances carried weight with the local elite, at least in part because they knew him to be one of their own, economically invested in the region’s landed economy. The internal tension evident in the 1270s and 1280s should not lead us to imagine Nubia heading into a permanent decline. What occurs in the kingdom in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries cautions us against writing its thirteenth-century obituary. Internal conflict, particularly between eparchs and kings, seems to have been common in other periods as well. A much earlier notice in Abu al-Makarim mentions a Lord of the Mountain (eparch) “whose eyes were put out by George, son of Zacharias Israel.”103 Nubia’s political structures had proved resilient enough to recover from these crises in the past. Such a recovery is evident in the 1330s during the reign of King Siti.104 The previous generation had been a turbulent one, with protracted conflict in the Nubian royal family between Kerenbes and his sister’s son Kanz ed-Dawla, Nubia’s first Muslim king. An Arabic inscription from the audience chamber at Dongola records that chamber’s conversion to a mosque in 1317. But this Muslim king was not a permanent step in Nubia’s

treaty grants the Genoese trading rights throughout the sultan’s dominion, but this treaty, unlike that with Aragon in the same year, makes no mention of the sultan’s claims over Nubia: see Holt 1995, 141–151. In any case, negotiation of such rights with Cairo would not necessarily reflect any reality on the ground in Nubia. See also Łajtar and Płóciennik 2011, discussed below at page 262. 101 . For this period of Gourresi’s career, see Ruffini forthcoming c. 102 . Vantini 1975, 687. 103 . Vantini 1975, 324. See also Zaborski 1982, 408. There is no indication in Abu alMakarim as to the date of this event, and it may well go back to the ninth century ad, where a father and son pair of kings named Zacharias and George are attested; see Munro-Hay 1982/1983, 104–105. 104 . For a contrasting judgment of “protracted decline,” see Welsby 2002, 246.

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Islamization. The documentary and epigraphic evidence from Siti’s reign in the 1330s gives no indication that he or any of his court officials were Muslim. The evidence from Siti’s reign has been noted in chapter 1.105 One fragmentary land sale from Qasr Ibrim naming King Siti dates to 1333 ad.106 It is an unusual text, as it fails to list an eparch of Nobadia in the protocol.107 The position may have been vacant at the time. Another text from the same Ibrim archive shows Siti issuing decrees from Dongola concerning the king’s land in Ibrim. Graffiti naming King Siti appear in Banganarti, in central Nubia, and as far afield as Kordofan. This would seem to suggest the continued existence of a powerful centralized Nubian kingdom into the second half of the fourteenth century. According to the traditional narrative, based on the histories of Maqrizi, the final collapse of Dongola came in the 1360s.108 The initial catalyst was yet another squabble between the ruling king and one of his sister’s sons. The final blow was the involvement of the Arab Bani Ja’d tribe on behalf of the would-be usurper, the ruination of Dongola during attempts to drive them out, and Nubia’s ultimate inability to defend the capital from their further incursions. The king and his nephew signed an agreement under which the king would establish a new capital at Daw and his nephew would serve as eparch at Ibrim.109 Modern scholars have typically understood this to be the point at which the vassal kingdom of Dotawo became independent of the wreckage of the Kingdom of Makuria.110 In truth, we have been dealing all along with one kingdom only, now rather reduced in size and power.111 We know none of the kings or eparchs in this period. The documentary evidence illuminates

105 . For references to all of the texts mentioned here, see above, page 29. 106. Unpublished EA 90230. 107. None of the protocols from Archive 3 omits the name of the eparch of Nobadia except 40, where the first-person voice of the sale is Adama the eparch himself, who identifies himself immediately after the end of the protocol. Similarly, none of the complete protocols in Archive 1 omits the eparch except this one. 108. Maqrizi: Vantini 1975, 698–703. Cf. Welsby 2002, 248–249. 109. Maqrizi: Vantini 1975, 699 and 702. The term used for eparch (nā’ib) is standard throughout Arab discussions of earlier periods of Nubian history as well. 110. See, for example, the remarks at Adams 1996, 254 and Welsby 2002, 250. 111 . See Ruffi ni forthcoming c.

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only the curious career of Timotheos, bishop of Faras, who comes to us from Qasr Ibrim’s Archive 5. This archive—two tremendous paper scrolls—came from debris in the stairway leading to the North Crypt of Qasr Ibrim’s cathedral.112 The two scrolls are Coptic and Arabic versions of Timotheos’s appointment letters. He was consecrated in Cairo and enthroned at Qamûla in Upper Egypt. The reasons for this are unknown. Plumley supposed that “Timotheos could no longer depend on the attendance of local Nubian Bishops at his enthronement to carry out the necessary rites and ceremonies.”113 The Coptic version of his appointment scroll calls Timotheos bishop of Faras (Apachoras in the original), but the Arabic version writes “Ibrim” above each reference to Faras. Timotheos’s burial at Ibrim shows that he never made it to Faras. The additions to the Arabic suggest that Ibrim was in the 1370s the home of the titular bishop of Faras and even that one bishop held both titles.114 Timotheos is the final example of a considerable degree of independence for Nubia’s church. It is clear from the text of his appointment that Timotheos was Nubian.115 A Coptic scroll from 1186 records King Moses George’s personal recommendation to Egypt’s Coptic patriarch of a candidate for a Nubian episcopal see.116 We may imagine that Timotheos’s appointment in the 1370s likewise came at the recommendation of an unknown Nubian king, no longer at Dongola but at Daw instead. This situation stands in remarkable contrast to the other African church subordinate to the Coptic patriarch, that of Ethiopia. Ethiopian emperors in the medieval period enjoyed no right of recommendation to the patriarch, for the simple reason that the patriarch only selected Egyptians to lead the Ethiopian church. This situation did not end until the reign of the emperor Haile Selassie in the twentieth century. Nubia’s relative independence—the right to nominate its own candidates—may be a symptom of the Coptic patriarch’s closer proximity to Nubia or the 112 . Plumley 1975c, 3. 113 . Plumley 1975c, 22. 114 . Jakobielskhi 1972, 168. The fact that EA 90225 names a bishop of Ibrim but no bishop of Faras might tend to confirm this suggestion. 115 . P.QI.Tim. 90223.185–186: “Timotheos pilubi xenpef | genos,” where lubi is the text’s standard way of referring to Nubia. 116. Plumley 1978, 240 and Adams 1996, 227–229 with discussion and translation and, most recently, Hagen 2010, 722 for the date.

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patriarchate’s comfort in the continued stability and security of the Nubian church.117 After Timotheos, another century passes before we find the last scraps of evidence from medieval Nubia: Qasr Ibrim’s last land sale in 1463 ad and the other documents from the reign of King Joel. The continuity of form between our last land sale and the earlier examples implies stability of economic and legal practices in Nubia’s final centuries.118 Future publication of the Gebel Adda manuscript naming King Joel in 1484 will no doubt confirm this picture. The literary evidence is less clear. Ibn Iyas records that the prefect of Manfalut, an Egyptian city near Assiut, fled the Egyptian sultan for Nubia in 1486.119 While Ibn Iyas makes no mention of a Nubian king, the prefect’s decision to seek safety in Nubia may be further trace evidence of Nubia’s independence under King Joel. The next notice in Ibn Iyas records a raid by the emir of Upper Egypt against “the Lord of Nubia” (“sāhib an-nūba”). Lack of reference to a Nubian king may be a hint that Dotawo deterioriated after the deposition or death of King Joel. It is certain only that no trace of an independent Christian kingdom remained in Lower Nubia when the Ottomans occupied Qasr Ibrim in the 1560s.120 One modern scholar has even suggested that it was the chaos and confusion caused by the final collapse of Dotawo after the reign of King Joel that prompted Ottoman intervention.121 Nubia’s embrace of Islam is central to the end of the story. In all likelihood, literacy survived in Nubia only as long as the organized Christian church.122 Without the demands of the liturgy—or more personal forms of piety in Nubia’s Christian magic—the market for scribal education could

117. Note Promińska 1982, 207, a brief study concluding that “the bishops of Faras belonged to the White variety” (i.e., were not native Nubians) in the eighth and ninth centuries, and that “from the 10th century the bishops were of the Black variety” (i.e., were “nominated from among local clergy”). The same study argues that the earlier, foreign bishops tended to take office at a young age, while the later, indigenous bishops “entered upon the Episcopal throne at a later age.” On Nubian religious autocephaly, see also Godlewski 2002, 95. 118. See above, 28. 119. Vantini 1975, 782. 120. See Alexander 1996 for a general history of the Ottoman presence on the Middle Nile. 121 . Plumley 1975a, 105–106, with another statement at Plumley 1982b, 20. 122 . And see Vantini 1970, 275–276 for an argument attributing the collapse of the church to the collapse of the state and its support.

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have evaporated quite quickly. No one would then have the knowledge needed to preserve the written forms of the Nubian land sale, which is not the sale itself but a mere cultural graft onto a pre-existing practice. Nonetheless, the influence of Islamic law and the accompanying influence of rather different Arabic legal instruments would have ultimately overwhelmed indigenous practice. Without the anchor of its written form, the Nubian land sale may likely have succumbed to external cultural influences even more easily.

Summary of Arguments My arguments throughout this study have been both specific and general in nature. The specific arguments have focused on reinterpreting the late medieval archives from Qasr Ibrim and their role in that site’s archaeological remains. Most narrowly, I have argued that the central figure in Ibrim’s Old Nubian Archive 3 is Mashshouda the choiak-eikshil, not Adama the eparch. This conclusion calls into question Adama’s role as putative inhabitant of House 177, one of the so-called houses of the eparchs. This, in turn, leads us to rethink—to diminish—the importance of the state and its officials in late medieval Ibrim. Somewhat more generally, I have argued that Archive 3 and supplementary unpublished material reinforcing its evidence compels a rethinking of old arguments about the nature of the Nubian economy. Private land ownership existed, not simply in practice but in law as well. Still more generally, I have argued for the obvious logical consequence of this fact: that private citizens, a monetized economy, complex economic markets and their mechanisms played a wider role in medieval Nubia than previously realized. This is not an argument devoid of cultural context but one that relies on basic assumptions of cultural continuity. These assumptions are in keeping with the observations of a generation of scholars of medieval Nubia. Osman has argued for further attempts to understand medieval Nubia through later Nubian culture. His own study of the postmedieval Kingdom of Kokka has helped clarify medieval Nubian court titles.123 He has also argued that aspects of modern Nubian ritual practice “show a large number of non-Islamic, nonChristian features” that appear to be “much older than the conversion of

123 . Osman 1982a.

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Nubia to Christianity.”124 Osman argues that Nubia cannot be understood solely through the outside influences on it, nor can any one of its periods be understood in isolation. This study follows his approach, but where he describes the “fundamental elements” of modern Nubian culture as including “local African elements” and “Arabic/Islamic elements,” this study sees medieval Nubian culture as including local African elements and classical Mediterranean elements.125 In 2004, the Polish excavations at Old Dongola uncovered a wall painting (see figure C.2) on the south wall of Room 6 in the southwestern annex of the Holy Trinity Monastery depicting two men sitting on a . . . bed. One of the men holds a purse and is actually giving the other man a handful of gold coins. Standing between them, behind the bed, is a dark-skinned slave or servant. . . . To the left, another servant is slaughtering a ram; the other animals are crowded . . . nearby. . . . Some financial transaction was undoubtedly intended: a sale of some kind or a purchase, perhaps marriage negotiations?126 Further excavations at Old Dongola may clarify the meaning of this remarkable painting. In the meantime, I propose a connection between the scene it depicts and the land sales we find from Qasr Ibrim. A ram’s slaughter—in preparation for a feast, we might guess—at the conclusion of a transfer of gold coins is little different from what we see in, for example, 36, in which the participants eat loaves and drink wine, and the scribe closes with a mention of gazelle, which Browne took to be roasted lion.127 These texts show that private land tenure existed in Christian Nubia. It is no longer enough to maintain that it existed de facto despite de jure restrictions on it. To the contrary, private land tenure—and the specific event of buying and selling land—not only had a clear legal foundation in Nubian social practice but also served a necessary social function. Under the interpretation I have proposed here, private land tenure in Nubia

124 . Osman 1982b, 85. 125 . Osman 1982b, 74. 126. Martens-Czarnecka 2005, 281. 127. “kolin tewiti”: see note 2 at page 91 above.

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figure c.2 A Nubian Financial Deal from the Wall Paintings at Old Dongola (Published courtesy of the Polish Center for Mediterranean Archaeology)

became a way—or perhaps even had its origins in the need—to establish social hierarchy and prestige. Nubian land sales are a dual transaction. In each case, the agent purchases not only land from the vendor but also legitimacy from the community. Each party had social legitimacy at stake. When the patrons of a church commissioned inscriptions commemorating themselves as “owning” (the Greek echôn) that church, “rich Nubians of both sexes proclaimed their status as well as their piety.”128 Similarly, the seller of a plot of land proclaimed his or her continued wealth to the community gathered as witness. I consider the case of private property in a monetized economy to be definitive for Nobadia, or Lower Nubia, but what of Makuria and Alwa, farther south? If we continue to cling to the Arab historians, we can draw a line in the sand, as they did, at the second cataract and insist on the 128. Łajtar and van der Vliet 1998, 43.

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absence of monetization south of that line. This seems fine in theory, but one wonders how it would have worked in practice. We know that claims to private property existed in Makuria: The epitaph of Aggeloskô, found near Old Dongola, described the deceased as “Komati echôn,” “having (the church of) Komati.”129 Several other epitaphs and graffiti from Dongola and Banganarti made similar claims to church ownership ranging from the twelfth to the fourteenth centuries.130 We also know that owners in Makuria held property in Nobadia: Account 60, the holdings of the JesusChurch of Touggili, is proof enough of this. We know from recorded cash transactions that property owners in Nobadia bought, sold, and collected income from their properties and that the same legal forms appeared at Nauri, south of the third cataract. Are we really to suppose that the second cataract was so impermeable a boundary or that the same property owner would buy, sell, and collect rent taxes in cash north of the cataract and then dutifully demonetize when returning to the south? Remember the gold coins in the wall painting just found at Dongola: I strongly suspect that what we have found so far in Lower Nubia held through all of medieval Nubia. Under the model I have proposed, the land sales of Qasr Ibrim’s Archive 3 are the Nubian adaptation of a Greco-Roman legal vessel to suit the society’s own social and economic purposes. This conclusion may demand greater levels of Roman influence on Nubia than some scholars have supposed, but consider the deeper history. For three centuries, the Roman imperial border lay 130 kilometers south of the Nile’s first cataract, at Hierasykaminos. Not until the 290s ad, the reign of Diocletian, did the Romans abandon that position and give up the Dodekaschoinos, the territory immediately south of Aswan. Qasr Ibrim stood just to the south of this border, within the shadow of Rome’s cultural influence, and may have served at times as “an outpost, in advance of but in close touch with the frontier rather like one of the forts north of the Antonine Wall in Roman Britain.”131 The inhabitants of Qasr Ibrim and the inhabitants of Roman Nubia, the Dodekaschoinos, would have ample opportunity to adapt Roman legal and economic structures to their own cultural purposes. After the passage of the Edict of Caracalla in

129. Łajtar and van der Vliet 1998, 52–53, reconsidering SB 4.7429 = TB 2. 130. See the list of unpublished examples summarized at I. Qasr Ibrim 22.11–12 note 111. 131 . Kirwan 1977, 23.

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212 ad, the inhabitants of the Dodekaschoinos would have been Roman citizens.132 In this period, the Dodekaschoinos in the north along with the first Meroitic province to the south “constituted a cultural unit.”133 This was particularly true of religious practices but would inevitably have resulted in other sorts of “local” acculturation as well, the emergence of new cultural practices from this mix.134 We imagine an African civilization adopting and adapting Coptic Christianity and Byzantine administrative practices and doing so—at least in the Dodekaschoinos—in an area that had once been part of the Roman Empire. In some ways, this is the extension into the medieval period of Török’s description of Lower Nubia as a society living “between two worlds.”135 I am certainly not the first person to suggest considerable Roman or Byzantine influence on Nubian civilization, political structures, and church practices. Frend, one of the early excavators at Qasr Ibrim, made such a claim more than a generation ago.136 Other authors have done so as well.137 But my claims push this thesis somewhat further, beyond the level of legal practice even to details of estate administration. These claims are part of a larger thesis, arguing for medieval Nubia as a Mediterranean society. This is not as far fetched as it might initially seem. Van der Vliet has recently argued that Qasr Ibrim’s funerary inscriptions place medieval Nubia in the context of “the shared values of Mediterranean Christian culture, which implied cultural Hellenism.”138 As importantly, he argued that these inscriptions were performance pieces, enacted by the community as “part of a communal rite that reinforces shared religious views . . . and forges social cohesion.” Nubian participation in a Mediterranean society requires interconnectivity. Scholars are now in possession of increasing evidence for precisely

132 . Cassius Dio Roman History 72.9. 133 . Török 2009, 507 134 . For the term “‘local’ acculturation,” see Török 2009, 511. 135 . Török 2009, with comments on this “model” at 531. 136. Frend 1968 and again at Frend 1972, 226. 137. Strongly stated at Papadopoullos 1966, 31–40. Note the proposal at Godlewski 2002, 80–86 of a ninth-century Nubian system of tetrarchy consciously modeled after Byzantine tradition. Compare also the remarks on Egypt after the Arab conquest at Papaconstantinou 2009, particularly (460) the insistence by Aristophanes the scribe of correct honorifics, “as if he were still in the Roman Empire.” 138. van der Vliet 2011.

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this phenomenon. Recent discoveries in the church at Banganarti, a town 10 kilometers south of Nubia’s capital, Dongola, include a peculiar graffito apparently written in Provençal.139 The text appears to be the record of a visit to that church by a man from Provence named Beneseg. The text dates from the second half of the thirteenth to the fourteenth century on both archaeological and palaeographical grounds. It gives no details about the man or the nature of his visit to Nubia. Its editors speculate that Beneseg had come to Nubia as either a merchant or an envoy from some European power and perhaps traveled in both capacities. This kind of contact might have been more common than initially imagined. The story of the Nubian king in Constantinople early in the thirteenth century, discussed in this chapter, is one example. European descriptions of Jerusalem speak of Nubian pilgrims there in the twelfth through the fourteenth centuries.140 European sources likewise speak of Genoese merchants at Dongola in the 1300s.141 Contacts both direct and indirect between Nubia and Europe had since the twelfth century provided European cartographers, diplomats, church officials, and apocalyptic mythographers increasing material for locating Nubia within the wider sphere of Christendom.142 Material from the Qasr Ibrim archives supplements the Beneseg graffito to give us a glimpse of these contacts from the Nubian perspective. An unpublished piece of paper found in a late Christian context in the 1974 season begins with an invocation to the Virgin Mary: Santa Maria.143 While notes in the excavation archives describe the text as Old Nubian, this introduction clearly is not. Old Nubian uses agios or ngiss to indicate saints. The Italian word santa is nowhere attested, nor do we expect it. Most of the first five lines following this invocation of Mary appear to be in Old Nubian, but few of the forms or words are recognizable nor is the final clause of the text recognizably Old Nubian: “Santa Simeouon aïousatta aïouta mi.”

139. Łajtar and Płóciennik 2011. 140. Rostkowska 1982, 114–115 and Welsby 2002, 76–77. 141 . Vantini 1970, 136–137 with 125–143 more generally for a survey of European sources on Christian Nubia. 142 . Note the presentation by Robin Seignobos at the 12th International Conference for Nubian Studies in London, August 2010. 143 . P.QI inv. 74.1.29/7A, available to me in a photograph and transcription from the British Museum’s Qasr Ibrim Archive. The text’s fi nd spot is the subfloor fi ll of Room 1 in House 177, the house in which Archive 3 was found.

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The component aïou is a frequent Old Nubian first-person form, but what it would mean in the form aïousatta is not obvious. The final phrase, “aïouta mi,” would appear to be an Italian plea—addressed perhaps to Saint Simeon—“help me.”144 Future study of this text may arrive at a more indigenous, less surprising interpretation of this text. Until then, it may appear as further evidence of medieval Nubia’s ties to the wider Mediterranean world. Fatimid Egypt was the nexus for such ties, a fact little discussed but long apparent from the literary evidence. While Nubiologists often mention the invasion of Nubia by Shams ad-Dawla, they rarely pay much attention to the conspiracies in Egypt that prompted it. According to Ibn al-Athir, in July 1173 the commissioner of the caliphate was killed in Cairo for conspiring against Saladin. He had “held the highest post in the palace. One day he and a number of Egyptians agreed among themselves to write to the Franks and invite them into the country to help them overthrow Saladin.”145 Narrating events in the following year, al-Athir clarifies which Franks are meant: The conspirators “had agreed to invite the Franks from Sicily and the Syrian Coast to Egypt offering them money and a portion of the country.”146 Some of the conspirators are described as blacks (as-sūdān) and “prominent members of the blacks.”147 According to al-Athir, “the Commissioner was one of their people and took their side.”148 It seems likely that the blacks in question are Nubians. The implications of this are striking. First, Nubians were integrated throughout the political and military structures of medieval Egypt, an unintended consequence of Fatimid recruitment of African soldiers.149 Second, that fact positioned them to be in active communication with European crusaders from the Middle East and Norman Sicily. These indirect political contacts between Nubia—through Egyptian Nubians—and the Mediterranean had economic parallels.150 From the 144 . The only other possibility is that aïouta mi is a distortion of the Old Nubian auatamê, the first-person vetitive form of the verb au(ei)-, “to make, do.” But what is Saint Simeon being urged to do? No immediately preceding direct object is apparent. 145 . Vantini 1975, 355–356. 146. Vantini 1975, 359. 147. Vantini 1975, 359. 148. Vantini 1975, 357. 149. An observation I owe to Łajtar and Płóciennik 2011. 150. And relatively early antecedents as well: note Thung 1996, 9–10 for a 943 ad contract between a Coptic woman and a Nubian tailor from Fustat.

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eleventh century on, Fatimid Egypt became the major link between the Indian Ocean trade and the Mediterranean basin, developing substantial ties with major trading centers in Italy.151 It is unlikely that the Nubian economy remained untouched by these developments. I have argued that extant evidence indicates that Lower Nubia’s economy was monetized in the Christian period through its contact with Egypt and—in keeping with my Mediterranean thesis—that the same evidence supports a gold to silver exchange rate in Nubia equal to that found in Egypt to the north. The extant evidence allows us to guess at the size of some of our Nubian landholdings, and comparing these plot sizes with known payment lists allows us to determine the amount of rent tax paid on land in medieval Nubia. Finally, I have argued that comparing these figures to the purchase price of land in Nubia suggests the role of land as investment property in this period. Critics might argue that I advance all of these arguments on precious little evidence. They might also argue that my use of that evidence has involved too much guesswork, speculation, and uncertainty. They would be right; but my arguments have a single virtue to them. They do not force medieval Nubia into an ill-fitting box crafted out of underinformed Arab historians and imprecise West African comparanda hammered together by a twentiethcentury socialist. My arguments are internally consistent and place medieval Nubia within both the continuous sweep of Sudanese cultural history and the framework of prolonged proximity to its Mediterranean neighbors. This is an Afro-Byzantine vision of medieval Nubia, freed from the anachronisms of Polanyi and Dahomey. Mashshouda was a Mediterranean liturgist, displaying his wealth to the community. The eparch was a late antique estate owner, collecting both rent and tax. His collections were part of a long-term investment strategy, pursued in tandem with his political career. This is because he, too, was, in a sense, a liturgist undertaking an expensive political office at the behest of the king. These men and their peers held Byzantine political and religious offices and might readily anticipate making a transition from one realm to the other at any point in their career. These men—and their wives and daughters—participated in a land economy and legal system that was fundamentally late antique in origin. Yet they did it in their own way, as Africans, displaying their wealth and reinforcing their social hierarchies through gift exchange and food rituals fundamentally Nubian at heart.

151 . Humphreys 1998, 449.

Appendix 1: The Chronology of Archive 3

plumley and browne realized that the protocols in the Old Nubian documents from Qasr Ibrim gave enough information about officeholders to establish a relative chronological sequence.1 P.QI 3 publishes Qasr Ibrim texts 30 through 40 in that relative sequence but without any explanation or further analysis. Texts 41 to 62 lack protocols and, therefore, lack obvious place in that relative order. This appendix first attempts to outline the logic behind P.QI 3’s chronological sequence, correct it where possible, and then relate the remaining texts to that sequence to the extent possible. Five of the first eleven texts in P.QI 3 include absolute dates given in the Era of the Martyrs, the traditional Coptic Christian chronological system dating from the start of the reign of Diocletian in August 284.2 These five dates provide the anchors securing the bulk of the Qasr Ibrim land sales within relatively narrow chronological ranges. The formula used to indicate the era varies from text to text. The royal proclamation 30 of Mouses George includes the clause “it being 871 from the martyrs” (“apo mart() ôoa einin”). This general model appears in 35, 36, 38, and 40, with only slight orthographical variation in 38 (“apo mart() rie inni”).3

1 Plumley 1978, 233. 2 . For the use of the Era of the Martyrs in Nubian texts, see Ochała 2010 and 2011a. 3 . For rie read, presumably, the Greek characters sampi, iota, and epsilon. I have not located images of this text and do not know what character appears for the sampi in the original. Browne’s first edition uses what appears to be a variation of rho for typesetting purposes.

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Why only these five texts receive absolute dates is not clear. Regnal years, perhaps a more obvious choice if annual precision were required, never appear in these texts. Clearly, a martyr-era year was not a legal requirement for a valid legal transaction either. Land sale 32 is dated only by the various officeholders listed in the protocol. Land sale 34 is dated both by officeholders and by day of the month: “on the 10th of the month of Phaloumouthi, it being the 8th of the moon” (“phalou|moutin souaeila i ounna ê einin”).4 Thus, three different forms of dating clauses could be used in Old Nubian legal documents. The decision was likely one of scribal preference, but that preference may have been dictated by varying levels of knowledge. The Old Nubian legal documents from Qasr Ibrim include five without protocols of any kind (41−45) and eleven with protocols. Seven have protocols but no martyr-era years given. Those seven protocols name an average of nine current officeholders, with three given at the low end (39) and thirteen given at the high end (34 and 37).5 The five protocols with martyr-eras name an average of seventeen current officeholders, with fourteen given at the low end (30) and nineteen given at the high end (36 and 38). In other words, scribes who gave the exact year were also more likely to list more officeholders in their protocols.6 They may have enjoyed the precision this material afforded them, or they may simply have been better informed. The five precise dates given in Qasr Ibrim Old Nubian documents are shown in table A.1. Browne’s conversions of the martyr-era dates were occasionally in error; the correct dates in the Julian calendar are also included.7 The dates in 30 and 40 provide our earliest and latest fixed points, with 35, 36, and 38 occurring in order in between. Almost every chronological determination placing 30−40 in sequence stems from comparing those five dates with the officeholders found in the protocols. For example, the king alternatively called Moses George, Moses, George, and George Moses appears in texts dating to 1155, 1187, and 1190, while King

4 . For lunar dating in Nubian texts, see Ochała 2010 and 2011a. 5 . The abbreviated protocol in 39 may be attributable to the change in hand immediately after the third name in the protocol. The first scribe began the text, perhaps intending to list more names, but broke off before a second scribe resumed: see page 115 above. 6. Kapenê includes the exact year in 35 but omits it in 37. His protocols are short for the precisely dated group (only fifteen names in 35) but long for the imprecise group (perhaps thirteen names in 37). 7. See Ochała 2010.

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Table A.1 Dated Old Nubian Documents. Text

Dating Clause

Browne’s Date*

Actual Date

30

29 Mesore 871†

23 August 1156

23 August 1155

35

6 Mesore 903

31 July 1188

30 July 1187

36

5 Hathur 907

1 November 1191

1 November 1190

38

4 Tubi 915

30 December 1199

30 December 1198

40

23 Mesore 915

16 August 1200

16 August 1199

* The dates for 30 and 35 are given in Browne’s transcription but not at his translation. The dates for the other three texts appear in each. †

See commentary ad.loc: corrected from 872.

Basil appears dating to 1198 and 1199.8 Thus, every text naming Moses king (30−36) must predate 1198, and every naming Basil king (37−40) must postdate 1190. From here, establishing the rest of the sequence becomes more difficult. The two most prominent figures after the king are the same in every protocol. In 38 and 40, under Basil in 1198 and 1199, the queen mother (ngonnen) is named Iêsousi-kol. In nearly every text under Moses, the queen-mother is Mari. Yet in 35, also under Moses, she is named Mari Iêsousi-kol, and in 37, under Basil, she is named Mari. If it is the same woman referenced in each text, she is no help in establishing relative chronology.9 Similarly, the bishop of Ibrim provides no chronological help either. The bishop is named Mena in 30 (1155), 38 (1198), and 40 (1199) but Thoma in 36 (1190). We might suppose there was a sequence of bishops alternating Mena, Thoma, and Mena, until we encounter 34, in which Thoma is named as bishop of Ibrim in the protocol but signs his own name as Mena when he witnesses the transaction. Not having any way to distinguish a bishop identified as Mena from one named Thoma, then, we must suppose that they could all be the same man. 8. That one man is meant by all four names for Mouses George seems likely, as the same queen mother, Mari, is named in all of his protocols. For further discussion of this king and the evidence for him, see above, note 21 on page 96. 9. To my knowledge, no discussion of Mari Iêsousi-kol appears in the scholarly literature. If her position as queen mother is taken literally in both cases, then Moses George and Basil are brothers. Alternatively, Mari might have retained the title in the event Basil had no living mother.

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The key to part of the chronological sequence is likely the career of a man named Douddil. He appears as architriclinus (“Douddil odnya dauoul einin”) in the undated 31, 33, and 37, as well as the dated 35 (1187) and 36 (1190). He is absent in 38 and 39, in the protocols of which the office goes unnamed, but appears again in 40 (1199), only as triclinarius (“Douddil odnyoda einin”). Assuming the simplest explanation, that Douddil held the office of architriclinus only once, for a continuous period, then his last attestation in office is in 37, King Basil’s first attestation in office. Browne was therefore correct to place text 37 between the last dated text of Moses and the first dated text of Basil, 36 and 38, respectively, and thus implicitly in the range from 1190 to 1198. (There appears to be no way to confirm the relative position of 39 between the fixed points of 38 and 40. However, given the appearance in 39 of Adama the eparch and Mena the bishop, each attested throughout the decade prior to 40, 39 is, if not prior to 40, not likely to be long after it.) By the same logic, Browne was incorrect to place 32 between 31 and 33. Douddil appears as architriclinus in 31 and 33. In 32, he appears as the triclinarius of Ngo (“Douddil ngon odnyoda einin”). Presumably Douddil held the office of triclinarius at a local level in 32 and held a higher form of the office later, in 31 and 33−37 before holding a lesser form of the office later in life, in 40.10 The joint appearances of Adama the eparch with Douddil strengthen the likelihood of this sequence. Adama is absent from 32, in which Gabrielinkouda is the eparch and Douddil merely a triclinarius. But Adama is present as eparch and Douddil as architriclinus in 31, 33, and 35−37. Text 30, which lists no architriclinus and mentions a different eparch and triclinarius of Ngo than those in this sequence, presumably comes before those in which Adama and Douddil appear together in sequence. Therefore, the correct chronological sequence of the first three texts is 30, 32, 31. Likewise, Browne was incorrect to place 34 between 33 and 35. In this case, the key is the career of a man named Darme. In 31 and 34, Darme, son of Michaelin-Asi, appears as ngeshsh of the domestikos (in 31: “Darme Michaêlin asin ngal|sametin ngeshsha einin”). In 33, he appears as meizoterus (?: daukatta) and Aggestotil appears as ngeshsh of the domestikos. In 35, Darme is gone, and Kajingngal appears as ngeshsh of the domestikos.

10. The break in this sequence is Douddil’s position in 34, in which he appears as potentiary (?) of Ngokko(l). It is possible that this is another Douddil and our man has simply been left out of the protocol of 34 .

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That 33 comes before 35 seems assured based not only on Darme’s circumstantial disappearance but also on the appearance in the former of a witness and deacon named Iesousinkouda, who appears in 35 as a witness and archdeacon. Again assuming the simplest explanation, in this case that Darme held the office of ngeshsh only once, in 31 and 34, the correct chronological sequence of the first six texts is 30, 32, 31, 34, 33, and 35.11 The middle four of these six texts therefore all date between 1155 and 1187. So far we have covered only the legal texts. Several of the letters can also be given approximate dates. In 51, Adama the eparch writes to Douddil the architriclinus. This pair held these offices during the land sale sequence beginning with 31 and ending with 37. This letter thus dates to a wide range, between 1155 and 1198. Adama’s second letter, 49, written to Soueti, was found rolled up with land sale 38, which dates to December 30, 1198. This is a slender thread but may allow us to date 49 to circa 1198. Soueti wrote letter 50 in response to the contents of 49, so both texts belong to the same period. Isou the priest, mentioned in each text, is likely to be the same Isou appearing in letter 54 without a title and in letter 55 as a priest writing to Eiongoka. Tapara the Great Priest wrote letter 56 to Eiongoka on the same business (Papon-Penti and the asousi) as letter 55. Thus we can tentatively propose that letters 49, 50, 54, and 55 all belong in a period roughly circa 1198. Other small advances in chronology are possible. In 37−40, 42, and 45, Tapara is meizoteros. In 41, Masê is meizoteros. Texts 42 and 45 may therefore date roughly to the period of 37 and 40, after about 1190 and 1199 ad, respectively. (Text 43, which refers to one of the transactions described in 37, may therefore belong to the same period.) Text 41 may be from a generation earlier. Marianou, a bishop of Kourte, witnesses the sale in 41 and may well be the bishop of Kourte by the same name attested in a Qasr Ibrim epitaph as dead by December 20, 1154.12 If they are the same man, this would result in long careers for Darme the timakkis and Ajola the deacon, who are attested at the end of the twelfth century. In 57, Abba Aron, bishop of Faras, writes to the bishop of Sai. The Faras episcopal list ends with Iesu, who held the throne for forty-five years ending in the 1170s.13 It

11 . This rejects the assertion by Adams 1996, 251 that the slave in Kapopi’s sales price in 36 is the slave Kapopi freed in 33 . 12 . I. Qasr Ibrim 24. 13 . Jakobielski 1972, 165.

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The Chronology of Archive 3

is unlikely that Aron is the same bishop of Faras who held the see from 952 to 972, and no other Aron appears later in the list.14 So 57 dates to after the end of the Faras list in the 1170s. Table A.2 depicts what all of these suggestions produce: Table A.2. 41

Before 1154?

30

1155

32

Between 30 and 57

31

Between 30 and 57

34

Between 30 and 57

33

Between 30 and 57

57

After the 1170s

35

1187

36

1190

37

After 36

43

Circa 37

38

1198

49

Circa 1198?

50

Circa 1198?

54

Circa 1198?

55

Circa 1198?

39

Between 38 and 40?

40

1199

42

After 1190 to after 1199

45

After 1190 to after 1199

14 . For his stela, precisely dated, see I.Khartoum Copt. 3; for his appearance on the Faras episcopal list, see Jakobielski 1972, 194–195.

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Index

Abd Allah Bey Hamza, archive of, 169 Abd el-Qadir, 111, 174–178 Abu al-Makarim, 200–201, 245, 248, 250, 252 Abu Negila, 29 Abu Salih. See Abu al-Makarim Abu Shama, 69, 71 Abu-l-Qasim, 71 Abyssinia. See Ethiopia Accounting, 16, 174–178, 181–198 Adama, eparch of Nobadia, 43–45, 51, 78, 98–99 career of, 214–215, 249–251 hand of, 117 and House 177, 19, 32–41, 56, 257 and investment income, 198 and Kapopi’s land, 2, 25, 86–87, 119–122 and witnesses, 129, 136–137 Adams, William Y., 4–5 on the baqt, 7 and Byzantium, 141 on the eparch, 35–36, 57 on Nubian currency, 175 on Nubian land prices, 78, 173–174, 180–181, 183 on Nubian land tenure, 61–62 on Nubian witnesses and scribes, 90–91, 114–116 on Nubia’s economy, 172–173 and Qasr Ibrim excavations, 10–11, 14, 22, 32 Addo, 137 Adindan, 206

Agents. See Land sale intermediaries Aidhab, 252 Ain Farah, 74 (see also Darfur) Akhet, 53 Aksha, 172 Alfonso of Aragon, 252 Al-Bakuwi, 100 Al-Hakim, Caliph, 174, 180 Al-Istakhrî, 71 Al-Khordadhbeh, 7 Al-Mansur, 252 Al-Maqrizi, 8, 79–80, 172, 249, 253–254 Al-Ma’mūn, 68, 72 Al-Mas’ūdī, 55, 62–63, 68–73, 205 Al-Umari, 71 Alexander the Great, 3 Alodia. See Alwa Alwa, 5–6, 100, 163, 259 Amulets. See Magic Anna, 239–240 Apocalypse, Elders and Beasts of, 229 Arabic documentary evidence, 11, 14, 35, 37 (see also Bilinguality in documentary evidence) compared to Old Nubian forms, 153–157 and currency, 175 and Israel the eparch, 207–209 in post-medieval Nubia, 166–169 and rent, 203 Arabic literary evidence, 37, 68–73, 108–109, 233–234, 252 Archangels, 229 Archbishop Text, 221–223 Archbishop, letter to, 231, 245

290

Index

Archive 1, 12–13, 26–28, 31–32, 152, 252 and archival practices, 58–60 and food consumption, 97–98 Archive 2, 13, 32 Archive 3, 14–19, 22, 32–33, 45, 97 and archival practices, 56–60 social networks in, 37–40 Archive 4, 14, 32 Archive 5, 32, 255 Aristophanes, 179 Aron, Bishop, 108 Assiut, 256 Astrology, 228–229 Aswan, 63, 68–69, 146–147, 249, 260 Atwa, 215 Augustus, 3, 46 Axum, 3

Carradori, Arcangelo, 234 Çelebi, Evliya, 164 Ceremony. See Food Cessions. See Land cessions Chaêl-Songoj, 83–84 Choiak, festival of, 52–56 Choiak, month of, 47–48, 52–56 Choiak-eikshil, 46–56 Christianity, 5 Christmas, 53, 55 Churches, foundation of, 119–122 Churches, ownership of, 238, 259–260 Cleisthenes of Sicyon, 107 Coins. See Currency Colonate, Roman, 69 Comes rei privatae, 204 Constantine, 55 Constantinople, 251, 262 (See also Byzantium) Consumption, conspicuous, 21, 75, 92, 97, 104–105 Contracts, 105 Conversion. See Islamization Coptic documentary evidence, 15, 18, 77, 174 as origin of Old Nubian forms, 143–150 and rent costs, 198–199 Coptic literary evidence, 12, 231 Coptic patriarch, 15, 200, 234, 255 Corpus Iuris Civilis, 145 Council of Nicaea, 109 Credit, 17 Cribiore, Raffaella, 237 Cromwell, Jennifer, 180 Crusades, 249, 251, 263 Cryptograms, 229–230 Cuoq, Joseph, 233–234 Currency, 16, 20, 61, 64, 150 role in Nubia, 171–180, 259–260 Currency, terms for, 175–176 (see also Face value) Cursus honorum, 217

Bagnall, Roger, 237 Banganarti, 17, 29, 254, 260, 262 Bani Ja’d, 254 Banū ’Abd al-Mu’min archive, 155 Baqt treaty, 6–8, 70, 79, 111, 162 Basil, King, 96–97, 151, 208, 247, 251 Bawit, 227 Bible in Nubia, 143, 220, 223–225 Bilinguality in documentary evidence, 147–148, 233–234 Bilinguality in literary evidence, 223–225 Bishops, Nubian, 15, 134–136, 216, 231, 255 Blemmyes, 3–4, 142 Book of Curiosities, 108 Book of the Cross. See Stauros Text Boulard, L., 144–145 Bourdieu, Pierre, 105 Brokerage, 17, 124, 180 Browne, Gerald M., 14, 16, 22, 26, 126, 159, 229 Burials, fetal, 195, 228 Byzantium, 19, 21, 249, 251, 261, 264 Arab view of, 72 legal and notary practices of, 92, 141 Cadastral systems, 17, 20, 83–85, 195 Cairo, 27, 68, 71, 91–92, 177 and Nubian politics, 205, 255, 263 Cairo Geniza, 154, 177, 199 Canons, Nicene, 109–110 Caracalla, Edict of, 260–261

Dahomey, 63–69, 73 Darfur, 8 n. 28, 74, 139 Darme, 38–39 Darme, eparch, 214, 247 Dashlut. See Teshlot

Index Dates and date palms, 15, 43, 88, 98–102, 158, 210 Dauti, thel() of Kaktine, 12, 212–218, 246 David, King, 242, 246–247, 252 Daw, 254–255 Debeira West, 149 Deir al-Bahari, 54 Deir el-Medina, 53 Demotic documentary evidence, 74 Deposits, 98–100, 116–117, 158, 210–211 Derrida, Jacques, 105 Dilling, 163 Dinar. See Gold, terms for Diocletian, 66, 260 Dipinti, 108–110 Dirhem. See Silver, terms for Dirr, 18, 76, 131, 150, 181–182, 246 Dodekaschoinos, 260–261 Dongola, 5–6, 9–10, 115, 223, 229, 254 in Arabic accounts, 71, 79 bishopric of, 28, 231 collapse of, 152, 242, 254–255 dynastic conflicts at, 27, 234, 242 epitaphs from, 245, 260 excavations at, 17, 102, 258–259 Genoese at, 262 and its Jesus-Church, 15–16, 189, 260 mosque at, 253 post-medieval, 169, 235 Dongolawi, 243–244 Dotawo, 1, 9–10, 12, 36, 152 and Dongola’s collapse, 254, 256 Durkheim, Émile, 104 Eating. See Food Economies, archaic, 105 Economy, 19–20 Edwards, David, 4, 61, 75, 107, 172 Egypt, Greco-Roman, 4–5, 19–20, 53–54, 66, 84 large estates in, 196 offices and titles in, 245 Egypt, Islamic, 7, 84, 91–92, 111 currency of, 175–178, 192 linguistic change in, 234 role in collapse of medieval Nubia, 242, 249, 252, 263–264 wages, prices and rents in, 183, 194–195, 199–201

291

Egypt, Muslim invasion of, 5 Egypt, Pharaonic, 3–4, 53, 84 Eikshi, 35–36, 50–52 Enoch, Book of, 231 Eparch, 2, 6, 8, 15, 27, 33 accounts of, 190 estates of, 197–198 function of, 36–37, 39, 79 house of. See House 177 titles of, 34–36, 38, 47, 50, 52, 84 Epiphanios of Salamis, 53 Epiphany, 55 Estate management, 17, 195–198, 203–04 Ethiopia, 71, 165, 231, 235, 255 (see also Axum) Eucharist, 110 Exchange rates, 174–178 Face value, 124, 178–180 Families as witnesses, 130–132 Faras, 17, 245 bishops of, 42, 115, 134, 255 paintings of, 108–111, 186, 235 Fatimids. See Egypt, Islamic Fayum, 155, 194, 199 Fazughi. See Makks of Fazughi Feasting. See Food Fernea, Robert, 243 Food, 90–104, 108–114, 258 Fragmentation of land. See Inheritance, partible Franks, 263 Frend, W. H. C., 59, 261 Funj Sultanate of Sinnar, 82, 100–101, 111, 156–157, 162–164, 194 Fustat. See Cairo Gabrielinkouda, eparch, 214–215, 217, 241, 246, 248 Galen, 70 Gascou, Jean, 196 Gebel Adda, 152, 157, 171–172, 256 Gebel Maktub, 228 Gebelein, 142 Genoa, merchants from, 262 Gender, 126–127, 169, 227, 235–244 Geniza. See Cairo Geniza George, King, 147–148, 247 Georgiou, Bishop, 217–218, 247

292

Index

Gift exchange, 8, 102–114 Goitein, Shelomo, 154, 199 Gold, payments in, 190 Gold, terms for, 158–159, 175–178 Gourresi, eparch, 27, 59, 78, 251–253 and investment income, 198, 203, 205 and his witnesses, 134–135 Greece, ancient, 106 Greek literary evidence, 12, 18, 143 Greek loanwords, 230 (see also Land sales, terminology of) Greek in magic, 228–230 Griffith, F. L., 47, 151 Guardianship, 85–89

Iesou, Bishop, 208–211, 247 Iesousinkouda, eparch, 247 Inheritance, 85–89, 121–122 Inheritance, partible, 82–83, 88–89 Intermediaries. See Land sale intermediaries Investment, 198–206, 244 Ioannes, King, 146 Ioel. See Joel Isis, 53–55, 226 Islamization, 3, 233–235, 243–244 , 256–257 Israel, eparch, 11, 98–99, 207–212, 214, 251 Italians at Qasr Ibrim, 262–263 Italy, 264

Habesh. See Ethiopia Hagen, Joost, 184–185, 226, 232 Haile Selassie, 255 Hermonthis, 54 Herodotus, 107 Hierasykaminos, 260 Hinds, Martin, 166 Holokottinos. See Solidus, Roman Horns, 98, 98 n. 26 Horoscopes, 228–229 Horus, 53 House 169, 32 House 171, 13, 32 House 172, 57 House 174, 195 House 177, 14, 37, 44 as Adama’s house, 18–19, 32–34, 56–57, 195, 211, 257 papers from room 1 of, 218–220 House 183, 231 House 202, 224–225 House 763, 10–12, 56, 207–212, 220 House 785. See Structure 785 House 848, 195, 227 House 849, 57 Ibn al-Athir, 263 Ibn Fudala, 91 Ibn Hawqal, 71 Ibn Iyas, 256 Ibn Khaldûn, 91 Ibn Mammāti, 195 Ibn Selim Al-Aswani, 79–81, 171–173, 176–177, 194, 234 Ibrahim al-Kurdi, 250

Jakobielski, Stefan, 62, 171 Jeme, 144, 149–150, 179 Jerusalem, 235, 251, 262 Jerusalem, heavenly, 110 Jesus, 240 Joassê, eparch and choiak-eikshil, 50, 246–248 Joel, King, 27, 152, 157, 256 John Chrysostom, 53, 220 John the Baptist, 163 Jorais. See Gourresi Judaism, 154 Justinian, 145 Kaktine. See Dauti, thel() of Kaktine Kanz ed-Dawla, 253 Kapenê, 97, 117–118, 127, 237–238 Kapopi, 1–3, 23, 41, 91, 104, 116 and Adama’s sale of her land, 25, 38, 45, 119–122 and her inheritance, 82–83, 87–89 and property liquidation, 205 selling to another woman, 237 and her slave release, 78, 149, 205 and witnesses, 125 Kashif of Ibrim, 164 Kenzi. See Dongolawi Kerenbes, 253 Kerkeosiris, 84 Kikellia, 53 Kokka, 112, 257 Kordofan, 29, 75, 113, 254 Kosma, 98–99, 210–211, 251

Index Kourte, 146, 214, 216 Kulubnarti, 18, 77, 132, 151, 159, 229 Kurds at Qasr Ibrim, 250 Kush, 3–4, 107, 201 Łajtar, Adam, 17, 47, 49, 217, 237 Lake Nasser, 1, 17 Land cessions, 86–89, 182–183, 203 Land, church ownership of, 37 Land, cost of. See Prices Land, king’s ownership of, 31, 61–62, 68–73 Land ownership, private. See Property, private Land sale intermediaries, 119–124 Land sales, 22–26, 30, 76–78 expenses associated with, 93–94, 102–104 protocols of, 114–116, 144–148 terminology of, 158–162 terms for, 160 Land surveys. See Cadastral systems Landholdings, size of, 79–83, 190–191 Law, Greco-Roman, 20, 75, 95, 108, 113 as origin of Nubian legal system, 140–144, 169–170 and witnesses, 125 and women, 120 Leases, 124, 155, 182 (see also Rent) Letters, Old Nubian, 144 Letters, terms for, 160 Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 105 Liber Institutionis Michaelis Archangeli, 220 Literacy and legal challenges, 138–139 Liturgies, ecclesiastical, 109–110 Liturgies, public, 56 Loans, 17, 122, 124, 180 Lord of the Horses. See eparch Lord of the Mountain. See eparch MacCoull, Leslie, 198 Magic, 21, 225–231 Makks of Fazughi, 163 Makuria, 5–6, 9, 62–63, 162 fall of, 254, 259–260 Mamluks. See Egypt, Islamic Manfalut, 256 Mari the Queen Mother, 151, 246

293

Marianou, Bishops named, 214, 217–218, 247 Mary, 163, 239–241, 262 Maris, 6, 63 (see also Nobadia) Marturokoudda, eparch, 27, 59, 78, 198, 251–253 Martyrophoros, choiak-eikshil, 48 Masê. See Masi Mashshouda, choiak-eikshil, 15, 19, 23–24, 32, 37, 257 cession to, 182–183 and his function, 56 land purchases of, 122–124 and his possible ancestry, 50 and the size of his land-holdings, 80, 85 and his social connections, 39–45 and his wealth, 45, 251 and witnesses, 125–126, 129, 136–137 Mashshouda, son of, choiak-eikshil, 49–50 Masi, eparch, 81, 214, 216, 246–247 Matriliny, 241–244 Mauss, Marcel, 104–108, 113–114, 139 Megali, eparch, 210, 251 Megaloprepeia, 106–107 Meinarti, 49–50, 225, 230, 240, 244, 246–247 Mena, Bishop, 14, 123, 126, 137, 250 and Adama the eparch, 51 ordering Kapenê, 117–118 Ménage, Victor, 166 Menches, 84 Merkurios, King, 6 n. 18, 77, 174 Merk(), Bishop, 115 Merkê, 230 Meroë and Meroitic civilization, 3, 54, 112, 141, 261 Meroë and Meroitic language, 141–142, 226 Migi, 6 (see also Nobadia) Migin songoj. See eparch Monetization, 17, 19–20, 171–174, 257, 259–260, 264 (see also Currency) and archaeological evidence, 192 and Dahomey, 73 and face value, 180 incomplete, 192, 197, 201 transition to, 108 and vocabulary, 150, 178

294

Index

Money. See Currency Monneret de Villard, Ugo, 71 Moses George, King, 1, 96–97, 115, 208, 248–249, 251 and the Coptic patriarch, 255 decree of, 31, 160, 204, 238, 246 names of, 96 n. 21 portrait of, 29 Muhammad, 69 Multilingualism, 232

Oukka. See Tidawa Ourtasheia, 195, 203–204

Nauri, 77, 94, 151 Na’ib, 35 n. 19 Neuesi, 2 Ngonnen, 243 Nile, 55, 79–82, 101, 163, 168 Nobadae, 3–4 Nobadia, 5–6, 36, 235, 248, 254, 259–260 Normans, 263 Nuba Mountains, 75, 163 (see also Kordofan) Nuba people, 113 Nubia, Muslim invasion of, 6 Nubia, Christian. See Nubia, medieval Nubia, Islamic, 5 Nubia, Lower, 1–2, 4, 8 Nubia, medieval, 1, 19, 73–74, 112–113 Nubia, modern, 73–74, 88–89, 101, 113 Nubia, Upper, 8 Nubian, Kenzi, 234–235 Nubian kings as priests, 245, 248 Nubian legal vocabulary, 95–96 Nubian, Old, 2, 11, 141, 168 documentary evidence, 12–14, 17–18, 143, 232 literary evidence, 12, 143, 220–225 vocabulary, 74 Nubians as Romans, 71–72 Nubians as slaves, 69–73 Nubians in Cairo, 263 Nureddin, 250 Oases, Great, 71 Ochała, Grzegorz, 108 Onomastics, 126–127, 236–241 Osiris, 53 Osman, Ali, 72–74, 172, 257 Ottoman empire, 19–20, 82, 164–168, 256

Pachoras. See Faras Papadopoullos, Theodore, 141 Papasa, choiak-eikshil, 49 Paper, 233 Pasan, 54, 205 Patronage, 109–110 Payment of witnesses and scribes. See Land sales, expenses associated with Philae, 53–54 Philotimia, 107 Piety, personal, 109, 228, 240 Pilgrimage, 228 Planks. See Wood, texts on Plato, 107 Plots of land. See Landholdings, size of Plumley, J. Martin, 10, 16, 26, 34, 255 Polanyi, Karl, 62–69, 105, 124 Potlatch, 105, 107 Prices, 66, 78–79, 128, 173–174, 180–184 Property, private, 17, 19, 21, 62, 73, 75 Protocols. See Land sales, protocols of Provence, travelers from, 262 Psalms. See Bible in Nubia Qâdî, 154 Qamar, eparch, 252 Qamûla, 255 Qasr Ibrim, 1–3, 5, 8, 10, 17, 32 cathedral of, 13, 185–186, 212, 220, 225, 255 elite of, 214, 217–218, 231, 244–253 Ottoman rule of, 164–168 social networks of, 37–41, 44, 56 Queen Mother. See Ngonnen Quseir, 155 Rent, 20, 151, 190, 197–198, 200–203 (see also Leases) Richter, Tonio, 145 Ritual. See Food Robert de Clari, 251 Sahlins, Marshall, 106 Sai, 42, 151

Index Sakinya, 238–239 Sakkout, Hamdi, 166 Saladin, 195, 249–250, 263 Saqiya, 75, 80–82, 166, 193–194, 202, 205 Sarapis, 54 Schiller, A. A., 145 Scribes, professional, 103, 116–119 Scribes, selection of, 135 Serra, 109 Shams ed-Dawla, 1–2, 248, 250, 263 and damage to Qasr Ibrim, 33–34, 57, 214, 218 Shboul, Ahmad, 72 Shekanda, 242, 252 Shinnie, P. L., 171–173 Shrouds, funerary, 223 Sicily, 263 Silver, payments in, 190–193 Silver, terms for, 175–178 Simeon, Saint, 262–263 Simon, King, 157, 242, 252 Sinnar. See Funj Sultanate of Sinnar Sisinios, Saint, 227–228 Siti, King, 27–29, 31, 157, 159, 204, 253–254 Size of plots. See Landholdings, size of Slaves, 78–79, 148, 167, 183 (see also Baqt and Nubians as slaves) Social networks. See Qasr Ibrim, social networks of Socrates, 107 Sokar, 53–54 Solidus, Roman, 174, 199 Solomon, King, 247 Songoj. See eparch Sonqi Tino, 108, 110, 186 Soukousapa, great eparch, 213–214, 246 Spaulding, Jay, 7, 73, 162, 234–235 Stauros Text, 111 Stipulatio, 159 Structure 785, 220 Sudan during British rule, 82 Sukkot, 101 Surveys. See Cadastral systems Synaxary, 55, 227 Syria, 263

295

Takla Alfa, 235 Tamit, 24 Tapara, 215–218, 241, 246 Taxation, 16, 20, 190, 193–198 in earlier scholarhip, 61–62, 68 Tax collection, 216–218 Tel(). See Dauti, thel() Telônês, 216 Tenyri, 213, 219, 246 Terminology. See Nubian legal vocabulary Teshlot archive, 150, 160, 198–199 Thoma, Bishop, 115 Tidawa and Oukka, choiak-eikshils, 48 Timotheos, Bishop, 32, 255–256 Tomb Two, 212–218 Tomb Four, 215 Török, Laszlo, 36, 62–63, 77, 107, 171, 261 Touggili. See Dongola Turkish documentary evidence, 166–167 UNESCO, 10, 17 Van der Vliet, Jacques, 17, 217, 261 Vocabulary. See Nubian legal vocabulary Wadi Halfa, 101 Waterwheel. See Saqiya Welsby, Derek, 4, 7, 36, 62 Wilfong, Terry, 37, 153 Witnesses, 125–139 in Arabic texts, 154 by family, 130–132 feeding of, 90–98 by gender, 126–127 by group, 132–134 number of, 103, 127–130 professional, 91–96 by status, 134–136 terms for, 159 Wood, texts on, 223–226 Xenophon, 107 Yaqut b. Abdalla ar-Rumi, 69