journal⁄Dotawo - A Journal of Nubian Studies

1. About Dotawo

Nubian studies needs a platform in which the old meets the new, in which archaeological, historical, and philological research into Meroitic, Old Nubian, Coptic, Greek, and Arabic sources confront current investigations in modern anthropology and ethnography, Nilo-Saharan linguistics, and critical and theoretical approaches present in postcolonial and African studies.

The journal Dotawo: A Journal of Nubian Studies brings these disparate fields together within the same fold, opening a cross-cultural and diachronic field where divergent approaches meet on common soil. Dotawo gives a common home to the past, present, and future of one of the richest areas of research in African studies. It offers a crossroads where papyrus can meet internet, scribes meet critical thinkers, and the promises of growing nations meet the accomplishments of old kingdoms.

2. Current Issue

3. Previous Issues

From 2014 to 2019, PDF articles of Dotawo were hosted by www⁄DigitalCommons@Fairfield. Since 2019, articles are available through University of California’s www⁄eScholarship platform. A print version of Dotawo is available through www⁄punctum books, which also hosts the Dotawo Monograph series.

Read more about Dotawo on the website of the www⁄Union for Nubian Studies.

article⁄Dotawo 8: War in the Sudan
issue⁄Dotawo 8: War in the Sudan

1. Preface by the Editor

As this volume on war in the Sudan materializes, there is war in the Sudan. In April 2023, armed conflict started between rival factions of the military regime in the country. The population is trapped on the battlefield between the military leaders at war with each other. We are deeply concerned for the people of the Sudan - among them are friends and colleagues. The escalation of the conflict has caused ourageous civilian casualties, and more than a million have already become refugees. We publish the volume in a grim context, and the aspiration of our research is now to raise awareness of how destructive war is for the people and their means of living. We can only hope for the rapid restoration of peace and a peaceful transition to democracy for the country.

War has been a recurring form of violent interaction between communities in the Sudan since the Stone Age, and many chronological divisions in the history of the country are set at events such as wars, battles, conquests, and peace treaties. Still, warfare has often been an overlooked topic among researchers working in Sudan and Nubia. An explanation is possibly that periods of stability or evolving complexity are usually longer than episodes of war, which occur during relatively short time spans at irregular intervals. Another reason may be that contemporary Sudan has been a violent place, and this has possibly made war in the country a sensitive topic and restrained researchers from making warfare their research object.

The modern borders of the Sudan are a construct of war. First through the conquests by the Ottoman rulers of Egypt between the 1820s and the 1870s. Then the Anglo-Egyptian conquest in 1898, which also incorporated the independent sultanate of Darfur in 1916.1 The borders of the Anglo-Egyptian condominium were maintained when Sudan became independent in 1956, but the northern and southern parts of the independent country thereafter fought on and off in the longest civil war in Africa. The war was terminated with the Comprehensive Peace Agreement in 2005, which culminated with a referendum where the southern part of the country voted for secession. The country was split in two in 2011. Nevertheless, violent conflict and war continued as the new states of South Sudan and Sudan were fighting over territory and oil fields in the border regions. Since late 2013, South Sudan has become deeply split in a civil war that is dividing the country along ethnic boundaries with great human sufferings. In the north, Sudan had a central government at war with systematically marginalized peripheries and a suppressed population. Increasing resistance from the inhabitants resulted in the toppling of the old regime in 2019. However, the transitional government failed to install civilian rule in Sudan, and the military took full control of the government in a coup in October 2021. The Sudanese people have taken to the streets numerous times since 2019 demanding civilian rule, and their persistence brings hope for a civilian government and democratic state in Sudan.

War has deep roots in Sudan. An Upper Paleolithic cemetery at Jebel Sahaba in the far north of the country is often referred to as the earliest evidence of war in world history.2 Around 25 victims at Jebel Sahaba exhibited injuries from attacks with bows and arrows.3 The extremities of the earliest war and the violent conflicts in modern times demonstrate that war in the Sudan covers a great time span and various levels of organization – from violent clashes between ethnic groups to warfare between states and civil wars. However, exact evidence for violent conflict and war in Nubia and Sudan is limited for all periods. Iconography and texts are often our only indications for warfare, but these data are indirect sources and not always reliable information. Although historians have researched the wars that have ridden the country in modern times, the time is ripe to study wars in the Sudan from a broader academic perspective. I hope the articles in this volume of Dotawo will stimulate to provide more attention to warfare in scholarship on the Sudan, as this will increase our understanding of interaction between people in this land.

2. About the Issue

Despite being delayed by the pandemic and its consequences for research, we are delighted to finally publish this Dotawo volume on “War in Sudan”. Five articles are included after three contributors were prevented from completing their articles.

We are deeply saddened by the passing of Karin Willemse (1962-2023).4 She wished to contribute to the volume with an article from her inspiring anthropological research on gender and war in Sudan: “Women of value, men of renown”: The social construction of gendered notions of gendered personhood in Darfur and Nubia in times of duress. Karin’s contributions to Sudan Studies will be greatly missed, but we are confident that her work will continue to inspire and influence others. Our thoughts are with her family and close colleagues.

The aim of this thematic collection is to offer new insights on wars and violent conflict in the Sudan either as case-studies or as broader historical patterns.

The volume is chronologically structured, beginning with the editor’s contribution on the mid-4th millennium BCE border war between peoples in Nubia and Egypt. Then follows Matthieu Honegger’s presentation of the famous archers from Kerma during the latter half of the 3rd millennium BCE. The bows and arrows in these earliest Kerma graves have never been presented in such detail before, and the appearance of the archers are linked to the emergence of the kingdom of Kerma. Next, Uroš Matić offers a fresh perspective on warfare and gender in textual and visual media during the Napatan and Meroitic periods (8th century BCE to 4th century CE), followed by Alexandros Tsakos' article on warfare terms in medieval sources (ca. 5th century CE to 15th century CE). The volume concludes with Roksana Hajduga's presentation of the art of the 2018/2019 revolution in Sudan. She explores how the war between non-violent protesters and a brutal regime caused a change in the freedom of expressions and greater creativity in Fine Arts, Street art, and online art. The volume thus covers some major chronological phases of Nubia and Sudan from the earliest Bronze Age until today.

The articles in this issue also span a wide geographical area along the Nile. The first article by Hafsaas focus on the First Cataract region in the northernmost part of Nubia and outside the borders of today’s Sudan. Honegger’s article on the archers is set at Kerma above the Third Cataract. In the article by Matić, we move further south to Napata below the Fourth Cataract and Merowe between the Fifth and the Sixth Cataracts. The article on the medieval era by Tsakos covers all of Nubia, while the last article by Hajduga considers the southernmost region in the volume by focusing on the capital Khartoum.

Dotawo’s Open Access Commitment

Dotawo: A Journal of Nubian Studies has been a journal with open access to both readers and authors since its launch in 2014. Since the previous volume, Dotawo has been even more committed to open scholarship by linking the references in the journal to records with open access, as far as possible. The aim is to give access to research to those without privileged access to institutional libraries.5 This great work to make the research openly available has largely been undertaken by Vincent W.J. van Gerven Oei, managing editor from 2014 to 2022. I am grateful to managing editor Alexandros Tsakos for the typesetting in an open-source infrastructure. Personally, publishing openly in this way is fulfilling despite the additional efforts. I hope the readers find the result accessible and appealing.


Acknowledgements

I wish to thank the peer-reviewers who spent their time and used their knowledge to improve the quality of the articles in this issue of Dotawo.

References

Crevecoeur, Isabelle, Marie‑Hélène Dias‑Meirinho, Antoine Zazzo, Daniel Antoine, and François Bon. “New Insights on Interpersonal Violence in the Late Pleistocene Based on the Nile Valley Cemetery of Jebel Sahaba.” Scientific Reports 11/9991 (2021): pp. 1-13.

Gat, Azar. War in Human Civilization. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008.

Van Gerven Oei, Vincent W.J. “Preface by the Editor.” Dotawo: A Journal of Nubian Studies 7 (2020): pp. 1-10.

Gewald, Ja-Bart, Freek Colombijn, Azeb Amha, and Sabine Luning, “In Memoriam Karin Willemse (1962-2023).” www⁄https://www.ascleiden.nl/news/memoriam-karin-willemse-1962-2023

Hafsaas-Tsakos, Henriette. War on the Southern Frontier of the Emerging State of Ancient Egypt. A Warfare Perspective on the History of the A-Group People in Lower Nubia during the 4th millennium BCE. Ph.D-thesis. Bergen: University of Bergen, 2015.

Otterbein, Keith F. How War Began. Texas: A&M University Press, 2004.


  1. Hafsaas-Tsakos, War on the Southern Frontier of the Emerging State of Ancient Egypt, p. 3. ↩︎

  2. E.g., Otterbein, How War Began, pp. 74-5; Gat, War in Human Civilization, p. 15. ↩︎

  3. Crevecoeur et al., “New Insights on Interpersonal Violence in the Late Pleistocene Based on the Nile Valley Cemetery of Jebel Sahaba.” ↩︎

  4. Gewald et al. “In Memoriam Karin Willemse (1962-2023).” ↩︎

  5. Van Gerven Oei, “Preface by the Editor,” pp. 1-3. ↩︎

article⁄The Role of Warfare and Headhunting in Forming Ethnic Identity: Violent Clashes between A-Group and Naqada Peoples in Lower Nubia (mid-4th millennium BCE)
abstract⁄This article reassesses the earliest cemeteries dating to the 4th millennium BCE in northern Lower Nubia. Remains from two cultural groups have been found in the region – native predecessors of the A-Group people and Naqada people arriving from Upper Egypt. The evidence presented suggests that Naqada people from the chiefdom at Hierakonpolis conducted a violent expansion into Lower Nubia in the mid-4th millennium BCE. The violent encounters with the natives are testified through evidence of interpersonal violence in five cemeteries of the predecessors of the A-Group people, young males buried with weapons in a Naqada cemetery in A-Group territory, and a settlement pattern shifting southwards. The author argues that the violence led to an ethnogenesis among the native population of northern Lower Nubia, and the ethnic boundary between the two groups became even more defined through headhunting provoking a schismogenesis. This case study provides new insights into warfare in ancient Nubia and an opportunity to discuss ethnic identity, ethnogenesis, and schismogenesis in the Nile Valley at the beginning of the Bronze Age.
keywords⁄Warfare, ethnicity, headhunting, schismogenesis, Early Bronze Age, Nubia, Egypt

Northern Lower Nubia with sites dating to the mid-4th millenium BCE. Graphic: Henriette Hafsaas

Map 1. Northern Lower Nubia with sites dating to the mid-4th millenium BCE. Graphic: Henriette Hafsaas.

1. Introduction

Lower Nubia in today’s southern Egypt has been studied by archaeologists since the beginning of the 20th century. Yet, the collective self-awareness and group identity of the people inhabiting the northernmost part of Lower Nubia in the 4th millennium BCE is still elusive. In this article, I will argue that the region from the First Cataract to Bab el-Kalabsha was the setting of violent encounters between peoples who increasingly came to view each other as culturally different during the mid-4th millennium BCE. I will demonstrate that the predecessors of the A-Group people were attacked by a band of Naqada warriors from Hierakonpolis in several deadly clashes that ultimately drove the A-Group predecessors south of Bab el-Kalabsha while Naqada peoples settled in the area between Bab el-Kalabsha and the First Cataract (Map 1).

The evidence for the violent expansion is interpersonal violence leading to deaths and injuries among the A-Group predecessors, young males belonging to the Naqada people buried with weapons in a cemetery of the A-Group predecessors, and a shifting settlement pattern with the A-Group predecessors retreating southwards as the Naqada people expanded into their territory. I will argue that the formation of the ethnic identity of the A-Group people was an ethnogenesis,1 as the distinctive material culture of the A-Group people became archaeologically visible around the middle of the 4th millennium BCE (Table 1).2

Chronology for the A-Group people including cross-dating with Egypt.

Table 1. Chronology for the A-Group people including cross-dating with Egypt.

After the first violent clashes near the First Cataract, headhunting appears to become part of the warfare practices as the Naqada people continued their expansion southwards. Headhunting probably affected the consolidation of ethnic identities among the A-Group and Naqada peoples, and the practice contributed to defining an ethnic boundary between the two ethnic groups in a process of schismogenesis.

The topic of this article is ethnogenesis, and especially how conflicts and competition affected the formation of ethnic identity. Ethnogenesis is a dynamic process where continuity and change are encompassed in forging a new ethnic identity.3 The ethnogenesis among the A-Group predecessors was enhanced in a process of schismogenesis, which made the A-group and Naqada peoples diverge further from each other. Schismogenesis is a process of differentiation first described by Gregory Bateson4 and recently expanded upon by David Wengrow and David Graeber.5 Ethnogenesis and schismogenesis are related concepts of identity formation through intercultural contact, but schismogenesis more specifically refers to the process where two groups of people who already are different diverge further due to interaction with each other.

The geographical focus in this article is limited to the region between the First Cataract and Bab el-Kalabsha, which I will refer to as northern Lower Nubia. Bab el-Kalabsha means ‘Gate of Kalabsha’ in Arabic. The toponym is descriptive as granite cliffs constricted the river to a width of only 220 metres, making this one of the narrowest passages of the Nile (Figure 1), while rocks and shoals broke the flow of the water.6 The rising cliffs of Bab el-Kalabsha were thus a distinctive geographical marker, and a position for exercising territorial control.

The landscape at Bab el-Kalabsha. Painting by Edward Lear (1871). Public domain, downloaded from Artvee.com

Figure 1. The landscape at Bab el-Kalabsha. Painting by Edward Lear (1871). Public domain, downloaded from Artvee.com.

For more than a century, scholars have overlooked the instances of violent injuries and lethal weapons in the cemeteries in northern Lower Nubia dating to the mid-4th millennium BCE.7 The omission of this evidence has limited our understanding of the role of warfare in the formation of an ethnic boundary through processes of ethnogenesis and schismogenesis. Furthermore, a warfare perspective will provide new knowledge on violent practices in the Nile Valley at the beginning of the Bronze Age and the emergence of the A-Group people as an ethnic group in the mid-4th millennium BCE.

2. Background

The core area of ancient Egypt was the lower reaches of the Nile, where the river flows like an elongated oasis through the Sahara. Travelling from the north, the islands and rapids of the First Cataract formed the first serious obstacle to riverine navigation. To the south of the First Cataract, the landscape is different. This is Nubia. The floodplain is narrower resulting in less fertile land. Six cataracts with granite boulders and treacherous rapids make travelling more difficult on water and over land along the Nubian stretch of the Nile. Furthermore, the cataracts divide Nubia into several smaller regions where the northern part of Lower Nubia is the closest southern neighbour of ancient Egypt.

Around 4000 BCE, people in Upper Egypt adopted agriculture as the main form of food production.8 New forms of a shared material culture emerged from around 3750 BCE, although regionality was still present.9 The transition to food production was followed by the gradual emergence of centralized forms of political organization, and three chiefdoms appeared around 3650 BCE.10 The political centralization culminated with the formation of the territorial state of dynastic Egypt around 3085 BCE.11 The time span from ca. 3750 to 3085 BCE is termed the Naqada period in Upper Egypt (see Table 1).12 I will call the population in Upper Egypt during this epoch for the Naqada people to signal their cultural unity and increasing communal self-awareness.13

In the latter half of the 4th millennium BCE, Lower Nubia was inhabited by the so-called A-Group people.14 Before the inhabitants of Lower Nubia came into more frequent contact with the Naqada people during the Early A-Group phase,15 the predecessors of the A-Group people in northern Lower Nubia appear less conscious about displaying a collective identity through material culture. Nevertheless, the A-Group predecessors had a distinctive tradition of pottery making, and they appear to have shared beliefs about death and practiced similar burial rituals. In contrast to the agricultural Naqada people, these A-Group predecessors probably maintained a pastoral way of life in continuation of the traditions encompassing the Nile Valley in the 5th millennium BCE.16 Although both groups inhabited quite similar ecological environments along the Nile, the differences in modes of food production suggest that the daily tasks of the people living in northern Lower Nubia was different from that of the Naqada people in Upper Egypt.

Archaeologists have diverging interpretations of the collective identity of the people living on the banks of the 130 kilometers long stretch of the Nile from Bab el-Kalabsha in Lower Nubia to Gebel es-Silsila in Upper Egypt during the 4th millennium BCE. Some scholars suggest an expansion of Naqada settlements or colonies into northern Lower Nubia.17 Others consider all sites in Lower Nubia and north to Kubbaniya18 or Gebel es-Silsila in Upper Egypt to belong to the A-Group people.19 Maria Gatto has fronted a third explanation and suggests a hybrid identity or entanglement of Naqada and A-Group identities in the region north of the First Cataract.20 In an elaboration of these positions, I argue that an ethnic boundary was established between the two groups in northern Lower Nubia. This boundary was a social construction, and the distribution of sites changed over time as the Naqada people expanded and the A-Group people retreated southwards. Both peoples inhabited northern Lower Nubia, but their sites were not contemporary.21 This blend of sites has given rise to the opposing conclusions based on the difficulty in drawing a border. Inconsistencies also exist in how collective identities are perceived among archaeologists working in the Nile Valley, so I will explain how ethnic identity will be understood in this study.

3. Ethnic Identities, Groups, and Boundaries

Ethnic identities seem to become more pronounced from the beginning of the Bronze Age. This development has been linked to the formation of more complex societies.22 The political communities engaged in wars against each other during the Bronze Age were often ethnic groups, so warfare studies focusing on this period need to consider ethnicity. In historically particular circumstances, war could be crucial for constructing and modifying ethnic identities, and warfare could also be responsible for the disappearance of ethnic groups.23

Siân Jones has formulated a renowned definition of ethnic groups by combining subjectivist and objectivist perspectives on ethnicity. Accordingly, ethnic groups are based on mutual perceptions of cultural differences between groups that are interacting or co-existing.24 The subjectivist approach to ethnicity is attributed to Fredrik Barth. He criticized the understanding of ethnic groups as comparable to the outdated equation between race, culture, and language. Barth emphasized self-ascription as fundamental for the forging of ethnic identity.25 However, ethnic identification is also dependent on ascription by others since ethnicity will only make an organizational difference if the ethnic identity is recognized by others and they act on this difference.26 Furthermore, Barth argued for shifting the focus of research away from differences between cultures and their historical boundaries. Instead, scholars should address the processes involved in forming and maintaining ethnic identities and upholding ethnic boundaries despite interaction.27 This perspective can also be seen as a critique against culture-historical approaches in archaeology.28

Since Barth’s seminal article, ethnicity is generally understood as an aspect of social relationships between people who perceive themselves as culturally different from each other in contact situations,29 such as exchange relationships and inter-group competition. The cultural characteristics that symbolize the ethnic identity remain unexplained in subjective perspectives, where ethnic identities are seen as fluid and situational.30 The subjective approach can thus be complemented by an objective perspective incorporating the cultural contexts and social structures in which ethnic groups interact. G. Carter Bentley applied Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of habitus for explaining ethnicity.31 Habitus is a “system of durable, transposable dispositions” that characterize life in a particular environment.32 In this way, habitus can provide an objective grounding for the subjective construction of ethnic identity.33 The structural dispositions of habitus permeate the cultural practices and social relations typical for a distinct lifestyle,34 and habitus is thus a factor in forging ethnic identities.35 A relevant example of habitus for archaeologists is “ethnically specific suites of motor habits” that develop with intentional and intensive training, such as pottery making.36

Ethnic identities of past peoples can leave traces in the archaeological record through obvious signs used intentionally to exhibit ethnic identity through material culture.37 More subtle remains can materialize through habitus as culturally structured practices.38 Ian Hodder has demonstrated through ethnoarchaeological fieldwork in Baringo (Kenya) that people actively maintain certain forms of material culture as expressions of ethnic identity, while other forms of material culture cross-cut ethnic boundaries.39 Objects that cross ethnic boundaries can be explained as foreign goods imported into the assemblage of an ethnic group from another group through trade, intermarriage, or raiding. The archaeological identification of an ethnic group becomes more convincing if the association between material culture and ethnic identity is based on a careful contextual analysis of a combination of objects and practices in multiple categories,40 although the remains of a site are rarely monocultural due to intercultural interaction. Contact with “others” is after all a prerogative for ethnicity.41

4. Ethnic Identity in Lower Nubia

I have previously examined the ethnic identity of the people inhabiting Lower Nubia in the 4th millennium BCE through a contextual approach. When the material culture and cultural practices were corresponding across several categories and at several sites, then the similar sites were most probably made by a group of people with a collective identity. For Lower Nubia in the latter part of the 4th millennium BCE, I propose that this group identity was ethnicity.42 The ethnonym that this group used for themselves is unknown to us, but their land was called “Ta-Sety” – Land of the Bow – according to Egyptian inscriptions from the beginning of the First Dynasty.43 The geographical distribution of pottery vessels, cosmetic palettes, and burial positions in Lower Nubia in the latter half of the 4th millennium BCE shows that Naqada traditions were prevalent north of Bab el-Kalabsha, while A-Group traditions dominated south of Bab el-Kalabsha. These results combined with less widespread grave goods give us a probable distribution of the two ethnic groups in Lower Nubia.44 I thus try to overcome the reduction of ethnic identity to techniques for manufacturing and decorating pottery.45 The aim is to bring the actors behind the material culture to the foreground. The interpretation of cultural differences as manifesting ethnic identity for the A-Group and Naqada peoples is strengthened by later expressions of ethnic differences between peoples in Nubia and Egypt in written sources.46 I thus propose an ethnic boundary between the A-Group people and the Naqada people in the latter half of the 4th millennium BCE.47 This boundary was social, and people and objects could cross the border. Still, the ethnic boundary probably also reflected ideas of territoriality, and Bab el-Kalabsha seems to be the location of the border. The situation was different earlier in the 4th millennium BCE, as we will see in the next section.

5. The A-Group Predecessors in Northern Lower Nubia

According to David Wengrow, funerary rites were remarkably similar in the Nile Valley from the confluence of the Blue and White Niles to Middle Egypt during the 5th millennium BCE. Deceased individuals were placed in contracted positions on their sides, and often accompanied by portable objects related to the decoration and ornamentation of the body – especially the skin and hair. This uniformity suggests a widespread and consistent set of beliefs and practices connected with a pastoral way of life, which fostered a mobile, body-centred habitus. Among the body-related objects were combs for the hair and cosmetic palettes used for grinding pigments for painting the skin.48 A coherent cultural group in Lower Nubia is difficult to distinguish at the beginning of the 4th millennium BCE.49 The area was thinly populated and other collective identities than ethnicity probably prevailed, such as corporate lineage groups.

Harry S. Smith realized that the sites in northern Lower Nubia initially termed ‘B-Group’50 actually constituted the earliest A-Group phase.51 He later dated these graves more accurately as contemporary with Naqada I in Upper Egypt.52 After reassessing the excavation reports from these B-Group sites, I agree with the dating presented by Smith, in accordance with other scholars.53 The material culture and cultural practices at these sites resemble the A-Group people more than the Naqada people, and these peoples were likely the direct forebearers of the A-Group people. I have therefore termed this earliest phase for the proto-phase of the A-Group (see Table 1).54

The earliest cemetery dating to the 4th millennium BCE in northern Lower Nubia has been identified as the graves on the south-eastern knolls of Cemetery 7 at Shellal – the widest plain and thus most attractive habitat in the First Cataract region.55 Between Shellal and Bab el-Kalabsha, four other sites originally attributed to the B-Group by Reisner belong to the proto-phase of the A-Group people.56 I will briefly describe these proto-phase sites.

5.1. Cemetery 7 at Shellal

The earliest graves in Cemetery 7, which spanned several periods, consisted of 50 human and nine animal burials. These earliest graves at Shellal were placed higher in the terrain than the later cemeteries of the plain. The deceased were buried in a contracted position. Out of 29 individuals with recorded burial position, 62 per cent were placed on the left side. The orientation of the head appears random. The individuals in the graves were often covered by goat skins or mats.57

Small spiral shells were used as personal decoration – often as necklaces – in 17 graves. 58 Most of the pots found at the site were similar in shape to the A-Group pottery tradition, but no types were distinctive of its later phases, such as rippled or eggshell wares.59 A fragment of a white cross-lined pot of the Naqada people was found in the debris and indicates a Naqada IA date.60 Seven out of twelve palettes were made of various unidentified hard stones in the cultural traditions of the Neolithic in Upper Nubia and Central Sudan,61 as well as in the later A-Group phases. The other five palettes were made of grey-green siltstone. The only known quarry for siltstone used for palettes is Wadi Hammamat, midway between the Nile Valley and the Red Sea in Upper Egypt.62 The palette shapes were described as rough, irregular, oval, oblong, and ovoid,63 which fit a Naqada I date.

In Cemetery 7, four weapons or tool-weapons were found in three graves – two maces and two ground stone axes (Figure 2). The mace-heads were of the disc-shaped type and made of black and white speckled stone. The shape is similar to the disc-shaped maces of Neolithic Sudan.64 Maces were specialized striking weapons, while ground stone axes could have been used as both weapons and tools. However, the size of these stone axes, with lengths of ca. 8 and 10 centimetres respectively, suggests that they could have been effective as weapons.

The few Naqada objects found at the site suggest that the cemetery was used contemporary with Naqada I.

a) The mace-heads and axe-heads uncovered in Cemetery 7. From the left: grave 229, grave 230, grave 230, and grave 234. Photo from Reisner, <em>The Archaeological Survey of Nubia</em>, plate 63/d. b) The disc-shaped mace-head from grave 229 at Cemetery 7. Photo by Alexandros Tsakos. Courtesy of Nubia Museum, Aswan. c) The disc-shaped mace-head from grave 230. Photo by Alexandros Tsakos. Courtesy of Nubia Museum, Aswan.

Figure 2: a) The mace-heads and axe-heads uncovered in Cemetery 7. From the left: grave 229, grave 230, grave 230, and grave 234. Photo from Reisner, The Archaeological Survey of Nubia, plate 63/d. b) The disc-shaped mace-head from grave 229 at Cemetery 7. Photo by Alexandros Tsakos. Courtesy of Nubia Museum, Aswan. c) The disc-shaped mace-head from grave 230. Photo by Alexandros Tsakos. Courtesy of Nubia Museum, Aswan.

5.2. Cemetery 14 at Khor Ambukol

Cemetery 14 with 23 human burials was located on the east bank at Khor Ambukol – ca. 9 kilometers upstream from Cemetery 7 at Shellal. The burial position was preserved for seventeen bodies, with 47 per cent placed contracted on the left side and the remaining on the right side. The orientation of the head appears random. The deceased were usually placed on matting and almost always accompanied by sewed leather.65 I have previously noticed a segregation between females and males in this cemetery. The females were buried in the north-eastern part of the cemetery and the males in the south-western part.66 The identification of the biological sex was based on the examination of the human remains.67 However, gender differentiations in the grave goods have not been identified so far,68 but the separation of the sexes in death may suggest a gendered division of labour.69

Only six pots were uncovered in four graves at Cemetery 14.70 Three black-mouthed pots and two black pots with a pointed base fit the A-Group pottery repertoire.71 No pots were diagnostic for the pottery produced by the Naqada people. Furthermore, four graves contained small spiral shells. Two rectangular palettes of indeterminable stone show affiliation with the traditions of Neolithic Nubia and Central Sudan.72 Two rhomboidal siltstone palettes originated from Upper Egypt, and this shape was used for some of the earliest palettes.73 Two ivory combs with carved animals, probably gazelles,74 belong to the shared features of the Neolithic in the Nile Valley.75 The finds from the cemetery are in accordance with the A-Group of the proto-phase, while two palettes from Upper Egypt suggest a date contemporary with Naqada I.

5.3. Cemetery 17 at Khor Bahan

Khor Bahan is a large khor coming down from the high desert on the east bank ca. 10 kilometers south of Shellal. The alluvial fan below the khor offered considerable fertile land, 76 and Cemetery 17 was located here (Figure 3).

I have previously argued that predecessors of the A-Group people used the highest terrace at Khor Bahan as a burial ground during the proto-phase, while the Naqada people reused the cemetery.77 Of the ca. 100 graves on the highest terrace, 24 human burials can be attributed to the proto-phase of the A-Group. I have presented several lines of evidence for this identification in addition to pottery and palettes: goat skin wrappings, small spiral shells, tortoise-shell bracelets, and the burial of males and females in different parts of the cemetery, like at nearby Cemetery 14.78 These graves also had a general lack of material culture from the Naqada people.79

The bodies were placed on the left side in eight graves and on the right side in five graves, which means that 63 per cent of the deceased with preserved burial position were placed on the left side.80 No complete pots were found in these graves, but potsherds with a red exterior and black interior were recorded in four graves.81 The description of these pots could fit the traditions of pottery making of both the A-Group predecessors and the Naqada people. Eight cosmetic palettes were uncovered.82 Five palettes were made of white stone, black and white speckled stone, or other hard stones in continuation of earlier practices and in accordance with later A-Group traditions. Three palettes were made of siltstone from Upper Egypt and of shapes dating to Naqada I. Weapons were absent as grave goods in these graves.

Cemetery 17 at Khor Bahan on the higher terrace of the khor, to the right of the white tents. The alluvial plain was already flooded behind the Aswan Dam as the palm trees would have lined the riverbank. Photo from Reisner (1910: plate 23/b). Colorized by cutout.pro.

Figure 3: Cemetery 17 at Khor Bahan on the higher terrace of the khor, to the right of the white tents. The alluvial plain was already flooded behind the Aswan Dam as the palm trees would have lined the riverbank. Photo from Reisner (1910: plate 23/b). Colorized by cutout.pro.

5.4. Cemetery 41 on the Meris Plain

Cemetery 41/200 was located on the central knoll of the Meris plain, ca. 25 kilometers south of Shellal.83 A total of 37 human graves and three animal graves were excavated. The bodies with recorded burial positions were placed on the left side in 13 graves and the right side in 12 graves, which means that 52 per cent were placed on the left side. The grave goods consisted of items for personal decoration: small spiral shells, tortoise-shell bracelets, and cosmetic palettes.84 Only two complete pots were uncovered. Unfortunately, these pots were undiagnostic and coming from unsecure contexts. Potsherds with red exteriors and black interiors as well as black polished wares were found in several graves.85 Red-polished wares with black interiors were used by both Naqada and A-Group peoples, but the black polished wares are closer to the A-Group pottery tradition.86 Three of the palettes were made of siltstone and two of other stones. The Naqada objects in this cemetery consisted of three siltstone palettes with elongated rhomboidal shape and two copper needles.87 The copper needles are probably the earliest copper objects uncovered south of the First Cataract.88

No specialized weapons were uncovered in these graves. However, six graves contained flint blades.89 For the bodies where the sex could be established, flint blades were found with males in four of five cases, and the flint blades were deposited singly in five of the six instances. One of these blades was also described as “broad”. These flint implements were probably used both as tools and weapons – so-called tool-weapons. I suggest that these blades were linked to masculine practices and identity,90 since they mainly occurred with males. A comparative case comes from the contemporary Copper Age cemetery Tiszapolgár-Basatanya on the Hungarian Plain. Flint blade knives longer than seven centimeters were restricted to males in this cemetery, and archaeologists have interpreted the longest blades at Tiszapolgár-Basatanya as knives used as weapons.91

The few datable objects suggest that the site was used in the latter part of the proto-phase, contemporary with Naqada IC-IIA.

5.5. Cemetery 45 on the Dehmit Plain

Cemetery 45/200 at Shem Nishai on the plain of Dehmit was located ca. 32 kilometers south of Shellal. A total of 33 human burials were published.92 Of the bodies with preserved burial position, 17 bodies were placed on the left side and 12 bodies on the right side, so 59 per cent of the burials were placed on the left side. Several orientations of the head were practiced.93 Goat skins covered the bodies.

Small white shells were uncovered in two graves, and two quartzite palettes were found. The excavation report describes 16 pots, so pottery vessels were more common in this cemetery than at the other A-Group sites of the proto-phase. Fourteen pots were made following A-Group traditions. A red-polished black-topped vase (Petrie’s B19a) and a coarse red bowl (Petrie’s R23a) were the only Naqada style pots.94 Both date within Naqada IC-IIA. The identity of the people buried in this cemetery is comparable to the other A-Group sites of the proto-phase.

5.6. Summary

Burial positions and orientations are unreliable for determining ethnic identity during the first half of the 4th millennium BCE. The standardized burial position among the Naqada people, contracted on the left side with the head to the south, was only applied from Naqada II onwards.95 The A-Group predecessors placed the deceased contracted on either sides, like the later A-Group people, but without the head oriented to the south or southwest like the standard for the A-Group people from the early phase.96 The positioning of the dead in the grave for both the A-Group predecessors and the Naqada people probably derived from shared features in the burial traditions along the Nile during the Neolithic.97 Most of the pots and palettes found in the cemeteries examined here were made in accordance with the later A-Group traditions, but with a few Naqada imports. The use of animal skins and small spiral shells in these burials seems typical for the A-Group people of the proto-phase.

The imported Naqada finds suggest that the sites of the A-Group proto-phase had a chronological progression where the cemeteries were established further south with time. The A-Group predecessors apparently retreated southwards. I relate this migration to a violent expansion of Naqada people into Lower Nubia. A contemporary Naqada site in northern Lower Nubia is examined in the next section.

6. The Earliest Naqada Cemetery in Lower Nubia

Nine cemeteries in northern Lower Nubia were used by the Naqada people during the 4th millennium BCE. The dating of these sites suggests a gradual expansion southward.98 In this article, I will only discuss the site contemporary with the proto-phase of the A-Group people. The other Naqada sites were established after the A-Group predecessors had retreated from northern Lower Nubia.99

Some of the mace-heads uncovered in the Naqada graves in Cemetery 17. a) Mace-head from grave 89. b) Mace-head from grave 70. c) Mace-head from grave 50. D) Mace-head from grave 88. Photos by Alexandros Tsakos. Courtesy of Nubia Museum, Aswan.

Figure 4: Some of the mace-heads uncovered in the Naqada graves in Cemetery 17. a) Mace-head from grave 89. b) Mace-head from grave 70. c) Mace-head from grave 50. D) Mace-head from grave 88. Photos by Alexandros Tsakos. Courtesy of Nubia Museum, Aswan.

6.1. Reuse of Cemetery 17 at Khor Bahan

I have previously argued that Naqada people reused the A-Group cemetery of the proto-phase at Khor Bahan. Cemetery 17 is the earliest known Naqada site south of the First Cataract, and the site is significant in terms of warfare.100

The 29 graves belonging to the Naqada people and dating to Naqada IC were placed between the two clusters of A-Group graves of the proto-phase.101 Of the seventeen skeletons completely or partially preserved, sixteen were males in the age range from youth to adult. Only one individual was female, and she was middle-aged. Human remains were absent in twelve graves (Appendix 1). Notably, each of the graves without human remains had an empty area intended for a body. I have proposed that these empty graves were cenotaphs for warriors whose bodies were lost on the battlefield and the burial rituals thus performed in absentia.102

This Naqada cemetery is extraordinary regarding war since several graves contained numerous weapons. Sixteen mace-heads were uncovered in twelve graves, and other weapons were found in four graves (see Appendix 1 and Figure 4).

Weapons were thus found in 55 per cent of the graves. Other weapons uncovered were flint daggers, flint knives, flint and chalcedony blades, and various types of arrowheads. Except for the lunates, these weapons were characteristic of the Naqada people. Some of the arrowheads had their closest parallels at Hierakonpolis in southern Upper Egypt, suggesting that this was the homeland of the individuals buried in Cemetery 17 (Figure 5).

Arrowheads typical for Hierakonpolis found in Naqada graves in Cemetery 17 in Lower Nubia. a) Large concave-base arrowhead with long straight lobes found in grave 50. b) Three tanged arrowheads with barbs found in grave 78. Photos by Alexandros Tsakos. Courtesy of Nubia Museum in Aswan.

Figure 5: Arrowheads typical for Hierakonpolis found in Naqada graves in Cemetery 17 in Lower Nubia. a) Large concave-base arrowhead with long straight lobes found in grave 50. b) Three tanged arrowheads with barbs found in grave 78. Photos by Alexandros Tsakos. Courtesy of Nubia Museum in Aswan.

In the cemetery, five males were interred with a single mace, while seven graves without human remains contained eleven maces (see Appendix 1). The latter graves may have been the cenotaphs for eleven warriors whose remains were not retrieved after the battle. Weapons are rare in Naqada graves in Upper Egypt.103 Being killed in action and buried in foreign territory was probably a context that made it necessary to provide these Naqada warriors with their weapons in the afterlife.

The predominance of male burials in this cemetery is exceptional. I suggest that the reason is that they derive from a warrior band. Warriors dispatched to fight far from the homestead would usually be males.104 The anatomists recorded no pathologies or trauma in this osteological material, since they, unfortunately, concentrated their attention on racial characteristics rather than pathology and trauma.105

Based on the contextual data, I have argued that Cemetery 17 was a burial ground for Naqada warriors who had made a violent expansion into the A-Group predecessors’ territory.106 Despite the lack of evidence for violent trauma, so many dead males is suspicious. Violence, also in war, is often the commonest cause of death for young adult males. The A-Group predecessors probably attacked the Naqada warriors with bows and arrows that would only leave microscopic traces on the bones, like the victims at Jebel Sahaba in southern Lower Nubia during the Upper Palaeolithic.107 Graves of fallen warriors are usually placed close to the battlefield,108 so the fighting probably happened near Khor Bahan.

In Cemetery 17, archaeologists also found 21 dogs in twelve graves. Several dogs had remains of collars and leashes.109 Gnawed bone fragments were found under the ribs of these dogs, suggesting that they were sacrificed on full stomachs when their owners were buried.110 A parallel has come to light at the elite Cemetery HK6 at Hierakonpolis. Around the large and richly equipped tomb 16, dating to Naqada IC-IIA, was a complex of associated graves belonging to humans and animals. Among the sacrificed animals were 27 dogs, often buried together with young males.111 The plundered graves of these young males still contained some tanged arrowheads characteristic for Hierakonpolis.112 Similar tanged arrowheads were also found in Cemetery 17 (see Figure 5b). These individuals in Cemetery HK6 have thus been interpreted as hunters.113 I find it probable that some, perhaps all, of these young males also were warriors. The difference between hunters and warriors was probably minor during the Naqada period. Both warriors and hunters were skilled in weaponry and cooperation. The chieftains in Upper Egypt probably raised, equipped, and led hunting expeditions and war parties to achieve their political ends.114 Indeed, the nineteen men depicted on the unprovenanced Hunters’ Palette carry the same types of weapons as found in Cemetery 17 at Khor Bahan and HK6 at Hierakonpolis: maces, spears, bows and arrows, and throw sticks. Furthermore, three hunting dogs were partaking in the lion hunt together with the men (Figure 6).

The Hunters’ Palette (BM EA 20790) depicting nineteen men and three hunting dogs in a lion hunt. Length: 30,5 cm. © The Trustees of the British Museum (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0).

Figure 6: The Hunters’ Palette (BM EA 20790) depicting nineteen men and three hunting dogs in a lion hunt. Length: 30,5 cm. © The Trustees of the British Museum (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0).

Since dog burials are associated with graves of males with weapons at Khor Bahan and Hierakonpolis, I will suggest that Naqada people trained dogs to assist with hunting and warfare. Dog burials are also attested at Neolithic cemeteries in Sudan115 and at Cemetery 7 of the proto-phase of the A-Group,116 so dog burials are not exclusively a Naqada practice.

7. Evidence for Violence in the Earliest A-Group Cemeteries

The violent injuries recorded in the cemeteries of the A-Group predecessors have been categorized according to whether the bodily harm was caused by blunt force, i.e., striking, or sharp force, i.e., stabbing/slashing/piercing.117 Not all injuries obtained in warfare would be deadly, although the aim of war is usually to defeat the enemies by killing or expelling them.118 Comparative research has demonstrated that the head is the preferred body part to attack in most societies.119 Preferences may vary for attacking the vault of the skull or the face.120 Fractures to the skull are thus a well-known indication of violence.121 Moreover, blunt force trauma to the skull is more easily attested archaeologically than injuries from arrows, spears, and daggers, which often affect soft tissues.122 In northern Lower Nubia, several violent deaths caused by fractures to the skull after blunt force violence, probably with a mace, are attested during the mid-4th millennium BCE.123 The practice of attacking the head also led to distinctive defensive injuries.124 Fractures of the distal ulna in the lower arm can derive from fending a blow to the head. This characteristic injury is often referred to as a parry fracture – especially if the radius is unaffected and the fracture line is transverse.125 Fractures of the middle of the clavicle can also be defensive injuries caused by avoiding blunt force violence to the head.126

The violent injuries testified on the bones could be lethal or nonlethal. Antemortem injuries have had time to heal. Perimortem injuries have had no time to heal and occurred around the time of death and may also have been the direct cause of death.127 Blood-stained bones sometimes testify to the perimortem infliction of the injuries.128 Postmortem damages to the bones occur after the individual is dead.129

Nubiologists have overlooked the data on violent injuries in northern Lower Nubia during the mid-4th millennium BCE for more than a century, although some attention has been given to the scientific value of the anatomical examinations by Sir Grafton Elliot Smith and Frederic Wood Jones in the last decades.130 The report on the human remains from northern Lower Nubia shows ample evidence of violence in the proto-phase graves of the A-Group people.131 The evidence is overwhelming when considering that only a limited range of violent injuries cause changes on the skeleton.132 The study of the human remains by Elliot Smith and Wood Jones has probably been disregarded for so long because archaeologists wish to distance themselves from the racist paradigm these anatomists worked in.133 Without the evidence dealing with violence, however, archaeologists have had the impression that the contact zone between peoples in Upper Egypt and Lower Nubia during the mid-4th millennium BCE was more peaceful than the violent cases I will present suggest. In this analysis of the human remains, osteological case descriptions are only provided for individuals with evidence of healed or unhealed trauma related to interpersonal violence. Most of these injuries are unambiguous traces of violence, but I cannot rule out that some resulted from accidents.

The human remains in Cemetery 7 included two violent cases (Appendix 2). The male in grave 257 died from multiple blows to the head that fractured several bones in his face. Besides the blunt violence, a piece on the back of his skull had been cut away by a sharp weapon – probably a copper-alloy implement.134 The female in grave 263 had a healed parry fracture of her right ulna. This fracture is a typical defensive injury.135 The graves of both victims were on the fringe of the cemetery, and the male in grave 257 was probably the last individual to be buried in the cemetery before abandonment.136 The male in grave 267 had a healed fracture probably unrelated to interpersonal violence.

Injuries caused by violence were also recorded at Cemetery 14 (Appendix 3). The male in grave 10 died from excessive blunt force violence to the skull, eight fractured ribs on his right side, and a fracture on the right side of the pubis. The violence had caused much bloodstaining of the bones.137 The female in grave 13 had a perimortem fracture of a rib on the left side that had caused blood stains on the bones.138 The injury happened at the time of her death. The female in grave 19 had a healed fracture of the left ulna just above the mid-point, which is most probably a parry fracture.139 The male in grave 23 had a healed fracture of his right cheekbone,140 which is an injury seen in assaults with blunt force violence.141

In the A-Group graves of the proto-phase in Cemetery 17, two individuals had antemortem fractures related to violence (Appendix 4). The male in grave 29 had fractured the distal portion of the right ulna,142 which suggests a parry fracture caused when fending a blow to the head.143 Additionally, the mid-point of the left clavicle had a healed fracture (Figure 7a).144 A direct frontal blow with a heavy device,145 like a mace, could inflict this injury. Both injuries seem related to interpersonal violence and may have occurred during a single attack. The male in grave 24 also had a healed fracture of the middle of the right clavicle (Figure 7b).146

Healed fracture of clavicle from proto-phase A-Group graves in Cemetery 17. Male in grave 24. No scale. Drawing from Elliot Smith and Wood Jones (1910: figure 74).

Figure 7a: Healed fracture of clavicle from proto-phase A-Group graves in Cemetery 17. Male in grave 24. No scale. Drawing from Elliot Smith and Wood Jones (1910: figure 74).

Healed fracture of clavicle from proto-phase A-Group graves in Cemetery 17. Male in grave 29. No scale. Drawing from Elliot Smith and Wood Jones (1910: figure 75).

Figure 7b: Healed fracture of clavicle from proto-phase A-Group graves in Cemetery 17. Male in grave 29. No scale. Drawing from Elliot Smith and Wood Jones (1910: fig. 75).

The archaeologists recorded no injuries related to interpersonal violence at Cemetery 41/200, but the skeletal remains were fragmentary and not prioritized for detailed anatomical study (Appendix 5).147

Abundant skeletal evidence for interpersonal violence was recorded at Cemetery 45 (Appendix 6). The elderly male in grave 211 appears to have been executed by having the back of his neck cut with a sharp instrument. This individual received seven incisions across the posterior surface of two of the cervical vertebrae (Figure 8).148

The male in grave 211 in Cemetery 45 had seven cut marks on his third and fourth cervical vertebrae. Drawing from Elliot Smith and Wood Jones (1910: fig. 69).

Figure 8: The male in grave 211 in Cemetery 45 had seven cut marks on his third and fourth cervical vertebrae. Drawing from Elliot Smith and Wood Jones (1910: fig. 69).

This practice of execution has in recent years been revealed on a large scale at Hierakonpolis.149 The anatomists suggested that a copper-alloy weapon had been used.150 The lowest cut probably caused death as it “passed into the spinal canal by cutting off the tip of the spine”.151 Furthermore, the male in grave 202 had perimortem injuries on the right side of his chest. Five ribs were fractured and had caused much blood-staining – especially around the nares suggesting bleeding from the nose.152 The female in grave 201 had a healed fracture through the left cheekbone,153 which is a common injury in an assault with blunt force violence.154 Individuals in grave 204 and 235 had healed fractures most likely unrelated to interpersonal violence.

7.1. Absent Skulls in the A-Group Cemeteries of the Proto-Phase

In addition to the violent deaths just described, the skull was missing from several graves in the cemeteries of the A-Group predecessors. In Cemetery 7, all skulls were present, but the skull of an adult male in grave 226 was distorted and broken. In Cemetery 14, the skull was absent from the male individuals in graves 8 and 12.155 In Cemetery 17, the unsexed individual in grave 19 was missing the skull.156

Cemetery 41/200 appears to have been vandalized in ancient times. The bodies were all greatly disturbed, and skulls and other body parts were missing. The male individuals in graves 227 and 238 lacked their skull.157 Broken or smashed skulls were recorded in graves 205, 206, 216, 218, 219, 224, 235, and 236.158 These damages to the bones occurred postmortem – possibly in acts of desecrating the corpse. Moreover, the pots seem to have been broken intentionally in this cemetery since only two were found complete. The later Naqada inhabitants of the plain possibly vandalized the cemetery of the A-Group predecessors.159

In Cemetery 45/200, the skull was missing from the bodies of females in graves 204, 223, 232, and 241, and of the male in grave 228.160 Furthermore, the individuals buried in graves 203, 205, 212, 217, 218, and 232 had their skulls broken postmortem.161 We saw above that the male in grave 211 had been stabbed in the back of his neck seven times with a sharp implement. The assault weapon was almost certainly a copper-alloy dagger or spear. The attacker probably came from Upper Egypt, since no large copper implements are known from the proto-phase of the A-Group people. Copper-alloy daggers and spears have been found in Upper Egypt in contexts dating to slightly later in the Naqada period.162

In the human skeleton, the joint between the skull and the atlas vertebra is among the first fixtures to fall apart. Decomposition was perhaps the means through which the skulls were separated from the bodies.163 A pattern of vandalizing the bodies through removing or crushing the head is appearing in the proto-phase cemeteries of the A-Group people in northern Lower Nubia.

7.2. Capital Punishment at Hierakonpolis

Examinations of skeletal remains at Hierakonpolis show that stabbing in the throat or full decapitations were relatively common in Cemetery HK 43 during Naqada IIA-C.164 In the excavated parts of the vast cemetery, 21 individuals out of 453 had lacerated vertebrae, i.e. 4,6 per cent.165 The cut marks were observed on males in 52 per cent of the cases, while 10 per cent were females. The remaining 38 per cent had unidentified sex. Most of the people killed in this way were young adults. The cut marks were found on several vertebrae, usually the second and the third. The numerous lacerations suggest “repeated blows with a lighter blade”.166 Based on the available weapon technology during Naqada II, I suggest that the implements used were sharp pointed weapons like daggers or spears of copper-alloy or flint.167 At Hierakonpolis, the purpose of the stabbing was to sever the neck, although complete decapitation also occurred.168

The practices of decapitation and/or dismemberment in Upper Egypt are often interpreted as rites of human sacrifice, like retainer sacrifices in connection with the First Dynasty royal burials.169 David Wengrow has suggested that dismembered bodies had received an alternative treatment in death when the individual had established a greater social network in life than the complete body could satisfy during the funerary rituals. Different parts of the body could then be buried in different locations and thus provide funerary ceremonies for more people.170 The bodies with lacerated vertebrae in Cemetery HK43 seem incompatible with these interpretations. The individuals at Hierakonpolis were not sacrificed retainers, since elite graves were absent.171 Furthermore, the graves of people with lacerated vertebrae in Cemetery HK43 had hardly any grave goods, so they were not themselves belonging to an elite with a large network. The violence performed on these poor people at Hierakonpolis thus seems related to ceremonial executions of criminals, which are later attested in Egypt.172 Sean P. Dougherty and Renée Friedman indeed suggest that the people with severed necks in Cemetery HK43 had received capital punishment.173

I propose that we consider the possibility that the bodies without heads dating to the proto-phase in northern Lower Nubia belonged to A-Group predecessors killed in action and decapitated on the battlefield.174 Decapitation of prisoners of war certainly was a later practice in Egypt, as attested in iconography such as the Narmer palette from the very beginning of the First Dynasty (Figure 9).

Detail of decapitated corpses on the obverse face of the Narmer palette (Egyptian Museum, Cairo JE 32169). Drawing by Henriette Hafsaas.

Figure 9: Detail of decapitated corpses on the obverse face of the Narmer palette (Egyptian Museum, Cairo JE 32169). Drawing by Henriette Hafsaas.

The head could also have been removed after some time of exposure on the battlefield. The Naqada people may have collected the skulls of fallen victims of violence before their kinsmen could return to bury their remains. Neither capital punishment nor dismembered and divided bodies seem likely explanations for the missing skulls in the small-scale and decentralized society of the A-Group predecessors.

7.3. Summary

The reassessment of the anatomical examination of the human remains from the five A-Group cemeteries of the proto-phase demonstrates that of the sample of preserved and examined bodies, five individuals had died of violence and another six individuals had survived a violent attack (Table 2). The sample consisted of 167 burials, and 7 per cent of the population was affected by violence attested in the osteological material. Most of the injuries seem to have been caused by blunt force violence – most probably stone maces. However, two individuals died in attacks where sharp force violence also was used – most likely copper-alloy weapons. Both males and females were injured and killed in these cemeteries (see Appendices 2-6).

Violent deaths, violent injuries antemortem, absent and broken skulls in total and in per cent in A-Group cemeteries dating to the proto-phase. Data from Appendices 2-6.

Table 2. Violent deaths, violent injuries antemortem, missing skulls, and broken skulls in total and in per cent in A-Group cemeteries dating to the proto-phase. Data from Appendices 2-6.

Furthermore, nine individuals appear to have been buried without their skull, and seventeen individuals were uncovered with their skull broken (see Table 2). In the sample of 167 burials, the skull was missing in 5 per cent of the graves. Additionally, 10 per cent of the burials were found with the head broken. Relevant comparative evidence from the Bronze Age is hard to find. Most cemeteries in Lower Nubia have been plundered in ancient and modern times. Furthermore, the human remains in Lower Nubia received less scientific attention after the first investigation by Elliot Smith and Wood Jones and before the UNESCO salvage campaign in the 1960s.175

However, the data on violent deaths and injuries in these five cemeteries shows that a high per centage of the population was affected by violence, which is compatible with a context of inter-group violent conflict. The frequency of interpersonal violence and missing skulls in cemeteries in Lower Nubia is difficult to assess due to both the widespread disturbances of the cemeteries and the inadequate attention given to the human remains in many cemeteries further south.

8. Discussion of the Violent Clashes between A-Group Predecessors and Naqada People

The previous sections have emphasized three main sources of evidence for war between Naqada intruders and native A-Group predecessors in the region between the First Cataract and Bab el-Kalabsha in the mid-4th millennium BCE. The most obvious evidence is the individuals killed or injured by violence in the A-Group cemeteries of the proto-phase (see Table 2). The second line of evidence is the Naqada cemetery consisting of young males with weapons at Khor Bahan. The third source of evidence is contextual with the shift in the settlement pattern as the Naqada people expanded into northern Lower Nubia and the A-Group predecessors retreated. I will now discuss how these findings can be interpreted as a historical sequence with several episodes of violence in a war between the Naqada people and the A-Group predecessors.

The Naqada people in Hierakonpolis and the A-Group people were aware of each other even before they came into closer contact in northern Lower Nubia in the mid-4th millennium BCE, since both groups sporadically used the area between the First Cataract and Gebel es-Silsila in Upper Egypt before the mid-4th millennium BCE.176 Imports in the graves also demonstrate interaction. The region north of the First Cataract thus appears as the first contact zone between the two populations.177 Ongoing archaeological investigations north of the First Cataract may provide further evidence for interaction between the A-Group and the Naqada peoples throughout the 4th millennium BCE.178

The peoples from the nearest Naqada center at Hierakonpolis were probably responsible for the violent Naqada expansion into Lower Nubia. Hierakonpolis was the southernmost of the Predynastic centers in Upper Egypt, and the site is situated around 130 kilometers downstream from the First Cataract. During Naqada IC, Hierakonpolis had grown to a large urban settlement, and the first elite cemetery including a tomb worthy of a chieftain was established. The developments at Hierakonpolis caused a rapid increase in the population,179 as confirmed by a palaeodemographic examination of Cemetery HK43.180 Archaeobotanical analyses demonstrate that the inhabitants subsisted on cereals, especially emmer wheat, supplemented with herding livestock and collecting wild plants.181 The flood plain was probably reaching the carrying capacity needed to sustain the growing population with the agricultural technology used at the time. Hierakonpolis needed more land, but possibilities for expansion were limited in all directions. Deserts encroached from the east and west, and the Nile Valley to the north and south was already inhabited. To the north, the Naqada people living in the Qena Bend were forming a chiefdom under the big man at Naqada. Since the A-Group predecessors lived dispersed with a decentralized organization, the chieftain of Hierakonpolis must have calculated that it was possible to conquer northern Lower Nubia by killing or displacing the inhabitants.182 Slightly before the expansion into northern Lower Nubia considered in this article, Naqada people had settled and established a cemetery at Kubbaniya between Gebel el-Silsila and the First Cataract.183 Nubiologists often interpret the Naqada cemetery at Kubbaniya in southern Upper Egypt as an A-Group site,184 but the material culture is overwhelmingly Naqadian. For instance, 31 palettes were made of siltstone, seven of other materials, and only four of quartzite.185 Siltstone was the preferred material for the Naqada people, while the A-Group people used other stones – mainly white quartzite.186 The fertile plain at the mouth of Wadi Kubbaniya was probably settled by Naqada people expanding southwards.187 Another Naqada cemetery and settlement with potsherds dating to Naqada IC was recently discovered at Nag el-Qarmila just to the north of Wadi Kubbaniya.188 We do not know if the Naqada people had to expel – violently or not – a native population before they settled in this area.189

I propose that the chieftains of Hierakonpolis dispatched several warrior bands to fight the communities between the First Cataract and Bab el-Kalabsha with the purpose to incorporate this territory into the chiefdom of Hierakonpolis. The A-Group predecessors at Shellal probably faced a violent attack by the Naqada people at the beginning of Naqada IC. Two individuals in Cemetery 7 carried traces of violence on their bones (see Appendix 2). The earliest A-Group occupation in this area appears to have ended with the burial of a male killed by excessive violence. His head was hit repeatedly with weapons causing both blunt and sharp force injuries. According to both pictorial and archaeological sources, the mace was the favoured weapon in hand-to-hand fighting in the Nile Valley during the 4th millennium BCE.190 The final blow at the back of his head was delivered with a copper-alloy axe or adze. This weapon of prestigious metal signals high social status, so it was probably the leader of the warrior band who gave him the final blow. This sharp force injury is furthermore one of the earliest attested uses of copper-alloy weapons in the Nile Valley. The A-Group predecessors appear to have retreated southwards after this violent clash – probably to the vicinity of Khor Ambukol and Khor Bahan where two contemporary cemeteries are placed in proximity. These cemeteries were soon afterwards abandoned due to new violent attacks.

The Naqada peoples buried in Cemetery 17 at Khor Bahan appear so uniformly equipped with mace-heads and other weapons that they probably formed a band of warriors under central command acting on the orders of the chieftain of Hierakonpolis. Males constituted a majority of 94 per cent of the burials in this cemetery (see Appendix 1). In addition, seven graves with weapons but no body have been interpreted as cenotaphs for killed warriors.191 The Naqada warriors buried at Khor Bahan appear to have died young, which strongly suggests that the A-Group predecessors fiercely fought back the intruders. Outnumbered by the Naqada warriors, the A-Group predecessors probably attacked in ambushes. The preferred weapons of ambushes during the Bronze Age were bows and arrows.192 Warrior bands dispatched to foreign territory traditionally consist of men,193 like the Naqada warriors in this study. In defensive warfare in the vicinity of habitation sites, women can participate in the fighting and thus be wounded or killed.194 Females were among the killed and wounded in the cemeteries of the A-Group predecessors in this study (see Appendices 2 to 6).

Violence can contribute to formalizing group identities.195 The forging of new collective identities can take the form of ethnogenesis. The A-Group predecessors needed to distinguish between friends and enemies after the Naqada people attacked them. Moreover, it became crucial to belong to a community larger than corporate lineage groups to be protected, and thus essential to be recognized visually as different from the enemy, whom the A-Group people appear to have attacked in ambushes. The ethnic identity of the A-Group people was probably established as they perceived themselves as culturally different from the Naqada people and perhaps the A-Group predecessors saw themselves as having common descent in accordance with a former lineage organization of the society.196 The A-Group predecessors thus appear to have conceived themselves as a distinctive cultural group in accordance with the definition of ethnic groups presented initially. I thus see the ethnogenesis of the A-Group predecessors from an emic perspective placing the A-Group predecessors as actors forging their own ethnic identity.197 The Naqada people also treated the A-Group predecessors as culturally different, so the ethnic identity made an impact on their relationship.

Interpreted together, the evidence presented strongly suggests that the communities of native A-Group predecessors at Shellal, Khor Ambukol, and Khor Bahan at first attempted to defend their territory when the Naqada people entered the region during Naqada IC. The Naqada warriors buried in Cemetery 17 indicate that the A-Group predecessors resisted the expansion at a high cost of lives for the intruders. Despite opposition, the warriors from Hierakonpolis achieved their mission – likely because they were better organized by being trained for combat and better equipped with specialized weapons of war, and they probably outnumbered the A-Group predecessors. The first clashes ended when the native people retreated, first from Shellal and then from Khor Ambukol and Khor Bahan. The decisive battle probably took place near Khor Bahan where the Naqada warriors were buried in the cemetery recently abandoned by the A-Group predecessors. The graves of fallen warriors are usually located close to the battlefield,198 and the graves without bodies suggest that not all fallen warriors were brought back to the site for burial. After the battle near Khor Bahan, the A-Group predecessors appear to have resettled on the plains of Meris and Dehmit further south.

The next clashes took place soon afterwards at Meris and Dehmit. Beside the violent deaths and injuries, I have identified a pattern where up to 12 per cent of the individuals in the cemeteries of the A-Group predecessors in northern Lower Nubia were recorded with the skull absent (see Table 2). Furthermore, up to 22 per cent of the individuals had their skull broken post-mortem. Especially cemeteries 41 and 45 have high numbers of missing and broken skulls. Archaeologists usually explain the absence of the skull in Nubia as an effect of grave plundering, and this explanation may in many instances be valid. However, the systematic pattern seen in the five cemeteries investigated here may require a different explanation for why the skull was absent or broken in so high numbers on a frontier with violent conflict.

As we saw in the examination of violence in the earliest A-Group cemeteries, a male in grave 211 in Cemetery 45/200 had been stabbed in the back of his neck seven times with a sharp implement – possibly a copper-alloy dagger or spear (see Appendix 6). A reconstruction of the violence placed the man prostrate with his face down in front of his assailant who struck him seven times. If the weapon indeed was a copper-alloy dagger or spear, as suggested from the cut marks and comparable decapitations at Hierakonpolis,199 then his attacker was probably coming from Upper Egypt. Only the Naqada people had access to copper-alloy weapons at this time. By considering the context of war between the Naqada people and A-Group predecessors, the male had probably been wounded by an arrowshot or taken captive, and then finished off by the stabbing in the neck. The missing skulls in other A-Group cemeteries of the proto-phase could have been executions of wounded warriors in skirmishes with Naqada people. More in line with the evidence, the head was possibly removed postmortem after some time of decomposition on the battlefield before the body was buried by the next of kin. The removals of the heads were probably undertaken in acts of ritual violence. Postmortem violence and humiliation of the enemy is also attested in Syria in the mid-4th millennium BCE.200

The seizure, modification, and display of human body parts as trophies have been practiced worldwide since prehistoric times.201 Decapitation was also practiced in Upper Egypt – even at the contemporary and neighbouring center of Hierakonpolis.202 The head is considered the most prestigious trophy since the head is believed to contain the individual’s spirit.203 Simon Harrison has argued that headhunting is a device to mask or deny the humanness of a chosen category of people in societies where male identity is related to hunting animals.204 Moreover, Harrison suggests that actors created and negotiated group boundaries and thus the groups themselves through such practices:

“[H]eads were taken not because the victims were distant strangers, but to make them distant, to generate estrangement, and ‘produce’ a category of people as enemies with whom to fight.”205

This quote seems analogous to the war between the Naqada people and the A-Group predecessors in northern Lower Nubia after the first clashes. Masculine identity at Hierakonpolis appears associated with hunting and warfare during Naqada IC-IIA, and I suggest that headhunting in northern Lower Nubia was related to creating and negotiating a boundary between the A-Group predecessors and the Naqada peoples. The Naqada people needed to make the A-Group predecessors more distant to justify expelling them from their land.

The presence of competition and conflict can intensify ethnic polarization.206 The Naqada people and the A-Group predecessors shared cultural similarities from a Neolithic body-centred habitus, like contracted burials on the side and cosmetic palettes.207 Although the first violent confrontation provoked an ethnogenesis among the A-Group predecessors, the Naqada people proceeded to make them more different after the first clashes. The next process of differentiation between the A-Group and the Naqada peoples is comparable to a schismogenesis, whereby cultural groups define themselves against each other.

9. Concluding Remarks on Ethnogenesis and Schismogenesis in Lower Nubia

In this article, I have argued that two culturally related, but distinctive populations – the Naqada people and the A-Group predecessors – clashed in deadly battles in northern Lower Nubia in the mid-4th millennium BCE. Since the first violent clashes of the two groups, the people north and south of the First Cataract region came to perceive themselves as culturally different. The violent conflict arose from increased contact and intensive competition for territory and resources. This context furthermore created the social environment where the forging of an ethnic identity became necessary for the A-Group predecessors. The Naqada people also recognized the A-Group predecessors as different from themselves, and ethnicity became an organizational factor in the relationship between the two groups.

The war was instigated by a violent expansion of the Naqada people from Hierakonpolis. Several episodes of violence can be detected with probable battles at Shellal, Khor Bahan, and Dehmit. The first violent clashes at Shellal and Khor Bahan instigated the confrontational ethnogenesis of the A-Group predecessors. The conflict escalated with new violent clashes near Meris and Dehmit. Headhunting appears to have contributed to a schismogenesis by dehumanizing the other. The A-Group predecessors and the Naqada people increasingly came to define themselves in opposition to each other, and their cultural and social differences continued to widen with time. For the latter half of the 4th millennium BCE, the A-Group people left a distinctive archaeological heritage in the region between Bab el-Kalabsha in northern Lower Nubia and Batn el-Hajar above the Second Cataract.

When the ethnic boundary was in place, the Naqada people established at least eight sites in northern Lower Nubia.208 The narrow passage with towering cliffs at Bab el-Kalabsha was a natural position for exercising territorial control, and the distribution of sites suggests that this was the border between A-Group and Naqada territory. During the Early A-Group phase, the A-Group people and the Naqada people started interacting in peaceful ways across the ethnic boundary.209 Exchange between the Naqada people and the A-Group people made it profitable to belong to the A-Group people as the whole community prospered.210 The Naqada people retreated from northern Lower Nubia with the establishment of the southern border of the dynastic and territorial state of Egypt at the First Cataract at the shift between Naqada IIIB and IIIC around 3085 BCE.211 The A-Group people became eradicated as an ethnic group when the newly founded state of ancient Egypt undertook a violent expansion into Lower Nubia after ca. 3085 BCE.212

10. Appendices

Human remains and weapons in the Naqada graves in Cemetery 17. Data from Elliot Smith and Wood Jones (1910) and Reisner (1910).

Appendix 1: Human remains and weapons in the Naqada graves in Cemetery 17. Data from Elliot Smith and Wood Jones (1910) and Reisner (1910).

Burials with human remains and osteological case descriptions for individuals with evidence of healed or unhealed trauma related to interpersonal violence in Cemetery 7. Data from Elliot Smith and Wood Jones (1910).

Appendix 2: Burials with human remains and osteological case descriptions for individuals with evidence of healed or unhealed trauma related to interpersonal violence in Cemetery 7. Data from Elliot Smith and Wood Jones (1910).

Burials with human remains in Cemetery 14. Osteological case descriptions for individuals with evidence of trauma related to interpersonal violence and absent or broken skulls. Data from Elliot Smith and Wood Jones (1910).

Appendix 3: Burials with human remains in Cemetery 14. Osteological case descriptions for individuals with evidence of trauma related to interpersonal violence and absent or broken skulls. Data from Elliot Smith and Wood Jones (1910).

Burials with human remains in the A-Group predecessor part of Cemetery 17. Osteological case descriptions for individuals with evidence of trauma related to interpersonal violence and absent skull. Data from Elliot Smith and Wood Jones (1910).

Appendix 4: Burials with human remains in the A-Group predecessor part of Cemetery 17. Osteological case descriptions for individuals with evidence of trauma related to interpersonal violence and absent skull. Data from Elliot Smith and Wood Jones (1910).

Burials with human remains and individuals with absent or broken skulls in Cemetery 41. Data from Elliot Smith and Wood Jones (1910).

Appendix 5: Burials with human remains and individuals with absent or broken skulls in Cemetery 41. Data from Elliot Smith and Wood Jones (1910).

Burials with human remains in Cemetery 45. Osteological case descriptions for individuals with evidence of trauma related to interpersonal violence and absent or broken skulls. Data from Elliot Smith and Wood Jones (1910).

Appendix 6: Burials with human remains in Cemetery 45. Osteological case descriptions for individuals with evidence of trauma related to interpersonal violence and absent or broken skulls. Data from Elliot Smith and Wood Jones (1910).

11. Acknowledgements

This article is an expansion of ideas first presented in my ph.d.-thesis War on the Southern Frontier of the Emerging State of Ancient Egypt (2015). I would like to express my gratitude to Stuart Tyson Smith and Rennan Lemos for conducting an open peer-review of this article. They provided thoughtful suggestions, and their constructive comments helped to improve the quality and clarity of the argument. I also wish to thank Alexandros Tsakos for handling the peer-review process of this article and reading the final draft. His attention to detail has improved the final product. Any remaining errors are my own.

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  1. For general discussions of the concept ethnogenesis, see Roosens, Creating Ethnicity, and Weik, “The Archaeology of Ethnogenesis.” ↩︎

  2. Nordström divided the A-Group into three stages, Early, Classic/Middle, and Terminal, in his seminal work Neolithic and A-Group Sites, p. 18. ↩︎

  3. Voss, “What’s new?” p. 656. ↩︎

  4. Bateson, Naven↩︎

  5. Wengrow and Graeber, “Many Seasons Ago,” p. 238. See also Graeber and Wengrow, The Dawn of Everything, especially Chapter 5. ↩︎

  6. Trigger, History and Settlement in Lower Nubia, p. 14. ↩︎

  7. See Nordström, Neolithic and A-Group Sites, p. 19 for a brief reference to the violent cases noted by Elliot Smith and Wood Jones (see below). ↩︎

  8. Wengrow et al., “Cultural Convergence in the Neolithic of the Nile Valley,” pp. 102-3. ↩︎

  9. Stevenson, “The Egyptian Predynastic and State Formation,” p. 431. ↩︎

  10. Bard, “Political Economies of Predynastic Egypt and the Formation of the Early State,” p. 6 and p. 12. ↩︎

  11. Bard, “Political Economies of Predynastic Egypt and the Formation of the Early State,” p. 1; Köhler, “Prehistoric Egypt,” p. 144; Stevenson, “The Egyptian Predynastic and State Formation,” p. 451. ↩︎

  12. See Dee et al., “An Absolute Chronology for Early Egypt,” for absolute dates. ↩︎

  13. Hafsaas-Tsakos, War on the Southern Frontier of the Emerging State of Ancient Egypt, p. 123. ↩︎

  14. Nordström, Neolithic and A-Group sites; Hafsaas-Tsakos, “Hierarchy and Heterarchy”; Roy, The Politics of Trade; Glück, “The Heritage of the A-Group”; Gatto, “The A-Group and 4th Millennium BCE Nubia.” ↩︎

  15. See for instance Takamiya, “Egyptian Pottery Distribution in A-Group Cemeteries,” p. 56 for the establishment of the contact, and Hafsaas-Tsakos, War on the Southern Frontier of the Emerging State of Ancient Egypt, p. 337. ↩︎

  16. Wengrow et al., “Cultural Convergence in the Neolithic of the Nile Valley,” p. 98; Gatto, “The A-Group and 4th Millennium BCE Nubia,” p. 129. ↩︎

  17. Some examples from the last 20 years: Hendrickx, “Predynastic—Early Dynastic Chronology,” p. 71 and p. 76; Wengrow, The Archaeology of Early Egypt, p. 75; Bard, “Political Economies of Predynastic Egypt and the Formation of the Early State”; Gatto, “The A-Group and 4th Millennium BCE Nubia,” p. 127 and p. 129. ↩︎

  18. Also spelled Kubaniya and Kubaniyeh. ↩︎

  19. Some examples from the last 20 years: Edwards, The Nubian past, pp. 68-9; Nordström, “The Nubian A-Group,” p. 134; Takamiya, “Egyptian Pottery Distribution in A-Group Cemeteries,” p. 41; Friedman, “The Nubian Cemetery at Hierakonpolis,” p. 62; Török, Between Two Worlds, p. 35; Roy, The Politics of Trade, p. 49; Glück, “The Heritage of the A-Group,” p. 199; Meurer, “Nubians in Egypt from the Early Dynastic Period to the New Kingdom,” p. 290. ↩︎

  20. Gatto, “Cultural Entanglement at the Dawn of the Egyptian History,” p. 117; Gatto, “The A-Group and 4th Millennium BCE Nubia,” p. 130. ↩︎

  21. See also Hafsaas-Tsakos, War on the Southern Frontier of the Emerging State of Ancient Egypt, p. 336. ↩︎

  22. Earle and Kristiansen, “Organizing Bronze Age Societies,” p. 243. ↩︎

  23. Otto, Thrane, and Vandkilde, “Warfare and Society,” pp. 16-7. ↩︎

  24. Jones, The Archaeology of Ethnicity, p. xiii. ↩︎

  25. Barth, “Introduction,” pp. 10-1. ↩︎

  26. Barth, “Enduring and Emerging Issues in the Analysis of Ethnicity,” p. 12; Smith, “Ethnicity,” p. 1. ↩︎

  27. Barth, “Introduction,” pp. 10-1. ↩︎

  28. E.g., Smith, Wretched Kush, p. 14. ↩︎

  29. Eriksen, Ethnicity and Nationalism, p. 12. ↩︎

  30. Jones, The Archaeology of Ethnicity, p. 75 and p. 78. ↩︎

  31. Bentley, “Ethnicity and Practice.” ↩︎

  32. Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, p. 72. ↩︎

  33. Bentley, “Ethnicity and Practice,” p. 27. ↩︎

  34. Jones, The Archaeology of Ethnicity, p. 120. ↩︎

  35. Smith, Wretched Kush, pp. 18-9. ↩︎

  36. Maceachern, “Scale, Style, and Cultural Variation,” p. 123. ↩︎

  37. See Barth, “Introduction,” p. 14. ↩︎

  38. Gosselain, “Materializing Identities.” ↩︎

  39. Hodder, Symbols in Action, p. 22 and p. 58. ↩︎

  40. Emberling, “Ethnicity in Complex Societies,” p. 318; Manzo, “Clash of Civilization on the First Cataract?,” p. 103; Smith, Wretched Kush, p. 31; Stevenson, The Predynastic Egyptian Cemetery of el-Gerzeh, p. 77. ↩︎

  41. Smith, Wretched Kush, p. 19. ↩︎

  42. See Hafsaas-Tsakos, War on the Southern Frontier of the Emerging State of Ancient Egypt, Chapters 8-10. ↩︎

  43. Nordström, Neolithic and A-Group Sites, p. 17. ↩︎

  44. For a more detailed analysis, see Chapter 8 in Hafsaas-Tsakos, War on the Southern Frontier of the Emerging State of Ancient Egypt. See also Gatto, “Egypt and Nubia in the 5th-4th Millennium BCE,” p. 132. ↩︎

  45. See Matić, Ethnic Identities in the Land of the Pharaohs, p. 28. ↩︎

  46. Smith, “Ethnicity.” ↩︎

  47. Hafsaas-Tsakos, War on the Southern Frontier of the Emerging State of Ancient Egypt, p. 253. ↩︎

  48. Wengrow, “Rethinking ‘Cattle Cults’ in Early Egypt,” p. 96; Wengrow et al. “Cultural Convergence in the Neolithic of the Nile Valley,” p. 105; Haaland and Haaland, “Early Farming Societies along the Nile,” p. 548. ↩︎

  49. Stevenson, “The Egyptian Predynastic and State Formation,” p. 432. ↩︎

  50. In the first systematic excavations in northern Lower Nubia, George Reisner gave the different material assemblages the letters A, B, C, D and E to indicate their relative chronological sequence. The so-called A-Group and C-Group have since been used as the terms for the indigenous populations inhabiting Lower Nubia during the Bronze Age. Junker was the first archaeologist dating the B-Group graves earlier than the A-Group in Bericht über die Grabungen der Akademie der Wissenschaften in Wien auf den Friedhöfen von El-Kubanieh-Syd, p. 26. ↩︎

  51. Smith, “The Nubian B-Group.” ↩︎

  52. Smith, “The Development of the A-Group Culture in Northern Lower Nubia.” ↩︎

  53. E.g., Gatto, “Cultural Entanglement at the Dawn of the Egyptian History,” p. 110; Raue, “Cultural Diversity of Nubia in the Later 3rd-mid 2nd Millennium BC,” p. 294. ↩︎

  54. Hafsaas-Tsakos, War on the Southern Frontier of the Emerging State of Ancient Egypt, p. 73. ↩︎

  55. Hafsaas-Tsakos, War on the Southern Frontier of the Emerging State of Ancient Egypt, p. 278. ↩︎

  56. Smith, “The Development of the A-Group Culture in Northern Lower Nubia,” p. 98 and p. 101; Hafsaas-Tsakos, War on the Southern Frontier of the Emerging State of Ancient Egypt, table 1. ↩︎

  57. Reisner, The Archaeological Survey of Nubia, pp. 33-42. ↩︎

  58. Reisner, The Archaeological Survey of Nubia, pp. 33-45. ↩︎

  59. Hafsaas-Tsakos, War on the Southern Frontier of the Emerging State of Ancient Egypt, pp. 257-9. See also Smith, “The Development of the A-Group Culture in Northern Lower Nubia,” p. 98; Roy, The Politics of Trade, pp. 68-9. ↩︎

  60. See Hendrickx, “Predynastic-Early Dynastic Chronology,” table II/1.4b. ↩︎

  61. Usai, “Other Stone Tools,” pp. 56-7. ↩︎

  62. Aston, Harrell, and Shaw, “Stone,” p. 57. ↩︎

  63. Reisner, The Archaeological Survey of Nubia, pp. 33-8. ↩︎

  64. Usai, “Other Stone Tools,” pp. 55-6 ↩︎

  65. Reisner, The Archaeological Survey of Nubia, pp. 141-4. ↩︎

  66. Hafsaas-Tsakos, War on the Southern Frontier of the Emerging State of Ancient Egypt, fig. 77. ↩︎

  67. Elliot Smith and Wood Jones, Report on the Human Remains, pp. 257-62. ↩︎

  68. See Nordström, “Gender and Social Structure in the Nubian A-Group,” for later gender differences among the A-Group people. ↩︎

  69. See Hodgson, “Gender, Culture, and the Myth of the Patriarchal Pastoralist,” p. 10 for pastoral labor structured by gender (and age). ↩︎

  70. Reisner, The Archaeological Survey of Nubia, pp. 142-4. ↩︎

  71. Reisner, The Archaeological Survey of Nubia, fig. 92/1-2. ↩︎

  72. Usai, “Other Stone Tools,” pp. 56-7. ↩︎

  73. Stevenson, “Social Relationships in Predynastic Burials,” p. 191. ↩︎

  74. Reisner, The Archaeological Survey of Nubia, p. 142, p. 144, and plate 66/b/31 and 33. ↩︎

  75. Wengrow et al. “Cultural Convergence in the Neolithic of the Nile Valley,” p. 103. ↩︎

  76. Reisner, The Archaeological Survey of Nubia, pp. 113-4. ↩︎

  77. Hafsaas-Tsakos, War on the Southern Frontier of the Emerging State of Ancient Egypt, p. 269 and p. 285. ↩︎

  78. See above. ↩︎

  79. Hafsaas-Tsaoks, War on the Southern Frontier of the Emerging State of Ancient Egypt, pp. 266-70. ↩︎

  80. Hafsaas-Tsakos, War on the Southern Frontier of the Emerging State of Ancient Egypt, table 18. ↩︎

  81. Reisner, The Archaeological Survey of Nubia, pp. 134-5. ↩︎

  82. Reisner, The Archaeological Survey of Nubia, pp. 133-7. ↩︎

  83. Hafsaas-Tsakos, War on the Southern Frontier of the Emerging State of Ancient Egypt, pp. 271-3. ↩︎

  84. Reisner, The Archaeological Survey of Nubia, p. 211. ↩︎

  85. Reisner, The Archaeological Survey of Nubia, pp. 211-4 and fig. 145. ↩︎

  86. Hafsaas-Tsakos, War on the Southern Frontier of the Emerging State of Ancient Egypt, p. 272. ↩︎

  87. See Reisner, The Archaeological Survey of Nubia, pp. 212-3. ↩︎

  88. Hafsaas-Tsakos, War on the Southern Frontier of the Emerging State of Ancient Egypt, p. 272. ↩︎

  89. Reisner described these flint implements as flakes. The published photos of other flint flakes identified by Reisner are in fact blades, see Reisner, The Archaeological Survey of Nubia, plate 62/b/1 depicting blades called flakes in the description. ↩︎

  90. See Hafsaas-Tsakos, “Edges of Bronze and Expressions of Masculinity,” for a later example of expressions masculine in Nubia. ↩︎

  91. Vandkilde, “Warriors and Warrior Institutions in Copper Age Europe,” p. 405. ↩︎

  92. Elliot Smith and Wood Jones, Report on the Human Remains, pp. 169-73. ↩︎

  93. Reisner, The Archaeological Survey of Nubia, p. 258 and pp. 262-5. ↩︎

  94. Reisner, The Archaeological Survey of Nubia, fig. 212/2-5, 12. ↩︎

  95. Stevenson, The Predynastic Egyptian Cemetery of el-Gerzeh, p. 145. ↩︎

  96. Nordström, Neolithic and A-Group Sites, p. 130. ↩︎

  97. Wengrow et al., “Cultural convergence in the Neolithic of the Nile Valley,” p. 105. ↩︎

  98. Hafsaas-Tsakos, War on the Southern Frontier of the Emerging State of Ancient Egypt, pp. 316-7. ↩︎

  99. Hafsaas-Tsakos, War on the Southern Frontier of the Emerging State of Ancient Egypt, Chapter 9. ↩︎

  100. See Hafsaas-Tsakos, War on the Southern Frontier of the Emerging State of Ancient Egypt, pp. 285-94 for more details. ↩︎

  101. Hafsaas-Tsakos, War on the Southern Frontier of the Emerging State of Ancient Egypt, p. 285. ↩︎

  102. Hafsaas-Tsakos, War on the Southern Frontier of the Emerging State of Ancient Egypt, p. 291. See also Hårde, “Funerary Rituals and Warfare in the Early Bronze Age Nitra Culture of Slovakia and Moravia,” p. 358, for a similar interpretation. ↩︎

  103. Gilbert, Weapons, Warriors and Warfare in Early Egypt, p. 83. ↩︎

  104. McMahon, “State Warfare and Pre-state Violent Conflict,” p. 181 ↩︎

  105. Elliot Smith and Wood Jones, Report on the Human Remains, p. 116. ↩︎

  106. Hafsaas-Tsakos, War on the Southern Frontier of the Emerging State of Ancient Egypt, pp. 327-8. ↩︎

  107. Crevecoeur et al., “New Insights on Interpersonal Violence in the Late Pleistocene Based on the Nile Valley Cemetery of Jebel Sahaba.” ↩︎

  108. McMahon, “State Warfare and Pre-state Violent Conflict,” p. 181. ↩︎

  109. Reisner, The Archaeological Survey of Nubia, pp. 137-9. ↩︎

  110. Elliot Smith and Wood Jones, Report on the Human Remains, pp. 116-7. ↩︎

  111. Friedman, “Hierakonpolis,” pp. 38-9. ↩︎

  112. Droux and Pieri, “Further Adventures at HK6: The 2010 Season,” p. 4. ↩︎

  113. Friedman, “Hierakonpolis,” p. 39. ↩︎

  114. Gilbert, Weapons, Warriors and Warfare in Early Egypt, p. 84. ↩︎

  115. Chaix and Reinold, “Animals in Neolithic Graves.” ↩︎

  116. Reisner, The Archaeological Survey of Nubia, pp. 37-42. ↩︎

  117. Elliot Smith and Wood Jones, Report on the Human Remains↩︎

  118. Helbling, “War and Peace in Societies without Central Power,” p. 115. ↩︎

  119. Judd, “Continuity of Interpersonal Violence between Nubian Communities,” p. 324 with references. ↩︎

  120. Judd, “Trauma in the City of Kerma,” pp. 46-8. ↩︎

  121. Martin and Harrod, “Bioarchaeological Contributions to the Study of Violence,” p. 121. ↩︎

  122. McMahon, “State Warfare and Pre-state Violent Conflict,” p. 182. ↩︎

  123. Elliot Smith and Wood Jones, Report on the Human Remains, pp. 330-2. ↩︎

  124. Filer, “Ancient Egypt and Nubia as a Source of Information for Cranial Injuries,” p. 70. ↩︎

  125. Judd, “Trauma in the City of Kerma,” p. 46; Judd, “The Parry Problem,” p. 1661; Martin and Harrod, “Bioarchaeological Contributions to the Study of Violence,” p. 121. ↩︎

  126. Robinson, “Fractures of the Clavicle in the Adult,” table 3. ↩︎

  127. Martin and Harrod, “Bioarchaeological Contributions to the Study of Violence,” p. 124. ↩︎

  128. Blood-stained bones were observed in some well-preserved human remains, see Elliot Smith and Wood Jones, Report on the Human Remains, pp. 329-30. However, stains from decomposed blood are usually absent in violent deaths uncovered from archaeological contexts, see Walker, “A Bioarchaeological Perspective on the History of Violence,” p. 578. ↩︎

  129. Martin and Harrod, “Bioarchaeological Contributions to the Study of Violence,” p. 124. ↩︎

  130. E.g., Molleson, “The Nubian Pathological Collection”; Filer, “Ancient Egypt and Nubia as a Source of Information for Cranial Injuries”; Judd and Redfern, “Trauma,” p. 362; Cockitt et al. “Capturing a Century of Study.” ↩︎

  131. Elliot Smith and Wood Jones, Report on the Human Remains, pp. 331-2. ↩︎

  132. See Martin and Harrod, “Bioarchaeological Contributions to the Study of Violence,” p. 118. ↩︎

  133. Marshall and Buzon, “Bioarchaeology in the Nile Valley.” ↩︎

  134. Elliot Smith and Wood Jones, Report on the Human Remains, pp. 331-2. ↩︎

  135. Elliot Smith and Wood Jones, Report on the Human Remains, p. 313. ↩︎

  136. Hafsaas-Tsakos, War on the Southern Frontier of the Emerging State of Ancient Egypt, p. 259. ↩︎

  137. Elliot Smith and Wood Jones, Report on the Human Remains, p. 331. ↩︎

  138. Elliot Smith and Wood Jones, Report on the Human Remains, p. 108. ↩︎

  139. Elliot Smith and Wood Jones, Report on the Human Remains, p. 312. ↩︎

  140. Elliot Smith and Wood Jones, Report on the Human Remains, p. 299. ↩︎

  141. Punjabi et al., “Causes and Management of Zygomatic Bone Fractures,” p. 36. ↩︎

  142. Elliot Smith and Wood Jones, Report on the Human Remains, p. 313 and fig. 87. ↩︎

  143. Judd, “The Parry Problem,” p. 1661. ↩︎

  144. Elliot Smith and Wood Jones, Report on the Human Remains, p. 305 and fig. 74. ↩︎

  145. Robinson, “Fractures of the Clavicle in the Adult,” p. 476 and table 3. ↩︎

  146. Elliot Smith and Wood Jones, Report on the Human Remains, p. 306 and fig. 75. ↩︎

  147. Elliot Smith and Wood Jones, Report on the Human Remains, p. 152. ↩︎

  148. Elliot Smith and Wood Jones, Report on the Human Remains, p. 301. ↩︎

  149. See below. ↩︎

  150. Elliot Smith and Wood Jones, Report on the Human Remains, p. 334. ↩︎

  151. Elliot Smith and Wood Jones, Report on the Human Remains, p. 301. ↩︎

  152. Elliot Smith and Wood Jones, Report on the Human Remains, p. 334. ↩︎

  153. Elliot Smith and Wood Jones, Report on the Human Remains, p. 299. ↩︎

  154. Punjabi et al., “Causes and Management of Zygomatic Bone Fractures,” p. 36. ↩︎

  155. Elliot Smith and Wood Jones, Report on the Human Remains, p. 108. ↩︎

  156. Reisner, The Archaeological Survey of Nubia, p. 134. ↩︎

  157. Reisner, The Archaeological Survey of Nubia, pp. 212-4. ↩︎

  158. Elliot Smith and Wood Jones, Report on the Human Remains, pp. 155-6; Reisner, The Archaeological Survey of Nubia, p. 213. ↩︎

  159. Hafsaas-Tsakos, War on the Southern Frontier of the Emerging State of Ancient Egypt, p. 274. ↩︎

  160. Reisner, The Archaeological Survey of Nubia, p. 262 and pp. 264-5 ↩︎

  161. Elliot Smith and Wood Jones, Report on the Human Remains, pp. 170-3. ↩︎

  162. Gilbert, Weapons, Warriors and Warfare in Early Egypt, pp. 42-3. ↩︎

  163. McMahon, “State Warfare and Pre-state Violent Conflict,” p. 182. ↩︎

  164. Dougherty and Friedman, “Sacred or Mundane.” ↩︎

  165. Dougherty and Friedman, “Sacred or Mundane,” p. 310 and p. 313. ↩︎

  166. Dougherty and Friedman, “Sacred or Mundane,” p. 316. ↩︎

  167. Hafsaas-Tsakos, War on the Southern Frontier of the Emerging State of Ancient Egypt, pp. 279-80. ↩︎

  168. Dougherty and Friedman, “Sacred or Mundane,” p. 313. ↩︎

  169. Wilkinson, Early Dynastic Egypt, p. 266. ↩︎

  170. Wengrow, The Archaeology of Early Egypt, pp. 116-23. ↩︎

  171. Dougherty and Friedman, “Sacred or Mundane,” p. 327. ↩︎

  172. Wilkinson, Early Dynastic Egypt, p. 266. ↩︎

  173. Dougherty and Friedman, “Sacred or Mundane,” p. 330. ↩︎

  174. Hafsaas-Tsakos, War on the Southern Frontier of the Emerging State of Ancient Egypt, p. 281. ↩︎

  175. Buzon, “Bioarchaeology of Nubia,” pp. 1052-3. ↩︎

  176. Gatto, “Egypt and Nubia in the 5th-4th Millennia BCE.” ↩︎

  177. Hafsaas-Tsakos, War on the Southern Frontier of the Emerging State of Ancient Egypt, p. 332. ↩︎

  178. See Gatto, “Cultural Entanglement at the Dawn of the Egyptian History.” ↩︎

  179. Hoffman, Hamrouch, and Allen, “A Model of Urban Development for the Hierakonpolis Region,” p. 181; Haaland and Haaland, “Early Farming Societies along the Nile,” p. 546. ↩︎

  180. Batey, Population Dynamics in Predynastic Upper Egypt, p. 31. ↩︎

  181. Fahmy, “Missing Plant Macro Remains as Indicators of Plant Exploitation in Predynastic Egypt.” ↩︎

  182. Hafsaas-Tsakos, War on the Southern Frontier of the Emerging State of Ancient Egypt, p. 324. ↩︎

  183. Junker, Bericht über die Grabungen der Akademie der Wissenschaften in Wien auf den Friedhöfen von El-Kubanieh-Syd Winter 1910-1911↩︎

  184. E.g., Nordström, Neolithic and A-Group Sites, p. 28; Edwards, The Nubian Past, p. 70; Glück, “The Heritage of the A-Group,” p. 209. ↩︎

  185. Hafsaas-Tsakos, War on the Southern Frontier of the Emerging State of Ancient Egypt, p. 126 and n. 10. ↩︎

  186. See above. ↩︎

  187. Hafsaas-Tsakos, War on the Southern Frontier of the Emerging State of Ancient Egypt, p. 123. ↩︎

  188. Gatto, “Egypt and Nubia in the 5th-4th millennia BCE,” pp. 129-30. ↩︎

  189. Hafsaas-Tsakos, War on the Southern Frontier of the Emerging State of Ancient Egypt, p. 324. ↩︎

  190. Hafsaas-Tsakos, War on the Southern Frontier of the Emerging State of Ancient Egypt, p. 325. ↩︎

  191. See above. ↩︎

  192. Hårde, “Funerary Rituals and Warfare in the Early Bronze Age Nitra Culture of Slovakia and Moravia,” p. 372. See also Honegger, “The Archers of Kerma,” in this volume. ↩︎

  193. McMahon, “State Warfare and Pre-state Violent Conflict,” p. 181. ↩︎

  194. McMahon, “State Warfare and Pre-state Violent Conflict,” p. 181. ↩︎

  195. Martin and Harrod, “Bioarchaeology and Violence,” p. 134. ↩︎

  196. Hafsaas-Tsakos, War on the Southern Frontier of the Emerging State of Ancient Egypt, p. 334. ↩︎

  197. See also Smith, Wretched Kush, p. 16, for a general observation. ↩︎

  198. McMahon, “State Warfare and Pre-state Violent Conflict,” p. 181. ↩︎

  199. See Dougherty and Friedman, “Sacred or Mundane,” p. 316. ↩︎

  200. McMahon, “State Warfare and Pre-state Violent Conflict,” p. 180. ↩︎

  201. Pommerening and Hendrickx, “Kopf und Schädel im Alten Ägypten.” ↩︎

  202. See above. ↩︎

  203. Okumura and Siew, “An Osteological Study of Trophy Heads,” p. 685. ↩︎

  204. Harrison, “Skull Trophies of the Pacific War.” ↩︎

  205. Harrison, “Skull Trophies of the Pacific War,” p. 831. ↩︎

  206. Smith, “Ethnicity: Constructions of Self and Other in Ancient Egypt,” p. 117. ↩︎

  207. Wengrow et al., “Cultural Convergence in the Neolithic of the Nile Valley,” p. 105. ↩︎

  208. Hafsaas-Tsakos, War on the Southern Frontier of the Emerging State of Ancient Egypt, chapter 10. ↩︎

  209. Hafsaas-Tsakos, War on the Southern Frontier of the Emerging State of Ancient Egypt, pp. 336-7. ↩︎

  210. Hafsaas-Tsakos, “Hierarchy and Heterarchy.” ↩︎

  211. Seidlmayer, “Town and State in the Early Old Kingdom,” pp. 112-3. ↩︎

  212. Smith, “Nubia and Egypt,” p. 259; Edwards, The Nubian Past, p. 73; Török, Between Two Worlds, pp. 50-1; Hafsaas-Tsakos, War on the Southern Frontier of the Emerging State of Ancient Egypt, pp. 376-81. ↩︎

article⁄The Archers of Kerma: Warrior Image and Birth of a State
abstract⁄A research programme conducted by the Swiss archaeological mission in the oldest sectors of the Eastern Cemetery of Kerma has uncovered the tombs of several dozen archers. The appearance of these armed warriors dating from ca. 2300 BC onwards can be put in parallel with the resumption of commercial activities between Egypt and Nubia, illustrated by the Harkhuf expeditions. The archers and their warrior attributes probably participate in the emergence of kingship ca. 2000 BC, which takes control of the commercial axis along the Nile and is illustrated by the accumulation of wealth and the development of servitude. This article proposes to describe these Kerma archers and then to look at the evolution of funerary rites that show in their own way how a social hierarchy emerges that will lead to the birth of a state, in this instance the kingdom of Kerma.
keywords⁄archers, warriors, Kerma, kingdom, social stratification

1. Introduction

It is known that at the time of the Egyptian Kingdom, Nubia represented a neighbouring and often rival entity, extending from the 1st to the 5th Cataracts. Its renowned warriors are represented by archers and are depicted on numerous occasions in the Nile valley, on stelae, engraved rocks, bas-reliefs and painted tomb walls. As early as the Old Kingdom, archers were enrolled in the Egyptian armies as mercenaries and probably formed troops, as shown by the model representing them in the tomb of Prince Mesheti (11th Dynasty). The territory of Nubia is itself designated from the beginning of the 3rd millennium by a hieroglyph in the shape of a bow, Ta-Sety, which means the land of the bow. Despite this evidence of the importance of these warriors and their weapons, archaeological attestations of tombs of Nubian archers contemporary with the Egyptian Kingdom are anecdotal. Only a few tombs from the Kerma period (2550-1480 BC) have been reported by Charles Bonnet in his excavation reports on the Eastern Cemetery of Kerma.1 His most important discovery consists of an almost intact tomb of a naturally mummified archer (Figure 1). Also dating from the Kerma ancien II phase (2300-2150 BC), the same tomb contained the body of a young man, whose head had been displaced by grave-robbers.2 He was accompanied by arrow remains and two bows of simple curvature, 120 cm long. One of the bows was decorated with a plume of ostrich feathers.

Reconstruction of the grave of the mummified archer excavated by Bonnet (1982), made with the original natural mummy, pottery and plume of ostrich feathers (Kerma ancien II, 2300-2150 BC) Figure 1. Reconstruction of the grave of the mummified archer excavated by Bonnet (1982), made with the original natural mummy, pottery and plume of ostrich feathers (Kerma ancien II, 2300-2150 BC)

The Eastern Cemetery of the Kingdom of Kerma3 is known for the abundance of weapons found in its tombs4 as well as the abundant evidence of trauma found on the skeletons there.5

Plan of the Eastern Cemetery with the locations of large graves excavated since the early 20th century identified. The sectors investigated by Reisner between 1913-1916 are indicated. Sectors 1-27 were excavated by Bonnet between 1980-1997, whilst Sectors 27-31, as well as Sector 8, have been excavated or re-examined during our excavations which began in 2008. Figure 2. Plan of the Eastern Cemetery with the locations of large graves excavated since the early 20th century identified. The sectors investigated by Reisner between 1913-1916 are indicated. Sectors 1-27 were excavated by Bonnet between 1980-1997, whilst Sectors 27-31, as well as Sector 8, have been excavated or re-examined during our excavations which began in 2008.

These observations led to the view of this society as a warlike aristocracy, where testimonies of violence were common. These reflections have so far focused on the final phase of the cemetery and of the Kingdom (1750-1500 BC), best known thanks to the work of George A. Reisner, undertaken at the beginning of the 20th century.6 Since then, excavations were undertaken between 1979 and 1999 by Charles Bonnet, who investigated 27 sectors spread over its entire surface (Figure 2), and between 2008 and 2018, we have undertaken systematic excavations in sectors of the early stages of the cemetery (2550-1950 BC), that correspond to the formation of the Kingdom of Kerma.7 They provide previously unpublished information on the appearance of the first warriors in the form of the famous Nubian archers, on cases of violence, as well as on the phenomena of servitude, wealth, and funerary ostentation that was co-eval with the birth of the kingdom and its domination over a large part of Upper Nubia.

2. The Eastern Cemetery of Kerma and its New Excavation

As part of our programme on the evolution of society in Early Kerma, we have reinvestigated and completed the excavations of Sectors 23, 27, and 8, and have opened Sectors 28, 29, 30, and 31 (Figure 3). The tombs have been systematically excavated, taking into account information on the surface (burial mounds, ceramic deposits, bucrania, fireplaces, and post holes) and collecting the material contained in the tombs and infill of the pits. Knowing that more than 99% of the graves dating from this period of the necropolis' utilisation were subsequently looted, the infill of the pits is often the only way to get an idea of the contents of the tomb and of the ceramics placed on the surface beside the mound.

The work undertaken in recent years has made it possible to build a precise chronology for the early phases of the cemetery, from the beginning of Early Kerma to the beginning of Middle Kerma. The study and spatial distribution of the 409 tombs excavated since 2008 allows us to follow in detail each stage from the evolution of funeral rites. An absolute chronology was constructed using 23 14C dates that were confronted with the typology of Kerma pottery and Egyptian imports, and this makes it possible to distinguish five successive phases between 2550 and 1950 BC: Kerma ancien 0, I, II, III, and Kerma moyen I (Figure 3).8

Map of the Early Kerma and early Middle Kerma sectors in the Eastern Cemetery. From the initial installation in Kerma ancien 0 (2550-2450 BC) to the emergence of the first royal tomb in Kerma moyen I (2050-1950 BC), the dimensions of the tombs increase, the rituals become more complex and the hierarchisation of society increases until the appearance of a royalty. Figure 3. Map of the Early Kerma and early Middle Kerma sectors in the Eastern Cemetery. From the initial installation in Kerma ancien 0 (2550-2450 BC) to the emergence of the first royal tomb in Kerma moyen I (2050-1950 BC), the dimensions of the tombs increase, the rituals become more complex and the hierarchisation of society increases until the appearance of a royalty.

We thus have a relatively precise chronological framework which highlights five distinct phases of relatively short duration from the beginning of Early Kerma to the Middle Kerma.

Regarding the spatial analysis, the first observed tendency during this evolution appears to be the progressive increase in the size of the graves’ pits. These are small and rectangular during Kerma ancien 0 (average surface of 0.9 m2), becoming oval and only marginally larger during Kerma ancien I (average surface of 1.2 m2). It is only from Kerma ancien II that they mostly become larger and more circular (average surface of 4.2 m2), with this tendency continuing in Kerma ancien III, with the larger pits attaining a diameter exceeding 4 metres, occasionally more quadrangular than circular (average surface of 5 m2). Then, in Kerma moyen I appeared the first royal graves with a diameter ranging between 7 to 10 metres.

In the oldest sectors (Kerma ancien 0 and I) the tombs are all of equal size and their contents do not give the image of strong social distinction. As is the rule in the Kerma period, the bodies are laid on their right side, head towards the east. The objects found in the tombs are not very abundant and metal (gold, copper alloy) is very rare. With regards to pottery, there is a marked presence of C-Group pots, which becomes more discrete over time.9

The Kerma ancien II phase shows spectacular changes in the funerary rites, compared to the earlier phases in the cemetery. The tombs are generally larger and contain more objects. Metal is more regularly attested, notably in the form of bronze mirrors and gold necklaces or pendants. Animal sacrifices make their appearance (dogs, caprines) as well as bucrania in front of some tumuli. Tombs with multiple burials are also more frequent, indicating the development of accompanying or sacrificed people, which will increase significantly in the succeeding periods. The distinction between male and female graves becomes systematic and stereotyped (Figure 4). If the buried women are systematically endowed with a stick, an ornament, and sometimes particular objects or tools such as potter's tools, the male tombs are systematically endowed with a bow.10

During the Kerma ancien III phase, the same tendencies identified in the previous phase continued. In the sectors of this period, we noticed that young boys' graves were also accompanied by bows (Figure 5).

Graves of an archer and of a woman with a stick of the Kerma ancien II Phase (2300-2100 BC), found in Sector 23 of the Easter Cemetery of Kerma. The grave of the archer contained two individuals: a young man in the central position and a woman placed by his side. A dog, a bow, an ostrich feathers fan, and a bronze mirror accompanied the young man. The grave with a wooden stick contained a woman aged 20-29 years. Both graves were partially plundered and a part of the skeletons is here reconstructed. Figure 4. Graves of an archer and of a woman with a stick of the Kerma ancien II Phase (2300-2100 BC), found in Sector 23 of the Easter Cemetery of Kerma. The grave of the archer contained two individuals: a young man in the central position and a woman placed by his side. A dog, a bow, an ostrich feathers fan, and a bronze mirror accompanied the young man. The grave with a wooden stick contained a woman aged 20-29 years. Both graves were partially plundered and a part of the skeletons is here reconstructed.

The four youngest individuals with a bow are less than 4 years old and the one in Figure 5 has a bow that is too large for his age.

Intact grave of a 1.5-year-old child with a bow, a cushion made of vegetable matter, and a pot (Kerma ancien III, Sector 29). As is the rule in Kerma graves, the body was placed on a carefully cut piece of bovine pelt. Figure 5. Intact grave of a 1.5-year-old child with a bow, a cushion made of vegetable matter, and a pot (Kerma ancien III, Sector 29). As is the rule in Kerma graves, the body was placed on a carefully cut piece of bovine pelt.

This observation and their age – less than two years for two of them – shows that these bows are not necessarily placed in tombs to express the activity of the deceased, but also have a symbolic connotation related to male status. The richest graves sometimes distinguish themselves in a more spectacular manner. One of them had 50 aligned bucrania to the south and 38 decorated pots on the surface. It is at the beginning of Middle Kerma (Kerma moyen I) that the first royal graves appeared, like that recently discovered in Sector 31 of which the diameter exceeds 10 metres and has over 1400 bucrania laid out in front of the tumulus.11

Middle Kerma grave with bucrania deposited south of the tumuli and a mud-brick chapel located to the west (ca. 1900 BC). Figure 6. Middle Kerma grave with bucrania deposited south of the tumuli and a mud-brick chapel located to the west (ca. 1900 BC).

Differences between burials increase during Middle Kerma and for this period it is not rare to find grave-pits of up to 10-15 meters in diameter. This ranking between burials suggests a stratified society, which would culminate at the end of the Kingdom of Kerma. The central inhumations in the largest tumuli are supposed to be the graves of the rulers; the other tumuli could belong to high status individuals or to free men and women.12 In certain instances a mud-brick chapel was erected on the west side of the tumulus (Figure 6).13

During Classic Kerma the diameter of the largest graves is between 30 and 90 meters. The three most famous ones were built to a uniform size with tumuli approximately 90 meters in diameter (KIII, IV, X). Composed of a complex internal structure of mud-brick walls with a corridor giving access to a central vaulted chamber, these tumuli are assumed to belong to the most powerful rulers of Kerma14. The grave goods found in these burials and in some subsidiary ones were particularly elaborate and the proportion of Egyptian imports high.15 Two monumental funerary temples (KI, KXI) were erected north-west of the tumuli KIII and KX. The Eastern Cemetery was abandoned as a location for royal burials during the conquest of Kush by the Egyptians of the 18th Dynasty, about 1500 BC. A last royal grave was erected 4 km to the west, south of the ancient town of Kerma and dates about 1480 BC.16

3. The Archers’ Graves

From the Kerma ancien II to the Kerma moyen I phases onwards (Figure 3) all male tombs that we excavated between 2008 and 2018 are equipped with a bow, even those of children.17 Of course, many graves are too looted to conclude that archery equipment was present, but as soon as the grave is better preserved, the presence of archery elements is attested, the smallest clue being the presence of the string made of twisted sinews, probably from sheep or goats (Figure 7). In view of the number of graves excavated, we can therefore suppose that the presence of men or boys with weapons is systematic for the earlier phases. However, it is not possible to conclude definitively that the presence of male archers was systematic for all phases of the Eastern Cemetery without looking at the previous excavations of Reisner and Bonnet.

Bowstring made of sheep&rsquo;s or goat&rsquo;s sinew with a fixation system at one end. Figure 7. Bowstring made of sheep’s or goat’s sinew with a fixation system at one end.

The "Cemetery North", close to our excavations (2008-2018), was excavated in 1915 by Reisner and in 1916 by his assistant W. G. Kemp (135 graves). The documentation published after the death of Reisner18 is of lesser quality than for the southern part of the cemetery, corresponding to Classic Kerma and excavated in 1913-1914.19 The tombs excavated by Kemp have not been spatially located. Nevertheless, we know from our excavations that the "Cemetery N" covers the Kerma ancien III and Kerma moyen I phases. The documentation identifies the grave of a woman with a staff, but there is no evidence of bows. In view of the discreet nature of the evidence for archery, we believe that it has simply not been identified. It must be said that the tombs were systematically excavated by Egyptians from the village of Kouft, assisted by Nubians. It is therefore very likely that they simply did not observe these fleeting remains.

In the “Cemetery M” (Middle Kerma, see figure 3), the documentation, published with that of the “Cemetery N”, is not better than the latter. No archer or bow was identified. It is only in Classic Kerma that this practice seems to disappear, according to Reisner’s documentation,20 which is of much better quality than that published by Dunham.21 It must be said that this part of the cemetery is different from that of Early and Middle Kerma. Our demographic estimate for the Eastern Cemetery suggests at least 36,000 buried individuals, but those attributed to Classic Kerma envelops only 700 individuals. Simulations of burial recruitment show that this part of the cemetery is the most selective and contains only a small section of the ruling class, in contrast to earlier periods. At this time, the armed persons are accompanied by daggers, which led Hafsaas to conclude that there was a warrior elite displaying this type of weapon, as was the case in Europe in the Late Bronze and Iron Ages.22

In the excavations of Bonnet, which involved just over 250 tombs, a few archers were identified. Again, the excavations were carried out almost systematically by Nubian excavators who were not trained to find small remains as bow stings. Nevertheless, Bonnet reports the presence of some archers in Early Kerma sectors, as well as in Middle Kerma sectors. The famous mummy of an archer (Figure 1) comes from Sector 423 (Kerma ancien II) and five other graves of archers were excavated in Sector 23 (Kerma ancien II).24 For Middle Kerma, two graves of archers were discovered in Sector 9 and one in Sector 11 (Kerma moyen I), as well as another in sector 20 (Kerma moyen IV).25 Finally, we had the opportunity to excavate a grave in sector 24 (Kerma moyen V) which contained 36 lunates corresponding to arrowheads.26 From all these observations, we can assume that the tradition of male burials as archers started in the Kerma ancien II phase and must have continued until the end of Middle Kerma.27

Plundered grave containing an adult with his leather loincloth and a double bend bow (Kerma ancien II, Sector 23). For detail of the bow, see figure 8b Figure 8a. Plundered grave containing an adult with his leather loincloth and a double bend bow (Kerma ancien II, Sector 23). For detail of the bow, see figure 8b

Let us return to the archers' graves of the oldest sectors.28 Their equipment consists of:

- One or two bows, single or double-curved (Figures 8a and 8b). It seems to us that not too much should be made of this distinction, because the double curvature can be achieved by deformation. It does not necessarily suggest a composite bow, attested in Egypt later and supposedly introduced by the Hyksos.29 The bow with a double curvature does not necessarily imply that it is composite, which is a far more sophisticated manufacturing technique, since it is not attested in Africa at this time. On the other hand, ethnographic material describes simple techniques to obtain a strong incurvation of the extremities of the bow, which consist in bending the wood by means of ligaments and forms.30 It is probably the use of similar techniques which explain the well-attested differences in the Nubian bows. The most common dimension is 120 cm, but two larger bows, about 150 cm long, have been found. In a child’s tomb, a small model, about 90 cm long, was discovered. The remains of bow-strings have often been found in situ alongside the bow. In some instances, the extent of the bow’s curvature leads one to believe that it was strung when placed in the tomb. The bow is always placed to the north of the body, close to the hands. It is occasionally decorated with a plume of ostrich feathers at its extremity (Figure 9). It has not been possible to identify the species of wood used to manufacture the bows since these had been too severely damaged by termites.

Detail of a double bend bow whose length is over 1,5 m (Kerma ancien II, Sector 23). Figure 8b. Detail of a double bend bow whose length is over 1,5 m (Kerma ancien II, Sector 23).

Plume of ostrich feathers with a string, which was rolled up at the extremity of the bow (Kerma ancien II, Sector 23). Figure 9. Plume of ostrich feathers with a string, which was rolled up at the extremity of the bow (Kerma ancien II, Sector 23).

- Reed arrows with a tail and several embedded microliths, similar to the arrows of Naga-ed-Der in Egypt, dated to the 6th to 12th Dynasty, i.e., a period contemporaneous with Middle Kerma.31 The arrowheads are lunates made of quartz, carnelian, or sometimes flint (Figure 10). The few surviving examples correspond to the A3 type of fitting defined by Clark et al.32 with one lunate placed at the tip of the arrow and the other two at the sides. The arrows would have been inserted in a quiver, but in at least one instance they were placed directly in the archer's left hand.

Middle Kerma quartz and carnelian lunates used as arrowheads (Kerma moyen V, Sector 24). Figure 10. Middle Kerma quartz and carnelian lunates used as arrowheads (Kerma moyen V, Sector 24).

- A goat-skin leather quiver. Its presence in the tombs is not systematic, but we have been able to identify seven more or less complete ones. They are sewn, some wide and rather short, while others are more slender, like the example in Figure 11.

Leather quiver 72 cm long with braided leather strap attachment (Kerma moyen I, Sector 31). Figure 11. Leather quiver 72 cm long with braided leather strap attachment (Kerma moyen I, Sector 31).

- A leather archer's wrist-guard of a specific model that seems to be typical of the Kerma tradition (Figure 12). These have been found in a few cases in situ, on the left wrist of the deceased (Figure 13), they are always of the same design, with the protective part provided with two concave sides and a pointed end. Some similar specimens are known from Egypt in the mass grave of soldiers found at Deir el-Bahari of the 12th Dynasty.33 This type of wrist-guard is unusual in Egypt and some authors considered it to have come from the north, but it probably belongs to Nubian archers originally attached to the Kerma culture.34

Leather archer’s wrist-guard (Kerma moyen I, Sector 8). Figure 12. Leather archer’s wrist-guard (Kerma moyen I, Sector 8).

Intact grave of an 18 years old archer. He wore a necklace with a Red Sea shell pendant, an ostrich feather fan, an archer’s wrist-guard on his left wrist, and a sheepskin loincloth covering his hips and legs. He held a few arrows in his hands and a bow was placed beside him of which only a few traces were left by termites. At his feet a sacrificial ram is tied with a rope that goes around the archer&rsquo;s waist several times (Kerma moyen I, Sector 31). Figure 13. Intact grave of an 18 years old archer. He wore a necklace with a Red Sea shell pendant, an ostrich feather fan, an archer’s wrist-guard on his left wrist, and a sheepskin loincloth covering his hips and legs. He held a few arrows in his hands and a bow was placed beside him, of which only a few traces were left by termites. At his feet, a sacrificial ram is tied with a rope that goes around the archer’s waist several times (Kerma moyen I, Sector 31).

Detail of a Nubian archer depicted on a fresco from the Temple of Amun at Beit El-Wali that describes the expedition of Rameses II to Nubia (New Kingdom). Figure 14. Detail of a Nubian archer depicted on a fresco from the Temple of Amun at Beit El-Wali that describes the expedition of Rameses II to Nubia (New Kingdom).

These observations will be the subject of more detailed descriptions in the future, especially the numerous leather objects, which are the subject of a recently started PhD thesis.35 Of all the tombs excavated, only two adult tombs were almost (Figure 1) or completely intact (Figure 13). Enriched by the observations made on the other male tombs, it is possible to reconstruct the appearance of these archers, who resemble quite closely the representations made by the Egyptians, notably those on the temple of Amun at Beit El-Wali, which describe the expedition of Rameses II in Nubia (Figure 14). Although later than the tombs where we made our observations, the white earrings of the men depicted in these frescoes are the same as those that first appear in the Kerma ancien II phase and continue thereafter. In fact, these earrings obtained from a Nile shell were found only in male tombs (Figure 15).

Shell earrings from male graves (Kerma ancien II, Sector 23). Their diameter is between 2 and 3 cm. Figure 15. Shell earrings from male graves (Kerma ancien II, Sector 23). Their diameter is between 2 and 3 cm.

Similarly, the men of Kerma wear a sheep-skin loincloth that still has its wool, which can be dark brown, beige, or quite frequently bicoloured, with alternating black and beige spots (Figure 16).

Sheep-skin loincloth that still has its wool (Kerma ancien I, Sector 27). The bicoloured fur is composed of black and beige spots. Figure 16. Sheep-skin loincloth that still has its wool (Kerma ancien I, Sector 27). The bicoloured fur is composed of black and beige spots.

This bicoloured fur, which bears witness to a selection process resulting from advanced domestication,36 could be a form of imitation of the coat of leopards such as those found on Egyptian frescoes. However, we never found a leopard-skin loincloth during our excavations in the Eastern Cemetery. Moreover, we cannot exclude that some archers were naked and did not wear a loincloth, as suggested by an engraving from Wadi Sabu at the 3rd cataract where a series of six archers wearing a feather on their head, are rendered in a figurative style very close to that observed at Kerma (Figure 17);37 among this group, only one archer is wearing a loincloth, while the others are naked. Finally, we did not have occasion to observe the presence of a feather belonging to the headdress of the buried, but Bonnet points out the trace of a headband in the tomb of a mummified archer (Figure 1) that could have served to attach a feather.38

Scene representing archers on a rock engraving at the 3rd cataract (Wadi Es-Sabu, 3rd or 2nd millennium BC, height of archers about 15 cm). One of them wears a loin-cloth and all have a head dress made of an ostrich feather, a typical Nubian adornment frequently used by the Egyptians when representing their southern neighbours. Figure 17. Scene representing archers on a rock engraving at the 3rd cataract (Wadi Es-Sabu, 3rd or 2nd millennium BC, height of archers about 15 cm). One of them wears a loin-cloth and all have a head dress made of an ostrich feather, a typical Nubian adornment frequently used by the Egyptians when representing their southern neighbours.

4. Evolution of Funeral Rites and the Emergence of a State

At Kerma men and boys of all ages are systematically buried with their archers' equipment from about 2300 BC onwards and this continues for several centuries, probably until the end of Middle Kerma about 1750 BC. Clearly, there is a symbolic dimension to this display, underscored by the fact that even children as young as 1,5 years old are equipped with bows. Moreover, researchers have repeatedly pointed out that there are numerous instances of evidence for violence in the Classic Kerma part of the cemetery,39 and the anthropologist working on the skeletons of Early Kerma has also noted the abundance of such evidence, especially on young men.40 It must therefore be admitted that the presence of archers cannot only be symbolic and that it also reflects the status of these warriors who were perhaps trained in the handling of the bow from a very young age. As reported by the Egyptians, this weapon was of major importance in Nubia and at the time of Early Kerma, the hundreds of excavated tombs did not reveal many other kinds of weapons. Mace heads are exceptional in this period and we found only one in 409 excavated tombs. Spears must have been made of wood or composite material as we found a long point manufactured from a mammal long bone that could have been the apex of a spear. As for copper alloy daggers, they only appear at the end of Early Kerma and become more numerous during Middle Kerma, becoming more elongated, to finally be replaced by the daggers of Classic Kerma. We can also point out the wooden throwing sticks or the several bronze spearheads, but the aim is not to draw up a complete inventory of weapons, an exercise that has already been done for weapons in this necropolis.41

If we have already underlined that it is from the Kerma ancien II phase (2300-2150 BC) that the distinctions between the tombs begin to be marked, this tendency will be reinforced thereafter to culminate with the appearance of the first royal tombs of the Kerma moyen I phase (2050-1950 BC). These tombs, unfortunately looted, are notable for their size (7 to 10 m in diameter for the pit, 12 to 15 m for the tumulus), for the hundreds or even thousands of bucrania deposited to the south of the tumulus, but also for the quantity of fine ceramics laid out inside the pit and around the tumulus. Other criteria, such as the animal and human sacrifices – which some prefer to call accompanying deaths – also underline the status of the individuals insofar as their number is proportional to the dimensions of the grave. Finally, the quantity of Egyptian ceramics gives an idea of the intensity of exchanges (Figure 18).

Competitive lavish funerals are evidenced by the increase of deposits of exotic goods in and next to the grave, ‘sacrificed people’, bucrania, and elaborate funerary pots. The proportions were calculated on the basis of 409 graves excavated between 2008 and 2018 (Honegger 2018b). Figure 18. Competitive lavish funerals are evidenced by the increase of deposits of exotics goods in and next to the grave, ‘sacrificed people’, bucrania, and elaborate funerary pots. The proportions were calculated on the basis of 409 graves excavated between 2008 and 2018 (Honegger 2018b).

During the first phase of the Eastern Cemetery, exchanges with Egypt are already significant and it is possible that the presence of several C-Group features is evidence of important contacts between Upper and Lower Nubia.42 During the next phase exchanges decline, a sign of a certain loss of Egyptian control over Lower Nubia as has already been pointed out.43 It is during the Kerma ancien II phase (2300-2150 BC) that imports increase again. It is also from this time onwards that the archers' tombs appear, that the distinctions between the tombs start to be significant, and that wealth becomes more important, notably through the presence of Egyptian copper alloy mirrors, which tend to attract the interest of looters.

It is precisely during this phase that Egyptian sources mention the famous expeditions of Harkhuf,44 a high dignitary from Aswan. His tomb, covered with inscriptions, relates the story of his three journeys to Nubia commissioned by the pharaohs Merenre I and Pepi II around 2250 BC. These were obviously expeditions aimed at reopening trade routes by making contact and trading with the Nubian populations located south of the 2nd cataract45. The narrative tells us that several populations or tribes populate Nubia and do not necessarily maintain peaceful relations between them46. These groups are already hierarchical with dominant personalities capable of gathering armed men in quantity, goods, and donkeys by the dozen, to accompany Harkhuf and his escort. It is likely that Kerma then developed a coercive policy to ensure the control of the lucrative trade with the Egyptians in an atmosphere of conflicts between tribes or lineages. The valorisation of the role of warriors in funeral rites could be a consequence of this.

From this point onwards, indications of a more marked social stratification rapidly increase alongside a growth of imports, human sacrifices, bucrania in front of the largest tombs, as well as red fine ware with black rims, whose decorations multiply (Figure 18). One can imagine a competition between dominant lineages, as we have suggested in an analysis of the significance of fine ceramics and their decorations47. This competition would have lead to the emergence of a dominant lineage that concentrated wealth and showed it in funeral rites, as exemplified by the first royal tombs, which appear around 2000 BC (Figure 19). It is from this period onwards that the necropolis will undergo a spectacular development, much more important demographically than natural population growth could allow. Kerma must therefore have been the centre of the kingdom from this period onwards and attracted populations from its kingdom to settle in the region.

View of the first Kerma royal tomb (Kerma moyen I, 2050-1950 BC). One can see the edge of the burial tumulus made of earth and stones, the post holes of a wooden architectural structure inside the burial pit and more than 1400 bucrania to the south of the tomb. The diameter of the burial pit is about 10 metres. Figure 19. View of the first Kerma royal tomb (Kerma moyen I, 2050-1950 BC). One can see the edge of the burial tumulus made of earth and stones, the post holes of a wooden architectural structure inside the burial pit and more than 1400 bucrania to the south of the tomb. The diameter of the burial pit is about 10 metres.

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Obsomer, Claude. “Les expéditions d’Herkhouf (VIe dynastie) et la localisation de Iam.” In Pharaons Noirs: Sur la piste des quarante jours, edited by Marie-Cécile Bruwier and Raymond Betz, pp. 39-52. Morlanwelz: Musée Royal de Mariemont, 2007.

Reisner, George A. Excavations at Kerma. Harvard African Studies 5-6. Cambridge, MA: Peabody Museum of Harvard University, 1923.

Smith, Stuart Tyson. “Nubia and Egypt: Interaction, Acculturation, and Secondary State Formation from the Third to First Millennium BC.” In Studies in Culture Contact: Interaction, Culture Change, and Archaeology, edited by James G. Cusick, pp. 256-87. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1995.

Testart, Alain. Éléments de classification des sociétés. Paris: Errance, 2005.

Török, László. Between Two Worlds: The Frontier Region between Ancient Nubia and Egypt 3700 BC - 500 AD. Leiden: Brill, 2009.

Vogel, Carola. “Fallen Heroes?: Winlock's 'Slain Soldiers' Reconsidered.” The Journal of Egyptian Archaeology 89 (2003): pp. 239-45.

Walsh, Carl. “Techniques for Egyptian Eyes: Diplomacy and the Transmission of Cosmetic Practices between Egypt and Kerma.” Journal of Egyptian History (2021): pp. 295-332.

Winlock, Herbert E. The Slain Soldiers of Neb-hepet-Re'-Mentu-entu-Hotpe. Publications of the Metropolitan Museum of Art Egyptian Expedition, 16. New York, 1945.


  1. Bonnet, “Les fouilles archéologiques de Kerma (Soudan),” 1982, pp. 15-9; 1984, p. 17; 1986, p. 12; 1995, p. 44. ↩︎

  2. Bonnet, “Les fouilles archéologiques de Kerma (Soudan),” 1982, pp. 15-9. ↩︎

  3. Kerma is the name of the village next to the city of Kerma and its eastern cemetery. It gave its name to the culture of Kerma, defined by its ceramics and its funeral rites (see Gratien, Les cultures Kerma. Essai de classification). This culture is also referred to as the Kingdom of Kerma. In the context of anthropological theories on the evolution of societies, a kingdom can be equated with a state (see Testart, Éléments de classification des sociétés). It can also be considered as a secondary state, insofar as it seems to emerge as a result of its contacts with the Egyptian state, which originated more than five centuries before (Smith, “Nubia and Egypt: Interaction, acculturation, and secondary state formation from the third to first millennium BC”). ↩︎

  4. Hafsaas-Tsakos, “Edges of bronze and expressions of masculinity: the emergence of a warrior class at Kerma in Sudan,” pp. 79-91; Manzo, “Weapons, ideology and identity at Kerma (Upper Nubia, 2500-1500 BC),” pp. 3-29. ↩︎

  5. Judd, “Ancient Injury Recidivism: An Example from the Kerma Period of Ancient Nubia,” pp. 89-102. ↩︎

  6. Reisner, Excavations at Kerma. Harvard African Studies 5-6↩︎

  7. This project was supported by the Swiss National Fund (SNF 100011_163021/1), the State Secretariat for Education, Research and Innovation of the Swiss Confederation, the Kerma Foundation, and the University of Neuchâtel (Switzerland). We also thank Dr Abdelrahman Ali, director of the National Corporation of Antiquities and Museums of Sudan (NCAM) for his support. ↩︎

  8. Honegger, “La plus ancienne tombe royale de Kerma en Nubie,” pp. 189-94; Honegger, “New Data on the Origins of Kerma,” pp. 21-4. ↩︎

  9. Honegger, “New Data on the Origins of Kerma,” pp. 25-8. ↩︎

  10. Bonnet and Honegger, “The Eastern Cemetery of Kerma,” pp. 216-8. ↩︎

  11. Honegger, “La plus ancienne tombe royale de Kerma en Nubie,” pp. 194-7. See also the end of this paper and figure 15. ↩︎

  12. Hafsaas-Tsakos, “Edges of bronze and expressions of masculinity: the emergence of a warrior class at Kerma in Sudan,” pp. 79-91. ↩︎

  13. Mud brick chapels were built in connection with the most important and largest graves, Bonnet, Edifices et rites funéraires à Kerma↩︎

  14. Kendall, Kerma and the Kingdom of Kush 2500-1500 B.C. The Archaeological Discovery of an Ancient Nubian Empire↩︎

  15. See Minor, The Use of Egyptian and Egyptianizing Material Culture in Nubian Burials of the Classic Kerma Period and Walsh, “Techniques for Egyptian Eyes: Diplomacy and the Transmission of Cosmetic Practices between Egypt and Kerma.” ↩︎

  16. Bonnet and Honegger, “The Eastern Cemetery of Kerma,” pp. 223-4. ↩︎

  17. Sector 23 contained 122 individuals of which 90 were discovered by our team. Of these 90 individuals, 49 were mature (25 female and 20 male), 37 immature and 4 undetermined. The total number of archers' graves was 24, of which 15 were adult males, 3 were children under 10 years of age, 5 were between 10 and 19 years of age, and one grave did not yield enough human remains to determine age and sex. In the Sector 29 (Kerma ancien III), 18 archers were identified on a total of 72 individuals. In the Sector 31 (Kerma moyen I), 8 archers were identified on a total of 20 individuals. The bio-anthropological data are provided by Agathe Chen, in charge of the study of the skeletons of the Eastern Cemetery. ↩︎

  18. Dunham, Excavations at Kerma. Part VI↩︎

  19. Reisner, Excavations at Kerma↩︎

  20. Reisner, Excavations at Kerma↩︎

  21. Dunham, Excavations at Kerma. Part VI↩︎

  22. Hafsaas-Tsakos, “Edges of bronze and expressions of masculinity: the emergence of a warrior class at Kerma in Sudan,” pp. 79-91. ↩︎

  23. Bonnet, “Les fouilles archéologiques de Kerma (Soudan),” 1982, p. 15-9. ↩︎

  24. They were excavated in January 1996 but remain unpublished. ↩︎

  25. Bonnet, “Les fouilles archéologiques de Kerma (Soudan)”, 1986, p. 12; 1995, p. 44. ↩︎

  26. Honegger, “Lunate Microliths in the Holocene Industries of Nubia: Multifunctional Tools, Sickle Blades or Weapon Elements?,” pp. 169-71. ↩︎

  27. The number of archers for Middle Kerma may seem low. However, it should be remembered that these tombs are often much more plundered than those of Early Kerma, and that we did not have the opportunity to excavate tombs later than Kerma moyen I during our programme conducted between 1998 and 2008. ↩︎

  28. Honegger and Fallet, “Archers Tombs of the Kerma ancien,” pp. 16-30. ↩︎

  29. Le Quellec, “Arcs et archers sahariens: les représentations d’archers dans l’art rupestre du Sahara central,” p. 62; Le Quellec, “Arcs et bracelets d’archers au Sahara et en Égypte, avec une nouvelle proposition de lecture des ’nasses’ sahariennes,” pp. 208-11. ↩︎

  30. Ibid. ↩︎

  31. Honegger, “Lunate Microliths in the Holocene Industries of Nubia: Multifunctional Tools, Sickle Blades or Weapon Elements?,” pp. 169-71. ↩︎

  32. Clark et al, “Interpretations of prehistoric technology from ancient Egyptian and other sources, part 1 : ancient Egyptian bows and arrows and their relevance for prehistory,” p. 362 and fig. 9. ↩︎

  33. The significance of this find of 59 soldiers is still debated and authors have sought to link it to one of the many conflicts during the 12th Dynasty, Winlock, Slain Soldiers. For a discussion on the interpretations of this find, see Vogel, “Fallen Heroes?: Winlock's 'Slain Soldiers' Reconsidered.” ↩︎

  34. Müller describes 5 wrist-guards, all made of leather, similar in shape to those of Kerma. He also presents another similar example from Gebelin. Der 'Armreif' des Konigs Ahmose und der Handgelenkschutz des Bogenschützen im alten Ägypten und Vorderasien, pp. 16-7 and pl. V. ↩︎

  35. Théophile Burnat, “Manufacture et usages du cuir dans le royaume de Kerma (Soudan, IIIe et IIe millénaires av. n. è.),” Université de Neuchâtel. ↩︎

  36. Louis Chaix, pers. comm. ↩︎

  37. Honegger and Fallet, “Archers Tombs of the Kerma ancien,” p. 20. ↩︎

  38. Bonnet, “Les fouilles archéologiques de Kerma (Soudan),” 1982, p. 15. ↩︎

  39. Cf. Judd, “Ancient Injury Recidivism: An Example from the Kerma Period of Ancient Nubia,” pp. 89-102. ↩︎

  40. Agathe Chen, pers. comm. ↩︎

  41. Manzo, “Weapons, ideology and identity at Kerma (Upper Nubia, 2500-1500 BC),” pp. 3-29. ↩︎

  42. Honegger, “The Eastern Cemetery of Kerma and its first Royal Grave,” pp. 6-19; Honegger, “La plus ancienne tombe royale de Kerma en Nubie,” pp. 185-98. ↩︎

  43. Török, Between Two Worlds, pp. 53-73. ↩︎

  44. There is still some debate about the country of destination of these expeditions, called Iam by the Egyptians. Kerma is one of these possibilities, and one of the only ones that provides early evidence of contact with the Egyptians in Upper Nubia. Other scholars have proposed the Western Nubian Desert or a region further south, towards Kordofan and Darfur. For a summary and discussion of these different hypotheses, see Obsomer, “Les expéditions d’Herkhouf (VIe dynastie) et la localisation de Iam”, pp. 39-52. ↩︎

  45. Lacovara, “The Stone Vase Deposit at Kerma,” pp. 118-28. ↩︎

  46. Török, Between Two Worlds, pp. 69-70. ↩︎

  47. Honegger, “Style and Identity Symbols: an Attempt to Define the Social Meaning of the Kerma Funerary Fineware and Its Decorations”, forthcoming. ↩︎

author⁄Uroš Matić
article⁄Gender as Frame of War in Ancient Nubia
abstract⁄Gender research in Sudan archaeology and Meroitic studies is a nascent field. Studies of gender are especially lacking in investigations concerning war and violence, which are usually written from an androcentric perspective, and often focus solely on soldiers, army, weaponry, and images of battles and enemies. The experiences of non-combatants in the context of war in ancient Nubia are rarely considered; nor is the gender background of war. This paper deals with gender structure in the lists of spoils of war, women and children as prisoners of war, feminization of enemies in royal texts, participation of royal women in war, and depictions of royal women smiting enemies. In gender as a frame of war, Kushite kings were represented as masculine and their enemies as feminine. This binary opposition has also been observed in ancient Egyptian and Neo-Assyrian sources, and was clearly a shared vocabulary of the great powers of the second and first millennium BCE. Such a frame of war was based on a gender disposition of men as active and strong, and women as passive and weak. It “naturalized” Kushite domination over their enemies just as it “naturalized” male domination in Kush. However, the participation of Meroitic queens in conflicts and their depictions smiting enemies shows how the visual vocabulary of violence can be utilized even by some women, in their own expressions of power.
keywords⁄ancient Nubia, war, violence, gender, women, children

1. Introduction

Gender studies in archaeology have moved a long way from the initial criticism of androcentrism (criticism of androcentric and heteronormative interpretations of the past, giving voices to ancient women, recognizing different genders behind the archaeological record), to viewing gender as a system or a result of performative practices.1 These developments in gender archaeology are not necessarily the same in all archaeological communities. In studies of ancient Sudan, gender studies have been introduced first through research of prehistoric and protohistoric societies2 and then through focus on Kushite royal women and the concept of queenship.3 The topic has been broadened by analyzing gender crossed with other aspects of identity, such as age, resulting in an intersectional understanding of identity in ancient Sudan.4 The focus in studies of ancient Sudan still seems to be largely on men (implicitly or explicitly), although recently, overviews on women, including non-royal women, have been published.5 Only few authors focused on masculinity.6 However, studies of gender are still far from being fully acknowledged in research on ancient Sudan. This is demonstrated by the lack of an entry on gender in even the most recent handbooks.7

In recent years, gender archaeologies are tackling a wide variety of different problems, offering equally varied approaches.8 Two related topics which have lately attracted the attention of several scholars are gendered violence and gender as a form of symbolic violence.9 Whereas scholars of the first search for evidence of quite specific gender patterns behind violent acts, scholars of the second argue that gender itself is a form of violence, because gender brings different people into asymmetrical relations of power in different domains. The idea that gender can be a form of symbolic violence is inherited from sociologist Pierre Bourdieu and philosopher Slavoj Žižek and has been only recently applied to archaeology.10 These discussions remind us that it is fruitful to think about gender from the point of view of violence, and to think about violence from the point of view of gender.

War is typically a sphere of past social action about which archaeologists and historians usually write from a male perspective and with the sole focus on men. The participation of women and their experiences are rarely addressed.11 War and violence in ancient Sudan are fields still largely dominated by male authors.12 This androcentric perspective rarely takes into account gender as a social category and tends to implicitly focus only on combatant men. As a result, we are left with numerous valuable contributions on Kushite representations of war, enemies, weaponry etc. However, a gender perspective is lacking in almost all of them. This does not mean that the effort to find women in such contexts or to relate these contexts to women is that which is lacking, although this is true too. What is missing, is a perspective on both masculinity and femininity as socio-culturally determined categories coming from a specific gender system. Until recently, this was also the case in Egyptology. However, some recent studies focusing on war in ancient Egypt have shown the potential of implementing ideas and concepts coming from gender studies.13 One of these concepts is the ‘frames of war’. The concept of the frames of war was developed by American philosopher Judith Butler, who demonstrated the way some political forces frame violence in modern media. Frames of war are operations of power which seek to contain, convey, and determine what is seen and what is real.14 They are the ways of selectively carving up experience as essential to the conduct of war.15 Butler argues that, by regulating perspective in addition to content, state authorities are clearly interested in controlling the visual modes of participation in war.16 The study by Butler on frames of war is essential for our understanding of how modern media creates the experience of war, whether and where they find a place for non-combatants, and how victory and defeat are presented. In this process, different genders are represented as differently positioned, depending on other identity categories such as age or status in an intersectional manner. According to Butler, we should undertake “a critique of the schemes by which state violence justifies itself”.17

In this paper, I will argue that gender was a frame of war that was also observable in the textual and visual media of ancient Sudan during the Napatan and Meroitic periods. I will first focus on non-combatants in texts, by analysing the attestations of prisoners of war of differing ages and genders. The lists of spoils of war demonstrate a structure based on a hierarchy based on status, age, and gender intersectionality. Intersectionality is one of the central tenets of black feminist theory. It is based on the fact that oppression is not monocausal, as for example in the USA it is not based either on race or on gender. Rather, an intersection of race and gender makes some individuals more oppressed or oppressed in a different way than others.18 This analysis of the attestations of non-combatants is followed by an analysis of a currently unique representation of women and children as prisoners of war found on the reliefs of Meroitic temple M250 in Meroe. After this, I turn to the feminization of enemies in Napatan and Merotic texts in order to demonstrate how gender was used to structure hierarchy and to position the Kushite king as masculine and his enemies as feminine. I argue that, in this way, gender framed both relations in war and hierarchies within the society of ancient Sudan. I also discuss evidence for the participation of Kushite royal women in war and stress that the sources at our disposal are providing us with an outsider (Graeco-Roman) perspective rather than a local perspective. Finally, I discuss the specifics of scenes in which Meroitic royal women are smiting enemies by comparing these scenes to others from ancient Egypt. I argue that the observed differences relate to a different understanding of the relation between kingship and queenship in these two societies.

2. Men, Women and Children as Prisoners of War

2.1. Textual Evidence

The taking of prisoners of war is a well-attested ancient war practice.19 Enemies of different gender, age, and status were also imprisoned during war in ancient Nubia. Although the practice surely must have been older, the first textual attestations come from the reign of Taharqa (690-664 BCE), and continue until the Meroitic period. The mentioning of men, women, and children as prisoners of war is mostly part of the lists of spoils of war. Since there is no space in this paper to thoroughly analyze these lists and present them in a systematic manner, I will concentrate only on prisoners of war, and especially on women and children, since they are often entirely neglected.20

The Kawa III stela of Taharqa (Copenhagen, Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek Æ.I.N. 1707, Columns 22-23) informs us that the king provided the temple of Amun with male and female servants, and the children of the rulers (ḥḳ3.w) of Tjehenu (Libyans).21 The Kawa VI (Khartoum SNM 2679, line 20-21) stela informs us that the temple of Amun in Kawa was filled with, among other others, female servants, wives of the rulers of Lower Egypt (T3-mḥw), and the children of the rulers of every foreign land.22 A granite stela from Karnak (line 3), attributed to Taharqa by Donald B. Redford, also mentions children of rulers, and later (lines 11-13) refers to the settling of a population with its cattle in villages. This possibly refers to the settlement of the prisoners of war among which were the above-mentioned children.23 A more securely-dated example of men and women (total: 544), seemingly presented as spoils of war during the reign of Taharqa, and enumerated according to ethnonyms or toponyms, can be found in his long inscription from Sanam.24

On the Enthronement stela of Anlamani (late 7th century BCE) from Kawa (Kawa VIII, lines 19-20, Copenhagen, Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek Æ.I.N. 1709), it is stated that his soldiers gained control of all the women, children, small cattle and property in the land Bulahau (b-w-r3-h-3-y-w) and that the king appointed the captives as male and female servants of the gods.25 This indicates that Anlamani, like Taharqa, appointed at least some prisoners of war to the temples.26

In the Annals of Harsiyotef (Cairo JE 48864, lines 68-70) from his 35th regnal year in the early 4th century BCE, the king states that he gave booty (ḥ3ḳ) to Amun of Napata, 50 men, 50 women, together making 100.27 The text (line 87-88) further states that the king took, among others, male and female servants in the land of Metete.28 Likewise, in the Annals of Nastasen (Stela Berlin ÄMP 2268, lines 44-46), from his 8th regnal year in the last third of the 4th century BCE, the king states that he gave a total of 110 men and women to Amun of Napata.29 As noted by Jeremy Pope, there is no reason to impose here an artificial distinction between a donation text and a record of war.30 In fact, there is also no such division in ancient Egyptian records of war and the Kushite records of war bear many similarities to those of ancient Egypt, especially when lists of spoils of war are concerned. Nastasen also claims (lines 46-49) that he captured Ayonku, the ruler connected to the rebels and that he took all the women, all the cattle, and much gold. The list mentions 2,236 women.31 Compared to the number of men and women given to the temple of Amun at Napata, this is a significantly larger number, which indicates that a majority of the prisoners actually did not end up as property of the temple. We can only speculate that they were distributed elsewhere, possibly even among the soldiers.32 Nastasen also seized the ruler Luboden and all the women in his possession (line 51).33 He also seized Abso, the ruler of Mahae, and all their women (line 53).34 Nastasen went against the rebellious land of Makhsherkharta and seized the ruler, as well as all of that by which the ruler sustained people, and all the women (line 55).35 Finally, Nastasen seized Tamakheyta, the ruler of the rebellious land Sarasarat, and caused the plundering of all their women (line 58).36

Common to all these Napatan and Meroitic texts written in Egyptian is the order in which different prisoners of war are listed, which is always the same. The enemy ruler is listed first, followed by the enemy men, women and children. No difference is made between male and female children. This demonstrates an intersectional hierarchy based on status, gender, and age. The enemy ruler was the most valued, then came enemy men, women and children, in that same order. An interesting question is if this intersectional hierarchy mirrors that of ancient Sudanese society or if it was only imposed on its enemies. That male and female prisoners of war feature together with children, including even those of foreign rulers donated to temples, comes as no surprise. The individual temples of Amun in Kush also functioned as centres of territorial government and redistribution.37 Some lines in the Annals of Nastasen refer to imprisoned women in a rhetorical manner, stating rather generally that all women of the enemy were taken, instead of providing a number like in earlier sources.

Currently, the textual evidence written in Merotic script is very scarce, and our understanding of the language is not on a level which allows for a detailed reading for most preserved texts. Nevertheless, several experts in Meroitic language and script have recognized the mentioning of prisoners of war in the Hamadab Stela of Amanirenas and Akinidad (British Museum 1650) from the late 1st century BCE.38 According to the new reading of Claude Rilly, the second (small) Hamadab stela (REM 1039) mentions Akinidad and the sites where the Roman prefect Petronius fought against the Meroites, namely Aswan (Meroitic “Sewane”), Qasr Ibrim (Meroitic “Pedeme”), and Napata (Meroitic “Npte”). According to Rilly, the stela also mentions the beginning of the war in its 3rd and 4th lines: “the Tmey have enslaved all the men, all the women, all the girls and all the boys”.39 Interestingly, if Rilly´s reading is correct, this would mean that when Meroitic folk were taken as prisoners by enemies, a gender differentiation was made among children and/or adolescents. The following discussion will focus on the possible iconographic evidence of the conflict between Meroe and Rome.

2.2. Iconographic Evidence

Unlike in ancient Egypt, ancient Nubian iconographic evidence for the taking of prisoners of war is rather scarce when the bound prisoner motif is excluded from the corpus. Even less attested are depictions of women and children being imprisoned.

One rare instance of such a depiction is found in temple M250, located about 1km to the east-southeast of the centre of the city of Meroe. John Garstang first investigated the temple in 1910-1911 together with Archibald H. Sayce. The temple M250 was investigated further by Friedrich Hinkel from 1984 to 1985. He dated it to the late 1st century BCE and early 1st century CE because of the royal cartouches of Akinidad found on fallen blocks of the cella’s north wall.40 The earliest temple on the site, which is northwest of M250, had probably already been built in Aspelta’s reign (the beginning of the 6th century BCE) in the form of a cella on top of a podium.41 According to László Török, the temple was dedicated in its later form to the cult of Re or, more precisely, to the unification of Amun with Re.42 Hinkel interpreted it more carefully as a temple of Amun.43

So far, the battle reliefs of M250 were analyzed by several authors. It is Hinkel who published the temple and gave the most detailed description and analysis of the relief blocks to date.44 According to Török, the decoration of the façades had a “historically” formulated triumphal aspect.45 Before the publication of the temple by Hinkel, Steffen Wenig assigned them to the reign of Aspelta because his stela was found on the site. Wenig related the reliefs to the ones from the B500 temple of Amun at Gebel Barkal, not knowing at that time that they predate M250.46 Inge Hofmann analyzed the war reliefs in detail regarding the weapons and equipment worn by the Meroites and emphasized that the weapons they use are post-Napatan. Based on the kilts and hair feathers worn by some of the enemies of Meroites in these scenes, she concluded that they are southerners, but that they cannot be associated with any specific Sudanese community.47 This type of enemy wearing a kilt and feathers is also found as a bound prisoner on the pylon of the tomb chapel of Begrawiya North 6 (the tomb of Amanishakheto).48 It is also depicted on the east wall painting from the small temple M292, better known because of the head of a statue of Augustus, which was buried in front of its entrance.49 According to Florian Wöß, this type of enemy can be classified as an Inner African Type. It is most numerous among Meroitic depictions of enemies and Wöß argues that it could have therefore represented a real threat to the Meroites.50 This conclusion resonates well with the interpretation of the Meroitic kingdom as having a heartland in the Nile Valley, at Keraba, and perhaps also the southland. The Meroitic kingdom was surrounded by various neighbouring communities that could have posed a real threat and were only occasionally under Kushite control.51 As we have already seen, numerous texts refer to conflicts with these communities outside the realm of the Kushite kingdom.

Hinkel has already concluded that the north wall of M250 depicts women and children taken by the Meroites in their raid of the First Cataract, as reported by Strabo in Geography (17. I. 54),52 and that the south wall depicts a conflict with some population that the Meroites encountered in Lower Nubia.53 However, if Meroe is understood as the centre of the axis, then the enemies depicted on the southern wall are unlikely to depict Lower Nubians. We know that during the last decades of the 1st century BCE Lower Nubia was not hostile to Meroe, but on the contrary, that it rebelled against Rome. Gaius Cornelius Gallus reports in his trilingual stela from Philae, erected in 29 BCE, that he placed a local tyrant to govern Triakontaschoinos (Lower Nubia), which became part of the province of Egypt and established a personal patron/client relationship with the king of Meroe.54 This arrangement obliged inhabitants of Triakontaschoinos to pay taxes.55 Roman emperor Augustus then ordered Lucius Aelius Gallus, the second prefect of Egypt, to prepare a military expedition against province Arabia Felix. Aelius Gallus regrouped the forces stationed in Egypt and took c. 8000 of the 16800 men in three legions and 5500 of the auxiliary forces. The expedition was carried out in 26-25 BCE and ended with Roman defeat. The inhabitants of Triakontaschoinos received the news of Aelius Gallus’ failure in Arabia and revolted in the summer of 25 BCE. The aim of the revolt was to end the previously established status of Triakontaschoinos and the obligation of paying tax to Rome. Concurrent with this revolt, there were local rebellions against the pressure of taxation in Upper Egypt.56 The rebels might also have received help from the king of Meroe. Meroe probably tried to use the opportunity presented by the revolt in Triakontaschoinos and Upper Egypt to establish the northern frontier in the region of the First Cataract.57 Therefore, it is unlikely that the southern enemy depicted on the walls of temple M250 represents Lower Nubians. They were not hostile toward Meroe at the time before the building of the temple M250 under Akinidad. On the contrary, they were its allies in war with Rome.

Regarding the representations of women and children as prisoners of war in temple M250, Török found parallels in New Kingdom Egyptian (ca. 1550-1070 BCE) reliefs,58 whereas Hinkel found parallels both in New Kingdom Egyptian and Neo-Assyrian reliefs (ca. 911-609 BCE).59 One must, however, stress that in the case of the New Kingdom Egyptian reliefs, the parallels are both thematic and iconographic, whereas in the case of Neo-Assyrian reliefs, the parallels are strictly general and thematic (e.g. imprisonment). In this paper, I will focus more closely on the thematic and iconographic parallels from New Kingdom Egypt and Nubia, considering the fact that general thematic parallels (e.g. imprisonment) are found in many cultures and are not particularly helpful in better understanding the decorative program of M250.

Women and children are found both on the south and the north wall of the temple M250. The blocks with representations of women and children are part of the preserved in situ lowest register of the north wall. Its preserved height is ca. 110cm above the crepidoma.60 Its register depicts an east-west oriented procession of armed men, horse riders, and chariots who join a battle. After the battle scene, the same register continues with the procession of armed men, with nude women and children in front of them (Figure 1).

The women and children are preceded by men with oval shields and cattle in front of them, after which comes one more group of nude women and children. They are approached by oppositely-oriented men, probably in a battle. After them, the register continues in an east-west orientation towards a columned building, which is presumably a representation of a temple.61 The register continues behind this columned building and there is a break here, after which comes poorly preserved representations of round huts and trees.62 Only the lower parts of the figures of women and children are preserved on the north wall, so it is hard to say more about them. However, the women and children seem to be nude. The gender of the children cannot be identified because the representations were later damaged in the genital area. There are two groups and in between them there are cattle. The groups are flanked with men who lead them forward.

Relief blocks from the north wall of M250 (redrawn after Hinkel, <em>Der Tempelkomplex Meroe 250. I. 1</em>: 140-141, Abb. 39, 40, 41, 42).

Figure 1. Relief blocks from the north wall of M250 in the sequence east-west (redrawn after Hinkel, Der Tempelkomplex Meroe 250. I. 1: 140-141, Abb. 39, 40, 41, 42).

The blocks of the southern wall, with representations of women and children, are not found in situ, but rather in the vicinity of the south wall. Some of them can be joined and some of these joints present evidence for at least two registers. In one case, the upper register of the two depicts both women and children as prisoners of war, while the lower register depicts ship-fragments 198, 322, 323, 319, and 190.63 The figures in the two registers are differently oriented. Additionally, one more boat representation with a head of a ram possibly indicates a relation to Amun (fragments 113 and 106).64 It is oriented in the same direction as the previous boat. On the blocks of the south wall, both men and women are depicted as prisoners of war next to children (Figure 2).

Relief blocks (fragments 943+185+180 and 222) of the south wall of M250

Figure 2. Relief blocks (fragments 943+185+180 and 222) of the south wall of M250 with fragmented depictions of imprisoned women and children, line drawing (redrawn after Hinkel, Der Tempelkomplex Meroe 250. I. 2b: C11).

Unlike the women from the north wall, the women from the south wall are half-dressed. The breasts depicted on some of them (fragments 188, 214, 136, 943, 185, 222, 199, 847, 849, 811) indicate their sex, while the sex of some of the children figures is depicted via smaller breasts (fragment 236). Some of the women from the south wall are carrying baskets with children on their backs, held with the help of a tumpline (fragment 943, 849). In New Kingdom Egyptian iconography, this is a characteristic of Nubian women when depicted with children in tribute scenes.65 Women are depicted with children either next to them, held in their arms, raised high in the air (fragments 210, 849), or in between them (fragments 185, 189, 230, 175). Both men and women on the south wall have ropes tied around their necks, with several people in a row being tied on the same rope (fragments 136, 943, 189, 34, 102, 39, 408, 847, 844, 849, 811).

Empty oval name rings on the northern part of the pylon of M250

Figure 3. Empty oval name rings on the northern part of the pylon of M250 (redrawn after Hinkel, Der Tempelkomplex Meroe 250. I. 1: 139; Abb. 37b).

Hinkel related the construction of the M250 temple to the treaty that the Meroites negotiated with Augustus on Samos in 21/20 BCE. He relates the taking of women and children as prisoners on the north wall to the sacking of Philae, Elephantine, and Syene by the Meroites,66 as reported by Strabo in Geography, 17. I. 54.67 The context of the war reliefs on the northern wall of the temple indeed indicates a northern conflict. It is interesting that the oval name rings for the toponyms or ethnonyms of defeated enemies are left blank on the northern part of the temple pylon (Figure 3),68 and were only filled in with Meroitic hieroglyphs on the southern part of the temple pylon, which have thus far not been identified with certainty.69 In the light of Strabo’s Geography 17. I. 54, in which he writes that when told that they should go to Augustus, the Meroites answered they do not know who that was,70 one has to consider that the Roman dominated world beyond the province of Egypt was unknown or insufficiently known to the Meroites. This explains the empty oval name rings on the northern part of the temple pylon. Except for the generic Arome referring to Rome71 and Tmey referring to the Northeners,72 we do not know of any other Roman toponyms from Meroe so far and it is likely that in the first century BCE and first century CE the Meroites indeed did not know of any others. If the reliefs on the northern walls of the temple depict a Meroitic raid on the First Cataract sites, then we have to take into account that they imprisoned the local population, consisting also of women and children and not only of men. These women and children could also have been local and not necessarily immigrants after the Roman takeover of Egypt. The iconographic evidence from M250 corresponds well with the textual attestations for the taking of prisoners of war of different ages and genders, and allocates them to temples of Amun. Interestingly, just like in ancient Egyptian iconography of the New Kingdom, there is an absence of violence against women and children.73 Bearing in mind the idea that frames of war regulate what is reported and represented in various media, we can consider the possibility that some realities of war such as violence against non-combatants were censured due to socially determined taste. Hurting women and children was probably considered a form of illegitimate violence and although it probably occurred, it was not communicated to local audiences.

3. Feminization of Enemies in Texts

The feminization of enemies is a common cross-cultural motif in war discourse, both textual and visual. As anthropologist Marilyn Strathern argued, “relations between political enemies stand for relations between men and women”.74 Numerous examples are known for this from ancient Egypt and Neo-Assyria and these are extensively dealt with elsewhere.75 Here, the focus will be on the feminization of enemies in Kushite war discourse.

One attestation for the feminization of enemies without parallels, to the best of my knowledge, is found on the Triumphal Stela of Piye (Cairo JE 48862, 47086-47089, lines 149-150), the founder of the 25th Dynasty of Egypt, who ruled between 744-714 BCE: “Now these kings and counts of Lower Egypt came to behold His Majesty’s beauty, their legs being the legs of women.” js gr nn <n> nswt ḥ3(tj).wꜥ nw T3-mḥw jj r m33 nfr.w ḥm=f rd.wj=sn m rd.wj ḥm.wt.76 Nicolas-Christophe Grimal has translated this part of the text in a way that suggests that the legs of the kings and counts of Lower Egypt trembled like those of women.77 One has to stress that the adjective tremblant (French for “trembling”) is not written in the text, but is rather assumed by Grimal. On the other hand, Hans Goedicke’s translates rd.wj=sn not as legs, but knees instead.78 According to Robert K. Ritner, this means that they were trembling in fear,79 and similarly, according to Amr el Hawary, this could indicate that enemies of Piye had their legs bent at the knees from fear.80 However, David O’Connor and Stephen Quirke understand the text as a metaphor for the femininity of Piye’s enemies, because the legs of women are smooth-skinned.81 Yet, although both men and women shaved in Egypt and Nubia, we cannot assume that body hair removal was restricted only to women. For Nubia, at least, this is indicated by the description of Kushites in the Bible as tall and smooth-skinned people (Isaiah 18:7).82 Later in the text, it is stated that three of these kings and counts stayed outside the palace “because of their legs” (r rd.wj=sn), and only one entered. El Hawary postulates that this could be related to the previous comparison with the legs of women.83 Another case is possibly alluded to later in the same text when it states “You return having conquered Lower Egypt; making bulls into women” (jw=k jy.tw ḥ3q.n=k T3-mḥw jr=k k3.w m ḥm.wt).84 Bearing in mind that in the Instructions of Ankhsheshonqy (X, 20), an Egyptian text of the Ptolemaic period (305-30 BCE), bulls are contrasted to the vulvas which should receive them,85 we can argue that, in both cases, bulls stand for men, or at least masculinity, in both the human and animal world. It is interesting that on the Triumphal stela of Piye, men from the palace of the Lower Egyptian king Nimlot paid homage to Piye “after the manner of women” (m ḫt ḥm.wt).86 Maybe this indicates that there was also a manner in which men are supposed to pay homage to the king, and that the defeated kings and counts of Lower Egypt failed to do this, or at least the text wants us to believe that. The failed masculinity of Nimlot in the text of the stela was extensively studied most recently by Mattias Karlsson. Next to the motives already mentioned, additional arguments are rich and complex. Piye is representing ideal masculinity, contrasted with failed masculinity of Nimlot. This can be observed both in the text and in the iconography of the stela. For example, Nimlot is holding a sistrum, a musical instrument usually linked to women (e.g. priestesses of Hathor), while he is standing behind his wife and not depicted in the usual front-facing manner. His wife speaks for him and appears as the head of his household.87 To these arguments one can also add the fact that the silhouette of the defeated Egyptian princes in proskynesis differs in shape from usual representations of men. Their bodies seem to be curvier as in Kushite depictions of women. An allusion of sexual domination is not directly communicated, but it might have been implied.

There are other attestations of the feminization of enemies in texts composed for the Kushite kings. In the Annals of Harsiyotef (Cairo JE 48864, line 89) we are informed about his conflicts with the Mededet people in his 6th regnal year. After taking spoils of war, the ruler of Mededet was sent to Harsiyotef, saying: “You are my god. I am your servant. I am a woman. Come to me” (ntk p(3)=j nṯr jnk p(3)=k b3k jnk sḥm.t my j-r=j).88 In this attestation, we have a direct speech of the enemy, who, according to the text, identifies himself with a woman. Of course we are safe to assume that these words were put in his mouth by the composer of the text of the stela. El Hawary has already made a connection between the passage from the Annals of Harsiyotef and this passage from the Triumphal stela of Piye, describing the homage to Piye in a womanly manner. Interestingly, no such attestations, as far as I am aware, are known from Egyptian sources.89

4. Meroitic Non-royal and Royal Women in War

In Diodorus Siculus (1st century BCE), Agatharchides reports how the Aethiopians employed women in war: “They also arm their women, defining for them a military age. It is customary for most of these women to have a bronze ring through one of their lips”.90 This is repeated by Strabo in first century CE.91

The conflict between Meroe and Rome was mentioned in the discussion of the iconography of temple M250. One interesting aspect of this conflict is the Roman perspective on the rulership of Meroe. Strabo mentions the participation of a Meroitic queen in war against Rome, describing Queen Kandake here as “a manly woman who had lost one of her eyes”.92 We should be careful with crediting such descriptions much value. Not only did Strabo confuse a Meroitic royal title that probably indicated a mother of a king,93 but there is also a tendency among Graeco-Roman authors to depict foreign women as masculine thus creating an inverted image to gender expectations in their own society. Such inversions could have served the purposes of shocking their audience and enhancing the otherness of foreign lands and peoples. This is evidently an example of ideological gender inversion used as a sign of barbarism, especially towards foreign women, in the works of Strabo.94

Still, that the soldiers in the Roman army knew of a woman that was referred to by her subjects simply as kandake is also demonstrated by a ballista ball (British Museum EA 71839) with a carbon-ink inscription KANΔAΞH/Kandaxe from Qasr Ibrim. On the ball, the second and third lines of text can be understood as a personal message for the queen: “Just right for you Kandaxe!”.95 Clearly, it is questionable if the ones who actually found themselves in Nubia during the conflict with Meroe knew the name of the enemy ruler. It is also possible that they knew, but referred to her as everyone else.

5. Meroitic Queens and Enemies: Iconographic Evidence

The smiting of an enemy scene originates from ancient Egyptian iconography, with its earliest known evidence found in tomb 100 in Hierakonpolis in Upper Egypt, dated to the Naqada IIC period, around 3500 BCE. In Egypt, the motif has remained in the decoration of temple pylons, private and royal stelae, and small finds for more than 3500 years. Its latest known appearance is found on temple reliefs from the Roman period when emperors Domitian, Titus, and Trajan are depicted smiting. Kushite kings are also depicted smiting enemies and the motif was adopted from ancient Egyptian art.96

What differentiates the use of this motif in ancient Nubia during the Meroitic period from its use both in the contemporary Roman province of Egypt and in earlier periods of Nubian history is the fact that certain queens are depicted smiting male enemies in Meroitic iconography. Some ancient Egyptian queens are also depicted smiting enemies. However, these enemies are always female when the figure who is delivering the blow is depicted as a woman.97 This is because a king is never depicted delivering harm to foreign women and children, at least in the New Kingdom. The king always defeats the supposedly stronger enemy.98 Although the inclusion of queen Nefertiti smiting female enemies alongside scenes of Akhenaten smiting male enemies probably indicates the elevation of her status during the period of his rule,99 Nefertiti is nevertheless not the dominant figure in such depictions; the dominant figure remains the smiting king because of the gender of the enemies he smites. Male enemies were considered more dangerous than female. When a female ruler like Hatshepsut (ca. 1479-1458 BCE) of the 18th Dynasty is depicted smiting or trampling male enemies, she herself is depicted as a king –a man– and her identity is indicated by the accompanying text that lists her name and royal titles.100

The Meroitic case is interesting precisely because certain royal women can be depicted smiting and spearing male enemies. Amanishakheto (1st century CE) is depicted spearing enemies on the pylon of her pyramid Begrawiya North 6 in Meroe, both to the left and right of the pylon entrance (Figure 4). On the left, she holds a bow, arrow, and rope in her left hand and a spear in her right hand. The rope in her left hand extends to the necks of the enemies to which it is tied. Seven enemies are depicted with rope tied around their necks and with their arms tied behind their backs. On the right, Amanishakheto holds a rope in her left hand which binds four enemies around their necks. Their arms are also bound behind their backs. In her right hand, she holds a spear with which she spears the enemies.101 On her stela from Naqa she is depicted before the enthroned Lion God above a group of bound enemies.102

Amanishakheto spearing enemies

Figure 4. Amanishakheto spearing enemies, pylon, pyramid Begrawiya North 6, line drawing (Chapman & Dunham. Decorated Chapels of the Meroitic Pyramids at Meroë and Barkal, Pl. 17).

Shanakdakheto (?) sitting on a throne with bound enemies underneath

Figure 5. Shanakdakheto (?) sitting on a throne with bound enemies underneath, north wall, pyramid Begrawiya North 11, line drawing (Chapman & Dunham. Decorated Chapels of the Meroitic Pyramids at Meroë and Barkal, Pl. 7A).

Bound enemies are additionally depicted under the throne of the queen on the north wall of pyramid Begrawiya North 11 attributed to Shanakdakheto (Figure 5).103 Nine bows, the traditional symbol for enemies originating from ancient Egypt, are depicted under the throne of Amanitore of the 1st century CE (Figure 6), just as they are depicted under the throne of Natakamani in the pyramid Begrawiya North 1 of queen Amanitore.104

Amanitore sitting on a throne with the nine bows underneath

Figure 6. Amanitore sitting on a throne with the nine bows underneath, south wall, pyramid Begrawiya North 1, line drawing (Chapman & Dunham. Decorated Chapels of the Meroitic Pyramids at Meroë and Barkal, Pl. 18B).

Amanitore is depicted smiting enemies on the pylon of the Lion Temple in Naga.105 There, she is paired with Natakamani, who is also depicted smiting enemies (Figure 7). Natalia Pomerantseva interpreted this as “hero worshiping of the woman-image”, adding that “it is impossible to imagine the frail Egyptian woman’s figure in the part of chastisement of enemies”.106 Yet, as we have seen, some Egyptian royal women are depicted in violent acts such as the smiting and trampling of female enemies and the reason they are not depicted doing the same to male enemies is status-related. If they would be depicted as women smiting or trampling male enemies, this would elevate their status to the one of kings; clearly, attention was paid to avoid this. In the case of the Meroitic queens, the gender of the enemy was not an issue. Jacke Phillips has also emphasized that the smiting of enemies by Merotic queens is among the corpus of scenes, which were formerly restricted to kings, but Phillips did not take the argument further. The reason for the creation of these scenes can be seen in the specific status of royal women in Meroitic ideology.107 However, we also have to bear in mind that, considering the number of known Napatan and Meroitic royal women, the smiting scenes of Amanishakheto and Amanitore in the 1st century CE are an exception rather than rule. Interestingly, the smiting and trampling scenes of Tiye and Nefertiti are also an exception rather than the rule, and this exception in ancient Egyptian iconography has so far been explained as a consequence of the increasing importance of royal women both in politics and religion.108 We can certainly say Amanishakheto and Amanitore also lived in exceptional times, during and after the conflict of Meroe with Rome. It is possible that in these times certain exceptional women rose to unparalleled positions.109

Natakamani and Amanitore smiting enemies

Figure 7. Natakamani and Amanitore smiting enemies, pylon of the temple of Naqa, line drawing (Lepsius, Denkmäler aus Aegypten und Aethiopien 10, B1. 56).

6. Conclusion

Gender as a frame of war has structured both Napatan and Meroitic texts, from lists enumerating the spoils of war to texts dealing with military campaigns. In the first case, this is observable in the order that different categories of prisoners of war are listed, namely enemy rulers (men), then enemy men, women, and children. This same structure for prisoners of wars is found with only slight differences in ancient Egyptian spoils of war examples,110 which can hardly be taken as a coincidence. Since the earlier Napatan texts were written in Egyptian, their structure, at least when lists of spoils of war are concerned, could have been based on an Egyptian pattern. This, then, continued into the Meroitic period. In the second case, namely the texts dealing with military campaigns, how gender as a frame of war operates can be observed in the discursive feminization of enemies in Napatan texts. Just like in ancient Egyptian and Neo-Assyrian texts,111 enemies are discursively framed as women or effemininate. This is in fact a metaphor found in many cultures in which strength is associated with men and weakness is associated with women. Rather than just framing the power relations between the Kushite kings and their enemies, such metaphors strengthen the gender structure of the society itself, privileging men and masculinity. By discursively taking away masculinity from the enemy, these texts are framing them as subordinate and thus legitimizing the subordination of women to men. Unfortunately, the present state of knowledge of the Meroitic language does not allow us to investigate possible feminizations of enemies in the Hamadab stelae written in Meroitic. It would indeed be interesting to know if the same metaphors are used.

The reports of Graeco-Roman writers such as Agatharchides in Diodorus Siculus and Strabo could have been a misunderstanding of Meroitic royal ideology and the figure of kandake. We should, however, not entirely exclude the possibility that women could have participated in war, although we do not have any explicit ancient Nubian textual attestations for this. We also do not have any burials attributed to “warrior women” or “warrior queens”, based on the placement of weapons as grave goods in graves of women.112 Even if such burials were to be found, one would have to be cautious in assigning military activity to women (or men) simply because of the associated weapons. Muscular stress markers or potential traces of trauma on the skeletons would be more indicative, however both could also be found in burials without such associated weapons. Nevertheless, one should not exclude the possibility that Meroitic queens made military decisions, just like, for example, the 17th Dynasty queen Ahhotep or the 18th Dynasty female pharaoh Hatshepsut in Egypt,113 though they probably did not fight in war. The depictions of Meroitic queens smiting enemies should be seen in the context of royal ideology. Unlike Egyptian queens, who are depicted as women smiting enemies only when these enemies are also women, both Meroitic kings and certain Meroitic queens are shown smiting and spearing enemy men. There is no difference in the gender of the enemy and therefore no hierarchy. This can be explained with an elevated status of queenship in Kush, in comparison to ancient Egypt. Unlike in Egypt, where a ruling woman like Hatshepsut had to be depicted as a man when smiting enemies, a ruling woman in Meroe could be depicted as a woman smiting male enemies.

Clearly, gender was one of the frames of war in ancient Nubia, with a tradition spanning several centuries and possibly even having ancient Egyptian roots, at least where the structure for listings of the spoils of war and some metaphors for enemies are concerned. However, as I have shown, there are certain expressions without parallels in ancient Egyptian texts, which testify to an independent, but equally male-privileging discourse. Gender as a frame of war (sensu Judith Butler) justified state violence against enemies by discursively representing them as women. In this manner, asymmetrical power relations in one domain (war) were tied to asymmetrical power relations in another domain (gender). This is a prime example of symbolic violence (sensu Pierre Bourdieu and Slavoj Žižek). Gender relations which place Kushite and enemy women as subordinate to Kushite men are naturalized through a reference to a subordination of enemy men to Kushite men. Simultaneously, the lack of explicit violence conducted against enemy women and children was in a way “the cosmetic treatment of war”, to use the words of Jean Baudrillard. The frame of war such as this one clearly influenced how war and violence is represented and consequently experienced by local audiences who did not participate in war. Some forms of violence are communicated to local audiences in specific manners relying on asymmetrical power relations of gender. Other forms of violence which probably occurred, such as violence against non-combatants, are carefully avoided in texts and images as it was probably hard to justify them.

7. Acknowledgments

I would like to express my enormous gratitude to Jacqueline M. Huwyler, M.A. (University of Basel) for proofreading the English of my paper. I am also grateful to Angelika Lohwasser and Henriette Hafsaas for their help in acquiring some of the references.

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Matić, Uroš. Violence and Gender in Ancient Egypt. London and New York: Routledge, 2021.

McCoskey, Denise Eileen. “Gender at the Crossroads of Empire: Locating Women in Strabo’s Geography.” In Strabo’s Cultural Geography: The Making of a Kolossourgia, edited by Daniela Dueck, Hugh Lindsay, and Sarah Pothecary, pp. 56-72. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005.

Minas-Nerpel, Martina, and Stefan Pfeiffer. “Establishing Roman Rule in Egypt: The Trilingual Stela of C. Cornelius Gallus from Philae.” In Tradition and Transformation: Egypt under the Roman Rule. Proceedings of the International Conference, Hildsheim, Roemer- and Pelizaeus-Museum, 3-6 July 2008. Culture and History of the Ancient Near East Vol. 41, edited by Katja Lembke, Martina Minas-Nerpel, and Stefan Pfeiffer, pp. 265-98. Leiden: Brill, 2010.

Nordström, Hans-Åke. “Gender and Social Structure in the Nubian A-Group.” In Combining the Past and the Present. Archaeological Perspectives on Society, edited by Terje Oestigaard, Nils Anfinset, and Tore Saetersdal, pp. 127-33. Oxford: British Archaeological Reports, 2004.

O’Connor, David, and Stephen Quirke. “Introduction: Mapping the Unknown in Ancient Egypt.” In Mysterious Lands. Encounters with Ancient Egypt, edited by David O’Connor and Stephen Quirke, pp. 1-22. London and New York: Routledge, 2011.

Parkinson, Richard B. “‘Homosexual’ Desire and Middle Kingdom Literature.” Journal of Egyptian Archaeology 81 (1995): pp. 57-76.

Perry, Elizabeth P., and Rosemary A. Joyce. “Providing a Past for Bodies that Matter: Judith Butler's Impact on the Archaeology of Gender.” International Journal of Sexuality and Gender Studies 6.1 (2001): pp. 63-76.

Peust, Carsten. Das Napatanische. Ein ägyptischer Dialekt aus dem Nubien des späten ersten vorchristlichen Jahrtausends. Texte, Glossar, Grammatik. Monographien zur Ägyptischen Sprache 3. Göttingen: Peust & Gutschmidt Verlag, 1999

Phillips, Jacke. “Women in Ancient Nubia.” In Women in Antiquity: Real Women across the Ancient World, edited by Stephanie Lynn Budin and Jean MacIntosh Turfa, pp. 280-98. London and New York: Routledge, 2016.

Pomerantseva, Natalia A. “The View on Meroitic Kings and Queens as it is Reflected in Their Iconography.” In Studien zum antiken Sudan. Akten der 7. Internationalen Tagung für meroitistische Forschungen vom 14. bis 19. September 1992 in Gosen/bei Berlin. Meroitica 15, edited by Steffen Wenig, pp. 622-32. Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1999.

Pope, Jeremy. The Double Kingdom under Taharqo. Culture and History of the Ancient Near East 69. Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2014.

Raue, Dietrich (ed.). Handbook of Ancient Nubia. Vols. I and II. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2019.

Redford, Donald. “Taharqa in Western Asia and Libya.” Eretz-Israel: Archaeological, Historical and Geographical Studies 24 (1993): pp. 188-91.

Revez, Jean. “Une stèle inédite de la Troisième Période Intermédiaire à Karnak: une guerre civile en Thébaïde?” Cahiers de Karnak 11 (2003): pp. 535-69.

Rilly, Claude. “New Advances in the Understanding of Royal Meroitic Inscriptions.” In 11th International Conference for Meroitic Studies. Abstract. 2008. www⁄http://www.univie.ac.at/afrikanistik/meroe2008/abstracts/Abstract%20Rilly.pdf

Rilly, Claude. “Meroitische Texte aus Naga.” In Königsstadt Naga. Grabungen in der Wüste des Sudan, edited by Karla Kröper, Sylvia Schoske, and Dietrich Wildung, pp. 176-201. München-Berlin: Staatliches Museum Ägyptischer Kunst, 2011.

Rilly, Claude. “Fragments of the Meroitic Report of the War Between Rome and Meroe.” 13th Conference for Nubian Studies, September 2014, Neuchâtel, Switzerland. Abstract. 2014

Rilly, Claude and De Voogt, Alex. The Meroitic Language and Writing System. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012.

Ritner, Robert Kriech. The Libyan Anarchy. Inscriptions from Egypt’s Third Intermediate Period. Sociey of Biblical Literature 21. Atlanta: Society for Biblical Literature, 2009.

Shinnie, Peter L., and Bradley, Rebecca J. “The Murals from the Augustus Temple, Meroe.” In Studies in Ancient Egypt, the Aegean, and the Sudan; Essays in Honor of Dows Dunham on the Occasion of His 90th Birthday, June 1, 1980, edited by William Kelly Simpson, pp. 167-72. Boston: Department of Egyptian and Ancient Near Eastern Art, Museum of Fine Arts, 1981.

Sørensen, Marie Louise Stig. Gender Archaeology. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000.

Spalinger, Anthony J. “Notes on the Military in Egypt during the XXVth Dynasty.” Journal of the Society for the Study of Egyptian Antiquities 11 (1981): pp. 37-58.

Spalinger, Anthony J. The Persistence of Memory in Kush. Pianchy and His Temple. Prague: Faculty of Arts, Charles University, 2019.

Spalinger, Anthony J. Leadership under Fire: The Pressures of Warfare in Ancient Egypt. Four leçons at the Collège de France. Paris, June 2019. Paris: Soleb, 2020.

Strathern, Marylin. Before and After Gender. Sexual Mythologies of Everyday Life. Chicago: HAU Books, 2016.

Taterka, Filip. “Military Expeditions of King Hatshepsut.” In Current Research in Egyptology 2016. Proceedings of the Seventeenth Annual Symposium. Jagiellonian University, Krakow 2016, edited by Julia M. Chyla, Joanna Dębowska-Ludwin, Karolina Rosińska-Balik, and Carl Walsh, pp. 90-106. Oxford: Oxbow Books, 2017.

Török, László. Meroe City, an Ancient African Capital: John Garstang's Excavations in the Sudan. London: Egypt Exploration Society, 1997.

Török, László. The Kingdom of Kush. Handbook of the Napatan-Meroitic Civilization. Handbook of Oriental Studies 31. Leiden and Boston: Brill, 1997.

Török, László. The Image of the Ordered World in Ancient Nubian Art. The Construction of the Kushite Mind, 800 BC-300 AD. Probleme der Ägyptologie 18. Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2002.

Török, László. “Sacred Landscape, Historical Identity and Memory: Aspects of Napatan and Meroitic Urban Architecture.” In Nubian Studies 1998. Proceedings of the Ninth Conference of the International Society of Nubian Studies. August 21-26, 1998, Boston, Massachusetts, edited by T. Kendall, pp. 14-23. Boston: Department of African-American Studies Northeastern University, 2004.

Török, László. Between the Two Worlds: The Frontier Region between Ancient Nubia and Egypt 3700 BC-500 AD. Probleme der Ägyptologie 29. Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2009.

Williamson, Jacquelyn. “Alone before the God: Gender, Status, and Nefertiti’s Image.” Journal of the American Research Center in Egypt 51 (2015): pp. 179-92.

Wilkins, Alan, Hans Barnard, and Pamela J. Rose. “Roman Artillery Balls from Qasr Ibrim, Egypt.” Sudan and Nubia 10 (2006): pp. 64-78.

Wenig, Steffen (ed.). Africa in Antiquity. The Arts of Ancient Nubia and the Sudan. I. The Essays. II. The Catalogue. New York: Brooklyn Museum, 1978.

Wöß, Florian. “The Representations of Captives and Enemies in Meroitic Art.” In The Kushite World. Proceedings of the 11th International Conference for Meroitic Studies, Vienna, 1-4 September 2008. Beiträge zur Sudanforschung 8, edited by Michael H. Zach, pp. 585-600. Vienna: Verein der Förderer der Sudanforschung, 2015.

Zach, Michael H. “A Remark on the ‘Akinidad’ Stela REM 1003 (British Museum EA 1650).” Sudan and Nubia 21 (2007): pp. 148-50.

Žižek, Slavoj. Violence. Six Sideways Reflections. New York: Picador, 2008.


  1. For criticism of androcentrism, see Conkey & Spector, “Archaeology and the Study of Gender,” pp. 5-14; for criticism of heteronormative interpretations of the past, see Dowson, “Why Queer Archaeology? An Introduction,” pp. 161-65; for giving voices to ancient women and recognizing different genders behind the archaeological record, see Gilchrist, Gender and Archaeology; Sørensen, Gender Archaeology; Díaz-Andreu, “Gender identity,” pp. 1-42; for viewing gender as a system, see Conkey & Spector, “Archaeology and the Study of Gender,” pp. 4-16; for gender as a result of performative practice, see Perry & Joyce, “Providing a Past for Bodies that Matter: Judith Butler's Impact on the Archaeology of Gender.” The literature in gender archaeology is vast and these are only some frequently quoted studies. ↩︎

  2. Haaland and Haaland, “Who Speaks the Goddess’s Language?”; Haaland, “Emergence of Sedentism”; Nordström, “Gender and Social Structure in the Nubian A-Group.” ↩︎

  3. Lohwasser, Die königlichen Frauen; Lohwasser, “Queenship in Kush: Status, Role and Ideology of Royal Women,” pp. 61-76; Lohwasser. “The Role and Status of Royal Women in Kush,” pp. 61-72. ↩︎

  4. Lohwasser, “Gibt es mehr als zwei Geschlechter? Zum Verhältnis von Gender und Alter,” pp. 33-41. ↩︎

  5. Phillips, “Women in Ancient Nubia,” pp. 280-98. The necessity of studying gender, rather than focusing solely on women has also been emphasized recently, Lohwasser and Philipps, “Women in Ancient Kush,” pp. 1015-32. ↩︎

  6. Hafsaas-Tsakos, “Edges of Bronze and Expressions of Masculinity”; Karlsson, “Gender and Kushite State Ideology.” ↩︎

  7. The contributions in the volume are entirely devoid of gender perspectives, Raue, Handbook of Ancient Nubia. For example, the new Oxford Handbook of Ancient Nubia has an entry on women in ancient Kush and on the body, but no entry on gender. Other contributions are entirely devoid of gender perspectives. ↩︎

  8. Among these, are the questions of ability and disability, gender and intersectionality, and masculinity. Danielsson & Thedéen, To Tender Gender↩︎

  9. Jensen and Matić, “Introduction: Why do we need archaeologies of gender and violence, and why now?,” pp. 1-23. ↩︎

  10. Bourdieu, Masculine Domination, pp. 1-2; Bourdieu, “Symbolic Violence,” pp. 339-42; Žižek, Violence. Six Sideways Reflections, pp. 1-2; for the application of these concepts in archaeology and Egyptology, see Jensen and Matić, “Introduction: Why do We Need Archaeologies of Gender and Violence, and Why Now?,” pp. 1-23; Matić, “Traditionally Unharmed? Women and Children in NK Battle Scenes,” pp. 245-60; Matić, Body and Frames of War, pp. 139-48; Matić, Violence and Gender in Ancient Egypt↩︎

  11. For example, see Kuhrt, “Women and War,” pp. 1-25. ↩︎

  12. Matić, “Die ''römische'' Feinde in der meroitischen Kunst,” pp. 251-62; Spalinger, The Persistence of Memory in Kush; Spalinger, Leadership under Fire, pp. 201-42; Wöß, “The Representations of Captives and Enemies in Meroitic Art,” pp. 585-600. ↩︎

  13. Matić, “Her Striking but Cold Beauty: Gender and Violence in Depictions of Queen Nefertiti Smiting the Enemies,” pp. 103-21; Matić, “Traditionally Unharmed? Women and Children in NK Battle Scenes,” pp. 245-60; Matić, Body and Frames of War in New Kingdom Egypt, pp. 139-48; Matić, Violence and Gender in Ancient Egypt↩︎

  14. Butler, Frames of War, pp. 1-10. ↩︎

  15. Butler, Frames of War, p. 26. ↩︎

  16. Butler, Frames of War, p. 65. ↩︎

  17. Butler, The Force of Non-Violence, p. 6. ↩︎

  18. Crenshaw, “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics.” ↩︎

  19. Matić, “The Best of the Booty of His Majesty: Evidence for Foreign Child Labor in New Kingdom Egypt,” pp. 53-63; Matić, “Begehrte Beute. Fremde Frauen als Raubgut im Alten Ägypten,” pp. 15-8. ↩︎

  20. The author is currently working on a comprehensive study of the ancient Egyptian and Nubian lists of spoils of war from the Egyptian Early Dynastic to Nubian Meroitic period, Matić, “Pharaonic Plunder Economy”. ↩︎

  21. Macadam, The Temples of Kawa I. Text, p. 9; Macadam, The Temples of Kawa I. Plates, Pls. 5-6. ↩︎

  22. Macadam. The Temples of Kawa I. Text, p. 36; Macadam, The Temples of Kawa I. Plates, Pls. 11-12; FHN I, pp. 172-73. ↩︎

  23. Redford, “Taharqa in Western Asia and Libya,” p. 190. The stela actually does not bear the name of Taharqa and Jean Revez attributed it to an entirely different dynasty, Revez, “Une stèle inédite de la Troisième Période Intermédiaire à Karnak: une guerre civile en Thébaïde?”. ↩︎

  24. Pope, The Double Kingdom under Taharqo, 98-106. ↩︎

  25. Macadam, The Temples of Kawa I. Plates, Pl. 15; FHN I, p. 222. ↩︎

  26. For appointing prisoners of war to temples and temple workshops in New Kingdom Egypt, see Matić, “The Best of the Booty of His Majesty: Evidence for Foreign Child Labor in New Kingdom Egypt,” pp. 53-63. ↩︎

  27. FHN II, p. 447. ↩︎

  28. FHN II, p. 449. ↩︎

  29. FHN II, p. 487; Peust, Das Napatanische, p. 40. ↩︎

  30. Pope, The Double Kingdom under Taharqo, p. 105. ↩︎

  31. FHN II, p. 488. ↩︎

  32. It is also possible that some of them ended up enslaved in the Mediterranean world, Burstein, “The Nubian Slave Trade in Antiquity: A Suggestion.” ↩︎

  33. FHN II, p. 489. ↩︎

  34. FHN II, pp. 489-90. ↩︎

  35. FHN II, p. 490. ↩︎

  36. FHN II, 491. ↩︎

  37. Török, “Sacred Landscape, Historical Identity and Memory,” p. 161; For the same practice in ancient Egypt, at least until the New Kingdom, see Matić, “The Best of the Booty of His Majesty: Evidence for Foreign Child Labor in New Kingdom Egypt,” pp. 53-63. ↩︎

  38. FHN II, pp. 722-3; The connection to the conflict with Rome has been challenged since, Zach, “A Remark on the ‘Akinidad’ Stela REM 1003 (British Museum EA 1650),” p. 148. ↩︎

  39. Rilly, “New Advances in the Understanding of Royal Meroitic Inscriptions”; Rilly, “Meroitische Texte aus Naga”; Rilly, “Fragments of the Meroitic Report of the War Between Rome and Meroe.” ↩︎

  40. Hinkel, Der Tempelkomplex Meroe 250. I. 1, p. 209; see also Török, Meroe City, p. 104. ↩︎

  41. Török, Meroe City, p. 104. ↩︎

  42. Török, The Kingdom of Kush, p. 401; Török, The Image of the Ordered World, pp. 219-20. ↩︎

  43. Hinkel, Der Tempelkomplex Meroe 250. I. 1, p. 262. ↩︎

  44. Hinkel, Der Tempelkomplex Meroe 250. I. 1; Hinkel, Der Tempelkomplex Meroe 250. I. 2b↩︎

  45. He adds that the archaizing iconography and style of the war reliefs of the south and north walls of M250 were based on 25th dynasty Kushite monuments, and supposes that this archaizing iconography was mediated by the early temple at the site, which was built during Aspelta’s reign, and whose reliefs could have been copied on M250, Török, The Image of the Ordered World, p. 213. The 25th dynasty connections are seen, for example, in the motif of spearing the enemy using a lance by piercing the enemy almost horizontally from above-fragments 809, 876, 828, 808, 857, 836, 916, 917, 928, Hinkel, Der Tempelkomplex Meroe 250. I. 2b. This motif is known from the Amun temple at Gebel Barkal B500, from the reign of Piye, Spalinger, “Notes on the Military in Egypt during the XXVth Dynasty,” p. 48, Figs. 3 and 4. ↩︎

  46. Wenig, Africa in Antiquity, pp. 59-60. ↩︎

  47. Hofmann, “Notizen zu den Kampfszenen am sogenannten Sonnentempel von Meroe,” pp. 519-21. ↩︎

  48. Chapman and Dunham, Decorated Chapels of the Meroitic Pyramids at Meroë and Barkal, Pl. 17. ↩︎

  49. Shinnie and Bradley, “The Murals from the Augustus Temple, Meroe,” p. 168, Fig. 1; Matić, “Der Kopf einer Augustus-Statue aus Meroe,” p. 70, Abb. 7. ↩︎

  50. Wöß, “The Representations of Captives and Enemies in Meroitic Art,” p. 589. ↩︎

  51. Lohwasser, “Kush and her Neighbours beyond the Nile Valley In The Fourth Cataract and Beyond,” p. 131. ↩︎

  52. FHN III, p. 831; Jones, Strabo. The Geography Vol. VIII, p. 139. ↩︎

  53. Hinkel, Der Tempelkomplex Meroe 250. I. 1, pp. 189-90. ↩︎

  54. Minas-Nerpel and Pfeiffer, “Establishing Roman Rule in Egypt: The Trilingual Stela of C. Cornelius Gallus from Philae,” pp. 285-8. ↩︎

  55. Kormysheva, “Political Relations between the Roman Empire,” p. 306; Török, Between the Two Worlds, pp. 434-6. ↩︎

  56. Jameson, “Chronology of the Campaigns of Aelius Gallus and C. Petronius,” p. 77; Török, Between the Two Worlds, p. 441. ↩︎

  57. Török, The Kingdom of Kush, p. 449; Török, Between the Two Worlds, p. 441. ↩︎

  58. Török, Meroe City, p. 185. ↩︎

  59. Hinkel, Der Tempelkomplex Meroe 250. I. 1, p. 142. ↩︎

  60. Hinkel, Der Tempelkomplex Meroe 250. I. 1, p. 139. ↩︎

  61. Hinkel, Der Tempelkomplex Meroe 250. I. 1, pp. 140-1, Abb. 39, 40, 41, 42; p. 257, Abb. 95. ↩︎

  62. Hinkel, Der Tempelkomplex Meroe 250. I. 1, p. 140, Abb. 38; p. 257, Abb. 95. ↩︎

  63. Hinkel, Der Tempelkomplex Meroe 250. I. 2b, C10. ↩︎

  64. Hinkel, Der Tempelkomplex Meroe 250. I. 2b, C10. ↩︎

  65. For example, in tribute scenes from the tombs of Useramun-TT 131, Rekhmire-TT 100, Horemhab-TT 78 but also the Beit el-Wali temple of Ramesses II, Matić, “Children on the Move: ms.w wr.w in the New Kingdom Procession Scenes.” pp. 378-9, Fig. 12. ↩︎

  66. Hinkel, Der Tempelkomplex Meroe 250. I. 1, p. 189. ↩︎

  67. FHN III, p. 831; Jones, Strabo. The Geography Vol. VIII, p. 139. ↩︎

  68. Hinkel, Der Tempelkomplex Meroe 250. I. 1, pp. 138-9, Abb. 37b. ↩︎

  69. Török, The Image of the Ordered World, p. 220; Breyer, Einführung in die Meroitistik, p. 67. ↩︎

  70. FHN III, p. 831; Jones, Strabo. The Geography Vol. VIII, p. 139. ↩︎

  71. Rilly and De Voogt, The Meroitic Language and Writing System, p. 185. ↩︎

  72. Rilly, “Meroitische Texte aus Naga,” p. 190; Matić, “Die ''römische'' Feinde in der meroitischen Kunst,” p. 258. ↩︎

  73. Matić, “Traditionally Unharmed? Women and Children in NK Battle Scenes,” pp. 245-60; Matić, Body and Frames of War in New Kingdom Egypt, pp. 139-48. ↩︎

  74. Strathern, Before and After Gender, p. 21. ↩︎

  75. Parkinson, “Homosexual’ Desire and Middle Kingdom Literature”; Matić, Body and Frames of War, pp. 139-48; Matić, Violence and Gender in Ancient Egypt↩︎

  76. Grimal, La Stèle Triomphale, p. 177; FHN I, p. 111. ↩︎

  77. Grimal, La Stèle Triomphale, p. 176. ↩︎

  78. Goedicke, Pi(ankhy) in Egypt, p. 172. ↩︎

  79. Ritner, The Libyan Anarchy, p. 492. ↩︎

  80. El Hawary, Wortschöpfung, p. 243. ↩︎

  81. O’Connor and Quirke, “Introduction: Mapping the Unknown in Ancient Egypt,” p. 18. ↩︎

  82. For a detailed analysis see Lavik, A People Tall and Smooth-Skinned↩︎

  83. El Hawary, Wortschöpfung, p. 281. ↩︎

  84. Ritner, The Libyan Anarchy. pp. 477 and 490. ↩︎

  85. Dieleman, “Fear of Women?,” p. 14. ↩︎

  86. FHN I, p. 84. ↩︎

  87. Karlsson, “Gender and Kushite State Ideology.” ↩︎

  88. FHN II, p. 450. ↩︎

  89. Matić, Violence and Gender in Ancient Egypt↩︎

  90. FHN II, p. 653. ↩︎

  91. FHN III, p. 816. ↩︎

  92. FHN III, p. 831; Jones, Strabo. The Geography Vol. VIII, p. 139. ↩︎

  93. Lohwasser, “The Role and Status of Royal Women in Kush,” p. 64; Lohwasser and Philipps, “Women in Ancient Kush,” p. 1021. ↩︎

  94. McCoskey, “Gender at the Crossroads of Empire”. pp. 61-8. ↩︎

  95. Wilkins, Barnard, and Rose, “Roman Artillery Balls from Qasr Ibrim, Egypt,” pp. 71 and 75, Pl. 8, 4F. ↩︎

  96. Hall, The Pharaoh Smites His Enemy, p. 44. ↩︎

  97. Queen Tiye (ca. 1398-1338 BCE) of the 18th Dynasty is depicted trampling over enemies in the guise of a female sphinx. Queen Nefertiti (ca. 1370-? BCE) of the same dynasty is depicted both smiting enemies and trampling over them in the guise of a sphinx. I argued that we can observe a clear gender structure behind such images, and that the status of queens smiting enemies is lower than the status of the king smiting male enemies, Matić, “Her Striking but Cold Beauty: Gender and Violence in Depictions of Queen Nefertiti Smiting the Enemies,” pp. 103-21. ↩︎

  98. Matić, “Her Striking but Cold Beauty: Gender and Violence in Depictions of Queen Nefertiti Smiting the Enemies,” pp. 103-21; Matić, “Traditionally Unharmed? Women and Children in NK Battle Scenes,” pp. 245-60; Matić, Body and Frames of War in New Kingdom Egypt, pp. 139-48. ↩︎

  99. Williamson, “Alone before the God: Gender, Status, and Nefertiti’s Image,” pp. 179-92. ↩︎

  100. Matić, Violence and Gender in Ancient Egypt↩︎

  101. Chapman and Dunham, Decorated Chapels of the Meroitic Pyramids at Meroë and Barkal, Pl. 17. ↩︎

  102. Rilly, “Meroitische Texte aus Naga,” Abb. 218. ↩︎

  103. Chapman and Dunham, Decorated Chapels of the Meroitic Pyramids at Meroë and Barkal, Pl. 7A. ↩︎

  104. Chapman and Dunham, Decorated Chapels of the Meroitic Pyramids at Meroë and Barkal, Pls. 18B and 18D. ↩︎

  105. Gamer-Wallert, Der Löwentempel von Naqa in der Butana (Sudan) III, Bl. 1-2. ↩︎

  106. Pomerantseva, “The View on Meroitic Kings and Queens as it is Reflected in their Iconography,” p. 625. ↩︎

  107. Phillips, “Women in Ancient Nubia,” p. 292. ↩︎

  108. Matić, “Her Striking but Cold Beauty: Gender and Violence in Depictions of Queen Nefertiti Smiting the Enemies,” pp. 116-7. ↩︎

  109. For exceptionality and the possible divinization of Amanirenas (1st century CE), see Zach, “A Remark on the ‘Akinidad’ Stela REM 1003 (British Museum EA 1650),” p. 149. ↩︎

  110. Matić, “Pharaonic Plunder Economy.” ↩︎

  111. Matić, Violence and Gender in Ancient Egypt↩︎

  112. For weapons in female burials of the Kerma period interpreted as symbols of status, see Hafsaas-Tsakos, “Edges of Bronze and Expressions of Masculinity,” p. 89. Henriette Hafsaas has in personal communication informed me that she considers investigating this topic further and maybe revising her conclusions. ↩︎

  113. For the military activities of Ahhotep and Hatshepsut see, Matić, Violence and Gender in Ancient Egypt; Taterka, “Military expeditions of King Hatshepsut,” pp. 90-106. ↩︎

article⁄Words on Warfare from Christian Nubia
abstract⁄This article is an attempt to assemble the vocabulary related to war found in Nubian written sources (primarily manuscripts) and discuss the insights it offers about warfare in Christian Nubia. All four languages used in medieval Nubia are examined, but the focus is on Old Nubian. Saint Epimachos, Saint Mercurios, Saint George, and the Archangel Michael are the personae around which pivot the narratives that offer insights into weapons, offices, and practices in the otherwise very scarcely documented military of Christian Nubia.
keywords⁄Christian Nubia, Makuria, Old Nubian, Greek, Coptic, Weapons", Military Offices, Military Saints, Eparch, General, Admiral, Esquire

The purpose of this paper is to present textual evidence from Christian Nubia relating to issues of warfare, weaponry, and military functions. This evidence will be gleaned mainly from manuscripts, and secondarily from monumental epigraphy. From the four languages used in Christian Nubia, the present study will focus primarily on Old Nubian and partly on Greek, while occasionally evidence from sources in Arabic and Coptic will also be used. Although the material is not particularly rich, it may add to and/or nuance the picture of warfare in Nubia during the medieval era (ca. 5th to 15th centuries), which otherwise lacks a systematic study.

Moreover, evidence of warfare in the archaeological record from Nubia is scarce.1 One of the major reasons is the abandonment of the ancient custom of accompanying the dead with tomb furnishings already from the very beginnings of the Christian era in Nubia,2 whereas it was precisely tombs that provided the richest material evidence for warfare in terms of weaponry, as can be seen in A-Group,3 Kerma,4 Napatan,5 Meroitic,6 and post-Meroitic burials.7 Wars were, however, far from absent from Christian Nubia.

Warfare in Nubia is marked on the landscape by the numerous castles and forts of the Middle Nile region,8 although their function was also as sites of power, sights of might, centers of authority9; it was witnessed by the historians who recorded the frequent wars between Christian Nubia and the Caliphate10; it is related with slavery and slaving expeditions that have impregnated the image of the past in Sudan from prehistory until modernity11; it was recorded implicitly on the walls of the Nubian churches, where military saints, most often on horseback, parade as martyrs of the Christian faith and as guarantors of the security, longevity and prosperity of the Makuritan realm.

These military saints will set off the presentation of the textual evidence on warfare in Old Nubian,12 because there has also been preserved textual evidence of their cult, in the form of both shorter texts (dedications, prayers) and longer hagiographic works,13 as well as legal documents. From the sanctified humans that populated the celestial army, we will then move to the archistratēgos of the heavens, the archangel Michael, whose cult in Nubia has produced texts that offer important insights into the military organization of the Makuritan state. Finally, a question about the possibility of discerning evidence of Makuritan naval forces in our epigraphic material will conclude this modest contribution on warfare in Christian Nubia.

1. The Protector of the Four Corners of the Nubian Nation

One of the most impressive documents of legal practice from Christian Nubia is a Royal Proclamation found at Qasr Ibrim (P.QI 3 30) and dated to the 23rd of August 1155.14 Through this legal act, king Moses George proclaims the rights and privileges of the church of Saint Epimachos at Ibrim West.15 The king threatens anyone who “speaks against and denies my statement” (P.QI 3 30, l. 30) that Epimachos will “stab him with his spear” (ll. 30-1). The action is described by the verb ϣⲁⲅ and the weapon by the noun ϣⲓⲅⲣ̄, but whether the latter refers to the “spear” indeed and not to any other weapon is uncertain. Without parallel texts in other languages, it is difficult to confirm the definitions in OND, which seem to try to conform with the fact that the spear was the diagnostic iconographic attribute of Epimachos in Nubian iconography (see below). There is moreover another word in the OND for “spear” or “lance,” i.e. ϣⲁ, which possibly has a related root, but again it does not necessarily mean “spear.” Finally, it should be noted that an Old Nubian term for “ruler” is ϣⲓⲕⲉⲣⲓ, and although in the OND this is etymologically linked with a variant ϣⲏⲕⲕ of the term ϣⲁⲗ for “administrative unit,” a verb ϣⲓⲕ, meaning “to rule” has recently been identified in P.QI 4 93.4 and P.QI 4 108.7. It is tempting to associate this verb with the noun ϣⲓⲅⲣ̄ and thus suggest that ϣⲓⲕⲉⲣⲓ was a military ruler, but for the time being this hypothesis remains speculative.

In any case, the king’s threat to invoke Saint Epimachos is presented in the royal proclamation from Qasr Ibrim as even more powerful than the King’s curse; a heart attack; the sharing of Judas Iscariot’s faith; and the rejection of the trespasser by the society. Again, after all these threats/curses, it is Epimachos who is called upon “on the day of judgment” to “come great in battle against him” (ll. 34-5). Here, the Old Nubian word for battle is used, i.e. ⲡⲛ̄ⲅ. There is also attested a verb form ⲡⲛ̄ⲕ, i.e. “to fight,” as well as a synonym ⲇⲓⳟⲉ (or ⲇⲓⳟⲁⲣ).16 One instance of the use of the latter term in the Old Nubian corpus translates the Greek participle πολεμουμένων, which derives from the term πόλεμος, i.e. “war.” In Nobiin, the verb ⲇⲓⳟ also translates as “Krieg führen,” 17 and it is not inconceivable that a derivative of the root ⲇⲓⳟ was also used to define “war” or “warfare.” A military victory can also be discerned behind the meaning of the term ⲇⲓⳟⲁⲣⲧ, attested once in the OND translating the Greek word νῖκος.18 In the same semantic field as ⲇⲓⳟⲉ (or ⲇⲓⳟⲁⲣ), there is the verb ⲉⲥⲕ meaning “to conquer,” which seems rather related with the ability to win rather with the fight necessary to mark a military victory. However, in one instance, the term is directly linked with the quality of a weapon, namely a shield (about the Old Nubian terms for this weapon, see below): P.QI 1 11.ii.2 ⲥⲟⲩⲇⲇⲟⲩ ⲙⲉⲇⲇⲕ̄ⲕⲧⲓⲛⲁ ⲅⲟⲩⲉⲓⲟⲩ ⲉⲥⲕⲓϭⲣⲉⲛⲛⲗ̄, that can be translated as “the staff which is the victorious shield of readiness.”

Conversely, the Greek term for “war,” i.e. πόλεμος, was surely known in Christian Nubia, since it appears several times in the Septuagint and the New Testament. It is important to note that the Greek term is also used in the Sahidic New Testament, suggesting that it is not impossible that it had remained untranslated in the Old Nubian version of the Bible too (for further evidence, see the section on Saint George).

Moreover, the adjective πολέμιος for “enemy,” deriving from the noun “πόλεμος” is attested in a prayer to Raphael from Banganarti, composed in “extremely corrupted” Greek. In the same text, a participle “πολεμόντων” (sic) also appears.19 From the rich textual corpus recorded at the same site one can also glean a couple of instances of the use of the Greek noun ἐχθρὸς, meaning «enemy».20 These instances seem to rather refer, however, to the devil and other demonic forces as the par excellence enemies of the Christians.

The term πολέμιος – denoting real, earthly enemies – is read in the text on the back of a small wooden plaque found at the late Christian settlement of Attiri, where Saint Epimachos is called upon “to protect the roads from the enemies.” 21 At the same time, there is also an Old Nubian term for “enemy,” i.e. ⲟⲩⲕⲕⲁⲧⲧ stemming apparently from the verb ⲟⲩⲣ meaning “to oppress.”

The reference to “the roads” in the text of the Attiri plaque seems to invest Epimachos with the role of the protector of the territory that the ruler and/or the inhabitants of Attiri controlled. This role is confirmed and expanded to the entire Makuritan realm in the text of P.QI 3 30.26-7, where the king makes an invocation “in order that Epimachos might arise, come and place the four corners of the nation for care under my feet.”

Although there are several saints with the name Epimachos, it is generally thought that the Nubian Epimachos is the same with Epimachus of Pelusium, who was not initially a warrior-saint, but a weaver from Pelusium who martyred for the Christian faith under Diocletian.22 Perhaps through his association with other martyrs under Diocletian, like Saint George, Epimachos became a warrior saint in the belief system of the Christian Nubians; perhaps this was due to his name, including the Greek word for battle, i.e. μάχη; or perhaps thanks to some local miracle that was not preserved to us due to the loss of the relevant written source. In any case, the cult of Epimachos was widespread at least in Lower Nubia and in the later centuries of Christianity there (first half of the second millennium CE), as can also be seen from a fragment of a stela in Coptic,23 two fragmentarily preserved texts witnessing an Old Nubian version of his Martyrdom,24 as well as from two painted representations at Aballah-n Irqi and Abu Oda, where the saint is spearing a fallen figure, like in the plaque from Attiri.25

There were, however, other military saints who were at least equally venerated in Christian Nubia as Saint Epimachos, and it seems that the idea of Epimachos spearing the enemies is inherently linked with the function of such saints who speared the adversary, in the form of a dragon, a pagan or an apostate, symbolizing in general terms the evil itself.

2. The Saint Stratēlates Mercurios and George

The spearing of an adversary of the Christian faith is exemplified in the Acta of Saint Mercurios.26 Mercurios was a Roman soldier who martyred under Decius. The locality of his martyrdom was near Caesarea in Cappadocia. Thence, he was linked in one legend with Saint Basil of Caesarea. Basil was a contemporary of Julian the Apostate and, according to a version of his Life, during Julian’s Persian campaign, Basil was informed in a dream that Mercurios was chosen by the Theotokos to kill the emperor. Basil rose and went to the martyrion of Mercurios, but neither his body nor his weapons were there. Later on, the news of Julian’s death reached him.

An exegesis for this miracle may be linked with the report by Ammianus Marcellinus that Julian was killed by a lance “no one knows whence” (Res Gestae XXV.3.6: incertum inde).27 Obviously, this vagueness gave room to speculation for divine intervention, while the reason that Mercurios was chosen may allegedly be linked with the role of Basil and the geographical proximity of the martyrion with Julian’s Persian campaign.

In any case, when the narrative about the assassination of Julian reached Egypt, it was still linked with both the dream of Basil and the spear of Mercurios, but rather seen as part of the History of the patriarchate of Athanasios, apparently in order to invest the miracle with local references. An even further alienation from the narrative in Basil’s Life is to be found in a Greek version of the Acta of Saint Mercurios discovered at Qasr Ibrim. There, Basil has disappeared from the miracle story, and the person who sees the dream is Pachomios. When this dream comes, the father of coenobitic monasticism is together with Athanasios, during the exile of the latter in the second half of Julian’s reign, i.e. 362-3 CE. The Theotokos has also disappeared from the narrative and it is now an angel of God who reveals things to Pachomios. Whether this new narrative is a local, i.e. Nubian, invention or an Egyptian contextualization of the legend around the assassination of the Emperor Julian cannot be investigated in this context.

It can be mentioned, however, that while Mercurios is represented in Egyptian iconography both as a holder of a spear,28 and as Abu Sayfayn, i.e. the Father with the two swords,29 in Nubia he appears as the slayer of Julian with his spear in all known mural representations, i.e. from Faras, Abdel Qadir and the Central Church of Abdallah-n Irqi.30 The mural from Faras is of special importance, because it has been suggested that the story of Abu Sayfayn was already part of the complete iconographical concept in that section of the cathedral (see below). Thus, the iconography of Mercurios spearing Julian unites a type of weapon with the miracle story of the saint and underlines the identification of Mercurios with the act of eliminating pagans and the threat of the old religion.

This identification is relevant for the purpose of this paper, when one considers that Mercurios was the name of a very important royal figure in the history of medieval Nubia: King Mercurios ruled during the turn from the 7th to the 8th century and the History of the Patriarchs of Alexandria calls him the New Constantine, who “became by his beautiful conduct like one of the Disciples”.31 Although this characterization has been linked with the annexation of Nobadia by Makuria and the integration of the united kingdom in the hierarchy of the Coptic Patriarchate of Alexandria, I have suggested that the name Mercurios might have been given to him as indeed a New Constantine who turned away from heathen practices the Nubian people remaining to be Christianized, stamping out paganism like his name-sake saint speared the last pagan emperor.32 In sum, for Christians of the Nile Valley, the name Mercurios must have sounded extremely heroic, belligerent and war-like.

Finally, there are three words that are attested in the Greek version of the Acta S. Mercurii from Qasr Ibrim, which are of direct relevance for the present investigation, namely:

- the noun πόλεμον for “war” commemorating the Persian campaign of Julian and confirming the knowledge that the Nubians must have had of this term.

- the noun λόγχαριν for “spear” identifying the miraculous weapon of the martyr in Greek. About the Old Nubian term, see discussion in previous section.

- the adjective στρατηλάτης for “general” referring to Mercurios and linking him with the other famous “general” of the Christian faith, saint George.

Saint George is perhaps the most renowned military saint. He belongs to the circle of Roman soldiers who martyred for the Christian faith under Diocletian, but his fame far surpassed that of others, for reasons that also surpass the scope of this article. His cult reached of course Christian Nubia too, as is witnessed by fragments of both a Greek and an Old Nubian version of his Acta that have been unearthed at Qasr Ibrim and Kulubnarti respectively.33

The Old Nubian fragments of the Martyrdom of Saint George have been reconstructed on the basis of the Greek editio princeps, but find also parallels in witnesses in several other languages.34 As to the Greek version, it exhibits a text written in a Greek language characteristic of late Christian Nubia,35 while its content seems to be a combination of Greek and Coptic versions. This observation led the editor of the Qasr Ibrim fragments to the hypothesis that the text is either the result of a free choice from both sources or a Nubian edition of an original narrative of the martyrdom antedating the Greek editio princeps.36

In terms of vocabulary, the Martyrdom of Saint George offers interesting attestations in both versions:

In the Greek one, the term κομητοῦρα,37 a Latin loan-word also attested in the editio princeps, is worthwhile to comment upon, because it confirms the acquaintance of Nubians with Latin military jargon, most probably as a result of an influx of Latin terms in medieval Greek. Moreover, it is interesting that Roman military correspondence has been unearthed at Qasr Ibrim,38 the site of provenance of the Greek version of the Nubian martyrdom of Saint George. The influence of Roman military practices in the Middle Nile region has also been marked on the ground through the apparent similarities between Roman forts and those built in the Middle Nile region during Late Antiquity.39

As far as the Old Nubian version of the Acta S. Georgii is concerned, the most interesting term is ⲡⲁⲇⲁⳡⳝⲁⲣⲓ[ⲗⲅⲟⲩⲗ], which stands for the Greek term σπαθάριος, or etymologically “those (soldiers) who carry sword,” combining the terms ⲡⲁⲇⲁⳡ for “sword” and ⳝⲁⲣ from ⲕⲁⲣⲣ for “to grasp, hold”.40 The shift from kappa to jima can be explained as progressive assimilation under influence of the palatal nasal nia, while the phenomenon of the incorporation of a noun into a verbal root complex is attested in Old Nubian.41

This etymological analysis may be compromised by the existence of the Old Nubian word ⲕⲁⲣ meaning “shield,” which could translate the term as “the holder (sic) of the sword and the shield,” but without any morpheme explicating the coining of the two terms, unless it can be found in the reconstructed part of the manuscript. Moreover, the existence of a Greek Vorlage for the Acta S. Georgii gives good ground for accepting the original etymological analysis, while the term ⲕⲁⲣ is only attested in a passage of the Stauros-text, that the Coptic parallel text does not preserve.42

Finally, the analysis of ⲡⲁⲇⲁⳡⳝⲁⲣⲓ[ⲗⲅⲟⲩⲗ] as “those (soldiers) who carry sword” opens the path for a new interpretation of another office from the titulature used in Christian Nubia, namely ⲅⲟⲩⲕⲁⲣⲕⲟⲗ.

This term is attested in P.QI 3 30.37 & 41 and seems to derive its etymology from the word ⲅⲟⲩⲉⲓ for “shield” or “armor” more generally. The last element ⲕⲟⲗ defines “the one who has,” forming a sort of a participle. And the remaining three letters could again be interpreted either as ⲕⲁⲣ meaning “shield” or as ⲕⲁⲣⲣ meaning “to grasp/hold”. In my opinion, it makes better sense to use the latter etymology and to see ⲅⲟⲩⲕⲁⲣⲕⲟⲗ as a term defining the officer who is wielding the shield.43 For this etymology to work, one must account for the dropping of the final glide, a phenomenon which is not unattested.

The relation of this office with the “shield” brings to mind the Greek title ὑπασπιστής, which means “the one who is under the shield” and derives from the Macedonian military organization, where the hypaspistēs were a sort of esquires.44 The office continued into the Byzantine period and, according to Maspero the hypaspistēs were the guard of the duces in Egypt,45 often composed of mercenaries, also including “Ethiopians”, a term used for the peoples leaving south of Egypt, but which remains vague whether it denoted in the medieval era the Nubians or the inhabitants of modern-day Ethiopia or both.46 The meaning “guard” for hypaspistēs appears also in Byzantine sources of the 11th century,47 while in later times the hypaspistēs were important individuals close to the ruler, sort of retainers of the king. Interestingly, the most renowned chronicle of the Fall of Constantinople in 1453 was written by Georgios Frantzis who was – among other things – the hypaspistēs of the last Byzantine Emperor, Constantine Paleologos.48

This interest lies with the fact that both instances of the term ⲅⲟⲩⲕⲁⲣⲕⲟⲗ in the Old Nubian corpus derive from the royal proclamation from Qasr Ibrim, examined in the section about Epimachos. Now, the first instance is only preserved partially as ⲅⲟⲩⲕ ̀ⲕ ́ and has been deciphered based on the second one, although they apparently refer to different persons, first to someone called Papasa and then to someone called Ounta. The first one accumulates several titles, mainly monastic, palatial, and bureaucratic; the second one is a scribe. It is not improbable that such individuals in Christian Nubia may also have exercised military functions, as the etymology based on ⲅⲟⲩⲉⲓ for “shield, armor” may indicate and the history of the term hypaspistēs in Byzantine Egypt underlines, but it is equally probable that the office meant in Makuria the same as in the later centuries in Byzantium, namely an esquire. At least this seems, in my opinion, more fitting with Papasa and Ounta in the service of king Moses George.

In any case, a military aura of the Makuritan royal court is very plausible, given, among other things, the certainly important role that the king played in warfare, as is attested in the Arabic sources referring to Christian Nubia, where the king always appears as the leader of the Nubian armies. We could look for example at this same king Moses George who stamped with hot iron a cross on the hand of the emissary of none less than Saladin, when he was asked to subdue and convert to Islam49; or much earlier in the 8th century, when king Kyriakos invaded Egypt and caused chaos there attempting to liberate the imprisoned patriarch Michael50; or even in the heroic defense of Dongola in the 7th century by king Qalidurut who signed the much-discussed baqt with Abdalla ibn Sa’d.51 During the siege, the world came to know the might of the Nubian archers who were praised by the Arabic chroniclers and poets for centuries to come. The Old Nubian word for bow is attested once in a passage translated from Greek Patristic literature: ⲇⲁⲙⲁⲣ. Interestingly, in the OND, this term is linked etymologically with the Dongolawi/Andaandi tungur, which has a striking phonetic similarity with the Old Nubian toponym for the Makuritan capital, namely ⲧⲟⲩⲅⲅⲟⲩⲗ. Although the term tungur for “bow” seems unrelated to the accepted etymologies of ⲧⲟⲩⲅⲅⲟⲩⲗ,52 it cannot be excluded that the inhabitants of Dongola associated their city with the war technique that their ancestors became famous for, and they themselves surely still practiced. This is a line of thought that might be worth investigating further in a future study.

3. The ⲥⲟⳟⲟⳝ of Heavens and the Archistratēgos of the Makuritan King

Mercurios and George were sanctified and as stratēlates were posthumously surely manning the celestial hosts in their perennial and eternal fight against evil, along with Epimachos and the other military saints of Nubia. In this superhuman afterlife, the martyrs would thus be expected to join forces with the archistratēgos of heavens, the leader of the angelic hosts, the archangel Michael.

Characteristically, the swords that Mercurios holds in his representations in Coptic art as Abu Sayfayn are given to him by Michael as narrated in the Encomium of Acacius, Bishop of Caesarea, on Mercurius the Martyr.53 It seems that the Nubians were aware of that story and while preserving the spear as weapon of the mounted Saint Mercurios in the cathedral of Faras, they represented on the adjoining wall Michael offering the sword to the saint.54

The archangel Michael is the most venerated celestial being in the Christian pantheon of medieval Nubia with innumerable sources dedicated to his cult.55 One of the most popular aspects of the archangel’s cult is an apocryphal work called “The Book of the Investiture of the Archangel Michael,” which describes – among other things – the fall of Mastema (i.e. the devil) from Heaven due to his objection to venerate Adam as an image of God and his replacement by Michael who thence becomes protector of the humans and leader/archistratēgos of the angelic hosts.56

A lot has been written about the importance of this work in Nubia.57 One important element in the discussion is the coincidence that the focal passage of the entire work – the scene of the Investiture of Michael – is the only thing narrated in the two versions fragmentarily preserved in two Nubian manuscripts: one in Greek from Serra East and one in Old Nubian from Qasr Ibrim.58 Among other insights that this coincidence offers, there is one that obtains a special importance in the context of the present paper, namely that the word that translates the Greek term ἀρχιστράτηγος in Old Nubian is ⲥⲟⳟⲟⳝ, which is most probably the term used to define an Eparch of the Makuritan kingdom,59 more often than not (but not exclusively) linked with the Late Antique kingdom of Nobadia controlling between the 4th-5th and the 6th-7th centuries Lower Nubia.

There are, however, more Eparchs attested in the Nubian sources than just the Eparch of Nobadia. Whether all Eparchs were Songoj or whether all Eparchs had (also) a military function, it is impossible to ascertain. The Eparch of Nobadia though (the Migin Songoj of the Nubian texts) seems to be the same term as the “Lord of the Mountain,” which is attested in Arabic sources and although apparently linked with economic activities (an idea based on the nature of the documents in which the title appears) he was also understood as a military officer and also called “Lord of the Horses.”60 Suffice to be reminded here that military saints in Nubia were mostly depicted on horseback.61

One more detail from the field of Nubian iconography: a mural from Faras housed at the National Museum of Warsaw represents an unnamed Eparch who holds a bow,62 perhaps the weapon par excellence of Nubians, as we mentioned in the reference to the successful defense of Dongola against the invading Islamic army in the 7th century. Admittedly, this is not the only representation of an Eparch from Christian Nubia, but the sole iconographic witness of the links between the Eparch and warfare.

So, although the title of the Eparch may have been used for a variety of functions in the Makuritan state, the military one should not be doubted based on the translation of ἀρχιστράτηγος as ⲥⲟⳟⲟⳝ in the Book of the Investiture of the Archangel Michael. All this is of course the result of the identification of the titles Eparch and ⲥⲟⳟⲟⳝ. This identification is quite certain for some contexts, but during the centuries (at least six) that it was in use the terms may have shifted semantic fields. So, it is plausible that the term ⲥⲟⳟⲟⳝ translating the Greek ἀρχιστράτηγος was a military office that supplemented the civil functions of the Eparch, an office for which the Old Nubian term is unknown – if it ever existed. On the same token, one may be reminded of the existence of the offices of peseto and pelmos in Meroitic Lower Nubia, the former having civil functions and the latter military ones.63

Leaving aside this necessary and eventually inevitable nuancing for a different venue, it may be concluded in the context of the present paper that the Songoj/Eparch was (also) the archistratēgos of the Makuritan king, a sort of a præfectus prætorio or ἔπαρχος στρατευμάτων.64

Hence, a complementary working hypothesis can be advanced. In the Greek version of the Book of the Investiture of the Archangel Michael, we get a detailed description of the celestial ceremony of investiture, where Michael is receiving the garments of his new function, the uniform of the archistratēgos. In the first instance that the military character of the archangel’s dress is mentioned, the garments are called στρατοπεδαρχίας ἀμφιάσματα, “the clothes of the chief of the military encampment.” The Old Nubian text prefers again to state that Michael was dressed in the garment of the office of the ⲥⲟⳟⲟⳝ. So, it seems that for the Makuritans the Songoj was an army general presiding over an encampment. Was this encampment permanent? Or did the role apply to the leadership of a special type of unit stationed at a given locality? And to what degree such στρατοπεδαρχίαι reflect the local authority that eventually the various Eparchs attested in our sources had? These questions should remain open until new discoveries and a more thorough study of the material takes place.

4. War on the Nile

There is a last aspect that is worthwhile a comment in the framework of the present paper. The dimensions of warfare discussed hereby all seem to refer to land forces. However, the most characteristic element of the Nubian civilization is its relation with the River Nile. Therefore, its navigation cannot have left unaffected the military exploits of Christian Nubians. Actually, it has already been suggested that the placement of the fortresses of Makuria along the banks of the Nile necessitated the existence of a fleet which could transport the army and vital provisions in case of a land attack from intruders, be they desert marauders or the Egyptian army.65 Unfortunately, there is very little in our sources that gives information about the naval forces of the Makuritans. Moreover, what is known about navigation on the Nile in terms of Old Nubian vocabulary has already been presented and this material includes nothing that points with certainty to warfare.66

There exists, however, one title in Greek, namely ναυάρχης, for ναύαρχος, meaning “admiral,” who has been already seen as the leader of the fleet transporting goods and military units to the Makuritan fortresses.67 Furthermore, there should be no doubt that an “admiral” was always in existence in Nubia, since we know of a “strategos of the water” from Meroitic times.68 Now, it has been shown in an early study of the titles and honorific epithets from Nubia that ναυάρχης, albeit of apparently Byzantine inspiration, was not the preferred terminus technicus for a Byzantine “admiral,” but it was mainly to be found in literary works.69 Thus, it is worthwhile enquiring whether the Makuritans did not make some bookish research in order to find the term that they would use for their admiral, as it seems that they have done in other occasions, like in the accumulation of terms for “king” in the renowned Kudanbes inscription, which – rather unsurprisingly under this light – is one of the places where the term ναυάρχης is being attested.70

5. Concluding Remarks

It would be difficult to pronounce a set of conclusions from this study that aimed primarily at assembling lexicographical data about warfare in Christian Nubia. Previous research has already traced the outlines of the influence of Greek terminology upon the way Nubians created their own titles and honorific epithets and there has not been found any new military terms or words of weaponry that can be added to OND. However, new apprehension of a couple of words on war was proposed here, while the revisiting of both literary and documentary sources has offered a reappraisal of some others and the nuancing of their contextualization against the background of the Makuritan Christian kingdom, undoubtedly involved in wars along its history and across the classes of its social stratification. Finally, it is perhaps the main contribution of this paper to show the potential of teasing out information about neglected aspects of the Nubian past from a careful and educated but also bold and imaginative reading of the available material.

6. References

Browne, Gerald Michael. Old Nubian Texts from Qasr Ibrim, volume 3. London: Egypt Exploration Society, 1991.

Browne, Gerald Michael. “An Old Nubian Version of the Martyrdom of Saint Epimachus.” In 50 Years of Polish Excavations in Egypt and the Near East: Acts of the Symposium at the Warsaw University, 1986, edited by Stefan Jakobielski and Janusz Karkowski, pp. 74-7. Warsaw: Centre Professeur Kazimierz Michalowski d'Archéologie Méditerranéenne de l'Université de Varsovie: Centre d'Archéologie Méditerranéenne de l'Académie polonaise des Sciences, 1992.

Browne, Gerald Michael. “Old Nubian Literature.” In Études Nubiennes. Conférence de Genève, Actes du VIIe Congrès international d’études nubiennes, 3-8 septembre 1990, I: Communications principales, edited by Charles Bonnet, pp. 379-87. Geneva: Compotronic SA, 1992.

Browne, Gerald Michael. Old Nubian Dictionary. Louvain: Peeters, 1996.

Browne, Gerald Michael. The Old Nubian Martyrdom of Saint George. CSCO 575. Subsidia 101. Louvain: Peeters, 1998.

Browne, Gerald Michael. “An Old Nubian Translation of the Martyrdom of Saint Epimachus.” Le muséon 115 (2002): pp. 69-76.

Budge, E. A. W. Miscellaneous Texts in the Dialect of Upper Egypt. Coptic Texts; Edited with Introductions and English Translations, 5. London: British Museum, 1915.

Crawford, Osbert Guy Stanhope. Castles and Churches in the Middle Nile Region. Sudan Antiquities Service Occasional Papers 2. Khartoum, 1953.

Derda, Tomasz, and Adam Łajtar. “Greek and Latin Papyri from the Egypt Exploration Society Excavations at Qasr Ibrim: A Testimony to the Roman Army in Upper Egypt and Lower Nubia in the First Years of Augustus.” In Actes du 26e Congrès international de papyrologie, Genève, 16-21 août 2010, edited by Paul Schubert, pp. 183-186. Geneva: Libraire Droz, 2012.

Derda, Tomasz, and Adam Łajtar. “The Roman Occupation of Qasr Ibrim as Reflected in the Greek Papyri from the Site.” In Qasr Ibrim, between Egypt and Africa, edited by Jacques Van der Vliet and Joost Hagen, pp. 105-10. Leuven: Peeters, 2013.

Drzewiecki, Mariusz. Mighty Kingdoms and Their Forts. The Role of Fortified Sites in the Fall of Meroe and Rise of Medieval Realms in Upper Nubia. Nubia VI. Warsaw: Institute of Mediterranean and Oriental Cultures, Polish Academy of Sciences, 2016.

Drzewiecki, Mariusz. “Roman Type Forts in the Middle Nile Valley. Late Antique Fortlets between Patterns of Roman Military Architecture and Local Tradition.” In Experiencing the Frontier and the Frontier Experience. Barbarian Perspectives and Roman Strategies to Deal with New Threats, edited by Alexander Rubel and Hans-Ulrich Voß, pp. 179-92. Oxford: Archaeopress, 2020.

Edwards, David N. “The Christianisation of Nubia: Some Archaeological Pointers.” Sudan & Nubia 5 (2001): pp. 89-96.

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Van Esbroeck, Michel. “Mercurius of Caesarea, Saint.” In The Coptic Encyclopedia, vol. 5, edited by Aziz S. Atiya, pp. 1592a-4a. New York: MacMillan, 1991. [https://ccdl.claremont.edu/digital/collection/cce/id/1327, last accessed in February 2021].

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Van Gerven Oei, Vincent W.J., and Alexandros Tsakos. “Apostolic Memoirs in Old Nubian”, In Parabiblica Coptica, edited by Ivan Miroshnikov. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, forthcoming.

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Łajtar, Adam. “The so-called Kudanbes Inscription in Deir Anba Hadra (St. Simeon Monastery) near Aswan: An Attempt at a New Reading and Interpretation,” in preparation.

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Tsakos, Alexandros. “Textual Finds from Cerre Matto.” In Oriental Institute of Chicago Nubian Expedition monograph series, vol. 13, Chicago, forthcoming.

Tsakos, Alexandros. “Sources about the Cult and Persona of the Archangel Michael in Nubia”. In Proceedings of the 14th International Congress of Nubian Studies, edited by Vincent Rondot. Paris, forthcoming*.*

Tsakos, Alexandros. “The Christianization of Nubia,” in preparation.

Vantini, Giovanni Fr. Oriental Sources Concerning Nubia. Warsaw-Heidelberg, 1975.

Van der Vliet, Jacques. Catalogue of the Coptic Inscriptions in the Sudan National Museum at Khartoum (I. Khartoum Copt.). Orientalia Lovaniensia Analecta 121. Leuven: Peeters 2003.

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Welsby, Derek A. The Medieval Kingdoms of Nubia. Pagans, Christians and Muslims along the Middle Nile. London: British Museum Press, 2012.

Zielińska, Dobrochna, and Alexandros Tsakos. “Representations of the Archangel Michael in Wall Paintings from Christian Nubia.” In The Archangel Michael in Africa: History, Cult and Persona, edited by Ingvild Sælid Gilhus, Alexandros Tsakos, and Marta Camilla Wright, pp. 79-94. London-New York-Oxford-New Delhi-Sydney: Bloomsbury Academics 2019.

Żurawski, Bogdan. “Strongholds on the Middle Nile: Nubian Fortifications of the Middle Ages.” In The Power of Walls – The Fortifications of Ancient Northeastern Africa: Proceedings of the International Workshop Held at the University of Cologne 4th-7th August 2011, edited by Friedrike Jesse and Carola Vogel, pp. 113-43. Cologne: Heinrich Barth Institut 2013.


  1. For a general presentation, see Welsby, The Medieval Kingdoms of Nubia, pp. 78-82. ↩︎

  2. Edwards, “The Christianisation of Nubia: Some Archaeological Pointers,” p. 89 ↩︎

  3. Hafsaas-Tsakos, War on the Southern Frontier of the Emerging State of Ancient Egypt↩︎

  4. Hafsaas-Tsakos, “Edges of Bronze and Expressions of Masculinity: The Emergence of a Warrior Class at Kerma in Sudan.” ↩︎

  5. Welsby, The Kingdom of Kush, pp. 39-50. ↩︎

  6. Francigny, Les coutumes funéraires dans le royaume de Méroé↩︎

  7. Lenoble, El-Hobagi↩︎

  8. Crawford, Castles and Churches in the Middle Nile Region↩︎

  9. Drzewiecki, Mighty Kingdoms and their Forts↩︎

  10. Vantini, Oriental Sources Concerning Nubia; Seignobos, L’Égypte et la Nubie à l’époque médiévale↩︎

  11. Edwards, “Slavery and Slaving in the Medieval and Post-Medieval Kingdoms of the Middle Nile.” ↩︎

  12. All the Old Nubian words assembled in this study can be found in Browne, Old Nubian Dictionary (hence OND). ↩︎

  13. Frend, “The Cult of Military Saints in Christian Nubia.” ↩︎

  14. For the correction of the date from 1156, see Ruffini, Medieval Nubia: A Social and Economic History, pp. 265-70. ↩︎

  15. The same church may be the object of two more documents, i.e. P.QI 3 40 & P.QI 3 53. ↩︎

  16. Here a corrigendum to P.Attiri 1.ii.1 from [ⲁⲛ] to [ⲇⲓ] should be noted, see Van Gerven Oei e.a., The Old Nubian Texts from Attiri, p. 39. ↩︎

  17. Khalil, Wörterbuch der nubischen Sprache, p. 41. ↩︎

  18. The word ⲇⲓⳟⲧ̄ for “wrestling” is totally reconstructed in OND and is not considered in the present discussion. ↩︎

  19. Łajtar, A Late Christian Pilgrimage Centre in Nubia. The Evidence of Wall Inscriptions in the Upper Church at Banganarti, pp. 383-5 (inscription nr. 578). The citation is from p. 384. ↩︎

  20. Idem, p. 562-3 and inscription 964. ↩︎

  21. Tsakos, “Miscellanea Epigraphica Nubica III: Epimachos of Attiri: a Warrior Saint of Late Christian Nubia,” pp. 215-7. ↩︎

  22. Esbroeck, “Epimachus of Pelusium, Saint,” pp. 965b-7a. ↩︎

  23. Van der Vliet, I. Khartoum Copt., pp. 83-4 (nr. 24). ↩︎

  24. Browne, “An Old Nubian Version of the Martyrdom of Saint Epimachus” and “An Old Nubian translation of the Martyrdom of Saint Epimachus.” ↩︎

  25. See Tsakos, “Miscellanea Epigraphica Nubica III: Epimachos of Attiri: a Warrior Saint of Late Christian Nubia,” p. 213 with an image of the plaque and pp. 220-1 for the other representations with references ↩︎

  26. Frend, “The Cult of Military Saints in Christian Nubia,” pp. 156-8. ↩︎

  27. For the reference, see Idem, p. 157 and note 9. ↩︎

  28. Piankoff, “Peintures au monastère de Saint Antoine,” p. 160 and ill. IV. ↩︎

  29. Esbroeck, “Mercurius of Caesarea, Saint,” pp. 1593b-4a. ↩︎

  30. See Frend, “The Cult of Military Saints in Christian Nubia,” p. 157 for references. ↩︎

  31. Vantini, Oriental Sources Concerning Nubia, p. 40; Seignobos, L’Égypte et la Nubie à l’époque médiévale, p. 96. ↩︎

  32. Tsakos, “The Christianization of Nubia.” ↩︎

  33. For the find from Qasr Ibrim, see Frend, “Fragments of a version of the Acta S. Georgii from Q'asr Ibrim.” For the find from Kulubnarti, see Browne, The Old Nubian Martyrdom of Saint George↩︎

  34. Browne, ibid., p. 1-3. ↩︎

  35. For the general characteristics of Greek in Late Christian Nubia, see Łajtar, A Late Christian Pilgrimage Centre in Nubia. The Evidence of Wall Inscriptions in the Upper Church at Banganarti, pp. 20-30. ↩︎

  36. Frend, “Fragments of a version of the Acta S. Georgii from Q'asr Ibrim,” pp. 103-4. ↩︎

  37. Idem., p. 94. ↩︎

  38. See Derda and Łajtar, “Greek and Latin papyri from the Egypt Exploration Society excavations at Qasr Ibrim: A testimony to the Roman army in Upper Egypt and Lower Nubia in the first years of Augustus,” p. 185; Derda and Łajtar, “The Roman Occupation of Qasr Ibrim as Reflected in the Greek Papyri from the Site,” pp. 105-6 and notes 1 and 2 for references. ↩︎

  39. Drzewiecki, “Roman Type Forts in the Middle Nile Valley. Late Antique Fortlets between Patterns of Roman Military Architecture and Local Tradition.” ↩︎

  40. Browne, The Old Nubian Martyrdom of Saint George, p. 11. ↩︎

  41. For the phenomenon of “incorporation”, see Van Gerven Oei, A Reference Grammar of Old Nubian, §15.1.3.4. ↩︎

  42. This passage has been interpreted as a later interpolation by the copyist of the original work in Old Nubian, see Van Gerven Oei and Tsakos, “Apostolic Memoirs in Old Nubian.” ↩︎

  43. It should be noted that two more terms may be linked with ⲅⲟⲩⲉⲓ for “shield”: the first is ⲅⲟⲩϣ (or ⲅⲟⲩⲥ), perhaps from ⲅⲟⲩⲉⲓ for “shield” and ϣⲁ for “spear”, but Osman, “The Post-Medieval Kingdom of Kokka: A Means for a Better Understanding of the Administration of the Medieval Kingdom of Dongola,” p. 191 proposes an alternative explanation of the word, albeit still interpreted as a military title; and the second is ⲅⲟⲩⲁⲇ, about which there is even less certainty. ↩︎

  44. Foulon, “Hypaspistes, peltastes, chrysaspides, argyraspides, chalcaspides.” ↩︎

  45. Maspero, Organisation militaire de l’Égypte byzantine, pp. 66-8. ↩︎

  46. For an up-to-date discussion of the issue, see Simmons, Nubia, Ethiopia, and the Crusading World, 1095-1402↩︎

  47. Ostrogorsky, “Observations on the Aristocracy in Byzantium,” pp. 13-4 ↩︎

  48. Koukounas, Georgios Phrantzes, Chronicon↩︎

  49. Vantini, Oriental Sources Concerning Nubia, pp. 369-70. ↩︎

  50. Vantini, Oriental Sources Concerning Nubia, p. 329; Seignobos, L’Égypte et la Nubie à l’époque médiévale, pp. 93-112. ↩︎

  51. Vantini, Oriental Sources Concerning Nubia, p. 639; Seignobos, L’Égypte et la Nubie à l’époque médiévale, pp. 53-91. ↩︎

  52. Łajtar, “On the Name of the Capital of the Nubian Kingdom of Makuria.” ↩︎

  53. Budge, Miscellaneous Texts in the Dialect of Upper Egypt, pp. 858-61. ↩︎

  54. Zielińska and Tsakos, “Representations of the Archangel Michael in Wall Paintings from Christian Nubia,” pp. 85-6. ↩︎

  55. See Hafsaas and Tsakos, “Michael and Other Archangels behind an Eight-Pointed Cross-Symbol from Medieval Nubia: A View from Sai Island in Northern Sudan”; Tsakos, “Sources about the Cult and Persona of the Archangel Michael in Nubia.” ↩︎

  56. For the use of the title archistratēgos for the archangel Raphael, see Łajtar, A Late Christian Pilgrimage Centre in Nubia. The Evidence of Wall Inscriptions in the Upper Church at Banganarti, p. 46. ↩︎

  57. Tsakos, “The Liber Institutionis Michaelis in Medieval Nubia.” ↩︎

  58. About this coincidence, see Browne, “Old Nubian literature,” p. 382; Tsakos, “Textual finds from Cerre Matto.” ↩︎

  59. Ruffini, Medieval Nubia: A Social and Economic History, pp. 34-5. ↩︎

  60. Seignobos, L’Égypte et la Nubie à l’époque médiévale, p. 198 and note 158. ↩︎

  61. For examples of the contrary, see Martens-Czarnecka, The Wall Paintings from the Monastery on Kom H in Dongola, pp. 207-13. ↩︎

  62. Michalowski, Faras - Wall Paintings in the Collection of the National Museum in Warsaw, nr. 61, p. 263; Jakobielski e.a., Pachoras/Faras: The Wall Paintings from the Cathedrals of Aetios, Paulos and Petros, nr. 138, pp. 419-22. ↩︎

  63. For a discussion framed as background for an analysis of the title “Eparch of Nobadia,” see Hendrickx, “The ‘Lord of the Mountain’. A Study of the Nubian eparchos of Nobadia.” ↩︎

  64. Mason, Greek Terms for Roman Institutions: A Lexicon and Analysis, pp. 138-40. ↩︎

  65. Żurawski, “Strongholds on the Middle Nile: Nubian Fortifications of the Middle Ages,” pp. 115-8. ↩︎

  66. Tsakos, “Terms for Boats and Navigation in Old Nubia.” ↩︎

  67. Żurawski, “Strongholds on the Middle Nile: Nubian Fortifications of the Middle Ages,” p. 116. ↩︎

  68. Welsby, The Kingdom of Kush, p. 40 ↩︎

  69. Hägg, “Titles and Honorific Epithets in Nubian Greek texts,” pp. 161-2. ↩︎

  70. Griffith, “Christian Documents from Nubia,” pp. 134-45; Łajtar, “The so-called Kudanbes Inscription in Deir Anba Hadra (St. Simeon Monastery) near Aswan: An Attempt at a New Reading and Interpretation.” ↩︎

author⁄Roksana Hajduga
article⁄The Art of Revolution: The Online and Offline Perception of Communication during the Uprisings in Sudan in 2018 and 2019
abstract⁄The article deals with art from the Sudanese revolution in 2018 and 2019 (the December Revolution). The focus is on the most recognizable and widespread images from the uprising and their presence on the streets of Sudanese cities and social media. The article shows how freedom of expression exploded on the Sudanese streets after years of censorship, suppression, and violations of freedom of speech, media, and civil rights. Art and social media had significant roles in covering the uprising. Issues related to the importance and value of art in transmitting social discourse and dissent in a tightly controlled society are raised. These issues should be the subject of wider research on conflict and social media in Sudan. This article focuses only on a small part of this vast and important topic.
keywords⁄Sudan, revolution, uprising, street art, social media, protests, murals, graffiti, images, iconic

1. Introduction

This article focuses on the images, graphics, and photos circulating on the internet – often photographs of murals and graffiti from the walls of Sudanese streets. I discuss how street art manifested the discourse of public opinion in Sudan during the revolution and how social media became a significant part of contemporary communication. Images from social media conveyed by the international media represented the voice of Sudanese people outside the country. I will show how social media helped stage events, control activities, and back the official policy of the Sudanese government to create a different narrative of events in Sudan. This article engages with the question of how the reach of social media platforms has changed the nature of political disobedience, and how it provided new tools to overcome the repression imposed by the regime and allowed quick, safe, and anonymous going out from hiding as public opposition.

2. Methodology

In this study, I will use an analytical approach to examine articles and social media concerning the 2018/2019 December Revolution in Sudan. International media used several terms to describe the events that began in Sudan in December 2018, depending on whether the events resulted in fundamental social changes or just political change. In my understanding, the events in Sudan should be called a 'revolution', because it was a dynamic and major shift of political power and directly related to social changes.

In this study, I employed various data collection methods, relying on an extensive review of news articles, reports, and social media content. At the same time, I conducted a comparative study on international media and its interpretation of revolutionary art. I observed social media reactions to threads related to the Sudanese revolution; spoke with Sudanese people in Khartoum and the provinces; followed the art groups created on the streets and online; analysed what happened to both street and digital art after the protests ended. All of this was the basis of the analysis of art's impact on the Sudanese people during the revolution and more than two years after these events. How strong emotional charge do they still have? For the article, I limited myself to the artwork directly related to the causes of the revolution, its most important events, and the participation of women, as they were strongly represented on the streets of Sudan. Chosen street art was posted on social media in the form of photographs, paintings, graphics, cartoons, etc. I have chosen the most frequently reproduced artworks and the creations that had the longest impact on public opinion, because over time these have become symbols of the revolution.

3. Politics and Social-Economic Context

The concept of revolution and the struggle to gain freedom is not a new phenomenon in Sudan. In 1964, the first president of Sudan, Ibrahim Abbūd was brought down during the October revolution.1 In 1969, Jafar al-Numayri overthrew the democratic rule of al-Azhari, and then was removed from power by the popular movement in 1985.2 Omar al-Bashir also came to power through a military coup in 1989.3 Many reasons contributed to the revolution in 2018. As in 1964 or 1985, the political and social situation was complex, and many of those problems are still relevant in 2021.4 However, during the 30-year reign of Omar al-Bashir, a new threat to democracy appeared while Sudan was becoming a fundamentalist dictatorship, which led to the economic sanctions imposed by the US and limited the inflow of foreign capital and opportunities for economic diversification. Media censorship and the rise of Islamic conservatism led to systemic changes dividing citizens into classes by origin, sex, and religion. Progressive changes in the law allowed the authorities to censor the citizens. In 2009, the Press and Publication Acts was introduced. This law established the National Council of the Press and Publication, which is responsible for regulating the media and licensing the newspapers. This Council is not independent, and the government appoints its members.5 During protests in 2019, 79 journalists were arrested based on this law. In 2015, Law on Access to Information was introduced to the public, a law restricting citizens' access to information.67 This was a time of high censorship and suppression. All of this meant silencing the political opposition and any criticism.

The independence of South Sudan in 2011, after the devastating Second Civil War lasting 22 years, had a dramatic effect on Sudan's economy. The Sudanese pound was devalued, and inflation rose to 70 per cent. Before that, since 1999, oil fueled the economic growth in Sudan. There was a period of relative prosperity, but the government missed this 'oil boom' and the opportunity to diversify the economy. Oil deposits are mainly located in today’s South Sudan, and with the secession of South Sudan, Sudan's economy lost its main driving force and primary income. In addition, US sanctions, corruption, and government inefficiency limited any changes that would improve citizens' lives. The economic crisis aggravates the additional costs of fighting the insurgents in the city streets and the continuous strengthening of the security sector.8 All this resulted in currency depreciation and hyperinflation.

Thus, in the economic crisis, the government tried to recover by drastically reducing social financing. In 2010, the activist Mohammed Hassan ‘Al Boushi’ Alim, accused Nafi’ Ali Nafi, the Former Assistant to the President, of corruption and human rights violations.9 Enas Satir, the Sudanese artist, refers to this event in her work explaining the causes of the 2018 revolution. On her Instagram profile, she writes: “(…) Al Boushi, when facing Nafi’ Ali Nafi’ (…), asked him: Tell me about the bread, that is now the size of an ear.” Every word uttered by Al Boushi is as powerful today as it was years earlier.10 The reduction in the size of the bread referred to by Enas Satir was associated with the reduction in government subsidies on basic goods, followed by an increase in grain prices. At the same time, bakers were forbidden to raise the price of bread. Having no other choice, they began to reduce the size of the bread. Nevertheless, bread shortages were not the main reason leading to the uprising in 2018. The reason should be sought in the Sudanese economy’s long-term deterioration. Many years of Islamist military regime activities have allocated more funds to the security apparatus than to economic development strategies. The corrupt system hit all citizens and significantly increased living costs, such as food and gas. Deteriorating living conditions spurred the development of a strong and conscious civil society. Professionals began forming trade unions to mobilize action for better pay and working conditions. The protesters demanded to overthrow the ruling National Congress Party (NCP) and a president who had held power for three decades. Without doubt, the lack of trust in the government and mounting tensions due to no prospects, economic collapse, and lack of access to reliable information, forced people into the streets. In 2013, 2014, and 2016, the police and the military brutally crushed the strikes in Khartoum.

In December 2018, the government, wanting to save the country from financial collapse, gave up subsidies for bread and fuel, which caused public outrage and started protests.11 These austerity measures were initially introduced in smaller cities. The government believed that the citizens from outside the urban areas would accept the measures without protests because they wouldn’t be able to mobilize. That is why the protests started in Atbara and other smaller cities. Before the protest moved to the capital, the people united in these smaller cities to demand radical political and social change. Referring to these events, artist Abdul Rahman Al Nazeer released ‘www⁄The Bread Loaf’, inspired by Michelangelo’s painting ‘The creation of Adam’.12 In the original, God stretches out his hand towards Adam sitting in Eden. His hand has an outstretched finger to transfer the spark of creation to Adam. This image has penetrated pop culture worldwide, and the symbol of conveying the ‘divine particle’ or ‘spark of life’ is often paraphrased in visual artworks. For Abdul Rahman, this scene takes place at a typical Sudanese bus station – a Sudanese pound in God’s hand, which symbolizes the spark of life necessary for human survival. In waiting for being created, Adam’s limp hand holds a bread loaf.

&lsquo;Train&rsquo;. Credit: Mounir Khalil. Source: https://twitter.com/TheMantle/status/1166501152537620480

Figure 1: ‘Train’. Credit: Mounir Khalil. Source: www⁄https://twitter.com/TheMantle/status/1166501152537620480

The uprising started with the protests in Atbara, home of the Railway Workers Union, the most vital trade union in Sudan and the libertarian driving force that fuelled the 1964 and 1985 uprisings.13 Responsible for the protests' organized activities, the Sudanese Professionals Association, established in 2018, follows the Union tradition.14 Entry in Khartoum of a train from Atbara full of people chanting: “The dawn has come, Atbara has arrived” has become one of the 2018-2019 revolt symbols. This event is also a reference to the October 1964 strike, when citizens from Kassala boarded their freedom train to Khartoum to help oust General Abbūd from power.15

One of the most recognizable images of the train is the art piece by Mounir Khalil (Figure 1), which captures the joy of the people on the train and the tense anticipation of the crowd gathering at the tracks.16 Hussein Merghani (Figure 2) immortalized this moment in a painting showing hundreds of people welcoming the train filled with waving flags. Merghani’s painting exudes strength, energy, and a sense of community – it reflects the atmosphere in Sudan during the revolution.17

&lsquo;Freedom Train&rsquo;. Credit: Hussein Merghani. Source: https://www.usip.org/blog/2020/11/how-art-helped-propel-sudans-revolution

Figure 2: ‘Freedom Train’. Credit: Hussein Merghani. Source: www⁄https://www.usip.org/blog/2020/11/how-art-helped-propel-sudans-revolution

Protests broke out in Sudan in December 2019, calling for the stepdown of President Omar al-Bashir and his regime.18 In particular, large numbers of young people, especially women, took to the streets. The mobilization of people in Atbara began the pursuit of political change for the entire nation. On December 19, girls from one of the schools in Atbara marched in one of the largest markets in the city chanting slogans against cutting subsidies. This was the result of increasing grain and bread prices and thus increasing prices for school meals. The girls were joined by others, and photos from the demonstration quickly circulated on social media and sparked protests in al-Gedarif, Madani (near Khartoum), Nyala (Darfur), and Port Sudan.19

Contrary to the uprisings of 1964 and 1985, where trade unions played a leading role, the uprisings in 2013, and especially that of 2018, were driven by masses of young people and activists organizing protests and providing up-to-date information. As far as the uprising of 2019 is concerned, the protests had a unique character because they were a combination of efforts by professional and social groups – those that were first mobilized in 2013, community-based structures and initiatives training from the beginning in non-violent civil engagement. The Sudanese Professional Association (SPA) showed extraordinary leadership skills, however, it was the involvement of civil society that made it possible to sustain a decentralized campaign based on non-violent protests.

The collaboration of local groups and trade unions (which always were a very strong part of civil society organizations) was particularly noticeable. SPA mobilized the people and actively participated in the activities against al-Bashir's regime, as during previous revolutions in which professional organizations took an active part. However, despite the similarities, the situation in 2019 was different due to the organizational structure. Decentralized activities in social media influenced the spread of information and mobilization of people across the country. Youth became more politically involved and joined volunteers and professional associations in training and organizing civil society during the protests. Even threats of arrest and attacks on protesters did not stop Sudanese citizens from going out in the streets.

The dramatic situation in which the Sudanese found themselves and the exhaustion of their trust in the government is shown in Khalid Albaih’s artwork (Figure 3).20 In his graphic, people are queuing for bread and other necessities and this queue ends with a bomb. The graphic is inspired by everyday life because people are forming a tight queue. There is already a fuse lit at the end of the queue, illustrating that citizens’ patience has its limits, that the process of social awakening has already started, and that there is no turning back.

Cartoon by Khalid Albaih. Source: https://kultwatch.se/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/KhalidAlbaih_QueuingBomb_Sudan.jpg

Figure 3: Cartoon by Khalid Albaih. Source: www⁄https://kultwatch.se/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/KhalidAlbaih_QueuingBomb_Sudan.jpg

In the face of widespread frustration and anger, president al-Bashir dissolved the government and appointed military officers in its place to avoid stepping down from power. However, on April 10, a military coup led to his resignation. History has come full circle, and al-Bashir was removed from power the same way that he seized power 30 years earlier. The protests continued as the army that forced al-Bashir to step down was engaged in the Transitional Military Council (TMC), chaired by General Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, also known as Hemeti.21 Hemeti is known in Sudan for his ties to The Rapid Support Forces (RSF), a paramilitary group descended from the infamous Janjaweed militias. Protesters demanded civilian participation in the transitional government and the dissolution of TMC. Among the protesters were young women seen on the frontline of the marches, women whose rights were systematically violated by the Bashir regime. Female protesters have been verbally and sexually harassed by the police and security forces. This meant that each of the protesting women had to face great fear. They had to be strong, and their strength emanated from the other women sharing the struggle. Each woman shouting anti-government slogans led masses of protesters behind her.

The protests continued nationwide despite the increasing acts of aggression from the armed forces. On June 3, the RSF cordoned off sit-in protesters and used firearms. This attack on peaceful protesters in front of the military headquarters in Khartoum resulted in the killing of at least 127 people, and the attack is called the Khartoum massacre.22 The RSF could not have acted on their own, and it seems that the TMC had approved the attack. Khartoum was cut off from the world by an internet blackout. Suddenly, all social media platforms updating daily on the situation in Sudan went silent. There was no possibility to use traditional media, television did not broadcast information, and newspapers were suspended. Acts of violence escalated, and shocking descriptions of attacks, shootings of protesters, and rapes of women appeared in reports of witnesses calling for international help.23 Increasing social tensions prolongated peace talks that were completed with the signing of the Draft Constitutional Declaration on August 4 by the Forces of Freedom and change – consisting of the uprising movement and the TMC.24 The agreement stipulated that a Transitional Government of four civilians and three military officers would oversee changes in the country during a three-year transition period. The declaration did not contain specific economic reforms, specific mandates to improve the rights of women and youth, any plan to prosecute those guilty of war crimes, or a rigorous investigation into the June 3 massacre.25 However, changes began with dissolving al-Bashir's NCP party and the repealing of the Public Order Act26, which targeted women drastically and restricted their freedom.27 Female Genital Mutilation (FGM) was prohibited under penalty of imprisonment.28

Strikes are over, but the Sudanese still fear that history will repeat itself and that the military will try again to usurp power. Democratization in Sudan has begun, but the elites associated with al-Bashir’s regime can slow down the process significantly. The failure to include social and economic reforms in the constitution may compromise the main postulates of the movement. The agreement also avoids issues of war and peace, racism, and the marginalization of minorities and refugees. However, solving such important and challenging problems requires time and careful observation of the government's actions, and Sudanese activists seem to be watching. Such a high civic mobilization may allow the building of a strong democracy because public opinion will hold both transitional and elected political leaders accountable. The Constitutional Charter from 2019 established a government consisting of a civilian cabinet, a Sovereignty Council, and a Legislative Council. Decisions regarding domestic and foreign policy are taken by Lieutenant General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, the head of the army and the chairman of the Sovereign Council, which bypasses civilian leadership and calls for the dissolution of the government. Meanwhile, citizens continue to demand a civilian government with full executive powers.

4. Art beyond Divisions and Prejudices

The core of the uprising and the source of its strength was the equality of all Sudanese people. No protests in Sudan had previously included every ethnic group and social class included. The Sudanese have emphasized that not only the people of Khartoum took protests to the streets, but also the peoples of Kordofan, Nuba Mountains, and Darfur. In a video from the protests, a woman chants: “From Kordofan [the revolution] has emerged after we have been hit by gunfire. This is a government with no feelings… and the Nuba mountains, like Darfur, their blood is very expensive. We will protect our land, oh farmer. Our Sudan will be set free!29 Three decades of hate speech used on generations of people was an easy and effective way to turn people against each other. NCP promoted ethnic, religious, and social discrimination and justified hatred and violence against minorities and refugees. Government propaganda polarized the country and aroused distrust between different ethnic groups while emphasizing the supremacy of Sudan's Arabic-speaking Muslims. Ethnic identification has been used by al-Bashir's regime for decades, dividing the country and fuelling inequality. During the civil war in Darfur, the rebel tribes were called by the government “Black Africans”. In opposition to them, the Sudan army was identified as Arabs.30 Attempts to implement the same ethnical division on young people impacted the social response and became a double-edged weapon. The opposite, as expected, brought people closer under the slogan: “We want a country free of racism!” 31 Young activists created a new quality of communication and collective disobedience. No one felt excluded, and a concept of peaceful demonstrations, so different from the terror used by the security apparatus, appealed to all people. The opposition to al-Bashir's rule formed a fertile ground for the unification of all Sudanese people and pushed them to act as one.

The long-lasting civil war in Darfur was used as a government excuse for the deepening economic crisis and the stricter racist policy towards non-Arabs.32 During the sit-in, protesters have often stressed that, as a result of long-term government campaigns targeting ethnic minorities, the division of society is a severe problem.33 Currently, there are studies on the Arab Islamist Sudanese government inspiring the conflict in Darfur.34 In 2018, the government accused ten young Darfur men of planning a terrorist attack on protesters on the streets of Khartoum. According to public records, they planned to use self-made bombs. The plot was exposed in social media and showcased the same race-based politics that the al-Bashir regime was known for. The friends of the young Darfurians identified them as peaceful students rather than terrorists.35 In response to such a despicable attempt to spark ethnic riots, protesters called for unification with a special message to the government: You racist egomaniac! We are all Darfur!36 As a counter-narrative to the regime’s propaganda, artists embraced Sudan’s cultural diversity and appreciation for uniting differences. One of the murals by Mughira, a fine arts student, shows a series of figures standing next to each other in traditional and contemporary clothes and headgear – symbolizing participation in protests regardless of origin.37

Racism in Sudan is a complex issue due to the mixture of various populations. Deep-rooted racism, discrimination, and intolerance are the results of years of government propaganda emphasizing racial and ethnic superiority. With the spread of the internet, propaganda moved to social media. Pages responsible for spreading ethnic propaganda were often exposed on Facebook during the revolution in 2019. Sudanese knew the regime’s methods and remembered many cases when fake news and hate speech started violence between ethnic groups, especially in the South.38 The exclusionary policy not only covered non-Arab tribes but also women, who were the primary victims of the Public Order Act.39 Coupled with physical and verbal abuse, women were gradually forced out of society.40 Women were in the front of the protests from the first day of the revolution; they became symbols of strength and muses for the artists. 60-70% of the participants were women, so there is a reason why this revolution is often described as the Women's Revolution.41 Women inspired artists with their steadfastness when facing the oppressive army officers, strength during the long sit-in and ululation, kindness, and readiness to help the wounded and those in need. Female artists' perspective was crucial for showing women’s everyday life without beautifying it and of priceless value for understanding their motivation and hopes. The artist Almoger Abdulbagey painted 17 images of walking women in traditional and contemporary clothes – reflecting their ethnic diversity. These abstract figures painted with vivid colours emanate power, as reporters who witnesses the marches and chanting described the women’s presence in the demonstrations.42 This is an example of how fake news targeting ethnic groups spread by the regime backfired during the protests. Art began to express the opposition to the state propaganda, and this became a turning point in the perception of social divisions by the Sudanese themselves. There is no consent to racist propaganda in these artworks.

On 8 April 2019, Lana Haroun took the photo of Alaa Salah in front of the military headquarters in Khartoum. The iconic photo shows Alaa Salah standing on the car’s roof, with her hand up, leading the chant and making the crowd cheer together.43 Alaa Salah was then a 22-year-old architecture student who advocated for women's rights. Her photo became a symbol of protests in Sudan and sparked a new trend in artworks focusing on women's rights, strength, steadfastness, and constant motivation to get the people around them involved. Of course, there are many photos and videos from this event. However, this photo widely echoed around the world. Alaa Salah’s white tobe is associated with professions such as teachers, nurses, and midwives – they adopted it as their uniform and is still considered a modest garment for educated and independent women. The thoughtful selection of Alaa Salah’s clothing makes reference to the tradition of Sudanese female activists from the 1940s and 1950s, and the dress emphasizes the legacy of women's fight for social justice.44At a national conference in 1969, activist and first female member of Sudan’s Parliament, Fatima Ahmed Ibrahim, argued that women’s rights were in keeping with Sudanese traditions. As evidence of this, Ibrahim asked the audience to compare her tobe with the western business suit of then-President Gaafar Numeiri, who stood next to her.”45 The choice of the outfit was undoubtedly a well-thought-out move and its message spread widely and drew attention to the feminist movement in Sudan. This image of a young student is still the most recognizable and most shared image in social media of the 2018/2019 revolution. The only downside to the attention the image attracted is that the focus was not on the words spoken by Alaa Salah but only on her outfit. She was quoting the reaction of Sudanese poet Azhari Mohamed Ali against the Public Order Act: “They imprisoned us in the name of religion, burned us in the name of religion … killed us in the name of religion”.46 Lana Haroun’s photo, referred to as a symbol of the revolution, was repeatedly adapted and changed by artists worldwide, sometimes in an optimistic or satirical way, and sometimes in a more serious and sublime manner. For example, in Ali Hamra’s cartoon where Alaa Salah replaced the Statue of Liberty on the pedestal, al-Bashir runs away in panic upon seeing her. Kesh Malek’s mural presents Alaa Salah standing among the flashes of mobile phones commemorating the event with a slogan next to it: “Liberty is not a statue anymore. She is alive with flesh and blood”. In an impressionist manner, a painting by Fatima Abdullahi shows Alaa Salah raising her arm in the air amidst a mostly female crowd of protesters, holding their phones with a flashlight, which creates a magical glow and gives the picture a nearly mystical expression. Of course, Alaa Salah is one of the thousands of women taking part in the revolution, standing up against uniformed men. However, this image became viral, and Alaa Salah became an icon of the revolution, a symbol of women's fights for equal rights. Thanks to her recognition, she also became an activist raising Sudanese women's rights to the international agenda. "Every revolution inspires another revolution," Alaa Salah says in an interview, stressing that women will not hesitate to take to the streets again when needed.47

An adaptation of Bint El Sudan perfume label. Credit: Amado Alfadni. Source: https://twitter.com/shambat2000/status/1251838673362001921/photo/1

Figure 4. An adaptation of Bint El Sudan perfume label. Credit: Amado Alfadni. Source: www⁄https://twitter.com/shambat2000/status/1251838673362001921/photo/1

A unique adaptation of Alaa Salah as “The scent of the revolution” was created by artist Amado Alfadni (Figure 4). He brilliantly turned the renowned Bint El Sudan perfume emblem into a powerful message of revolution. The exhibition of Bint El Sudan perfume labels created by Amado shows how the iconography has changed over the decades, from the original to a censored version of an Arabian woman dressed from head to toe. This collection reflects the political discourse and social changes in Sudan without words and helps realize the extent of changes and restrictions in the lives of all Sudanese women.48

A billboard with a photo of Alaa Salah next to the sign: “My grandmother was a Kandaka.” In a powerful way, this picture emphasizes Sudanese women’s strength.49 These words were also chanted during the demonstration, empowering, and connecting generations of women walking together. On a mural painted by artists Amir Saleh and Belal Abdelrahman it is stated: Our history returns back with Kandaka. It shows a woman wearing a helmet and brandishing a sword for her enemies.50

Sudanese artist Yasmin Elnour’s Instagram account is Kandaka Khronicles. The nickname is inspired by the Kushite queen. Her works beautifully and harmoniously draw on Nubian traditions and combine ethnic aesthetics with modern symbols.

The art piece “Kandaka factory" emphasizes the participation of women in strikes (Figure 5). She traces the women's ancestry back to the pyramids of Ancient Kush, where she placed the factory producing all the brave Sudanese warriors. With the art piece 'Women rights?' Yasmin Elnour asks where are women's rights, and why are Sudanese women second-class citizens? She writes on her Instagram account: "A surprising status quo in the old stomping ground of the Kandakes - Nubian Warrior Queens that fought off foreign powers and steadfastly ruled the Kingdom of Kush. We cannot blindly accept oppressive frameworks but instead carve a path of resistance, in the glowing spirit of our female ancestors.51

‘Kandaka Factory’. Credit: Yasmin El Nour’s aka Kandaka Khronikles. Source: https://www.instagram.com/p/B6gu7tBHds7/

Figure 5: ‘Kandaka Factory’. Credit: Yasmin El Nour’s aka Kandaka Khronikles. Source: www⁄https://www.instagram.com/p/B6gu7tBHds7/

A collage by Mahammed Mahdi shows women in white tobes and modern clothes marching with their fists raised in protest and as signs of anger. Above them, in the air, as if freed and freely soaring upwards, there is a woman in white and next to her the inscription: Long live the women’s struggle!52 The artist emphasizes women’s daily battle for equality, free speech, and fair governance (Figure 6).

Graphic by Mahammed Mahdi reading ‘Long live the women&rsquo;s struggle’. Source: https://kultwatch.se/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/866BFC8F-AF67-4463-8BDA-08D5CAD648B6-760x1024.jpeg

Figure 6: Graphic by Mahammed Mahdi reading ‘Long live the women’s struggle’. Source: www⁄https://kultwatch.se/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/866BFC8F-AF67-4463-8BDA-08D5CAD648B6-760x1024.jpeg

Artist Alaa Satir focused on the socio-political aspects of women's lives in Sudan. Her series of cartoons, "We are the revolution", honours female protesters' centrality in uplifting and sustaining the resistance through their strength, courage, and commitment.53 In her graphic, she also refers to Sudan's Independence Flag, which no longer represents the state. Gaafar Nimeiry replaced this flag with the tricolor black-white-red flag with a green triangle at the hoist in 1970. The Independence Flag, as seen on the Alaa Satir graphics, resembled the flags of Rwanda and Tanzania, emphasizing the racial diversity of Sudan and the joining of all ethnic groups, while Nimeiry’s flag derives from purely Arab aesthetics and refers to the Sudanese Arab identity.54 Many protesters waved the Independence Flag during the rallies. Its colors emphasize the combination of Arab and African roots, which was also reflected in the people's outfits on the streets. Like many young activists, Alaa Satir raised a very important issue regarding identity and ethnicity, which was widely discussed during the sit-in. For the first time, these matters were discussed openly and emphasized that multi-ethnicity is what makes Sudan stronger. In her works, Alaa Satir also shows the everyday life of protests and the enormous influence of women who took the fight to the streets and for whom giving up is not an option. One of the murals with the inscription: ‘We are the revolution, and the revolution continues’ portrayed women in traditional clothes with their hands raised and their fists clenched in a gesture of victory.55

Another mural, painted on a blue background, shows a woman with a raised hand in a sign of victory with slogans next to this like: ‘Freedom, peace, and justice’, ‘Tasqut Bas’ and ‘Ladies, stand your ground; this is a women’s revolution’. The artist writes about the events in Sudan: “We are not here just to overthrow a political regime but the corrupt social system that came along with it, that targeted women and used all techniques to try and push them backwards!56

Mergani Salih chose a different form of expression by creating a mosaic with thousands of photos of women protesting and suffering from an oppressive government. With dedication, he searched the Internet to choose the right photos to create a representation of Sudan's embodiment. The character is deeply rooted in Sudan folklore – Habouba, grandmother and caretaker. He adopted a photo of an older woman in a traditional headdress, with a calm expression on her face, curious eyes, and a face bearing traces of work and time – like Sudan itself, tired and aged but still with a sparkle in the eyes looking to the future. This video mosaic is available online and even now makes an unforgettable impression on the onlooker.57

An anonymous female artist who adapted Banksy’s 'Mona Lisa with rocket launcher' created a mural deeply inspired by pop culture. After all, Banksy's London mural was referring to Da Vinci's ‘Mona Lisa’. The mural in Khartoum shows a figure whose outline resembles Banksy’s ‘Mona Lisa’, but her face is that of a Sudanese woman with a scarf on her head and a rocket launcher in her hands. This simple image has a powerful and direct message: beware of women’s power.

5. Online Art

A new generation of young activists looks back to the Girifna (meaning ‘we are fed up’) movement, founded by students in Khartoum in 2009, for inspiration. Their fight shifted the protest onto completely different tracks than those known from previous uprisings. Girifna volunteers organized just before the elections that would take place in 2010, realizing that the society was under-informed, and deciding to change this situation.58 Awareness campaigns quickly expanded to organizing protests and publishing news without censorship. Within a few years, these activists became the main opposition force, and they are now visible on the political scene in Sudan. Contemporary opposition groups significantly differ from classical parties such as the National Umma Party, the Democratic Unionist Party, and the Communist Party.59 The SPA distinguished itself through their activities in social media, thanks to which Sudanese people were allied to their demands. At the beginning of the revolution, SPA formed alliances with many political parties. As a result, ‘The Forces of Freedom and Change’ was formed.60 Very quickly the SPA started expressing the voices of all Sudanese and published daily on Facebook the public opinion on the current situation in Sudan.

The activists arousing political awareness among young people and manifesting their social needs come from various regions of Sudan and even the diaspora. Thanks to such participation of young people, revolutionary agitation was very effectively transferred to social media and developed countless forms of expression. These tactics have so far been entirely ignored by political parties, but young innovative activists identify themselves without any problems with them. Elusive on the web, they are free to report on events in Sudan and strengthen international support for the protesters. Online communication has been constantly changing over the years, adapting to the situation and guaranteeing optimal and safest oppositionist conditions. NISS (National Intelligence and Security Service) created cyber units called jihadist cyber units. Members created false accounts on Facebook or Twitter to disinform protesters, spread propaganda, or lure individual activists into traps. These efforts did not go unnoticed. The SPA has created applications for contact between members and a website that broadcasts protests live. Social media became the primary source of information about events in Sudan and the main communication tool for revolutionaries. One can say that they even fuelled their activities. The regime controlled the state media and for a long time provided only propaganda to improve its image. At the same time, information was published on Twitter and Facebook, simultaneously translated from Arabic to English.61

Al Jaili ‘Jaili’ Hajo is an artist who has pointed out the lack of information about the situation in the country in the media. In his collages, he compares public television news with photos from protests, showing how the reality on the streets of Khartoum is diametrically different from government propaganda broadcasted on television.62 In one of his collages, we see people injured after the June 3 2019 crackdown. In a manner, such artworks replace public media, which had no information about this event.

The live-streaming massacre on 3 June 2019 was an unprecedented case made possible by the courage of the protesters who shared photos and videos in social media. Journalists producing “Africa Eye” for BBC have collected several videos from the attack by RSF in a shocking short documentary about the revolution.63 The documentary shows the ruthless and planned actions of the militia and the terror of the protesters. Live posts on Twitter reported a minute-by-minute escalation of violence by the RSF. Photos showed people injured and killed on the streets, overcrowded hospitals, and bodies pulled out from the Nile. All this, seen almost live, confronted the world with what was happening in Sudan in an unprecedented manner. Social media flooded with digital art after these horrifying events.

The artist Enas Satir created the series ‘Kaizan and why they are bad for you’ – a compilation of drawings explaining the origin of the word ‘kaizan’ (metal mug) and why the Sudanese use it as a name for the government (see also below). This series is aesthetically appealing and, for those from abroad, also very informative. Enas Satir put a broader context on Sudan’s situation in a simple and clever manner.64 She writes on one of her drawings: If Sudan was a person, it would by now be gravely ill next to a metal cup (‘Kaizan’) filled with blood.65

Under al-Bashir's rule, any political expression was forbidden, so artists developed a way to spread anti-government content, in an indirect way. However, during the uprising, the freedom of expression replaced all restrictions, and artists finally could speak their minds, and via social media they could reach people anywhere. Visual and audio-visual forms of documentation attracted a larger group of people and had a more significant impact on the audience than TV news. Never has such an extensive range of information resources been used to show the power of the people in Sudan. An online mobilization aimed at identifying the aggressors who were attacking protesters, another unprecedented method of exercising justice. Based on photos and videos available online, a group of women recognized the RSF officers and published their data on Facebook. For this reason, operations’ officers began to wear masks to hide their faces and prevent their identification.66

There has been an unstoppable flow of drawings, cartoons, and memes, fuelling the protests with bold images and intelligent retorts. This uprising sparked a social, political, and cultural awakening that intertwined with each other, creating an image of the marginalized before pressing problems and underlining the power of social resistance. In art, we can find traditional symbols and African indigenous motifs. Also, the modern cultural references blend poetically with traditional Sudanese aesthetics, creating bold and authentic artwork. Thanks to the influence of tradition, so deeply rooted in Sudanese consciousness, art reached everyone, regardless of age or origin. Artists found a way to spread ideas and share their views in an accessible and universal way. We can distinguish references to the history of Sudan, be it ancient (the kingdom of Kush) or more modern (independence and earlier revolutions). For example, a collage by Merghani Salih with a young boy reciting poetry during protests superimposed on Kushite pyramids refers to the ancient history of Sudan (Figure 7). It is an adaptation of the photo entitled ‘Straight Voice,’ a powerful image made by Yasuyoshi Chiba, who won World Press Photo in 2020, in the Photo of the Year category.67

Adaptation of 2020 World Press Photo by Yasuyoshi Chiba. Credit: Merghani Salih. Source:  https://twitter.com/Merg_Salih/status/1251875224838176771/photo/1

Figure 7. Adaptation of 2020 World Press Photo by Yasuyoshi Chiba. Credit: Merghani Salih. Source: www⁄https://twitter.com/Merg_Salih/status/1251875224838176771/photo/1

A famous slogan appearing on social media: Make Sudan Great Again, on the background of monumental buildings from the Kush period, is an ironic comment on Donald Trump’s slogan “Make America Great Again”, but it also emphasized the reliance on the powerful Sudanese ancestors dominating in north-eastern Africa during the Kushite period. The people of ancient Nubia were captured as slaves by Egypt. Then the power dynamics between Nubia and Egypt shifted, and Kush ruled Egypt as pharaohs of the 25th Dynasty (about 747-656 BCE). Thus, art teaches history; the Sudanese cannot live in chains, and they are capable to regain their freedom. Ben Jones, with his artworks, alludes to modern times in world history. His graphics portray al-Bashir and his military allies as Nazis. It is a powerful and terrifying combination, but it is indisputably associated with the racist rhetoric of the NCP authorities and the genocide committed in Darfur and Kordofan.

The global movement #BlueForSudan started in solidarity with Sudanese martyr Mohamed Mattar, whose favourite colour was blue. An artist known as Kandaka Khronicles (see above), created a photomontage with a young boy crying in a boat floating on a bloody river. It is a homage to those killed in the crackdown and their families. The dark blue backdrop honours Mohamed Mattar, the boy’s endless tears remind of the ongoing aggressions against peaceful protesters. Also, ‘Blue Night’ by Mounir Khalil, an impressionist painting, shows people waving flags against a starry sky background. It is a beautiful art piece full of tranquillity and dedicated to those fallen during the uprising (Figure 8).

&lsquo;Blue Night&rsquo;. Painting by Mounir Khalil. Source: https://pl.pinterest.com/pin/635992778614196359/s

Figure 8: ‘Blue Night’. Painting by Mounir Khalil. Source: www⁄https://pl.pinterest.com/pin/635992778614196359/s

A graphic by Jaili Hajo is a collage of a viral photo made on the streets of Khartoum. In a pickup truck used by security services lies a protester knocked over on the car's back but still holding the Sudanese flag high in the air. On the car roof, covered by the waving Sudanese flag, stands an enormous figure of al-Bashir. He is not essential for the artist; his face does not even deserve to be shown; he is only a symbol of oppression. The artist thoughtfully depicts the sense of fear that people must have felt when faced with the armed forces. We can notice an officer with a long truncheon with a split end on the side of the car – the truncheon was probably used against the crowd.68

When the news broke out on social media that a NISS car killed the 3-year-old boy Muayed Yasir and seriously injured his 5-year-old brother, people worldwide were shocked and mobilized against the impunity of the security services in Sudan. Artists decided to react too.69 The ‘Hanz’ graphic designer on his Twitter account condemned this event and asked for public support to the mother of the two boys, one of which was still in intensive care at the hospital (Figure 9).

Death 3-year-old boy Muayed Yasir. Credit: Hanz. Source: https://twitter.com/mr_hanzala/media

Figure 9. Death 3-year-old boy Muayed Yasir. Credit: Hanz. Source: www⁄https://twitter.com/mr_hanzala/media

Mustafa Alnasry created a poignant graphic of Bashir dancing on stage during his ‘1 Million People March’ organized to underline people's support for the government. Alnasry shows the coldly calculated dance of the President, posing as a kind leader, at the same time, ruthlessly attacking peaceful resistants.70

Drawings inspired by pop culture reached the most remarkable popularity online. For example, in the work of Ibrahim Jihad (known as hxmaside), there is a reference to the Transformers’ universe of the DC comics. His graphic entitled ‘Fallen’ presents the symbolic metal cup, “Kaizan” (see above) damaged by bullets, dropped on the ground or thrown away, thus no longer needed.71 This art piece resembles a movie poster, and as with any poster of that kind, we can find out that “Kaizan Fall” was produced and directed by Sudanese people – a clever artistic move. Another point of inspiration from pop culture is the reference to the KFC restaurants: The slogan “Al-jidād al-iliktrūni” means “The electronic chicken”, and it is referring to people hired by the regime to spread fake news on the Internet. In a satirical manner, the revolutionaries created posters portraying Omar el-Bashir on a KFC flyer, where KFC was replaced by KEC (Kaizan Electronic Chicken).72 What is ‘Kaizan’? It is a traditional mug made of steel and called ‘koz’ (singular of Kaizan). There are different theories on why Sudanese started calling the ruling party 'Kaizan’. Alshaheed Alimam Alhassan Albana, the Muslim Brotherhood founder, once said: “Knowledge is a sea and we are its kaizan”, which back then described Muslim Brotherhood members but now refers to Omar al-Bashir and the National Congress Party (NCP).73

Among the artists who commented on the events in Sudan were cartoonists. Cartoons are sarcastic, often on the verge of absurdity or insult, but their message refers often to tragic events. They have sometimes been made without any inscriptions because the image itself is universal and does not need any explanation. Khalid Albaih shows how General Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, also known as Hemeti, climbs on the corpses of the Sudanese people to attain power (symbolized here as a throne).74 A pile of bodies wrapped in shrouds is a very powerful and upsetting image. In a violent manner, the artist addresses the civilian casualties, which are part of the brutal rise of Hemeti to power in Sudan. Hemeti, together with general Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, are responsible for armed attacks in Darfur and took part in the war in Yemen. Their rise to power was a blow for the Sudanese and, at the same time, a call for mobilization to continue the struggle for democracy. Sudanese cartoonist Boushra Al-Mujahid commented daily on the events in Sudan. His images were always on point, clever, and understandable even for foreigners unfamiliar with Arabic.75 The security forces were so obedient that they even arrested a donkey that the protesters had marked with revolutionary slogans. The event recorded by the phone of an onlooker set in motion a wave of satirical cartoons ridiculing the absurd attempts of the government to keep order on the streets. This image transformed into all sorts of memes and cartoons to mock the soldiers and express disrespect for their actions.76

Participating in sit-ins was associated with the risk of an attack by the security forces using tear gas and rubber bullets and all kinds of physical and mental aggression. A video available online shows a group of protesters on one side of the street and police forces on the other, throwing tear gas canisters into a crowd. We see the brave woman Rifka Abdel Rahman taking a tear gas canister (which is about to explode) and throwing it back. She was named ‘Bumban Catcher’ (‘Bumban’ means tear gas in Sudan). Merghani Salih returns to these events in his art after the revolution using 3D models. The series is called "Living with Revolutionaries" and, as he describes himself, it was created to capture the icons of the Sudan Revolution. One of these 3D models, posted on Merghani’s Twitter account, commemorated the courage of Rifka 'Bumban Catcher’.77

6. Street Art

During the uprising, alongside regular verbal and written communication, a flood of sketches, murals, graffiti, and cartoons spread the word about the revolution across Sudan. Art became a platform for transmitting information in a highly censored environment, reflecting social tensions, and forming political discourse. Slogans were everywhere, on people’s clothes or bodies, but mainly on all urban structures. Sudanese people expressed their emotions on the building walls, streets, public transport, fences, and even trees and animals. Anti-government slogans appeared in every space that it was possible to draw, even the smallest ones. The slogan Tasqut bas addressed to el-Bashir and his regime can be translated as: Just fall, that’s all or You’d better fall.78 This slogan was repeated and hash-tagged many times on different kinds of brochures and online flyers. Almost equally famous was: Ash-shaab yurid isqat an-nizam, which means: The people want the regime to fall.79 It appeared on the buildings and bus stops not only in Khartoum but in other towns and even villages. Activists created the hashtags #BlueForSudan and #KeepEyesOnSudan, which appeared widely both on the streets and online. These hashtags attracted world attention on Sudan and kept up the mobilization in favour of the revolution. #BlueForSudan represents the favourite colour of the martyr Mohamed Mattar, who was shot protecting two women during a police attack (see above). Another hashtag formed during the protests was #Sudaxit. This alluded to Brexit and emphasized that protesters identified more with African peoples than with Arabs and demanded the separation of Sudan from the Arab League.80

Due to the restrictions imposed on Internet and the censorship practised in public television, the flow of information had to find other ways to spread. The activists used brochures, postcards, or leaflets, sometimes minor marks on clothes or on their bodies. That information included the dates and places of protests, comments on current events, revolutionary slogans or symbols, and glorifications of the martyrs. Women, for example, used the henna painting (traditionally made before weddings) and designed anti-government slogans or images on the hands or feet of protesters.81 Also women wove revolution symbols into their traditional clothes, adding victory signs or Tasqut bas slogans to their toubes, which gained over the years representative status as a reminder of feminist values fought by their mothers and grandmothers.82 Older generations wore the white toube during the previous popular uprising, which once again linked traditions with modern times.

The artists felt responsible for showing the emotions of the Sudanese people and spreading the revolutionary messages. Such a message can be found on a mural in Khartoum, which is an interesting adaptation of www⁄Eugène’a Delacroix’, ‘La Liberté guidant le peuple’. The accompanying text reads: The revolution will go on. These artworks were an expression of despair and hope. They were born out of a desperate need for change and the necessity of speaking the truth. Street art, impermanent and unique, could be removed at any time, and the artists who made it were in constant danger of being caught and imprisoned. All of this was evanescent. It emphasized the fragility of human existence and made it even more inclined to reflect on the values of life and what is worth fighting for. Assil Diab, a graffiti artist, known as ‘sudalove’, was one of the many female Sudanese artists courageously creating art on the streets of Khartoum.83 Diab painted murals and immortalised the memory of Sudanese killed by security forces during the uprising. Sometimes the families were taking part in creating the martyrs' portraits, which allowed them to add something personal to commemorate their loved ones. The portraits are reminders of the loss and sacrifice, of government brutality and their disrespect for human life, and the price of freedom and democracy.

One of the most high-profiled cases of police and intelligence services brutality was the death of Ahmed al-Khair, a 36-year-old teacher from Kashm al-Qirba. He was arrested at his home after the protest he was taking part in and died on 2 February 2019, after a week of detention. The police stated that the cause of Ahmed’s al-Khair death was the result of his poor health condition and was not related to his imprisonment. However, the examination of Ahmed's body, first by his family and then by pathologists, indicated death by beating and torture to which he was subjected during the interrogation. The horrifying details of the torture shocked and infuriated the public and Ahmed’s story was told nationwide.84 Sudanese still recall these events in conversations, emphasizing that this was the turning point of the revolution. There was nationwide mobilization and awareness that nothing would stop the regime to silence the voice of the nation. Anger and opposition to violence united the Sudanese people more than before. Images of Ahmed were held by the protesters during the rallies, were reproduced on the city's walls, and circulated in social media. When, on 30 December 2020, 29 intelligence agents and police officers responsible for Ahmed al-Khair's death were sentenced to death, a crowd rallied outside the court in Omdurman. This event went down in history as a moment of national mourning from which Sudanese rose resiliently. After the revolution ended, Ahmed's story was taught in schools and drawings of his face appeared on the walls of school buildings. These paintings were often painted over by the security services but were always recreated by the people, determined and in strong opposition to the regime's brutality and their efforts to censor history.

The 3 June 2019 massacre has left a deep mark on everyone who participated in the sit-in and watched the live streaming. RSF militia forces opened fire on unarmed protestants, beat many of them, and raped 48 women. In their works, Galal Yousif and Amel Bashier condemned cruelty and rape as tactics for pacifying women. Following these events, the African Union degraded Sudan’s rights as a member.85 The daily news about atrocities committed by the RSF is reflected in the artists' work following these events. The mural of Galal Yousif, destroyed during the June 3 crackdown, shows people shouting or screaming. Above them, huge hands try to silence the figure in the centre. The inscription in Arabic on the side explains: You were born free, so live free.86 Yousif painted several murals in Khartoum. One of them was placed under the bridge near the sit-in and depicts screaming figures with horrified and distorted faces. The incomprehensible anxiety can be compared with Edward Munch's ‘Scream’.87

Colourful murals, graffiti, sculptures, and installations within the sit-in created a whole new space in the centre of Khartoum, a city within a city. Space where people felt free, expressed their political views with no fear, and experimented with new forms of artistic expressions. It was an unprecedented phenomenon – there has never been such a concentration of artists from all over Sudan with different cultural backgrounds covering various fields of fine art. Space within the sit-in became an exhibition on a vast scale, with paintings, graffiti, sculptures and installations, various traditional crafts, regional costumes, poems, songs, and dances.

In the face of a military crackdown, protesters opposed the aggression in a very clever way. They collected military equipment and reused it differently, peacefully changing its meaning and creating an utterly different dichotomy between them and the government forces. They made it possible to find a bit of humour in these difficult moments and ridiculed the militia on the other side of the barricade. Such acts gave people a different perspective; they began to let go of fear and regained the dignity that was taken from them by years of oppression. Empty tear gas canisters that were used to separate protesters have been transformed into flower vases, containers, or electrical connectors.88 There was an impressive increase of photos on social media showing an endless creativity, among these one may pick the "tasqut bas" slogan made with tear gas canisters. The protesters were utterly changing the functions and common perceptions of military equipment, almost straightforwardly saying objects themselves are not dangerous but only become so in the hands of dangerous people. An example is a photo of a ring made from a bullet. Art, therefore, did not embellish reality and did not avoid showing the violence and terror in which everyday protesters functioned.

In 2019, merchandise with symbols of the revolution started to appear in the street markets. They were mainly produced abroad by the diaspora, but some handmade products also circulated, albeit in a limited range, also in Sudan: stickers, phone cases, bags, and T-shirts, on which symbols and hashtags spread the message of the revolution. Street art became popular and functioned as a reference to political ideas and the current situation in the country.

7. Summary

The 2018/2019 revolution in Sudan was one of the most significant and best-organized revolts in the Arab world in recent years. There were large-scale protests, which showed social commitment and the effectiveness of opposition by activists. The political engagement of young activists changed the approach to protests in Sudan. They showed extraordinary creativity and commitment, and thanks to that, they reached vast sections of the society. Resistance groups, which have been emerging since 2009, moved their activities to the streets, showing their opposition through slogans, murals, and leaflets. Most of their activities quickly spread online, where they joined forces with other groups to create an efficient machine of resistance and for spreading information without the fear of governmental censorship. Their actions in the streets and online created a foundation for mass resistance, which was used to the full during the protests in 2018-2019.

This article shows the phenomenon of revolutionary art in shaping public opinion, transferring information, political discourse, and calls for mass disobedience. The photos of the revolution, murals, and graphics are still circulating in social media and the events related to them are still present in the consciousness of the Sudanese.89 Most of the murals have been painted over by the police, but the ones in the University of Khartoum campus have remained untouched. They were protected from destruction by the people and can also be seen in galleries online.90 These murals are examples of the strong emotions evoked in the Sudanese people, even after the end of the revolution. Their preservation can be understood as a tool for remembering, for commemorating the loss of loved ones and the tragedies of many families, raising people's spirits, and keeping resistance alive.

The artwork that was created out of this revolution has a significant role in civil disobedience. Sudanese people lived under constant control, repression, and racism-based politics. The need to talk about it loudly and be heard was unbearable. Art helped them express themselves and brought people together for a common cause. It also changed the information flow and created a dialogue with the government. The protesters' actions inspired the artists who, over time, mobilized the people. It was a mutually reinforcing relationship that gave birth to a freedom movement that emanated strength and bravery. Art became an integral part of this movement as the artists raised awareness and became a voice of the people. Art was inclusive, anti-conformist, and empowering, and it was used as a censorship-free source of news and expression.

Street art and graffiti glorify people and their sacrifice, challenge them during the revolution and after, and remain a constant memento of the events in Sudan. War has many faces, but whether it is a cultural, ideological, or religious war, it is associated with social change and never leaves the country unchanged. In Sudan, during the uprising, this change took place in the freedom of expression, greater self-awareness of citizens and creativity in all areas of fine arts. Poetry, songs, photography, collages, and street and online art during the revolution in the blink of an eye responded to the ever-changing situation in Sudan. Art inspired by actual events evokes instant connection and understanding between the artist and the viewer. Apart from anti-government slogans, art reflects the revolutionary reality. It shows sadness and fear; there are visible references to police brutality, excessive use of force, tear gas, ammunition, torture, and mental and physical exhaustion of people. It is an incredibly moving picture, without glorifying a peaceful uprising but considering the dangers associated with it. Devoid of the romantic vision of the freedom struggle in which all protesters happily return home.

The events in Sudan inspired and still inspire artists. ‘Kejer’s Prison’ – a short film by Mohamed Kordofani, in a moving way shows the social tear during the revolution, especially among the military soldiers.91 Many years of indoctrination or compulsion to obey the order have caused the soldiers to turn against their fellow citizens. Everyone should be held accountable, there is no doubt, but Mohamed Kordofan’s film changes a bit our perspective on the events. We want to hear their stories and find out how they became torturers for those they should protect. Abu’Obayda Mohamed, known as OXDA, in his graphic shows the burning Khartoum, where the militia’s attack on the sit-in on 3 June 2019 took place. The graphic was created a year later with a dedication to all the fallen and the shed blood on the dangerous road to democracy. Also, in 2021, the anniversary of the June 3 massacre was celebrated, emphasizing that the memory of these events is still alive, and the victims of the regime’s violence will not be forgotten.

Even after the revolution, the role of the artists has not changed. On the contrary, the artists have gained more momentum, and they are using the newly acquired freedom. However, social and political change is a long process, and Sudan's future remains unknown. The economy is suffering from inflation and the continued devaluation of the Sudanese pound. The locust plague and the flood disaster hit agricultural production, and the COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated the health crisis in the country. All this contributed to the deepening of the recession in 2020 and 2021. On the other hand, the U.S. removed Sudan from the list of states assisting terrorism and mediated the signing of a peace agreement with Israel, after which Sudan received $ 1 billion in financial aid. The situation in Sudan will not change dramatically overnight, however, the government has proposed fuel subsidies and tax law reforms, as well as social protection programs. New fiscal and monetary policies were introduced while renewing diplomatic relations and attempts to stabilize the economic situation. Sudan is ready for fundamental economic and institutional reforms and the first changes have already been noticed in August 2021, when the inflation decreased by 35 points. International media were talking about stabilization in the country.

8. 2022 update. The conflict in Sudan is not over.

In October 2021 the Sudanese army carried out a coup against the civilian leadership. Prime Minister Adballa Hamdook and his cabinet were arrested. Strikes broke out again and the actions of the army were condemned. This situation provoked a reaction from the international financial institutions supporting Sudan and forced the cessation of financial aid totaling $4.6bn. Furthermore, $700m of financial aid from the US has been blocked, along with the supply of grain to be used in subsidizing bread.92 The cost of living began to rise dramatically, and inflation soared.

The Sudanese still protest against the military coup on a weekly basis. Currently carried out by professional groups, students, and women's rights groups. Protests still rely on non-violent tactics and the use of social media is still crucial for wider media coverage. The rise of local activism in Sudan is a phenomenon that continues to grow and reach even larger circles. Protests re-emerged and Sudanese people demand a constitution and a democratically elected government.

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Robathan, Hannah, and Isabella Pearce. “The Satir Sisters: Two Artists Inspiring Change Through Illustration.” Shado, April 5, 2019. www⁄https://shado-mag.com/do/the-satir-sisters-two-artists-inspiring-change-through-illustration/.

Roychoudhury, Supriya. “The Art of Resistance: When Imagination Meets Technology at Protests from India to Chile.” Scroll.in, March 14, 2020. www⁄https://scroll.in/article/954091/the-art-of-resistance-when-imagination-meets-technology-at-protests-from-india-to-chile.

Salih, Zeinab Mohammed, “‘I was raised to love our home’: Sudan’s singing protester speaks up.” The Guardian, April 10, 2019. www⁄https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2019/apr/10/alaa-salah-sudanese-woman-talks-about-protest-photo-that-went-viral

Salih, Zeinab Mohammed, and Tom Wilson. “Sudanese Women Take Lead in Protests Against Bashir.” Financial Times,* March 28, 2019. www⁄https://www.ft.com/content/8e185568-4976-11e9-bbc9-6917dce3dc62

Strategic Initiative for Women in the Horn of Africa (SIHA) and The Redress Trust. Criminalization of Women in Sudan. A Need for Fundamental Reform. SIHA and REDRESS, November 2017. www⁄https://redress.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/report-Final.pdf

Staff writer. “Sudan Just Criminalized Female Genital Mutilation in a Landmark Victory for Women.” Scene Arabia, May 1, 2020. www⁄https://scenearabia.com/Life/Sudan-Just-Criminalised-Female-Genital-Mutilation-in-a-Landmark-Victory-for-Women.

The Observers. “Brothers Create Mosaic Portraits of Protesters Killed in Sudan’s Revolution.” France 24, March 12, 2019. www⁄https://observers.france24.com/en/20191203-sudan-mosaic-portraits-protesters-killed-revolution

UK Home Office. “Country Policy and Information Note: Sudan Opposition to the Government, Including Sur Place Activity.” November 2018 (version 2.0). www⁄https://www.ecoi.net/en/file/local/1452813/1226_1543570381_sudan-pol-oppn-cpin-v2-0-november-2018-external.pdf

Wilde Botta, Emma. “The Revolution Has Emerged: Sudan’s Acute Contradictions.” Review of African Political Economy, September 5, 2019. www⁄https://roape.net/2019/09/05/the-revolution-has-emerged-sudans-acute-contradictions/.


  1. Berridge, Civil Uprising in Modern Sudan, pp. 13-34. ↩︎

  2. Deshayes, Etienne, and Medani, “Reflection on the Sudanese Revolutionary Dynamics.” ↩︎

  3. Bolatito, “Sudan Revolution.” ↩︎

  4. In 1964, the so-called 'Southern Problem' became the cause of the conflict. The increasing discrimination against the Christian South of Sudan was the result of the policy of Abbud’s regime. A 'Southern problem' became widely discussed at the time, which led to clashes between students and the police at the University of Khartoum. A very important factor depending on the conflict was the government's ineffective economic policy and the rising costs of living. Eventually, the protests led to the president's resignation. ↩︎

  5. Any newspaper under this law could be suspended without any court order and its employees arrested. ↩︎

  6. CIPESA, “Sudan’s Bad Laws.” ↩︎

  7. For more information see: Reporters without Borders, “Sudan: Press freedom still in transition a year after Omar al-Bashir’s removal.” ↩︎

  8. Wilde Botta, “The Revolution Has Emerged.” ↩︎

  9. Copnall, A Poisonous Thorn in Our Hearts↩︎

  10. www⁄https://www.instagram.com/p/BtBLM5cFNG-/ ↩︎

  11. Karar, Protesters Dismantling Modus Operandi of Sudan's Oppressor: …the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the government adopted austerity measures that resulted in cutting fuel and bread subsidies. However, the adjustment plan has immensely hit the extremely poor, estimated to be around 36.1 per cent of the population. In December 2018, the inflation rate has risen to 72.94 per cent, the second worst rate worldwide after Venezuela↩︎

  12. Elhassan, “How Sudanese Art Is Fueling the Revolution.” ↩︎

  13. Berridge, Civil Uprising in Modern Sudan↩︎

  14. Elhassan, “Sudan’s Revolution Isn't a Fluke, It's Tradition.” ↩︎

  15. Ibid. ↩︎

  16. Lamensch, “Sudan's Artists of the Revolution: An Interview with Mounir Khalil.” ↩︎

  17. Murray, “How Art Helped Propel Sudan’s Revolution.” ↩︎

  18. Africa News, “Anti-Bashir Protesters Tear Gassed in Omdurman.” ↩︎

  19. Hassan and Kodouda, “Sudan’s Uprising: The Fall of a Dictator,” pp. 97-100. ↩︎

  20. Häggström, “Art for the Revolution.” ↩︎

  21. Norbrook, “Sudan: Who Is Hemeti.” ↩︎

  22. Wilde Botta, The Revolution has Emerged↩︎

  23. Human Rights Watch, “‘They Were Shouting ‘Kill Them.’” ↩︎

  24. Powell, Sudan Constitutional Declaration: Draft Constitutional Charter for the 2019 Transitional Period↩︎

  25. Policy and military attacked sleeping protesters and destroy the site of the sit-in. People were shot and wounded by machetes and their bodies were thrown into the River Nile. For more information see: Physicians for Human Rights, “Chaos and Fire”: An Analysis of Sudan's June 3, 2019, Khartoum Massacre." Videos made by protesters during the massacre (contains disturbing scenes): htpp://bbc.com/news/av/worls-africa-48956133 ↩︎

  26. The Public Order Law was proposed in 1989 and created as a set of legal provisions from the Sudanese Criminal Law Act. A restrictive public law that controlled how women acted and dressed in public, violating their privacy and freedoms. Promotes discrimination against women and limits their social activities. For more information see: www⁄http://democracyfirstgroup.org ↩︎

  27. Dabanga, “Prosecution Denounces Call to Revive Sudan’s Repealed Public Order Law.” ↩︎

  28. Staff writer, “Sudan Just Criminalised Female Genital Mutilation in a Landmark Victory for Women.” Cartoon by Alaa Satir condemning FGM with a sign: female body cannot be edited, available: www⁄https://www.instagram.com/p/BjHpwZjFxD9/ ↩︎

  29. Wilde Botta, The Revolution Has Emerged↩︎

  30. Propaganda is not in the scope of this article, for more information on this matter see: Goldstein, “Exploiting Darfur Genocide for Propaganda.” ↩︎

  31. Osman and Bearak, “Omar Al-Bashir Exploited Sudan’s Ethnic Division for Decades. Now Sudan Is United Against Him.” ↩︎

  32. Bolatito, Sudan Revolution↩︎

  33. Latif, You Arrogant Racist, We are All Darfur’; Human Rights Protests as Nation-Building in Sudan, pp. 54-67. ↩︎

  34. Idris, Conflict and Politics of Identity in Sudan↩︎

  35. Carmichael and Pinnell, “How Fake News from Sudan’s Regime Backfired.” ↩︎

  36. Bishai and Elshami, “‘We Are All Darfur!” – Sudan’s Unity Protests Stand a Real Chance." ↩︎

  37. Hashim, “In Pictures: The Art Fuelling Sudan's Revolution.” ↩︎

  38. For more information see: Reeves, “Online fake news and hate speech are fuelling tribal ‘genocide’ in South Sudan.” ↩︎

  39. For more information see: Global Gender Gap Report. ↩︎

  40. SIHA, “Criminalisation of women in Sudan. A need for Fundamental Reform,” pp. 8-13 and pp. 41-3. ↩︎

  41. Salih and Wilson, “Sudanese Women Take Lead in Protests Against Bashir.” ↩︎

  42. Hendawi, “Sudan: An Artist’s Tribute to Women Leaders of the Pro-Democracy Movement.” ↩︎

  43. For more information see: Salih, “‘I was raised to love our home’”; Reilly, “The Iconic Photo of Her Helped Fuel Sudan’s Revolution.” ↩︎

  44. Jaafari, “Here's the Story Behind the Iconic Image of the Sudanese Woman in White.” ↩︎

  45. Brown, “History Stands Alongside the Woman in the White Tobe.” ↩︎

  46. Elamin and Ismail, “The Many Mothers of Sudan’s Revolution.” ↩︎

  47. Reilly, “The Iconic Photo of Her Helped Fuel Sudan's Revolution.” ↩︎

  48. Lichtenstein, “Read the Scent of Revolution: The Story Behind Sudan's Legendary Perfume Label Remi .* The information about the Amado Alfadni project is available here: www⁄https://amadoalfadni.com/project/bint-el-sudan/ ↩︎

  49. Abdel Aziz, “The Third Sudanese Revolution Reinstates Women from All Walks of Life onto the Map of Sudanese Public Life.” ↩︎

  50. Kuwait Times, “Bashir's Overthrow Inspires Sudan Graffiti Artists.” ↩︎

  51. www⁄https://www.instagram.com/p/Bqm6Ne1lxrP/ ↩︎

  52. Häggström, “Art for the Revolution.” ↩︎

  53. Dahir, “Sudan’s Protests Inspire Art, Graffiti Revolution.” ↩︎

  54. For more information see: Mondesire, Race after Revolution↩︎

  55. Lamensch, “Sudan's Artists.” ↩︎

  56. Häggström, “Art for the Revolution.” ↩︎

  57. The Observateurs, “Brothers Create Mosaic Portraits of Protesters Killed in Sudan’s Revolution.” ↩︎

  58. Anonymous, “We Are Fed up! The Power of a New Generation of Sudanese Youth Activists.” ↩︎

  59. UK Home Office, “Sudan Opposition to the Government.” ↩︎

  60. For more information about the structure and evolution of the Sudanese professionals Association see: www⁄https://www.arab-reform.net/publication/sudanese-professionals-association-structure-evolutioroles-and-coalitions-changes-and-future-prospects/ ↩︎

  61. Bior, “Sudan's Social Media Deemed Major Player in Bashir's Ouster.” ↩︎

  62. Hassab, “Sudan Uprising: On an Artistic Note.” ↩︎

  63. www⁄https://www.bbc.com/news/av/world-africa-48956133 ↩︎

  64. Robathan and Pearce, “The Satir Sisters.” ↩︎

  65. Elhassan, “Inside Sudan's Viral Revolution.” ↩︎

  66. Gaafar and Shakwat, “Sudanese Women at the Heart of the Revolution.” ↩︎

  67. www⁄https://www.worldpressphoto.org/collection/photo/2020/39605/1/Yasuyoshi-Chiba ↩︎

  68. Fuhrmann, “#sudanrevolts.” ↩︎

  69. www⁄https://www.dabangasudan.org/en/all-news/article/public-anger-in-sudan-capital-as-children-crushed-by-niss-driver ↩︎

  70. Fuhrmann, “#sudanrevolts.” ↩︎

  71. Hassab, “Sudan Uprising.” ↩︎

  72. Casciarri and Manfredi, “Freedom, Peace and Justice,” p. 18. ↩︎

  73. Diab, “Everything You Need to Know About the Sudan Revolution.” ↩︎

  74. Editors, “Cartooning for Peace.” ↩︎

  75. Akwei, “Sudan’s Protests Through Cartoons.” ↩︎

  76. Fuhrmann, “#sudanrevolts.” ↩︎

  77. www⁄https://twitter.com/Merg_Salih/status/1401508418708545540 ↩︎

  78. Casciarri and Manfredi, “Freedom, Peace and Justice,” pp. 15-7. ↩︎

  79. Deshayes, Etienne, and Medani, “Reflection.” ↩︎

  80. Hashim, “In pictures: The art fuelling Sudan's revolution.” ↩︎

  81. Fuhrmann, “#sudanrevolts.” ↩︎

  82. Roychoudhury, “The Art of Resistance.” ↩︎

  83. Lamensch, “Sudan's Artists of the Revolution: An Interview with Assil Diab.” ↩︎

  84. For more information see: Reeves, “On the Brutal Murder of Ahmed al-Khair of Kashm al-Qirba.” Authors note: Some readers may find the description of events distressing. ↩︎

  85. Carmichael and Pinnell, “How fake news from Sudan’s regime backfired.” ↩︎

  86. Murray, “How Art Helped Propel Sudan’s Revolution.” ↩︎

  87. Roychoudhury, “The Art of Resistance.” ↩︎

  88. Capron, “In Sudan, Empty Tear Gas Canisters from Protests Turned into Art.” ↩︎

  89. The art of the Sudanese revolution was exhibited at the University of London and Khartoum ↩︎

  90. www⁄http://sudanrevolutionart.org ↩︎

  91. Kordofani, “Kejer's Prison.” ↩︎

  92. Kamabressi, “To save its economy, Sudan needs civilian rule.” ↩︎

article⁄Miscellanea
issue⁄Miscellanea

Miscellanea is a series of articles that will be published individually and will be included in a single issue when a sufficient number of articles have been accepted for publication.

author⁄Vanessa Davies
article⁄Booker T. Washington’s Challenge for Egyptology: African-Centered Research in the Nile Valley
abstract⁄In 1909, Egyptologist James Henry Breasted sent a letter to Booker T. Washington, along with a copy of an article Breasted had recently published in The Biblical World. To fully understand the short correspondence between the two scholars, this article delves into three related topics: Washington’s philosophy of industrial education and its complementarity with the educational program of his contemporary W. E. B. Du Bois; Washington’s prominent standing in educational, political, and social circles, including his professional relationship with the president of the University of Chicago William Rainey Harper and his advisory role to US president Theodore Roosevelt; and Breasted’s perspective on race and Egyptology. Washington, unlike Breasted, considered connections between ancient Nile Valley cultures and cultures elsewhere in Africa, a point of inquiry that has recently gained momentum in a variety of fields. In the correspondence between Washington and Breasted, we see demonstrations of precarity and privilege as related to scientific research, an imbalance seen also in the infamous syphilis study carried out at Tuskegee. This article points out the continued need to interrogate benefit by asking who constructs research questions and whom does research benefit.
keywords⁄Booker T. Washington, James Henry Breasted, W. E. B. Du Bois, William Rainey Harper, Theodore Roosevelt, Egyptology, ancient Nile Valley cultures, Africa

In her autobiography, Mary Church Terrell recounts an event that filled her with such pride, she felt as though she “had grown an inch taller.”1 In 1902, Prince Henry of Prussia, the grandson of Queen Victoria, visited the United States. Mary and Booker T. Washington were among the attendees at a reception held for the prince at the Waldorf Astoria hotel in New York City. During the event, the Prince asked to speak with Washington, and by all accounts, the encounter was a great success. The man who hosted the prince on behalf of US President Theodore Roosevelt described it in this way: “The ease with which Washington conducted himself was very striking. […] Indeed, Booker Washington’s manner was easier than that of almost any other man I saw meet the Prince in this country.”2 Mary Church Terrell viewed the meeting similarly.

Terrell was a social activist, working with Ida Wells on anti-lynching campaigns and collaborating with others to found the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and the National Association of Colored Women. What made her feel an inch taller was her reflection on their morning with the prince and Washington’s subsequent lunch hosted by Mrs. Cornelius Vanderbilt. “Thus did an ex-slave [Washington] and one of his friends touch elbows and clasp hands with royalty, as represented by a monarchical government of Europe, and sit at the table of royalty, as represented by Republican America.”3 Terrell’s description of Washington fits well with the events of the following pages. He regularly interacted with ease with heads of state, for example, US president Theodore Roosevelt, and with other educational leaders, such as the first president of the University of Chicago, William Rainey Harper. In a brief exchange, Washington applied the same expert communication skills to a conversation about ancient Nubia with the US Egyptologist, James Henry Breasted.

This article outlines in broad strokes Booker T. Washington’s perspectives on education, which were shaped by his own educational experiences and the particular needs of the students who attended Tuskegee Institute, which he ran from 1881 until his death in 1915. His program of industrial education has often been distinguished from the liberal arts style of education championed by his contemporary W. E. B. Du Bois. In the following pages, we will see that their approaches were complementary, not contradictory, means of adapting and maneuvering within a system that was riddled with obstacles designed to hinder their students’ success. Washington’s awareness of an obstacle-ridden system is clear in his correspondence with Breasted who explicitly isolates Washington from the ancient Egyptian culture. But that was of no significance to Washington who, with his focus on industrial education, was uninterested in Breasted’s esoteric considerations of ancient Nile Valley cultures and who, in any case, viewed the ancient Egyptians as unjust persecutors. The research questions that interested Booker T. Washington were not those that interested most Egyptologists at that time, although they are increasingly of interest today to scholars, particularly in fields adjacent to Egyptology.

Washington found no benefit in Egyptological research for African descended people in the US. Nonetheless, this article points out a lesson drawn from his approach that is particularly urgent for our contemporary world. Scientific research has offered great benefits and also great pain and injustice, as clearly demonstrated in the decades-long syphilis study centered at Tuskegee that is now recognized as a textbook case of medical racism. Yet despite such unethical practices, we do not abandon scientific inquiry. Just as Washington weighed the benefits of Egyptology, we must interrogate the purposes and benefits of research questions to recognize when seemingly worthwhile studies actually result in harm.

1. Industrial and Liberal Arts Education

At the turn of the century in the United States, there was discussion in African American communities as to the best type of education that should be provided for African Americans. At a very basic level, the two sides of the dispute advocated either for industrial education or book-based learning. The two people often positioned as the figureheads advocating for each perspective were Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. Du Bois, although their points of view were not as diametrically opposed to one another as they are sometimes presented.

Booker T. Washington was born in Virginia to an enslaved woman named Jane who, after emancipation, took him and her other two children to live with her husband in West Virginia.4 They lived in extreme poverty, and immediately he and his older brother worked in physically arduous conditions to help their stepfather provide for the family. When neighboring families chipped in to pay a teacher to instruct members of the community, he continued to work during the day and completed his schoolwork at nighttime.5 From such inauspicious beginnings, Washington was able to secure a college education for himself, and by his mid-twenties, he was appointed to lead a new school that would train African American teachers, what is today Tuskegee University in Alabama.

Washington framed the particular advantage of industrial education over so-called book learning in terms of its positive impact on the lives of White people. As he described it in a 1903 article in The Atlantic, Black professionals, such as lawyers, doctors, and ministers, primarily served Black communities, but Black people trained in trades and business pursuits could serve both Black and White communities.

There was general appreciation of the fact that the industrial education of the black people had direct, vital, and practical bearing upon the life of each white family in the South; while there was no such appreciation of the results of mere literary training. […] The minute it was seen that through industrial education the Negro youth was not only studying chemistry, but also how to apply the knowledge of chemistry to the enrichment of the soil, or to cooking, or to dairying, and that the student was being taught not only geometry and physics, but their application to blacksmithing, brickmaking, farming, and what not, then there began to appear for the first time a common bond between the two races and coöperation between North and South.6

Du Bois, on the other hand, felt that higher education should not be focused on teaching the skills necessary to earn a living, but should shape students into people by teaching them how to think.

Teach the workers to work and the thinkers to think. [...] And the final product of our training must be neither a psychologist nor a brickmason, but a man. And to make men, we must have ideals, broad, pure, and inspiring ends of living,—not sordid money-getting.7

Although it may seem as though differences in educational philosophy separate these men’s views, in fact each also supported the other’s vision. In 1902, Washington wrote about the goal of education in a way that sounds similar to Du Bois’s view, that education makes human beings: “The end of all education, whether of head or hand or heart, is to make an individual good, to make him useful, to make him powerful; is to give him goodness, usefulness and power in order that he may exert a helpful influence upon his fellows.”8 In December of the following year, Du Bois gave a lecture in Baltimore where he expressed his approval for industrial training as long as it did not threaten book-based learning: “A propaganda for industrial training is in itself a splendid and timely thing to which all intelligent men cry God speed. […] But when it is coupled by sneers at Negro colleges whose work made industrial schools possible […] then it becomes a movement you must choke to death or it will choke you.”9 Washington and Du Bois appreciated the value in the other’s perspective, but their strategies emphasized a different best path forward.

Washington and Du Bois formulated educational methodologies within systems that were not set up to benefit their targeted groups of students: people of color in the racially segregated United States. Each educator found ways to maneuver within that system, to carve out a space where their methodology might be successful without threatening the dominant (White) systems. Washington articulated his position in a speech he gave in Atlanta in 1906. He knew that people of color attaining education, wealth, and civil rights were seen by many White people as a threat to their own wealth and rights. Washington sought to allay those fears by assuring his audience that people of color had “no ambition to mingle socially with the white race. […] [or] dominate the white man in political matters.”10 Washington’s separatist vision was at odds with Du Bois’s vision of integration and was less challenging to White people who were wary of losing their own status in awarding social gains to people of color.11

Mary Church Terrell took a stance in the middle ground of this debate. She was born to a couple who had been formerly enslaved but achieved great financial success through their business ventures and were able to provide her with elite schooling. As an African American woman with a master’s degree in ancient Greek and Roman cultures from Oberlin College, she had experienced and benefitted from a liberal arts education.12 She also had great respect for the type of education that Washington facilitated through Tuskegee. Her concern was that Washington promoted that education to the exclusion of other types of education.

I was known as a disciple of the higher education, but I never failed to put myself on record as advocating industrial training also.

After I had seen Tuskegee with my own eyes I had a higher regard and a greater admiration for its founder than I had ever entertained before. […] From that day forth, whenever these friends tried to engage me in conversation about Tuskegee who knew that ‘way down deep in my heart I was a stickler for the higher education, and that if it came to a show down I would always vote on that side, I would simply say, “Have you seen Tuskegee? Have you been there? If you have not seen it for yourself, I will not discuss it with you till you do.”13

Washington saw his system of industrial education as the way to prepare African Americans to participate in the economic systems in the United States from which they had been excluded for so long.14

A key to understanding the differing educational views of Du Bois and Washington rests in their own family situations and educational experiences, as well as the experiences of the students whom each envisioned they would be serving. As mentioned earlier, Washington’s schooldays in West Virginia mostly consisted of him doing the schoolwork at night after a difficult day’s work at the salt furnace or in the coal mines of West Virginia.15 With a bit of support from members of his community, who gave a few cents here and a few cents there, he set out walking, hitchhiking, and working to pay for food until he reached Hampton Institute (now Hampton University), where he continued to work to pay tuition.16 After completing that program and more schooling at Wayland Seminary (now Virginia Union University), Washington was hired in 1881, at about the age of twenty-five, to be the first leader of Tuskegee Normal (Teachers’) and Industrial Institute in Alabama.

Du Bois was born and raised in a predominantly White town in Massachusetts. His tuition at Fisk University in Nashville was provided for him through donations from a number of Congregationalist churches, and scholarships largely paid his way through Harvard University.17 As he later described it, the aid came him almost effortlessly, “I needed money; scholarships and prizes fell into my lap.”18 With those experiences, as well as a stint abroad at the University of Berlin, Du Bois greatly benefitted from book-based learning, and he believed it provided the best educational tools for the next generation. He famously quarreled with Egyptologist Flinders Petrie because Petrie not only did not see the merits of book-based learning for modern Egyptians, he inexplicably felt it would harm them.19 Du Bois countered Western colonial attitudes in his engagement with Petrie and in his many publications that centered the Africanity of ancient Nile Valley cultures. Like Du Bois, Washington was aware of White and Western-centric views of antiquity. But he did not devote his energies to resisting such claims because Egyptology was completely irrelevant to his educational program.

Because of his educational experiences, Du Bois was familiar with the types of students who had access to elite educations. As Washington describes the students at Tuskegee, they were a world away from the students who attended Fisk and Harvard.

The students had come from homes where they had had no opportunities for lessons which would teach them how to care for their bodies. [...] We wanted to teach the students how to bathe; how to care for their teeth and clothing. We wanted to teach them what to eat, and how to eat it properly, and how to care for their rooms. Aside from this, we wanted to give them such a practical knowledge of some one industry, together with the spirit of industry, thrift, and economy, that they would be sure of knowing how to make a living after they had left us. We wanted to teach them to study actual things instead of mere books alone.20

Tuskegee had a very different purpose and mission than an institution like Fisk University that Du Bois attended or Atlanta University where Du Bois taught because Tuskegee served a different group of students. The adaptive strategies that Washington and Du Bois developed to facilitate their students’ success reflect the very different environments in which they operated.

Tuskegee Institute thrived under Washington’s leadership and continues through the present in its educational mission. Du Bois’s dream of a liberal arts style of education widely available to students of color continues in many institutions, despite the fact that his own educational trajectory took a different turn. After holding a few different teaching posts, Du Bois left the ranks of faculty and became editor of The Crisis, the magazine of the NAACP. His program of education continued through that work and through the many books he published, arguably reaching a much larger audience than his university teaching did. Under Du Bois’s leadership, The Crisis experienced an exponential growth in circulation, increasing readership by more than 500% in the first year and again by more than 600% in the following seven years.21

2. The Presidents of Tuskegee Institute and the University of Chicago

Although Booker T. Washington’s industrial education was far removed from an elite liberal arts education, Washington nonetheless had a close association with the president of just such an institution. The University of Chicago has become famous for its particular style of instruction that emphasizes honing analytical skills as opposed to parroting opinions. That educational philosophy is rooted in the practices of its first president, William Rainey Harper. As a teacher, Harper was described as instructing his students not in “what to believe, but how to think.”22 Despite the clear differences in curricula, the industrial education offered at Tuskegee Institute found an ally in the University of Chicago.

William Rainey Harper was appointed president of the University of Chicago in 1891, a decade after Booker T. Washington took the helm at Tuskegee Institute. Harper was involved in a wide-range of educational pursuits from laying the groundwork for today’s junior college or community college to promoting the arts and crafts movement, which sought to counter the growing role of mechanization.23 For example, the Industrial Art League, a nonprofit formed in 1899, asserted “the educational value of the handicrafts” and valuing “quality of production as against mere cheapness.”24 The five-person executive committee of the Industrial Art League included Chicago architect Louis Sullivan and William Rainey Harper.

Washington and Harper became acquainted toward the end of the nineteenth century. Over the years, they had many opportunities to meet professionally. In 1895, Harper invited Washington to speak to the students of the University of Chicago. Washington recounted that he “was treated with great consideration and kindness by all of the officers of the University.”25 In October 1898, a National Peace Jubilee was held in Chicago following the end of the four-month Spanish-American War.26 Harper, in his role of chair of the committee on invitations and speakers, invited Washington to participate. The high-profile event was planned to be held over the course of many days, with intellectuals, social leaders, and war heroes speaking at various locations around Chicago. Dignitaries scheduled to attend included diplomats, members of Congress, and US president William McKinley.

On Sunday, October 16, Washington spoke to a huge crowd, reported to have numbered sixteen thousand. As he later wrote, it was “the largest audience that I have ever addressed,” including President McKinley.27 Washington gave a historical overview touching on the service of African Americans to their country and thanked the president, to wild acclaim, for recognizing their commitment to the United States during the war. Two days later, Washington spoke again, that time at Chicago’s Columbia Theater, a 600-seat venue, where he shared the stage with two esteemed veterans.28

In 1902, Harper was again instrumental in bringing Washington to speak in Chicago. The Industrial Art League, on whose executive committee Harper served, was building a new studio. US President Theodore Roosevelt did the honor of laying the cornerstone, and one of the invited speakers was Booker T. Washington.29

After Harper’s untimely death before his fiftieth birthday, in January 1906, Washington maintained his relationship with the University of Chicago through its next president, Harry Pratt Judson. In 1910, Judson invited Washington to speak on campus. His address in December of that year in Mandel Hall was entitled “The Progress of the American Negro.”30 A further connection between the University of Chicago and Tuskegee Institute was Julius Rosenwald, head of Sears, Roebuck and Company, who served on the Board of Trustees of both institutions.31 In February 1912, Rosenwald, Judson, and James R. Angell, Dean of the Faculties at Chicago, visited Tuskegee to see firsthand the work that Washington was doing. The visitors approved, stating that Tuskegee was “one of the most practicable and successful attempts to solve the Negro problem in the South.”32

In June 1912, six and half years after Harper’s death, the University of Chicago honored their first president by dedicating a library named for him. A large group of invited guests, including Booker T. Washington and other leaders in the world of higher education, as well as a crowd of about four thousand people listened to a series of addresses on topics such as the university’s libraries, its architecture, and the importance of literature (Fig. 1).33 The University of Chicago Magazine reported on Washington’s presence at the event in this way:

The delegates to the dedication to the Library numbered in all sixty. Among those to attract the greatest attention was the representative of Tuskegee Normal, Principal Booker T. Washington. Arriving late, he was the only man on the platform without a gown. This deficiency he supplied in the afternoon, however, without seeming to lessen the interest of the onlookers in his presence.34

The magazine’s remarks were reserved solely for Washington. No comment is made on the ceremony’s other attendees. Washington would surely not have read the article, which was aimed at a reading audience of graduates and other donors to the university. Nonetheless, the snide comments seem designed to embarrass him while simultaneously signaling the superiority of the other invited guests. The author objectifies Washington by viewing him as a curiosity.

Booker T. Washington (far left) in procession to the afternoon Convocation at the University of Chicago, 1912. Credit: University of Chicago Photographic Archive, apf1-08583, Hanna Holborn Gray Special Collections Research Center, University of Chicago Library<sup id="657e8509e8c7674c8a16f298c2db3288fnref:35"><a href="#657e8509e8c7674c8a16f298c2db3288fn:35" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">35</a></sup> Figure 1. Booker T. Washington (far left) in procession to the afternoon Convocation at the University of Chicago, 1912. Credit: University of Chicago Photographic Archive, apf1-08583, Hanna Holborn Gray Special Collections Research Center, University of Chicago Library35

Judson’s continuing relationship with Washington is interesting in light of Judson’s poor treatment of an African American student at the University of Chicago. Georgiana Simpson, who became the first African American woman to receive a PhD in the United States, was expelled from her campus dorm by Judson in 1907. Some White students complained about Simpson’s presence in the dorm, but the Dean of Women declared that Simpson would remain in her lodging. In a shocking display of micromanagement, Judson intervened in the matter and forced Simpson to move off campus. Thanks to the recent efforts of some undergraduates, a bust of Simpson commemorating her accomplishments now resides in the campus’s Reynolds Club opposite a plaque recognizing Judson.36 Judson’s treatment of Simpson in light of his relationship with Washington seems motivated by racism, sexism, and also a status differential, where Washington, as a fellow institutional head, was a peer, while Simpson was merely a student. Set against this complex backdrop, University of Chicago professor of Egyptology James Henry Breasted inserted himself in Washington’s world.

3. Ancient Nubia in The Biblical World

In December 1908, Breasted published an article in a journal called The Biblical World. In the article, he promoted his epigraphic work on “the monuments of the ancient kingdom of Ethiopia.”37 Like most scholars of that time, Breasted used the term Ethiopia to refer to the ancient culture of Nubia, not the modern country of Ethiopia. He also discussed various writing systems in ancient and modern Nubia and the recent acquisition of some ancient Nubian texts. The texts were written using Greek letters, but the language that lay underneath the letters was largely unknown to scholars. The content was Biblical in nature, and Breasted wrote with excitement about the possibility of deciphering the ancient language.

Breasted believed that the ancient language, once understood, would reveal connections between the scripts of the Nile River Valley’s lower area, most of modern-day Egypt, and its upper area, the southern part of modern-day Egypt and northern to central Sudan. He describes the ancient people of the Upper Nile as “neither pure negroes nor Egyptians,” with no explanation as to what either term means in a scientific sense.38 In the future, when their language would be deciphered, Breasted claimed that:

For the first time we shall then possess the history of an African negro dialect for some two thousand years; for while the Nubians are far from being of exclusively negro blood, yet their language is closely allied to that of certain tribes in Kordofan [Kurdufan in central Sudan] at the present day. In the Nubians, therefore, we have the link which connects Egypt with the peoples of inner Africa.39

Breasted’s racism tinged with colonialism is on full display in this section of the article. As he saw it, the ancient culture of the Lower Nile was “civilized” and the ancient culture of the Upper Nile was only civilized when it adopted Egyptian culture. Otherwise, the Upper Nile culture was doomed, in his view, to “barbarism.” “The Egyptian veneer slowly wore off as this kingdom of the upper Nile was more and more isolated from the civilization of the north, and it was thus thrown back upon the barbarism of inner Africa.”40

Breasted used imperialistic race-based language to describe the cultural influence that may have flowed from south to north, from “inner Africa,” as he put it, to the Lower Nile. “When, therefore, we are in a position to read the early Nubian inscriptions, we shall be able to compare the ancient Nubian with the Egyptian and thus to determine how far, if at all, the Egyptian language of the Pharaohs was tinctured by negro speech.”41 The word “tinctured” is associated with dyeing or coloring. Breasted drew a color line that separated the people who spoke the undeciphered language (“an African negro dialect”) and those who spoke the “language of the Pharaohs” (clearly “non-negro” in his view). When he wrote of the “coloring” influence of the language of the Upper Nile on the language of the Lower Nile, he revealed his US-American race-based perspective, drawn from his contemporary world. Then he incorrectly projected his contemporary Western worldview on to the world of the ancient Nile cultures that he studied. An increasing number of scholars are now devoting their publication efforts to correct colonialist attitudes of this type.42

4. Breasted Writes to Washington

Breasted was offered a career as a faculty member when he was still an undergraduate. Willian Rainey Harper was a professor at Yale when Breasted studied there. Harper was planning the new University of Chicago and learned of Breasted’s interest in the ancient Egyptian language. He encouraged Breasted to study it in Germany with the assurance that a job would be waiting for him in Chicago when he finished.43 By 1894, Breasted had completed his degree and was teaching Egyptology at the new university, establishing himself as one of the founders of the discipline in the US system of higher education.44

In late 1908, when Breasted’s article was published in The Biblical World, Washington had been head of Tuskegee Institute for nearly three decades. He was a leader in the fight for educational and labor rights for African Americans, an international figure who regularly interacted with heads of state and whose professional acquaintance was cultivated by other educational leaders like the presidents of the University of Chicago.

In April 1909, Breasted sent a copy of his article to Washington. In an accompanying letter, he wrote about his work on ancient Nile Valley cultures, and he described the article as being about “a matter concerning early history of your race.”45 Breasted once again demarcated “Nubian” from “Egyptian” and marked the former as belonging to African Americans, thus excluding them from the realm of ancient Egyptians.

In his letter to Washington, Breasted explained the importance of the decipherment of the ancient Nilotic language in this way:

The importance of all this is chiefly that from these documents when deciphered, we shall be able to put together the only surviving information on the early history of the dark race. Nowhere else in all the world is the early history of a dark race preserved.46

Again, Breasted expresses a segregationist viewpoint, where he imagines the inhabitants of the Upper Nile are members of a “dark race” as distinguished from the people whom he imagined in the Lower Nile. In the letter’s closing, he states that he mailed the article to Washington because “possibly one who has done so much to shape the modern history of your race will be interested in the recovery of some account of the only early negro or negroid kingdom of which we know anything.”47 The slipperiness of Breasted’s argument is clear. His letter declares the evidence to be of an “early negro or negroid kingdom,” “a dark race,” one that Washington shares, and in the article, he describes the people of the Upper Nile as “neither pure negroes nor Egyptians.”48 Breasted’s argument about race was based on unscientific terminology that lacked precise definitions and resulted in prejudiced and incorrect conclusions.49 The slipperiness of his arguments applies across his publications because, as we will see below, he expresses different views in different publications.

5. Washington’s Response and the Brownsville Affair

At the time that Breasted sent the article, Washington was preoccupied with something far removed from the arcane world of ancient Nilotic cultures. He was grappling with the aftermath of an injustice done to black soldiers stationed in Brownsville, Texas. At the time, the soldiers were deemed guilty without the benefit of having had their case heard through regular legal proceedings. US president Theodore Roosevelt refused to undo the damage to their reputations, careers, and futures. The US Army launched subsequent inquiry that concluded in 1972 that all of the accused people were innocent.50

Roosevelt and Washington were closely connected, as Washington advised Roosevelt on matters related to issues facing African American communities. Roosevelt became president following the assassination of President McKinley, two years after Washington had spoken before McKinley and the largest audience of his career at the peace jubilee in Chicago. About a month after taking office in 1901, Roosevelt invited Washington to dinner at the White House. The event, aimed at securing the support of African Americans for the new president, was also a recognition of the acceptability in some White circles of Washington’s philosophy of “self-help and accommodation of segregation.”51 Nonetheless, the dinner invitation caused an angry backlash among some White politicians and members of the press who were enraged by the honor given to Washington.52

Five years after that dinner, in November 1906, President Roosevelt publicly announced his decision to declare, without due process, that the African American soldiers at Brownsville were guilty of murder and conspiracy to hide murderers. Before the public announcement, Roosevelt relayed his decision to Washington who tried unsuccessfully to change the president’s mind.53 Mary Church Terrell was well placed enough to intercede with the Secretary of War William Howard Taft to get a brief stay of the president’s order.54 She saw a connection between the injustice to the soldiers and the White House dinner. “He [Roosevelt] might have thought by discharging three companies of colored soldiers without honor he would prove to the South he was not such a negrophile as he had appeared to be.”55 In the midst of this crisis, Washington received Breasted’s letter.

Despite the pressing nature of the aftermath of the injustice done to the Black soldiers, Washington replied to Breasted the following week, expressing his polite interest in the matter. He noted that although he had not had time to acquaint himself with the ancient history of the Nile Valley, he did mention a particular point of interest. He wrote that “the traditions of most of the peoples whom I have read, point to a distant place in the direction of ancient Ethiopia as the source from which they, at one time, received what civilization they still possess.”56 Washington wondered if that “distant place” and the subject matter of Breasted’s article could be one and the same. “Could it be possible that these civilizing influences had their sources in this ancient Ethiopian kingdom to which your article refers?”57

6. Washington and Egyptology

Washington’s correspondence with Breasted is a fascinating chapter in histories of Egyptology and Nubiology, a chapter that needs to be included in future histories of these disciplines.58 The study of ancient Nile Valley cultures never factored into Washington’s work, as they did in the intellectual work of many other African Americans, including Du Bois.59 There are obvious reasons why the topic would not resonate deeply with Washington.

In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, many Egyptologists had largely agreed on a historical narrative that connected the northern Nile Valley—in what is today the country of Egypt—with the Levant, Mesopotamia, Anatolia, and parts of the northern Mediterranean, while simultaneously isolating it from Arabia and parts of Africa to the south and the west.60 More than reflecting any historical reality, this one-sided isolation reflects the research interests of early Egyptologists, their sources of funding, which were often people or organizations interested in exploring sites associated with Biblical stories, and the predetermined worldview that researchers brought to the material.

In his letter to Breasted, Washington makes connections across Africa, between the southern Nile Valley and West Africa.61 Research questions like the one he posed (“Could it be possible that these civilizing influences had their sources in this ancient Ethiopian kingdom to which your article refers?”) continue to be of interest to scholars, although more so to scholars in fields adjacent to Egyptology.62 Washington does not challenge the divide that Breasted imagined between the northern and southern Nile Valley. His reticence to identify with the northern Nile Valley was rooted in an entirely different set of motivations.

As mentioned earlier, Washington was born into slavery. Because of his experience, the Biblical story of the Exodus resonated strongly with him. In one publication, he wrote, “I learned in slavery to compare the condition of the Negro with that of the Jews in bondage in Egypt, so I have frequently, since freedom, been compelled to compare the prejudice, even persecution, which the Jewish people have to face and overcome in different parts of the world with the disadvantages of the Negro in the US and elsewhere.”63 Where Breasted viewed the ancient Egyptian culture as a “great civilization,” Washington saw it as an unjust power that enslaved other people. Finally, Washington’s pedagogical system focused on industrial education. Undeciphered ancient texts from the southern Nile and the enslavers of the Jewish people in the northern Nile Valley had no place in his educational worldview. But although Washington never incorporated ancient Nile Valley cultures into his work, Breasted continued to produce incorrect arguments that attempted to divide the ancient Nile Valley along so-called racial lines.

7. Breasted on Race

Breasted wrote many books on the ancient cultures of Europe, Asia, and Africa for a general reading audience and for use in schools. His views on the ancient people of the Nile Valley are made clear in his 1935 school textbook Ancient Times, first published in 1916. In Ancient Times and the accompanying atlases, Breasted connects the ancient cultures of the Near East, as it was called, and Europe to illustrate the spread of “western civilization.”64 In Ancient Times, a map labels Europe, Western Asia, and North Africa as “Great White Race,” and the area to the south of that is labeled “Black Race.”65 Breasted does not provide a formal definition of race, and he sometimes treats race as though it is tied to language or culture (both incorrect ideas).66 His muddled discussion sometimes suggests that race is a well-defined category with strict boundaries, and other times his discussion blurs those boundaries.

Breasted’s ideas about race are incorrect by the scientific standards of today and even of his own day. Anthropologist Franz Boas (1858–1942) offered an alternative anthropological view. “Put simply, Boas—albeit grudgingly—attempted to extricate race relations theory from most of the racist assumptions of late nineteenth-century social science.”67 Repeatedly in his work, Boas discussed variation, arguing that “human beings possessed enormously varied physiques, so diverse that what at first appeared to be easily bounded racial types turned out to grade into each other.”68 A racializing classification system, with its attempt to set firm boundaries delineating different groups of people, ignores the reality of variation in human populations.

The skeletal concept of “race” depended and depends on arbitrarily defined, well-marked anatomical complexes or “types” which had by definition little or no variation. However, modern population biology has demonstrated that variation with geographically defined breeding populations, or those more related by ancestry, is the rule for human groups.69

The confusion arises because variation in physical features became the basis for “race” and was used to classify humans, but humans defy classification because of variation.

Here the phrase “concept of race” refers to the biological idea as found in science texts in its most idealized form, namely that biological human population variation can be, or is to be partitioned into units of individuals who are nearly uniform, and that there is greater difference between these units than within them. This concept implies or suggests/emphasizes between-group discontinuity in origins, ancestral and descendant lineages, and molecular and physical traits, implying the opposite for within group variation. The human reality is different.70

Two people who may appear to be different based on physical features may not actually be different when examined at a genomic level. Furthermore, there are more similarities between human population groups than there are differences.

No such border (or color line), like the one that Breasted drew on the map, exists in reality. That becomes quite clear when considering where such a line would run.

There seems to be a problem in understanding that human genetic variation cannot always be easily described. Genetic origins can cut across ethnic (sociocultural or national) lines. At what village along the Nile valley today would one describe the “racial” transition between “Black” and “White”—assuming momentarily that these categories are real? It could not be done.71

Not only does such a line on a map not exist in reality, but the very idea of separating the Nile River Valley in the way that Breasted imagined is nowhere reflected in the ancient material. The “racialization of Nubia and Nubians as ‘black’ in contrast to Egyptians [is incorrect], implying an essentialized racial divide between Egypt and Nubia that would not have been acknowledged in antiquity.”72 Because the material record does not provide the separation that Breasted’s theory requires, he had to resort to an inaccurate description of the geography. He argues that the culture in the northern Nile Valley was isolated from the rest of the landmass. Breasted incorrectly describes the Nile River Valley in this way:

It [his area labeled “Black Race”] was separated from the Great White Race by the broad stretch of the Sahara Desert. The valley of the Nile was the only road leading across the Sahara from south to north. Sometimes the blacks of inner Africa did wander along this road into Egypt, but they came only in small groups. Thus cut off by the desert barrier and living by themselves, they remained uninfluenced by civilization from the north.73

This incorrect characterization ignores the fact that the area now known as the Sahara was not always a desert and ignores the existence of oases that continue in the present to facilitate movement across dry areas.74 Breasted himself makes that point in an earlier publication when he describes the desert around the Nile River Valley. “Plenteous rains, now no longer known there, rendered it a fertile and productive region.”75 In that case, he used the disciplinary boundaries set up by the university to separate those ancient people from the ones he studied. For him, humans living in the Nile Valley area in the Paleolithic “can not be connected in any way with the historic or prehistoric civilization of the Egyptians, and they fall exclusively within the province of the geologist and anthropologist.”76 With that comment, Breasted dispenses of any evidence that predates the era he wants to discuss, namely, predynastic and dynastic Egypt. Having dismissed that evidence, Breasted then incorrectly contrasts a “civilized” lower Nile Valley and a “barbaric” upper Nile Valley, a contrast that reflects more about the world of his day than the ancient world he imagined he was describing. As Stuart Tyson Smith put it:

The implied contrast between primitive and barbaric Nubians conquering their more sophisticated northern neighbor serves to reproduce and perpetuate a colonial and ultimately racist perspective that justified the authority of modern Western empires, in this case over “black” Africa, whose peoples could not create or maintain “civilized” life without help from an external power.77

Breasted’s segregation of the Nile Valley based on an nonexistent color line was founded on the mistaken idea that differences in physical appearance among humans correspond with differences in language or culture. That simply is not true, nor is it true that differences in the human genome correspond to linguistic or cultural differences.78

Breasted’s conception of races rested on many incorrect ideas, two of which I will touch on here. Breasted’s discussion intimates that there is such a thing as a “pure” race, meaning, a group of people who are so isolated from other people that they have bred only with each other since the beginning of time.79 Knowledge of human migrations easily disproves such an outdated concept.80 At a more local level, evidence to the contrary is easily seen within families, when certain traits are expressed or not expressed in various family members.

Defining a population as a narrow “type” logically leads to procedures such as picking out individuals with a given external phenotype and seeing them as members of a “pure race” whose members all had the same characteristics. This would imply that the blond in a family of brunettes was somehow more related to other blonds (“Nordics”) than to immediate family members.81

Breasted himself evidently realized that point. In his 1905 book A History of Egypt, he describes the ancient Egyptians in a way that belies the strict border delineated on his map. The book would be republished in a second edition just two years after the passage cited above and would be unchanged from the original edition, indicating that Breasted continued to hold to this view in the late 1930s.

Again the representations of the early Puntites, or Somali people, on the Egyptian monuments, show striking resemblances to the Egyptians themselves. […] The conclusion once maintained by some historians, that the Egyptian was of African negro origin, is now refuted; and evidently indicated that at most he may have been slightly tinctured with negro blood, in addition to the other ethnic elements already mentioned.82

Breasted’s dismissal of an “African negro” origin of Egyptians aligns with his racializing map in Ancient Times. But in the description above, he allows (again using the word “tinctured”) for some “negro blood” in the Egyptian population. By the standards of the US society in which Breasted lived, such an allowance would discount Egyptians from being White.

In his map, Breasted mistakenly depicted race as existing according to strict geographical boundaries, and in the passage above, he blurred that strict boundary line. The fuzziness of his racialized dividing line in the Nile Valley brings to mind Bernasconi’s interpretation of race as “a border concept, a dynamic concept whose core lies not at its center but at its edges and whose logic is constantly being reworked as the borders shift.”83 Bernasconi argues that in the United States, race should be seen as a “fluid system that never succeeded in maintaining the borders it tried to establish, but whose resilience came from the capacity of the dominant class within the system to turn a blind eye to their inability to police those boundaries effectively.”84 The idea of race as a fluid system can be seen in these ideas of Breasted’s. One of the discipline’s founders literally drew a color line across the Nile Valley (the map) even when by his own account (the text quoted above) people’s features blurred that line due to what he called “ethnic elements” among Egyptians. On a macro scale, the discipline of Egyptology in the US did the same. Despite the fact that one of the discipline’s founders made these statements, the discipline continues to “turn a blind eye,” having distanced itself from the statement without formally acknowledging its role in promoting such racist ideas.

Breasted’s second incorrect idea is his failure to explain how early humans who settled in Europe became “White.” His narrative makes it seem as though they simply appeared in Europe, already White.85 To account for Egypt’s place in a sphere dominated by “Europe” and described by him as “White,” Breasted produces a convoluted argument that ignores the very evidence that he has laid before the reader. “In North Africa these people were dark-skinned, but nevertheless physically they belong to the Great White Race.”86 With that illogical statement, Breasted opens the doors of his “Great White Race” to “dark-skinned” people. What then closes the doors to other dark-skinned people, such as those who inhabited the space he labeled “Black Race”? The answer is found in Breasted’s view of “civilization,” which for him was very much a White, Western, male-dominated space, something that he incorrectly felt was off-limits to other parts of Africa.

8. Breasted on Civilization and Women

Western imperialism is on clear display in Breasted’s 1926 book, The Conquest of Civilization. The title of his book signals his evolutionary view of human sociocultural development. Reflecting on history, Breasted sees a “rising trail” that “culminated in civilized man,” and he repeatedly contrasts that trajectory with “bestial savagery,” the earlier state of humans.87 When Breasted referred in his book title to civilization as conquering, he was not speaking metaphorically. His narrative romanticizes “great men” carrying weapons. In his preface, Breasted gazes over the plain in present-day Israel where his Rockefeller-funded excavations occurred. He glowingly recalls the Egyptian king Sheshonq who raided Jerusalem in tenth century BCE and the 1918 victory of the English Lord Allenby over Ottoman forces.88 The types of actions that constituted civilization and civilized people, in Breasted’s view, included acts of violence, theft, invasion, and subjugation of others. Breasted does not question who comprises “mankind” or whether the “progress” that some modern humans had achieved positively impacted others.89

Breasted’s worldview was impacted by colonialism, sexism, and racism. In the first edition of his textbook Ancient Times, Breasted paints a negative picture of the women of early human history. He blames the loss of an idyllic male hunting fantasy on a physically overwhelmed “primitive woman.” “Agriculture […] exceeded the strength of the primitive woman, and the primitive man was obliged to give up more and more of his hunting freedom and devote himself to the field.”90

Breasted reveals a similar lack of regard for contemporary women in a letter to his patron, John D. Rockefeller. In the letter, Breasted thanked Rockefeller for his “delightful companionship” during the Rockefeller family’s visit to Egypt. The Egyptologist recounted with jocularity what must have been a spirited discussion one day.

On the important question of the relative value of men and women to human society, Mrs. Rockefeller and Mary were somewhat out-voted when it came to a show of hands; but Mrs. Rockefeller never lost a scrimmage; she gave as good as she got in a spirit of unfailing good humor and amiability that won all hearts.91

Whether Mrs. Rockefeller and Mary actually felt any type of good humor at being relegated to a place of less value to human society is not clear from this passage.

Over the course of his career, the Rockefeller family repeatedly provided funds to enable Breasted’s work along the Nile and in the Middle East. One such notable case was in an ill-fated museum to be built in Egypt.92 Breasted used an imperialistic appeal to stress the grand implications of his work. He wrote to Mrs. Rockefeller that the museum was “not really business, but the fate of a great civilization mission, sent out by a great American possessing both the power of wealth and the power of vision that discloses and discerns new and untried possibilities of good.”93 He composed the letter to Mrs. Rockefeller partially as an apology for the public uproar over the ultimately rejected proposal for the new museum.94 His imperialistic narrative takes a decidedly Christian turn when he refers to the plan to build the museum in Egypt as a “new Crusade to the Orient.”95 According to Breasted, the misunderstanding about Rockefeller’s intentions in building the museum were a result of the Egyptian public’s unawareness that the money was to be without any reciprocal return, but simply for the general good. In fact, a combination of factors doomed the plan, including a growing dissatisfaction with such imperialist actions and the fact that under the plan, the Egyptian Antiquities Service would cede control of the museum’s antiquities and all future antiquities found in Egypt for thirty-three years.96 Had the museum come to pass, Breasted and those involved in the museum would have defined, on Egyptian soil, what Egyptology would be in terms of its artifacts, practitioners, and historical narratives.

9. Research for Whose Benefit?

The point was made earlier that despite the fascinating exchange of letters between Booker T. Washington and James Henry Breasted, ancient Nile Valley cultures did not factor into Washington’s work although other African American intellectuals did write about them. With Washington, we see the importance of interrogating benefit. Who constructs the research questions, and whom does research benefit? The fact that Breasted did not have to ask such questions is evidence of his privilege. Breasted did not have to be concerned with who benefitted from his research and from the research of other Egyptologists. He knew that it benefitted people like him: educated men in the west who were considered White. (Egyptian men were not included in that category as evidenced in the story about the failed museum in Cairo that excluded them.) Booker T. Washington did need to ask that question. In the case of Tuskegee Institute, how would Egyptology (Nubiology as such did not exist then nor were academic silos as limiting–e.g., George Reisner’s move from Semitic languages to archaeology) benefit the African American students whom Washington was educating? His answer: It would not.

In fact, Tuskegee has unfortunately become a central word in making sure that harm is not done to people through research. The Tuskegee Experiment is the informal name of a decades-long deception and health crisis that the United States government foisted on innocent African American people.97 The research began as a health survey in rural areas where people lacked access to regular medical care. The survey, which was organized by federal and local public health professionals with funding from the Rosenwald Fund, tested people for syphilis. Rosenwald, it will be remembered, was a longtime benefactor of the University of Chicago and Tuskegee Institute. In 1932, the survey turned into a four-decade long program that purported to treat syphilis in African American men but instead purposefully did not do so because it instead secretly studied the effects of untreated syphilis.98

One outcome of the disastrous Tuskegee Syphilis Study was the creation of the Belmont Report. Written by the (US) National Commission for the Protection of Human Subjects of Biomedical and Behavioral Research and released in 1979, the Belmont Report lays out ethical guidelines that continue to govern human subjects research in the US.99 It provides three principles that guide ethical questions that arise during research: respect for persons (including protecting those who are most vulnerable), beneficence (the obligation to not harm and to maximize benefits while minimizing harm), and justice (who benefits from the research and is burdened by it). The commission’s task—to revisit the exploitation of humans as subjects of research and to redress that history through policy—is an example of the “healing” that has recently been discussed as a goal within Nubian archaeology.100

Washington was not involved in the Tuskegee Syphilis Study. He died in 1915, about fourteen years before the survey began. But this injustice was done in the county where Tuskegee Institute is located with the cooperation of many people in that community, including Tuskegee’s then-president.101 Whatever the reasons for those people’s cooperation, whether they even knew about the true nature of the so-called study, the lasting health and psychological impacts of the study are a grim reminder of the need to ensure the safety of human subjects in research. One step in that process is to analyze research questions to determine who will benefit.

Kim TallBear asks a similar question today. Her work shows the urgency in continuing to interrogate innovation to determine who systems are set up to benefit and what ramifications may be lying beneath the surface, unstated. Breasted’s theories about a “Great White Race” are thoroughly discredited. Also discredited are the racial typologies of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that some Egyptologists, like Breasted, used in their work. But the kernels of those ideas are beginning to make a comeback in the guise of DNA studies.

On the surface, DNA studies may seem to be of positive benefit to a community. As TallBear states, “It has become a standard claim of human-population genetics that this scientific field can save us from the evils of racism.”102 But she cautions that it is not that simple. “The science does not undermine race and thus racism, but it helps reconfigure both race and indigeneity as genetic categories.”103 In terms of ancient Nile Valley cultures, we have seen vast overstatements, where, for example, the genetic map of one or two individuals has been wielded as a marker of an entire population group spanning thousands of years and hundreds of kilometers with no attention paid to cultural context, human migrations, or variation among humans.104 Such overly broad claims based on a fraction of evidence completely disregard the complexities of human culture and seem to suggest that culture is written in human DNA, which is incorrect.105

The threat to people who participate in such studies involves loss of sovereignty over one’s genetic material, one’s personal narrative, and perhaps material assets as well. The worry is that DNA mapping projects are not concerned with the research subjects’ well-being but are solely done “to satisfy the curiosity of Western scientists.”106 The alarms that TallBear sounds are often muffled beneath rhetoric that sounds positive and promising, such as the idea that all humans originated in Africa and so are all “related.”

Privileging the idea that ‘we are all related’ might be antiracist and all-inclusive in one context, although that is also complicated, because it relies on portraying Africa and Africans as primordial, as the source of all of us. ‘We are all related’ is also inadequate to understanding how indigenous peoples reckon relationships in more complicated ways, both biologically and culturally, at group levels. ‘We are all related’ can also put at risk assertions of indigenous identity and indigenous legal rights.107

The cultural identification, what TallBear describes as being “at group levels,” is also missing from studies of ancient human remains in the Nile Valley. As Keita put it:

It is important to emphasize that, while the biology changed with increasing local social complexity, the ethnicity of Niloto-Saharo-Sudanese origins did not change. The cultural morays [sic], ritual formulae, and symbols used in writing, as far as can be ascertained, remained true to their southern [i.e., Egyptian] origins.108

In formal Egyptian artistic contexts, phenotype, along with dress and hairstyle, was used to represent groups of people according to ethnic stereotypes and then to characterize those ethnic groups in positive or negative ways, depending on official state ideology.109 The Egyptians’ highly stereotyped artistic representations of ethnic groups tell us only about the Egyptian ideology of ethnic distinctions, not about actual differences between ethnic groups. But even in the fantastical scenario that the ancient Egyptian portrayals were accurate, it would be impossible to map genotypical distinctions onto those ethnic groups. “One’s known ethnically identified ancestors and one’s genes ancestors are conceptually two different things.”110 Genotype, of course, had no bearing on a person’s “insider” or “outsider” status in ancient Egypt, regardless of whatever ethnic divisions existed among ancient peoples.111 TallBear has spent much time analyzing the impact and potential threats to Native American communities from research projects that want to study their genetic map, that claim to be able to tell them “who they are,” as if they did not know. Her grave concern for whom those studies benefit are a modern-day mirror to the racial typologies of the ancient Nile Valley that Booker T. Washington ignored.

TallBear’s warning to carefully consider the promises and the purposes of research is a first step in constructing a critical framework to examine Egyptological research. It is beyond the scope of this article to directly address the following issues, but their complexities should also be kept in mind. As mentioned above, a growing body of work addresses legacies of colonialism in the discipline of Egyptology.112 Alongside those works should be considered issues such as color prejudice in modern Egypt, the rights of indigenous people to a land’s history, and the particular challenges faced by African descended people in the US versus in Africa.113

10. Conclusion

Mary Church Terrell recalled with pride the day that Booker T. Washington met Prince Henry of Prussia in the morning and Mrs. Vanderbilt in the afternoon. Although some African descended scholars, such as W. E. B. Du Bois, are much feted in academic circles these days, Booker T. Washington is too frequently overlooked not only as a pioneer in education but in teaching students how to recognize what benefits them. Put in the language of the Harper and Breasted’s University of Chicago, he taught the students of Tuskegee how to think.

Washington felt his method of education could teach “self-help, and self-reliance,” as well as “valuable lessons for the future.”114 In the Institute’s early days, he had students constructing buildings and clearing land for agricultural purposes.

My plan was to have them, while performing this service, taught the latest and best methods of labour, so that the school would not only get the benefit of their efforts, but the students themselves would be taught to see not only utility in labour, but beauty and dignity; would be taught, in fact, how to lift labour up from mere drudgery and toil, and would learn to love work for its own sake.115

Despite the fact that the Institute and its community were the direct and visible beneficiaries of this labor, many students were nonetheless reluctant to do the work. Washington convinced the students at Tuskegee Institute of the benefit of his style of education by participating in the educational experiment with them.

When I explained my plan to the young men, I noticed that they did not seem to take to it very kindly. It was hard for them to see the connection between clearing land and an education. Besides, many of them had been school-teachers, and they questioned whether or not clearing land would be in keeping with their dignity. In order to relieve them from any embarrassment, each afternoon after school I took my axe and led the way to the woods. When they saw that I was not afraid or ashamed to work, they began to assist with more enthusiasm. We kept at the work each afternoon, until we had cleared about twenty acres and had planted a crop.116

Their labor on the grounds of the new Institute benefitted them as an educational community. As quoted early in this article, Washington also published an article in The Atlantic that framed such work as a benefit to White society. Why? Because Washington knew how to think from a position of precarity. He knew that the economic and social success of African Americans would begin to make White people feel that same precarity, a precarity usually only felt by people of color and the most economically disadvantaged White people. His piece in The Atlantic forestalled any such alarm in wealthier White circles by assuring them that the labor of African Americans benefitted White people too.

Washington found no benefit in Egyptology. Personally, he did not connect with the ancient culture. As a formerly enslaved person, he saw the ancient Egyptians through the lens of the Biblical Exodus, as those who enslaved other people. Systemically, there was nothing in Egyptology to benefit his educational system. Breasted’s “Great White Race” clearly excluded Tuskegee Institute. But Washington deftly shows us a way to move past the roadblock of Breasted’s Egyptology.

As seen in Washington’s interactions with world leaders and other university leaders, he handled difficult situations with ease. The same is true in his correspondence with Breasted. In his reply, Washington showed himself to be an astute reader, able to discern where in Breasted’s narrative he felt the benefit lay for African American communities. He sidestepped the contradictory narrative of the Nile Valley based on skin color and instead wrote an empowering narrative. He turned to the kingdom of the Upper Nile as an ancient source for the cultures of West Africa, where many African Americans traced their heritage.

As one of the founders of Egyptology in the US, Breasted’s viewpoints formed the basis of the discipline. His core values, with their attendant racist, sexist, and colonialist overtones, are clearly spelled out in public and in private, in the school textbooks and in the personal correspondence that he authored. To move away from those viewpoints and the unwelcome baggage they bring with them, Egyptologists must find alternative directions to the ones set out by early scholars like Breasted. One alternative path was offered by Booker T. Washington who considered cultural connections across Africa. Other scholars, in Africa and elsewhere in the world, have thought similarly. Increasingly, we see efforts to bring new perspectives to research questions in the Nile Valley and to make connections between the ancient Nile Valley and elsewhere in Africa. Washington modeled for his students a connection between physical labor and school education. In his brief encounter with Egyptology, he models for us a way to move forward from the discipline’s colonial outlooks.

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  1. Terrell, A Colored Woman, p. 191. The author would like to thank the Rockefeller Archive Center, the Oriental Institute Museum Archives, and the University of Chicago Special Collections for permission to publish their materials in this article. ↩︎

  2. Scott and Stowe, Booker T. Washington, p. 153. ↩︎

  3. Terrell, A Colored Woman, pp. 190–191. ↩︎

  4. Washington, Up From Slavery, pp. 1–2. ↩︎

  5. Washington, Up From Slavery, pp. 8–9. ↩︎

  6. Washington, “The Fruits of Industrial Training.” ↩︎

  7. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, p. 67. ↩︎

  8. Washington, Character Building, pp. 97–98. ↩︎

  9. Du Bois, “Lecture in Baltimore,” pp. 76–77. ↩︎

  10. “Seeks No Social Equality” The Daily Maroon, December 11, 1906, p. 3, available online: campub.lib.uchicago.edu/search/?f1-title=Daily%20Maroon. Note that the issue is mistakenly catalogued under the date November 12, 1906. ↩︎

  11. On Washington’s motives behind his rhetoric, see, for example, Hall, Black Separatism and Social Reality, and more recently Bieze and Gasman, Booker T. Washington Rediscovered↩︎

  12. For more on Terrell’s impact in that sphere, see Haley, “Black Feminist Thought and Classics.” ↩︎

  13. Terrell, A Colored Woman, pp. 191–193. ↩︎

  14. Williams, Rethinking Race, p. 62. ↩︎

  15. Washington, Up From Slavery, pp. 8–11. ↩︎

  16. Washington, Up From Slavery, pp. 15–19. ↩︎

  17. Du Bois, The Autobiography of W. E. B. DuBois, pp. 126–28; Lewis, W. E. B. Du Bois, pp. 45, 69. ↩︎

  18. Du Bois, Darkwater, p. 15. ↩︎

  19. Davies, “W. E. B. Du Bois.” ↩︎

  20. Washington, Up From Slavery, p. 126. ↩︎

  21. For those figures, see Concerning circulation of the Crisis, 1918. Du Bois, W. E. B. (William Edward Burghardt), 1868–1963 (MS 312), Robert S. Cox Special Collections and University Archives Research Center, UMass Amherst Libraries. ↩︎

  22. Goodspeed, William Rainey Harper, p. 47. ↩︎

  23. Harper, The Trend in Higher Education, pp. 378–382. Harper was one of the founders of Joliet Junior College, the first public community college in the United States. ↩︎

  24. The Industrial Art League, [p. 4]. See also Triggs, Chapters in the History↩︎

  25. Harlan, The Booker T. Washington Papers, Volume 1, p. 84. ↩︎

  26. Harlan, The Booker T. Washington Papers, Volume 4, pp. 472–473. ↩︎

  27. Washington, Up from Slavery, pp. 253–54. ↩︎

  28. Official Program of the National Peace Jubilee↩︎

  29. Bieze, Booker T. Washington, pp. 97–98. ↩︎

  30. University of Chicago. Office of the President. Harper, Judson and Burton Administrations. Records, 85, 14, Hanna Holborn Gray Special Collections Research Center, University of Chicago Library. ↩︎

  31. Rosenwald’s philanthropic fund was dedicated to promoting technical education, supporting African American artists and intellectuals, and piloting a program for treating syphilis that when taken over by the federal government deceitfully harmed the African Americans research participants; Feiler, A Better Life for Their Children↩︎

  32. “The University Record,” University of Chicago Magazine 5,5 (March 1913), Chicago, University of Chicago Press, p. 159. Hanna Holborn Gray Special Collections Research Center, University of Chicago Library. ↩︎

  33. “Events and Discussion,” University of Chicago Magazine 4,8 (July 1912), Chicago: University of Chicago Press, p. 293–96. Hanna Holborn Gray Special Collections Research Center, University of Chicago Library. ↩︎

  34. “Events and Discussion,” University of Chicago Magazine 4,8 (July 1912), Chicago: University of Chicago Press, p. 297. Hanna Holborn Gray Special Collections Research Center, University of Chicago Library. ↩︎

  35. Note that the description in the University’s online photographic archive (“procession […] to the dedication of the William Rainey Harper Memorial Library”) is incorrect. Given the fact that Washington is wearing a mortarboard and robe, this must have been the afternoon procession to the Convocation. See photoarchive.lib.uchicago.edu/db.xqy?show=browse1.xml|3147. ↩︎ ↩︎

  36. Witynski, “100 years ago, Georgiana Simpson made history.” ↩︎

  37. Breasted, “Recovery and Decipherment,” p. 385. ↩︎

  38. Breasted, “Recovery and Decipherment,” p. 376. ↩︎

  39. Breasted, “Recovery and Decipherment,” p. 384. ↩︎

  40. Breasted, “Recovery and Decipherment,” pp. 378–80. ↩︎

  41. Breasted, “Recovery and Decipherment,” pp. 384–385. ↩︎

  42. Much on this topic has been written by Reid (e.g., “Indigenous Egyptology”) and Quirke (e.g., “Exclusion of Egyptians”), as well as many others, for example, Riggs, “Colonial Visions;” Doyon, “On Archaeological Labor”; Langer, “Informal Colonialism”; Minor, “Decolonizing Reisner”; Lemos, “Can We Decolonize.” Note too the statement by Tuck and Yang (“Decolonization,” pp. 1): “Decolonization brings about the repatriation of Indigenous land and life; it is not a metaphor for other things we want to do to improve our societies and schools.” ↩︎

  43. Goodspeed, William Rainey Harper, pp. 116–17. ↩︎

  44. The other is George Reisner, professor at Harvard. See Davies, “Egypt and Egyptology.” ↩︎

  45. Letter from James Henry Breasted to Booker T. Washington, April 29, 1909. Breasted, James Henry. Directors Correspondence. Records. Box 013, Folder 033, OI Museum Archives of the University of Chicago. ↩︎

  46. Letter from James Henry Breasted to Booker T. Washington, April 29, 1909. ↩︎

  47. Letter from James Henry Breasted to Booker T. Washington, April 29, 1909. For Williams’s perspective on Breasted and Washington, see Williams, Rethinking Race, pp. 54, 72. ↩︎

  48. Breasted, “Recovery and Decipherment,” p. 376. ↩︎

  49. Ambridge described his conclusions as “deeply ethnocentric at best”; Ambridge, “Imperialism and Racial Geography,” p. 13. ↩︎

  50. The story of the original series of events and the inquiry is recounted by the person whose research resulted in a presidential pardon: Baker, The Brownsville Texas Incident↩︎

  51. Baker, The Brownsville Texas Incident, p. 13. ↩︎

  52. Baker, The Brownsville Texas Incident, p. 219; Lusane, The Black History of the White House↩︎

  53. Baker, The Brownsville Texas Incident, p. 240. ↩︎

  54. Terrell, “Secretary Taft and the Negro Soldiers.” ↩︎

  55. Terrell, A Colored Woman, p. 278. ↩︎

  56. Letter from Booker T. Washington to James Henry Breasted, May 6, 1909. Directors Correspondence. Records. Box 013, Folder 033, OI Museum Archives of the University of Chicago. ↩︎

  57. Letter from Booker T. Washington to James Henry Breasted, May 6, 1909. ↩︎

  58. Histories of Egyptology consistently avoid engaging with the scholarship of African descended scholars both in the US and in Africa outside of Egypt, for example, Thomas, American Discovery; Thompson, Wonderful Things; Bednarski, Dodson, and Ikram, History of World Egyptology↩︎

  59. Beatty and Davies, “African Americans”; Davies, “Egypt and Egyptology”; Davies, “Pauline Hopkins’ Literary Egyptology”; Davies, “W. E. B. Du Bois.” ↩︎

  60. On the formation of the question of the racial identity of ancient Egyptians, which arose among White researchers as “Europeans were becoming increasingly invested in the idea of their own preeminence,” and Morton, Nott, and Gliddon, who popularized the idea that the ancient Egyptians were White, see Bernasconi, “Black Skin, White Skulls.” Also Smith, “Stranger in a Strange Land.” On the work of Galton and Pearson, who worked with Egyptologist Flinders Petrie, see Challis, The Archaeology of Race. One of Breasted’s sources for his Ancient Times book who aligned with these perspectives is Parsons, cited below. ↩︎

  61. Mudimbe, The Invention of Africa, lays out the colonialist view of “Africa.” I learned about this work from the discussion in TallBear, Native American DNA, p. 147. See also Wengrow, “Landscapes of Knowledge, Idioms of Power,” p. 134, who notes “The claim that Ancient Egypt arose upon ‘African foundations’ constitutes a powerful but vague rhetorical statement, which implies a historical relationship between what are, in reality, two relatively modern categories (‘Africa’ and ‘Ancient Egypt’), both subject to a variety of possible understandings.” ↩︎

  62. See n. 112. ↩︎

  63. Washington, The Man Farthest Down, p. 241. ↩︎

  64. The set included an abridged student atlas, an unabridged atlas “especially suitable for teachers,” and an accompanying teacher’s manual. See Breasted and Huth, A Teacher’s Manual; also European History Atlas↩︎

  65. Breasted, Ancient Times, 2nd ed, p. 13. ↩︎

  66. See his discussion of now-discredited theories about the differing head shapes among so-called races and his discussion of the “Semitic race”, as if race were linked to language family; Breasted, Ancient Times, 2nd ed, pp. 131 note, 160. For more on this issue, see Ambridge, “Imperialism and Racial Geography”; Ambridge, History and Narrative↩︎

  67. Williams, Rethinking Race, pp. 7–8. ↩︎

  68. Teslow, Constructing Race, p. 68. Note that Boas was not without prejudice to Africans, as Teslow outlines. ↩︎

  69. Keita, “Studies and Comments,” p. 130. ↩︎

  70. Keita, “Ancient Egyptian ‘Origins’ and ‘Identity.’” See also Templeton, “Human Races,” p. 646: “Humans show only modest levels of differentiation among populations when compared to other large-bodied mammals, and this level of differentia- tion is well below the usual threshold used to identify sub- species (races) in nonhuman species. Hence, human races do not exist under the traditional concept of a subspecies as being a geographically circumscribed population showing sharp genetic differentiation.” ↩︎

  71. Keita, “Studies and Comments,” p. 129. For more on the mistaken idea of “purity” in this context, see TallBear, “The Emergence, Politics, and Marketplace.” ↩︎

  72. Smith, ‘Backwater Puritans’?, p. 4. ↩︎

  73. Breasted, Ancient Times, 2nd ed, p. 133. ↩︎

  74. Williams, When the Sahara Was Green↩︎

  75. Breasted, A History of Egypt, p. 25; Breasted, “Recovery and Decipherment,” pp. 378–80. ↩︎

  76. Breasted, A History of Egypt, p. 25; Breasted, “Recovery and Decipherment,” pp. 378–80. ↩︎

  77. Smith, “‘Backwater Puritans’?,” p. 4. ↩︎

  78. “What the archaeological work is bringing to light, though, is the irrelevance of the race-based theory, as cultural identities do not necessarily match or relate to race”; Gatto, “The Nubian Pastoral Culture,” p. 21. ↩︎

  79. See, for example, Breasted, Ancient Times, 2nd ed, pp. 767, 770. His division of the continent of Africa repeated claims made by earlier writers. Parsons, a source cited in his second edition of Ancient Times, both mischaracterized Egypt as cut off from other population groups (“the most isolated nation of the Western world in early times”) and mistakenly entertained the idea that the culture to because of biological circumstances (“Or was there a touch of genius in the ancient Egyptian blood [the result of a fortunate crossing of races or perhaps simply of slow evolution within a pure breed] that lifted the Egyptian mind above the other peoples of Africa?”) before launching into a rambling explanation of how “scientists have scarcely begun to understand the conditions which are favorable to greatness,” which then leads him to essentially give the reader permission to be racist: “The truth is that anthropology can help very little as yet in solving the great racial problems. Man will have to rely upon his old racial instincts.” See Parsons, The Stream of History, pp. 200, 143, 145–46. ↩︎

  80. For example, a recent study dispenses with the rather simplistic idea that the predynastic population of the northern Nile Valley was essentially replaced by a largescale migration of people from the south (Naqada). Instead, the study shows that migration occurred in northern and southern directions. See Keita, “Mass Population Migration.” ↩︎

  81. Keita, “Studies and Comments,” p. 130. ↩︎

  82. Breasted, A History of Egypt, p. 26. ↩︎

  83. Bernasconi, “Crossed Lines,” p. 227. ↩︎

  84. Bernasconi, “Crossed Lines,” p. 226. ↩︎

  85. “After the Glacial Age, when the ice, which had pushed far south across large portions of Europe and Asia, had retreated for the last time, it was the men of the Great White Race who moved in and occupied these formerly ice-bound regions”; Breasted, Ancient Times, 2nd ed, p. 12 note. ↩︎

  86. Breasted, Ancient Times, 2nd ed, p. 12 note. ↩︎

  87. Breasted, The Conquest of Civilization, p. 704. ↩︎

  88. Breasted, The Conquest of Civilization, pp. xii–xiii. ↩︎

  89. In a biography of Breasted written for the National Academy of Sciences, John Wilson of the Oriental Institute falteringly tries to defend Breasted’s characterization of “an upward line” of “man’s course” through history, but the effort falls terribly flat. Wilson, “James Henry Breasted,” p. 111. ↩︎

  90. Breasted, Ancient Times, p. 25. By the book’s second edition, his narrative had softened: “After men began cultivating food in the field and raising it on the hoof, they became for the first time food-producers. Being therefore able to produce food at home, they found it less necessary to go out as hunters and kill wild animals for food. The wandering life of hunting, therefore, gradually changed”; Breasted, Ancient Times, 2nd ed, p. 29. ↩︎

  91. Letter from James Henry Breasted to Mr. Rockefeller. Office of the Messrs. Rockefeller, John D. Rockefeller, Jr., Series 2 (FA335), Box 41, Folder 368, Rockefeller Archive Center. ↩︎

  92. Dawood, “Failure to Engage”; Dawood, “Building Protestant Modernism.” ↩︎

  93. Letter from James Henry Breasted to Mrs. Rockefeller. Office of the Messrs. Rockefeller, Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, AA (FA336), Box 2, Folder 23, Rockefeller Archive Center. ↩︎

  94. On the issue of the museum as it pertained to contemporary Egyptian politics, see Abt, “Toward a Historian’s Laboratory”; Abt, American Egyptologist↩︎

  95. Letter from James Henry Breasted to Mrs. Rockefeller. Office of the Messrs. Rockefeller, Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, AA (FA336), Box 2, Folder 23, Rockefeller Archive Center. ↩︎

  96. Abt, “Toward a Historian’s Laboratory,” p. 177. ↩︎

  97. Baker, Brawley, and Marks, “Effects of Untreated Syphilis.” ↩︎

  98. Much has been written about these injustices from the perspective of public health and medicine, as well as the social sciences. I choose to focus on Mr. Gray’s narrative because of his involvement with the legal case that resulted in some compensation for the victims and the Belmont Report and subsequent laws protecting humans as subjects of research; Gray, The Tuskegee Syphilis Study, pp. 39–42. ↩︎

  99. Available at www⁄https://www.hhs.gov/ohrp/regulations-and-policy/belmont-report/index.html↩︎

  100. Lemos, “Can We Decolonize,” p. 13. ↩︎

  101. Gray, The Tuskegee Syphilis Study, pp. 45–46. ↩︎

  102. TallBear, Native American DNA, p. 146. ↩︎

  103. TallBear, Native American DNA, pp. 146–47. In assessing the data that DNA testing companies provide to consumers about their own genetic material, she writes, “Thus we must ask for whom are particular forms of genetic knowledge power (or profit), and at whose expense?” TallBear, “The Emergence, Politics, and Marketplace,” p. 22. ↩︎

  104. Schuenemann, “Ancient Egyptian mummy genomes.” ↩︎

  105. Gourdine, Keita, Gourdine, and Anselin, “Ancient Egyptian Genomes.” ↩︎

  106. Asociación ANDES, “ANDES Communiqué.” I found this source via TallBear, Native American DNA, p. 194. ↩︎

  107. TallBear, Native American DNA, p. 153. ↩︎

  108. Keita, “Studies and Comments,” p. 149. ↩︎

  109. On ethnic stereotypes, see Smith, Wretched Kush, pp. 6–7. But note that “there are no texts from the Egyptians or Kushites that present an identification scheme of peoples designated by their color” (emphasis in the original); Keita, “Ideas about ‘Race,’” p. 100. On the formal art of temple and elite tomb contexts as a vehicle for the expression of state ideology, see Smith, Wretched Kush, esp. chap. 7; Davies, Peace in Ancient Egypt, esp. pp. 12–13. ↩︎

  110. Keita, “Ideas about ‘Race,’” p. 110. ↩︎

  111. Keita, “Ancient Egyptian ‘Origins’ and ‘Identity’”; Keita, “Ideas about ‘Race,’” p. 112, 116. ↩︎

  112. See n. 59 for some articles that give examples of scholars doing this work in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Another famous example is the work of the Senegalese scholar Cheikh Anta Diop. More recent examples include Ashby and Adodo, “Nubia as a Place of Refuge”; Buzon, Smith, and Simonetti, “Entanglement”; Capo Chichi, “On the Relationship”; Faraji, The Roots of Nubian Christianity; Gatto, “The Nubian Pastoral Culture”; Hansberry, Pillars in Ethiopian History; Hassan, “Memorabilia”; Heard, “Barbarians at the Gate”; Jaggs, “Maat - Iwa”; Keita, “Ancient Egyptian ‘Origins’ and ‘Identity’”; Lemos, “Beyond Cultural Entanglements”; Malvoisin, “Geometry and Giraffes”; Monroe, “Animals in the Kerma Afterlife”; Smith, “‘Backwater Puritans’?”; Somet, L’Égypte ancienne; Wengrow, “Landscapes of Knowledge.” ↩︎

  113. On these issues, see Sabry, “Anti-blackness in Egypt”; Abd el-Gawad and Stevenson, “Egypt’s Dispersed Heritage”; Hassan, “African Dimension.” ↩︎

  114. Washington, Up From Slavery, p. 149. ↩︎

  115. Washington, Up From Slavery, p. 148. ↩︎

  116. Washington, Up From Slavery, pp. 130–31. ↩︎

article⁄An Obituary for George Pagoulatos
author⁄
Alexandros Tsakos, University of Bergen
in issues⁄
keywords⁄Acropole Hotel, Khartoum, Greeks in Sudan, George Pagoulatos, Sudan

The year 2022 marks a jubilee for Nubian studies. Fifty years ago, the International Society for Nubian Studies (ISNS) was founded during the first International Conference for Nubian Studies (ICNS). Like then, this year’s ICNS took place in Warsaw, the headquarters of the study of—at least—medieval, or Christian, Nubia. For the ISNS, the jubilee was also, in many ways, a year of reflection on the deeds of the past and the pioneers who founded and promoted the field of Nubiology—a discipline born in the context of the 1972 ICNS in Warsaw. What could not escape the attention of anyone present at this year’s ICNS was the fact that so many of these pioneers were absent. From the group involved in the Aswan High Dam Campaigns, for example, only Stefan Jakobielski was present. Many may have been afraid of the pandemic; some are no longer active; others have left this world. The list of the latter is long. The names of Bill Adams, Hans-Åke Nördström, László Török, and Stefan Wenig perhaps suffice to underline the weight of the moment the ISNS commemorated their departure. Commemorating late colleagues at the ICNS is not a new practice. This year, however, there was a novelty in the necrology. The participants were reminded of the death of a person who, though not a scholar, was the warmest supporter and most efficient facilitator of the fieldwork of foreign missions to Sudan. This person is none other than George Pagoulatos, who passed away in June 2022. He was the pillar of the Acropole Hotel, home away from home for so many of us, researchers and travelers passing through Khartoum or expatriates living there.

I met George on the first day of my very first visit to Khartoum in 1994. I had been invited by one of the thousands of Greek families that have lived in Sudan since the nineteenth century, when the first Greeks appeared in the Middle Nile in modern times, following the armies of Mohamed Ali, the governor of Egypt born in Kavala in modern-day Greece. Two regions of modern-day Greece contributed the most to the diaspora population of Sudan: the eastern Aegean islands, thanks to the boat connection between Istanbul and Egypt passing by these islands, and the Ionian islands, thanks to their long-standing links with Europe—especially the British Empire, ruler of the islands between 1809 and 1862. The island of Cephalonia played a particular role in these emigrations, as testified by the oldest known textual source produced by a Greek of Sudan, namely the diary of Angelos Kapatos, allegedly the most important merchant of Anglo-Egyptian Sudan. And among the Cephalonians of Sudan, the Pagoulatos family stands out.

The Pagoulatos family achieved renown in the second half of the twentieth century. During World War II, Panaghis Pagoulatos left Cephalonia and settled in Egypt, where he met his wife Flora, a member of the Greek diaspora of Alexandria. There, their first son, Thanassis, was born. The family soon settled in Khartoum, where Panaghis was employed by the British government, working as a private accountant in the afternoons to complement the family’s income. With his first capital, he opened a night club just opposite the governor’s house, and in 1952, he founded the Acropole Hotel on the corner of Zubeir Pasha Street (no. 52) and Babikr Badr Street, right behind Jamhuria Street, Khartoum’s central avenue. The first establishment had only ten rooms. Forty more were added in 1954, when a building across the street was annexed to the original premises. Panaghis and Flora ran the hotel until the founder’s death in 1967. Flora was subsequently assisted by Thanassis. His younger brothers, George and Gerasimos (Makis), soon followed suit. They were both born in Khartoum—Makis at the Acropole itself.

The hotel’s central position defined its clientele. First, it was mainly merchants. Then, with the political and humanitarian calamities befalling the country, its clientele consisted mainly of employees of the United Nations and several nongovernmental organizations. It was perhaps due to these connections that on May 15, 1988, one of the two Acropole Hotel buildings became the target of a terrorist attack that killed seven people and seriously injured another twenty-two. This was not the only time that the fate of the hotel and the Pagoulatos family went hand in hand with the sociopolitical developments in Sudan. In 1983, the Sharia law imposed by Gaafar Nimeiry’s regime prohibited alcoholic beverages, leading to the loss of a crucial source of income for many Greeks, including the Pagoulatos family, then distributors of Amstel beer in Sudan.

In the 1990s, however, the hotel gained a new clientele: archaeologists. Thanks to the family’s forty years of business experience and his unique talent in socializing, George Pagoulatos became the go-to person for addressing all sorts of administrative and logistic challenges that the foreign missions were facing in a country that was not exactly an easy place to travel, work, and conduct fieldwork. As George stated in 2016, “Some archaeologists have been coming to our hotel for over twenty years. Having solved various problems together, we have developed strong bonds that go beyond business relationships. We are like a family.” This feeling of belonging to this family was almost contagious for everyone approaching George and the hearth of the Acropole.

This was also my feeling when I arrived at the hotel’s foyer in 1994 and was offered a splendidly refreshing “nous-nous” (a drink consisting of 50% karkadeh and 50% lemon juice)—one of the many reasons to seek shelter from Khartoum’s suffocating heat in the Acropole, but surely not the most important one. As soon as we were introduced to each other, George showed an earnest interest in this young archaeologist from his home country—the first to ever set foot in Sudan, as he exclaimed in delight. At that moment, any doubts I had about dedicating my career to studying the past of Sudan and Nubia were dispelled. But George’s involvement in the field of Sudanese archaeology was not limited to formalities and kindness. He introduced me to many archaeologists staying at the Acropole who were willing to share their experiences with a novice in the field. I recall how he managed to relieve my stress with his kind words and mindful observations during a dinner he planned with professors returning from Kerma, the (mythical to me) capital of Bronze Age Sudan; how, when I moved to Sudan, he invited me to the Acropole time and again to meet colleagues who had an interest in or questions about Greco-Roman topics to which I could provide some feedback. It is no little thing that after such a call, I met my mentor in medieval Nubian textual studies, and later friend and long-standing collaborator, Professor Adam [Ł]{.smallcaps}ajtar from the University of Warsaw. I trust that many will smile reading about my memories, having been recipients of George’s love for our work themselves.

George’s kindness and help extended far beyond the premises of the Acropole. He had deep respect for the efforts of the National Corporation of Antiquities and Museums to protect and promote the country’s archaeological heritage. His material and diplomatic assistance also allowed him to facilitate administrative procedures for all researchers active in Sudanese archaeology. Beyond archaeology and the National Museum, his interest and respect extended to all sister disciplines and museums. For example, he personally introduced me to the director of the Ethno-folkloristic Museum in the early 1990s, hoping for some broadening of the museum’s scope to include traditions shared between Greeks and the Sudanese through their coexistence in modern Sudan, as well as during Ottoman times.

George Pagoulatos was a man of culture. He knew and loved to talk about literature and music. I remember how actively he engaged with the events organized at “Ergamenis,” the Greek Community of Khartoum Cultural Center. He was especially supportive both before and during the concert of the Samandalyat, a group of eleven Sudanese women playing the violin under the guidance of Professor Leila Pastawi on the keyboard instrument. When the group performed at the premises of “Ergamenis,” he also showed his generosity and humbleness by offering and serving drinks himself to more than a hundred people at the concert’s intermission, always with a smile for everyone.

The early 2000s, when I was living in Sudan, were perhaps some of the most prosperous years for the country thanks not only to the discovery of oil but also to the constant flow of money that supported the work of the numerous NGOs present in the country due to the humanitarian crises in all the peripheries controlled by Khartoum. The country felt somewhat more open to foreigners and tourists started coming in larger numbers. The Acropole Hotel became a hub for this type of visitors too and George’s name was known to all involved in the tourism industry. However, whenever one praised him for his services, efficiency, and warmth, he always replied on behalf of the entire family—brothers, wives, and children—who all contributed to running the hotel and achieving such quality standards in an environment like Khartoum, thus having equal shares in the hotel’s success and the family’s fame.

It is no surprise that the Acropole Hotel has become the heart of the Greek diaspora in Sudan even officially, since after the closure of the Greek Embassy in Khartoum, Makis Pagoulatos took up the responsibility of running the Consulate of Greece in Khartoum from the Acropole’s office. I am sure that he does this with pride and confidence, inspired by the image of his father on the wall and the memory of his brother in every corner of the hotel.

Although George’s memory cannot be contained in words, I could not but express my sadness for his departure, my respect for his person, and my love for this exceptional friend in this short text. If people who knew George Pagoulatos are touched by this text or are inspired to reflect on what makes life in Khartoum meaningful, the presence of researchers in Sudan vital, and the future of the country—hopefully—better, then I trust that we can all see him smiling from his office or from the entrance of the Acropole Hotel, wishing us a good journey ahead.

author⁄Adam Simmons
article⁄A Short Note on Queen Gaua: A New Last Known Ruler of Dotawo (r. around 1520-6)?
author⁄
Adam Simmons, Nottingham Trent University
in issues⁄
abstract⁄The Nubian Christian kingdom of Dotawo is attested in Old Nubian sources from the eleventh to the late fifteenth centuries. The reign of Dotawo’s last “king” is dated to the period between 1463 and 1483 (at least). This short note wishes to highlight another ruler, a Queen Gaua (or Jawe), who is mentioned by the Portuguese historian João de Barros in his imperial history entitled the Terceira Década da Ásia (“Third Decade of Asia”), published in 1563. Her reign can be dated to encompass the early 1520s and knowledge thereof challenges certain narratives regarding the latter period of Dotawo and this note poses questions for further research to explore regarding Christian Nubia in the sixteenth century.
keywords⁄Dotawo, Christian, queen, Gaua, Jawe, sixteenth century, Joel, Portuguese, Ethiopia, João de Barros, Francisco Álvares, Dongola

The Nubian Christian kingdom of Dotawo, which was the product of the unification between the kingdoms of Makuria and Alwa, is attested in Old Nubian sources from the eleventh century to the late fifteenth century.1 Spanning from Aswan to an unknown distance beyond the confluence of the White and Blue Niles, this region had been politically Christian since the sixth century. The last ourou (“king”) of Dotawo named in Old Nubian sources is Joel [II], who reigned between at least 1463 and 1483.2 His reign is often seen as reflecting the last period of the Christian Kingdom of Dotawo before the kingdom witnessed increasing strain, and ultimate collapse, following the Funj conquest of Soba in 1504 and their establishment along the Nile. How long this process took remains open for debate. The next known named ruler in the surviving corpus is Ḥasan walad Kuškuš, Muslim mekk (“king”: Funj title akin to Arabic al-malik) of Dongola in the 1680s, seemingly after the disintegration of the Christian kingdom.3

This short note wishes to highlight another named ruler, a Queen Gaua,4 who was first mentioned by the Portuguese historian João de Barros in his imperial history entitled the Terceira Década da Ásia (“Third Decade of Asia”), published in 1563. Her reign can be dated to encompass the early 1520s as she is said to have sent an embassy to Ethiopia as the Portuguese were resident at the Ethiopian court which would date this embassy between 1520 and 1526: the dates that the Portuguese arrived and left the Ethiopian kingdom. To date, she has hitherto been overlooked but she offers a significant anomaly in our current understanding of Christian Nubia: Gaua would be the only known female ruler to hold power throughout Christian Nubian history. Her reign also comes during a period of almost complete source silence, both internally and by external observers. Whether Gaua was a ruler of Dotawo or of a successor kingdom cannot be explored adequately here. As such, it is not the intention of this short note to explore the many questions her reign asks in-depth, but, rather, to offer some initial interpretations which shall receive greater attention at a later date.

Unlike the text of Francisco Álvares, a Portuguese Franciscan who was part of the Portuguese embassy to Ethiopia between 1520 and 1526 and who related a few comments about a people he called the Nobiis, which is known in Nubian Studies, the work of João de Barros remains overlooked.5 Before looking at the text of Barros, here is the most significant passage by Álvares for our purposes:

E contra ho norte confinam estes bellomos com una gente que se chamam Nobiis: & estes dizem que foram xp̃aos & regidos por Roma. Ouvi a hum homem Suriano natural de Tripulli de Suria, & se chama Joam de Suria (que andou com nosco tres annos na terra do Preste, & veyo comnosco a Portugal): que fora nesta terra, & que ha nella cento & cincoenta igrejas: & que ainda tem crucifixos & imagemes de Nossa Senhora: & outras imagemes pintadas pollas paredes & tudo velho: & ha gente da terra nam sam christãos, mouros, nem judeus: & que vivem com desejos de serem christãos. Estas igrejas todas estam em fortalezas velhas antigas que ha polla terra: & quantas fortalezas ha tantas igrejas tem. E sendo nos na terra do Preste Joam vieram de aquella terra leis homemes aho mesmo Preste como embaixadores, pedindolhe que lhes mandasse clerigos & frades que hos ensinassem: & elle hos nam quis mandar, & deziam que lhes disera, que elle havia ho seu Abima da terra dos mouros .f. do Patriarca de Alexandria que estava em poder de mouros: como poderia elle dar clerigos & frades, pois outro lhos dava? & assi se tornaram. Dizem que estes antigamente haviam tudo de Roma, & que ha grandes tempos que lhe falleceo hum Bispo que de Roma tinham: & pollas guerras dos mouros, nam poderam haver outro: & assi careceram de toda ha clerecia & de toda sua christandade. Estes confinam com Egipto & dizem haver nesta terra muyto ouro & fino: & jaz esta terra de tromte de çuaquem que he perto do mar roxo: & sam estas senhorias de Nobiis de aquem & dalem Nillo: & dizem que quantas sam has fortalezas, tantos sam hos capitães: nam tem rey senam capitães.6

Towards the north, these Bellonos border upon a people who are called Nobiis: and they say that they had [once] been Christians and ruled from Rome. I heard from a Syrian man, a native of Tripoli of Syria, who was called John of Syria (he accompanied us for three years in the Prester’s country, and came with us to Portugal), that he had been to this country, and that there are a hundred and fifty churches in it, which still contain crucifixes and images of Our Lady, and other images painted on the walls. All are old. And the people of this country are neither Christians, Moors, nor Jews; and that they live in the desire to become Christians. These churches are all in ancient old castles which are [dotted] throughout the country; and as many castles there are, so there are as many churches. While we were in the country of Prester John there came six men from that country [of the Nobiis] as ambassadors to the Prester himself, begging him to send them priests and friars to teach them. He did not send them; and it was said that he told them that [Ethiopia] had the Abun from the country of the Moors, that is to say from the Patriarch of Alexandria, who is under the rule of the Moors; how could he give priests and friars when [it was the power of] another to give them. And so [the ambassadors] returned. They say that in ancient times these people had everything from Rome, and that it was a very long time ago that a bishop had died, whom they had got from Rome, [but] on account of the wars of the Moors they could not get another, and so they lost all their clergy and their Christianity. These [Nobiis] border up to Egypt, and they say that they have much fine gold in their country. This country lies in front of Suakin, which is close to the Red Sea. The lordships of the Nobiis are on both sides of the Nile, and they say that as many castles as there are, so [too are as] many captains: they have no king, but only captains.

Álvares’ account was first published in 1540 and, while a second printing in Italian in 1550 shows some changes, the content remains largely the same in this instance.7 Elsewhere in his narrative Álvares also highlights the strength of these Nobiis, saying that on their frontier regions there are four or five hundred cavalry who were great warriors, that the kingdom was well supplied, and that only a short time ago they killed the son of the Ethiopian Bäḥr Nǝguś (“ruler of the sea”), a quasi-independent regional ruler centred in modern Eritrea within the dominion of the Ethiopian Nǝguś (“king”) Lǝbnä Dǝngǝl (r. 1508-40), though no great detail about this conflict is forthcoming.8 Álvares portrays a kingdom which is both simultaneously fragmented and apparently in decline, yet militarily strong.

The text of João de Barros equally relates the embassy but adds one additional key detail to the text of Álvares: Nubia was actually ruled by a queen called Gaua. The career of João de Barros (b. 1496-d. 1570) had him at the centre of Portuguese imperial affairs throughout his life.9 Educated at the palace of Dom Manuel I (r.1495-1521), his career saw him hold numerous roles: notably having a brief stint as captain of São Jorge da Mina (1524-5), becoming treasurer of the Casa da Índia (1525-8), and receiving a captaincy which made him a driving force behind the Portuguese colonisation of the region of Maranhão in Brazil from 1539. Following a stroke, he retired in 1567, returning to Portugal, before dying of another stroke in 1570. He wrote numerous published and unpublished works. His four-volume history of the Portuguese in India, the Décadas da Ásia (1552-1615), is the most well-known and is a key set of texts for chronicling the history of the first two centuries of the Portuguese empire and are remarkably well-informed.10 Whether the noting of Queen Gaua remained an oversight on the part of Álvares or was contained in lost unpublished manuscripts remains impossible to know.

In a passage in Book Four, Chapter Two of the Terceira Década da Ásia Barros makes note of a Queen of Nubia (Nobia), who the Ethiopians (Abasiis) called Gaua, and who was said to be “not of small stature” (nam de pequeno estádo)11 and had sent an embassy to Ethiopia.12 Given the two descriptions of a Nubian embassy being sent to Ethiopia concerned with the same issue of requiring clerics, it would appear that both Álvares and Barros were describing the same event. It was likely while treasurer of the Casa da Índia at the heart of the Portuguese imperial project that Barros had heard news or viewed documents relating to a Queen Gaua of Nubia soon after her embassy had arrived in Ethiopia. Nothing else is said of this queen. For example, it is not made known how long this Queen Gaua had ruled or would rule. The wider passage is about the Queen of Sheba in Ethiopian tradition, describing her as a Candace (kandake: “queen” or “queen-mother”) of Meroë before leading on to a passage about Gaua inserted within the broader narrative. The section concerning Gaua relates:

João de Barros. <em>Terceira Década da Ásia</em>. Lisbon: Impressa per João Barreira, 1563, fo. 88, Mi,v.

João de Barros. Terceira Década da Ásia. Lisbon: Impressa per João Barreira, 1563, fo. 88, Mi,v.

E ainda que nam seja com nome de Candaçe, sabemos que quásy naquelles confiis que dissemos oje rey na huma molhęr, & nam de pequeno estádo: a qual os mesmos Abasiis chamão Gaua. Nas tęrras de qual, prinçipalmente nas que sam da regiam a que chamámos Nobia, & os Abexiis Nobá, algũus dos nósses que aly foram, viram muytos templos da Christiandáde que aquella tęrra teue: os quáes jaziam aruinados das mãos dis mouros, & em algũas paredes imagenes de sanctos pintádas. E a causa desta destruiçam segundo elles diziam: foy serem desemparádos igreja Romana, por razá do grande numero de mouros que ons tinham çercádo. E sendo os nossos na corte de Pręste Ioam, em companhia de hum embaixador que Diogo López de Sequeira desta vez do porto de Arquico lhe mandou (como logo veremos): esta Gaua raynha daquelles Nobiis, mandou pedir ao mesmo Pręste per seus embaixadores, que lhe mandasse clerigos & frádes pera lhe reformar o seu povo, que com a entráda dos mouros avia muyto tempo que estáva sem doctrina Evangęlica, pom am poderem aver Bispo Romano como já tevęram. Ao que o Pręste respondeo que o nam podia fazer, porque tandem o seu Abuna, debaixo da doctrina do qual estava toda a igreja da Ethiópia: elle os avia do Patriarcha Alexandrino que estáva entre os mouros, & sem recádo do que pediam se tornaram estes embaixadores da Gaua.

And even though she is not named Candace, we know that in this region they say that the king today is a woman, and [she] is not of small stature: who these Abyssinians call Gaua. These lands are principally those which we call Nubia and the Abyssinians call Noba. Some of our people who went there saw many Christian temples that belonged to the land: they lay in ruins from the hands of the Muslims, and on some walls there were painted images of saints. The cause of their destruction, according to what they said, was that they were abandoned by the Roman Church because they had become surrounded by a large number of Muslims. And to the court of Prester John, in the company of the ambassador who Diogo López de Sequeira had sent to the port of Arkiko (as we will see), this Queen Gaua of the Nubians sent to the same Prester her ambassadors to ask for clerics and friars to be sent to Nubia to reform her people, who, as a result of Muslim incursion, had been without Christian doctrine for a long time so that they could see a Roman bishop as they used to have. The Prester replied that he could not do this, as they had the Abun, whose authority oversaw all of the Ethiopian Church: he had been sent from the Alexandrian Patriarch who was among the Muslims. No more [information] was received of what became of these ambassadors of Gaua.

While clearly the passage is portraying a Latin discourse onto Nubia with the suggestion that they sought Latin Christian priests – Bishop Tivoli was made first Latin Christian Bishop of Dongola in 1330, though likely only in name, following a period of increasing relations between Nubia and Latin Europe – it should not be dismissed out of hand.13 Indeed, the Noba (ኖባ) were the Nubians in Ethiopian Gəʿəz texts, as can be witnessed in the account of the monk Täklä ʾÄlfa who travelled through Dongola in 1596 as a near contemporary example.14 The fundamental elements of the text, Gaua’s name and the act of sending an embassy to Ethiopia, need to be taken into consideration and not dismissed as purely Latin Christian hearsay and rumours. For instance, firstly, it is notable that Gaua could readily be a form of the female name Jawe (ⳝⲁⲩⲉ), known in at least one c. tenth-century Old Nubian text regarding somebody described as the wife (ⲉⲧ̅ⲧⲟⲩ ⳝⲁⲩⲉ: lit. “his wife Jawe”) of Ṅešš of Atwa in a colophon of a hymn to the Cross and discourse on Christ, when rendered into Portuguese.15 While error and conflation are often a feature of European texts writing about regions of Africa without direct authorial experience, Barros does appear to be referencing a Nubian queen rather than combining different pieces of information. It should be said that a contemporary female ruler called Gaʿəwa is recorded in both Arabic and Gəʿəz sources as leading the Sultanate of Säläwa/Mäzäga in Tigray from 1534 (initially as her brother the sultan lay dying) until at least 1558. She allied with Aḥmad ibn Ibrāhīm al-Ġāzī, the initial leader of a period of Muslim conquest within the Kingdom of Ethiopia until the latter was killed in battle by Ethiopian forces in 1543, before Gaʿəwa then allied with his followers.16 Barros certainly would have had ample opportunity to learn about this other Gaʿəwa prior to the publication of his Terceira Década in 1563 which could have resulted in a later conflation. However, Gaʿəwa is never portrayed as a Christian ruler – which her later nominal association with the tenth-century destruction of the pagan Queen Gudit, who also became to be known as Gaʿəwa by some as a result, attests – let alone a ruler who would have wanted Christian clerics sent to her kingdom, and it is unknown how much power she held in the early 1520s in any case. Moreover, her kingdom was to the east of the Kingdom of Ethiopia towards the Red Sea, whereas Barros makes clear that he intended the region of the Nile Valley below Egypt in his text. It would therefore appear that any similarly in name between the Nubian Gaua/Jawe and the Ethiopian Gaʿəwa is purely coincidental and need not necessarily result in any uncritical dismissal of the possibility of Gaua as a Nubian queen.

Despite being the only known female Nubian Christian ruler in the surviving corpus, it is unclear how unique, or indeed even unremarkable, Gaua’s reign may actually have been given the fragmentary nature of our knowledge of rulers in general. Indeed, her reign poses questions regarding the commonality of the ability of daughters and nieces to be able to assume the throne akin to sons and nephews, whether as a sole heir or as a rival to a male challenger. Alternatively, she may have been acting as regent for a child male ourou and not an outright ruler after all, yet was still somebody who wielded significant power.17 In the absence of another illustrative Nubian scenario, a similar contemporary example of the latter situation can be found in neighbouring Ethiopia where an embassy was sent to Lisbon in 1509 by dowager queen Ǝleni, the acting primary regent for her adoptive great-grandson Lǝbnä Dǝngǝl who would not become of age to rule independently until 1516. She had held significant influence at the Ethiopian court since the 1440s: Solomonic Ethiopia only witnessed one outright female ruler (Zäwditu, r. 1916-30) in its history between 1270 and 1974. Secondly, while the request for Latin Christian priests was in all likelihood a Portuguese fallacy, requesting aid from its sister church in Ethiopia would otherwise make sense for a ruler of Nubia. The relationship between the Churches of Nubia and Ethiopia is remarkably seldom featured in either internal or external sources beyond noting its existence. Nevertheless, these were not two disconnected Christian neighbours. Despite this passage, it remains unclear whether Dotawo continued to function in the same form into this latter period or had morphed into something new.

Questions remain regarding the territorial extent of Dotawo after Joel [II]. Indeed, while it is commonly assumed that the capital at Dongola relocated to Daw in 1365, both archaeological and textual evidence is by no means conclusive and remains open to the possibility for a new narrative: this will surely come to light in future work, but it is not for this brief note here to discuss this any further beyond providing a few key details for initial consideration. The most southern Ottoman permanent presence during this period was established at Sai Island by the late sixteenth century – though they appear to have had increasing influence as far south as Hannek – whereas Funj evidence does not suggest any prominent offensive into Nubian territory beyond Soba until the second decade of the seventeenth century, leaving a region along the Nile, which significantly included Dongola, potentially stretching as much as c.170 miles unconquered.18 In turn, given this reference to Gaua, a picture can be painted which highlights the possibility for the continuing functioning of a Christian kingdom centred at Dongola between both the Ottomans and the Funj for at least a century after 1504. It is also not until this mid-seventeenth-century period where archaeology is increasingly dating new urban developments in Dongola.19 Such developments may potentially speak to a later dating to the eventual Funj conquest and subsequent submission of Dongola as a client kingdom to the Funj under rulers such as mekk Ḥasan walad Kuškuš if such evidence is to be viewed in this way. The acknowledgement of Gaua now poses even more questions for our understanding of sixteenth-century Nubia and further adds fuel to the need for a continual re-evaluation of this later period of Christian Nubian history prior to the true onset of the Ottoman and Funj periods.

Bibliography

Sources

Álvares, Francisco. Verdadeira informaçam das terras do Preste Joãm. Lisbon: Impressa per Luis Rodrigues, 1540.

———. “Viaggio fatto nella Ethiopia per don Francesco Alvarez Portoghese.” In Primo volume delle navigationi et viaggi nel qual si contiene la descrittione dell’Africa, et del paese del Prete Ianni, con varii viaggi, dal mar Rosso a Calicut & infin all’isole Molucche, dove nascono le Spetiere et la navigatione attorno il mondo: li nomi de gli auttori, et le navigationi, et i viaggi piu particolarmente si mostrano nel foglio seguente, edited by Giovanni Batista Ramusio. Venice: Appresso gli Heredi di Lucantonio Giunti, 1550.

De Barros, João. Ásia de Joam de Barros, dos fectos que os Portugueses fizeram no descobrimento et conquista dos mares et terras do Oriente. Lisbon: Impressa per Germão Galharde, 1552.

———. Quarta Década da Ásia, edited by João Baptista Lavanha. Madrid: Impressão Real, 1615.

———. Segunda Década da Ásia (Lisbon: Impressa per Germão Galharde, 1553.

———. Terceira Década da Ásia (Lisbon: Impressa per João Barreira, 1563.

Faḍl Ḥasan, Yūsuf. Kitāb al-tạbaqāt fī khusụ̄s ̣al-awliyāʼ wa-al-sạ̄lihị̄n wa-al-ʻulamāʼ wa-al-shuʻarāʼ fī al-Sūdān. Khartoum: University of Khartoum Press, 1974.

Strabo. Geography, edited and translated by Horace L. Jones, 8 vols. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1917-1932.

Studies

Boxer, Charles R. João de Barros: Portuguese Humanist and Historian of Asia. New Delhi: Concept Publishing Company, 1981.

Ceccarelli-Morolli, Danilo. “Un interessante brano di un manoscritto etiopico del XVI sec. concernente la Nubia.” In Actes de la VIIIe Conférence internationale des études nubiennes: Lille, 11-17 septembre 1994, 3 vols, vol. III, pp. 67-72. Villeneuve-d’Ascq: Université Charles de Gaulle–Lille III, 1995-1998.

Coelho, Antonio B. João de Barros: Vida e obra. Lisbon: Grupo de Trabalho do Ministério da Educação para as Comemorações dos Descobrimentos Portueses, 1997.

Elzein, Intisar. “Ottoman Archaeology of the Middle Nile Valley in the Sudan.” In The Frontiers of the Ottoman World, edited by Andrew C. S. Peacock, pp. 371-383. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009.

Van Gerven Oei, Vincent. A Reference Grammar of Old Nubian. Leuven: Peeters, 2021.

Van Gerven Oei, Vincent and Alexandros Tsakos. “Apostolic Memoirs in Old Nubian.” In Parabiblica Coptica, edited by Ivan Miroshnikov. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, forthcoming.

Griffith, Francis L. The Nubian Texts of the Christian Period. Berlin: Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1913.

Łajtar, Adam. A Late Christian Pilgrimage Centre in Nubia: The Evidence of Wall Inscriptions in the Upper Church at Banganarti. Leuven: Peeters, 2020.

Łajtar, Adam and Giovanni Ruffini. “Qasr Ibrim’s Last Land Sale, AD 1463 (EA 90225).” In Nubian Voices: Studies in Nubian Christian Civilization, edited by Adam Łajtar and Jacques van der Vliet, pp. 121-131. Warsaw: University of Warsaw/Raphael Taubenschlag Foundation, 2011.

Levi, Caroline A. Yodit. Unpublished PhD Thesis, School of Oriental and African Studies, 1992.

Obłuski, Artur and Dorota Dzierzbicka. Old Dongola: Development, Heritage, Archaeology: Fieldwork in 2018-2019, vol. 1: Excavations. Leuven: Peeters, 2021.

Ruffini, Giovanni. “Newer Light on the Kingdom of Dotawo.” In Qasr Ibrim, Between Egypt and Africa: Studies in Cultural Exchange (Nino Symposium, Leiden, 11-12 December 2009), edited by Jacques van der Vliet and Joost Hagen, pp. 179-191. Leuven: Peeters, 2013.

Simmons, Adam. Nubia, Ethiopia, and the Crusading World, 1095-1402. Abingdon: Routledge, 2022.

Small, Margaret. Framing the World: Classical Influences on Sixteenth-Century Geographical Thought. Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2020.

Werner, Roland. Das Christentum in Nubien: Geschichte und Gestalt einer afrikanischen Kirche. Münster: LIT Verlag, 2013.


  1. The circumstances of this unification are still unknown, though it would appear to be the result of a political union of both kingdoms via marriage, as there is no currently known evidence reflecting upheaval or a Makuritan conquest of Alwa. For a brief summary with references, see: Van Gerven Oei, Reference Grammar, p. 1n2. On Dotawo in the sources, see: Ruffini, “Newer Light on the Kingdom of Dotawo.” ↩︎

  2. He is the second Joel known in the corpus but there may have been others not yet known. The earlier Joel is recorded as ruling in 1322 in an as-yet-published new interpretation of an inscription by Adam Łajtar: Łajtar, A Late Christian Pilgrimage Centre in Nubia, p. 388. On Joel [II], see: Łajtar & Ruffini, “Qasr Ibrim’s Last Land Sale.” The 1483 document found at Gebel Adda is known and currently housed at the Egyptian Museum in Cairo but remains unpublished. ↩︎

  3. Faḍl Ḥasan, Kitāb al-tạbaqāt, pp. 183, 275. ↩︎

  4. There are currently no other known female rulers of Dotawo or of the earlier kingdoms of Makuria, Alwa, or Nobadia to know for sure what indigenous title akin to ourou Gaua would have held so “queen” is employed here for familiarity and in keeping with the Portuguese text. ↩︎

  5. For example: Werner, Das Christentum in Nubien, pp. 149-50. ↩︎

  6. Álvares, Verdadeira informaçam, p. 168. ↩︎

  7. Álvares, “Viaggio fatto nella Ethiopia per don Francesco Alvarez Portoghese”, p. 269a. ↩︎

  8. Álvares, Verdadeira informaçam, p. 30. ↩︎

  9. On his life and works, see: Boxer, João de Barros; Coelho, João de Barros↩︎

  10. Ásia de Joam de Barros, Segunda Década da Ásia, and Terceira Década da Ásia were published in his lifetime, with the Quarta Década da Ásia being posthumously published in an edited and reworked form by João Baptista Lavanha. ↩︎

  11. It is unclear here whether this is a contemporary description or, given it follows a passage about Queen Candaces, was imitating Strabo’s description of his Queen Candace as being a “masculine woman” (ἀνδρική τις γυνὴ: Strabo, Geography, 17.1.54). Barros certainly knew the text of Strabo and makes reference to it elsewhere; see: SMALL, Framing the World, p. 68. ↩︎

  12. De Barros, Terceira Década da Ásia, fo. 88ff. ↩︎

  13. On Bishop Tivoli, see: Simmons, Nubia, Ethiopia, and the Crusading World, p. 132. ↩︎

  14. Ceccarelli-Morolli, “Un interessante brano.” ↩︎

  15. Griffith, Nubian Texts of the Christian Period, p. 47. On this text, see: Van Gerven Oei & Tsakos, “Apostolic Memoirs in Old Nubian.” ↩︎

  16. Levi, Yodit, pp. 104-6. ↩︎

  17. There are numerous examples of women who held the title of ngonnen, or “queen-mother”, in the surviving corpus and these individuals were influential and active in Nubian politics and society. Regrettably, we are not aware of an instance of a similar regency scenario prior to Gaua, if, indeed, that was the case, to be able to expand on this suggestion any further. The naming of Gaua directly would, however, suggest that she wielded great power in any case. ↩︎

  18. Elzein, “Ottoman Archaeology”; Faḍl Ḥasan, Kitāb al-tạbaqāt, p. 61. ↩︎

  19. For example, see the results in: Obłuski & Dzierzbicka, Old Dongola 2018-2019 vol. 1. ↩︎

article⁄'In the Bosoms of Abraham': A Christian Epitaph from Nubia in the Brooklyn Museum
abstract⁄First edition of a Christian epitaph in Greek of a woman, Timothea, brought by Henry J. Anderson to the United States in 1848 and now in the Brooklyn Museum. Analysis of the form and text of the monument allows its epigraphic context to be reconstructed, as part of a dispersed funerary assemblage of northern Nubia, including a distinctive textual formula wishing the deceased repose in the “bosoms of Abraham.”
keywords⁄Christian Nubia, epigraphy, epitaph, Greek, Brooklyn Museum, Henry J. Anderson, Abraham, Timothea

1. Introduction: From Nubia to Brooklyn 1

Among the hundreds of artifacts collected by Dr. Henry J. Anderson (1799–1875) on his travels in the eastern Mediterranean in 1847 is a small sandstone grave stele (fig. 1), now in the Brooklyn Museum (37.1827E). The rectangular stone (18.5 cm high × 15 cm wide × 8 cm deep) is inscribed with nine lines of Greek, once rubricated, on a smoothed face, chipped at lower right. The text gives the epitaph of a woman, Timothea.

Epitaph of Timothea. Brooklyn Museum accession 37.1827E; ex-New-York Historical Society O.127An. Photography: the author.

Figure 1. Epitaph of Timothea. Brooklyn Museum accession 37.1827E; ex-New-York Historical Society O.127An. Photography: the author.

The findspot is not recorded, but the dating of her death by an Egyptian month (3 Phaōphi [1 October]) points towards Egypt, where Anderson is known to have acquired other antiquities, or a nearby region within range of its cultural transmission, as the material and form of the monument and the formulary of the text, discussed in detail below, point to Egypt’s southern neighbor Nubia in the early medieval period. Comparable stelae are generally assigned to a range between the seventh and ninth centuries CE, and in the absence of an objective date, the same range must be considered for the Brooklyn epitaph.2

Anderson, professor of mathematics and astronomy at Columbia College (appointed 1825), had served as geologist to the United States Dead Sea Expedition, the occasion for his eastern travels.3 Along with nearly 400 other objects, mostly from Egypt—including a mummy, whose public unwrapping was the occasion for lectures delivered by Anderson at the New-York Historical Society in December 1864 (fig. 2), reported in major newspapers at the time—,4 the stone was donated by Anderson’s sons E. Ellery and Edward H. Anderson to the Society in 1877.5

New-York Historical Society Lecture on Egypt, 1864: Concluding Lecture by Prof. Henry J. Anderson. Poster. New-York Historical Society Pictorial Archives, RG-5, Series IV, 2NW, Range 12A, Bay B, Drawer 10, F:1. Photography ©New-York Historical Society (http://nyhistory.org).

Figure 2. New-York Historical Society Lecture on Egypt, 1864: Concluding Lecture by Prof. Henry J. Anderson. Poster. New-York Historical Society Pictorial Archives, RG-5, Series IV, 2NW, Range 12A, Bay B, Drawer 10, F:1. Photography ©New-York Historical Society (www⁄http://nyhistory.org).

There the stele received the inventory number O.127An, reflected in a label still attached to its back (fig. 3). It may be among the “Four Stones with Greek inscriptions” mentioned in an unnumbered inventory of the Anderson gift printed in 1915.6

Epitaph of Timothea, back side. Photography: the author.

Figure 3. Epitaph of Timothea, back side. Photography: the author.

Anderson himself never published an account of how he came into possession of this stele or any other antiquities from Egypt or its vicinity. Other sources, however, firmly establish a visit in late 1847 and early 1848, apparently on the heels of his work for the Dead Sea Expedition. One is epigraphic: a graffito in his name with that date has been recorded in the temple of Amenophis III at Elkab. Another traveler, William Henry Adams Hyett, also recalled meeting an “American boat” carrying Anderson at Qasr Ibrim on 7 January, on whose “bump of destructiveness” he trained a phrenological gaze.

On Friday evening we reached Ibreem. As an American boat was there on return, we stopped and lionized the ruins with its occupants, a Mr. Anderson and son, one of Yankee Doodle’s most respectable scions, an intelligent gentleman of forty-five, or thereabouts, rather of the scientific turn; the bump of destructiveness strongly developed, I should fancy, from the huge hammer his dragoman carried, and with which he mercilessly chopped away at old stones, pillars, cornices, &c.7

The “son,” apparently E. Ellery Anderson (1833–1903), later a prominent lawyer and reformist whose political appointments included New York City School Commissioner, left graffiti of his own on ancient monuments in the same year, establishing that the party visited further Nubian sites at Abu Simbel and the temple of Kumma.8

The probable Nubian provenance of the stele may also be compared to that of the “Skull and piece of a Skull from Nubia” and “Fragments of Temple of Thothmes III. and Aboo Simbel (sic)” in the same inventory.9 The five Greek and Coptic funerary stelae from northern Nubia in the collection of the British antiquarian William John Bankes (1786–1855), acquired during his travels in Egypt and Nubia in 1815–1819, provide both parallels for the monumental form and text of the Brooklyn Museum stele and a general parallel for how the epitaph of Timothea may have reached the United States, though in the case of the new stele, the visit of Anderson was too late for any direct involvement of the diplomat Henry Salt (1780–1827) in the acquisition, as in the case of Bankes,10 and the account of Hyett supports first-hand collecting activity, whether by the dragoman’s hammer or subtler instruments. In 1937 the stele, along with a larger lot, was loaned to the Brooklyn Museum and subsequently purchased outright in 1948.

2. Epigraphic Context

The formula with which this epitaph opens, ἔνθα κατάκειται “Here lies,” can be found in Greek epitaphs across the ancient world. When the focus is narrowed to Egypt and its vicinity, the presence of this opening is generally restricted to northern Nubia, most often Talmis (Kalabsha) or Taphis (Tafa), sites of extensive cemeteries from which antiquities were removed in the nineteenth century.11 No fewer than 56 epitaphs on sandstone stelae (Table 1), not yet systematically collected, can be assigned with certainty or high probability to northern Nubia, with a comparable sequence of formulae beginning in ἔνθα κατάκειται, followed by ὁ μακάριος or ἡ μακαρία “the blessed” and the name of the deceased, a euphemistic verb of death, the date, and a prayer for a divine grant of repose (with ἀναπαύω) in the “bosoms” (ἐν κόλποις and variants) of Abraham and, usually, his successor patriarchs Isaac and Jacob.12


Talmis
Epitaph of References
Abraam I.Chr. Egypte 623 (SB V 8720; I.Nubia Tibiletti Bruno 54) (DBMNT 482)
Akkendarpe I.Chr. Egypte 622 (SB V 8736; I.Nubia Tibiletti Bruno 53) (DBMNT 481)
Manna SEG LII 1817 (I.Chr. Egypte 652; SB III 6089; V 8737; I.Nubia Tibiletti Bruno 47) (DBMNT 495)
P..thia SB I 1600 (I.Nubia Tibiletti Bruno 44) (DBMNT 539)
Samsōn I.Chr. Egypte 624 (SB V 8722; I.Nubia Tibiletti Bruno 55) (DBMNT 483)
Thisauria I.Chr. Egypte 625 (SB V 8721; I.Nubia Tibiletti Bruno 48) (DBMNT 484)
Talmis?
Epitaph of References
Edra SEG LXV 2010 (DBMNT 3075)
Epephanios SEG XLIX 2348 (LXIII 1712) (DBMNT 566)
Georgios SEG LXVII 1472 (DBMNT 4398)
Taphis (Ginari)13
Epitaph of References
Aarōn Firth 486[a] (DBMNT 429)
Abraham Firth 486[b], with Ochała, “Nubica onomastica,” pp. 152–4 (DBMNT 450)
Agathe Firth 841 (DBMNT 440)
Akousta Firth 437 (DBMNT 427)14
Amantōse SEG LIV 1774 (I.Nubia Tibiletti Bruno 59; Firth s.n., p. 50) (DBMNT 449)
Anna Firth 269 (DBMNT 416)
Archippas Firth 483 (DBMNT 428)
Arōn Firth 374 (DBMNT 424)
Aroumi15 SEG XLIII 1178 (Firth 807; I.Nubia Tibiletti Bruno 49) (DBMNT 436)
Axios SEG XLIII 1179 (Firth 230; I.Nubia Tibiletti Bruno 56) (DBMNT 542)
Chrisantē16 Firth 372 (DBMNT 423)
Christina Firth 804 (DBMNT 435)
Christophoros Firth 246 (DBMNT 412)
Erna Firth 323 (DBMNT 421)
Eustephanou Firth 124 (DBMNT 409)
Gennatios Firth 281 (DBMNT 419)
Ichilos Firth 208, with Ochała, “Nubica onomastica,” pp. 149–50 (DBMNT 411)
Iōanna Firth 259/261 (DBMNT 415)
Iōannēs Firth 651 (DBMNT 432)17
Iōseph Firth 193 (DBMNT 410)
Longinos Firth 486[c] (DBMNT 624)
Maria Firth s.n. (p. 50) (DBMNT 446)
Mariam Firth 802 (DBMNT 434)
Marou Firth 397 (DBMNT 425)
Martha Firth 95 (Łajtar, “Epitaphs,” pp. 58–9 no. 2) (DBMNT 406)
Merchani Firth 838 (DBMNT 437)
Merchō Firth 325 (DBMNT 422)
Mōuseou Firth 122 (Łajtar, “Epitaphs,” pp. 59–60 no. 3) (DBMNT 407)
Mp(e)r(e)rhote18 Firth s.n. (p. 50), with Ochała, “Nubica onomastica,” pp. 152–4 (DBMNT 445)
Pelagia Firth 434 (DBMNT 426)
Petrōinia Firth s.n. (p. 50) (DBMNT 444)
Seuēros Firth 907, with Ochała, “Nubica onomastica,” pp. 151–2 (DBMNT 442)
Siōn Firth 249, with Ochała, “Nubica onomastica,” pp. 150–1 (DBMNT 413)
Sophia Firth 270 (DBMNT 418)
Staurophania Firth s.n. (p. 50) (DBMNT 447)
Taria Firth s.n. (p. 50) (DBMNT 448)
Theognōsta Firth 840 (DBMNT 439)
[..]nasilei19 Firth 412 (DBMNT 623)
Taphis?
Epitaph of References
Protōkia SEG LXV 2011 (DBMNT 3074)
Pselchis?
Epitaph of References
Athanasios I.Chr. Egypte 629 (I.Nubia Tibiletti Bruno 45) (DBMNT 487)
Northern Nubia (unknown site)
Epitaph of References
Anna I.Nubia Tibiletti Bruno 50 (DBMNT 541)
Aulōse I.Chr. Egypte 654 (SB V 8738; I.Nubia Tibiletti Bruno 52; I.Egypte Nubie Louvre 113) (DBMNT 401)
Elisabet I.Chr. Egypte 660 (I.Nubia Tibiletti Bruno 58) (DBMNT 498)
Maria I.Chr. Egypte 655 (SB V 8739; I.Nubia Tibiletti Bruno 51; I.Egypte Nubie Louvre 111) (DBMNT 402)
Petros I.Chr. Egypte 649 (SB V 8734; I.Nubia Tibiletti Bruno 46) (DBMNT 493)
Theotōtē I.Chr. Egypte 805 (I.Nubia Tibiletti Bruno 57) (DBMNT 505)
[...]20 Liddel, “Greek Inscriptions,” pp. 97–8 no. B.2

Table 1. Greek epitaphs from northern Nubia with the same formulary as the Brooklyn Museum stele, by provenance. (Names are presented without normalization.)


The theological implications of this plural expansion of the "bosom" (see further the commentary to line 8 of the edition below) remains to be explained. After the seminal passage of Luke 16, the deceased was imagined--to judge from the famous illuminated manuscript of Gregory of Nazianzus produced for the Byzantine emperor Basil I (fig. 4)--as sitting in Abraham's lap.

Illuminated copy of Gregory of Nazianzus, scene of Dives and Lazarus. Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, grec 510, fol. 149r. Source: gallica.bnf.fr.

Figure 4. Illuminated copy of Gregory of Nazianzus, scene of Dives and Lazarus. Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, grec 510, fol. 149r. Source: gallica.bnf.fr.


The publication of the Brooklyn Museum epitaph, besides encouraging the continued commemoration of Timothea–an activity that the inclusion of a month date in the text was meant to promote–, 21 offers a small step towards the reconstitution of a dispersed funerary assemblage of early Christian Nubia. The general cohesion of material and (Greek) textual forms across major northern Nubian sites, substantially unique to this area in turn, casts a sidelight on inextricable nexus of the Greek language and Nubian Christianity, and the negotiation of a distinctive local variety of both, in the early medieval period. The monuments, and the names that they continue to make live, are precious testaments to society in cities like Talmis and Taphis, later ruled from elsewhere (Primis, Pakhoras) but retaining a position as urban centers. 22

3. Edition

Epitaph of Timothea

18.5 cm (h) × 15 cm (w) × 8 cm (d)

Brooklyn Museum, accession 37.1827E

Seventh–ninth centuries CE

Northern Nubia

Text

+ ἔνθα κατάκε̣ι-
ται ἡ μακαρία
Τιμοθέα· ἐτε-
λεύτησεν
5 μη(νὶ) Φαῶφι : γ
ἰνδ(ικτιῶνος) ιε : ἀνα-
παύσῃ αὐτὴ(ν)
ὁ θ(εὸ)ς εἰς κόλποις
Ἀβραὰμ ϥ̣[θ]

3 τιμ̅ο̅θε̅α stone || 5 μη stone || 6 ϊνδ/ ϊε stone | ανα stone || 7 αυτη̅ stone || 8 θϲ̅ stone, which is pitted above the preceding omikron (probably a chance mark, not a diacritic) | κολποιϲ stone; read ἐν κόλποις or εἰς κόλπους

Translation

Here lies the blessed Timothea. She met her end on the 3rd of the month of Phaophi of the 15th indiction. May God give her rest in the bosoms of Abraham, 99 (=amen).

Commentary

3 Τιμοθέα (τιμ̅ο̅θε̅α on the stone). Overlining of personal names is occasionally found in epitaphs: Nikea (Νικεα, an apparent nominative in what should be the genitive of a female name) in I.Chr. Egypte 627 from northern Nubia (Talmis), and Deidō (in the genitive Δειδους) in I.Chr. Egypte 525 from southern Egypt (Hermonthis?). Neither of these instances could have been conflated with a nomen sacrum, which might otherwise have influenced the scribal practice here (cf. θϲ̅ for θ(εό)ς in 8 below), that is, overlining θε̅ as if θ(ε)έ, then extending the overline to the left.

This is the first instance of the name Timothea in published texts from Christian Nubia (so the DBMNT). Only three individuals listed under this name in the Trismegistos Names database (TM Nam 25628) are acceptable parallels: SB I 5854 (Alexandria, undated [early Ptolemaic, to judge from letterforms in ed.pr., fig. 3]); C.Étiq.Mom. 749 (T.Mom.Louvre 322), third or fourth century CE; and P.Flor. I 150 + P.Louvre III 193 i 2, 3, 6, 7, etc. (Κλαυδία Ἑρμητάριον ἡ καὶ Τιμοθέα), 269 CE. (The form in Cruz-Uribe, Graffiti, p. 46 no. 67 [Hibis; undated, but probably Hellenistic to judge from the drawing], read Τιμοθηι and rendered “to Timothea,” is probably rather the male name Τιμοθῆς̣.) Foraboschi, Onomasticon, p. 318, adds one instance from seventh-century Egypt (P.Got. 14.10).

3–4 ἐτελεύτησεν. So far nearly all other parallels for this formulary from northern Nubia use either ἐτελε(ι)ώθη or ἐκοιμήθη (cf. Tibiletti Bruno, “Epigrafi funerarie cristiane della Nubia,” p. 513), a coherence that led Junker (“Die christlichen Grabsteine Nubiens,” p. 139) to the conclusion that ἐτελεύτησεν is entirely lacking in Nubia except at Bigeh (for him, not a true exception) and characteristic instead of southern Egypt (see also Tudor, Christian Funerary Stelae, Appendix, Table A, III.3.1.5). The situation is complicated by a closer examination, including texts published in the interim. In addition to the epitaph from Bigeh (C. M. Firth ap. Reisner, Archaeological Survey of Nubia, p. 104 no. 8, line 6, with an improved text by Monneret de Villard, La Nubia medioevale, p. 14, correcting the erroneous attribution to Ginari of the photograph printed in Archaeological Survey of Nubia, plate 51, no. 3), ἐτελεύτησεν does appear in some Nubian epitaphs (Adam Łajtar is thanked for the following references): those of no lesser personages than King David (of Alodia/Alwa or a united Nubian kingdom including also Makuria and Nobadia) from Soba (I.Khartoum Greek 79, line 19), and Joseph, bishop of Aswan, who died and was buried in Dongola (SEG LXI 1543, line 29); as well as that of a woman Tikete (?) from Kalabsha, which was later brought to Cairo (Monneret de Villard, Nubia medioevale, p. 41, lines 3–4: read Τικετη ἐτελεύτησεν in place of τικε τη ετελευτηϲ εν); and likely a sandstone funerary cross from Ghazali (I.Khartoum Greek 45: [ἐ]τελεύ̣[τησεν] probably to be restored in line 5 with the editor [accepted also in I.Ghazali 210]). Corruptions, in ancient or modern copying, could also be suspected in two cases from Taphis (Ginari): of επη (sic: ἐ⟨τελευτ⟩ή⟨σεν⟩?) in the corresponding place in Firth 124, and of the confused sequence ΤΕ[.]ΝΑΝ[.]ΙΔΕΘ in SEG LIV 1774, which might conceal an error (probably of copying by the editor rather than execution by the ancient stonecutter) for ⟨ἐ⟩τε⟨λεύτησεν⟩. The spelling ἐτελευώθη in I.Chr. Egypte 622 (SB V 8736; I.Nubia Tibiletti Bruno 53) (Talmis) may represent conflation of the more common ἐτελειώθη with a variant ἐτελεύτησεν.

5–6. For the use of Egyptian months and indictions in Nubia, see Ochała, Chronological Systems, pp. 221–4 and 99–124, respectively; writings and attestations of the month Phaōphi are listed at pp. 226 and 256–9, respectively. The presence of an indiction-year in the formulary is an indication of possible provenance from the Ginari cemetery at Taphis (cf. the following n.), but the substitution of τελευτάω (see 3–4n. above) complicates this assignment.

6–7 ἀναπαύσῃ. The use of the subjunctive rather than imperative (ἀνάπαυσον) could be another sign (cf. the previous n.) of provenance from Taphis (van der Vliet and Worp, “Four North-Nubian Funerary Stelae,” p. 32); for prayer-formulae requesting rest for the deceased, see in general Tudor, Christian Funerary Stelae, pp. 152–6.

8 εἰς κόλποις. References to the figure of the bosom of Abraham (Luke 16:22–3) are collected by Staerk, “Abrahams Schoß”; for interpretative questions, see recently Yoder, “In the Bosom of Abraham,” esp. 17–19, and for the form εἰς κόλποις in place of εἰς κόλπους (or ἐν κόλποις), Tibiletti Bruno, “Epigrafi funerarie cristiane della Nubia,” p. 513 (six instances)

So far only I.Chr. Egypte 622 (SB V 8736; I.Nubia Tibiletti Bruno 53) with εἰς κόλιπον Ἀβραάμ could be considered a secure parallel for the omission of Isaac and Jacob, but with a singular “bosom” rather than the plural as here; cf. I.Chr. Egypte 627 (SB V 8724; I.Nubia Tibiletti Bruno 60), which ends εἰς κόλπον Ἀβραά̣μ [ ] and seems unlikely to have continued with more than ἀμήν or a final cross; Firth 270, in which the stone ends (it is unclear whether due to damage or not) with ἐν κόλποις Ἀβραάμ but the editor restores [κ(αὶ) Ἰσαὰκ κ(αὶ) Ἰακώβ] in a following line; and I.Nubia Tibiletti Bruno 59, lines 9–10, ἀναπαύσῃ σε ἐν Ἀβραμιαίοις “may (God) give you rest in the (bosoms?) of Abraham.” Perhaps a form of the same derived adjective Ἀβρααμιαῖος “of Abraham” is to be read where [Firth]{.smallcaps} copied αναπαυση ο θ(εος) εν αβρααμ ια . . . . . . in an unnumbered epitaph from “debris” at Ginari (p. 50); compare the nexus Ἀβραμίοις κόλποις in the grave epigram MAMA VII 587, line6, and Ἀβραμί[οι]ς ἐ⟨ν⟩ κόλποις in the epitaph I.Mus. Catania 187, lines 2–3. The substitution of another body part, for a presumably metonymic effect, is also found: ἀπεβίωσεν ὁ μακάριος ἐν βραχὺς (for βραχίοσιν) Ἀβραὰμ καὶ Ἰσαὰκ καὶ Ἰακώβ “the blessed (deceased) departed life in the arms of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob (SB III 6133, Hermonthis?).

Lefebvre (I.Chr. Egypte, p. xxx), considered the expression of hope for the rest of the deceased in the bosoms of the three patriarchs to have been “créée par les chrétiens d’Égypte,” which should also be understood to include those of northern Nubia. (It is far from limited to inscriptions of the formula-type to which the Brooklyn Museum epitaph belongs: in addition to the texts gathered by Lefebvre, note, e.g., an unpublished epitaph on a “small Coptic stele” in a private house in the modern village of Tafa [ancient Taphis] mentioned by Weigall, Antiquities of Lower Nubia, p. 64, with a drawing in pl. 27, which shows that the text, in fact in Greek, belongs to a distinct formula-type beginning ὑπὲρ {ε}μνήμ̣(ης) (καὶ) ἀνα̣πα̣[ύ]σεως and eventually calling on God to give the deceased, a woman [Ε̣ντρει?], rest ἐν κ[όλ]π[οι]ς Ἀβραὰμ (καὶ) Ἰσα[ὰκ (καὶ)] Ἰακώ̣[β].) The appearance of the same motif in Christian prayers for those near death, asking for their repose in Paradise, with a wider late ancient circulation including Syriac (Mateos, “Prières syriennes,” pp. 276–7 no. 5), complicates this thesis of creation. It was also incorporated in the Christian funerary liturgy in the so-called ὁ θεὸς τῶν πνευμάτων prayer (“God of spirits”), not exclusively in Nubia (contra Brakmann, “Defunctus adhuc loquitur,” pp. 302, 305–10) but reflected particularly in epitaphs there; see in general Ruggieri, “Preghiera funebre.” Reference to Abraham alone in this respect is reflected already in Augustine, Confessions 9.3.6, of a deceased friend: “Now he lives in the bosom of Abraham. Whatever it is that is meant by that bosom, that is where my Nebridius lives” (nunc ille vivit in sinu Abraham. quidquid illud est quod illo significatur sinu, ibi Nebridius meus vivit).

An interchangeability of singular κόλπος and plural κόλποι is established early, with the Gospel background of this motif: in Luke 16:23 Lazarus is seen in the plural “bosoms” (ἐν τοῖς κόλποις) of Abraham, though at the first appearance of Lazarus in the previous verse he is carried “to the bosom” (εἰς τὸν κόλπον) of the patriarch. The plural, in reference to Abraham alone, continued in patristic literature (e.g. Gregory of Nyssa, Funerary Oration on the Bishop Meletios [Spira, Gregory Nysseni opera, p. 452], ὁ μὲν ἐν τοῖς κόλποις τοῦ Ἀβραὰμ ἀναπαύεται [“He rests in the bosoms of Abraham”]; Epiphanius, Panarion 2:468, τὸν μὲν ἐν κόλποις Ἀβραὰμ δεικνὺς ἀναπαύεσθαι [“Showing that he rests in the bosoms of Abraham”]; John Chrysostom, On the Blessed Abraham 3 [PG 50:746], τὸν Ἀβραὰμ μιμήσασθαι ἵνα ξενισθῶμεν ἐν τοῖς τούτου κόλποις [“To emulate Abraham, so that we may be received in his bosoms”]). Although, as noted, the plural κόλποι “bosoms” of Abraham alone is so far unique to the Brooklyn Museum stele in funerary epigraphy, the converse, a singular, collective κόλπος “bosom” of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, may be observed in three epitaphs from Taphis (Ginari) (Firth 208, 323, 412).

9 ϥ[θ]. The cypher stands by isopsephism, with a form of qoppa resembling Coptic fai, for ἀμήν, which it occasionally replaces as the end of the formula (e.g. Firth 95, 208, 230, where either qoppa or the same fai has been misread as Greek gamma; Liddel, “New Greek Inscriptions,” pp. 97–8 no. B.2 [with 7n.]). Junker, “Die christlichen Grabsteine Nubiens,” p. 128, considered this replacement exclusive to Ginari, but it is now found in three epitaphs from Ghazali (I.Ghazali 78, 120, 153). In SEG LXV 2010, from an unknown site probably in northern Nubia, it appears alongside ἀμήν in the corresponding place.

Bibliography

Abbreviations

C.Étiq.Mom. = Bernard Boyaval, Corpus des étiquettes de momies grecques. Publications de l’Université de Lille III. Villeneuve-d’Ascq: Université de Lille III, 1976.

DBMNT = Grzegorz Ochała (ed.), Database of Medieval Nubian Texts (Warsaw: University of Warsaw, 2011– ) www⁄http://www.dbmnt.uw.edu.pl.

Firth = Cecil M. Firth, “Appendix II: Catalogue of the Greek Gravestones of the Christian Period from Ginari, Cemetery 55,” in The Archaeological Survey of Nubia: Report for 1908–1909 (Cairo: Ministry of Finance, Egypt, Survey Department, 1912), vol. 1, pp. 45–50 (cited by grave number).

GrEpiAbbr. = A. Chaniotis et al., “Liste des abréviations des éditions et ouvrages de référence pour l’épigraphie grecque alphabétique” www⁄https://www.aiegl.org/grepiabbr.html.

I.Chr. Egypte = Gustave Lefebvre, Recueil des inscriptions grecques-chrétiennes d’Égypte. Cairo: Institut français d’archéologie orientale, 1907.

I.Egypte Nubie Louvre = Étienne Bernand, Inscriptions grecques d’Égypte et de Nubie au Musée du Louvre. Paris: CNRS, 1992.

I.Khartoum Greek = Adam Łajtar, Catalogue of the Greek Inscriptions in the Sudan National Museum at Khartoum (I. Khartoum Greek). Orientalia Lovaniensia analecta 122. Leuven: Peeters, 2003.

I.Mus. Catania = Kalle Korhonen, Le iscrizioni del Museo Civico di Catania: Storia delle collezioni, cultura epigrafica, edizione. Commentationes humanarum litterarum 121. Helsinki: Societas Scientiarum Fennica, 2004.

I.Nubia Tibiletti Bruno = Maria Grazia Tibiletti Bruno, Iscrizioni nubiane con riferimento alla nota « Di alcune cratteristiche epigrafi funerarie cristiane della Nubia » pubblicata dall’Istituto lombardo - Accademia di scienze e lettere. Pavia: Successori Fusi, 1964.

MAMA VII = William M. Calder, Monuments from Eastern Phrygia. Monumenta Asiae Minoris Antiqua 7. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1956.

P.Flor. I = Girolamo Vitelli, Documenti pubblici e privati dell’età romana e bizantina. Papiri greco-egizii, Papiri Fiorentini 1. Supplementi Filologico-Storici ai Monumenti Antichi. Milan: Ulrico Hoepli, 1906.

PG = Jacques-Paul Migne (ed.), Patrologia cursus completus, Series Graeca. Paris: J.-P. Migne, 1857–1866.

P.Got. = Hjalmar Frisk, Papyrus grecs de la Bibliothèque municipale de Gothembourg. Göteborgs Högskolas Årsskrift 35.1. Gothenburg: Elanders, 1929.

P.Louvre III = Andrea Jördens et al., Griechische Papyri aus der Sammlung des Louvre (P. Louvre III). Papyrologische Texte und Abhandlungen 47. Bonn 2022.

SB = Friedrich Preisigke et al., Sammelbuch griechischer Urkunden aus Aegypten. Various places and publishers, 1915– .

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TM = Trismegistos: An Interdisciplinary Portal of the Ancient World www⁄https://www.trismegistos.org

T.Mom.Louvre = François Baratte and Bernard Boyaval, “Catalogue des étiquettes de momies du Musée du Louvre,” Cahiers de Recherches de l’Institut de Papyrologie et d’Égyptologie de Lille 2–6 (1975–1981).

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Tudor, Bianca. Christian Funerary Stelae of the Byzantine and Arab periods from Egypt. Marburg: Tectum, 2011.

Van der Vliet, Jacques. “Gleanings from Christian Northern Nubia.” Journal of Juristic Papyrology 32 (2002): pp. 175–94.

Van der Vliet, Jacques. “‘What Is Man?’: The Nubian Tradition of Coptic Funerary Inscriptions.” In Nubian Voices: Studies in Christian Nubian Culture, edited by Adam Łajtar and Jacques van der Vliet, Journal of Juristic Papyrology Supplement 15, pp. 171–224. Warsaw: Raphael Taubenschlag Foundation, 2011.

Van der Vliet, Jacques, and Klaas A. Worp, “Four North-Nubian Funerary Stelae from the Bankes Collection.” In Nubian Voices II: New Texts and Studies on Christian Nubian Culture, edited by Adam Łajtar, Grzegorz Ochała, and Jacques van der Vliet, Journal of Juristic Papyrology Supplement 27, pp. 27–44. Warsaw: Raphael Taubenschlag Foundation, 2015.

Van der Vliet, Jacques, and Klaas A. Worp, “A Fifth Nubian Funerary Stela from the Bankes Collection: An Addendum to ‘CIEN’ 3, 26–9.” Journal of Juristic Papyrology 47 (2017): pp. 251–4.

Weigall, Arthur E. P. A Report on the Antiquities of Lower Nubia (the First Cataract to the Sudan Frontier) and Their Condition in 1906–07. Oxford: University Press, 1907.

Yoder, Keith L. “In the Bosom of Abraham: The Name and Role of Poor Lazarus in Luke 16:19–31.” Novum Testamentum 62 (2020): pp. 2–24.


  1. I thank Katya Barbash and Kathy Zurek-Doule for their help and hospitality during my visit to consult the stone (19 December 2022), Eleanor Gillers for assistance with archival material in the New-York Historical Society, Adam Łajtar for epigraphic and Julia Hamilton for photographic advice, respectively, and an anonymous reader of Dotawo for criticisms of this article. All remaining errors are my own. ↩︎

  2. A rare instance of an internally dated inscription of this type (with an expanded formulary) belongs to 699 CE: I.Chr. Egypte 661 (I.Nubia Tibiletti Bruno 43). (Abbreviations for epigraphic sources follow GrEpiAbbr. where relevant.) The letterforms of the Brooklyn epitaph are broadly comparable, as is the lettering of the parallel text (see further below) edited by Van der Vliet and Worp, “Four North-Nubian Funerary Stelae,” pp. 32–3 no. 2 (SEG LXV 2010), tentatively assigned to the same century. ↩︎

  3. He contributed a report, “Geological Reconnaisance of Part of the Holy Land,” on explorations from Beirut south to the Dead Sea, including its eastern shores (in Lynch [ed.], Official Report, pp. 75–206); see also his obituary in the New York Times, 18 January 1876, p. 8. ↩︎

  4. New York Times, 15 December 1864; New York Commercial Advertiser and New York Evening Post, 16 December 1864. ↩︎

  5. Information from copies of correspondence related to the donation kept in the Brooklyn Museum archives; Kathy Zurek-Doule is thanked for this reference. ↩︎

  6. Catalogue of the Egyptian Antiquities, p. 74. ↩︎

  7. Graffito: De Keersmaecker, Elkab, p. 20 (with further bibliographical information on Anderson at pp. 21–2); Hyett, Journal, p. 33. ↩︎

  8. See De Keersmaecker, Temples of Abu Simbel, p. 75, and Temples of Semna and Kumma, p. 61 (with further biographical information at pp. 62–6), respectively; the obituary in the New York Times, 25 February 1903, p. 2, also mentions travels in Egypt and Nubia in 1847 and 1848. ↩︎

  9. Catalogue of the Egyptian Antiquities, p. 75. ↩︎

  10. For the texts, and the proposed connection to Salt, see van der Vliet and Worp, “Four North-Nubian Funerary Stelae,” pp. 27–9, and “Fifth Nubian Funerary Stela.” ↩︎

  11. Junker, “Die christlichen Grabsteine Nubiens,” pp. 114, 125–7 (see also pp. 122–3 on physical form); van der Vliet, “Gleanings,” pp. 180–3. ↩︎

  12. See in general Tibiletti Bruno, “Epigrafi funerarie cristiane della Nubia,” pp. 513–15. ↩︎

  13. Not included here is the fragmentary SEG LXV 2009 (DBMNT 1482), an epitaph of a man whose name, or whose patronym, was read as Iatouros, but the text is very uncertain, and the opening ἔνθα κατάκειται is entirely restored. ↩︎

  14. The request for repose is omitted. ↩︎

  15. The word ara following her name is probably an Egyptian title from “the domain of local law or finance”: van der Vliet, “Gleanings,” pp. 176–8 [SEG LII 1816]. ↩︎

  16. Firth read χρισαν̅τη; the overline in a Nubian context would be expected to represent /i/, but a misreading (or misprinting) of χρισανθη (Chrisanthē; cf. Χρυσάνθη) is also possible. An anonymous reader of Dotawo is thanked for these observations. ↩︎

  17. The request for repose is omitted. ↩︎

  18. Ochała, to whom this reading is owed, doubts that the sequence is a name, but, although not precisely paralleled, it fits well as a “hortatory” name (for the category, see, e.g., Fischer, Albion’s Seed, pp. 94–7) in Coptic, “Fear-not,” drawn from the words of the angel to Mary in Luke 1:30 (in the Sahidic version, ⲙⲡⲣⲣϩⲟⲧⲉ ⲙⲁⲣⲓⲁ). ↩︎

  19. The formulary (ἡ μακαρία) indicates that the deceased was a woman. ↩︎

  20. The name is lost, but the formulary (α̣ὐ̣τοῖς for αὐτῆς) indicates that the deceased was a woman. The stone, now in the Bristol Museum and Art Gallery, was accessioned in a group that included artifacts from Elephantine and Dakkeh(?). The first editor writes of a “(modern) inscription, lightly incised, ‘ΚΑΛΒ’”: could Kal(a)b(sha) (Talmis) have been meant? ↩︎

  21. For this function of the month date, see van der Vliet, “‘What is Man,’” pp. 195–7. The stelae of the Ginari cemetery were originally affixed to the outer, western end of the tombs, in some cases accompanied by niches for the placement of commemorative lamps: [Firth]{.smallcaps} p. 40; Łajtar, “Epitaphs,” p. 58. ↩︎

  22. Cf. van der Vliet, “Gleanings,” p. 175. ↩︎

issue⁄Dotawo 7: Comparative Northern East Sudanic Linguistics

1. Preface by the Editor

1.1. A New Platform

Since its inception, the www⁄Union for Nubian Studies has been committed to opening up Nubiological research to a wider audience and broadening access to source materials. Dotawo: A Journal of Nubian Studies was launched in 2014 as an open-access journal, with free access for both authors and readers. It has been hosted by www⁄DigitalCommons@Fairfield of Fairfield University and since 2019 by University of California’s www⁄eScholarship platform.

Both digital platforms allowed Dotawo to grow, expanding its reach by means of the creation of persistent digital identifiers and membership of the www⁄Directory of Open Access Journals. The content of Dotawo, however, remained essentially tailored to human — rather than machine — readers because it was only available in PDF or printed form, and to privileged readers with access to institutional libraries because the references it included were often difficult to access for members of the public without such access, even though most if not all of this research was produced with the aid of public funds. This state of affairs presented a challenge in terms of the accessibility and discoverability of the journal as well as the long-term preservation and openness of the scholarship presented and referenced.

Starting with the present issue, Dotawo will design and publish its content via the www⁄Sandpoints platform. Dotawo contributions are formatted in www⁄Markdown syntax, thus moving away from proprietary software such as Microsoft Word and Adobe InDesign. For collaboration and version-control we employ www⁄Git rather than Google Drive or Dropbox. The online issue is created via www⁄Gitea and www⁄Hugo, which take the Markdown files from the Git repository and generate a static website from them. The result is a compact and fast website, which moreover can also be used offline. Also the typography of Dotawo is now based on open fonts. The journal is typeset in www⁄Gentium, which is released under an www⁄SIL Open Font License. The PDF output is generated by www⁄PagedJS, and will continue to be hosted on the eScholarship platform, while the printed book will remain available through scholar-led open access press www⁄punctum books. In short, all of the software used in the creation of Dotawo is now open source. Although this process demands a certain amount of flexibility of the editors, it also shows that transitioning an open access journal to open infrastructure is not only possible but also feasible.

The plundering and destruction of the University of Khartoum by forces allied with the former dictator during the 2019 Sudanese Revolution1 has once again impressed upon us the precarity of the research environment in which many scholars of Nubia operate and thus the necessity and moral obligation of creating open and resistant scholarly infrastructures. To improve the long-term preservation of and access to the scholarship contained and referenced in Dotawo, all sources mentioned in contributions to the journal will henceforth be linked, as much as possible, to records deposited in a public library using the open infrastructure of www⁄Memory of the World.2 This will allow for easy storage and dissemination of both content and context of the research presented in Dotawo to those scholars of Nubia — and there are many — who are not institutionally privileged, including many who live in the Global South.

A recent, bleak assessment by Richard Poynder of the goals set by the www⁄Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI) Declaration in 2002, and the open access movement more broadly, states that “it now seems unlikely that the affordability and equity problems will be resolved, which will impact disproportionately negatively on those in the Global South”:3

OA advocates failed to anticipate — and then for too long ignored — how their advocacy was allowing legacy publishers to co-opt open access, and in ways that work as much against the goals of BOAI as for them. And they have often downplayed the negative consequences that OA policies and initiatives developed in the Global North will have for those in the Global South.4

Furthermore, it appears that the turn toward open access in the scholarly communications landscape is increasingly facilitating the agendas of an oligopoly of for-profit data analytics companies. Perhaps realizing that “they’ve found something that is even more profitable than selling back to us academics the content that we have produced,”5 they venture ever further up the research stream, with every intent to colonize and canalize its entire flow.6 This poses a severe threat to the independence and quality of scholarly inquiry.7

In the light of these troubling developments, the expansion from Dotawo as a “diamond” open access to a common access journal represents a strong reaffirmation of the call that the late Aaron Swartz succinctly formulated in his “Guerilla Open Access Manifesto”:

Those with access to these resources — students, librarians, scientists — you have been given a privilege. You get to feed at this banquet of knowledge while the rest of the world is locked out. But you need not — indeed, morally, you cannot — keep this privilege for yourselves. You have a duty to share it with the world.8

Swartz’s is a call to action that transcends the limitations of the open access movement as construed by the BOAI Declaration by plainly affirming that knowledge is a common good. His call goes beyond open access, because it specifically targets materials that linger on a paper or silicon substrate in academic libraries and digital repositories without being accessible to “fair use.” The deposition of the references from Dotawo contributions in a public library is a first and limited attempt to offer a remedy, heeding the “Code of Best Practices in Fair Use” of the www⁄Association of Research Libraries, which approvingly cites the late Supreme Court Justice Brandeis that “the noblest of human productions — knowledge, truths ascertained, conceptions, and ideas — become, after voluntary communication to others, free as the air to common use.”9 This approach also dovetails the interpretation of “folk law” recently propounded by Kenneth Goldsmith, the founder of public library www⁄Ubuweb.10

I strongly believe that it is in the interest of Nubian Studies and its stakeholders, especially scholars in adjunct or para-academic positions without access to institutional repositories, and the Nubian people who are actively denied knowledge of their own culture, to enable the widest possible dissemination of scholarship. In this enterprise, striving for common access and relying on open source software are merely a first step.

1.2. About This Issue

The seventh issue of Dotawo is dedicated to Comparative Northern East Sudanic (NES) linguistics, offering new insights in the historical connections between the Nubian languages and other members of the NES family such as Nyima, Taman, Nara, and Meroitic. A special focus is placed on comparative morphology.

The Nilo-Saharan phylum was first proposed by Joseph Greenberg as a linguistic remainder grouping whose internal affiliations remained unclear.11 The Nilo-Saharan phylum contained what Greenberg then called Chari-Nile languages, which in turn included the Eastern Sudanic family. The coherence of this larger linguistic grouping will be investigated in the contribution by Roger Blench, article⁄“Morphological Evidence for the Coherence of East Sudanic.”

Within Eastern Sudanic,12 there is a further subdivision between what Lionel Bender referred to as the Ek- and En-branch, based on the shape of the 1sg pronoun.13 Bender’s Ek-branch contains the Nubian language, Nara, as well as the Nyima and Taman languages. This group of languages is now commonly referred to as Northern East Sudanic.

Although the contours of NES are relatively well established, much of the details of its linguistic development and relations remain the subject of ongoing research and debate. There are three particular issues within NES linguistics to which the articles in the present issue make a contribution:

  • The coherence of Nile Nubian
  • The inclusion of Nyima
  • The inclusion of Meroitic

1.2.1. The Coherence of Nile Nubian

Robin Thelwall proposed that the apparent proximity between Nile Nubian languages Nobiin and Mattokki–Andaandi was not the result of their belonging to the same branch within the Nubian language family, but due to prolonged language contact.14 In other words, he proposed that there was no such thing as “Nile Nubian.” This proposal was further developed by Marianne Bechhaus-Gerst using lexicostatistical methods.15

Based on comparative NES phonology, Claude Rilly concluded on the contrary that Nobiin and Mattokki–Andaandi were closely related, and that the divergence between the two in terms of vocabulary was due to the influence of a substrate language underneath Nobiin.16 Rilly’s arguments are supported independently by lexicostatistical evidence presented by George Starostin in his contribution article⁄“Restoring ‘Nile Nubian’: How to Balance Lexicostatistics and Etymology in Historical Research on Nubian Languages.” Angelika Jakobi’s article⁄“Nubian Verb Extensions and Some Nyima Correspondences” provides further morphological evidence for the coherence of Nile Nubian.17

1.2.2. The Inclusion of Nyima

Although Bender, Rilly, and Dimmendaal include the Nyima languages within NES,18 these are excluded by Christopher Ehret in his Historical-Comparative Reconstruction of Nilo-Saharan.19 Rejecting Ehret’s proposition, Russell Norton’s contribution article⁄“Ama Verbs in Comparative Perspective” provides morphological evidence for inclusion of Nyima in NES. This is reinforced by several correspondences discussed in Jakobi’s contribution between Nubian and Nyima.

1.2.3. The Inclusion of Meroitic

Finally, the inclusion of Meroitic in NES has long been a point of contention owing to our fragmentary comprehension of the language.20 In this respect, the work of Claude Rilly represents an enormous leap forward in our understanding, which can now with relatively strong certainty be classified as Nilo-Saharan, in particular Northern East Sudanic.21 His contribution article⁄“Personal Markers and Verbal Number in Meroitic” provides for the first time a systematic overview of person marking in Meroitic, no doubt opening up further avenues in comparative Northern East Sudanic linguistics.

2. Bibliography

Aguado-López, Eduardo & Arianna Becerril-Garcia, bib⁄“The Commercial Model of Academic Publishing Underscoring Plan S Weakens the Existing Open Access Ecosystem in Latin America.” LSE Impact Blog, May 20, 2020. www⁄https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2020/05/20/the-commercial-model-of-academic-publishing-underscoring-plan-s-weakens-the-existing-open-access-ecosystem-in-latin-america/.

Anon. bib⁄“Designing the Public Domain.” Harvard Law Review 122, no. 5 (2009): pp. 1489–1510.

Bechhaus-Gerst, Marianne. bib⁄“‘Nile-Nubianʼ Recon­sidered.” In Topics in Nilo-Saharan Linguistics, edited by M. Lio­nel Be­n­der. Ham­burg: Helmut Buske, 1989: pp. 85–96.

Bender, M. Lionel. bib⁄The East Sudanic Languages: Lexicon and Phonology. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University, 2005.

Bodó, Balázs. bib⁄“Own Nothing.” In Guerrilla Open Access, ed. Memory of the World. Coventry: Post Office Press, Rope Press, and Memory of the World, 2018: pp. 16–24.

Dimmendaal, Gerrit J. bib⁄“Nilo-Saharan.” In The Oxford Handbook of Derivational Morphology, edited by Rochelle Lieber & Pavol Štekauer. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014: pp. 591–607.

Ehret, Christopher. bib⁄A Historical-Comparative Reconstruction of Nilo-Saharan. Cologne: Rudiger Köppe, 2001.

Goldsmith, Kenneth. bib⁄Duchamp Is My Lawyer: The Polemics, Pragmatics, and Poetics of Ubuweb. New York: Columbia University Press, 2020.

Greenberg, Joseph H. bib⁄The Languages of Africa. The Hague: Mouton, 1963.

Güldemann, Tom. bib⁄“Historical Linguistics and Genealogical Language Classification in Africa.” In The Languages and Linguistics of Africa, edited by Tom Güldemann. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 2018: pp. 58–444.

Kelty, Christopher. bib⁄“Recursive Publics and Open Access.” In Guerrilla Open Access, ed. Memory of the World. Coventry: Post Office Press, Rope Press, and Memory of the World, 2018: pp. 6–15.

Mars, Marcell, Manar Zarroug & Tomislav Medak. bib⁄“Public Library.” In Javna knjižnica – Public Library, edited by Marcell Mars, Tomislav Medak, and WHW. Zagreb: WHW/Multimedijalni Institut, 2015: pp. 75–85.

Moore, Samuel. bib⁄“The Datafication in Transformative Agreements for Open Access Publishing.” July 3, 2020. www⁄https://www.samuelmoore.org/2020/07/03/the-datafication-in-transformative-agreements-for-open-access-publishing/

bib⁄“Report: Large Parts of University of Khartoum Destroyed on June 3.” Dabanga, August 7, 2019. www⁄https://www.dabangasudan.org/en/all-news/article/report-large-parts-of-university-of-khartoum-destroyed-on-june-3.

Rilly, Claude. bib⁄Le méroïtique et sa famille linguistique. Leuven: Peeters, 2010.

Swartz, Aaron. bib⁄“Guerrilla Open Access Manifesto.” July 2008. www⁄https://archive.org/details/GuerillaOpenAccessManifesto/page/n1/mode/2up.

Thelwall, Robin. bib⁄“Linguistic Aspects of Greater Nubian History.” In The Archaeological and Linguistic Reconstruction of African History, edited by Christopher Ehret and Merrick Posnansky, pp. 39–56. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982.


  1. “Report: Large Parts of University of Khartoum Destroyed on June 3.” ↩︎

  2. A public library is defined as follows: “[A] public library is: free access to books for every member of society; library catalog; librarian” (Mars, Zarroug & Medak, “Public Library,” p. 85). ↩︎

  3. Poynder, “Open access: ‘Information wants to be free’?” p. 2. ↩︎

  4. Ibid., p. 22. ↩︎

  5. Bodó, “Own Nothing,” p. 23. ↩︎

  6. See, e.g., Moore, “The Datafication in Transformative Agreements for Open Access Publishing.” ↩︎

  7. The reduction in agency of academics as a result of the implementation of open access schemes has been widely recognized. As Christopher Kelty put it succinctly: “OA has come to exist and scholarship is more available and more widely distributed than ever before. But, scholars now have less control, and have taken less responsibility for the means of production of scientific research, its circulation, and perhaps even the content of that science” (“Recursive Publics and Open Access,” p. 7). These problems are exacerbated in the Global South, as the financial models for OA funding developed in the Global North threaten local public infrastructures managed by academics (Aguado-López & Becerril-Garcia, “The Commercial Model of Academic Publishing Underscoring Plan S Weakens the Existing Open Access Ecosystem in Latin America”). ↩︎

  8. Swartz, “Guerilla Open Access Manifesto.” ↩︎

  9. Int’l News Serv. v. Associated Press, 248 U.S. 215, 250 (1918) (Brandeis, J., dissenting), cited in Anon., “Designing the Public Domain,” p. 1494. ↩︎

  10. Goldsmith, Duchamp Is My Lawyer. ↩︎

  11. Greenberg, The Languages of Africa, p. 130. ↩︎

  12. See, for a recent overview, Güldemann, “Historical Linguistics and Genealogical Language Classification in Africa,” pp. 299–309. ↩︎

  13. Bender, The East Sudanic Languages, p. 1. ↩︎

  14. Thelwall, “Linguistic Aspects of a Greater Nubian History,” pp. 47–48. ↩︎

  15. See, in particular, Bechhaus-Gerst, “‘Nile Nubian’ Reconsidered.” ↩︎

  16. Rilly, Le méroïtique et sa famille linguistique, pp. 274–288. ↩︎

  17. Perhaps it is now time for www⁄Glottolog to update its entry on Nubian. ↩︎

  18. Bender, The East Sudanic Languages, p. 1; Rilly, Le méroïtique et sa famille linguistique, pp. 181–183; Dimmendaal, “Nilo-Saharan,” p. 593. ↩︎

  19. Ehret, A Historical-Comparative Reconstruction of Nilo-Saharan, p. 88. Ehret refers to NES as “Astaboran.” ↩︎

  20. See, for an overview, Rilly, Le méroïtique et sa famille linguistique, pp. 25–36. ↩︎

  21. Dimmendaal, “Nilo-Saharan,” p. 593. ↩︎

author⁄Claude Rilly
article⁄Personal Markers and Verbal Number in Meroitic
abstract⁄Thanks to the use of linguistic comparison and analyses of new inscriptions, Meroitic, the extinct language of the kingdom of Meroe, Sudan, has become increasingly well known. The present article deals with the identification of personal markers and verbal number. It shows how Meroitic, like many other languages, used a former demonstrative, qo, as a 3rd person independent pronoun. An in-depth analysis of the royal chronicles of the kings and princes of Meroe, compared with their Napatan counterparts written in Egyptian, further yields the 1st person singular dependent pronoun e- (later variant ye-), which can be compared with 1st person singular pronoun found in related languages. A stela of Candace Amanishakheto found in Naga is the starting point for identifying the 2nd person singular and plural independent pronouns are and deb. These two morphemes are linked with the most recent reconstructions of Proto-Nubian pronouns and confirm the narrow genetic relation between Nubian and Meroitic. Finally, the reassessment of the so-called “verbal dative” ‑xe/‑bxe shows that this morpheme is simply a former verbal number marker with integrated case endings. This makes it a rare instance of transcategorisation in the cross-linguistic typology of verbal number.
keywords⁄Meroitic, Meroe, Kush, Napata, pronouns, Egyptian, decipherment, verbal morphology, pronominal morphology, person, comparative linguistics, Old Nubian, Nobiin, Andaandi, Ama, Nara, Taman, Mattokki, Karko

1. Introduction

Meroitic was the language spoken by the elite of the successive kingdoms of Ancient Sudan since at least the second millennium BCE.1 Only from the third century BCE was it written with a script borrowed from Demotic. Later, a second script, using the same writing system but with hieroglyphic signs, was created for the sacred texts, particularly the wall inscriptions of the temples. The two scripts were deciphered in 1911.2 Approximately 2,000 texts have been published so far. The main issue with regard to Meroitic inscriptions is the understanding of their content. The language disappeared in the early Middle Ages without descendants.

Internal methods have been used since 1911 to investigate the meaning of the texts, with remarkable success in the realm of the funerary inscriptions, which are many and highly stereotypical. In addition to these philological methods, a comparative approach has become possible now that the linguistic affiliation of Meroitic, a hotly debated issue for decades, was settled by the present author.3 Meroitic belongs to the Northern East Sudanic (NES) language family, a branch of the Nilo-Saharan phylum. This family further includes:

  • Nubian–Nara
    • Nubian, comprising Nobiin, Andaandi (Dongolawi), and Mattokki (Kenzi) spoken in Egypt in Sudan; Midob, (nearly) extinct Birgid, and the Kordofan Nubian (Ajang) languages in Sudan;
    • Nara, a small language spoken in Western Eritrea;
  • Taman, comprising Tama and Mararit, in Darfur and Chad;
  • Nyima, comprising Ama and Afitti in the Nuba Mountains in central Sudan.

Nubian and Nara are closest to Meroitic, yet unfortunately neither is close enough to allow for a quick and straightforward comparison of vocabulary and morphology. The split between the different branches of NES is supposed to have occurred in early third millennium BCE,4 so that the chronological depth between the NES sister-languages is comparable to the time gap that separates Indo-European languages. For that reason, the comparative method must not be used alone, but in combination with internal methods.

The present paper deals with personal markers that can be identified in Meroitic inscriptions. This topic was not investigated until now, mainly because the Meroitic morphology was — and mostly remains — a terra incognita. The texts that have been found so far rarely offer a situation of uttering5 in which the subject can be easily identified. For example, the royal chronicles include reports of military campaigns where the verb ked “cut in pieces, kill” frequently occurs. However, in most cases, the verbal form is simply ked, without any pronoun or affix that could indicate which person is the subject.

In addition, when the situation of uttering is clear and verbal affixes are present, they often vary from one text to another and are distorted by assimilative phenomena, so that it is extremely difficult to isolate the personal markers and assign them an accurate value. For example, in funerary inscriptions, a textual category that makes up a third of the corpus, the situation of uttering is clear: These texts are prayers to the gods of the afterlife, uttered by a fictive enunciator who probably represents the funerary priest or the family of the deceased. He invokes the gods at the beginning and beseeches them in the last sentences to provide the deceased with water and food. The final verb is expectedly an optative or imperative form. It is not preceded by a 2nd person plural pronoun, but it includes a prefixed element pso-, psi- (or many other variants) and two suffixes. The first is -x or -xe (“verbal dative”) and is located immediately after the verbal stem. The second suffix is a compound -kte, -kete, -ketese, -kese, which can be reduced to -te as a result of assimilation with the first suffix. Until Fritz Hintze published his Beiträge zur meroitischen Grammatik, no scholar managed to find which of these complex affixes marked the person of the verb. Thanks to his morphological study of the verb in funerary benedictions,6 it is now clear that the final compound suffix is the marker of the 2nd person plural on the verb. Further analyses of old data can provide better insights into other personal markers, particularly the 3rd person singular and plural pronouns and possibly the first person singular subject marker, as can be seen in the following sections. Furthermore, some textual material recently discovered can be used to identify new personal markers, namely the 2nd person singular and plural possessive pronouns and the 2nd person singular subject pronoun.

2. Preliminary Remarks about the Conventions of the Meroitic Writing System

Morphological issues in Meroitic cannot be addressed without taking into account the conventions of the writing system, because this is the only way we have to reconstruct the actual pronunciation of the words. The traditional transliteration of the texts, which follows the rules established by Griffith in 1911, is convenient because it is a direct reflection of the Meroitic signs (the default vowel /a/ is not written), but it is not a faithful rendering of the pronunciation. For instance, the Meroitic transcription of Greek Καῖσαρ (Latin Caesar) is written kisri but was pronounced /kaisari/. The Meroitic script is an alphasyllabary (Fig. 1), like Indic scripts or the Ethiopian abugida.7 There were actually two scripts, the cursive script and the hieroglyphic script, but they followed the same principles and differ only by the forms of the signs, like capital and lowercase letters in Latin script, with the difference that the two registers are never mixed in the same text.

The Meroitic alphasyllabary

Figure 1. The Meroitic alphasyllabary

The script includes nineteen syllabic signs. Fifteen of them have the value “consonant + /a/.” The default vowel /a/ can be modified by adding one of the three vocalic signs e, i, and o. Like in English, the sign e has three values: /e/, /ə/ (schwa), and zero. The zero value is used to write consonant clusters or final consonants, for instance qore “ruler,” pronounced /kʷur/. The sign o is used for /u/ and /o/. Four additional syllabic signs have a fixed vocalic value: three of them represent “consonant + e” (ne, se, te, with the three values of e), one represents “consonant + o” (to). For initial vowels, there is a single sign transliterated a, which represents /a/, /u/, and probably /o/ and /ə/. Initial /e/ and /i/ were written e and i until the first century CE. In later times, they were written ye and yi with a dummy y, which was not pronounced. Finally, the texts include a word-divider, made of two dots like our modern colon, which is used (more or less regularly) between words or more commonly between the different clauses of a sentence.

The sound values of the Meroitic signs are generally known,8 but there remains a few unclear points. Until recently, it was supposed that the sign 𐦭, transliterated formerly ḫ, and x according to the revised conventions,9 had only the value [χ], a velar fricative like Egyptian ḫ. A second sign, which can replace x in several variant spellings, is h, formerly . I suggested that h was a labialized version of x, in IPA [χʷ], because it mainly occurs before or after labiovelar vowels [o] or [u]. These two values [χ] and [χʷ] are evidenced by the use of x and h in Meroitic transcriptions of Egyptian words. The same distribution can be observed between k and q, the latter being a labialized velar consonant [kʷ]. However, in the Old Nubian alphabet, the Meroitic sign 𐦭 x was borrowed, not for the velar fricative consonant [χ], for which the Coptic sign ϩ was used, but for the velar nasal consonant /ŋ/, written ⳟ. Furthermore, in several Egyptian transcriptions of Meroitic royal names that include x or h, the scribes used a digraph nḫ.10 My impression is therefore that the signs x and h had a double set of values: [χ] and [χʷ] in loanwords from Egyptian and [ŋ], and [ŋʷ] in native words. This assumption is supported by strong arguments but still needs to be checked word by word.

A last peculiarity, pertaining rather to phonetic changes than to spelling conventions, needs to be mentioned here because it will be found in some of the following quotations from Meroitic texts. From the first century CE onwards, the sequence /s/ + /l/ (written se + l), which was frequent in Meroitic due to the use of the article -l at the end of noun phrases, merged into /t/. For example, the sentence written kdise-l-o “she is the daughter” became kdit-o. This phonetic development is known as “Griffith’s law.”11

3. The Third Person Markers

Among the possible markers of the third person, only pronouns are known so far, namely qo/qe and variants for singular and qoleb for plural. No verbal ending that could be connected with the third person, such as Latin -t/-nt or Egyptian =f/=sn, has been spotted in the texts. The case of the “verbal dative” will be later investigated, but this morpheme is probably to be classified as a clitic pronoun.

In the paradigm of personal pronouns, the 3rd person has a special place. Whereas the 1st and 2nd persons refer to the protagonists of the uttering situation (see n. 6), the 3rd person refers to people and things that are outside this situation. According to the relevant categorization of Arab grammarians, the 3rd person is “the absentee.”12 From this perspective, 3rd person pronouns are close to demonstratives. This is particularly obvious when it comes to morphology. In many languages, these pronouns are derived from demonstratives. In Romance languages for example, they stem from the Latin distal demonstrative ille “that,” for instance French il “he,” Spanish él, Romanian el. Some languages even use the same word for the demonstrative and the 3rd person pronoun.13 In Latin, the proximal demonstrative is, ea, id “this” was used as a 3rd person pronoun. In Turkish, a language that displays a full range of typological similarities with Meroitic,14 the same demonstrative o is used as a demonstrative adjective, a demonstrative pronoun and a 3rd person pronoun.15 This seems also to be the case in Meroitic, which has apparently the same word, qo/qe, for “this” (adjective), “this” (pronoun), and “he,” “she,” “it.”16

3.1. Demonstrative Pronoun or Independent Third Person Pronoun Object?

Meroitic
Arilnemkse
Arilanemakas
q(o)-o
this-cop
“This is Arilanemakas.” (REM 0239A, epitaph)
(1)
Mloton
Malutuna
q(o)-o-wi :
this-cop-emp
“This is Malutuna.” (REM 0277, epitaph)
(2)
qo :
this
Atqo
Ataqu
q(o)-o-wi :
this-cop-emp
“This (one), this is Ataqu.” (REM 1057, epitaph)
(3)

The pronoun qo was among the first elements that Griffith singled out in the funerary inscriptions after his decipherment of the script.17 The word occurred in final position in the “nomination” of the deceased, either bare (1) or followed by an optional particle -wi “for emphasis” (2).18 Quite often, another qo preceded the name of the deceased (3). Griffith suggested that this first qo was an epithet meaning “honorable” or “noble” and the final qo was a grammatical tool “to introduce the name of the deceased.” In his Beiträge zur meroitischen Grammatik, Hintze was the first to regard qo as a demonstrative pronoun.19 According to him, the original form of this word was qe and the predicative compound qo(wi) was composed of qe + copula -o ± particle -wi. Actually, qe is a variant spelling of qo and the two forms were pronounced /ku/,20 so that qo(wi) can be analysed also as qo + copula -o ± particle -wi with a merger of the two consecutive o’s. The additional qo at the beginning (3), found in 10% of the epitaphs, is used as a topic “this one, this is….”21 It emphasizes the deixis that connects the inscription and the deceased, since these texts were inscribed on offering-tables or stelae that were placed at the entrance and inside the funerary chapels respectively.

kdi
woman
qo:
this
Mitslbe
Mitasalabe
q(o)-o-wi :
this-cop-emp
“This woman, this is Mitasalabe.” (REM 0087, epitaph)
(4)
wle
dog
qo
this
p-xn
caus-yield(?)
tlt
talent
3
3
Netror-se-l-o
Natarura-gen-det-cop
“May this dog yield(?) three talents, it is Natarura’s.” (REM 1165, beside graffito of a greyhound)
(5)

Another function of qo, which confirms the demonstrative status of this word, is adjectival. Like in English or German, the same word is used for the adjective and the pronoun. In (4), also drawn from a funerary text, the topic found in (3) is extended: qo “this one” becomes kdi qo “this woman,” “this lady.” This interpretation, which I first advanced with some reservations,22 was since then confirmed: (5), (6), and (7) are captions of pictures, respectively the graffito of a dog hunting a hare in the Great Enclosure of Musawwarat, the drawing of a gazelle on a wooden board found in the temple of Amun in Qasr Ibrim and a pair of feet engraved in the temple of Isis in Philae. The deictic nature of qo is perfectly obvious here. Its use as a 3rd person pronoun in Meroitic is therefore an extension of his function, because the other way round, namely that a personal pronoun could become a demonstrative, is cross-linguistically highly improbable.

abese
gazelle
qo-li
this-det
“This gazelle…” (REM 1198 and 1199) The rest of the sentence cannot yet be translated.
(6)
ste
foot
qo-leb
this-det.pl
Addo[.]-se
Adadu[.]-gen
“These feet (are) Adadu[.]’s.” (REM 0113)
(7)

Examples (6) and (7) show that the demonstrative adjective qo is compatible with the use of the determiner (article), singular -l(i), plural -leb, unlike English or French, but like Greek23 or Hungarian. It is, however, absent in some instances, such as (5) above.

In these examples, the determiner is apparently attached, not to the demonstrative, but to the noun phrase as a whole, as is normal in Meroitic.24 However, a plural form qoleb25 can be found independently as a pronominal object, but, from the instances found so far, it is difficult to decide if it is a demonstrative or a personal pronoun. This form is particularly attested in royal chronicles.26

Atnene :
Atanene
ssmrte-l :
(title)-det
Imlotror :
Imalutarura
wtotrse-l :
(title)-det
qoleb :
3pl
Amnp :
(to) Amanap
i-de-bx :
1sg.s-give(?)-vnm.pl
“Atanene, the ssmrte (and) Imalutarura, the wtotrse, I gave(?) them to Amanap.” (REM 1044/25–26)
(8)

Example (8) is quoted from the great stela of king Taneyidamani kept in Boston. Engraved around 150 BCE, it is the earliest royal chronicle written in Meroitic. The excerpt deals with the assignment to the temple of Amanap (Amun of Napata) of two officials, Atanene and Imalutarura. Their names and titles are enumerated and followed by qoleb. The context is utterly different from (7), where the deixis is obvious, since it is engraved beside the image of two feet. As in (3) and (4), we are doubtlessly dealing with a topicalized construction. The topic is formed by the names and the description of the two officials, whereas qoleb is an anaphoric pronoun that refers to these two persons, but operates as the actual object of the verb.27 In anaphoras referring to animate antecedents as shown in (8), most languages where demonstratives and 3rd person pronouns are clearly distinct, a personal pronoun is used. In Meroitic, it seems that qoleb, at least when it is the object of the verb, can function as a personal pronoun. Unfortunately, there are no similar instances, namely in sentences with verbs, with the singular qo, but the non-verbal sentence in (3) suggests that it would function similarly. In the latter example, the first qo plays the role of a deictic whereas the second qo assumes the function of an anaphoric.

3.2. The Third Person Possessive Pronoun

Whereas Hintze regarded qe/qo as a demonstrative, Hofmann held it as a personal pronoun because it is the basis of the 3rd person possessive marker, qese and variants.28 It is found mainly after the kinship terms, as in (9) below, drawn from a funerary stela where two brothers are commemorated.29

Qoreqore-l-o-wi [:
Qurqurla-cop-emp
y]etmde
relative
qese :
3sg.gen
Qoretkr
Qurtakara
q(o)-o-wi :
this-cop-emp
“(This) is Qurqurla; this is his elder Qurtakara.” (REM 0273/2–4, funerary stela)
(9)

The possessive of the 3rd person singular includes the pronoun qo/qe, followed by the genitival postposition -se and means literally “of him/her.”30 Once again, it can be compared with Latin demonstrative is, ea, id, whose genitive eius is also used as a 3rd person singular possessive. Three variants are known: qose, very rare, eqese in REM 1003, and aqese, much more common.31 Unexpectedly, the 3rd person plural possessive is not *qolebse, but qebese, as can be seen in (10), drawn from an epitaph from Gebel Adda that was written for a deceased whose relatives were administrators and scribes from the temple of Isis. Like (3) and (4) above, the sentence includes a topicalized constituent. The genitival phrase (i.e., the officials of the temple) is the topic and is referred to in the predication by the anaphoric possessive qebese (their nephew).

perite :
agent
Wos-se-leb :
Isis-gen-det.pl
qorene
royal scribe
Wos-se-leb :
Isis-gen-det.pl
yetmde
nephew
qebese-l-o-wi :
3pl.gen-det-cop-emp
“He was the nephew of agents of Isis and royal scribes (?) of Isis.” (GA. 04, epitaph)
(10)

The possessive qebe-se includes qebe-, a plural form of qo that is more conservative than qoleb, but is, unlike the latter, never attested in isolation. It includes the plural suffix -b that can also be found on the plural determiner:32

  • Determiner: singular -l → plural -leb
  • Pronoun: singular qo-/qe- → plural qebe-

Qebese has several variants, aqebese, aqobese (see n. 32) eqebese, and especially bese, which is frequent. This last form, in all likelihood, is not an abbreviated variant but is based on a still earlier form of the 3rd person pronoun, -b, which will be considered below §⁄3.3.6.

3.3. The “Verbal Dative” as Possible Enclitic Pronoun or Verbal Number Marker

The funerary inscriptions from the Karanog and Shablul cemeteries were the first texts published by Griffith, after his decipherment of the script. He was able to get a rough understanding of their content, but could not yet deliver a detailed analysis of the verbal compounds that end the benedictions. The first two benediction formulae, commonly named A and B, are prayers to Isis and Osiris, asking them to provide the deceased with water and bread respectively, as can be seen in (11)–(14).33

Formula A, singular beneficiary
ato
water
mhe
plentiful
pso-he-(xe)-k(e)te
caus-drink-vnm.sg-opt.2pl
“May you cause him/her to drink plentiful water!”
(11)
Formula A, plural beneficiary
ato
water
mhe
plentiful
pso-he-bxe-k(e)te
caus-drink-vnm.pl-opt.2pl
“May you cause them to drink plentiful water!”
(12)
Formula B, singular beneficiary
at
bread
mhe
plentiful
psi-xr-(xe)-k(e)te
caus-eat-vnm.sg-opt.2pl
“May you cause him/her to eat plentiful bread!”
(13)
Formula B, plural beneficiary
at
bread
mhe
plentiful
psi-xr-bxe-k(e)te
caus-eat-vnm.pl-opt.2pl
“May you cause them to eat plentiful bread!”
(14)

Meroitic is an agglutinative language, but it has a strong propensity to assimilative processes that blur the boundaries between successive morphemes.34 However, Griffith managed to identify the element -bx or -bxe as a “plural ending in the funerary formulae,” which appeared each time several individuals were commemorated in the same epitaph.35 In his Beiträge, Hintze was the first to suggest a plausible segmentation of these verbal compounds.36 He showed that -bxe (which, meanwhile, had been termed “dative infix”) had a singular counterpart -x or -xe37 that was theoretically present in the verbal compound, but concealed by a nearly systematic assimilation to the following suffix.38 Only in the archaic versions of formulae A and B (15)–(16) was this singular “infix” visible.

Formula A (archaic)
ato
water
mlo
good
el-x-te
give-vnm.sg-opt.2sg
“May you give him/her plentiful water!” (REM 0427)
(15)
Formula B (archaic)
at
bread
mlo
good
el-x-te
give-vnm.sg-opt.2sg
“May you give him/her plentiful bread!” (REM 0427)
(16)

The same wording occurs in the prayers to the gods that were engraved near their figures in votive stelae (17) or in Meroitic temples (18). In the latter example, cited from the Lion temple in Naga, the beneficiaries are the king, his mother, and the prince.

A[pe]dem[k-i]
Apedemak-voc
Tneyidmni
Taneyidamani
pwrite
life
el-x-te
give-vnm.sg-opt
“O Apedemak! May you give life to Taneyidamani!” (REM 0405)
(17)
Apedemk-i
Apedemak-voc
pwrite :
life
l-bx-te
give-vnm.pl-opt
“O Apedemak! May you give life to them!” (REM 0018)
(18)

3.3.1. Earlier Hypotheses

In an early analysis of these sentences,39 I interpreted this “dative infix” as an applicative suffix, with reference to Kanuri, a Saharan language. Applicatives are used to encode a beneficiary of the action in the verb, instead of adding an adposition or a case ending to the noun. They are quite common among African languages and are for example found in Nubian.40 However, this can hardly apply to the Meroitic construction. The applicative is a voice, such as passive and causative, and the affixes it uses cannot convey the notions of singular or plural. Example (19) from a Bantu language, Tswana, shows that the same applicative suffix -el is used regardless of the beneficiaries’ number.41

Tswana
ke
1sg.s
rek-a
buy-fin
ditlhako
shoes
“I am buying shoes.”
(19a)
ke
1sg.s
rek-el-a
buy-appl-fin
bana
children
ditlhako
shoes
“I am buying shoes for the children.”
(19b)
Lorato
Lorato
o
3:1.s
tlaa
fut
kwal-el-a
write-appl-fin
Kitso
Kitso
lokwalo
letter
“Lorato writes a letter to Kitso.”
(19c)

In (19b), the beneficiary is plural (bana “children,” sg ngwana), whereas in (19c), lokwalo “letter” is singular. In both cases, the applicative suffix is -el. The Meroitic suffixes -x and -bx, by contrast, agree in number with the beneficiary.

In addition, this morpheme was first identified as a beneficiary marker from the instances found in the benedictions of the epitaphs, hence its name “dative infix.” However, in royal chronicles and biographical passages of several funerary texts — which have been little studied to date — the suffix obviously refers to a direct object, as can be seen in (20) drawn from the funerary stela of viceroy of Nubia Abratoye.42

Meroitic
kdi
woman
mdxe
virgin
35
35
anese
donkey
25 :
25
kelw :
also
∅-arohe-bx
1sg.s-take.control-vnm.pl
“I took control of 35 virgins and 25 donkeys.” (REM 1333/16)
(20)

For these two reasons, in a later analysis,21 I considered -x(e) and -bx(e) to be object personal pronouns that had been incorporated into the verbal compound as clitics. A similar enclisis can be found, for instance, in the imperative forms of Romance languages,43 especially in Spanish: dámelo “give it to me,” presentémonos “let us introduce ourselves.”

This analysis, however, does not account for the location of these so-called clitic personal markers inside the verbal compound. In the examples from Spanish above, they occur in final position, as is expected for external elements that were later added to a fully inflected form. In Meroitic, as can be seen in (11)–(18), they are directly attached to the verbal stem and followed by the subject person marker and tense–aspect–mood (TAM) endings. For that reason it was termed “infix” and not “suffix.”

3.3.2. Verbal Number Markers in Northern East Sudanic

The unexpected location of -x(e) and -bx(e) in the verbal complex can be compared with that of the verbal number marker in two groups of the NES linguistic family, Nyima and Nubian. In these languages, the plurality of the subject in intransitive constructions and of the object in transitive constructions (“ergative pattern”) is realized by the same verbal suffix which is added directly to the verbal stem, before the TAM suffixes. The clearest instances of this construction are found in the Nyima language Ama and involve an ergative-pattern verbal plural marker44 -(ì)d̪ì as shown in (21)–(22).

Ama
kùd̪ū
goat
t̪èbīò
black
asp
nɛ̀
be.impfv
“The goat is black.”
(21a)
kùd̪ū
goat
t̪èbīò
black
asp
nɛ̀-d̪ì
be.ipfv-vnm
“The goats are black.”
(21b)
á
1sg
asp
dámì-ɔ̄
egg-acc
tàm
eat.ipfv
“I am eating an egg.”
(22a)
á
1sg
asp
dámì-ɔ̄
egg-acc
tàm-īd̪ì
eat.ipfv-vnm
“I am eating eggs.”
(22b)

In Old Nubian and Nobiin, this suffix is -(i)j. A related marker -j- is found in Midob.45 In Kordofan Nubian, a similar suffix -c is attested along with others suffixes, such as -Vr, which is much more frequent. Recent publications showed that the Nubian suffixes function according to the same ergative pattern as the Ama suffix.46 Example (23) illustrates the use of the suffix to mark subject plurality with intransitive verbs, whereas examples (24)–(25) show the suffix marking object plurality with transitive verbs.47

Nobiin
ter
3pl
balee-la
wedding-loc
kar-j-is-an [kaccisan]
came-vnm-prt1-3pl
“They came to the wedding.”
(23)
ay
1sg
tii-ga
cow-acc
aag
prog
jurr-il
milk-prs.1sg
“I am milking the cow.”
(24)
ay
1sg
tii-guu-ga
cow-pl-acc
aag
prog
jurr-ij-il
milk-vnm-prs.1sg
“I am milking the cows.”
(25)

It is noteworthy that, unlike in the Ama examples above, the plural marking operated by the suffix -(i)j is redundant, since plurality is already marked by the subject pronoun ter “they” in (23) and the plural nominal suffix -guu in (25). In Ama, apart from rare instances of replacive patterns such as wīd̪ɛ́ŋ “child”/dŕīŋ “children,” and a plural suffix -gí/-ŋì which can be attached to kinship terms, plurality is unmarked in nouns. This makes it necessary, either to mark it by determiners (“several,” “many,” etc.) or to encode it in the verb by a specific marker, as showed in (20b) and (21b) above.

Considering that the nominal plural suffixes that can be found in the NES languages are so diverse that no protoform can be reconstructed, it is plausible that Proto-NES had no plural nominal markers, but only a few replacive patterns and collective nouns with singulatives forms marked by a suffix *-tV.48 It was therefore necessary to encode the plurals of the participants in the verbal compound. Proto-Nubian seems to have been in this regard close to its ancestor Proto-NES.49 Later on, for unknown reasons — but areal influence probably played a major role in it — each Nubian group worked out its own plural markers for all the nouns. This novelty of course competed with the earlier plural marking by verbal suffixes. However, both of them survived to this day, but they often follow economy principles. Khalil notes that “the j-suffix appears sporadically in the intransitive clause” and that “[i]n the transitive clause […], when the object noun phrase is modified by a numeral or a quantifier such as mallee [many] or minkellee [how many], the plural marker on the object noun phrase becomes optional and subsequently the suffixation of -j becomes optional, too.”50

A third use of verbal plural markers in NES languages is to encode in ditransitive verbs the plurality of the indirect object, i.e., the beneficiary or recipient of the action. In this construction, the plural verbal suffix refers to the indirect object and not to the object in Old Nubian51 and Nobiin52 and probably in Ama. For the latter language, I have unfortunately no clear example of this point in my limited fieldwork data, but an example provided by Norton illustrates this point for dual, which operates exactly like plural, but with the suffix -ɛ̄n/-ēn (the macron stands for mid tone).53

Ama
àɪ̀
1sg
ver
ə̄mōr-ì
friend-dat
āmɪ̄ɛ̄r
pen
t̪ɛ̄g-ɛ̄nɪ̀
give-du
“I gave a pen to two friends.”
(26)

Here, the verbal number marker refers to the beneficiary (“friend”) and not to the object (“pen”), as it does in monotransitive constructions, although this beneficiary is already marked as a dative by the case ending -ì. The same feature is observed in Nobiin as shown in (27) and (28).54

Nobiin
ay
1sg
torbar-ka
farmer-acc
aŋŋaree-nci-ga
bed-pl-acc
kaay-a-tis
make-a-appl.prt1.1sg
“I made the farmer beds.”
(27)
ay
1sg
torbar-ii-ga
farmer-pl-acc
aŋŋaree-g
bed-acc
kaay-a-tic-c-is
make-a-appl-vnm-prt1.1sg
“I made the farmers a bed.”
(28)

3.3.3. Plural Object Marking in Meroitic

The verbal number marking in these languages follows a syntactic hierarchy: it refers to the subject if there is no object, to the object if there is no beneficiary and to the beneficiary if there is one. This brings us back to Meroitic, in which the so-called “verbal dative” again has close parallels with the Ama and Nobiin verbal number marker. Unfortunately, no clear instance of -x(e)/-bx(e) can be found with intransitive verbs, mainly because none has been so far translated with certainty. Unlike Ama (21a–b), Meroitic does not use a real verb “to be,” but a copula which is inflected for plural with a different suffix. Nonetheless, transitive and ditransitive constructions display the same hierarchy for the use of the verbal plural suffix as Ama and Nobiin.

Examples (29) and (30) are prayers to Amun, said by a fictive enunciator, in favour of king Amanakhareqerema (end of 1st c. CE). The first is engraved upon the base of ram statues from the entrance of the king’s temple in El-Hassa (REM 0001 and 115155) and the second is a wall inscription from Temple 200 in Naga.56 The long epithet of Amun, which is irrelevant to the present discussion, is omitted. Example (31) is one of the four columns of text engraved on the shaft of each of the sandstone columns in the Amun Temple in Naga (REM 0034A).57 Each of these inscriptions is a prayer to Amun, that he may give to the royal family the cardinal point it is facing (here “north”). The three members of the royal family are King Natakamani, Queen-Mother Amanitore, and Prince Arakakhataror. The epithet of Amun is again omitted here for convenience.

Meroitic
Amni (…)
Amun
Mnxreqerem
Amanakhareqerema
qore :
ruler
Mni
Amun.gen
tke-l :
beloved-det
pwrite :
life
l-x-te :
give-vnm.sg-opt.2sg
“O Amun (…), to Amanakhareqerema, ruler beloved of Amun, may you give life!”
(29)
Amni (…)
Amun
Mnxreqerem
Amanakhareqerema
qore :
ruler
Mni
Amun.gen
tke-l :
beloved-det
pwrite :
life
ntke :
strength
kesekene
also
l-x-te :
give-vnm.sg-opt.2sg
“O Amun (…), to Amanakhareqerema, ruler beloved of Amun, may you give life and strength!”
(30)
Amni (…)
Amun
Ntkmni
Natakamani
Amni
Amun.gen
mdese-l :
descendant-det
Mnitore
Amanitore
Aritene-l
Aritene-det.gen
mdese-l
descendant-det
Arkxtror
Arakakhataror
Mke-deke-l
God-great-det.gen
mdese-l :
descendant-det
hr-l :
north-det
alose :
entirely
l-bx-∅-te :
give-vnm.pl-2sg-opt
“O Amun (…), to Natakamani, the descendant of Amun, to Amanitore, the descendant of (the) Aritene, to Arakakhataror, the descendant of the Great God, may you give the north entirely!”
(31)

In (29), the singular suffix -x is added to the stem l- “give.” It refers to a single beneficiary, king Amanakhareqerema. Admittedly, the object, namely pwrite “life, vital strength,” is also singular, so that evidence of the agreement with the beneficiary is to be sought in examples (30) and (31). In (30), the object is plural, pwrite ntke “life and strength,” since there is no dual in Meroitic. However, the suffix remains in the singular. In (31), the object is again singular, hrl alose “the north entirely,” but the beneficiary is now a plural, namely the three members of the royal family. In this case, the plural form -bx of the suffix is used,58 just as we have seen in Ama and Nobiin.

3.3.4. The Verbal Plural Marker in NES Languages and in Meroitic

The Meroitic plural suffix -bx(e) shares three significant features with the verbal number markers in Ama and Nobiin: its direct adjunction to the stem within the verbal compound; its function as a plural marker of direct/indirect object; and its dependency on the hierarchy between participants of the action (cf. n. 59). Nonetheless, some important divergences can be observed. First of all, the Meroitic plural suffix is not a single morpheme like Ama -(ī)d̪ì and Nobiin -(i)j (where /i/ is a epenthetic vowel) but the plural form of a singular suffix -x(e). In languages where verbal number is an operative category, the most frequent situation contrasts unmarked singular and marked plural. Nonetheless, the growing literature on verbal number/pluractionality records some languages where there is an opposition between marked verbal singular and marked or unmarked verbal plural. In her study of verbal number in Karko, a Kordofan Nubian language, Jakobi gives some instances of such verbs (Table 1).

Gloss Sg. Object Pl. Object
hang up kúʃ-ɛ́ɛ́r kùj-ùk
split wood kák-ɛ̀ɛ́r kàk
pull out ɖúʃ-ɛ̀ɛ́r ɖùj
kindle ʃíl-ɛ̀ɛ́r ʃìl-ìk
wake up fɛ́ʃ-ɛ̀ɛ́r fɛ̀j-ɛ̀k

Table 1. Transitive verbs in Karko, singular stems marked by -ɛɛr, plural stems either unmarked or extended by -Vk.59

In Maba, a language of Ouaddai (Eastern Chad) belonging to the Nilo-Saharan phylum, Weiss recorded instances of singular verbal suffix -n versus plural verbal suffix -k.60

Maba
ɛ́njìː
water
à-wáː-k-
1sg-pour-vnm.pl-decl
“I pour out a lot of water, I pour out water regularly.”
(32a)
ɛ́njìː
water
à-wáː-n-
1sg-pour-vnm.sg-decl
“I pour out a bit of water.”
(32b)

However, these examples are utterly different from the Meroitic verbal number system. In each case, the singular and plural verbal suffixes are independent. In Meroitic, the plural marker -b-x(e) is morphologically the plural of the singular marker -x(e), which might be termed not the “dative” suffix, because it also encodes the direct object, but the “objective” verbal suffix. As in the related language groups Nubian and Taman, Meroitic merges the accusative and the dative nominal cases in an “objective” case marked by the same case endings.

The second discrepancy between the Meroitic plural suffix and “canonical” number markers such as the Nubian plural suffix -(i)j is the range of their functions. Unlike Western European languages, where plurality of events is conveyed by lexical derivation (Latin sal-t-a-re “dance” from sal-i-re “jump”) or adverbs (“repeatedly,” “often,” “again and again,” etc.), with plurality of participants being encoded by verbal agreement and nominal or pronominal plural markers, verbal number is a category that includes equally all these pluralities. As this category falls between stem derivation and aspect, it is morphologically marked, either by modification of the verbal stem (syllable reduplication, vocalic or tonal change, etc.) or by affixes directly appended to the verbal stem. Consequently, in languages such as Nubian, where verbs are inflected by suffixation, verbal number markers are directly appended to the stem, before TAM or person markers.

3.3.5. Plural Object Marker or Plural Event Marker

The Meroitic suffix -bx(e) is therefore located in the right place, but, contrary to its Nubian counterparts, its use, as much as we can judge in the limited corpus available, seems restricted to plural object marking and does not extend to the plurality of events. The following examples of frequentative forms are attested in Nobiin (33) and Karko (34).61

Nobiin
ay
1sg
neer-j-ir
sleep-vnm-1sg
“I sleep several times.”
(33)
Karko
súk
market.loc
ʃɛ̀-ʈɛ̀g
go.vnm-frq.imp
“Go pl to the market frequently!”
(34)

It may, however, be mentioned that in Nubian languages, few instances of the use of the same morpheme for the frequentative (plurality of events) and the verbal number (plurality of participants) are attested. Nobiin and Old Nubian are the only Nubian languages where -(i)j is attested as both a plural event and participant marker, as shown in (33).62 Still, it is uncertain whether this was also the case in Proto-Nubian. In (34) from Karko, the plurality of participants is indicated by the vowel ɛ̀ in the verbal stem ʃɛ̀- (the singular stem is ʃù-), whereas the plurality of events is marked independently by the suffix -ʈɛ̀g. It may happen that a verb exhibits three different stems in Karko: one for a singular participant, one for a plural participant, and one for plurality of action.63 A conspicuous instance is the verb “call,” which is òg- with singular object, ògór for plural object, and òʃór for plural action, i.e., a distributive meaning “call one by one.” The suffix -(V)ʃ is a frequent number marker in Karko64 and other Kordofan Nubian languages, and is doubtlessly a reflex of Proto-Nubian suffix *-(i)j. Another verbal number marker, the most frequent, is -Vr, with a vowel that is subject to vowel harmony. It is obvious that òʃór is an assimilated compound derived from *og-ʃ-Vr. The two verbal plural suffixes -(V)ʃ and -Vr are used successively in the same stem to express plurality of object and plurality of events respectively. A similar distribution of these two verbal extensions is paralleled in Andaandi, where -(i)j is used for frequentatives, whereas the suffix -ir is used to mark the plurality of participants (only objects in this language).65 The markers -(i)j and -ir are clearly the Mattokki–Andaandi cognates of Kordofan Nubian -(V)j and -Vr, so that their use as specialized verbal plural markers might go back to Proto-Nubian.

A distinct marker -k is found in Nubian for the plurality of events,66 e.g., Nobiin jòog “grind” → *joog-k > jòkk “chew.” This suffix dates back to Proto-NES, or at least to its eastern branch, because it is also found in Nara and Meroitic.67 In Nara, it differentiates verbal forms such as ishayto (< *ishag-to) “he asked” from ishakkito (< *ishag-k-i-to) “he asked them” or “he asked several questions,” but is rarely used.68 This suffix is also attested in Meroitic,69 as shown in the following example:

Meroitic
abr-se-l :
man-each-det
e-ked :
1sg.s-kill
kdi-se-l :
woman-each-det
e-(e)r-k :
1sg.s-take-plc
“I killed each man; I (repeatedly) took each woman.” (REM 1044/4–5)
(35)

Although it encodes the plurality of events, it seems that this suffix cannot be used in combination with the plural object marker -bx(e), unlike the verbal form òʃór in Karko, where the plural event suffix is combined with the plural object suffix. Examples (36) and (37) are drawn from Queen Amanirenas and Prince Akinidad’s stela REM 1003 and describe military campaigns against two different tribes in nearly identical terms. The first uses the pluractional suffix -k, but no plural object marker is present, probably because the distributive value of tk-k “seize one by one” implies the plurality of the object. Conversely, in the second sentence, the verbal plural marker -bx is present, but not the pluractional suffix -k.70

abr :
man
100 :
100
kdi
woman
1[.]2 :
1[.]2
qo-leb :
this-det.pl
apote
envoy
be-se :
3pl-gen
tk-k :
seize-plc
“(I) seized 100 men, 1[.]2 women (and) their envoy.” (REM 1003/10)
(36)
abr :
man
58 :
58
kdi
woman
223 :
223
qo-leb :
this-det.pl
apote
envoy
qebe-se :
3pl-gen
ye-tk-bx-i :
1sg.s-seize-vnm.pl-tam
“I seized 58 men, 223 women (and) their envoy.” (REM 1003/12–13)
(37)

The difference between Meroitic, where the pleonastic use of the two plurality markers is avoided and Karko, where it is allowed, shows how verbal number marking can vary within the same language family. This flexibility may be due to the rivalry between these markers and other ways to express plurality, according to Gerrit Dimmendaal:

These typological properties suggest that such systems are subject to a considerable degree of communicative dynamism, and hence to historical change or reinterpretation. There may be a number of reasons for the relative instability of such systems, compared to some other grammatical domains in these languages, such as noun-class systems in Niger-Congo languages, or gender marking in Afroasiatic languages. One reason, as argued in the present contribution, may derive from construction-level effects of number marking across categories. As shown below, pluractional marking, as a derivational phenomenon describing event structure, interacts with plural argument marking.71

3.3.6. A New Hypothesis Concerning the Origin of -bx(e)

The plural object marker -bx(e) displays an astonishing feature, which has yet to be noted. One may expect the plural of -x(e) to be *-x(e)b, with a suffixed plural marker -b, as is the cases with other morphemes. The plural of the article -l is -leb and the possessive qe-se “his/her” (lit. “of him/her”) becomes qe-be-se “their” (lit. “of them”) when the possessor is in the plural (see §⁄3.2). The unexpected initial location of the plural marker in the compound -b-x(e) is best explained by supposing that the plural morpheme -b was the basic element of this group. The object marker -x(e) was later added to it, and not the opposite. In this case, we can surmise that, originally, the verbal plural marker was simply -b. As is obvious from comparative pairs such as Proto-Nubian *nogu ~ Meroitic nob /nuba/ “slave”; Proto-Nubian *aŋgur ~ Meroitic abore /abur/ “elephant,” the Meroitic reflex of Proto-NES *g followed or preceded by a labiovelar vowel is /b/.72 The original verbal plural marker was therefore *gu. In Old Nubian and Nobiin, this element is preserved as a nominal and pronominal plural marker: ⲙⲁⲛ /man/ “that,” ⲙⲁⲛⲛ̄-ⲅⲟⲩ /manin-gu/ “those.”

It is nevertheless unclear whether the Old Nubian and Nobiin verbal plural marker -(i)j (see §⁄3.3.2) is a cognate of *gu. The Proto-Nubian phoneme cannot be reconstructed in Proto-NES, but principally derived from *g, when followed or preceded by the palatal vowels *i and *e.73 The Nubian verbal plural marker might accordingly result from a protoform *-ig. Similarly, its Ama counterpart -(ī)d̪ì probably derived from *(-i)gi. The Ama dental stops and are the regular reflexes of Proto-NES *k and *g with back vowels,74 but there are some instances of the same development with palatal vowels, such as kwɔ̀dŕ “strong” < Proto-NES *kugir75 or tɛd̪i-ŋ “under” < Proto-NES *tago- “belly.”76 To sum it up, the Meroitic suffix derives from *gu, whereas the Ama and Nubian suffixes derive from *(i-)gi. Because Ama and Nubian belong to two separate groups within the NES languages, it is plausible that *(i-)gi is the Proto-NES etymon, whereas *gu is a secondary protoform restricted to the eastern branch of NES (Nubian/Meroitic and Nara).

Like -(i)j in Old Nubian and Nobiin, the verbal plural marker -b was once used for plurality of events or plurality of object. The name of the Napatan king Amani-nataki-lebte,77 who ruled during the second half of the 6th century BCE, does not make sense if the suffix -b marks the plurality of object. It would mean “Amun, give them strength,” with no clue as to who these multiple beneficiaries could be. Actually, the suffix marked the plurality of events and emphasised the repetition of the gift: “give again and again,” “give continuously,” or “keep giving.”78

Egyptian transcription
Meroitic (reconstituted)
Gloss
Jmn-
Amni-
Amun
ntk-
ntki-
strength
lbt
l-b-te
give-vnm-opt.2sg
“Amun, may you keep giving strength!”
(38)

At first sight, the addition of the object marker -x(e) to the verbal plural suffix -b, i.e., the suffixation to a suffix, makes no sense grammatically. This would be only possible if this suffix, at a moment in the history of the Meroitic language, was interpreted as a pronoun. The following example from the Old Nubian legend of Saint Mina can illustrate how this transcategorization of the verbal plural marker occurred.79

Old Nubian
ⳟⲥ̄ⲥⲟⲩ ⲙⲏⲛⲁ-ⲛ ⲕⲥ̄ⲥⲉⲗⲁ ⲧ̄ⳝⳝⲁⲛⲁⲥⲁ
ŋissou
holy
mēna-n
Mina-gen
kisse-la
church-dat
tij-j-ana-sa
give>2/3-o.pl-imp.2/3pl-purp
“So that we give it to them in the church of Saint Mina.” (M 9.3–4)
(39)

In his analysis of the text, Van Gerven Oei notes that the “plural object marker -ⳝ [is] referring to the recipients of the egg, which remain unexpressed.”80 Nevertheless, even if the plural object marker is not stricto sensu a pronoun, it operates in this sentence as an anaphoric element and is accordingly translated “to them” by the editor of the text. It is probably via a similar process that its Meroitic counterpart -b became a 3rd person plural enclitic pronoun. This explains the strange location of this morpheme, which is directly appended to the stem, before the TAM suffixes.

Once it was considered to be a pronominal marker, -b was inflected by the objective case ending. This morpheme is attested after noun phrases in two variants; -xe (40) and -w (41).

Meroitic
atepoke :
offering(?)
dot-l-xe
large(?)-det-obj1
pisi-tk-bxe-kese (< -kete-se)
caus-offer-vnm.pl-opt.2pl.impp
“May you pl present them with a large(?) offering(?)” (REM 1063)
(40)
x(re)
food
mlo-l-w
good-det-obj2
hol-kete
serve-opt.2pl
“May you pl serve him a good meal” (REM 0059)
(41)

The difference between the two suffixes is unclear. The previous examples are drawn from benediction formulae used at the end of the funerary texts, formula J in (40) and formula C’ in (41).81 They can co-occur in the same text.82 The Proto-NES ending for the objective case can be reconstructed as *-gV,83 which is preserved in Nubian and vestigially in Nara. In the Taman language group and in Ama, the vowel V was dropped and the final *-g became -ŋ. We have seen in §⁄2 that the value of the grapheme -x in local words was most likely /ŋ/. The following e probably had a zero value, so that -xe was simply a final /ŋ/ like the Taman and Ama marker.

This “objective case” in Nubian and in Tama undergoes some restrictions governed by economy principles. In his analysis of Tama, Dimmendaal speaks of “differential object marking.”84 In Meroitic, the objective case has become so rarely marked that the absence of case ending was more a rule than an exception. Example (41) is the benediction formula C’. It is the royal and princely counterpart of formula C which is used for private people. The only difference was the presence of the objective case-ending in C’, whereas it was missing in the C formula.85 It probably gave the royal benediction a more formal wording, worthy of the lofty position of the deceased.

Similarly, the objective case ending may be omitted, as can be seen in the second of two consecutive sentences from King Taneyidamani’s stela. In (43), the expected verbal compound, parallel to the singular form ekedeto in (42), should be ekedbxto. However, maybe because of the presence of the object pronoun qoleb, the objective case ending -x is absent.

Nhror
Nakharura
wide-l :
brother-det
e-kede-to :
1sg.s-kill-tam
“I killed the brother, Nakharura” (REM 1044/143–144)
(42)
qoleb :
3pl
axro
?
tewideb-wit
?
e-ked-b-to
1sg.s-kill-vnm-tam
“I killed them, ???” (REM 1044/148–150)
(43)

In conclusion, the suffixes -x(e) and -bx(e) operate in the verbal compound as enclitic object pronouns. It originally consisted of a verbal plural marker -b, similar to its counterparts in Nubian and Ama. Between the 6th and the 2nd century BCE, this suffix underwent a transcategorization and became an enclitic object pronoun inflected with the objective case ending -x(e). In parallel, a singular counter­part, -x(e), without the plural marker -b, was created. However, they cannot be termed “personal pronouns” unless different forms for the 1st and the 2nd persons are identified, so as to constitute a full paradigm. Considering the formation of this morpheme, it is altogether unlikely that it also marked person.

4. The First Person Singular Marker

If the wording of the Meroitic inscriptions was identical to the Egyptian texts of the same genre, we should expect to find first person singular markers in the captions accompanying the divine figures in the temples and in the royal chronicles. However, the Meroitic culture, though deeply influenced by the Egyptian civilisation, still preserved many of its own peculiarities. The gods, for instance, never speak for themselves in religious texts. In an Egyptian or a Napatan temple, the caption inscribed beside an image of Amun would begin with the sentence: “Utterance of Amun. I have given all life and all power to you.”86 In the Meroitic texts of the temples of Naga, Meroe, Amara, and others, the god is not speaking himself. Rather, a fictive enunciator is inviting him to shower his blessings upon the ruler and his family: “O Amun! May you give X life and strength,” as shown in (17)–(18) and (29)–(31). For that reason, no first person marker can be expected in these inscriptions.

4.1. Person in Egyptian Royal Texts

The Egyptian royal chronicles, the so-called Königsnovellen,87 alternatively use the first person pronoun and the phrase ḥm=f “his Majesty” to designate the king — the hero of the narrative. This is for instance the case in the famous poem of Kadesh, where passages in the first person and the third person freely intertwine to describe the battle that Ramesses II fought against the Hittites. In Kush, the earliest and the most sophisticated Königsnovelle is the Victory Stela of King Piankhy (FHN I: pp. 62–118), engraved around 720 BCE and erected in the dynastic temple of Amun in Jebel Barkal. Apart from the passages including the king’s speech, which are in the first person, the narrative uses ḥm=f “his Majesty” to refer to Piankhy. The same usage is found in the stelae erected in the temple of Kawa by king Taharqo and, later, in the inscriptions of the early Napatan kings Anlamani and Aspelta.88

In the mid-5th c. BCE, a dramatic shift occurred. The inscriptions of the late Napatan king Amannote-erike (FHN II: pp. 400–428) still use the time-honored phrase ḥm=f, but the two subsequent royal stelae, erected in the temple of Amun in Jebel Barkal by kings Harsiotef (FHN II: pp. 438–464) and Nastasen (FHN II: pp. 471–501), are written in the first person, even in the reports of military campaigns in which the ruler did not take part in person. This shift was not an isolated novelty, but took place among several divergences from the Egyptian/Early Napatan pattern. In Nastasen’s inscription, for example, the time scale by regnal years is replaced by vague adverbial phrases such as kt ꜥn “another matter again” in the war reports.89 This chronological vagueness was to become systematic in the royal stelae written in Meroitic, where no regnal year is ever mentioned. The reasons for these changes are unclear but the influence of local oral epics may have played a role.

In Harsiotef’s stela, after the titles and the eulogy, where the king is referred to in the third person, the text abruptly shifts to the first person, without any kind of transition (FHN II: p. 441, l. 4). In Nastasen’s stela, the main text similarly begins with the titles of the king and a long eulogy, after which the narrative is introduced by the clause dd=f “he says,” referring, of course, to the king. This addition, lacking in Harsiotef’s stela, makes clear that, from this point on, the narrator is the ruler.90 The following passage from Nastasen’s chronicle (ll. 54–56) illustrates this novel use of the first person in Napatan war reports.91 Conspicuously, the monarch is not acting in person, but through his warriors, hence the use of the factitive verb dj “make, cause to.”

Egyptian
k.t ꜥn
“And another thing again.
dj=ı͗ sj=f pd.t ḥr sby.t Mḫ Šrḫrtj
I had a battalion of archers to go against the enemy tribe of the Makho of Sharakharti.
dj=j ḫꜣy ꜥꜣ
I caused a great bloodbath.
dj=j ṯꜣ pꜣ wr pꜣ nty jw=f r s.ꜥnḫ jr.t n-jm=f nb ḥmt nb.t
I had the chief seized, (together with) all that on which he [= they] would feed, and all the women.
dj=j <s>w ẖr=j x[]q jwꜣ 203,146 mnmn 33,050
I put in my possession a booty (of) 203,146 oxen and 33,050 head of livestock.”
(44)

The first preserved royal text in Meroitic, namely the great stela of king Taneyidamani from the temple of Amun in Jebel Barkal, was inscribed a century and a half later. In the meantime, the Egyptian-language donation stelae of king Aryamani, Kawa XIV and XV, are admittedly written in the first person, but the texts — at least what is left of them — are speeches to Amun and contain no narrative.92 On the other end of the Meroitic period, a century after the fall of Meroe, the wall inscription of the Nobadian ruler Silko in Kalabsha, though written in Greek, also is in the first person.93 It is therefore highly probable that the Meroitic royal chronicles fall in this long-lasting tradition and include events and war reports narrated by the ruler in the first person, like the late Napatan royal stelae and the post-Meroitic inscription of king Silko.

4.2. The Verbal Affix (y)e- in Meroitic Royal Texts

Although the major part of the Meroitic royal inscriptions remains untranslatable, the passages that enumerate the spoils of war are now fairly well understood.94 They include, on the one hand, verbs such as ked “kill”; are and er “take hold of”; tk “seize”; and kb “seize, plunder,” sometimes followed by the pluractional marker -k (er-k, tk-k), and, on the other hand, nouns such as abr “man”; kdi “woman”; ar “boy”; anese “donkey”; mreke “horse”; and d “house,”95 all of them being parts of the booty and therefore, cited with figures or more summarily followed by -se-l “each.” Examples (20), (35), (36), (37), (42), and (43) above are instances of booty lists from royal inscriptions.

In his publication of the so-called Akinidad stela from Hamadab (REM 1003), Griffith was the first to deal with these passages. Thanks to his then recent translation of kdi “woman” and abr “man,” he correctly identified the first two clauses (abrsel yekedi: kdisel: arseli: tkk) as the outcome of military campaigns and tentatively translated them as “slaying men, enslaving women.”96 By using participles, he eluded the thorny issue of the subject of the verbs. After Griffith, few scholars addressed this particular question. In her analysis of the same passages, Inge Hofmann dealt with the meaning of the verb ked, but ignored the problem of its subject.97 As for Millet, in a first study of Kharamadoye’s royal inscription REM 0094, he suggested that ked was a noun meaning “slayer.”98 Later, in a revised analysis of the same article, he assumed that ked was a verb in the third person singular,99 but did not explain how this third person was morphologically expressed.

It is necessary first to summarize the different forms that the verbs “kill” and “seize” (vel sim.) can take in different royal, princely, and viceregal inscriptions. Table 2 includes a list of these forms with reference to the texts which are quoted in chronological order:

  • Great stela of king Taneyidamani from Barkal (REM 1044, ca. 150 BCE);
  • Graffito of prince Akinidad in the temple of Dakka (REM 0092, ca. 25 BCE);
  • Stela of Amanirenas and Akinidad from Hamadab (REM 1003, ca. 20 BCE);
  • Funerary stela of viceroy Abratoye from Tomas (originally Karanog, REM 1333, ca. 270 CE);
  • Late inscription of the Blemmyan kinglet Kharamadoye from the temple of Kalabsha (REM 0094, ca. 420 CE).

Note that only the passages where at least the verb ked is present are taken into consideration here.

Text Lines Example “kill” “seize” (vel sim.)
REM 1044 5 e-ked erk (< e- + er-k)
130–131 e-ked-td er-td (< e- + er-td)
143 (42) e-kede-to
144 e-kede-to
149–151 (43) e-kede-b-to
REM 0092 6–8 kede-to are-de-to
12–14 kede-to are-de-to
REM 1003 4–5 (35) ye-ked-i tk-k; yerki (< ye- + er-k-i)
9 ye-ked-i erk (< e- + er-k)
11 (36) ye-ked tk-k
14 ye-ked tk-k
REM 1333 6 ye-ked
13 ked
14 ked kbxelo (< kb-bxe-l-o)
16–17 (20) ked arohe-bx; tk-bxe-l-o
18 ye-ked
20 ked
24 kede-bx
REM 0094 11 kede-bxe
20–21 kede-bx kb-b-te

Table 2. Forms of the verbs “kill” and “seize” (vel. sim) in REM 1044, 0092, 1003, 1333, and 0094.

The verbal forms listed above show a great diversity of suffixes. The plural verbal marker -bx(e) in REM 1333, variant -b in REM 1044/149–150 and 0094, and the pluractional suffix -k in REM 1044/5 and 1003, which were studied both in §⁄3.3.6, are irrelevant in the quest for personal markers. The suffixes -td (only in REM 1044), -to in REM 1044 and 0092, -te in REM 0094 are probably tense or aspect markers, which are in final position in all the other NES languages.100 The morpheme -i in REM 1003 is obviously optional, as it can be present or absent in identical sequences such as abr-se-l: ye-ked-i “I killed each man” in l. 4 vs. abr-se-l ye-ked in l. 11.101 The vocalic sign -e appended to the stem in (e)-kede-to (REM 1044 and 0092) is probably an epenthetic vowel inserted before the suffix -to. In the other verbal forms ending with this suffix that occur in the same texts, the vowel -e is generally absent, but no obvious rule, as for now, can predict its appearance. Finally, the forms ending with -l-o in REM 1333 are very probably periphrastic, as they include participles followed by the article -l and the copula -o. The multiplicity of tense or aspect markers that occur in these narrative texts is by no means unexpected or dubious, but is a further aspect of the varietas that is so peculiar to the Meroitic texts, when compared with their formulaic Egyptian counterparts.102 A similar variety in narrative tenses can be found in many languages. In French, for example, historical records can of course use simple past and imperfect, but present is possible (présent de narration) and even future, in this case referring to past events (futur historique).

Coming back to Table 2, the only marker that can actually refer to the person is the prefix (y)e-, since it has no alternative, unlike the diverse suffixes that are listed above. As explained in §⁄2, the form ye- is just a later spelling of e-. Both were similarly pronounced /e/. In early inscriptions such as Taneyidamani’s stela (REM 1044), the prefix is spelled e- everywhere. In classical Meroitic texts such as Akinidad’s stela (REM 1003), e- (in erk) and ye- (in yerki) are alternately used for the same verb. Finally, in the late stela of viceroy Abratoye (REM 1333), the only spelling is ye-. One may wonder why this personal marker was not identified earlier. Actually, there were two difficulties. First, the prefix is missing in several clauses in REM 1003 and is completely absent in REM 0092 and 0094; second, a prefix ye- is attested in the final benedictions of the funerary texts, in a context where only the 2nd person plural is expected.

4.3. The Distribution of the Prefix (y)e- and Homonymy

The first difficulty can be easily resolved. Once again, this issue is connected with the chronology of the inscriptions. In the early text REM 1044, the prefix is present everywhere, before ked “kill” as well as before the verbs meaning “take” in the following clauses, except for tk-to in l. 151. In the classical Meroitic stela REM 1003, it is always present in the first clause (“kill”) and can be omitted in the second clause (“take”), especially when the verb tkk is used. In the late inscription REM 1333, (y)e- is present before ked in the first instance of this verb, that is, at the beginning of the narrative part of the funerary stela. It is omitted in the subsequent occurrences of ked until l. 18, at which point it appears again. Furthermore, it is never present before the verbal forms of the second clause (“take” vel sim.). Curiously, the prefix (y)e- is lacking in REM 0092, which is contemporaneous with REM 1003, as they both mention Prince Akinidad. It is also absent from the occurrences of “kill” and “take” in the very late inscription of kinglet Kharamadoye (REM 0094).

How can we account for these variations in the distribution of the prefix (y)e- in the royal and princely inscriptions? In the early stela REM 1044, the prefix is systematically present on all the verbal forms. In REM 1003, a century and a half later, the prefix is used with the first verbal form (“kill”) but is omitted in the following clause (“take”) for reasons of economy, since the subject is the same as in the previous clause. In the late stela REM 1333, the first occurrence of the verb ked includes the prefix ye-, but the next three occurrences of the same verb are again subject to ellipsis, as are all the verbs of the second clauses (“take” vel sim.). In l. 18, the personal prefix is resumed, as a reminder for the two last occurrences of ked, where it is omitted again. In the very late inscription of the post-Meroitic kinglet Kharamadoye, the prefix is totally missing in the forms meaning “kill” or “take.” However, a previous sequence in l. 8, yetolxe, could be a verbal form with prefix ye-.103 Finally, the inscription REM 0092, though written at the same time as REM 1003, shows no prefix in the verbal forms for “kill” and “take.” However, in a previous passage in l. 5, the verb is illegible because the stone is damaged in this place. This lacuna possibly contained the prefix e-, whose lower stroke seems partly visible on some photographs taken prior to the relocation of the temple of Dakka when the Aswan dam was built.

It seems that, in the course of time, the personal marker (y)e- shifted from compulsory verbal affix to quasi-independent subject pronoun. On the one hand, it could be present or absent if implicit, just like personal pronouns in English he came and saw. On the other hand, it was never separated from the verb by an intermediary element such as an object noun group or an adverbial phrase. Its close connection with the following verbal form is also showed by the total absence of a word-divider (:) between them in all the texts. In addition, ellipsis was likely more frequent in everyday speech than in the literary inscription. This could explain the difference in the use of the prefix between the contemporaneous texts REM 0092 and 1003: REM 0092 is a simple graffito carelessly engraved in the temple of Dakka during the visit of prince Akinidad, whereas REM 1003 was an official stela erected at the entrance of the temple of Amun in Hamadab.

The second difficulty is that a homonymous prefix ye- is attested in verbal compounds of the funerary benedictions, which are clearly in the 2nd person plural since these passages are prayers to Isis and Osiris. This rare alternative prefix can replace the element p(V)s(V)- that is generally found at the beginning of the complex verbal forms of the benedictions A and B.104 It is altogether the most frequent in the rare benediction D.105 The suffixes of the verbal compounds of the benedictions are now relatively well understood (see §⁄5.1), though their prefixes still remain puzzling. Both ye- and p(V)s(V)- can best be interpreted as causative markers, as they always appear before the verbal stems meaning “drink” (he in benediction A) and “eat” (xr in benediction B), but are optional before the verb “offer, present” (hol in benediction C). The deities invoked in the funerary texts would be invited to “make” the deceased “drink” and “eat,” but they could either “present them with a good meal” or “have them presented with a good meal.” Prefixes are extremely rare in NES languages and only the Taman group has verbal prefixes, used exclusively for marking the person (a point to which we return below).

The most plausible solution would be to regard ye- and p(V)s(V)- as causative verbs, such as “make” or “have” in English. In the case of p(V)s(V)-, a possible cognate could be Old Nubian ⲡⲉⲥ- “tell, speak, say.” The gods of the underworld could in this case could be invited, literally, to “tell” that the deceased eat and drink, that is, to make them eat and drink. As for the alternative verb ye- in these passages, it could be linked with Old Nubian ⲉⲓ- and Nobiin ií- “say,” especially because ye- has a variant yi- which is three times more frequent in funerary texts.106 This solution may be semantically acceptable, but it faces a major obstacle: Meroitic, like all the NES languages, is a head-final language, in which the verb is placed at the end of sentences and the auxiliary is expected to occur after the verb. In addition, the absence of TAM markers after p(V)s(V)-, and ye-/yi- points to a serial verb construction, where only the last verb is inflected for TAM. However, this is cross-linguistically attested only for consecutive verbs that share a common subject.107 For all these reasons, the verbal compound of the funerary benedictions requires further study. Nevertheless, the element ye- in these benedictions has nothing to do with the prefix ye- we found in the royal texts. It is just a further instance of the many homonymous morphemes that are attested in Meroitic.

Finally, another element ye- is attested in several kinship noun phrases, also in funerary inscriptions. The “filiation” part of these texts specifies the mother and father of the deceased, who is said to be “the person born of X” and “the person begotten by Y.” In the major part of the inscriptions, these two compounds are te-dxe-l (or t-dxe-l) and t-erike-l. They include a prefixed element t(e)-, the participles dxe “born” and erike “begotten,” and the final article, which has a nominalizing role. Several texts include a variant with a first element y(e)-, namely ye-dxe-l and y-erike-l. The forms including y(e)- and t(e)- can even be found together in the same inscription, giving a further example of the aforementioned varietas sought by Meroitic scribes. Another kinship term, yetmde “younger in the maternal line, i.e., nephew/niece,” may provide the key to the element ye- in filiation clauses. It includes the word mde which refers to the mother’s family in this matrilineal society. The first element is yet- (pronounced /eta/ or /eda/), but has many variants: yete, yed, yen (with assimilation before ­mde). The elements te- and ye- in filiation are probably two eroded forms of yet-, which can be compared with Proto-Nubian *id, Proto-Taman *at “person,” and Nara eítá “body.”108 “The person born” and “the person begotten” are therefore accurate translations of ye-dxe and y-erike. The element ye- in these contexts is therefore originally a noun and has nothing to do with the homonymous prefix found in royal inscriptions.

4.4. Comparative Evidence from NES Languages

In light of the above, it seems certain, first, that the verbs in the narratives of the royal inscriptions are in the first person singular and, second, that the prefix (y)e- is the personal subject marker of the verbs “kill” and “take.” Consequently, ye-ked (archaic e-ked), can be translated “I killed” or “I have killed” and yerki (archaic erk) as “I took,” “I have taken,” or the like. Given the meaning of these passages, the basic tense/aspect using simple stems like ked, tkk, and so on, must be a perfective. Alternative tenses with suffixes also are attested, as shown in Table 2, but for now, it is impossible to explain them. The first person singular marker (y)e- is probably the Meroitic reflex of the Proto-NES pronoun *a(-i),109 reconstructed from Proto-Nubian *a-i,110 Nara *a(-ga),111 and Proto-Nyima *a-i. The stem of this pronoun is *a, to which a suffix *-i has been appended. This ending was probably a deictic particle and can be found at the end of persons’ and gods’ names in Meroitic and in Old Nubian.112 The Meroitic form seems to have undergone crasis113 /a/ + /i/ > /e/, which is also found for this pronoun in several Ajang dialects.114

If the form of the Meroitic marker matches its cognates in other NES languages, its syntactic use shows a substantial difference to them. In all these languages, the subject pronoun is located at the beginning of the sentence and the verb at the end (SOV word order) as in these examples from Nobiin and Ama.115

Nobiin
ày
1sg
tùuɲì-n
boys-gen
mèdrèsá-l
school-loc
júù-r
go-1sg
“I go to the boys’ school.”
(45)
Ama
1sg
ɲúfà-ŋ
father.2sg.gen-dat
ēlò-ɔ̀
milk-acc
têg
give.ipfv
“I give (some) milk to your father.”
(46)

The only NES-languages which have personal prefixes appended to the verb are the Taman languages, that is, Tama and Mararit. However, these suffixes, namely nV- for the 1st person, V- for the 2nd person, and ∅- (zero suffix) for the 3rd person,116 are distinct from the subject pronouns, which are optional as shown in the following examples.117 In the second sentence, the subject pronoun is here for emphasis and could be translated “as for me.”

Tama
dʊ́t
big
n-ànᵻ́
1sg-be
“I am big.”
(47)
1sg
tàmʊ́t
Tama
n-ànᵻ́
1sg-be
“I am a Tama.”
(48)

This structure seems an innovation of the Taman group within the NES languages. Generally speaking, the personal affixes appended to the verb in Nara, Nubian, and Taman strongly differ from each other and cannot be reconstructed in Proto-NES. It seems that the original person marking combined independent pronouns (which are clearly related in the daughter languages) and verbal plural suffixes, which have been studied above. This system still operates in the Nyima languages. The Meroitic system — at least in the passages of the royal inscriptions under examination — seems close to the Proto-NES and Nyima system, but has innovated by displacing the subject pronoun before the verb. This innovation created a specific OSV word order for sentences including a subject pronoun, whereas the original SOV order was preserved in sentences with nominal subject.

4.5. Another Person Marker in Meroitic Royal Texts?

Instead of (y)e-, an alternative prefix w- appears before the verbal forms of er-k “take, capture,” kb “seize, and bqo “take control” within the royal texts REM 1044, 1003, and 0094. It never occurs with ked “kill,” as can be seen in the examples below.118

Meroitic
heHle
?
qoleb :
3pl
ahtero-l
?
am
?
w-k[b]-bx-te
pm-seize-vnm-tam
“? seized ? them ???” (REM 1044/68–70)
(49)
qorte
palace(?).gen
dxe-leb :
child-det-pl
wide-bese
brother-3pl.gen
aroqitm
Aruqitama
tdxsene
Tadakhesene(?)
w-er-k
pm-take-plc
“? captured the children of the palace (and) their brothers Aruqitama (and) Tadakhesene(?)”
(50)
kdi-se-l-w :
woman-each-det-acc
abr-se-l-w :
man-each-det-acc
yemoqe :
belongings(?)
eqebese-wit :
3pl.gen-det(?)
w-kb-te
pm-seize-tam
“? seized each man, each woman (and) their belongings(?)” (REM 1003/23–24)
(51)
kdi-se-l-w :
woman-each-det-acc
abr-se-l-w :
man-each-det-acc
emoqe :
belongings(?)
eqebese-wit :
3pl.gen-det(?)
w-kb-te
pm-seize-tam
“? seized each man, each woman (and) their belongings(?)” (REM 1003/31–35)
(52)
wedi
?
dxe
child
mte-kdi
young-woman
Aqtoye : -se
Aqatoye-gen
2
2
w-bqo-b-te
pm-take.control-vnm-tam
“? took control of ??? the two young daughters of Aqatoye” (REM 0094/24)
(53)

There is no doubt that the prefixed element w-, which is paradigmatically parallel to the morpheme (y)e-, is also a person subject marker. We should expect it to mark a different person, which can only be the 1st plural or the 3rd singular or plural, since there is no interlocutor in these sections of the royal inscriptions. Unfortunately, the context of these passages with w- does not provide much information, chiefly because of our scanty knowledge of Meroitic, but also because of the poor preservation of some parts of the stelae REM 1044 and 1003. However, it seems that these passages are the continuity of the sentences where the subject is in the first person, either explicitly or implicitly. The passage below precedes (50) in Taneyidamani’s stela (REM 1044/141–155). The lines that follow are unfortunately badly eroded.

Ahotone qorte : drteyose-l : e-kede-to :
“I killed Akhutune, the ??? of the palace(?).
Nhror wide-l : e-kede-to :
I killed (his) brother Nakharura.
kdi : ste-bese : dnetro :
I ??? their mother [lit. ‘woman-tutor’].
sxseli : holno-leb : asxdose : tedd : qoleb : axro tewideb-wit : e-ked-b-to :
I killed ??? them, namely the ???, the ???.
krtedse : xrpxe-se-mlo-l : tk-to :
I seized the good ??? governor.
qorte : dxe-leb : wide-bese : Aroqitm : Tdxsene : w-erk :
? captured the children of the palace(?) (and) their brothers Aruqitama and Tadakhesene(?).” (= ex. 51)
(54)

Three of these sentences include the subject pronoun marker e- “I” in the verbal compounds e-kede-to (twice) and e-ked-b-to. In two other sentences, the prefixed pronoun is absent, but implicit, in dnetro(?) and tk-to. It is difficult to account for the subject shift in the last sentence (50), where the prefixed pronoun w- replaces e-. No solution is fully satisfactory, but the most acceptable is to assume that the antecedent of the prefixed pronoun is one of the nouns of the same sentence that would be placed as its topic. These topicalized constructions are well documented in Meroitic.119 They can also be found, under Meroitic influence, in the Egyptian texts of the late Napatan royal inscriptions, as in this example from king Nastasen’s stela (ll. 12–13, after FHN II: p. 478):

Egyptian
jr=w šn jr=j rmt-ꜥꜣ, ḥ(m)-ntr Jmn dr=w
“They made obeisance to me, (to wit) all the notables and priests of Amun
jry=w smꜣ jr=j, rꜣ nb
They blessed me, (to wit) every mouth.”
(55)

If so, the tentative translation of (50) suggested above must be thoroughly corrected. A singular object is expected, because there is no plural object marker at the end of the verbal compound. Maybe the translation should be “(as for) the children of the palace (?) (and) their brother Aruqitama, they captured Tadakhesene.” If this solution is syntactically acceptable, it is less so morphologically. A plural marker would be expected, like in qe-be-se “of them” (§⁄3.2 above). In addition, an element w- is attested in the late text REM 0094 as a variant of the singular 3rd person pronoun qo/qe “he/she, this” (cf. §⁄3.1). Instead of qe-se, qo-se “his/her” (lit. “of him/her”), a form w-se, with variants we-se, and even w-si, in the same text, is attested: semle: w-si “his wife,” ste: wese “his mother” (line 26). Finally, no cognate can be found in other NES-languages, all of which have for “they” at least traces of a plural element *-gV. In conclusion, the prefixed element w- in verbal compounds remains unexplained and needs further examination.

5. The Second Person Markers

Many Meroitic texts include prayers to the gods. They are chiefly present, of course, in the funerary inscriptions, which begin with an invocation to the deities of the underworld and finish with several “benedictions,” in which a fictive enunciator beseeches them to provide the deceased with water, bread, and a good meal in the afterlife. Similarly, in the temples and on a few stelae, the depictions of the kings and their family in front of the gods are accompanied by captions, most of them in Meroitic hieroglyphic script. They also include prayers, uttered by a fictive enunciator again, that invite the deities to shower their gifts (life, strength, health, etc.) upon the ruler.

In all these inscriptions, the requests to the gods use verbal moods that fit with wishes, namely imperative or optative. The forms are in the singular in the temples because there is a specific prayer for each deity. They are in the plural in funerary inscriptions because they are addressed to Isis and Osiris together. Unlike in Egyptian and Napatan texts, the gods are never answering. Such sentences as “I gave you all life and all power,” which are so common in Napatan texts and could give us details about the first and second person pronouns, are unfortunately missing from the Meroitic religious texts. However, a small stela found in 1999 has miraculously provided the genitive of the 2nd person pronouns singular and plural. Finally, recent researches on the Meroitic names of person have shown that they sometimes comprised short sentences, which in two cases include a second person singular pronoun.

5.1. Second Person Verbal Suffixes in Optatives and Imperatives

The final prayers of the funerary texts, which Griffith termed “benedictions,” amount to thirteen different types, classified with uppercase letters from A to L, plus a formula “X” added by Hofmann.120 The general scheme for benedictions A to D, by far the most frequent, is presented in (56).121

Formula A
ato
water
mhe
plentiful
pVsV-/yi-
caus
he
drink
-x(e)/bx(e)
vnm.sg/pl
-k(e)te
opt.2pl
“May you pl make her/him/them drink plentiful water.”
Formula B
at
bread
mhe
plentiful
pVsV-/yi-
caus
xr
eat
-x(e)/bx(e)
vnm.sg/pl
-k(e)te
opt.2pl
“May you pl make her/him/them eat plentiful bread.”
Formula C
x(re)
meal
mlo
good
(pVsV-/yi-)
caus
hol/tx
present
-x(e)/bx(e)
vnm.sg/pl
-k(e)te
opt.2pl
“May you pl present her/him/them (or have her/him/them presented) with a good meal.”
Formula D
x(re)
meal
lh-l
large-det
(pVsV-/yi-)
caus
hol/tx
present
-x(e)/bx(e)
vnm.sg/pl
-k(e)te
opt.2pl
“May you pl present her/him/them (or have her/him/them presented) with a large meal.”
(56)

The prefixed elements pVsV- or yi-, which obviously have a causative value but are not yet fully understood, have been studied above in §⁄4.3. The element -x(e) in the singular, -bx(e) in the plural, is a verbal number marker that has been analysed in section §⁄3.3. As the funerary benedictions are basically prayers to the gods, imperative or optative in the 2nd person plural are expected. The verbal TAM ending here is -k-te or -ke-te with a plural suffix -k(e). The singular TAM ending is -te, as seen in examples (19), (29)–(31), each of which contains a prayer to a single god. Cross-linguistically, the singular imperative is generally a simple verbal stem, e.g., English see!, Latin vide!, and Middle Egyptian m3! This is also true for the living NES languages: Nobiin nàl!, Midob kóod!, etc.122 For this reason, the verbal form with ending -te, which is used in the royal blessings and funerary benedictions, must be regarded as an optative rather than an imperative. However, an optional particle -se, which is added to the verbal compound in several funerary inscriptions,123 has an Old Nubian parallel in the command marker -ⲥⲟ or -ⲥⲱ.124 Be it related or borrowed, this particle shows the semantic proximity of the Meroitic optative with the Old Nubian imperative.

The imperative proper, in all likelihood, is the verbal form devoid of TAM markers which is used instead of the optative in several funerary texts. As shown in the following examples, it occurs either in one or two of the three main benedictions A, B, and C (a further example of varietas), or in all of them. Example (57) is drawn from REM 0369, an offering table from Shablul engraved for a single deceased. Example (58) is cited from a stela found in the same cemetery, REM 0381, and engraved for two persons, hence the plural verbal marker at the end of verbal compounds.125

Meroitic
Benediction A
a<to>
water
mhe
abundant
pso-h :
caus-drink.imp.2
“Make her/him drink plentiful water.”
Benediction B
at
bread
mhe
abundant
psi-xr [:]
caus-eat.imp.2
“Make her/him eat plentiful bread.”
Benediction C
x(re)
meal
mlo-l
good-det
hol :
present.imp.2
“Present her/him with a good meal.”
(57)
Benediction A
ato
water
<m>he
abundant
pso-he-b :
caus-drink.imp.2-vnm
“Make her/him drink plentiful water.”
Benediction B
at
bread
mhe
abundant
psi-xr-b :
caus-eat.imp.2-vnm
“Make her/him eat plentiful bread.”
(58)

In these imperative forms, there is virtually no plural marker. A final suffix -k(e) for the 2nd person plural is expected, but it is only attested in a very small number of funerary inscriptions.126 However, it seems that in some epitaphs, the two deities Isis and Osiris, to whom these prayers were addressed, were syntactically regarded as a single god, as shown by the use of a single vocative suffix for both, located after the second noun.127 Moreover, in the final invocations that resume the initial call to the deities, Osiris is sometimes omitted.128 Finally, Isis (or one the goddesses assimilated to her in the Meroitic funerary cults, namely Nephthys, Nut, or Maat), is often figured in the private offering tables and the funerary chapels, whereas Osiris is never present, at least in the non-royal contexts with with which here we are dealing.129 I surmise that the instances of the imperative are addressed to Isis. This would explain why the 2nd person singular, and not plural, is used.

Furthermore, a not uncommon variant of the verbal suffix -te, found only in the late funerary benedictions, is -to.130 It is directly appended to the verbal stem and, unlike -te, is never preceded by the plural marker -ke. In REM 0368, an offering table from Shablul, there are four benedictions, A, B, C, D. The verb in benediction A has no suffix, so that it should be an imperative in the 2nd person singular. In the subsequent three benedictions, the verbs are in the optative with the final suffix -to. The four verbs, most likely, are all in the singular and convey prayers to Isis.

Benediction A
ato
water
mhe
abundant
pso-he
caus-drink.imp.2
“Make her/him drink plentiful water.”
Benediction B
at
bread
mxe :
abundant
psi-xr-to
caus-eat.opt.2sg
“May you make her/him eat plentiful bread.”
Benediction C
x(re)
meal
mlo-l :
good-det
psi-tx-to
caus-present-opt.2sg
“May you have her/him presented with a good meal.”
Benediction D
x(re)
meal
lh-l :
large-det
psi-hol-to
caus-present-opt.2sg
“May you have her/him presented with a large meal.”
(59)
From the above, it appears that the markers of the Meroitic imperative and optative moods are as follows:

2sg 2pl impp
Imperative -∅ -k(e) (-se)
Optative -∅-te/-to -k(e)-te (-se)

Table 4. Meroitic imperative and optative suffixes.

The use of the suffix -k/-g to express the plurality of actors in the imperative (and in other moods) is widespread in Nilo-Saharan languages and particularly frequent in the NES family. Although it may have the same origin as the verbal plural marker, it must not be confused with it. The exception here is Ama, where the same morpheme -(ì)d̪ì is used both verbal plural marker (§⁄3.3.2) and marker of the plural imperative: kílí “hear!,” pl kíld̪ì “hear ye!”131 In Nara, the plural imperative is marked with a suffix -aga. This morpheme is attested in the two major dialects, namely in Higir ay “make!,” pl ay-aga “make ye!”132 and in Mogoreeb, aw “make!,” pl aw-aga “make ye!”133 In Mararit (Taman group), the plural imperative is marked with a morpheme -k-, which can be prefixed or suffixed according to the verb classes: sîn “eat!,” pl kí-síŋ-gì “eat ye!” (prefixed); kɛ̀dɛ̀k “cut!,” pl kɛ̀d-k-ɛ̀k “cut ye!” (suffixed).134 In the Nubian group, the suffix *-k/-g is perhaps preserved in Midob in a palatalized form -ic: kóod “see!,” pl kóod-íc “see ye!,”135 but the difference with the plural verbal marker, as in Ama, is not clear. The other branches of Nubian seem to have innovated separately. In Andaandi, the 2pl imperative is marked with a suffix -we136 and with a suffix -an in Old Nubian and Nobiin.137 However, Old Nubian has a morpheme -ke “you,” which Van Gerven Oei analyzes as a subject clitic.138 It is not used for the “positive” imperative like in Meroitic, but is part of the jussive -ⲛⲕⲉ, vetitive -ⲧⲁⲛⲕⲉ(ⲥⲟ), and affirmative -ⲗⲕⲉ/-ⲥⲕⲉ. This morpheme is probably related to the Meroitic suffix -k(e) used in the plural imperative.

5.2. The Second Person Singular and Plural Pronouns

5.2.1. Interpretation of the Pronominal Forms in REM 1293

In 1999, the archaeological team of the Berlin Museum in Naga found a small stela (REM 1293) in the temple of Amun. It was nearly complete, but broken into three joining pieces. On the obverse, Queen Amanishakheto is depicted standing between god Apedemak and his wife, Amesemi. The Lion-god is seated on a throne whereas the goddess is standing behind the ruler. The two deities hold her elbows with their right hands in a gesture of legitimization.

On the reverse of the stela, an inscription in Meroitic cursive script is engraved on six lines. The first three lines include the following prayer.

apedemk :
Apedemak
dqri-te-l-i :
Daqari-loc-det-voc
amni[sxeto :]
Amanishakheto
qor : (< qore-l)
ruler.det
kdke-l :
candace-det
pwrit(e)
life
(a)rese :
2sg.gen
yel-x-te :
give-vnm-opt.2sg
pwrite
life
debse :
2pl.gen
el-x-te
give-vnm-opt.2sg
“O Apedemak (who is) in Daqari, to Amanishakheto, the ruler, the Candace, give the life from you sg, give the life from you pl!” (REM 1293)
(60)

The god is here invited to shower his gifts upon the ruling queen, and chiefly the most precious of them, pwrite “life, vital strength.” Similar instances of this prayer for King Amanakhareqerama have previously been quoted in (29) and (30). The royal text REM 1293 is engraved with great care and a sense of aesthetics that is missing in so many private inscriptions. The different phrases are accurately separated by word dividers. Conspicuously, the phrases pwritrese and pwrite debse do not include a word divider after pwrite. Furthermore, in the first group, pwrite and its extension are agglomerated into a single unit. Due to the conventions of the Meroitic alphasyllabary (see §⁄2), the second element must have been arese, with an initial /a/ which was not explicitly written, because it occurred in internal position in this contracted phrase. The noun pwrite was pronounced /bawarit/ with the zero value of the grapheme e. So, the sequence pwrite + arese was pronounced /bawaritaresə/ and was accordingly spelled pwritrese, with default vowel /a/ after t. Additionally, the second term could not be *rese because the phoneme /r/, in Meroitic as well as in all the NES languages, cannot occur in initial position.139

The close connection between pwrite and its successive extensions, arese and debse is best explained if the latter are determiners. They both include the genitival postposition “of,” which also was part of the possessives qe-se “his/her” and qe-be-se “their” (§⁄3.2). Consequently, in the sentence from REM 1293 cited above, the sequences are-se and deb-se must be considered as possessive adjectives, that is, genitival forms of two personal pronouns, are and deb. As the context is a prayer to a deity, the only possibility is the second person: “O Apedemak, give your life to the queen,” that is “give her the life (coming) from you.”

5.2.2. Egyptian Parallels

This wording was already used in the Egyptian texts of the royal inscriptions engraved for the kings of the 25th Dynasty and their Napatan successors. Example (61) below is cited from the dedication engraved in the Temple of Mut, built by King Taharqo inside the cliff of Jebel Barkal (ca. 680 BCE). Example (62) is a text written on each side of the figure of goddess Mut in the same temple (after FHN I: p. 133). Example (63) is an excerpt from a stela of the Napatan king Anlamani (late 7th c. BCE) erected in the temple of Kawa (after FHN I: p. 322). In the three texts, the passages of interest to the question under study are in bold characters.

Egyptian
dd-mdw n Mwt, nb<.t> Tꜣ-Sty
“Words to be said by Mut, mistress of Nubia:
Jmn-Rꜥ nb ns.wt Tꜣ.wy ḥry-jb <m> Dw wꜥb
‘O Amun-Re, Lord of the thrones of the Two-Lands who is in the Pure Mountain
sꜣ=k mry=k Thrq ꜥnḫ d.t
(as for) your beloved son, Taharqo, may he live forever,
dj=k <n>=f ꜥnḫ dd wꜣs nb ḫr=j
you have given to him all life, stability and power from me,
snb nb ḫr=j mj Rꜥ d.t
all health from me, like Re, for ever’.” (Temple of Mut, inscription beside of the goddess standing behind Amun)
(61)
jr.n=f m mnw=f n mw-t=f Mwt
“He made (this) as his monument for his mother Mut,
nb<.t> p.t ḥnw.t Tꜣ-Sty
Lady of Heaven, Mistress of Nubia
qd=f pr=s: sꜥꜣ=f ḥw.t-ntr=s m mꜣw m jnr ḥd nfr rwd
he built her house and enlarged her temple anew in fine, white sandstone,
dj=s n=f ꜥnh nb ḫr=s,
so that she might give him all life from her,
dd nb ḫr=s, wꜣs nb ḫr[=s]
all stability from her, and all power from [her].” (Temple of Mut, dedication to the goddess)
(62)
ḫꜥ Jmn-Rꜥ Gm-Jtn jw=f ꜥḫꜥ m-bꜣḫ=f
“Amun-Re of Gematon (Kawa) appeared as he (the king) stood before him,
dj ntr pn ḥr=f r=f
and this god turned his face to him
jr=f ꜣ.t ꜥꜣ.t ꜥḥꜥ ḥr sdm ḏd.wt=f nb
and spent a long time standing and listening to all that he said
dj=f n=f ꜥnḫ dd wꜣs nb ḫr=f
and gave him all life, stability, and power from him (Amun),
snb [nb] ḫr[=f] ꜣw.t-jb nb ḫr=f
[all] health from him, and all joy from him.” (Enthronement stela of Anlamani (Kawa VIII/ 27–28))
(63)

In all these passages, the Egyptian preposition ḫr is used: ꜥnḫ nb ḫr=j “all life from me,” ꜥnḫ nb ḫr=f “all life from him.” Its primary meaning is “near,” but it can be also used with the agent of a passive verb in which it is usually translated with “by,”140 a closer meaning to the sense of this proposition in examples (61)–(63). In these passages, the deity connected with the gift of life is the source of this gift, but not necessarily the one who provides it. In (62) the goddess gives to the ruler the life which is coming from her, and in (63) Amun is also the source and the giver of life. By contrast, in (61) Mut is asking her husband Amun to give Taharqo the life coming from her.141

In the Meroitic stela from Naga, the context bears similarities to the situation in (32). There are also three persons, namely the ruler, Amanishakheto, the lion-god Apedemak and his wife Amesemi, all of them figured on the obverse of the stela. The great difference between the Egyptian and the Meroitic texts is the position of the enunciator. In (32), Mut is the enunciator (1st person) and speaks to Amun (2nd person) about the king (3rd person). In REM 1293, the enunciator, as is common in the Meroitic prayers, is a fictive individual, who is never present in the text, so that there are no 1st person markers. He speaks to Apedemak and possibly to Amesemi (2nd person) about the queen (3rd person). The gift of life is presented to the ruler by Apedemak and the source of this life is expressed, first, by the phrase are-se and second by the phrase deb-se. The latter obviously includes the pronominal plural marker -b, cf. qe-be-se “their,” lit. “of them, from them” (§⁄3.2)142 In conclusion, the only solution is to regard are-se as a 2nd person singular possessive referring here to Apedemak, and de-b-se as a 2nd person plural possessive referring to both Apedemak and Amesemi.

5.2.3. Personal Pronouns in Proto-Nubian

The two possessive pronouns discussed above suggest a basic form are for “you sg” and de-b for “you pl” These forms differ considerably from the pronouns I reconstructed in proto-NES, namely *i for “you sg” and *i-gi for “you pl.”143 For Proto-Nubian, I suggested *i-r/*i-n sg and *i-gi/*u-gi pl. It is beyond the scope of this article to explain in detail on which bases these proto-forms were put forward. Suffice it to say that the pronouns attested in the Taman and Nyima groups, alongside with the most conservative dialects of Nara, are very similar to each other and provided the main basis for my reconstruction. By contrast, the personal pronouns in the Nubian family show considerable variations that are difficult to reconcile. The two proto-forms I worked out were mostly based on the genitives of these pronouns, which have a better consistency among Nubian languages and with the other branches of the NES family.

During the 14th Nilo-Saharan Linguistics Colloquium held in 2019 in Vienna, Angelika Jakobi, the leading expert on Nubian, delivered a paper entitled “The Nubian Subject Pronouns.” She revisited the reconstruction of these morphemes in Proto-Nubian and suggested new proto-forms. For the 1st person singular and the 3rd person singular and plural, her reconstructions are not so different from mine. However, there are significant discrepancies for the 1st person plural and the 2nd person singular and plural. For the latter, she suggests *ed “you sg” and *ud-i “you pl.” These proto-forms are very close to the Birgid forms edi and udi, but quite different from the Midob counterparts íin and ùŋŋú. Of course, it is tempting to believe that Jakobi’s reconstruction is mainly based on Birgid. However, this language, in many respects, is the most conservative within the Nubian family, whereas Midob is one of the most innovative.144

In Old Nubian, we find ⲉⲓⲣ “you sg” and ⲟⲩⲣ “you pl,” in Nobiin, ìr and úr respectively, and Mattokki–Andaandi er and ir. I had previously interpreted the final -r as an original article appended to personal pronouns in Proto-Nubian.145 In Midob and in Tama, the article is actually -r, but it was -l in Meroitic and early Old Nubian, so that it must also have been -l in Proto-Nubian. In addition, the Midob reflexes of the Proto-Nubian liquids are often unpredictable,146 whereas they are stable in Nile Nubian. For these reasons, I now think that at least in Proto-Nubian, the final -r was part of the stem of these personal pronouns.

On the other hand, Nubian languages have a propensity for intervocalic /r/ to shift to /d/. Many words for which the Proto-Nubian etymon included the sonorant *r in intervocalic position, are written in Old Nubian with a delta, which later shifted back to /r/ in Nobiin, its modern descendant. As shown in Table 5 below, Birgid and sometimes, Midob, can also have /d/ from Proto-Nubian *r.

Gloss Proto-Nubian Old Nubian Nobiin Birgid
black *ur(r)-i ⲟⲩⲇⲙ úrúm úudè
great *ŋoor ⳟⲟⲇ “Lord” Nóor “Lord” -gor “old”
24 hours *ugur ⲟⲁ̄ⲣ/ⲟ̄ⲁ̄ⲇⲉ “night” áwá, pl àwàrìi “night” (nergi)
six *gorji ⲅⲟⲣⳝⲟ górjò korʃi
sorghum *usi ⲙⲁⲇⲉ márée (uze)
sword147 ⲡⲁⲇⲁⳡ fáráɲ (ʃíbídí)
white *arr-e ⲁ̄ⲇⲱ KD aro148 éelé (M. áddè)149

Table 5. Alternation between intervocalic /r/ and /d/ in Nubian.

As this vacillation between /r/ and /d/ is shared by languages that belong to different branches of the Nubian family, it was in all likelihood present in Proto-Nubian. As a result, the proto-form *ed for “you sg,” which is suggested by Jakobi, is certainly possible. Likewise, it is possible that already in Proto-Nubian, a variant *er was present.

In my previous reconstruction of Proto-Nubian, I assumed that the plural marker of the subject pronouns “we,” “you pl,” and “they” was *-gi and consequently suggested *agi for “we” and *igi ~ *ugi for “you pl.” That assumption was based on parallels with Taman and Nyima, where this morpheme is easily reconstructable. However, I could not account for the consonant /d/ in the Birgid reflexes adi and udi.150 If the Proto-Nubian pronoun of the second person singular is *ed, the Birgid reflexes become perfectly regular and the Proto-Nubian plural marker is definitely *i. This could be a development of Proto-NES *-gi, which implies that *g was already lost in Proto-Nubian, like in modern English night and brought. In conclusion, if Proto-Nubian “you sg” was indeed *ed, a plural form *ud-i is a consistent reconstruction. The initial vowel *u instead of the expected *e still has to be explained, but it is substantiated by the Old Nubian, Ajang,151 and Birgid reflexes.

This alternation between /d/ and /r/ is obvious when comparing Meroitic and Nubian. Several Meroitic words related to Nubian have /d/ where Nubian has /r/. This is for instance the case for the words for “brother,” in Meroitic wide and in Proto-Nubian wer-i.152 In addition, the Meroitic phoneme /d/ has two different realizations: alveolar [d] in initial position and after another consonant, retroflex [ɖ] in intervocalic position.153 The retroflex consonant was acoustically so close to [r] that Egyptians and Greeks transcribed this sound with the grapheme “r.” That is why the capital of the kingdom, spelled Medewi in Meroitic, was written Mrw.t by the Egyptians and Μερόη by the Greeks.

Consequently, the two Meroitic pronouns are and deb for the second person singular and plural, are reliable cognates of the Proto-Nubian forms *ed and *ud-i. The singular are was pronounced /ar/ (§⁄5.2.1) and strongly resembles its Dongolawi counterpart er. The plural form deb was pronounced /deba/ and must derive from an older form *adeb. For prosodic reasons, the initial vowel was weakened and finally dropped.154 Thus, the vacillation between /d/ and /r/, which was evidenced in the Nubian group, was also present in Meroitic, with /r/ in the singular and /d/ in the plural. Another possibility would be to that the original pronoun was *areb, pronounced /areba/. This form would also have undergone the same apheresis, but, as /r/ can never be initial in Meroitic, it would have shifted to /d/, the closest stop to this vibrant. Finally, recall that /ba/ is the regular Meroitic reflex of Proto-SON *-gu, which is known as plural marker for demonstratives in the eastern branch of the NES family.155 In this respect, the formation of the plural form in Meroitic differs not only from Proto-Nubian, where a plural marker *i was used, but also from Proto-NES, where this morpheme was *gi.

5.2.4. The Second Person Singular Subject Pronoun in Personal Names

Most Meroitic personal names, and particularly the rulers’, are complex compound words. This resulted in names being unique most of the time, and it may actually have been the purpose of this complexity and length. Among the royal names, only Arkamani was used twice, a sharp contrast to the seven Mentuhoteps and the eleven Ramesseses of the Egyptian history. These Kushite royal names seem to have been the birth-names of the rulers, to which the name of a god, most frequently Amun, was possibly — but not systematically — added at the time of their ascension to the throne. In some of them, “Amun” is fully integrated into the syntax of the compound, so that it may originally have been present, be it an actual birth-name or a completely new name given to the ruler. For instance, Amannote-erike means “the one whom Amon of Thebes has begotten” and it is obvious that in this case, the god name was not added at a later stage. Many Kushite royal names are theophoric and probably fall within the Egyptian naming tradition. For example, “Natakamani” probably means “Amun is strong” and is the Meroitic counterpart of Egyptian Nakht-Amun or Amun-Nakht.

However, several royal names seem to follow a local tradition of naming an individual from physical features or temperament and can therefore be considered genuine birth-names. A stunning example of this tradition among private individuals is the name of the mother of a deceased woman from Sedeinga. She was called Xmlowiteke, which means “she who likes a good meal.”156 It can be either the birth-name of a greedy baby or a nickname given later during her lifetime. In the royal sphere, a name like Aspelta falls in the same tradition. The name of this Napatan king, written in Meroitic, was recently identified by the author among the graffiti of Great Enclosure in Musawwarat es-Sufra. It was written Isplto.157 If the first segment Is- is the Meroitic cognate of Old Nubian ⲉⲓⲥ- “other,”158 it could mean “another is given” and refer, for example, to the birth of a second son, a possible heir to the throne. This name would be appropriate for a ruler like Aspelta, who succeeded his brother Anlamani at a very young age.

This naming tradition, in spite of the increasing influence of Islam, still exists in some parts of Sudan. In her study of the personal names among the Midob, a Nubian-speaking population of Northern Darfur, Abeer Bashir gives several examples of personal names whose meaning is connected with physical or social particularities, or with events that happened at the time these individuals were born:159

Midob
Óndìtèóndì “camel” + “own” = “rich, lit. owner of a large herd of camels”
Úccíúdí “black” + suffix -(i)cc = “person of black skin”
Ábágàlòábá “grandmother” + gálò “lost” = “who has lost his/her grandmother”
(66)

Interestingly, two royal names belonging to this category of “contextual” names include a first element are which is obviously the same as the 2nd person pronoun identified above. They are the names of Queen Amanirenas (Amnirense) and king Amanakhareqerema (Amnxreqerem).160 The god names Mni “Amun” and Amnxe “Amanakh” were added to their original names when they received the royal crown of Kush.161 Their former names were Arense and Areqerem respectively. The vowel /a/ is never written in internal position (here after Amni- or Amnax-). However, it must have been present at the beginning of Arense and Areqerem, because, as addressed above in §⁄5.2.1 when analysing the compound pwritrese “the life from you,” /r/ can never be initial in Meroitic and its related languages.

The first element, are “you ” is followed by the sequences “-nase” (written nse) in the first name and “-qerema” (written qerem) in the second. They display striking resemblances with the Nubian adjectives “tall” and “black.” In Old Nubian, these are ⳟⲁⲥⲥ- and ⲟⲩⲇⲙ- respectively, in Nobiin nàssí and úrúm, and in Andaandi nosso and urumme. In addition, the correspondence in initial position between Meroitic qe/qo /kʷu/ and Nubian /u/ is well attested, for instance between Meroitic qore “king” and Old Nubian ⲟⲩⲣⲟⲩ. The birth-name of the queen, namely (A)rense “Are-nase” would therefore mean “you are tall” and the birth-name of the king, namely (A)reqerem “Are-qerema” “you are black.” The elision of the copula (-o was expected in final position) is noteworthy, but this morpheme has so far been attested only with 3rd person constructions.162 The names were possibly given to them soon after they were born and described the physical appearance they had at this young age. When they ascended to the throne, these names were not considered incompatible with royal status: tall stature and black skin are, for example, features that were commonly associated with Osiris, the mythical first king of Egypt. The names of Amun or his hypostasis Amanakh were just added to their birth-names, according to the custom mentioned above.

5.3. The Prefixed Second Person Singular Marker in the Verbal Complex

We have previously seen that there were in Meroitic two types of person markers encoding the subject of the verb. First, independent pronouns such as qo “he, she” or are “you sg,” attested so far only in non-verbal clauses, and second, prefixed elements which are appended to the verbal compound, such as ye- “I” and w- “he/she(?),” in verbal clauses. For the 2nd person singular, a morpheme d-, which has remained unexplained for twenty years, is very likely the prefixed person marker that matches the independent pronoun are “you sg.”

In the 2000 issue of the Meroitic Newsletter, I published an article to show that a small corpus of Meroitic inscriptions on papyrus, leather strips, and ostraca, which were hitherto regarded as private letters, were actually protection spells.163 They were purchased by pilgrims from the temples, especially the temple of Amun in Qasr Ibrim, where the major part of these texts were found by the British team of the Egypt Exploration Society. I termed them “Amuletic Oracular Decrees,” after the name of the same type of texts attested in Egypt in the early first millennium BCE. Because of the rich vocabulary they include, describing all kind of misfortunes from which their owner will be protected, the translation of these inscriptions is still in an early stage. However, the scheme of the introductive parts of the texts is clear. They are divided in two groups according the prefixes of the verbal forms, y(i)- or d-.

Meroitic
Prefix y(i)- (REM 0345, 1096, 1152(?), 1317/1168 (?), 1319, 1321, 1325, 1326)
Formula A
name-i
pn-voc
wte-li
life-det
pke-li
n-det
y-irohe-se-l-o-wi
pm-vc-det-cop-emp
Formula B
God names and epithets
Formula C
mlowi
health
y-ni
pm-vc
bnebeseni
?
(66)
Prefix d- (REM 0361, 1174(?), 1236, 1322, 1323, 1324)
Formula A
noun-l
n-det
wte-li
life-det
pke-li
n-det
d-irohe-se-l-o-wi
pm-vc-det-cop-emp
Formula B
God names and epithets
Formula C
mlowi
health
d-n-se-l-o
pm-vc-det-cop
bnebeseni
?
(67)

The decrees always begin with the mention of the beneficiaries in the vocative. They can be called either by their name or by their title. The verbal compound in formula A (yirohe-se-l-o-wi/d-irohe-se-l-o-wi) is partly obscure, but it is not an optative or an imperative (§⁄5.1). It is a periphrastic form — probably with an aspectual or modal value — since it includes the determiner -l used as nominalizer, followed by the copula. Accordingly, an explicit personal marker is expected, more precisely a 2sg, because of the vocative. Many texts are so damaged that it is impossible to know whether the initial vocative phrase included a name or a title, but each time it is preserved, the formulae with initial d- occur after the titles and those with initial y(i)- after the proper names. This initial d- is very likely the expected 2nd person subject prefix, a short version of the independent pronoun are/*ade “you sg” or the singular of de-b “you pl,” without the plural suffix -b.

The verb used in formula A is arohe, which, in these oracular decrees, probably means “take under someone’s protection.”164 It can also signify “take control,” hence “take prisoner” in military contexts (see (20)). From the two nouns groups present in formula A, only wte-li “life(time)” is known. A very tentative translation of formula A with prefix d- would be “Oh you, the XXX, you shall (?) be protected for your lifetime and your ???.” The other prefix y(i)- remains an enigma. It is not certain that it can be also regarded as a personal marker. Since yi- is a late spelling for initial /i/, it may be present in the form of the sign i in the verbal compound d-i-(a)rohe-se-l-o-wi. In that case, yiroheselowi would be a variant of d-irohe-se-l-o-wi unmarked for person.

6. Conclusion

In conclusion, a general table of the personal markers that have been identified or merely hypothesised in this article is given below. The reader must keep in mind that some of those results are still tentative. However, they illustrate the significant advances that the linguistic comparison has recently made possible in the decipherment of the Meroitic texts.

1sg 2sg 3sg 1pl 2pl 3pl
Independent Subject Pronoun ? are (< *ade) qo ? deb qoleb
Prefixed Person Marker (y)e- d- w-(?) ? ? ?
Possessive Pronoun ? arese (a)qese ? debse (a)qebese
Imperative Person Marker -∅ -k(e)
Optative Person Marker ? -∅-te ? ? -k(e)-te ?

Table 6. Meroitic Person Markers

sg pl
Subject -∅ -b
Object -x(e) -bx(e)

Table 7. Meroitic Verbal Number Markers

7. Abbreviations

  • […]: signs missing
  • [x]: signs reconstructed
  • : (colon): Meroitic word divider
  • 1, 2, 3: 1st, 2nd, 3rd person marker
  • acc: accusative
  • adj: adjective
  • asp: aspect marker
  • app: applicative voice
  • cop: copula
  • cont: continuous (tense)
  • dat: dative
  • dec: declarative
  • det: determiner
  • disc: discursive (direct discourse marker)
  • du: dual
  • emp: so-called “emphatic particle” after the copula in Meroitic (-wi)
  • caus: causative
  • FHN: Eide et al., eds., Fontes Historiae Nubiorum
  • fin: final element
  • frq: frequentative
  • fut: future tense
  • gen: genitive (genitival postposition)
  • imp: imperative
  • impp: imperative particle (-se)
  • IPA: International Phonetic Alphabet
  • ipfv: imperfective
  • loc: locative
  • n: noun
  • o: object
  • obj: objective (= accusative/dative) marker
  • opt: optative
  • pl: plural
  • plc: pluractional
  • prt1: preterite 1
  • pm: personal marker
  • pn: person name
  • purp: purposive
  • REM: Répertoire d’épigraphie méroïtique
  • s: subject
  • sg: singular
  • tam: tense, aspect, and mood markers
  • ver: veridical
  • vnm: verbal number marker
  • voc: vocative suffix
  • vc: verbal compound

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Gardiner, Alan H. bib⁄Egyptian Grammar: Being an Introduction to the Study of Hieroglyphs. 3rd edition. Cambridge: Cambridge Universite Press, 1957.

Gerven Oei, Vincent W.J. van. A Reference Grammar of Old Nubian. Leuven: Peeters, forthcoming.

Gerven Oei, Vincent W.J. van & El-Shafie El-Guzuuli. bib⁄The Miracle of Saint Mina. Tirana: Uitgeverij, 2013.

Griffith, Francis Ll. bib⁄Karanòg: The Meroitic Inscriptions of Shablûl and Karanog. Eckley B. Coxe Jr. Expedition to Nubia 6. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, 1911.

Griffith, Francis Ll. bib⁄“Meroitic Studies IV: The Great Stela of Prince Akinizaz (Continued).” Journal of Egyptian Archaeology 4, nos. 2–3 (1917): pp. 159–173.

Haspelmath, Martin. bib⁄“The Serial Verb Construction: Comparative Concept and Cross-linguistic Generalizations.” Language and Linguistics 17, no. 3 (2016): pp. 291–319. doi: www⁄10.1177/2397002215626895.

Hintze, Fritz. Beiträge zur meroitischen Grammatik. Meroitica 3. Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1979.

Hintze, Fritz. bib⁄“Some Problems of Meroitic Philology.” In Sudan im Altertum: 1. Internationale Tagung für meroitistische Forschungen in Berlin 1971, edited by Fritz Hintze. Meroitica 1 (1973): pp. 321–336.

Hofmann, Inge. bib⁄Material für eine meroitische Grammatik. Veröffentlichungen der Institute für Afrikanistik und Ägyptologie der Universität Wien 16. Vienna: Afro-Pub, 1981.

Jacquesson, François. bib⁄Les personnes. Morphosyntaxe et sémantique. Paris: CNRS Éditions, 2008.

Jakobi, Angelika. Kordofan Nubian: A Synchronic and Diachronic Study. Unpublished manuscript, 2001.

Jakobi Angelika. “The Nubian Subject Pronouns.” Paper presented to the 14th Nilo-Saharan Linguistics Colloquium, Vienna (hand-out), 2019.

Jakobi, Angelika. bib⁄“Verbal Number and Transitivity in Karko (Kordofan Nubian).” Sprachtypologie und Universalienforschung 70 (2017): pp. 117–142. doi: www⁄10.1515/stuf-2017-0007.

Jakobi, Angelika, Ali Ibrahim & Gumma Ibrahim Gulfan, “Verbal Number and Grammatical Relations in Tagle.” In Proceedings of the 2nd Nuba Mountain Languages Conference, Paris 2014, edited by Nicolas Quint and Stefano Manfredi. Forthcoming.

Khalil, Mohamed K. bib⁄“The Verbal Plural Marker in Nobiin.” Dotawo: A Journal of Nubian Studies 2 (2015): pp. 59–71.

Kitchen, Kenneth A. Ramesside Inscriptions Translated and Annotated: Notes and Comments, II. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 1999.

Kuckertz, J. “Amanakhareqerema: A Meroitic King of the 1st Century AD.” Der antike Sudan, Mitteilungen der Sudanarchäologischen Gesellschaft zu Berlin e.V 29 (2018): pp. 119–144.

Loprieno, Antonio. “The ‘King’s Novel’.” In Ancient Egyptian Literature: History and Forms, edited by Antonio Loprieno. Leiden: Brill, 1996: pp. 277–295.

Lukas, Johannes. bib⁄“Die Sprache der Sungor in Wadai (aus Nachtigal’s Nachlaß).” Mitteilungen der Ausland-Hochschule an der Universität Berlin, dritte Abteilung. Afrikanische Studien 41 (1938): pp. 171–246.

Millet, Nicholas B. bib⁄“The Kharamadoye Inscription.” Meroitic Newsletter 13 (1973): pp. 31–49.

Millet, Nicholas B. bib⁄“The Kharamandoye Inscription (MI 94) Revisited.” Meroitic Newsletter 30 (2003): pp. 57–72.

Norton, Russell. bib⁄“Number in Ama Verbs.” Occasional Papers in the Study of Sudanese Languages 10 (2012): pp. 75–93.

Peust, Carsten. Das Napatanische. Ein Ägyptischer Dialekt aus dem Nubien des späten ersten vorchristlichen Jahrtausends. Texte, Glossar, Grammatik. Göttingen: Peust & Gutschmid, 1999.

Reinisch, Leo. bib⁄Die Barea-Sprache. Vienna: Wilhelm Braumüller, 1874.

Rilly, Claude. bib⁄“Deux exemples de décrets amulétiques oraculaires en méroïtique: les ostraca REM 1317/1168 et REM 1319 de Shokan.” Meroitic Newsletter 27 (2000): pp. 99–118.

Rilly, Claude. “Graffiti for Gods and Kings: The Meroitic Secondary Inscriptions of Musawwarat Es-Sufra: A Preliminary Study.” Der Antike Sudan 31 (forthcoming).

Rilly, Claude. “Histoire du Soudan, des origines à la chute du sultanat Fung.” In Histoire et Civilisations du Soudan. De la préhistoire à nos jours, edited by Olivier Cabon. Paris: Soleb, 2017: pp. 25–445.

Rilly, Claude. bib⁄La langue du royaume de Méroé: Un panorama de la plus ancienne culture écrite d&rsquo;Afrique subsaharienne. Paris: Champion, 2007.

Rilly, Claude. bib⁄Le méroïtique et sa famille linguistique. Leuven: Peeters, 2010.

Rilly, Claude. bib⁄“‘Les chouettes ont des oreilles’. L’inscription méroïtique hiéroglyphique d’el-Hobagi REM 1222.” In La pioche et la plume. Autour du Soudan, du Liban et de la Jordanie. Hommages archéologiques à Patrice Lenoble, edited by Vincent Rondot, Frédéric Alpi & François Villeneuve. Paris: Presses de l’université Paris-Sorbonne, 2011: pp. 481–499.

Rilly, Claude. Répertoire d’épigraphie méroïtique. Analyse des inscriptions publiées. Tome IV. REM 0001 à REM 0073. Habilitation Thesis, École Pratique des Hautes Études. Paris, 2018.

Rilly, Claude. “The Meroitic Inscriptions of Temple Naga 200.” In Josefine Kuckertz, Naga: Temple 200 – Wall Decoration. Berlin: Ugarit Verlag, forthcoming: pp. 283–328.

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Weiss, Doris. bib⁄Phonologie et morphosyntaxe du maba. PhD Thesis, Université Lumière-Lyon 2, 2009.

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  1. I am grateful to Abbie Hantgan-Sonko for checking the English text. ↩︎

  2. Griffith, Karanòg. ↩︎

  3. Rilly, Le méroïtique et sa famille linguistique. ↩︎

  4. Rilly, “The Wadi Howar Diaspora and Its Role in the Spread of East Sudanic Languages from the Fourth to the First Millenia BCE.” ↩︎

  5. For the definitions of the key terms in the Theory of Enunciative Operations, see www⁄https://feglossary.sil.org/page/definitions-key-terms-theory-enunciative-operations?language=en↩︎

  6. Hintze, Beiträge zur meroitischen Grammatik, pp. 63–87. Nevertheless, he regards the 2nd person plural as an address to the visitors of the tomb. The interpretation of Inge Hofmann in her Material für eine meroitische Grammatik, p. 194, according to which the prayer is addressed to the gods of the afterlife, is much more convincing. See Rilly, La langue du royaume de Méroé, pp. 163–166, for a detailed review of the numerous hypotheses that were advanced since the decipherment of the scripts. ↩︎

  7. This distinctive feature of the Meroitic writing-system was first evidenced in Hintze 1973. For an extensive study of the rules of Meroitic script, see Rilly, La langue du royaume de Méroé, pp. 277–314. ↩︎

  8. Rilly, La langue du royaume de Méroé, pp. 359–407. ↩︎

  9. See Rilly & Francigny, “Excavations of the French Archaeological Mission in Sedeinga, Campaign 2011,” p. 67, no. 10. ↩︎

  10. For further details, see Rilly, “Upon Hintze’s Shoulders,” pp. 28–29. ↩︎

  11. Formerly known as “Hestermann’s law,” see Rilly, La langue du royaume de Méroé, pp. 415–420. ↩︎

  12. In Arabic ghâ‘ib, cf. Cotte, Langage et linéarité, p. 130. ↩︎

  13. In addition to Latin, this feature can be found in Korean, Hindi, Panjabi, Marathi, Mongolian, etc. See Jacquesson, Les personnes, pp. 103–105. ↩︎

  14. These similarities are due to common typological features and do not originate from a common genealogical origin. Turkish is, like Meroitic or Nubian, an agglutinative language, with no grammatical gender and an SOV word-order, cf. Rilly, La langue du royaume de Méroé, pp. 497–502. ↩︎

  15. Creissels, Syntaxe générale 1, 2006: p. 91. ↩︎

  16. In (2), Malutuna is traditionally transcribed “Maloton.” This viceroy of Lower Nubia (peseto), living at the end of the 3rd century CE, is famous for his beautiful ba statue kept in the Nubian Museum in Aswan. ↩︎

  17. Griffith, Karanòg, p. 120. ↩︎

  18. The function of this particle is not yet identified (Rilly, Le méroïtique et sa famille linguistique, pp. 386–387). ↩︎

  19. Hintze, Beiträge zur meroitischen Grammatik, pp. 53–56. ↩︎

  20. The frequent variants qe/qo here and in other words (for example Aqedise/Aqodise “Moon-god” in the texts from the Lion temple in Naga) is best explained by the labialized articulation /kʷ/ of the sign q: see Rilly, La langue du royaume de Méroé, pp. 374–379. ↩︎

  21. See Rilly, La langue du royaume de Méroé, p. 547. The literal translation “this one, this is…,” which is used above, is somewhat unnatural in English. In spoken French, the topicalization of the subject is overwhelmingly frequent and sentences such as celui-ci, c’est… or even ça, c’est…, literally “this, this is” are very common. ↩︎ ↩︎

  22. Rilly, La langue du royaume de Méroé, p. 98. ↩︎

  23. Ancient Greek οὖτος ὁ ἀνήρ “this man,” literally “this the man.” ↩︎

  24. Rilly, La langue du royaume de Méroé, p. 511. ↩︎

  25. From the textual material so far available, the adjunction of the plural determiner -leb seems to be the only way to build the plural of nouns. For an alternative plural qebe-, see §⁄3.2↩︎

  26. In (8), the titles ssmrte and wtotrse cannot yet be translated. The former is probably an early form of the title ssimete frequently attested in later texts and which is connected to the cult of the gods in several instances. The second one is a hapax legomenon. It is presumably a compound word (wto-tr-se) including possibly an indirect genitive with postposition -se↩︎

  27. The final element -bx in (8), which could be considered as the object of the verb, is discussed in §⁄3.3↩︎

  28. Hofmann, Material für eine meroitische Grammatik, pp. 334–338. ↩︎

  29. In (9), the kinship term yetmde is applied to younger members of the same maternal line (Rilly, La langue du royaume de Méroé, pp. 526–527). It mostly designates “nephews” and “nieces,” who are referring to a prestigious uncle in the descriptive part of their epitaph, but in rare cases such as this one, it can be applied to a younger brother. ↩︎

  30. Rilly, La langue du royaume de Méroé, pp. 550–551. ↩︎

  31. The initial a in aqese and in the variants of the 3rd plural possessive, aqebese and aqobese are unexplained. It is possible that this a is etymological and that, in this case, the forms qese and qebese result from apheresis (a widespread development in Meroitic, see Rilly, La langue du royaume de Méroé, pp. 290–291). In some instances, however, a non-etymological a is added at the beginning of a word for unknown reasons, for example Ams-i “oh (sun-god) Masha” in REM 0091C instead of expected Ms-i. ↩︎

  32. Rilly, Le méroïtique et sa famille linguistique, p. 389. ↩︎

  33. A third formula for “a good meal” is oftentimes added. A dozen of additional formulae are known, but they are less frequent. See Rilly, La langue du royaume de Méroé, pp. 163–183; Rilly, Le méroïtique et sa famille linguistique, pp. 68–74. ↩︎

  34. See Comrie, Language Universals and Linguistic Typology, pp. 43–19 for an updated interpretation of this old classification of languages. ↩︎

  35. Griffith, Karanòg, p. 14 and n. 1, pp. 25–26, 45. ↩︎

  36. Hintze, Beiträge zur meroitischen Grammatik, pp. 65–66, 73–74. ↩︎

  37. The form -x (= /xa/ or /ŋa/) and -bx (= /baxa/ or /baŋa/) are early. They later became -xe (= /x/ or /ŋ/) and -bxe (= /bax/ or /baŋ/). It is noted that the sign transliterated e can have a zero-vowel value (see §⁄3 for the principles of the Meroitic script). ↩︎

  38. The suffixes -xe and -bxe end with the consonant /x/, which assimilated to the subsequent suffix -ke. However, similar assimilation is rare with the plural suffix -bxe. In early texts, the suffixes were -x and -bx, with default vowel /a/. This final vowel explains why there was no assimilation with the following suffix. ↩︎

  39. Rilly, La langue du royaume de Méroé, pp. 553–554. ↩︎

  40. Jakobi, “Verbal Number and Transitivity in Karko,” pp. 121–122 and n. 3. Nile Nubian (Nobiin and Mattokki/Andaandi) uses applicative suffixes that are nothing but a grammaticalized forms of the two verbs “to give,” deen and tir. In other languages, they may result from the incorporation of adpositions in the verbal compound, as is the case in Amharic (Creissels, Syntaxe générale 2, p. 39). ↩︎

  41. Adapted from Creissels, Syntaxe générale 2, pp. 74, 76. In (19c), the added gloss “3:1.s” means “subject 3rd person, Bantu nominal class 1.” ↩︎

  42. Carrier, “La stèle méroïtique d’Abratoye.” ↩︎

  43. Jacquesson, Les personnes, pp. 297–298. ↩︎

  44. An in-depth analysis of this construction in Ama can be found in Norton, “Number in Ama Verbs.” This author prefers to speak of “distributive” rather than “plural” (ibid., p. 78). His stance is supported by a series of five examples, which can be nonetheless analysed as a particular case of plural construction. In her study of verbal plural in Nubian, Jakobi states that “verbal number — realized by distinct singular and plural verb stems — can have both aspectual and morphosyntactic functions. On the one hand these stems may encode habitual, progressive, iterative, repetitive, distributive, or even single events, on the other hand these stems may encode the participants affected by these events” (Jakobi, “Verbal Number and Transitivity in Karko,” p. 117). ↩︎

  45. Werner, Tìdn-áal, p. 49. ↩︎

  46. The suffix -(i)j is mentioned in Van Gerven Oei, A Reference Grammar of Old Nubian, §13.1 who calls it “pluractional” and in Werner 1989: 173–175, who speaks of “plural object extension” but not of plural subject marking. Recent and more explicit studies are Khalil, “The Verbal Plural Marker in Nobiin”; Jakobi, “Verbal Number and Transitivity in Karko”; and Jakobi et al., forthcoming. ↩︎

  47. Examples from Khalil, “The Verbal Plural Marker in Nobiin,” p. 65, ex. 9; p. 64, exx. 3, 4. ↩︎

  48. Rilly, Le méroïtique et sa famille linguistique, p. 350. ↩︎

  49. Ibid., p. 272. ↩︎

  50. Khalil, “The Verbal Plural Marker in Nobiin,” pp. 64–65. ↩︎

  51. Van Gerven Oei, A Reference Grammar of Old Nubian, §13.1.3. ↩︎

  52. In Kordofan Nubian language Karko, unlike in Nobiin, the verbal number marker refers to the direct object even in ditransitive construction (Jakobi, “Verbal Number and Transitivity in Karko,” pp. 164–165). The example she gives (“Dry the pots for the woman”), compared with the Nobiin example (28) above, shows that at least in this language, the participant hierarchy is not connected with the degree of animacy of the two objects, direct and indirect. See, however, n. 59 below. ↩︎

  53. Example from Norton, “Number in Ama Verbs,” p. 86, ex. 35. ↩︎

  54. Examples from Khalil, “The Verbal Plural Marker in Nobiin,” p. 64, exx. 6, 7. ↩︎

  55. cf. Rilly, Le méroïtique et sa famille linguistique, p. 90. ↩︎

  56. Rilly, “The Meroitic Inscriptions of Temple Naga 200.” ↩︎

  57. Aritene and Makedeke/Makedoke, “the Great God,” are two of Amun-Re’s numerous hypostases. The name Aritene is obviously a nominal compound and is consequently followed by the article -l, though scribes frequently omitted it. This determiner is mandatory here because the name is a direct genitive (Rilly, La langue du royaume de Méroé, pp. 520–523). The meaning of Aritene is uncertain. It might be a Meroitic transcription Ar-i-tene of Egyptian Harakhty (Ḥr-ꜣḫt.y) “Horus of the Horizon,” where the “horizon” is reinterpreted as the “west”: cf. Meroitic tene-ke-l “west,” Nobiin tin-o, Ama t̪êŋ and words for “evening” or “night” in NES languages (Rilly, Le méroïtique et sa famille linguistique, p. 141). ↩︎

  58. Example (8) above, which is two centuries earlier than (29)–(31), is apparently a counterexample. Admittedly, the contextual elements are much clearer and the meaning of the verb is better established in examples (29)-(31) than in (8). However, it may be that the marking of the direct/indirect object is governed by the degree of animacy/definiteness, as it is in Old Nubian (Van Gerven Oei, A Reference Grammar of Old Nubian, §13.1.3). According to Dimmendaal, “Tama,” p. 324, this hierarchy is the following:

    • Animacy: Human > animate > inanimate:

    • Definiteness: Personal pronoun > proper name > definite NP > indefinite specific NP > non-specific NP.

    In (8), the beneficiary is a god designated by his proper name, Amun of Napata (Amnp). The logical direct object is the two men, also designated by their names. But they are referred to by a personal pronoun (qoleb) which is the grammatical object of the verb. The personal pronoun is higher in the definiteness hierarchy than the proper name, and this might explain why it is encoded in the verbal compound by the plural suffix. ↩︎

  59. Data from Jakobi, “Verbal Number and Transitivity in Karko,” p. 126, t. 6. Only three of these verbs have specific markers both in singular and plural (“hang up,” “kindle,” “wake up”). In Karko, most of the verbs operate according to a pattern “unmarked singular/marked plural.” As in many languages where verbal number is present, the plural form can be a different verb (ibid., pp. 128–129). Several cases of replacive verbal forms for plural object marking are attested in Ama, see Norton, “Number in Ama Verbs,” p. 77. ↩︎

  60. Example from Weiss, Phonologie et morphosyntaxe du maba, p. 270, ex. 699. ↩︎

  61. Examples from Werner, Grammatik des Nobiin, p. 173; Jakobi,“Verbal Number and Transitivity in Karko,” p. 130, ex. 16. The original gloss plr “verbal plural stem” has been replaced by vnm “verbal number marker” in accordance with the conventions of the present article. ↩︎

  62. See also Khalil, “The Verbal Plural Marker in Nobiin,” p. 37. ↩︎

  63. Jakobi, “Verbal Number and Transitivity in Karko,” pp. 130–132. ↩︎

  64. Ibid., p. 128. ↩︎

  65. See Jakobi, Ibrahim & Gulfan, “Verbal Number and Grammatical Relations in Tagle,” §2, with further references, particularly Armbruster, Dongolese Nubian: A Grammar, §§2880f, 3031f. ↩︎

  66. Jakobi, “Verbal Number and Transitivity in Karko,” p. 122 with further references. ↩︎

  67. The morphology of event plurality marking in Tama seems complex (Dimmendaal, “Tama,” p. 316) and needs a specific study. In the closely related language Mararit, it seems reduplication, which is cross-linguistically a very common way to form verbal plurals, is used (El-Nazir, Major Word Categories in Mararit, p. 55). In Ama, the same suffix -īd̪ì (see exx. 21–22) is used for plurality of participants and plurality of events. ↩︎

  68. Thompson, “Nera,” p. 491. ↩︎

  69. Several cases of “fossilized” suffix -k are attested in Meroitic, in which basic verb has disappeared whereas the form with -k has been preserved, but has lost its pluractional meaning. Examples are the verbs erik- “beget” and probably tk- “love” or “revere” in Amni-tke-l “beloved of Amun” (Rilly, Le méroïtique et sa famille linguistique, pp. 90–91). The former verb is still attested in Ajang (Kordofan Nubian) in both its forms: ír-í “give birth,” pluractional ír-k-í “give birth to one child after the other” (Jakobi, Kordofan Nubian, p. 114). The second might be an assimilated form /takk/- of *tar-k-, cf. Old Nubian ⲧⲁⲣⲟⲩ-, ⲧⲁⲣⲓ- “praise, bless,” Tama tár- “love.” ↩︎

  70. In (36), “their” refers to the women and the men, who are quoted in the previous sentence. One may wonder whether the term apote, which is borrowed from Egyptian wpwtj, “envoy, ambassador,” does not mean something like “tribal chief” in this particular context. ↩︎

  71. Dimmendaal, “Tama,” p. 130. ↩︎

  72. Rilly, Le méroïtique et sa famille linguistique, p. 373. ↩︎

  73. Ibid., pp. 303–304. ↩︎

  74. Ibid., p. 329, n. 4. ↩︎

  75. Ibid., p. 456, no. 72. ↩︎

  76. Ibid., p. 523, no. 190 ↩︎

  77. For this ruler, see FHN II, pp. 293–296. The name is known in Egyptian transcription only (first line of (38)), since the Meroitic script was invented only three centuries later. ↩︎

  78. In the inscriptions of the temple of Apedemak in Naga, the verbal form lbxte “give them” is attested in REM 0003, where the beneficiary is the sole queen and in REM 0004, where it is the king alone. In her publication of these texts, Karola Zibelius (Die Löwentempel van Naq‘a in der Butana (Sudan). IV, pp. 45–52) explains this plural form as an iterative. However, at this time (mid-1st c. CE), the verbal plural suffix -bx was already specialized to exclusively mark the object plurality. It never occurs in benedictions involving a single person, where only lxte is used at least since the 2nd c. BCE (REM 1044A, REM 1151). The plural marker in REM 0003 and 0004 refers to the three members of the royal family, who constitute an indissoluble trinity, even when the queen and the king are figured alone (cf. ex. 31 above). ↩︎

  79. Example from Van Gerven Oei, A Reference Grammar of Old Nubian, §8.3.2.2. ↩︎

  80. Van Gerven Oei & El-Guzuuli, The Miracle of Saint Mina, p. 99. He later refers to the same suffix as “pluractional” (Van Gerven Oei, A Reference Grammar of Old Nubian, §13.1.) ↩︎

  81. See Rilly, La langue du royaume de Méroé, pp. 171–172 (formula C’) and pp. 176–177 (formula J). ↩︎

  82. The two suffixes are therefore used at the same period, but a dialectal difference is possible, since the Meroitic scribes had a marked taste for variety and commonly used dialectal variants in the same text (cf. Rilly, La langue du royaume de Méroé, p. 42). ↩︎

  83. Rilly, Le méroïtique et sa famille linguistique, pp. 390–395. ↩︎

  84. Dimmendaal, “Tama,” pp. 323–328 after Bossong, “Differential Object Marking in Romance and Beyond.” ↩︎

  85. Rilly, Le méroïtique et sa famille linguistique, p. 394. ↩︎

  86. See for instance the speech of Amun-Re in Anlamani’s stela from Kawa (FHN I: pp. 217–218). ↩︎

  87. See Loprieno, “The King’s Novel” and Spalinger, “Königsnovelle and Performance.” For an annotated edition of the poem of Kadesh, see Kitchen, Ramesside Inscriptions Translated and Annotated: Notes and Comments, II. ↩︎

  88. Taharqo’s stelae, Kawa IV: ḥm=f with a long speech of the king in the 1st person (FHN I: pp. 135–145), Kawa V: ḥm=f, with a long narrative told by the king in the second half of the text (FHN I: pp. 145–158), Kawa VI: ḥm=f, with a long speech told by the king in the second half of the text (FHN I: pp. 164–176), Kawa VII: ḥm=f, with a speech told by the king in the second half of the text (FHN I: pp. 176–181); Anlamani’s stela, Kawa VIII: ḥm=f, but the raid against the Blemmyes uses the 3rd person plural (“soldiers”) because the king stayed in Napata (FHN I: pp. 216–228); Aspelta’s stelae from Jebel Barkal, Election stela: ḥm=f (FHN I: pp. 232–252), Banishment stela: ḥm=f (FHN I: pp. 252–258), Adoption stela (king hardly mentioned): ḥm=f (FHN I: pp. 259–268), stela for the mortuary cult of Prince Khaliut: ḥm=f (FHN I: pp. 268–279). ↩︎

  89. Cf. FHN II: p. 487 (l. 46), p. 488 (l. 50), p. 489 (l. 52), p. 490 (l. 54, 56), p. 491 (l. 60), p. 492 (l. 64). ↩︎

  90. FHN II: p. 475 (l. 4). This infringement of the Egyptian tradition puzzled the editor of the text, who appropriately translated “he says,” but erroneously corrected in n. 151: “For ‘I say’.” ↩︎

  91. Reading and translation by the author. See FHN II: p. 490 and Peust, Das Napatanische, pp. 42, 60, 64. ↩︎

  92. See FHN II: pp. 522–532. The stelae, which are in very bad state of preservation, are dated to the late 4th or the early 3rd c. ↩︎

  93. FHN III: pp. 1147–1153; Rilly, “Histoire du Soudan, des origines à la chute du sultanat Fung,” pp. 385–388. ↩︎

  94. Cf. Rilly, Le méroïtique et sa famille linguistique, pp. 74–80. ↩︎

  95. The word appears in REM 1003/14 and in graffito MS 57 from Musawwarat. Its translation is inferred from the context of these two occurrences and from the comparison with Andaandi daa “residence” and Nara dà “village.” See Rilly, “Graffiti for Gods and Kings.” ↩︎

  96. Griffith, “Meroitic Studies IV,” p. 167. Note that Griffith mistook the noun phrase ar-se-li “all the boys” for the verbal form he translated “enslaving,” which verb was actually tkk. ↩︎

  97. Hofmann, Material für eine meroitische Grammatik, pp. 294–297. For a critical review of her translation of ked, see Rilly, Le méroïtique et sa famille linguistique, pp. 76–78. ↩︎

  98. Millet, “The Kharamadoye Inscription,” p. 38. ↩︎

  99. Millet, “The Kharamandoye Inscription (MI 94) Revisited,” p. 67. ↩︎

  100. Wolfgang Schenkel, in his analysis of the verbal affixes in the Meroitic royal text (“Meroitisches und Barya-Verb”), assumes that -td is a durative suffix, which he compares with the durative ending -ter/-der in Nara. Note that this suffix is attested only in Reinisch’s description of the language, which used second-hand material and is not entirely reliable (Reinisch, Die Barea-Sprache, p. 57). Schenkel suggests that the suffix -to includes an aorist marker -t followed by a 1st person singular -o, with similar comparisons with Nara. For a critical review of his hypotheses, see Hofmann, Material für eine meroitische Grammatik, pp. 214–216. Note that the suffix -te in REM 0094 (also frequent with other verbs in REM 1003) is not identical with the 2nd person plural suffix of the optative, which is also written -te (see §⁄5.2 below). ↩︎

  101. This morpheme may be the same as the particle -wi that is added ad libitum to the singular copula -o (cf. Rilly, Le méroïtique et sa famille linguistique, p. 186). The consonant w- could be either an epenthetic glide inserted between o (pronounced /u/) and i, or a dummy sign used to write the hiatus /u/ + /i/ according to the rules of the alphasyllabic Meroitic writing system (Rilly, La langue du royaume de Méroé, pp. 294–295). ↩︎

  102. This is particularly true for the funerary texts. See Rilly, La langue du royaume de Méroé, pp. 202, 565. ↩︎

  103. Millet, “The Kharamandoye Inscription (MI 94) Revisited,” pp. 62, 70, considered this sequence a noun group yeto-l-xe “on (?) the river.” The variant yeto for ato “water” is, however, attested only in REM 0307. ↩︎

  104. See Rilly, La langue du royaume de Méroé, pp. 559–567. It accounts for 2% of the verbal forms used in the benedictions funerary texts according to Schenkel, “Zur Struktur des Verbalkomplexes in den Schlußformel der meroitischen Totentexte,” p. 8. ↩︎

  105. Rilly, La langue du royaume de Méroé, pp. 172–174. Only twenty occurrences are known so far. ↩︎

  106. The frequency of yi- is 6,2% according to Schenkel, “Zur Struktur des Verbalkomplexes in den Schlußformel der meroitischen Totentexte,” p. 8. For Nobiin ií-, more commonly used with a causative suffix in the compound ií-gìr, see Werner, Grammatik des Nobiin, p. 356. Note that “say” is frequently used as a light verb (but not as a causative auxiliary) in the languages of Sudan, regardless of the linguistic family. For Andaandi, see El-Guzuuli, “The Uses and Orthography of the Verb ‘Say’ in Andaandi”; for Ama, see Stevenson Grammar of the Nyimang Language, p. 147 (my copy of the manuscript, an annotated version transmitted by Roger Blench, has the light verb she on pp. 146–146a and 147. Page 146a is handwritten and the page numbers on p. 147 and 148 have been corrected manually) and Rilly, Le méroïtique et sa famille linguistique, p. 210; for Beja, see Vanhove, Le bedja, pp. 146–147. ↩︎

  107. See Haspelmath, “The Serial Verb Construction,” esp. pp. 409–411 (with possible exception in ex. 31, where two different subjects are found). ↩︎

  108. Rilly, Le méroïtique et sa famille linguistique, p. 496, no. 141. ↩︎

  109. Cf. Rilly, Le méroïtique et sa famille linguistique, pp. 467–468, no. 92. The Proto-Taman is curiously *wa, which can result from *o through vowel-breaking. The Proto-NES genitive of the 1sg pronoun seems to have been *on and might have triggered an analogical shift for the nominative in Proto-Taman. ↩︎

  110. Reconstructed *ay in Proto-Nubian according to Jakobi, “The Nubian Subject Pronouns,” tab. 2. The glide y, IPA [j], has no phonological status in Proto-Nubian according to my own research (Rilly, Le méroïtique et sa famille linguistique, p. 269). For this reason, I am inclined to reconstruct this word as vowels in hiatus. ↩︎

  111. In the Nara group, the ancient accusative form (with regular *-ga ending) of this pronoun has replaced the nominative when the distinction between both cases was lost: see Rilly, Le méroïtique et sa famille linguistique, p. 391 and n. 471. There is no way to know if the original nominative form was also *a-i↩︎

  112. In Meroitic, this particle is spelled -i in names of gods, for example Amn-i “Amun” or Atr-i “Hathor” and -ye in the names of people, for example Abrato-ye, name of a famous viceroy of Nubia. In Old Nubian, for example, Jesus is written ⲓ̈ⲏⲥⲟⲩⲥ-ⲓ. This particle may be connected to the Meroitic vocative ending -i: Wos-i “oh Isis!” ↩︎

  113. Fusion of two consecutive vowels into one. ↩︎

  114. For instance Karko ê “I” (Jakobi, Kordofan Nubian, p. 42) from Proto-Nubian *a-i. ↩︎

  115. Example (45) is based on Werner, Grammatik des Nobiin, p. 291. ↩︎

  116. These prefixes (where V stands for a variable vowel) are the same for the singular and plural persons. ↩︎

  117. The data are cited from the unpublished Tama grammar of Pierre Palayer. ↩︎

  118. In (49), the reading of the first signs was made possible thanks to excellent photos and interpretation by Gilda Ferrandino in her doctoral thesis, Studio dei testi reali meroitici, p. 65 and pl. 29.1. For the archaic sign conventionally transcribed H, see Rilly, La langue du royaume de Méroé, p. 353. In all likelihood, the form kbxte comes from kb-bx-te after haplography, as the object seems to be a plural and, accordingly, should be marked in the verb by the suffix bx.

    In (50), the word tdxsene includes the noun phrase t-dx- meaning “child (of a mother)” but the following sequence -se-ne is obscure. It ultimately might be a proper name, Tadakhesene, with an ending -ne that is common in the Meroitic personal names.

    Examples (51) and (52) differ only in the spellings of (y)emoqe “belongings (?)”and (e)qebese “their’.

    In (53), a direct genitive Aqtoye mtekdi 2 “the two daughters of Aqatoye” should be expected for unalienable possession (cf. Rilly, La langue du royaume de Méroé, pp. 525–527). However, the inscription REM 0094, engraved for the Blemmyan kinglet Khamaradoye after the fall of Meroe, is very late (c. 420 CE) and includes some strange features that could have resulted from language contact with Old Nubian and Blemmyan (Old Beja dialect), in which no distinction was made between alienable and unalienable possession (for Beja, see Vanhove, Le bedja, p. 40). ↩︎

  119. Rilly, La langue du royaume de Méroé, pp. 547–548. ↩︎

  120. Griffith, Karanòg, pp. 42–53; Hofmann, Material für eine meroitische Grammatik, pp. 198–200; synthesis in Rilly, La langue du royaume de Méroé, pp. 163–183 and Rilly, Le méroïtique et sa famille linguistique, pp. 68–74. A further type of benediction was used in a stela recently found in Sedeinga, Exc. No II S 055, cf. Rilly & Francigny, “Excavations of the French Archaeological Mission in Sedeinga, Campaign 2011,” pp. 70–71. It remains unattested elsewhere. ↩︎

  121. For benedictions A and B, see also (11)–(14) above. ↩︎

  122. In the Nubian group, for Nobiin: Werner, Grammatik des Nobiin, p. 145; for Andaandi: Armbruster, Dongolese Nubian, pp. 194–195; for Midob: Werner, Tìdn-áal, pp. 58–59. In the Nara group, for Higir: Thompson, “Nera,” p. 467; for Mogoreeb: Elsadig, Major Word Categories in Nara, p. 66. For Tama: Palayer’s unpublished grammar, §4.3; for Sungor: Lukas, “Die Sprache der Sungor in Wadai,” pp. 192, 198–199; for Mararit: El-Nazir, Major Word Categories in Mararit, pp. 57–58. For Ama: Stevenson, Grammar of the Nyimang Language, pp. 106, 110 and Stevenson, Rottland & Jakobi, “The Verb in Nyimang and Dinik,” p. 30; for Afitti: ibid., p. 33. In all these languages, the singular imperative is generally the simple stem of the verb. However, a suffix -i is found for some verbs in Nubian, Taman, and Nyima. Suppletive forms for basic verbs are attested in Nara, Taman, and Nyima. ↩︎

  123. The particle -se may have an emphatic role, such as donc in French dis-moi donc! or the use of the auxiliary do in the English counterpart do tell me!. The resulting verbal compound is pVsV-k(e)-te-se, often reduced to pVsV-k(e)-se with regressive assimilation (see (40) above); cf. Hintze, Beiträge zur meroitischen Grammatik, p. 75 and Rilly, La langue du royaume de Méroé, p. 563. ↩︎

  124. Van Gerven Oei, A Reference Grammar of Old Nubian, §4.2. ↩︎

  125. The verbal plural marker -bxe here appears as -b, without the objective case marker. See (43) and its comment above. ↩︎

  126. One clear example is REM 0380, an offering table from Shablul, where benediction B is written with final verb compound pisixrke. The form is complete, since it ends with a word divider, it is located in the middle of a line and followed by benediction C. Note that, in this inscription, benedictions A and C have regular optative forms in -kete. There may be more instances of 2pl imperative in the benedictions. In particular, it cannot be ruled out that all or part of the verbal compounds ending with -ke-se are not assimilated optative forms deriving from -ke-te-se, but imperative with plural suffix -ke followed by the emphatic particle -se (see n. 124). ↩︎

  127. Rilly, La langue du royaume de Méroé, p. 297. Another solution for the lack of plural marker -ke is again the principle of economy, which seems to play an important role in Meroitic, as in Tama (see n. 72). ↩︎

  128. Ibid., p. 93. ↩︎

  129. In the Meroitic private funerary iconography, the male counterpart to Isis is Anubis, or more rarely Thoth. The local names of these Egyptian gods are unknown. ↩︎

  130. Cf. Griffith, Karanòg, p. 48. The alternation -te/-to is apparently a phonetic, not morphological, feature. It also occurs in person names. Queen Amanishakheto’s name, for instance, is generally written (A)mnisxeto, but is spelled (A)mnisxete in REM 0706, 1055, 1293, and 1346. ↩︎

  131. Recall that the dental stop is a development of Proto-NES *g which is specific to the Nyima group. ↩︎

  132. Thompson, “Nera,” p. 487. ↩︎

  133. Elsadig, Major Word Categories in Nara, p. 66. ↩︎

  134. El-Nazir, Major Word Categories in Mararit, pp. 57–58 (version updated for tones, 2019). ↩︎

  135. Werner, Tìdn-áal, pp. 145–146. ↩︎

  136. Armbruster, Dongolese Nubian, pp. 194–195. ↩︎

  137. Van Gerven Oei, A Reference Grammar of Old Nubian, §10.1.5, Werner, Grammatik de Nobiin, pp. 145–146. ↩︎

  138. Van Gerven Oei, A Reference Grammar of Old Nubian, §10.1.6. ↩︎

  139. Rilly, Le méroïtique et sa famille linguistique, p. 230. ↩︎

  140. Gardiner, Egyptian Grammar, pp. 42, 121. ↩︎

  141. The complex distribution of roles in the last sentence, which includes the three grammatical persons together, is rare in this genre of Egyptian texts. Some mistakes in the use of the Egyptian personal suffixes are attested in late Napatan stelae written in poor Egyptian by local scribes. By contrast, the texts engraved in the temple of Mut were prepared by Egyptian scribes working for Taharqo during the heyday of the Kushite power. Consequently, the use of personal suffixes in (32) must be considered correct and deliberate. ↩︎

  142. The Meroitic postposition -se can be appended to the name of the giver in inscriptions found on funerary offerings. In this case, -se is best translated as “from”; see Rilly, “Les chouettes ont des oreilles,” pp. 489–491. ↩︎

  143. Rilly, Le méroïtique et sa famille linguistique, p. 519, no. 184 and p. 528, no. 200. ↩︎

  144. For conservative aspects in Birgid, see Rilly, Le méroïtique et sa famille linguistique, pp. 367–368. ↩︎

  145. Ibid., p. 383. ↩︎

  146. Ibid., p. 254. ↩︎

  147. The Old Nubian and Nobiin forms are reflexes of Proto-NES *mbar-e “spear.” The Birgid word is borrowed from Old Dongolawi *sibit, ultimately from Egyptian šf.t “knife,” probably through a still unattested Meroitic word. ↩︎

  148. “White” is in Old Nubian ⳟⲟⲩⲗⲟⲩ, Nobiin nùlù. The adjective ⲁ̄ⲇⲱ is an Old Dongolawi word used in an Old Nubian letter. The modern form which is given here, aro, is Mattokki–Andaandi. ↩︎

  149. The reflex /l/ in Birgid is unexpected. It could actually be a flap [ɾ], which is acoustically very close to [l] but is cross-linguistically a frequent allophone of /d/ in intervocalic position, particularly in American English. However, it was transcribed as l by both McMichael and Thelwall (cf. Rilly, Le méroïtique et sa famille linguistique, p. 425). Accordingly, the Midob form, which has an undisputable d, has been added here. ↩︎

  150. Rilly, Le méroïtique et sa famille linguistique, pp. 250–251 and n. 7. ↩︎

  151. Jakobi, “Verbal Number and Transitivity in Karko,” t. 5. ↩︎

  152. Ibid., pp. 367–368. ↩︎

  153. Rilly, Le méroïtique et sa famille linguistique, p. 18. ↩︎

  154. Rilly, La langue du royaume de Méroé, pp. 29–30, 289–291. ↩︎

  155. Rilly, Le méroïtique et sa famille linguistique, p. 389. The eastern branch comprises Meroitic, Nubian, and Nara (§⁄1). ↩︎

  156. This name occurs in the inscribed lintel II T 302 d2, found in 2017: see Rilly & Francigny, “Closer to the Ancestors,” p. 70. ↩︎

  157. Rilly, “Graffiti for Gods and Kings.”” ↩︎

  158. Nobiin íccí, Andaandi ecce-l. The verb pl(e)- “give, offer” is attested in the funerary bendiction D (Rilly, La langue du royaume de Méroé, p. 173). ↩︎

  159. Bashir, “Address and Reference Terms in Midob,” pp. 136–137. ↩︎

  160. Queen Amanirenas reigned around the end of the first c. BCE and the beginning of the first c. CE, Amanakhareqerema at the end of the first c. CE. For their reigns, see Rilly, “Histoire du Soudan, des origines à la chute du sultanat Fung,” pp. 242–252, 286–291 and Kuckertz, “Amanakhareqerema.” ↩︎

  161. Amanakh, written Amnx(e) or Mnx(e), was obviously a hypostasis of Amun, but his identity remains a mystery. The name is not dubious; it appears in the names of king Amanakhabale and of many princes and queens. However, it is never independently attested and no Egyptian parallel is known so far. ↩︎

  162. The absence of copula (final -o expected) or of any verb “to be” (stem ne-) is certainly puzzling, but as this is the first time a sentence with a probable second person subject pronoun is attested, one cannot expect to find the same syntactic features as in sentences where the subject is a 3rd person and not a pronoun. ↩︎

  163. Rilly, “Deux exemples de décrets amulétiques oraculaires en méroïtique” and La langue du royaume de Méroé, pp. 216–226. ↩︎

  164. The Old Nubian verb ⲁ̄ⲣⲟⲩ-ⲁⲅⲁⲣ “protect” is probably related to the Meroitic verb arohe, rather than borrowed, if the link suggested by Browne with ⲁ̄ⲣⲟⲩ “rain” is correct (Browne, Old Nubian Dictionary, p. 19). ↩︎

author⁄Russell Norton
article⁄Ama Verbs in Comparative Perspective
abstract⁄Ama verbs are comparable with Nubian and other related languages in their clause-final syntax, CVC root shape, and some affixes. However, there is also considerable innovation in adjoined relative clauses, a shift from number to aspect marking traced by T/K morphology, and other changes in the order and meaning of affixes. These developments show a unique trend of concretization of core clause constituents, and internal growth in the complexity of verbs in isolation from other languages. On the other hand, Ama’s stable distributive pluractional represents a wider Eastern Sudanic category. The late loss of pronominal subject marking supports a hypothesis that the Ama language was used for inter-group communication with Kordofan Nubians.
keywords⁄Ama, Northern East Sudanic, comparative linguistics, Nilo-Saharan, Nyimang, Afitti

1. Preliminaries

Ama is a Northern East Sudanic language spoken in villages to the west and north-west of Dilling, near to where Kordofan Nubian languages are spoken in the north-western Nuba Mountains. “Ama” (ámá “people”) is the self-designated name of the language community identified by the ISO639-3 code [nyi] and replaces the name “Nyimang” in older sources,1 as “Ama” is the name used in local literature in the language created over the last three decades. Nyimang is an altered form of “Nyima,” one of the mountains in the Ama homeland, which is now used as the name of the branch of Eastern Sudanic consisting of Ama [nyi] and Afitti [aft]. I will assume that Nyima is one of a group of four extant northern branches of the Eastern Sudanic family, the others being Nubian, the Nara language, and Taman.2

Ama examples unless otherwise stated are from the author’s fieldwork verified with leading Ama writers who oversee literacy in the language. For vowels, I distinguish five –ATR brassy vowels ɪɛaɔʊ and five +ATR breathy vowels ieəou, as represented fluently by Ama writers using five vowel letters {aeiou} and a saltillo {ꞌ} in breathy words. For tone, Ama’s nearest relative Afitti has been described as having two contrastive tone levels,3 but Ama has three levels, which play a role in the verb system as well as the wider lexicon as shown in Table 1.

kɛ́r “woman” nɪ́ “kill” fact ɕɪ́ɛ̄ “do” tr
kɛ̄r “crane” (bird sp.) nɪ̄ “kill” prog 3 ɕɪ̄ɛ̄ “say”
kɛ̀r “around” nɪ̀ “kill” prog 1/2 ɕɪ̀ɛ̄ “do” itr

Table 1: Level tone contrasts in Ama

A brief overview of Ama morphosyntax can be gained by locating it in the typology of Heine and Voßen,4 which assesses African languages on the presence of nominal classification, nominal case, and verbal derivation. In Ama, the role of nominal classification is limited due to a remarkable lack of nominal number affixes, although there is some differentiated grammatical behavior of rational nominals.5 However, case is extensive in Ama,6 as is typical of Nilo-Saharan verb-final languages,7 and likewise verbal derivation is extensive.

Feature Presence Categories
1. Nominal classification limited rational
2. Nominal case extensive accusative, dative, genitive, ablative, locatives
3. Verbal derivation extensive causative, applicative, reciprocal, directional

Table 2. Ama morphosyntax

In the remaining sections, we will examine Ama’s verb syntax (§⁄2), verb stems (§⁄3) and verb affixes (§⁄4) from a comparative perspective, followed by a conclusion (§⁄5).

2. The Syntax of Ama Verbs

Ama verbs follow a syntax that is partly familiar from other Nilo-Saharan languages. It has SOV word order, although as we shall see, Ama is not strictly verb-final. It also has coverbs that occur with an inflecting light verb. As in Tama,8 most Ama verbs take their own inflections but coverbs are also seen quite frequently. Many Ama coverbs fit Stevenson’s characterization that the coverb occurs before the light verb stem ɕɪɛ “do/say” and is either an ideophone (with marked phonology such as reduplication or non-mid tone) or a word marked by the suffix -ɛ̄n (typically a borrowed verb).9 The form of the Ama coverb suffix -ɛ̄n matches the Fur coverb suffix -ɛn ~ -ɛŋ.10 The transitivity of the predicate is distinguished in Ama by the tone on the light verb ɕɪ̀ɛ̄/ɕɪ́ɛ̄.

Intransitive coverbs Transitive coverbs
nʊ̄nʊ̄ɲ ɕɪ̀ɛ̄ “hop” díɟí ɕɪ́ɛ̄ “work”
ɟɪ̀ɟɪ̀ɡ ɕɪ̀ɛ̄ “speak angrily” ɟɛ̀rɟɛ̀r ɕɪ́ɛ̄ “scatter”
àɽɪ̀mɛ̀ ɕɪ̀ɛ̄ “be angry” t̪úūl ɕɪ́ɛ̄ “destroy”
ōlɡ-ēn ɕɪ̀ɛ̄ “cry” dɪ́ɡl-ɛ̄n ɕɪ́ɛ̄ “gather” (KN ɖigil)11
tɔ̄ɡl-ɛ̄n ɕɪ̀ɛ̄ “tie oneself” fɔ̄ɟ-ɛ̄n ɕɪ́ɛ̄ “make suffer”
sɛ̀ɡ-ɛ̄n ɕɪ̀ɛ̄ “complain” tɪ̄m-ɛ̄n ɕɪ́ɛ̄ “finish”
kɔ̄w-ɛ̄n ɕɪ́ɛ̄ “iron” (SA kowa)
rɛ̄kb-ɛ̄n ɕɪ́ɛ̄ “ride” (SA rikib)
mɪ̄skɪ̄l-ɛ̄n ɕɪ́ɛ̄ “give someone a missed call” (SA miskil)

Table 3. Ama coverbs

While Ama’s verb-final word order and use of coverbs are reminiscent of other Nilo-Saharan languages, relative clauses in Ama are of a globally rare type. Ama uses adjoined relative clauses at the end of the main clause, and these modify the last noun of the main clause.12

Ama
àɪ̀
1sg
bā
decl.ver
ìr-ò
elephant-acc
tɛ̀lɛ̄
see
[
(ɪ̀n)
3sg
kwārāŋ-àʊ̀
field-loc
túŋ
sleep:prog ]
“I definitely saw the elephant who was sleeping in a field.”
(1)
ābɪ̄dɪ̄-ʊ̄ŋ
God-gen
kwɛ̄ɪ̄
man
d̪ɛ̄
ev
ɪ̄rɪ̄d̪ā
message
wʊ̄ɔ̄
keep:prog
kɛ̄r-àʊ̀
girl (kɛ̄rà)-loc
[
yʊ̄sʊ̄f-ɪ̄l
Joseph-loc
tɪ̄ŋ-ɛ́ɪ́
choose-med ]
“An angel from God had a message for a girl who was engaged to Joseph.”
(2)

The adjoined relative clause strategy means that verbs tend not to occur in noun phrases in Ama, although for completeness we should observe that they are not entirely excluded. Since it is impossible to modify the subject of a transitive clause by an adjoined relative clause, as it is separated by another object or oblique noun, speakers consulted confirmed that it is grammatically acceptable to modify a subject noun by a progressive verb within the noun phrase as in (3), although they felt this is not used much, and I have not found examples in texts. However, verb participles marked by the suffix -ɔ̀ (or -ò by vowel harmony) also occur in noun phrases, including in texts as in (4) and (5).

Unmarked relative clause in subject noun phrase (elicited)
ìr
elephant
nɔ̄
this
[
mūɕ-èɡ
run-dir:prog ]
bā
decl.ver
āŋ
1sg.acc
t̪ɛ̀lɛ̄
see:fact
“This running elephant definitely saw me.”
(3)
Participial subject relative clause
ə́níŋè
when
[
wád̪à
word
kìr-d̪-ò
cut-pct-ptcp ]
wàá
people
ɕɪ̀ɽāɡɪ́d̪ɪ́
rule
wāɡ-áʊ́
keep-pst.prog
“When the judges (lit. ‘cut-word people’) were ruling,”
(4)
Participial object relative clause
mʊ̄rd̪à
horse
[
kʊ̄ɟɔ̄-ɔ̀
saddle-ptcp ]
d̪ɛ̄
ev
ŋáŋà
attention
túɽāk
warn:prog
“The saddled horse is warning, look out.”
(5)

Nevertheless, the adjoined relative clause strategy is an innovative feature of Ama that tends to place information about participants outside the noun phrase where they are mentioned. A similar distribution applies to the expression of number. Within the noun phrase, there are no number affixes, although there is a plural specifier ŋɪ̄ or ɡɪ̄ that can be used with rational nouns as seen in (6). Speakers consulted assess this specifier the same way as unmarked relative clauses within the noun phrase: acceptable, but not used much. However, Ama also has a post-verbal quantifier ɡàɪ̀ that can be used when there is a plural participant in the clause, as shown in (7).13

Plural noun phrase specifier (elicited)
ābā
father
dɪ̀à
big
ŋɪ̄
pl
“grandfathers”
(6)
Post-verbal plural quantifier
wàá
people
dū
top
fāɽāŋ
drum
fɪ̄l
dance:prog
ɡàɪ̀
pl
“The people were all dancing to a drum.”
(7)

We will return to this tendency to express relative clauses and number late in the clause after considering other evidence from verb stems.

3. Ama Verb Stems

Stevenson discovered the existence of two stems of each Ama verb.14 The forms of the two stems are not fully predictable from each other in general, and their usage depends on aspect.

3.1. The Factative–Progressive Distinction

The aspectual functions of the two stems were described by Stevenson as definite and indefinite aspect, and relabeled as perfective and imperfective by more recent authors. However, the usage of the former stem meets the definition of “factative,”15 such that it has a past perfective reading when used for an active verb like “eat,” but a present continuous reading when used for a stative verb like “know.” The other stem has a present progressive reading, which is marginal for stative verbs (as indicated by “?”) where the meaning contribution of progressive to an already continuous verb is highly marked.16 The factative–progressive analysis is helpful when we consider the history of these stems below.

active verb stative verb
fact t̪àl “ate” (past perf.) t̪ʊ̄-máɪ́ “know” (pres. cont.)
prog tām “is eating” ?máɪ́ “is knowing”

Table 4. Verb stems of active and stative verbs

3.2. Stem Formation and the Verb Root

Although factative aspect is broader in meaning and more heavily used in text, the progressive stem is generally more basic in form, often consisting only of the bare root. However, neither the factative stem nor the progressive stem is predictable from the other in general because: (i) factative stems belong to various theme vowel classes, and some belong to a class taking a formative prefix t̪V-; (ii) in some verbs the two stems have two different suppletive roots; and (iii) the progressive stems of some verbs require certain obligatory incorporated affixes. When the root is extracted from any additional formatives, CVC is the most frequent verb root shape.

fact prog Gloss morphology other than fact theme vowel
sāŋ-ɔ̄ sāŋ search
kɪ̄r-ɛ̄ kɪ̄r cut
wāɡ-ā wʊ̄ɔ̄ keep suppletive roots
t̪ī-ə̀ túŋ sleep suppletive roots
t̪áw-ɔ̄ ɡēd̪-ì cook suppletive roots, final -i required after
ɟɛ́ɡ-ɛ̄ ɟēɡ-īn leave s.th. applicative -(ī)n
á-bɪ̄ɽ-ɪ̄ŋ-ɔ̄ á-bɪ̄ɽ-ɪ̄ŋ invent causative á- and inchoative -ɪ̄ŋ
t̪ī-ŋīl-ē ŋɪ̄l laugh factative t̪V-
t̪ū-mūs-ò mús-èɡ run factative t̪V- ~ directional -èɡ
t̪ɪ́-ɡɛ̄l-ɛ̄ á-ɡɛ̄l wash causative-factative t̪V́- ~ causative á-
ɕɪ̀-ɛ̄ á-ɕɪ̄ do (intr.) causative á-

Table 5. Examples of verb stems

The CVC shape of verb roots is characteristic across Eastern Sudanic languages. In Gaahmg, for example, at least 90% of verb roots are CVC, whereas nouns are much more varied in shape.17 CVC is also the predominant shape in the following comparative data for verbs across Northern branches of Eastern Sudanic.18

Gloss Nubian Nara Taman Nyima Proto-NES
be *-a(n)/*-a-ɡV ne-/ge- pl *an-/*aɡ- *nV *(a)n/*(a)ɡ pl
burn *urr kál, war **wer *wul “boil” *wul, [*wel?]
buy *jaan tol ~ dol *tar *tol
come *taar til *or, pf *kun *t̪ar/*kud̪ *tar, [*kud?]
cut *mer ked *kid – (Ama kɪr) *kɛd
dance *baan bàl, bàr *bal/fal *bal
drink *nii l-, líí- *li – (Ama li) *li
eat *kal kal *ŋan *t̪al/*tam *kal/*kamb pl
give *tir (2/3), *deen (1) nin *ti(n) *t̪Vɡ, *t̪ɔ́ŋ (1) *te(n) [final C?], *den
look *ɡuuɲ *ɡun, pf *ɡud *t̪iɡol *guɲ [final C?]
love, want *doll, *oon sol – (Tama tar) – (Ama war) *tor
sit *ti(i)g/*te(e)g dengi, daŋŋi “wait” *juk *dɔɲ *daŋ
take, carry *aar *ar-i *-ur *ar
take, gather *dumm nem – (Tama tɔ-mɔɽ) – (Ama dum-) *dɔm
take, raise *eɲ hind *eɲ – (Ama ɲɔn “carry”) *meɲ ~ *ɲeɲ

Table 6. Verbs across Northern East Sudanic (NES)

3.3. T/K Morphology for Factative/Progressive

An alternation between t̪- and k- cuts into the characteristic CVC shape in one class of Ama verbs as a marker of aspect along with the theme vowel.

fact prog Gloss
t̪-ùɡ-è k-ūɡ build
t̪-īw-ò k-íw dig
t̪-ūɕ-ē k-úɕ-ín light (fire)

Table 7. T/K marking on Ama verbs

A longer list of examples of this alternation shown in Table 8 was documented by Stevenson, Rottland & Jakobi, albeit with a different standard of transcription; they also detected the alternation in Afitti (tosù/kosìl “suckle”; tòsù/kosìl “light fire”).19

fact prog Gloss
tuɡɛ̀ kwò build
tàiɔ̀ kaì chop
tìwò kìù dig
tìwò kèù fall (of rain)
twɛ̀ kwài rear, bring up
twèr kweàɡ grow itr
tɔwɛ̀ kwɔ̀i grow tr
tuwɛlɛ̀ kwɛlì guard
tuɡudò kwoɡidì mix up, tell lies
toromɔ̀ kwòròm gnaw
toso kwoʃì suck (milk, of baby)
tɔʃìɡ kwɔʃìɡ suckle
tosùn kwosùn burn itr
tuʃè kwuʃìn light fire
tɛ̀nɛ̀ kɛndìr climb
tɛnìɡ kɛndɛ̀ɡ mount

Table 8. More verbs with T/K marking

T and K are well-known markers of singular and plural in Nilo-Saharan languages,20 but in Ama and Afitti where there is no T/K morphology on the noun, essentially the same alternation (*t becomes dental in the Nyima branch)21 is found on the verb. It also cuts into the characteristic CVC verb root shape, implying that it is an innovation on the verb. I therefore propose that this class of verbs attests the Nyima cognate of the wider Nilo-Saharan T/K alternation. This entails a chain of events in which the T/K alternation first moved from the noun (singular/plural) to the verb (singulactional/pluractional), and then shifted in meaning from verbal number to verbal aspect (factative/progressive).

Both steps in this proposed chain are indeed plausible cross-linguistically. As to the first step, the possibility of nominal plural markers being extended to verbal pluractionals is familiar from Chadic languages, where the same formal strategies such as first-syllable reduplication or a-infixation may be found in plural nouns and pluractional verbs.22 In the Nyima languages, the productive innovation at this step appears to have been the extension of singulative T to a verbal singulactional marker. This is seen in the fact that t̪- alternates with other consonants as well as k in Ama (t̪ān-ɛ̄/wɛ̄n “talk,” t̪ɛ̀l-ɛ̄/wɛ̄ɛ́n “see,” t̪àl/tām “eat”), or is prefixed in front of the root (t̪ʊ́-wár-ɔ̄/wār “want,” t̪ī-ŋīl-ē/ŋɪ̄l “laugh,” t̪ì-fìl-è/fɪ̄l “dance,” t̪ū-mūs-ò/mús-èɡ “run,” t̪ʊ̄-máɪ́/máɪ́ “know,” t̪-īlm-ò/ɪ́lɪ́m “milk”). There is also external evidence from Nubian and Nara cited in Table 6 above that *k is the original initial consonant in *kal “eat” replaced by t̪- in Ama and Afitti.

As to the second step, the prospect of verbal number shifting to verbal aspect is supported by semantic affinity between pluractional and progressive. Progressive aspect often entails that a process that is iterated (“is coughing,” “is milking”) over the interval concerned.23 In Leggbo,24 a Niger-Congo language, the progressive form can have a pluractional reading in some verbs, and conversely, verbs that fail to form the regular progressive C# → CC-i because they already end in CCi can use the pluractional suffix -azi instead to express progressive aspect. In Spanish,25 a Romance language, there is a periphrastic paradigm between progressive (estar “be” + gerund), frequentative pluractional (andar “walk” + gerund), and incremental pluractional (ir “go” + gerund). The two Spanish pluractionals have been called “pseudo-progressives,” but conversely one could think of progressive aspect as pseudo-pluractional. What is somewhat surprising in Ama is that progressive stems, being morphologically more basic (see Table 5), lack any devoted progressive affixes that would have formerly served as pluractional markers.26 However, some progressive marking is found in irregular alternations that reveal former pluractional stems.

In t̪àl/tām “eat,” the final l/m alternation is unique to this item in available word lists, although l/n occurs elsewhere (kɪ́l/kín “hear,” t̪ɛ̀l-ɛ̄/wɛ̄ɛ́n “see”). The final l/m alternation is nevertheless also found in Afitti (t̪ə̀lɔ̀/tə̀m “eat”) and in Kordofan Nubian (*kol ~ kel/*kam “eat”).27 Kordofan Nubian *kam is used with a plural object, a pluractional function, so in the Nyima branch the proposed shift pluractional → progressive derives the progressive function of final m found in Ama, just as it does for the initial k in t̪/k alternations or the t in t̪àl/tām “eat.” Furthermore, a final plosive in Old Nubian (ⲕⲁⲡ-28; Nobiin kab-) suggests that the unique m in “eat” arose by assimilation of the final nasal (realized as n in the other Ama verbs mentioned) to a following *b, that was fully assimilated or incorporated in Old Nubian.

Seen in this light, the significance of moving T/K morphology onto verbs in the Nyima branch is that it renewed an existing system of irregular singulational/pluractional alternations. We then have a tangible account of where Ama’s missing noun morphology went, because formerly nominal morphology is found on the verb instead.

3.4. Concretization of Core Clause Constituents

We can also now tie together this finding with the findings on verb syntax in §⁄2. Both T/K number marking and relative clause modification have moved out of the noun phrase, and in these comparable changes we can observe a trend towards concretization of noun phrases, with number and clausal information about the participant being expressed later in the clause.

The trend towards concretization also affects the verb itself. T/K and other irregular stem alternations did not maintain their pluractional meaning, as this evolved into a more concrete construal of the predicate over an interval of time as progressive aspect. Since concretization affected the verb as well as noun phrases, it affected the entire core SOV clause, with plurality as well as relative clauses largely deferred to after the verb.

A role for concreteness in grammar was previously proposed in the Pirahã language of Brazil by Everett.29 Everett’s approach remains highly controversial,30 particularly, I believe, in its attempt to constrain grammar by culture directly in the form of a synchronic “Immediacy of Experience Constraint” on admissible sentence constructions and lexemes in Pirahã. My proposal here is deliberately less ambitious, appealing to concreteness as a diachronic trend in the Nyima branch, not as a constraint on the current synchronic grammar of Ama. Thus, Ama typically attests a separation between a concrete SOV clause and post-verbal modification, but this is not a strict division in the grammar, because it is not impossible to express number or relative clauses within the noun phrase, just infrequent. The concretization process in Ama must also have been specific enough not to have eliminated adjectives from the noun phrase. Ama has adjectives, as shown in examples (8)–(11), which occur as attributive modifiers of nouns in their unmarked form, whereas in predicates they are separated from the subject noun by a clause particle and occur as the complement of the inflecting copula verb nɛ̄. Ama adjectives include numerals and quantifiers, despite the limited role of number in the grammar.

kwɛ̄ɪ̄
man
tòɽū
tall
“tall man”
(8a)
kwɛ̄ɪ̄
man
decl
tòɽū
tall
nɛ̄
be
“The man is tall.”
(8b)
kwɛ̄ɪ̄
man
ɡɔ̀ɽɛ̀
old
“old man”
(9a)
kwɛ̄ɪ̄
man
decl
ɡɔ̀ɽɛ̀
tall
nɛ̄
be
“The man is old.”
(9b)
ŋɔ̄ɽɪ̄
day
mūl
five
“five days”
(10a)
ŋɔ̄ɽɪ̄
day
decl
mūl
five
nɛ̄-ɛ́d̪-ɪ̄
be-distr-th
“The days are five.” (“There are five days.”)
(10a)
wàá
people
kàdúùŋ
many
“many people”
(11a)
wàá
people
decl
kàdúùŋ
many
nɛ̄-ɛ́d̪-ɪ̄
be-distr-th
“The people are many.” (“There are many people.”)
(11b)

4. Ama Verbal affixes

Research over the past century has also been gradually clarifying the complex morphological system of Ama verbs.31 Factative and progressive aspect are distinguished in the affix system as well as in stems, and there is an evolving portfolio of pluractional affixes.

4.1. Affix Selection and Order

Some verbal affixes are selected depending on factative or progressive aspect in Ama, just as verb stems are. For example, different suffixes for past tense or for directional movement are selected in the different aspects:

Stem pst
fact t̪àl t̪àl-ʊ̀n
prog tām tām-áʊ́

Table 9a. Affix selection according to aspect: “eat”

Stem dir
fact dɪ̀ɟ-ɛ̄ dɪ̀ɟ-ɛ̄-ɡ
prog dɪ̄ɟ-ɪ̄ dīɟ-ír

Table 9b. Affix selection according to aspect: “throw”

The same is true of passive and ventive suffixes, but in factative aspect the suffixes replace the theme vowel, so that the affixes are the sole exponent of aspect in many verbs:

Stem pass
fact ásɪ̄d̪āy-ɛ̄ ásɪ̄d̪āy-áɪ́
prog ásɪ̄d̪āɪ̄ ásɪ̄d̪āy-àɡ

Table 10a. Affix selection as sole exponent of aspect: “paint”

Stem ven
fact ɪ̄r-ɛ̄ ɪ̄r-ɪ́ɪ̄ɡ
prog ɪ̄r ɪ̄r-ɪ́d̪ɛ̄ɛ̀ɡ

Table 10b. Affix selection as sole exponent of aspect: “send”

In passive and in past, affix order also varies according to aspect with respect to the dual suffix -ɛ̄n:

Stem du pass
fact ásɪ̄d̪āy-ɛ̄ ásɪ̄d̪āy-áy-ɛ̄n
prog ásɪ̄d̪āɪ̄ ásɪ̄d̪āy-ɛ̄n-àɡ

Table 11a. Affix order variation according to aspect: “paint”

Stem du pst
fact sāŋ-ɔ̄ sāŋ-ɛ̄n-ʊ̀n
prog sāŋ sāŋ-áw-ɛ̄n

Table 11b. Affix order variation according to aspect: “search”

The origin of this affix order variation is revealed by further evidence. Passive marking comes after dual in progressive aspect, whereas past marking comes after dual in factative aspect, but the common feature of both suffixes -àɡ, -ʊ̀n placed after the dual is that they both bear low tone. Two more suffixes with low tone, directional -ɛ̀ɡ ~ -ɡ (the second allomorph is toneless) and mediocausative -àw ~ -ɔ̀ (the second allomorph is used word-finally) appear after the dual, but if another low-tone suffix is added after the dual, they appear before the dual instead. Hence, there is only one more affix slot in Ama after the penultimate dual suffix.

Gloss throw throw to du elicit du
fact dɪ̀ɟ-ɛ̄-ɡ dɪ̀ɟ-ɪ́-n-ɪ̄ɡ kɪ́l-ɛ̄n-ɔ̀
throw-th-dir throw-ven-du-dir hear-du-medcaus
fact imp dɪ̀ɟ-ɛ̀ɡ-ɛ̄-ɪ̀ dɪ̀ɟ-ɪ́-ɡ-ɛ̄n-ɪ̀ kɪ́l-àw-ɛ̄n-ɪ̀
throw-dir-th-imp throw-ven-dir-du-imp hear-medcaus-du-imp
fact pst dɪ̀ɟ-ɛ̀ɡ-ɔ̄-ɔ̀n dɪ̀ɟ-ɪ́-ɡ-ɛ̄n-ʊ̀n kɪ́l-àw-ɛ̄n-ʊ̀n
throw-dir-th-pst throw-ven-dir-du-pst hear-medcaus-du-pst

Table 12. Inward displacement of suffixes by an imperative or past suffix

Both types of affix alternation in Tables 11 and 12 involve low-tone suffixes in the final slot. Therefore, the development of all affix order alternations can be attributed to a single historical shift of all low-tone suffixes to the final slot. However, this shift is not realized in verbs containing two low-tone suffixes, because only one of them can go in the final slot. The only final-slot suffix that does not alternate is the imperative -ɪ̀, which leaves imperative as original to the final slot. Other suffixes originate from more internal slots to the left of the dual.

As for the origin of affix selection according to aspect, this presumably arose as an extension of the systematic stem selection that occurs for every verb in Nyima languages. This question remains complex, however, because each of the categories affected (past, passive, directional, ventive) will have its own history as to how alternating affixes were acquired in these conditions. One modest proposal is that the NES plural copula *aɡ shown earlier in Table 6 is the likely source of the progressive passive suffix -àɡ in Ama,32 via the shift from pluractional to progressive (§⁄3.3), and by a plausible assumption of a transition in passive marking strategy from use of a copula to morphological marking on the verb. This sourcing does not extend to the other passive suffix in factative aspect -áɪ́, however, which does not resemble the singular copula *an. Some similar proposals that other progressive suffixes have pluractional origins are made in the course of §4.2 below.

4.2. Pluractional Affixes

Ama has extensions that fall within the family of pluractionals that associate plurality with the verb in different ways, that has emerged as an area of study in language description in recent years.33 These extensions are particularly comparable with Nubian and other related languages.

4.2.1. Distributive Pluractional

Ama has a distributive suffix -ɪ́d̪ that marks incremental distribution of an event over time or over participants (àɪ̀ bā fʊ̄rā mʊ̄l t̪àl-ɪ́d̪-ɛ̀ “I ate until I had eaten five rabbits,” wùd̪ēŋ bā dɔ̄rɛ̄ŋ t̪ɛ̀l-ɪ́d̪-ɛ̄ “The child saw each of the children”).34 Called “plural” in earlier works, it is remarkable that this category was largely unaffected by the shift of pluractional → progressive analyzed in §⁄3.3 above,35 indicating that we are dealing with two distinct pluractionals, a distributive pluractional and another former pluractional that is now progressive. Ama has a second distributive suffix -r used only on verbs with the theme vowel -a (wāɡ-ā “keep,” distributive wāɡ-ɪ́d̪-ā-r).36 Ama’s immediate relative Afitti has a “verbal plural” suffix -tər,37 which corresponds to Ama -ɪ́d̪ and -r combined, reminiscent of their use in that order in Ama on verbs with the theme vowel -a, but regularized to all verbs in Afitti. The Ama suffix -ɪ́d̪ also closely resembles a “plural action” suffix -(ɨ)t̪ in the nearby Eastern Sudanic language Temein,38 and a “plurality of action” suffix -íd in Midob.39 The distributive suffix -ij in Mattokki (Kunuz Nubian) is also similar.40

Distributive pluractionals are characterized by optionality with a plural participant (distributivity implies plurality but is distinct from it),41 which distinguishes them from plural-object pluractionals found in many Nubian languages that mark, and are thus obligatory with, plural objects.42 Distributives are also characterized by non-occurrence with dual participants (to be non-trivial, distribution requires at least three targets).43 The Ama distributive has the first property of optionality in transitive (but not intransitive) verbs, and the second property of non-duality with respect to subjects (but not objects).44 This second property is shared by the Afitti suffix -t(ə)r which likewise does not occur with dual subjects.45 This is shown in Afitti field data below,46 where the suffix -t(ə)r contrasts in this respect with plural pronominal affixes 1pl ko-, 2pl o-, and 3pl -i which do occur with dual subjects.

1 Gloss 2 Gloss 3 Gloss
ɡə́-ɡaɲal I milk é-ɡaɲal you sg milk kaɲál he/she milks
kó-ɡaɲal we du milk ó-ɡaɲál you du milk ɡaɲál-i they du milk
kó-ɡaɲa-tr̀ we pl milk ó-ɡaɲa-tr̀ you pl milk ɡaɲá-tər-i they pl milk

Table 13. Afitti pluractional -t(ə)r not used with dual subjects

Beyond the Nyima branch, the Temein “plural action” suffix -(ɨ)t̪ shares the first property of optionality as it “is by no means always added with plural objects.”47 It actually marks a distributive effect of the verb on the object (ŋɔŋɔt-ɨt̪-ɛ dʉk “I break the stick into pieces”), as also found with the Mattokki distributive suffix -ij (duɡuːɡ ɡull-ij-ossu ‘She threw the money here and there’).48 Information on non-occurrence with dual subjects is not reported in these languages, but it appears that this is because non-duality is a feature of incremental-distributive marking as found in Nyima, and not distributive-effect marking as found in Temein and Mattokki which can even occur with a singular object, as in the Temein example.

The confirmation of distributive markers across Nubian, Nyima, and Temein implies that a distributive pluractional was present in Eastern Sudanic from an early stage, with a form like *-id. In Nubian the consonant is palatal,49 and although palatals are a difficult area for establishing wider sound correspondences,50 the palatal arises in the plausible conditioning environment of a high front vowel.

4.2.2. Second Historic Pluractional

Ama’s second distributive suffix -r corresponds to the Nubian plural object marker *-er,51 and since this suffix is much less productive in Ama, it may well have been bleached of its original meaning. In the Kordofan Nubian language Uncu, the cognate extension -er has the same function as the irregular pluractional stem (kol/)kom “eat,” as both occur with plural objects.52 Similarly in Ama, some trills shown below occur in the same category as the irregular progressive stem (t̪àl/)tām “eat,” providing evidence that the trill originally marked the second Nyima pluractional that is now progressive.

The Ama suffix -ar can be added to a progressive verb as a mirative that marks unexpected events (swāy-ɔ́ “was cultivating” → swāy-ɔ̄r-ɔ́ “was unexpectedly cultivating,” where the vowel has harmonized to the following vowel). However, this suffix is also used to disambiguate progressive verb forms from otherwise indistinguishable factatives (sāŋ-ɛ̄n/sāŋ-ɛ̄n, sāŋ-ār-ɛ̄n “search du”),53 providing what looks like an alternate progressive stem to take the dual suffix. Similarly, the negative imperative construction in Ama requires a progressive stem with -ar after the negative particle fá as shown in Table 14 below. Inflections occurring in this construction are a plural subject marker à- on the particle, and dual or distributive marking on the verb. Only the dual suffix can occur without -ar, where in my data the dual suffix adds to the longer stem with -ar unless the short stem is suppletive (t̪ī-ə̀/túŋ “sleep,” t̪àl/tām “eat”) and can take the dual suffix without ambiguity with factative aspect.

sg du distr pl Gloss
fá kɪ̄r-ār à-fá kɪ̄r-ār-ɛ̄n à-fá kɪ̄r-ɪ́d̪-ār don’t be cutting!
fá sāŋ-ār à-fá sāŋ-ār-ɛ̄n à-fá sāŋ-ɪ́d̪-ār don’t be searching!
fá túŋ-ār à-fá túŋ-ɛ̄n à-fá túŋ-ɪ́d̪-ār don’t be sleeping!
fá tām-ār à-fá tām-ɛ̄n à-fá tām-ɪ́d̪-ār don’t be eatingǃ

Table 14. Ama negative imperative paradigms

Another trilled suffix -ir marks motion in progress.54 It can be added to a progressive verb (dɪ̄ɟɪ̄ “is throwing” → dīɟ-ír “is throwing (motion in progress)”), but on several motion verbs it is documented as part of the progressive stem, as in the examples in Table 15 below from Stevenson, Rottland, and Jakobi.55 The motion meaning of -ir simply agrees with the semantics of the roots, all of which define motion along some schematic scale, so that the aspectual meaning of -ir assumes greater significance. Hence, -ir approximates a progressive stem formative for this class of verbs. The final example in Table 15, due to Kingston,56 shows still another trilled suffix -or in the progressive stem of a caused motion verb.

fact prog Gloss
bwìɡ buɡìr overtake
nɪfɛ̀ɡ nɪfìr fall
tɛnɛ̀ kɛndìr climb
tɪjɛ jeìr shoot
ánasa ánasor take down

Table 15. Progressive stems ending in a trill

The trill thus fuses with certain vowels that behave like theme vowels for creating extended progressive stems. As a progressive element, the trill most probably derives from the shift of pluractional → progressive, identifying it as the missing extension of the second Nyima pluractional. We then have an Ama distributive pluractional suffix -ɪ́d̪ that resembles the Nubian distributive pluractional *-(i)ɟ, and Ama “pseudo-pluractional” progressive suffixes of the shape -Vr that resemble the Nubian plural-object pluractional *-er.

4.2.3. Innovative Dual-Participant Pluractional

A late addition to Ama’s pluractional portfolio is its unique dual suffix -ɛ̄n.57 The older form of the Ama dual suffix is -ɪn,58 which has been noted to resemble reciprocal suffixes in other Eastern Sudanic languages, such as Kordofan Nubian -in, Daju -din, Temein , and also Ik -in of the Kuliak group.59 In Ama, its function has evolved to dual reciprocal and other dual participant readings, so for example wʊ̀s-ɛ̄n “greet du” can refer to when two people greeted each other, or someone greeted two people, or two people greeted someone.60 The dual suffix is regularly used in Ama folktales to link two primary characters.61 Although such dual participant marking is extremely rare globally, it becomes possible in Nyima languages in particular where the incremental-distributive pluractional leaves a paradigmatic gap for dual subjects, as still seen in Afitti in Table 13 above, which Ama has filled in.

5. Conclusion: Ama as a Matured Northern East Sudanic Language

Ama verbs show a number of connections to Nubian and other Eastern Sudanic languages in their clause-final syntax, CVC root shape, and certain affixes. However, these connections are more in form than meaning, as the semantics is highly innovative in such notable shifts as plural → pluractional → progressive and reciprocal → dual, and in the drive towards concretization that has moved the expression of both relative clauses and number out of noun phrases to after the verb. In addition, the movement of low-tone suffixes to the final suffix slot, while itself a formal development, has further advanced the morphologization of aspect, so that stem selection, affix selection, and affix order all vary with aspect in Ama verbs. Next to these considerable changes, Ama’s stable distributive pluractional stands out as indicative of a wider Eastern Sudanic verbal category.

An explanation for the innovations found in Ama will not be found in influence from other languages of Sudan, because several of its innovations are extremely rare (adjoined relative clauses, dual verbal number, tone-driven affix order alternation). Instead of an influx of new forms, we have unusual internal evolution of existing forms, implying relative isolation. Ama then exemplifies what both Dahl and Trudgill call “mature phenomena,”62 found in languages of isolated small communities where the language has time to evolve based on an abundance of specific shared information in a closed society of intimates. Languages spoken by isolated societies of intimates are more likely to conventionalize complex morphological paradigms, unusual categories, and unusual syntax (maturation), whereas larger, multilingual social networks encourage simpler grammars in the sense of smaller paradigms, and pragmatically well-motivated categories and syntax that are found widely in language (pidginization). Aforementioned verbal features in Ama of dual number, irregular allomorphy (in suppletive roots and in the use of a second distributive suffix), fusion (in affixes like passive and ventive that mark aspect as well), polyfunctionality (of the progressive suffix -ar for mirativity or long stem formation), and multiple exponence (of aspect by stem selection, affix selection, and affix order), plus the unusual syntax of adjoined relative clauses, all look like mature language phenomena.63

Ama nominals, similarly, are known for their relatively rich case systems, but similar case paradigms are found in Nubian and other Northern East Sudanic languages, implying that the case system largely matured at an earlier stage and the resulting complexity is retained in all these languages. Thus, it is the verb system rather than the nominal system that provides evidence of maturation in the Nyima branch in particular.

The conclusion that Ama verbs (and post-verbal syntax) have matured as a result of Nyima’s isolated position, away from the river systems that hosted speakers of other languages in the Sudan region in the past, faces the possible difficulty that contacts have in fact been proposed between Nyima and other Nuba Mountain groups. Thus, it is proposed that the Niger-Congo Nuba Mountain group Heiban borrowed accusative marking and basic vocabulary from Nyima.64 Such contact would have put a brake on maturation in Nyima, because the use of proto-Nyima for inter-group communication between first-language Nyima users and second-language Heiban users would not have supported further growth in complexity.65 However, it is not realistic that such contacts lasted for a large proportion of Nyima history, but rather were fairly temporary periods punctuating Nyima’s longer isolation. Thus, the Heiban group has now developed separately in the eastern Nuba Mountains for something approaching two millennia (given the internal diversity of the ten Heiban languages found there) since its contact with Nyima.

Some time after the contact with Heiban, Rottland and Jakobi note the likelihood of contact of Kordofan Nubian with Ama and Afitti in the north-west Nuba Mountains before the arrival of Arabic as a lingua franca in the Nuba Mountains.66 Ama and Afitti are more lexically divergent than Kordofan Nubian and therefore were probably already separate communities when the Kordofan Nubians arrived. However, the innovation of dual marking on Ama verbs in the period after separation from Afitti still shows the hallmarks of maturation. It adds an extremely rare category, increases the occurrence of morphologically complex verbs by using a verbal marker in dual participant contexts that were not previously marked, and adds redundancy when agreeing with noun phrases containing two referents. This mature feature of Ama again suggests that any language contact with Kordofan Nubian occurred for only part of the time since Ama separated from Afitti.

This period nevertheless also reveals one significant example of simplification in Ama verbs that supports the idea that language contact occurred. Afitti has pronominal subject markers on the verb, seen earlier in Table 13, which are absent in Ama. The pronominal prefixes are not the same in form as personal pronoun words in Afitti (1sg oi but 1sg prefix kə-),67 therefore they are not incorporated versions of the current pronoun words, but rather predate them. Some of the Afitti pronoun words (1sg oi, 2sg i)68 are similar to Ama (1sg àɪ̀, 2sg ) and must be retentions from proto-Nyima, hence the older pronominal prefixes must also be retentions in Afitti, but lost in Ama. Their loss in Ama is remarkable against the larger trend of growth in complexity of Ama verbs that we have examined in this paper. The predicted cause of this surprising reversal is pidginization under contact. That is, their loss is evidence that the Ama language was used for inter-group communication, presumably with the Kordofan Nubians, during which (and for which) Ama SOV sentences were simplified by dropping verbal subject marking. If Kordofan Nubians spoke Ama, then borrowing from Ama into Kordofan Nubian is also likely. In verbs, the obvious candidate for borrowing into Kordofan Nubian is the reciprocal suffix -in, as this is not attested elsewhere in Nubian.69 The following two-step scenario would then account for the facts: Ama was learned and used by Kordofan Nubians, during which Ama dropped verbal subject marking and its reciprocal suffix was borrowed into Kordofan Nubian; next, Ama returned to isolation in which the reciprocal suffix developed its dual function that is unique to Ama today.

6. Abbreviations

  • 1, 2, 3 – 1st, 2nd, 3rd person;
  • acc – accusative;
  • decl – declarative;
  • dir – directional;
  • distr – distributive;
  • du – dual;
  • ev – event;
  • fact – factative;
  • gen – genitive;
  • imp – imperative;
  • itr – intransitive;
  • KN – Kordofan Nubian;
  • loc – locative;
  • med – mediopassive;
  • medcaus – mediocausative;
  • pass – passive;
  • pct – punctual;
  • pf – perfect;
  • pl – plural;
  • prog – progressive;
  • pst – past;
  • ptcp – participle;
  • SA – Sudanese Arabic;
  • sg – singular;
  • th – theme;
  • top – topic;
  • tr – transitive;
  • ven – ventive;
  • ver – veridical

7. Bibliography

Abdel-Hafiz, Ahmed. bib⁄A Reference Grammar of Kunuz Nubian. PhD Thesis. Buffalo: State University of New York, 1988.

Bryan, Margaret A. bib⁄“The T/K languages: A New Substratum.” Africa 29 (1959): pp. 1–21.

Comfort, Jade. bib⁄“Verbal Number in the Uncu Language (Kordofan Nubian).” Dotawo: A Journal of Nubian Studies 1 (2014): pp. 145–163. doi: www⁄10.5070/D61110032.

Corbett, Greville G. bib⁄Number. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000.

Dahl, Östen. bib⁄The Growth and Maintenance of Linguistic Complexity. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2004.

Dimmendaal, Gerrit. bib⁄“Africa’s Verb-Final Languages.” In A Linguistic Geography of Africa, edited by Bernd Heine and Derek Nurse. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008: pp. 272–308.

Dimmendaal, Gerrit. bib⁄“Introduction.” In Coding Participant Marking: Construction Types in Twelve African Languages, edited by Gerrit J. Dimmendaal. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2009: pp. 1–22.

Everett, Daniel. bib⁄“Cultural Constraints on Grammar and Cognition in Pirahã: Another Look at the Design Features of Human Language.” Current Anthropology 46, no. 4 (2005): pp. 621–646. doi: www⁄10.1086/431525.

Everett, Daniel. bib⁄“Pirahã Culture and Grammar: A Response to Some Criticisms.” Language 85, no. 2 (2009): pp. 405–442. doi: www⁄10.5070/D61110032.

Frajzyngier, Zygmunt. bib⁄“The Plural in Chadic.” In Papers in Chadic Linguistics, edited by Paul Newman & Roxana Ma Newman. Leiden: Afrika-Studiecentrum, 1977: pp. 37–56.

Gilley, Leoma G. bib⁄“Katcha Noun Morphology.” In Nuba Mountain Language Studies, edited by Thilo Schadeberg and Roger Blench. Cologne: Rüdiger Köppe, 2013: pp. 501–522.

Greenberg, Joseph. bib⁄The Languages of Africa. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1963.

Heine, Bernd & Rainer Voßen. “Sprachtypologie.” In Die Sprachen Afrikas, edited by Bernd Heine, Thilo Schadeberg, and Ekkehard Wolff. Hamburg: Helmut Buske, 1981: pp. 407–444.

Hyman, Larry & Imelda Udoh. bib⁄“Progressive Formation in Leggbo.” In Globalization and the Study of Languages in Africa, edited by Ozo-mekuri Ndimele. Port Harcourt: Grand Orbit Communications and Emhai Press, 2005: pp. 297–304.

Jakobi, Angelika. Kordofan Nubian: A Synchronic and Diachronic Study. Unpublished manuscript, 2013.

Kröger, Oliver. bib⁄“Typology Put to Practical Use: A Participatory Approach to Initial Grammar Research.” In Proceedings of the 6th World Congress of African Linguistics, Cologne 17–21 August 2009, edited by Matthias Brenzinger & Anne-Marie Fehn. Cologne: Rüdiger Köppe, 2012: pp. 155–168.

Laca, Brenda. bib⁄“Progressives, Pluractionals and the Domains of Aspect.” In Domaines, Journées d’Études linguistiques. Nantes: Université de Nantes, 2004: pp. 87–92.

Mufwene, Salikoko S. bib⁄Stativity and the Progressive. Bloomington: Indiana University Linguistics Club, 1984.

Nevins, Andrew, David Pesetsky & Cilene Rodrigues. bib⁄“Pirahã Exceptionality: A Reassessment.” Language 85, no. 2 (2009): pp. 355–404.

Newman, Paul. bib⁄“Pluractional Verbs: An Overview.” In Verbal Plurality and Distributivity, edited by Patricia Cabredo Hofherr and Brenda Laca. Berlin: de Gruyter, 2012: pp. 185–209.

Norton, Russell. bib⁄“Classifying the Non-Eastern-Sudanic Nuba Mountain Languages: Evidence from Pronoun Categories and Lexicostatistics.” In Nuba Mountain Language Studies: New Insights, edited by Gertrud Schneider-Blum, Birgit Hellwig and Gerrit Dimmendaal. Cologne: Rüdiger Köppe, 2019: pp. 417–446.

Norton, Russell. bib⁄“Number in Ama Verbs.” Occasional Papers in the Study of Sudanese Languages 10 (2012): 75–94.

Norton, Russell. bib⁄“The Ama Dual Suffix: An Internal Reconstruction.” In Nilo-Saharan: Models and Descriptions, edited by Angelika Mietzner & Anne Storch. Cologne: Rüdiger Köppe, 2015: pp. 113–122.

Rilly, Claude. bib⁄Le méroïtique et sa famille linguistique. Leuven: Peeters, 2010.

Rottland, Franz & Angelika Jakobi. bib⁄“Loan Word Evidence from the Nuba Mountains: Kordofan Nubian and the Nyimang Group.” Afrikanistische Arbeitspapiere, Sondernummer (1991): pp. 249–269.

Smits, Heleen. bib⁄A Grammar of Lumun: A Kordofanian Language of Sudan, Vol. 2 Utrecht: LOT, 2017.

Stevenson, Roland C. bib⁄“A Survey of the Phonetics and Grammatical Structures of the Nuba Mountain Languages, with Particular Reference to Otoro, Katcha and Nyimaŋ.” Afrika und Übersee 40 (1956): pp. 73–84, 93–115.

Stevenson, Roland C. bib⁄“A Survey of the Phonetics and Grammatical Structures of the Nuba Mountain Languages, with Particular Reference to Otoro, Katcha and Nyimaŋ.” Afrika und Übersee 41 (1957): pp. 27–65, 117–152, 171–196.

Stevenson, Roland. bib⁄Grammar of the Nyimang Language (Nuba Mountains). Unpublished typescript, 1938.

Stevenson, Roland, Franz Rottland & Angelika Jakobi. bib⁄“The Verb in Nyimang and Dinik.” Afrikanistiche Arbeitspapiere 32 (1992): pp. 5–64.

Stirtz, Timothy. bib⁄A Grammar of Gaahmg: A Nilo-Saharan Language of Sudan. Utrecht: LOT, 2011.

Trudgill, Peter. Sociolinguistic Typology: Social Determinants of Linguistic Complexity. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011.

Voogt, Alex de. bib⁄“A Sketch of Afitti Phonology.” Studies in African Linguistics 38, no. 1 (2009): pp. 35–52.

Voogt, Alex de. bib⁄“Dual Marking and Kinship Terms in Afitti.” Studies in Language 35, no. 4 (2011): pp. 898–911. doi: www⁄10.1075/sl.35.4.04dev.

Waag, Christine. bib⁄The Fur Verb and Its Context. Cologne: Rüdiger Köppe, 2010.

Welmers, William E. bib⁄African Language Structures. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973.

Werner, Roland. bib⁄Tìdn-áal: A Study of Midob (Darfur Nubian). Berlin: Dietrich Reimer, 1993.

Wolff, Ekkehard. bib⁄“Patterns in Chadic (and Afroasiatic?) Verb Base Formations.” In Papers in Chadic Linguistics, edited by Paul Newman & Roxana Ma Newman. Leiden: Afrika-Studiecentrum, 1977: pp. 199–233.


  1. Stevenson, Grammar of the Nyimang Language and “A survey of the phonetics and grammatical structure of the Nuba Mountain languages with particular reference to Otoro, Katcha and Nyimaŋ,” 40: p. 107. ↩︎

  2. Rilly, Le méroïtique et sa famille linguistique, §4. ↩︎

  3. De Voogt, “A Sketch of Afitti Phonology,” p. 47. ↩︎

  4. Heine & Voßen, “Sprachtypologie,” cited in Kröger, “Typology Put to Practical Use,” p. 159. ↩︎

  5. Norton, “Number in Ama verbs,” pp. 75⁠–⁠76, 85; Stevenson, “A Survey of the Phonetics and Grammatical Structure of the Nuba Mountain Languages,” 41: pp. 175⁠–1⁠76. ↩︎

  6. Stevenson, Grammar of the Nyimang Language, §§2–⁠10. ↩︎

  7. Dimmendaal, “Africa’s Verb-final Languages,” §9.2.3. ↩︎

  8. Dimmendaal, “Introduction” to Coding Participant Marking, pp. 6–7. ↩︎

  9. Stevenson, “A Survey of the Phonetics and Grammatical Structure of the Nuba Mountain Languages,” 41: p. 174. ↩︎

  10. Waag, The Fur Verb and Its Context, p. 49; low tone is unmarked in the Fur two-tone system. ↩︎

  11. Jakobi, Kordofan Nubian, p. 159. Her data from Kordofan Nubian varieties shows high tone. ↩︎

  12. Stevenson, Grammar of the Nyimang Language, p. 178, shows cleft constructions with a similar core+adjoined structure, wadang nɔ a nɛ [a meo tolun] “This is the man [I saw yesterday].” ↩︎

  13. Stevenson, Grammar of the Nyimang Language, p. 176, claims that “GAI gives the idea of completion, going on till an act is finished,” although all his examples involve a plural subject “they.” His claim suggests that this quantifier may have a collective function, over all participants and/or over all the stages in the completion of the event. It can nevertheless appear in the same clause as distributive marking -ɪ́d̪, as in an example shown in Norton, “Number in Ama verbs,” p. 83, wùd̪ēŋ bā dɔ̄rɛ̄ŋ t̪ɛ̀l-ɪ́d̪-ɛ̄ ɡàɪ̀ “the child saw each of the children [until she had seen them all].” ↩︎

  14. Stevenson, “A Survey of the Phonetics and Grammatical Structure of the Nuba Mountain Languages,” 41: p. 177. ↩︎

  15. Welmers, African Language Structures, pp. 346, 348. ↩︎

  16. Compare Mufwene, “Stativity and the Progressive,” where it is argued that progressive is a stativizing category in a number of European and Bantu languages, although progressive verb forms typically have a more transient interpretation, and lexical statives a more permanent interpretation. ↩︎

  17. Stirtz, A Grammar of Gaahmg, p. 40. ↩︎

  18. Rilly, Le méroïtique et sa famille linguistique, annex. ↩︎

  19. Stevenson, Rottland & Jakobi, “The Verb in Nyimang and Dinik,” p. 16. By convention, t is dental and mid tone is left unmarked in their data. Pertinent to the present alternation, I question the phonemic status of the w in t/kw alternations before rounded vowels. ↩︎

  20. Greenberg, The Languages of Africa, pp. 115, 132; Bryan, “The T/K Languages”; Gilley, “Katcha Noun Morphology,” §2.5, §3, §4; article⁄Blench, this issue↩︎

  21. Rilly, Le méroïtique et sa famille linguistique, p. 299. ↩︎

  22. Frajzyngier, “The Plural in Chadic”; Wolff, “Patterns in Chadic (and Afroasiatic?) Verb Base Formations.” ↩︎

  23. Newman, “Pluractional Verbs” notes a separate affinity between pluractional and habitual aspect found in Niger-Congo and Chadic languages. Smits, A Grammar of Lumun, Vol. 2, §13, identifies habitual pluractionals in a Niger-Congo language of the Nuba Mountains. ↩︎

  24. Hyman & Udoh, “Progressive Formation in Leggbo.” ↩︎

  25. Laca, “Progressives, Pluractionals and the Domains of Aspect.” ↩︎

  26. See, however, §4.2 below which purports to recover the missing extension. ↩︎

  27. Rilly, Le méroïtique et sa famille linguistique, p. 478. ↩︎

  28. Ibid; Old Nubian also attests the lateral in a hapax form ⲕⲁⲗ-. ↩︎

  29. Everett, “Cultural Constraints on Grammar and Cognition in Pirahã.” ↩︎

  30. Nevins, Pesetsky & Rodrigues, “Pirahã Exceptionality”; Everett, “Pirahã Culture and Grammar.” ↩︎

  31. Stevenson, Grammar of the Nyimang Language, §XI; Stevenson, “A Survey of the Phonetics and Grammatical Structure of the Nuba Mountain Languages,” 41: pp. 171–183; Stevenson, Rottland & Jakobi, “The Verb in Nyimang and Dinik"; Norton, “Number in Ama Verbs”; Norton, “The Ama Dual Suffix"; Norton, “Classifying the Non-Eastern-Sudanic Nuba Mountain Languages.” ↩︎

  32. The Tama plural copula àɡ is likewise listed with low tone in Rilly, Le méroïtique et sa famille linguistique, p. 451. ↩︎

  33. Newman, “Pluractional Verbs.” ↩︎

  34. Norton, “Number in Ama Verbs,” pp. 77, 83. ↩︎

  35. I say the distributive is “largely” unaffected by the shift from pluractional to progressive because a dental plosive appears to have been co-opted in the progressive ventive suffix, as in dɪ̀ɟ-ɪ́-n-ɪ̄ɡ/dɪ̀ɟ-ɪ́d̪-ɛ̄n-ɛ̀ɡ (throw-ven-du-dir) “threw to”/“is throwing to” as the dental plosive is the only difference with the factative ventive suffix -ɪ́↩︎

  36. Norton, “Number in Ama Verbs,” p. 81. ↩︎

  37. De Voogt, “Dual Marking and Kinship Terms in Afitti,” p. 903, which also shows a similar plural object suffix -to↩︎

  38. Stevenson, “A Survey of the Phonetics and Grammatical Structure of the Nuba Mountain Languages,” 41: p. 187, where ɨ is used in the same way as contemporary ɪ. Tone was not recorded. ↩︎

  39. Werner, Tìdn-áal, p. 52. ↩︎

  40. Abdel-Hafiz, A Reference Grammar of Kunuz Nubian, p. 117. Tone was not recorded. ↩︎

  41. Corbett, Number, p. 116. ↩︎

  42. article⁄Jakobi, this issue ↩︎

  43. Corbett, Number, pp. 115–116. ↩︎

  44. Norton, “Number in Ama Verbs,” pp. 78, 79, 91. ↩︎

  45. De Voogt, “Dual Marking and Kinship Terms in Afitti,” p. 903. ↩︎

  46. I am grateful to Alex de Voogt for sharing this data in personal communication from his field research on Afitti. ↩︎

  47. Stevenson, “A Survey of the Phonetics and Grammatical Structure of the Nuba Mountain Languages,” 41: p. 187. ↩︎

  48. Abdel-Hafiz, A Reference Grammar of Kunuz Nubian, p. 118. ↩︎

  49. article⁄Jakobi, this issue. Jakobi points that the other very similar suffix -íd in Midob cannot be reconstructed to proto-Nubian from just one Nubian language, so appears to be an innovation, and her observation of its similarity to the Ama suffix clearly suggests borrowing into Midob from Ama’s ancestor or another related language. Hence, the reconstructable pluractional *[i]ɟ is more viable as the historic cognate of the Ama suffix. ↩︎

  50. Rilly, Le méroïtique et sa famille linguistique, pp. 303–304. ↩︎

  51. article⁄Jakobi, this issue↩︎

  52. Comfort, “Verbal Number in the Uncu Language.” ↩︎

  53. Norton, “Number in Ama Verbs,” p. 40. ↩︎

  54. I defer description of tone on this affix to another time. ↩︎

  55. Stevenson, Rottland & Jakobi, “The Verb in Nyimang and Dinik.” ↩︎

  56. This verb appears in unpublished data collected by Abi Kingston. ↩︎

  57. Norton, “Number in Ama Verbs,” §3. ↩︎

  58. Stevenson, Rottland & Jakobi, “The Verb in Nyimang and Dinik,” p. 28. ↩︎

  59. Norton, “The Ama Dual Suffix,” p. 121. ↩︎

  60. Ibid., p. 120. ↩︎

  61. Norton, “Number in Ama Verbs,” pp. 84, 87. ↩︎

  62. Dahl, The Growth and Maintenance of Linguistic Complexity; Trudgill, Sociolinguistic Typology↩︎

  63. Maturity could also describe further properties of Ama verbs whose description is in preparation by the author, including further instances of allomorphy, fusion, polyfunctionality, and several kinds of tonal morphology. ↩︎

  64. Norton, “Classifying the Non-Eastern-Sudanic Nuba Mountain Languages.” ↩︎

  65. Stevenson, “A Survey of the Phonetics and Grammatical Structure of the Nuba Mountain Languages,” 41: p. 175, notes the similarity of Ama’s nominal plural ŋi to a similar plural clitic ŋi [sic] in Heiban, which here might be interpreted as a pidginization effect in which the universally well-motivated category of nominal plurality was renewed in Nyima during inter-group communication after the earlier loss of number affixes. However, Stevenson is unusually in error in this passage as the Heiban form is actually -ŋa as he himself documented (ibid, p. 28). Subsequent lowering to a in Heiban cannot be ruled out (he notes Heiban’s relative Talodi has ɛ here), but it is also quite possible that ŋi was sourced internally, as the high front vowel is also the common element in the plural pronouns ə̀ŋí/ɲí/ə̀ní 1pl/2pl/3pl). ↩︎

  66. Rottland & Jakobi, “Loan Word Evidence from the Nuba Mountains.” ↩︎

  67. Stevenson, Rottland & Jakobi, “The Verb in Nyimang and Dinik,” pp. 34–38. ↩︎

  68. Stevenson, “A Survey of the Phonetics and Grammatical Structure of the Nuba Mountain Languages,” 41: p. 177. ↩︎

  69. article⁄Jakobi, this issue↩︎

author⁄Angelika Jakobi
article⁄Nubian Verb Extensions and Some Nyima Correspondences
abstract⁄Having a historical-comparative approach this paper is concerned with the reconstruction of some Proto-Nubian derivational morphemes comprising two causatives, two applicatives, and two suffixes deriving verbal plural stems, as well as a now defunct causative prefix. When discussing applicatives in the Nile Nubian languages, it is argued that they involve converbs, i.e., dependent verbs, which in Old Nubian and Nobiin are marked by the suffix -a. This verbal suffix is considered to be distinct from the homophonous predicate marker -a which occurs as a clitic on various other hosts. The paper also points out that some of the Nubian verb extensions correspond to Nyima (mostly Ama) extensions, thus providing strong evidence of the genetic relationship between Nubian and Nyima. Perhaps the most striking evidence of Nubian–Ama relations and the coherence of the Nilo-Saharan phylum as a whole is provided by the archaic Nilo-Saharan *ɪ-. The reflexes of this prefix in Nubian and Ama, along with the archaic Nubian prefix *m-, which serves as verbal negation marker, supports Dimmendaal’s hypothesis that these languages have undergone a restructuring process from originally prefixing to predominantly suffixing languages.
keywords⁄Nubian, comparative linguistics, Nyima, Northern East Sudanic

1. Introduction

Since Greenberg’s classification of the African languages there is agreement that the Nubian languages belong to East Sudanic, the largest subgroup of the Nilo-Saharan phylum.1 According to Bender, Dimmendaal, and Blench, East Sudanic (also known as Eastern Sudanic) is divided into a northern and a southern branch.2 The northern branch comprises Nubian as well as the Taman languages of Darfur and Wadai, the Nyima languages3 of the Nuba Mountains, and Nara on the Sudanese–Eritrean border. Rilly, in his historical-comparative study, argues that the extinct language of the Meroitic Empire is also part of the northern branch.4 The southern branch consists of Berta, Jebel, Daju, Temeinian, Surmic, and Nilotic.5 This subclassification is, however, disputed. Ehret and Starostin, for instance, suggest that Ama (referred to by the term Nyimang) is genetically closer to Temeinian and hence part of the southern – rather than the northern – branch of East Sudanic.6

In contrast to Ehret’s and Starostin’s subgrouping, the present paper will provide evidence of some verb extensions shared by Nyima and the Nubian languages. They demonstrate the genetic links between these languages and therefore support Bender’s and Dimmendaal’s classification of Nyima as a member of the northern East Sudanic subgroup. Although Ehret, in his historical-comparative study of Nilo-Saharan languages, tries to identify verb extensions, too, his claimed reconstructions lack corroborating evidence because he does not provide contrastive examples of extended and unextended verb stems.7

According to Rilly, the Nubian language family has two main branches, Nile Nubian, and western Nubian.8 Nile Nubian comprises the medieval Old Nubian language as well as Nobiin (also known by the alternative names Mahas and Fadicca), Mattokki (Kunuz, Kunuzi, Kenzi), and Andaandi (Dongolese, Dongolawi). The western branch comprises the cluster of Kordofan Nubian languages spoken in the northern Nuba Mountains, as well as the Nubian languages of Darfur, Midob, and the nearly extinct Birgid (Fig. 1).

Family tree model of the Nubian languages

Figure 1. Family tree model of the Nubian languages9

Map 1 below shows the northern Nuba Mountains and the geographic distribution of the Nyima group languages, Ama, Mandal, and Afitti, and some neighboring Kordofan Nubian and non-Kordofan Nubian languages. Afitti is spoken on Jebel Dair in the northeastern Nuba Mountains. The Afitti area is adjacent to the area of Dair, a Kordofan Nubian language which occupies the southwestern part of Jebel Dair. By contrast, Ama and Mandal are spoken in the northwestern Nuba Mountains, close to the Kordofan Nubian languages Dilling, Karko, Wali, and Ghulfan.

The northern Nuba Mountains

Map 1. The northern Nuba Mountains10

Probably due to frequent contact between speakers of Nyima and speakers of Kordofan Nubian languages, there is some lexical evidence of sound–meaning correspondences between these languages. Considering i) the close phonetic similarities between the Ama, Mandal, and Afitti items on the one hand and Kordofan Nubian items on the other; and ii) the less close resemblance between Ama, Mandal, and Afitti and the corresponding Nile Nubian (NN) items, Rottland and Jakobi have interpreted this constellation as evidence of lexical borrowing, with Kordofan Nubian as the source of the borrowings.11 Table 1 and Table 2 illustrate this point: Table 1 shows that the phonetic similarities between the Ama and Mandal items and their Proto-Kordofan Nubian (PKN) counterparts are closer than those between Ama, Mandal, and the corresponding Nile Nubian items.

Ama Mandal PKN NN Gloss
burgɔ̀l “thief” borgòl “thief” *borg- maag- (An), mark- (No) steal
kwɔrʃè, kɔrʃè kwarʃè *korʃu gorij (An), gorjo (No) six
tājò tāj *tɛj(j)ɛ dessi (An, No) green, unripe

Table 1. Ama – Mandal – PKN correspondences12

Examples of the close sound and meaning correspondences between Afitti and Proto-Kordofan Nubian are shown in Table 2. Even though a specific Kordofan Nubian variety cannot be identified as the donor language, the obvious phonetic resemblances suggest that the lexical items in Afitti originate from a Kordofan Nubian, rather than from a Nile Nubian language.

Afitti PKN NN Gloss
tɔ̀rɛ *toaɽa norɛ (An), noree (No) termite
fàrsɛˑn, fàrsɛ *farʃ- barsi (An, No) twin
t̪ɔndɔˑ *tondo dungur (An), dungir (No) blind

Table 2. Afitti–PKN correspondences

The striking Ama and Afitti similarities with the corresponding Kordofan Nubian items also indicate that borrowing into the Nyima languages has occurred rather recently, after Kordofan Nubian had split off from the other branches of the Nubian family.

However, the correspondences between the verb extensions in Nubian and Ama (Table 3), which are the focus of this paper, suggest a different historical interpretation, namely as evidence of their remote genetic relationship. This assumption, which will be corroborated in detail below, is based on the correspondences between the Proto-Nubian causative *u- ~ o-prefix, which is comparable to the Ama causative a-prefix, and the Proto-Nubian causative suffix *-(i)gir, corresponding to the Ama directional/causative suffix -ɪg ~ -ɛg. In addition, there are two pairs of phonetically and semantically very similar verb extensions, which have a limited distribution in the Nubian group. They comprise the Kordofan Nubian reciprocal -in vs. the Ama dual -ɪn, as well as Midob -íd vs. Ama -ɪ́d̪. Another set of corresponding extensions (not shown in Table 3) includes the Kordofan Nubian and Midob verbal plural -er as well as the Mattokki and Andaandi plural object suffix -ir or -(i)r-ir and the Ama distributional suffix -r.

Nubian Ama
causative prefix PN *u- ~ o- causative prefix *a-
causative PN *-(i)g-ir directional, causative -ɪg, -ɛg
reciprocal KN -in dual -ɪn
pluractional Mi -íd distributive, pluractional -ɪ́d̪

Table 3. Comparable Nubian and Ama verb extensions

Presumably, the Ama inceptive -ɪŋ13 is cognate with the Nubian inchoative morphemes which comprise Old Nubian -ⲁⳟ,14 Nobiin -aŋ,15 Mattokki and Andaandi -an,16 as well as Dilling -ŋ.17 The inchoative -an of the Nilotic languages Bari and Lotuko is obviously related, as well.18 As these suffixes mainly derive verbs from qualifiers and nouns, rather than from verbal bases, they are excluded from further consideration in the present paper.

Reconstructable lexical and grammatical items are indicators of a normal generational transmission.19 They are often conceived as indicators of a continuous divergent development from the assumed proto-language to its daughter languages, the gradual divergence being depicted with a family tree model. However, such tree diagrams can account neither for diffusion or convergence between genetically related languages, nor for language contact that may have induced changes such as borrowings and other instances of interference. Evidence of contact-induced changes calls for a historical interpretation and for the identification of the donor language,20 as illustrated by the Ama and Afitti lexical items adopted from Kordofan Nubian (Tables 1 and 2). Another case in point is the so-called pre-Nile Nubian substrate. It comprises several basic lexical items in Old Nubian and Nobiin which do not have cognates in the other Nubian languages. Rilly supposes that they originate from other northern East Sudanic languages.21

Evidence of the genetic relationship among the Nubian languages has mostly been provided by comparing lexical data.22 In their historical-comparative studies, Zyhlarz, Bechhaus-Gerst, Jakobi, and Rilly have mainly focused on the reconstruction of Proto-Nubian lexical items and the phoneme system.23 So far, grammatical morphemes, particularly verb extensions, have not been considered in these studies, although such bound morphemes are generally assumed to be better indicators of genetic coherence.

According to Dimmendaal, “[v]erbal derivation in the Nilo-Saharan languages commonly involves valency-changing operations such as causative, middle voice, antipassive, or pluractional and ventive marking.”24 However, the Nubian languages deviate from this pattern since dedicated markers for middle voice, antipassive, or ventive are unattested.

The present paper will show in detail that Proto-Nubian had seven verbal derivational devices: two causative suffixes (§⁄2.1 and §⁄2.2); two applicatives (§⁄3.3 to §⁄3.5); two verbal number suffixes (§⁄4.1 and §⁄4.2); and a causative prefix (§⁄5). The section on the applicatives (§⁄3) is extensive because it will show that two donative verbs can be used as independent lexical verbs and also as valency-increasing devices. I will argue that applicatives in the Nile Nubian languages are realized as converb constructions rather than as derivational suffixes, the latter being attested in the western branch of the Nubian family.

Whereas the derivational devices which are found in both branches of the Nubian language group can be reconstructed for Proto-Nubian, there are further verb extensions with a more limited distribution. The Nile Nubian languages, for instance, have passive extensions (§⁄6.1); Mattokki and Andaandi exhibit a plural object extension (§⁄6.2); and a plural stem extension is attested in Kordofan Nubian and Midob (§⁄6.3). A reciprocal suffix (§⁄6.4) as well as some plural stem extensions occur in Kordofan Nubian (§⁄6.5). Kordofan Nubian and Midob, meanwhile, exhibit a valency-decreasing suffix (§⁄6.6). Moreover, in Midob a distinct pluractional extension is found (§⁄6.7).

Ama, too, has a rather rich inventory of derivational extensions.25 It has suffixes for passive, ventive, directional/causative (§⁄5.2); mediocausative, reciprocal, distributive (§⁄6.3); pluractional; and dual (§⁄6.4). In addition, Ama has a causative prefix (§⁄5.2). The range of Afitti verb extensions, however, is still little known.

The Ama data are drawn from Stevenson’s survey of the Nuba Mountain languages, Tucker & Bryan’s grammatical sketch of the Nyima group, which is based on Stevenson’s fieldwork data, and additional work by Rottland, Jakobi, Stevenson, and Norton.26

The Old Nubian data mostly come from the legend of Saint Mina but also from a few other sources quoted from Van Gerven Oei’s forthcoming comprehensive Old Nubian grammar.27

Due to their poor documentation, the nearly extinct Birgid language of Darfur and the extinct Nubian language of Jebel Haraza are not considered in the present contribution.

2. The Causative

A causative extension is a valency-increasing morphological device adding an argument with the role of causer to an intransitive or transitive clause. When the causative extension is suffixed to an intransitive verb base, it derives a transitive stem, the former intransitive subject being assigned the role of causer. When the causative suffix is attached to a transitive base, it derives a ditransitive verb. While the former transitive subject is assigned the role of causee, the former transitive object retains the role of patient. In the Nubian languages, the causative extension on a transitive verb base allows two object arguments, as shown in (7), (46), and (50).

2.1. The Causative *-(i)r-Extension

The *-(i)r-extension has reflexes in all Nubian languages considered in this study. However, there is ample evidence that, due to semantic bleaching, the assumed original causative function has faded away, so that reflexes of the *-(i)r-extension have become redundant or lexicalized features of many verbs. In the Kordofan Nubian languages, by contrast, the *-(i)r-extension has gained new functions, as it serves as intransitivizer and even as singular stem marker.

The initial segment of the *-(i)r-extension is an epenthetic vowel, which is required to prevent unadmitted consonant sequences when *-(i)r is attached to a consonant-final root.

PN ON No Ma An Dil Ta Ka Mi
*-(i)r -(ⲁ)ⲣ, -ⲣ̄, -(ⲟⲩ)ⲣ -ir -ir, -ur -ir, -ur -ir -ir -(V)r -(i)r

Table 4. The causative extension *-(i)r

The Old Nubian -(i)r-extension has two variants, -ar and -ur, which are often conditioned by anticipatory assimilation to the quality of the preceding vowel(s) of the root. The extension can attach to nouns and verbs. In combination with a noun the extension derives transitive verbs.28

Old Nubian Nouns Verbs
(1) ⲟⲩⲗⲅ “ear” ⲟⲩⲗⲅ-ⲣ̄ “listen”
(2) ⲕⲓⲧⲧ “garment” ⲕⲓⲧ-ⲣ̄ “clothe”
(3) ⲥⲟⲩⲙⲡⲟⲩⲧ “foundation” ⲥⲟⲩⲙⲡⲟⲩⲧ-ⲣ̄ “found”

Although Van Gerven Oei conceives -(i)r as a “transitive” suffix which is used “to make an intransitive verb transitive,”29 -(i)r can be shown to add an argument with the role of causer to the base verb. Moreover, it is not restricted to intransitive verbs but also found on transitive bases such as ⲟⲟⲕ and ⲕⲟⲩⲗⲗ deriving ditransitive stems. For this reason, -(i)r behaves like a typical causative extension and should be referred to by the term causative.

(4) ⲡⲁⲗ “come out” itr ⲡⲉⲗ-ⲣ̄ “release” tr
(5) ⲟⲟⲕ “call” tr ⲟⲟⲕ-ⲣ̄ “cause to call” ditr, “have called”
(6) ⲕⲟⲩⲗⲗ “learn” tr ⲕⲟⲩⲗⲗ-ⲣ̄ “teach” ditr

The ditransitive construction derived by the causative -(i)r-extension on the verb ⲕⲟⲩⲗⲗ “learn” can be illustrated by the following example. Assigning the role of causer to the addressee of the request, the causative of the transitive verb allows two accusative-marked arguments, the first being assigned the role of causee and the second the role of patient.30

ⲁⲓ̈ⲕⲟⲛⲱ ϣⲟⲕⲕⲁ ⲕⲟⲩⲗⲗⲓⲣⲉⲥⲟ
ai-k-onō
1sg-acc-refl
šok-ka
book-acc
koull-ir-e-so
learn-caus-imp.2/3sg.pred-comm
“Teach me the book” (gr 2.4)
(7)

Browne points out that the “causative element may be weakened and become apparently redundant,”31 that is, some verbs can occur with or without the -(i)r-suffix without a change in their meaning.

The Nobiin -(i)r-extension can derive transitive and ditransitive stems when it attaches to intransitive and transitive bases, respectively.32

Nobiin
(8) karj-e “ripen” itr karj-ir-e “cook” tr
(9) naaf-e “be hidden” itr naaf-ir-e “hide” tr
(10) jad-e “suck” tr jad-ir-e “suckle” ditr

Werner does not comment on Lepsius’s data, nor does he provide evidence in his Nobiin grammar of such derived transitive and ditransitive verbs. However, his verb paradigms indicate that – unlike transitive verbs – intransitive verbs never take the -(i)r-extension in their unmarked 2sg imperative forms.33 The absence of -(i)r is, no doubt, due to the original restriction of -(i)r to transitive and ditransitive verbs.

(11) nèer “sleep!”
(12) àag “sit!”
(13) kîr “come!”
(14) júù “go!”
(15) fîyy “lie (down)!”

2sg imperative forms of transitive verbs, by contrast, can be assigned to two groups, a group characterized by the -(i)r-extension and another group which does not exhibit this extension.

(16) tìg-ìr “cover!”
(17) fáay-ìr “kill!”
(18) úkk-îr “listen!”
(19) dèg-îr “tie!”
(20) kàb “eat!”
(21) dòllì “love!”
(22) nàl “see!”
(23) êd “take!”

Apparently, having ceased to be a productive derivational morpheme, Nobiin -(i)r has become a morphological residue of the originally causative *-(i)r-extension. This process in which “a morpheme loses its grammatical-semantic contribution to a word but retains some remnant of its original form and thus becomes an indistinguishable part of a word’s phonological construction” can be described by Hopper’s term “demorphologization.”34

Unlike the Old Nubian and Nobiin -(i)r-extension, which can be attached to intransitive and transitive bases, the cognate Mattokki -(i)r is restricted to intransitive verb bases from which it derives transitive stems.35 The allomorph -ur of -(i)r is conditioned by lag assimilation triggered by the root vowel.

Mattokki
(24) arub “be folded up” itr arb-ir “fold up” tr
(25) urub “have a hole” itr urb-ur “make a hole” tr
(26) tag “be covered” itr tag-ir “cover, protect” tr

Abdel-Hafiz claims that Mattokki -(i)r is a “transitivizing suffix.”36 However, he overlooks the fact that it also occurs on some intransitive verbs such as “move down” and “fall,”37 without, however, turning them into transitive verbs. These examples suggest that the functional weight of the -(i)r-extension is low.

(27) dig-ir “fall”
(28) ʃug-ur “move down, descend”

It is conceivable that the loss of morphological meaning observed with -(i)r has triggered the emergence of a reduplicated causative extension which exhibits more phonological material and more functional weight than -(i)r. The resulting (unattested) -ir-ir-suffix has presumbably undergone a phonotactic change affecting the second component of this suffix. After the metathesis of the last two segments, the resulting suffix -ir-ri (allomorph -ur-ri) has come to be realized as [iddi] or [uddi]. Massenbach accounts for this reduplicated causative suffix in her Mattokki study (29)–(30), but in Abdel-Hafiz’s grammar it is not mentioned.38

essi
water
aa-was-in
prog-boil-neut.3sg
“the water is boiling”
(29)
essi=gi
water=acc
was-iddi
boil-caus
“boil the water!”
(30)

As in Mattokki, Andaandi ‑(i)r ~ ‑(u)r is attached to intransitive verb bases deriving transitive stems. Both the simple ‑(i)r ~ ‑(u)r and the reduplicated extension ‑iddi ~ ‑uddi are attested on these bases.39

Andaandi
(31) kuɲ “sink, get buried” itr kuɲ-ur “bury” tr
(32) aag “squat, sit” itr ag-iddi “cause to sit, seat” tr
(33) dab “disappear” itr dab-ir “cause to disappear” tr
tɛn
3sg.gen
dungi
money
dab-os-ko-n
disappear-pfv-pt-3sg
“his/her money has disappeared”
(34)
tokkon
proh
dungi=gi
money=acc
dab-ir-men
disappear-caus-neg
“don’t lose the money”
(35)

Regarding the ‑iddi ~ ‑uddi-extension, Armbruster claims that it is composed of ‑(i)r plus ‑d(i), the latter allegedly having a causative or intensive function.40 However, it is difficult to corroborate his assertion, since ‑d(i) is only found after consonants where [d] may originate from [r] assimilated to a preceding consonant. Moreover, the ‑(i)r-extension may trigger the same morphophonemic changes when it is followed by ‑r-i marking the neutral41 1sg form. Also this morpheme sequence is realized as [iddi], e.g., boog-ir-ri is realized as [boogiddi] “I pour.”42 This evidence supports the analysis of the causative ‑iddi-extension as originating from ‑ir-ir → -ir-ri → ‑iddi, that is, as a sequence of two ‑(i)r-morphemes. Here are two Andaandi examples attesting the causative ‑iddi ~ ‑uddi-extension.

(36) ʃug-ur “move down, descend” ʃug-uddi “cause to descend”
(37) bowwi “bathe” boww-iddi “cause to bathe”

In Kordofan Nubian, the ‑(i)r-extension has gained and lost functions. In Dilling, for instance, the ‑(i)r-suffix has – apart from its causative function – adopted the function of an intransitivizer, thus both changing the valency of a verb from intransitive to transitive and, vice versa, from transitive to intransitive.43

Dilling
(38) dwaj “spoil something” tr dwej-ir “spoil” itr
(39) kuj “hang” itr kuj-ir “hang up” tr, oj sg

Some transitive and intransitive verbs are always extended by the ‑(i)r-extension, thus suggesting that it has lost its valency-changing function. Noticing this loss, Kauczor refers to this extension by the German term “Stammverstärkung” – literally, “strengthening of the stem.”44

The corresponding Tagle extension is realized as [ir] after [+ATR] root vowel(s), and as [ɪr] after [–ATR] vowels. It appears to have lost its valency-changing function, too. This is indicated by two facts. First, on some intransitive verbs, ‑(i)r ~ ‑(ɪ)r may or may not be present, as shown by the following verbs in 2sg imperative form (marked by the final ‑i ~ ‑ɪ).45

Tagle
(40) ʃɔ̀k-ɪ̀ ~ ʃɔ̀k-ɪ̀r-ɪ̀ “rise!”
(41) dùʃ-ì ~ dùʃ-ìr-ì “come out (of the ground)!”
(42) ɛ̀ʃ-ɪ̀ ~ ɛ̀ʃ-ɪ́r-ɪ̀ “wake up!”

Second, Tagle ‑(i)r ~ ‑(ɪ)r is attested on some transitive verbs, but not as a causative suffix. Rather, it appears to have gained a new function in interacting with singular objects. Because of this function it contrasts with the ‑er ~ ‑ɛr-extension, which is sensitive to plural objects (see §⁄6.3).

(43) ūlt-ír-ì “breastfeed!” oj sg ūlt-ér-ì id. oj pl
(44) ùj-ír-ì “put down, lay down!” oj sg ùj-èr-í id. oj pl

This contrast of ‑(i)r ~ ‑(ɪ)r versus ‑er ~ ‑ɛr is attested by a few Tagle verbs only. It is more common in combination with ‑ig, forming the valency-increasing extensions ‑ɪg-ɪr ~ ‑ɪg-ɛr, as shown in §⁄2.2.

The Karko reflex of the causative *‑(i)r-extension has an unspecified vowel V which adopts the quality of the root vowel, as is common in Karko suffixes having a short vowel. The causative extension can therefore be represented as ‑(V)r. It has the same segmental structure as the plural stem extension ‑(V)r discussed in §⁄6.3 which precedes the causative suffix. In the following examples the object noun phrase ɕə̄kə̄l “gazelle” has the role of patient, occurring in singular form. Because of the generic reading of ɕə̄kə̄l, the verb requires to be realized by a plural stem.

Karko
ɕə̄kə̄l=ə́g
gazelle=acc
fɛ̄t̪-ɛ́r
hunt-plr
“hunt gazelle!”
(45)
gɔ̄
this
t̪ǒnd̪=òg
boy=acc
ɕə̄kə̄l=ə́g
gazelle=acc
fɛ̄t̪-r-ɛ́r
hunt-plr-caus
“make this boy hunt for gazelle!”
(46)

The causative *‑(i)r is reflected by the Midob ‑(i)r-extension. Werner provides two paired examples of ‑(i)r deriving transitive from intransitive examples.46

Midob
(47) tìmm-íhàm “we gathered” itr tìmm-ír-hàm “we gathered” tr
(48) pècc-ìhêm “I got up” itr pècc-ír-hèm “I woke (somebody) up” tr

In addition to deriving transitive from intransitive verbs, Midob ‑(i)r can derive ditransitive from transitive verbs. The extension ‑(i)r adds an additional argument with the role of causer and assigns the role of causee to the previous transitive subject. The patient role of the previous transitive object remains unchanged in the derived ditransitive clause. Note that the object arguments in the following two examples do not require to be overtly accusative-marked.47 This observation confirms Werner, who points out that syntactic objects in Midob are commonly unmarked for case.48

Midob
on
3sg
taa
road
pacc-ihum
deviate-prf.3sg
“s/he deviated from the road”
(49)
on
3sg
naa
3sg.acc
taa
road
pacc-ir-hum
deviate-caus-prf.3sg
“s/he made him deviate from the road”
(50)

In terms of its valency-increasing function, Midob ‑(i)r is comparable to the extension ‑ée-k ~ -èe-k (§⁄2.2).

2.2. The Causative *‑(i)gir-Extension

As suggested by the voiced or voiceless velar stop, [g] or [k] and the close phonological similarity among the causative morphemes displayed in Table 5, all Nubian languages considered in this paper have retained a reflex of the causative extension *-(i)gir. Presumably this extension originated from the lexical verb kir “make” which, due to grammaticalization, emerged as a valency-increasing auxiliary-like verb in a converb construction (attested in Nobiin), and finally as a causative derivational suffix on verbs. In the Kordofan Nubian languages and Midob *-(i)gir is re-analyzed as a complex morpheme. In Dilling and Tagle it has split up into two extensions which are sensitive to a singular and a plural object, respectively.

PN ON No Ma An
*‑(i)gir -ⲅ(ⲁ)ⲣ -kir, -in-kir -igir, -gid-di ‑(i)gir, -(i)n-gir
Dil Ta Ka Mi
-iir < -eg-ir oj.sg, -eer < -ig-er oj.pl -ɪg-ɪr oj.sg, -ɪg-ɛr oj.pl -ɛɛr < -ɛg-ɪr -ée-k, -èe-k

Table 5. The causative extension *-(i)gir

Old Nubian -ⲅ(ⲁ)ⲣ – alternatively spelled as -ⲅⲉⲣ -ⲅⲣ̄, -ⲓⲅⲣ̄, -ⲕⲁⲣ, and -ⲕⲣ̄ – can be attached to nominals and verbs. According to Van Gerven Oei, the Old Nubian causative -ⲅ(ⲁ)ⲣ developed from an auxiliary verb, which later turned into a derivational suffix.49

The following examples from Browne’s dictionary show that it derives transitive verb stems from an intransitive base, and ditransitive stems from a transitive base.50

Old Nubian
(51) ⲟⲕ, ⲱⲕ, ⲟⲅ “stand, be (over)” itr ⲟⲕ-ⲕⲁⲣ, ⲟⲕ-ⲕⲣ̄ “place over, attend” tr
(52) ⲡⲗ̄ⲗ “shine” itr ⲡⲗ̄ⲗ-ⲓⲅⲣ̄ “reveal, illumine” tr
(53) ⲓϭ, ⲉϭ “send, impel” tr ⲓϭ-ⲅⲣ̄ “cause to send” ditr

Browne points out that -(ⲁ)ⲣ (§⁄2.1) and -ⲅ-(ⲁ)ⲣ may occasionally interchange.51 This finding supports my claim that they have the same function.

(54) ⲧⲙ̄ⲙ-ⲁⲣ ~ ⲧⲙ̄ⲙ-ⲓⲅⲁⲣ “assemble”

In Nobiin, particularly in the Fadicca dialect, kir “make” is still used as an independent verb, as Reinisch points out.52 In addition, kir has undergone a grammaticalization process which has resulted in a causative construction comprising an uninflected lexical verb marked by the converb suffix ‑a followed by kir serving as an auxiliary (for converb constructions see §⁄3.2). This biverbal causative construction is very similar to the applicative construction in the Nile Nubian languages. The following examples are drawn from Reinisch.53

Nobiin
(55) kab “eat” kab-a kir “feed”
(56) junti “pregnant” junt-a kir “impregnate”

In the Nobiin variety documented by Werner, however, kìr is no longer part of a biverbal converb construction but rather a derivational suffix of the lexical verb root.54 The suffix ‑kèer results from ‑kir-ir, i.e., the fusion of the causative suffix ‑kir with the 1sg present tense55 suffix ‑ir.

ày
1sg
tàk=kà
3sg=acc
kàb-kèer
eat-caus.ind.prs.1sg
“I feed him,” lit. “I make him eat”
(57)

In addition to ‑kìr, Nobiin exhibits the complex causative extension ‑in-kir. The etymological origin of the component ‑in is debatable. Is it the linker ‑(i)n-, as Werner first assumed,56 or a cognate of the Old Nubian copula verb ⲉⲓⲛ (in), as he has recently proposed? Werner renders ‑in-kir as “let be” or “let happen” which fits well the semantic association of ‑in-kir with permission.57 By contrast, ‑kìr connotes with causation. This semantic distinction is confirmed by the Nobiin mother tongue speaker Isaameddiin Hasan.58

The inflectional suffix ‑kiss is due to anticipatory assimilation of the final consonant of ‑kir to the preterite suffix ‑s.

ày
1sg
tàk=kà
3sg=acc
nàl-ìnkìss
see-caus.ind.pt.1sg
“I caused him to see”
(58)

The Mattokki causative extensions ‑(i)gir, ‑kir, ‑giddi (< ‑gir-ri < ‑gir-ir), and ‑kiddi (< ‑kir-ri < ‑kir-ir) derive transitive stems from intransitive bases and ditransitive stems from transitive bases.

Mattokki
(59) boor “be destroyed” boor-kiddi “destroy”
(60) soll “hang” soll-igir “hang up”
(61) kuur “learn” kuur-kiddi “teach”

Here is a Mattokki example of kuur “learn” in a causative construction with two arguments, a 1sg causee and an assumed unexpressed pronominal patient.59

ter
3sg
ai=g
1sg=acc
aa-kuur-kiddi-mun-um
prog-learn-caus-neg-ind.pt.3sg
“he did not teach [it] to me,” lit. “he did not make me learn [it]”
(62)

The Andaandi causative suffix ‑(i)gir is, as Armbruster argues,60 morphologically composed of two morphemes, accusative marker ‑g (i.e., the “objective suffix” in Armbruster’s terms) and causative suffix ‑ir discussed in §⁄2.1.

However, the fact that the velar stop [g] appears even in the non-Nubian Ama causative suffixes ‑ɪg and ‑ɛg (see §⁄5.2) indicates that this stop should be identified with the causative, rather than with the accusative morpheme.

The ‑(i)gir-extension occurs on intransitive and transitive verb stems. It is also used on borrowings from Arabic, such as jammɛ in (65).61 This indicates that ‑(i)gir is highly productive.

Andaandi
(63) ɛɛʃ=ɛ62 “belch” ɛɛʃ=ɛ-gir “cause or allow to belch, play with food and drink”
(64) ulli “kindle” ull-igir “cause or allow to kindle”
(65) jamm=ɛ “come together, assemble” jamm=ɛ-gir “cause or allow to come together, assemble”

Besides attaching to verbal bases, Andaandi ‑(i)gir can attach to nominal bases, too. The resulting forms are transitive verb stems.

(66) fɛkka “change, small coin” (Arabic loan) fekka-gir “convert into change”
(67) dolli “deep” doll-igir “cause or allow to be or become deep, deepen”
(68) owwi “two” oww-igir “cause or allow to be or become two, double”

In addition to the ‑(i)gir-extension, Andaandi exhibits the complex causative extension ‑(i)n-gir, realized after a vowel as [ŋgir], after a consonant as [iŋgir]. It strongly resembles the Nobiin causative ‑in-kir. Armbruster proposes to parse ‑ŋ-gir into three morphemes ‑n-g-ir, comprising the 3rd person suffix ‑n of the subjunctive present tense, the accusative marker ‑g, and the causative suffix ‑ir.63 However, this morphological analysis is not convincing, particularly when the subject of the verb is a 2nd person addressee, as seen in the prohibitive and imperative examples below. Two alternative interpretations should be considered. Is ‑(i)n- to be identified with the linker tying the causative extension ‑(i)gir to the verb root? Or, as Werner has suggested for the Nobiin causative extension ‑in-kir,64 should we interpret ‑in as a cognate of the Old Nubian copula ⲉⲓⲛ (in)? In the latter case the causative ‑in-gir may be rendered by “let be, let happen.” This interpretation is supported by the notion of (negated) permission which is particularly apparent in (69).65

tokkon
proh
dab-iŋgir-men
get.lost-caus-neg
“don’t let it get lost!”
(69)
iig=ki
fire=acc
ull-iŋgir
light-caus
“cause him to light the fire!”
(70)

The Kordofan Nubian language Dilling has two causative extensions, ‑iir and ‑eer. According to Kauczor, the suffix ‑iir is a contracted realization of ‑ig-ir, cf. transitive ʃwak-iir “raise” and intransitive ʃwak-ir “rise.” The suffix ‑eer is either a contracted realization of ‑eg-ir or ‑ig-er. The first is attested on the derived transitive verb kok-eer “split,” while the latter occurs on the derived transitive verb with a plural object, duk-eer “bend.” Some transitive verbs extended by ‑eer do not have an intransitive stem. This is true for ʃah-eer “mend.”66

Dilling
(71) ʃwak-ir “rise” itr ʃwak-iir “raise”
(72) duk-ir “bow” itr duk-iir “bend” oj sg
duk-eer “bend” oj pl
(73) kok-er “split” itr kok-eer “split” tr
(74) ʃah-eer “mend” tr

Similar to Dilling, Tagle uses the causative extensions ‑ɪg-ɪr and ‑ɪg-ɛr, when referring to a singular and a plural object, respectively.

Tagle
(75) ɛ̀ʃ-ɪ̀ ~ ɛ̀ʃ-ɪ̀r-ɪ̀ “wake up” itr, imp 2sg
(76) ɛ́ʃ-ɪ́g-ɪ́r-ɪ̀ “wake up” tr, oj sg, imp 2sg
(77) ɛ́ʃ-ɪ́g-ɛ́r-ɪ̀ “wake up” tr, oj pl, imp 2sg

The causative function of Tagle ‑ɪ́g-ɪ́r and ‑ɪ́g-ɛ́r can be demonstrated by the following examples. Note that the abbreviations sg and pl are used for glossing the number of nominal elements (e.g., nouns, agreement markers on verbs), when glossing verbal number, however, the singular and plural stems are glossed by sng and plr.67

tɔ́ɔ́
up
ʃɔ̀k-ɪ̀r-ɪ̀
rise-sng-imp.2sg
“rise!”
(78)
ánná
2sg.gen
ʊ́r=gɪ́
head=acc
tɔ́ɔ́
up
ʃɔ́k-ɪ́g-ɪ́r-ɪ̀
raise-caus-sng-imp.2sg
“raise your head!”
(79)
ùníì=n
2pl.gen.people=gen
ʊ́r-ʌ́nɪ́=gɪ́
head-pl=acc
tɔ́ɔ́
up
ʃɔ́k-ɪ́g-ɛ́r-ɪ̀
raise-caus-plr-imp.2sg
“raise your people’s heads!”
(80)

The Karko extension ‑ɛɛr is only found on transitive verbs. It originates from ‑ɛg-ɪr, the intervocalic velar [g] is assumed to be deleted. The extension ‑ɛɛr often expresses single events, the morphologically unmarked stem, by contrast, conveys multiple events.

Karko
gɔ̄
this
hɔ̄ɔ́g
wood.acc
kák-ɛ̀ɛ́r
split-caus.sng
“split this [piece of] wood!”
(81)
hə̄r=ə́g
wood.pl=acc
kàk
split
“split the [pieces of] wood!”
(82)

Midob, too, has – besides the ‑(i)r-extension discussed in §⁄2.1 – another valency-increasing extension. With some verb bases it is realized as high tone ‑éek, with others as low tone ‑èek. Werner’s examples illustrate that ‑éek ~ ‑èek derives causative from transitive verb bases.68 The question whether it also derives transitive from intransitive bases has yet to be answered.

Midob
(83) ètt-ìhèm “I crossed” ètt-èek-ìhèm “I caused to cross”
(84) tèey-áhèm “I carried” tèey-éek-ìhêm “I caused to carry”
(85) ètt-áhèm “I bought” oj pl ètt-éek-ìhêm “I sold” oj pl

Midob ètt represents the plural stem of “buy,” it contrasts with the singular stem èed.69 As Midob nouns are not required to be marked for number,70 the plurality of the object is solely expressed by the plural stem ètt. Literally, the following example can be rendered as “I made him/her buy my goats,” that is, with an unexpressed pronominal causee.71

ə́j
1sg
ə́ən
1sg.gen
tér=g
goat=acc
ett-eek-ih-èm
buy.plr-caus-prf-1sg
“I sold my goats”
(86)

Whereas the causative extensions in the Nile Nubian and Kordofan Nubian languages obviously originate from the Proto-Nubian *‑(i)gir-extension, it is more difficult to show this for the Midob ‑éek ~ ‑èek. The presence of the voiceless velar [k] is a first indication of the etymological relationship to *‑(i)gir, since initial Proto-Nubian *g is regularly shifted to Midob k, as attested by *geel-e > kéelé “red”; *gorji > kórcí “six”; and *goj > kòcc “slaughter.”72 Furthermore, the long vowel of ‑éek ~ ‑èek is suspected to be a realization of *‑(i)r, because syllable-final *r is often deleted in Midob. Compare *juur > sóo “go, walk”; *weer > pèe “someone (indefinite pronoun)”; and *kir > ìi “come.” The lengthening of the ii-vowel in the last item, which also attests the regular loss of initial *k in Midob, is regarded to be a compensation for the lost *r. Compensatory lengthening does not occur in sóo and pèe because they have an originally long vowel.

As a result of the preceding considerations, the Midob causative suffix ‑éek ~ ‑èek is assumed to originate from a complex morpheme composed of *‑ir and *‑(i)g, that is, from a metathesized form of *‑(i)gir. The question what motivated this morphotactic change cannot be answered presently.

3. The Applicative

The applicative – more precisely, the benefactive applicative – is a valency-increasing morphological device which adds an object argument to the basic construction. This object argument is commonly assigned the role of beneficiary (or, depending on the semantics of the lexical verb, a semantically related role such as a recipient or addressee).

Applicative constructions in the Nubian languages are based on a grammaticalized verb “give.” In the Nile Nubian languages, the grammaticalization path has led to a periphrastic applicative construction, comprising a nonfinite lexical verb and a finite donative verb. In the western branch, by contrast, the grammaticalization process has gone further, because “give” has adopted the status of a derivational applicative extension. Both the Nile Nubian and the western Nubian applicative constructions are highly productive.

Before exploring these applicative constructions in more detail, we show in §⁄3.1 that most Nubian languages have two donative verbs serving as independent lexical verbs. In §⁄3.2 we introduce the concept of “converb,” as applicatives in the Nile Nubian languages can be identified as converb constructions, see §⁄3.3 and §⁄3.5.

3.1. Two Verbs for “give”

It is assumed that originally each of the Nubian languages considered in this paper had two donative verbs. Rilly reconstructed them as *tir and *deen.73 Differing in their deictic component, reflexes of *tir refer to a 2nd or 3rd person recipient, while reflexes of *deen are associated with a 1st person recipient. That is, *tir can be rendered as “give to other than the speaker(s)” and *deen as “give to the speaker(s).”

This distinction is still reflected in Nile Nubian. In the languages of the western branch, however, the system is more complex because of the morphological blending of the two donative verbs. The resulting new donative verb is employed in non-imperative applicative forms (§⁄3.4). In imperative applicative forms, by contrast, at least in Karko and Dilling, the two distinct donative verbs are used (see §⁄3.5).

Table 6 shows that the Kordofan Nubian languages exhibit some unexpected reflexes of *tir and *deen. Tagle and Karko tìì and tèn exhibit an initial alveolar stop. The realization of the initial consonant of Dilling tir and tin is not known, because the Dilling data are drawn from Kauczor’s grammar which fails to distinguish between dental and alveolar stops – although the phonemic opposition between the dental and alveolar place of articulation is a characteristic of the Kordofan Nubian languages. For this reason, we can only assume that the two donative verbs in Dilling have an initial alveolar stop t, just like the Karko items and the single Tagle “give” shown in Table 6.74

Proto-Nubian word-initial *t (as, for instance, in *toor “enter”; *tar “he, she”; *tossi-gu “three”75) is regularly reflected by a dental in the Kordofan Nubian languages. However, *tir “give” is unexpectedly reflected by Karko tìì, i.e., with an initial alveolar, rather than with the expected dental stop t̪. On the other hand, the shift of initial *d (as in *deen) to the Kordofan Nubian alveolar t is quite regular. It is also attested in reflexes of *duŋ(-ur) “blind”; *diji “five”; and *dii “die.” The fact that Karko tìì and tèn both exhibit an initial alveolar stop indicates the beginning of a morphological blending of the originally distinct donative verbs. This process of simplification is already completed in Tagle tí, suggesting the loss of the lexical and semantic contrast originally associated with the two verbs. As Tagle can neither be shown to be a reflex of *tir nor of *deen, it is considered to be the unpredictable outcome of that blending and simplification process.

In Table 6, the lexical items which are not regarded as reflexes of Proto-Nubian *tir are put in parentheses.

PN ON No Ma An Dil Ta Ka Mi
*tir ⲧⲣ, ⲧⲣ̄ tìr tir tir (tir)? () (tìì) tìr
*deen ⲇⲉⲛ, ⲇⲓⲛ dèen deen deen tin () tèn téen

Table 6. The two verbs for “give”

The Old Nubian reflexes of *tir and *deen are ⲧⲣ̄ (tir) and ⲇⲉⲛ (den), also spelled as ⲇⲓⲛ (din). As Proto-Nubian *deen is reflected by deen in Nobiin, Mattokki, and Andaandi, one would expect the ⲉ in Old Nubian ⲇⲉⲛ to represent a long vowel as well. However, as Old Nubian does not have a standardized orthography, long vowels are sometimes spelled by doubling the corresponding vowel character but often they are just written with a single vowel in the Old Nubian texts.76

Old Nubian
ⲧⲁⲕⲕⲁ ⳟⲟⲕ ⲧⲛ̄ⲛⲁⲥⲱ
tak=ka
3sg=acc
ŋok
glory
tin-na-sō
give>2/3-imp.2/3pl.pred-comm
“give him glory!”
(87)
ⲁⲓ̈ⲕⲁ ⳟⲟⲕⲟⲩ ⲇⲓⲛⲉⲥⲱ
ai=ka
1sg=acc
ŋokou
glory
din-e-sō
give>1-imp.2/3sg.pred-comm
“give me glory!”
(88)
Nobiin
tak=ka
3sg=acc
tir
give>2/3
“give him/her!”
(89)
ay=ga
1sg=acc
deen
give>1
“give me!”
(90)

In the following Matokki example tir is realized as [tij], because of the anticipatory assimilation of the root-final r to the following palatal j. The unexpressed 3pl pronominal recipient “(to) them” requires the pluractional -(i)j-extension combined with the plural object marker ‑ir or ‑(i)r-ir.77

Mattokki
ay
1sg
duguu=gi
money=acc
tij-j-ir-s-im
give>2/3-plact-ploj-pt2-1sg
“I gave them money”
(91)
kal
bread
toodek=ki
a.little.bit=acc
ay=gi
1sg=acc
deen
give>1
“give me a little bit of bread!”
(92)

The following Andaandi clause exhibits the plural object extension ‑ir being triggered by the plural referent of the direct object (theme). In the second example the plural referent of the indirect object (recipient) requires the pluractional -(i)j realized as [c] combined with the plural object extensions ‑(i)r-ir. The two examples also show that the position of the pronominal recipient may vary. In the first example the recipient precedes the theme, in the second example this sequence is reversed.78

Andaandi
tɛk=ki
3sg=acc
in-gu=gi
this-pl=acc
tir-ir
give>2/3-ploj
“give these (various things) to him/her!”
(93)
in=gi
this=acc
ar=gi
1pl=acc
deen-c-irir
give>1-plact-ploj
“give this to us!”
(94)

Dilling and Karko distinguish two donative verbs. As pointed out in the beginning of this section, Kauczor’s Dilling data do not account for the phonemic contrast between and t, therefore tir and tin are spelled with the same initial character. We assume, that – similar to Tagle and Karko – the initial segment in both verbs is an alveolar t. The final ‑en on the uninflected donative verbs can be identified as a purposive converb marker (see §⁄3.2).79

Dilling
a=g
2sg=acc
waltu
also
a=tir-en
2sg.acc=give>2/3-pcnv
kol-i-a
eat.sng-imp.2sg-q
“shall I give it also to you so that you eat it?”
(95)
o=g
1sg=acc
waltu
also
o=tin-en
1sg.acc=give>1-pcnv
kol-e-a
eat.sng-imp.1sg-q
“will you give it also to me so that I eat it?”
(96)

Tagle has lost the distinction between the two donative verbs, leaving a single donative verb, tí. In the following examples, refers to a 3rd person and a 1sg recipient. When exchanging the 1sg accusative clitic ò for 2sg à, the verb can be shown to refer to a 2nd person recipient, as well.

Tagle
ɪ́yɪ́=g
milk=acc
tí-m-ín
give-pst-3
“he gave him/them milk”
(97)
ɪ́yɪ́=g
milk=acc
ò=tí-m-ín
1sg.acc=give-pst-3
“he gave me milk”
(98)

Like Dilling but unlike Tagle, Karko exhibits two donative verbs, tìì (with an irregular alveolar t rather than the expected dental ) and tèn, respectively.

Karko
gɔ̄
this
t̪ēē=g
cow=acc
tìì
give>2/3
“give him this cow!”
(99)
íǐ(g)
1pl.incl.acc
t̪ēē
cow
tèn
give>1
“give us a cow!”
(100)

In Midob, the original distinction between the two donative verbs is retained as well, *tir being reflected by the low tone verb stem tìr “give to you/him/them” and *deen by the high tone verb stem téen “give to me/us.”80 Apparently, these stems undergo some alternations in their imperative forms, tìr being realized as tìd and téen as téèm. When they refer to a plural recipient, they require the plural stem extension -èr ~ -àr (§⁄6.3).

Midob
(101) tìd “give him!” téèm “give me!”
(102) tìr-èr “give them!” 2sg téén-àr “give us!”

Parallel to their continuous use as independent verbs, the two Nubian donative verbs have undergone grammaticalization associated with applicative constructions. In the course of this process they have lost their status as lexical verbs. Due to reanalysis they have gained the status of valency-increasing elements, either as derivational suffixes or as a kind of auxiliary in a biverbal converb construction.

3.2. Converb Constructions

Before embarking on a more detailed account of these applicative constructions in §⁄3.3, §⁄3.4, and §⁄3.5, the present rather extensive section aims at shedding more light on the properties of the nonfinite dependent verbs. Due to their restricted occurrence and specific functions, these verbs are identified as converbs. Whereas converbs in Andaandi and Mattokki are morphologically unmarked, Old Nubian and Nobiin exhibit an ‑a-suffix as converb marker. We claim that this suffix differs from the homophone “predicate marker” ‑a which is attested as a clitic in Old Nubian and Nobiin. According to Van Gerven Oei, Old Nubian ‑a can cliticize to various hosts, including i) nominal and verbal predicates in main clauses; ii) final clauses; iii) the element preceding a universal quantifier; and iv) names and kinship terms where ‑a is used as a vocative marker.81 A remnant of the Old Nubian predicate marker is also attested in Nobiin, where it serves as a copula.82

Previous scholars of Nile Nubian languages used various other terms for converbs, including “participle,”83 “adjunctive,”84 “verbum conjunctum,”85 “a-Form,”86 or “predicate marker.”87 Only in Hintze’s and Smagina’s studies does the term converb occur,88 apparently because these authors were acquainted with the concept of converb in Slavic, Turkish, and Mongolian studies.

Converbs are known from various verb-final languages of Eurasia and South America. However, according to Amha & Dimmendaal, converbs are also common in the Afroasiatic and Nilo-Saharan languages of northeastern Africa.89 In these languages, converbs share at least two typological features, one semantic and one morphological. Semantically, converbs can be used for “adverbial modification of manner” and also for combining “series of events usually anterior to or simultaneous with the event expressed by the main verb.”90 Amha & Dimmendaal also assert that converbs “are morphologically distinct from main verbs as well as dependent verb forms occurring in conditional, purposive, or reason clauses.” This latter claim, however, should be restricted to conditional and reason clauses because some languages – for instance Beria (Saharan),91 Dilling and Uncu (Kordofan Nubian)92 – have dedicated purposive converbs (cf. Dilling examples (95) and (96)). These converbs are morphologically distinct from converbs used for conjoining a series of events or for adverbial modification.

The characteristic semantic, syntactic, and morphological properties of converbs in the Nile Nubian languages are first illustrated by three Nobiin examples. The converbs in (103) express a series of events, each of the transitive converbs being preceded by its acc-marked object argument. The converb joog-j-a additionally has an ins-marked adjunct jaaw=log. Thus, the converb(s) and the finite main verb together with their arguments and adjuncts constitute a multiclausal construction.93

Nobiin
iiw=ga
cereals=acc
jaaw=log
mill=ins
joog-j-a
grind-plact-cnv
issee=g
dough=acc
att-oos-a
knead-pfv-cnv
ittir
side.dish
tan=ga
3sg.gen=acc
niff-oos-a
stir-pfv-cnv
aman
water
tan=ga
3sg.gen=acc
oll-ij-a
draw-plact-cnv
id=idan
man=com
jelli=laak
work=towards
sukk-oos-on
descend-pfv-pt.3sg
“she ground the cereals with the handmill, prepared the dough, stirred her side dish, drew her water, and went down to the work with the man”
(103)

The converb in (104) indicates an event prior to the event designated by the main verb.94

kaj-j-a
come.plr-plact-cnv
tal=lo
3sg=loc
juu-s-an
go-pt2-3pl
“having arrived they went to him/her”
(104)

In (105) the converb expresses an event which is simultaneous with the event designated by the main verb. In this latter case the converb can be interpreted as an adverbial modifier of the main verb.95

mir-a
run-cnv
kir-on
come-pt.3sg
“s/he came running”
(105)

In the Nile Nubian languages, converbs share the same subject with the main verb.96 Whereas main verbs are fully inflected, the range of inflectional morphemes on converbs is strongly restricted: they do not take tense, negation and cross-referencing subject markers. Derivational extensions and aspect markers, by contrast, do occur on converbs, as attested by the pluractional ‑(i)j on kaj-j-a in (104), and the perfective markers ‑ed and ‑os ~ ‑oos97 illustrated in (106).

Converb constructions and serial verb constructions resemble each other because in each of them the verbs combine as a single complex predicate. However, whereas serial verbs can serve as independent verbs in simple clauses (in the same form),98 this is not possible for converbs. Moreover, serial verbs “allow no markers of syntactic dependency on their components.”99 Converbs, in contrast, usually receive a dedicated converb marker, as attested by Old Nubian ‑ⲁ and the cognate Nobiin ‑a-suffix. Andaandi and Mattokki, however, do not exhibit a converb marker.100 Its absence is considered to result from loss and hence to be a secondary historical development. Except for the lack of a converb marker, Andaandi and Mattokki converbs behave like Old Nubian and Nobiin converbs.101

Andaandi
shay=gi
tea=acc
nii-ed
drink-pfv
bedd-os
pray-pfv
imbel
get.up
nog-ir-an
go-neut-3sg
“they drink tea, pray, get up, and leave”
(106)

When both the converb(s) and the main verb contribute equally to the semantic expression of events, as illustrated in (106), this type of complex predicate is conceived of as a symmetrical converb construction. It differs from an asymmetrical type which comprises a converb from an open class and a main verb from a closed class.102 These asymmetrical constructions result from specific syntactic constellations in which the converb and the main verb are immediately adjacent to each other. Such contiguous converb plus main verb sequences are subject to various grammaticalization processes in which the main verbs can turn into markers of aspect/modality, direction, or even valency change.103 The latter, i.e., the valency-changing use of asymmetrical converb constructions, is attested by the applicative constructions in the Nile Nubian languages – and even by some causative constructions, as seen in (55) and (56).

The stative aspect marker in Nobiin, for instance, is also associated with an asymmetrical converb construction (107). It results from the collocation of a lexical verb in converb form (V1) and a finite posture verb fìyyîr ~ fìir “lie” as V2. In this bipartite construction, the posture verb renders a stative reading to V1, depicting the eating as a transient state of affairs.104

Nobiin
V1
kàb-à
eat-cnv
V2
fìir
stat.1pl
“we are eating”
(107)

Similarly, in Mattokki105 and Andaandi, a motion verb realized by an unmarked converb (V1), plus a finite posture verb buu “lie, rest” (V2), is used to express a transient state of motion. Due to its grammaticalization as a stative marker, V2 has lost its status as a separable main verb. The question clitic te, for instance, cannot be inserted between V1 and V2.106

Andaandi
indo
here
V1
juu
move.along
V2
bun
stat.3sg
“s/he is on his way hither”
(108)

While the preceding Nobiin and Andaandi examples illustrate the grammaticalization of an asymmetric converb construction in which the main verb has turned into an aspect marker, the following examples show another type of asymmetric converb construction. It is associated with the collocation of transfer and directed motion verbs which jointly express single directed events.107

Nobiin
ay ed-a kiir > ay ed-kiir [ekkiir] “I bring it,” lit. “I take it and come”
(109)
ay ed-a juur > ay ed-juur [ejjuur] “I take it along,” lit. “I take it and go”
(110)

Andaandi, too, exhibits similar converb constructions expressing directed transfer events. The verbs involved in such a construction are often synonymous or nearly synonymous.108

Andaandi
(111) sukk undur “insert it!, squeeze it in!,” lit. “insert it and enter it!”
(112) kall undur “push it in!,” lit. “push it and enter it!”
(113) kall oos “push it out!,” lit. “push it and cause it to issue!”
(114) toll oos “pull it out!,” lit. “pull it and cause it to issue!”
(115) tolle dukki “pull it out!,” lit. “pull it and pull it out!”
(116) nog ju ind etta “go and bring it,” lit. “go and move along and take it up and bring it!”

In Mattokki, too, such transfer events are often expressed by more than one verb. When the derived transitive verb ʃuguddi “bring down,” for instance, is preceded by the converb uski “bear, give birth,” the resulting construction uski ʃuguddi expresses the single transfer event “give birth.”109 Abdel-Hafiz considers such biverbal converb constructions as compounds and consequently writes them as one word.110

Mattokki
wel
dog
katree=r
wall=loc
ekk-undur-s-u
urinate-insert-pt2-3sg
“the dog urinated on the wall”
(117)

At least in Andaandi, however, the clitic interrogative marker te can be inserted between the two verbs. This indicates that they are separate verbs rather than compounds.111

Andaandi
ekki=te
urinate=q
undur-ko-n
insert-pt1-3sg
“did he urinate on it?”
(118)

When a directed motion or transfer event is expressed by means of two verbs, of which V1 conveys the manner of movement and V2 the path or trajectory in relation to the deictic center, this construction represents a pattern typical of verb-framed languages where “manner must be expressed in some kind of subordinate element, such as a gerund or other adverbial expression,” as Slobin points out.112 In the Nile Nubian languages, the adverbial expression is represented by a converb.

Asymmetrical converb constructions can also become fixed collocations expressing a unique and often unpredictable meaning.113 This is illustrated by the following examples, which have become inseparable biverbal compounds.114

(119) dukk-undur “spread rumors!,” lit. “pull out and enter!”
(120) tull-undur “spread lies!,” lit. “blow (smoke) and enter!”

Such collocations and the grammaticalization of adjacent verbs are also manifested in asymmetric serial verb constructions, as Aikhenvald points out.115 For this reason, these features cannot be regarded as defining properties of converbs.

The syntactic, morphological, and semantic properties of converb constructions attested in the modern Nile Nubian languages are also apparent in Old Nubian whose converbs are marked by ‑ⲁ. The converb(s) and the main verb, along with their respective object complements and adjuncts, form multiclausal constructions which can express a series of events, as illustrated by ⲉⲛ⳿ⲉ̇ⲧ-ⲁ … ⲥⲟⲩⲕⲕ-ⲁ ⲕⲓⲥⲛⲁ in (121) and by ⳝⲟⲣ-ⲁ ⲕⲓ-ⲁ̄ … ⲕⲙ̄ⲙ-ⲁ⳿ ⲟ̄ⲟ̄ⲕⲣ̄ⲥⲛⲁ in (122).116

Old Nubian
ⲙⲁⲛ⳿ ⲉⲧ̄ⲧⲗ̄ⲗⲟⲛ ⲕⲟⲩⲙⲡⲟⲩⲕ⳿ ⲉⲛ⳿ⲉ̇ⲧⲁ ⲁ̄ⲙⲁⲛⲇⲟ⳿ ⲥⲟⲩⲕⲕⲁ ⲕⲓⲥⲛⲁ
man
that
eitt-il=lon
woman-det=top
koumpou=k
egg=acc
en-et-a
take-pfv-cnv
aman=do
water=sub
soukk-a
descend-cnv
kis-n-a
come.pt2-2/3sg-pred
“that woman took up the egg and went down to the water” (M 3.14–4.1)
(121)
ⳟⲥⲥⲟⲩ ⲙⲏⲛⲁⲉⲓⲟⲛ ⲙⲁⲛ ⲉⲧ̄ⲧⲛ̄ ⳟⲟⲅⲗⲟ ⳝⲟⲣⲁ ⲕⲓⲁ̄ ϣⲁⲁⲕⲕⲁ ⲕⲙ̄ⲙⲁ⳿ ⲟ̄ⲟ̄ⲕⲣ̄ⲥⲛⲁ·
ŋissou
Saint
mēna=eion
Mina=top
man
that
eitt=in
woman=gen
ŋog=lo
house=loc
jor-a
go-cnv
ki-a
come-cnv
ʃaak=ka
door=acc
kimm-a
hit-cnv
ook-ir-s-n-a
call-caus-pt2-2/3-pred
“And Saint Mena went to the house of that woman, knocked on the door and had her called.” (M 12.13–16)
(122)

A converb can also represent an event anterior to the event designated by the main verb, as illustrated by ⲟⲩⲕⲣⲓ ⲇⲓⲉ̇ⲅⲟⲩⲗ ⳟⲟⲕ-ⲁ ⳝⲟⲣⲟⲩⲁⲛⲛⲟⲛ … ⲕⲓⲥⲛⲁ in (123).

ⲟⲩⲕⲣⲓ ⲇⲓⲉ̇ⲅⲟⲩⲗ ⳟⲟⲕⲁ ⳝⲟⲣⲟⲩⲁⲛⲛⲟⲛ ⲫⲓⲗⲟⲝⲉⲛⲓⲧⲏⲛ ⲅⲁⲁⲇⲇⲱ ⲕⲓⲥⲛⲁ
oukr-i
day-pl
die-gou-l
be.much-pl-det
ŋok-a
pass-cnv
jor-ou-an=non
go-pt1-3pl=foc
philoxenitē=n
Philoxenite=gen
gaad=dō
shore=supe
ki-s-n-a
come-pt2-2/3sg-pred
“And after many days had gone by, he came to the shore of Philoxenite” (M 7.15–8.2)
(123)

When the converb expresses an event simultaneous with the event expressed by the main verb, it is used like an adverb of manner modifying the main verb, as shown by ⲇⲟⲕ‑ⲁ ⲕⲛ̄ in (124).

ⲙⲟⲩⲣⲧⲟⲩ ⳟⲟⲩⲗⲟⲩⲕⲁ⳿ ⲇⲟⲕⲁ ⲕⲛ̄
mourtou
horse
ŋoulou=ka
white=acc
dok-a
ride-cnv
kin
come.prs.2/3sg
“[… as] he came riding a white horse” (M 11.1)
(124)

Similar to the modern Nile Nubian languages, Old Nubian converbs do not take inflectional morphemes such as tense, negation, and subject markers. In fact, the variety of aspect and derivational extensions is strongly restricted. They comprise the perfective markers, ‑ⲉⲓⲧ ~ ‑ⲉⲧ as in (121) en-et-a and ‑ⲟⲥ in (125) aul‑os-ij-a, as well as the causative, as attested on (144) pill-igr-a, and the pluractional ‑j on (125) aul‑os-ij-a.117 These suffixes immediately precede the converb marker ‑ⲁ. However, in comparison to the modern Nile Nubian languages where ‑os ~ ‑oos is frequently found with converbs – as seen in (103) and (106) – the Old Nubian perfective marker ‑ⲟⲥ appears to be rather rare. Moreover, it is often attested being followed by the pluractional extension ‑j. In the modern Nile Nubian languages, by contrast, the pluractional ‑(i)j precedes ‑os ~ ‑oos, as in (161) gull‑ij‑os-s-u. These findings show that the position of ‑ⲟⲥ is not yet firmly established in the Old Nubian grammatical system. They support Van Gerven Oei’s hypothesis that ‑ⲟⲥ and ‑ⲉⲓⲧ ~ ‑ⲉⲧ are newly developed perfective markers in Old Nubian.118

ⲥ̄ⲧⲁⲩⲣⲟⲥⲟⲩ ⳟⲟⲕⲕⲟⲛⲁ ⲧⲱⲉⲕ ⲧⲉⲕⲕⲁ ⲁⲩⲗⲟⲥⲓⳝ[ⲁ̄]· ⳟⲁⲗⲓ̈ⳝⲟⲩⲁⲇⲇⲛ[ⲁ]ⲉⲛⲕⲱ
istaurosou
cross
ŋok-ko=na
glory-adj=gen
tōek-∅
power-nom
tek=ka
3pl=acc
aul-os-ij-a
save-pfv-plact-cnv
ŋal-ijou-ad-d-n-a-enkō
save-plact-inten-prs-2/3sg-pred-but
“but (the) power of the glorious cross will save and rescue them” (St 15.1–9)
(125)

Asymmetric converb constructions in Old Nubian often involve two contiguous motion or transfer verbs. These collocations serve to express single directed events, as shown by (121) ⲥⲟⲩⲕⲕⲁ ⲕⲓⲥⲛⲁ “descend” plus “come,” i.e., “go down to” or (122) ⳝⲟⲣⲁ ⲕⲓⲁ̄ “go” plus “come,” i.e., “go to.” Collocations of two nearly synonymous verbs can even turn into compound verb stems in which the converb marker is deleted.119

ⲕⲉⲛ-ⲇⲟⲩⲕⲕ “present an offering” ← ⲕⲉⲛ “place” + ⲇⲟⲩⲕⲕ “worship” (M 6.5)
(126)
ⲕⲉⲛ-ⲟⲩⲧⲟⲩⲣ “deposit” ← ⲕⲉⲛ “place” + ⲟⲩⲧⲟⲩⲣ “lay” (M 6.15)
(127)

Now, after having described the morphological, syntactic, and semantic properties of Nile Nubian converb constructions and after identifying the Old Nubian verbal suffix ‑ⲁ and its cognate, Nobiin ‑a, as dedicated converb markers, we will finally turn towards the applicative in the Nile Nubian and western Nubian languages.

3.3. The Applicative Based on *tir

While Nile Nubian languages and Midob employ reflexes of *tir in their applicative constructions, the Kordofan Nubian languages employ a new donative verb. As this verb is not a regular reflex of *tir, it is not accounted for in this section but rather in §⁄3.4.

Nile Nubian applicatives are encoded by bipartite converb constructions, including a converb, which contributes to the lexical expression of the event, and an inflected donative verb as a marker of increased valence. In the western Nubian languages, however, the donative verb is a derivational extension which attaches to the stem of the lexical verb by means of the linker -(i)n, see Midob in Table 7 and examples of Kordofan Nubian in §⁄3.4. Whereas the Midob applicative extension -(i)n-tir can license a 1st, 2nd, or 3rd person beneficiary, the Nile Nubian applicative based on *tir is restricted to 2nd and 3rd person beneficiaries, thus retaining the original system.

PN ON No Ma An Dil Ta Ka Mi
*tir ⲧⲣ, ⲧⲣ̄ tìr tir tir - - - -(i)n-tir

Table 7. Applicative marker *tir

In the bipartite Old Nubian applicative construction, the stem of the lexical verb V1 is marked for its status as dependent verb by the converb suffix ‑ⲁ. It is followed by V2, the finite donative verb serving as valency-increasing grammatical device.

Old Nubian
ⲕⲟⲩⲙⲡⲟⲩⲕⲁ ⲧⲁⲛ⳿ ⲉⲓⲗⲁ⳿ ⲟⲩⲧⲣ̄ⲁ ⲧⲣ̄ⲥⲛⲁ
koumpou=ka
egg=acc
tan
3sg.gen
ei=la
hand=dat
outir-a
lay-cnv
tir-s-n-a
appl>2/3-pt2-3sg-pred
“she placed the egg in his hand” (M 7.4–6)
(128)

Such periphrastic applicative constructions are considered to be asymmetric formations because only the converb (V1) contributes to the lexical expression of the event. The finite donative verb (V2), by contrast, provides grammatical meaning as “valence operator”120 licensing an object argument with a beneficiary role or a semantically related role.

The following three examples illustrate an applicative construction with the utterance verb “say, tell.” Because of the semantics of this verb, the applied object argument is assigned the role of addressee. When this object has a pronominal 3rd person referent as in (129), the corresponding person pronoun is not required to be overtly expressed.121

Nobiin
tar
3sg
iig-a-tir-on
say-cnv-appl>2/3-pt.3sg
“he told you/him/her”
(129)
talaamiidii=g
disciples=acc
iig-a-tij-j-on (< iig-a-tir-j-on)
say-cnv-appl>2/3-plact-pt.3sg
“he told his disciples”
(130)
íig-à-tèer
say-cnv-appl>2/3.prs.1sg
“I tell you/him/her”
(131)

In Mattokki and Andaandi, too, the verb tir (with the allomorph sir when following s) has become a valency-increasing device forming applicative constructions. In (132) the pronominal object tek=ki has a beneficiary role, while in (133) ek=k has the role of addressee assigned by the utterance verb wee “say.”

Unlike Old Nubian and Nobiin converbs, which are marked by ‑a, Mattokki and Andaandi do not have such a dedicated converb marker. Due to the lack of tone-marked data, we do not know, however, whether converbs undergo any tonal modifications.122

Mattokki
tek=ki
3sg=acc
kus-sir-sim
open-appl>2/3-pt.1sg
“I opened [it] for him”
(132)
ai
1sg
ek=k
2sg=acc
aa-wee-tir-rin
prog-say-appl>2/3-neut.1sg
“I am telling you”
(133)

Massenbach, Armbruster, Werner, and Abdel-Hafiz represent the biverbal applicative constructions as single words.123 At least in Andaandi, however, the question clitic te can be inserted between the converb and the finite donative verb. This indicates that the converb and the donative verb are separable free forms. The question of whether the two verbs in the corresponding Nobiin and Mattokki applicative constructions can be separated as well has yet to be investigated.124

Andaandi
kus=te
open=q
tir-kon
appl>2/3-pt-3
“did he open [it] for him/her?”
(134)

In Midob, the applicative construction is associated with a reflex of *tir realized as tir. As in Kordofan Nubian (see §⁄3.4) it is a bound morpheme tied to the lexical verb stem by the linker ‑(i)n. After a consonant-final lexical verb such as əək, the linker is realized by the allomorph ‑Vn. Apparently, due to lag assimilation, V adopts the quality of the stem vowel ə.

Although *tir originally only referred to 3rd or 2nd person recipients/beneficiaries, as still attested in the applicative constructions of the Nile Nubian languages, this restriction does no longer hold for Midob tir. It can serve in applicative constructions, no matter whether the applied object has a 1st, 2nd, or 3rd person referent. Examples (135) and (136) show the directed transfer verb əək “send” assigning the role of recipient to a 2sg and a 1sg object pronoun.125

Midob
əj
1sg
náj=je
2sg=acc
an
that
jawaab=e
letter=acc
əək-ən-tir-hem
send-lk-appl-prf.1sg
“I have sent that letter to you”
(135)
on
3sg
əj=je
1sg=acc
an
that
jawaab=e
letter=acc
əək-ən-tir-hum
send-lk-appl-prf.3sg
“s/he has sent that letter to me”
(136)

3.4. The Applicative in the Kordofan Nubian Languages

Unlike the Nile Nubian applicatives where a donative verb operates in an asymmetric converb construction, applicatives in the languages of the western branch employ a donative verb as an applicative suffix attached to the lexical verb stem by means of the linker ‑(i)n. In the introduction to §⁄3 we have already pointed out that – except for their imperative forms – Kordofan Nubian applicative constructions exhibit a single donative verb, which is neither a regular reflex of *tir nor of *deen. Moreover, like ‑(i)n-tir in Midob, the applicative extension in the Kordofan Nubian languages can refer to a 1st, 2nd, or 3rd person beneficiary. This means that languages of the western branch have lost the original distinction between the two donative verbs.

Dil Ta Ka
-n-di < -n-ti -n-dì < -n-tì -n-dìì < -n-tìì

Table 8. The applicative extension in the Kordofan Nubian languages

Dilling ti is referred to by Kauczor as “verbum dativum.”126 When attaching to the lexical verb stem by the linker ‑(i)n, the resulting morpheme sequence is realized as ‑(i)n-di. It is assumed to originate in the innovative t-initial donative verb which is employed in Tagle and Karko. The utterance verb in (137) assigns the role of addressee to the unexpressed 3rd person object pronoun. In (138) the verb “hit” assigns to the 1st person object clitic the role of a “maleficiary,” rather than beneficiary.127

Dilling
fe-n-di-re
say-lk-appl-prs.1sg
“I tell him”
(137)
or=gi
head=acc
o=bod-n-di-m [oboːnum]
1sg.acc=hit-lk-appl-pst.3
“he hit me (on my) head”
(138)

In Tagle, too, the linker ‑(i)n connects the applicative extension -tì with the lexical verb stem. The ‑tì-extension is realized as [dì] after adopting the [+voice] feature of the nasal in ‑(i)n. Although Tagle suffixes mostly take the same ATR value as the root vowel, the applicative suffix retains the [+ATR] value of the donative verb tì. This suggests that the applicative extension ‑n-dì has not yet acquired the phonological properties of “regular” bound morphemes, whose vowels commonly harmonize with the root vowel. As applicative extension, Tagle has a low tone. When used as independent verb, it has a high tone, as seen in (97) and (98). Examples (139) and (140) show the applicative extension referring to a 3rd person and a 1st person beneficiary.128

Tagle
t̪ɛ́nd̪ʊ̀
girl.sg
ɪ́d̪ʊ́=gɪ́
woman=acc
kᴧ̀t̪ʊ̀=ʊ̀
field=acc
ʃʊ́-n-dì-m
weed-lk-appl-pst.3
“the girl weeded the field for the woman”
(139)
t̪ɛ́nd̪ʊ̀
girl.sg
kᴧ̀t̪ʊ̀=g
field=acc
ɔ̀=ʃʊ́-n-dì-m
1sg.acc=weed-lk-appl-pst.3
“the girl weeded the field for me”
(140)

Applicative extentions may attach to an intransitive or transitive verb stem, as illustrated by the Karko verbs ɕīj “descend (itr)” and kɛɛ “make sth. good (tr),” respectively, shown in (141)–(143). The applicative extension ‑n-dìì (-dìì after l) is a realization of -n-tìì. It licenses both a 3rd person, a 1st person, and a 2nd person beneficiary. The pronominal 3sg beneficiary t̪éě is not required to be overtly expressed. The position of the locative‑marked adjunct is variable, preceding or following the verb phrase.129

Karko
t̪óóɲē
child.dim.pl
(t̪éě)
3sg.acc
kóld
well.loc
ɕīj-īk-n-dìì
descend-plr-lk-appl
“the children go down for him into the well”
(141)
t̪óóɲē
child.dim.pl
ɔ̀=ɕīj-īk-n-dìì
1sg.acc=descend-plr-lk-appl
kóld
well.loc
“the children go down for me into the well”
(142)
ɕwàr
existence
ɔ̀=nàà
1sg=gen
ûúg
2pl.acc
t̪ɔ́ɔ́
place
kɛ̀ɛ̀-ŋgàl-dìì
make.good-tr.pst-appl
“my existence made your life good.”/ lit. “… made the place good for you” (This is said to children to remind them that they are dependent of their parents and that they have to pay them respect.)
(143)

As shown in this section, applicative constructions in the Kordofan Nubian languages use a single donative verb, which adds an object argument whose referent may be a 1st, 2nd, or 3rd person beneficiary. This simplification of the original system is also attested in Midob (§⁄3.3).

3.5. The Applicative Based on *deen

Reflexes of *deen “give to 1st person” are attested in all Nile Nubian applicative constructions. However, in Kordofan Nubian, more precisely in Dilling and Karko, reflexes of *deen are restricted to applicative imperative forms, as shown at the end of this section. Tagle, by contrast, no longer exhibits a reflex of *deen. These are indicators of a restructuring process associated with the weakening and the final loss of the function of *deen. Due to the lack of data, we do not know whether Midob applicative imperative forms are also affected by this process.

PN ON No Ma An
*deen ⲇⲉⲛ dèen deen deen

Table 9. Nile Nubian applicative marker *deen

When Old Nubian ⲇⲉⲛ “give to 1st person” is employed as a valence operator, the resulting applicative is a bipartite construction composed of V1 – a lexical verb stem marked by the converb marker ‑ⲁ – plus the finite ⲇⲉⲛ as V2. The plural number of a 1st person beneficiary is reflected by the pluractional extension ‑ⳝ (see §⁄4.1). Example (144) also shows that the values of the inflectional suffixes on the main verb – with ‑ⲉ-ⲥⲟ marking the imperative form in a command – have scope over the preceding converb, which means that it is also conceived as an imperative form, even though it does not show the corresponding inflectional suffixes.130

Old Nubian
ⲙⲩⲥⲧⲏⲣⲟⲩ ⲉⲕ̄ⲕⲁ ⲉ̄ⲅⲓⲇⲣⲟⲩⲕⲁ ⲟⲩⲕⲁ ⲡⲗ̄ⲗⲓ̈ⲅⲣⲁ̄ ⲇⲉⳡⳝⲉⲥⲟ
mustērou
mystery
eik=ka
2sg=acc
egid-r-ou=ka
ask-prs-1/2pl=acc
ou=ka
1pl.excl=acc
pill-igr-a
shine-caus-cnv
deñ-j-e-so
appl>1-plact-imp.2/3sg.pred-comm
“reveal to us the mystery which we ask you” (St 5.3–7)
(144)

The position of the pronominal beneficiary appears to be variable. In (144) the pronominal beneficiary ⲟⲩⲕⲁ immediately precedes the converb, whereas in Nobiin example (145) the theme precedes the converb, the pronominal beneficiary occupying clause-initial position.131

Nobiin
ay=ga
1sg=acc
an-gi
1sg.gen-uncle
gelabije
jellabiya
uwo=ga
two=acc
V1
jan-a
buy-cnv
V2
deen-on
appl>1-pt.3sg
“my uncle bought me two jellabiyas”
(145)

Most commonly, applicative constructions assign a beneficiary role to the applied object, as seen in (144) and (145). However, when interacting with an utterance verb like “say, tell,” the applied object is assigned the role of addressee.132

ànn-ùu
1sg.gen-grandfather
ày=g
1sg=acc
íig-a-dèn-ô
tell-cnv-appl>1-pt.3sg
“my grandfather told me”
(146)

Unlike Old Nubian and Nobiin, which employ the converb marker ‑a, the converbs in Mattokki and Andaandi are unmarked.133

Mattokki
een
woman
kadee=g
dress=acc
sukki-deen-s-u
wash-appl>1-pt2-3
“the woman washed the dress for me”
(147)

Studies of the modern Nile Nubian languages mostly represent the periphrastic applicative constructions as a single word. This may be due to the realization of these biverbal forms as a single prosodic phrase. However, at least in Andaandi, the question clitic te can be inserted between the dependent verb and the finite donative verb, thus providing clear evidence of the bipartite character of the applicative constructions.134

Andaandi
er
2sg
ay=gi
1sg=acc
iʃin=te
send=q
deen-ko-n
appl>1-pt-3sg
“did you send it to me?”
(148)

As for Kordofan Nubian, only Dilling and Karko have retained reflexes of *deen. They appear in two grammatical contexts: i) when employed as lexical transfer verbs, as shown in §⁄3.1; and ii) when used as applicative extensions in imperative forms. Tagle, by contrast, has preserved no reflex of *deen.

Dil Ta Ka
-nin < -n-tin imp -nVn < -n-tèn imp

Table 10. Kordofan Nubian applicative markers in imperatives based on *deen

The Dilling applicative extension -nin is assumed to originate from the fusion of the linker -(i)n plus the regular reflex of *deen “give to 1st person,” -tin. In the imperative forms ‑nin stands in paradigmatic contrasts with -(i)n-di stemming from the linker -(i)n plus the irregular donative verb ti referring to a 3rd person beneficiary.

The directed transfer verbs kuʃ “take to” and kwata “bring” assign the role of recipient to the applied object. In (149) both the pronominal recipient and the pronominal theme are unexpressed.135

Dilling
kuʃ-in-di
take.to-lk-appl>2/3.imp.2sg
“take it to him!”
(149)
oti
water
o=kwata-n(i)n-(i)
1sg.acc=bring-appl>1-imp.2sg
“bring me water!”
(150)

Similar to Dilling -nin, Karko exhibits with -nVn a realization of the linker -(i)n fused with tèn “give to 1st person,” the latter being a regular reflex of *deen. The applicative extension -nVn contrasts with -n-dìì (after b realized as the allomorph ‑m-bìì) which originates from the linker plus the irregular donative verb tìì and refers to a 3rd person beneficiary.

Interestingly, in Kordofan Nubian applicative constructions the morphosyntactic behavior of the two objects differs from the behavior of the corresponding objects in the Nile Nubian languages. In the Kordofan Nubian languages, it is the number of the theme argument that triggers the selection of a singular or plural verb stem. In Karko, for instance, a singular theme selects the singular verb stem ɕùù (151), while a plural theme selects the plural stem ɕùb (152). In the Nile Nubian languages, by contrast, it is the number of the beneficiary which interacts with the verb stem, as seen in (144), where the 1st person plural beneficiary selects the ‑(i)j-marked plural verb stem.

Karko
kèt̪=èg
cloth.sg=acc
ɕùù-m-bìì
wash.sng-lk-appl>2/3
“wash the cloth for him/them!”
(151)
kèn=ég
cloth.pl=acc
ɕùb-n-dìì
wash.plr-lk-appl>2/3
“wash the clothes for him!”
(152)
áǎ
1pl.excl.acc
kèn=ég
cloth.pl=acc
ɕùb-nùn
wash.plr-lk.appl>1
“wash the clothes for us!”
(153)

Summarizing §⁄3, we recognize that the reflexes of the donative verbs *tir and *deen continue to be employed as lexical verbs of transfer. Parallel to this use and bleached of their original semantic content, they have come to serve as valency-increasing grammatical elements in applicative constructions – at least in the Nile Nubian languages. In Kordofan Nubian, however, a simplification process has begun which is associated with the emergence of a new verb ti which is replacing the original donative verbs and is considered to result from a morphological blending of both. The initial consonant of ti appears to be a reflex of the initial of *deen, while the high front vowel of ti stems from the vowel of *tir. In Karko, such CV-shaped lexical items are realized with a long vowel, as confirmed by Karko tìì “give,” in Tagle with a short vowel, tí. This contrast is also attested by Karko dìì “drink” corresponding to Tagle dì, and Karko tìì “die” corresponding to Tagle tì. Note that Karko tìì “die” and tìì “give” are homophones.

4. Verbal Number

Verbal number is a grammatical category which “can reflect the number of times an action is done or the number of participants in the action.”136 That is, it can be sensitive to event number conveying aspectual notions such as intense, repetitive, distributed, or even single actions. It can also interact with the number of intransitive subjects or transitive objects. As verbal number is insensitive to transitive agents, however, this pattern of grammatical relations is a realization of an ergative alignment system.

The Nubian languages exhibit several verbal number marking extensions. Two of them, *-(i)j (§⁄4.1) and *-(i)k (§⁄4.2) are reconstructable because they are attested in both branches of the Nubian family. Other extensions have a more restricted distribution. This is true for the plural object extension ‑ir and ‑(i)r-ir in Mattokki and Andaandi (§⁄6.2), the plural stem extension ‑er attested in the Kordofan Nubian languages and Midob, and also for further plural stem suffixes in the Kordofan Nubian languages (§⁄6.5).

4.1. Pluractional *‑(i)j

Reflexes of the *‑(i)j-extension are attested in all Nubian languages where it operates as a highly productive morpheme with a wide range of semantic and morphosyntactic properties. Because of its frequent occurrence in these languages, it is suggested that it should be referred to by the term pluractional (glossed as plact) to distinguish it from other plural stem extensions.

While the western Nubian languages reflect the *‑(i)j-extension by -j, -c, -ʃ, or even -ɕ, the Nile Nubian languages reflect it by -j, this consonant being realized as voiced palatal stop [ɟ] which has several allomorphs depending on the preceding or following consonant. When the pluractional extension is attached to a consonant-final verb stem, it is predictably preceded by the epenthetic high front vowel i to prevent certain unadmitted consonant sequences.

PN ON No Ma An Dil Ta Ka Mi
*‑(i)j -(ⲓ)ⳝ -(i)j -(i)j -(i)j -j ~ ‑c -c -ɕ ~ ‑j -j ~ -c

Table 11. The pluractional extension *‑(i)j

Browne points out that Old Nubian ‑ⳝ “refers to a plural object (either direct or indirect) and occasionally to a plural subject […] it may also refer to a plural object not specifically identified in the text.”137 The first example illustrates how -(ⲓ)ⳝ interacts with a transitive plural object, the second shows the interaction of -(ⲓ)ⳝ with an intransitive plural subject.

Old Nubian
ⲕⲁⲡⲟⲡⲓⲅⲟⲩⲕⲁ ⲇⲟⲗⲓⳝⲛⲓⲁ̄
kapop-igou=ka
pearl-pl=acc
dol-ij-ni-a
gather-plact-purp-quot
“in order to gather pearls” (SC 4.19)
(154)
ⲇⲓⳝⲟⲗⲅⲟⲩⲛⲁ
di-j-ol-gou=na
die-plact-pst1-pl=gen
“of those who are dead” (SC 8.12–13)
(155)

While Lepsius refers to the -(i)j-extension in Nobiin as “verbum plurale,”138 Werner uses the term “Pluralobjekt-Erweiterung” (plural object extension).139 This latter designation is, however, not quite adequate, because ‑(i)j is not confined to interacting with plural objects; it can also be triggered by an intransitive plural subject and by event plurality.140

Nobiin
(156) ày kàb-ìr “I eat” oj sg ày kàb-j-ir “I eat (a lot or several times)” oj pl
(157) ày nèer-ìr “I sleep” ày nèer-j-ìr “I sleep (several times)”

Because of the wide range of functions covered by ‑(i)j, Khalil uses the term “verbal plural marker.”141 Apart from interacting with plural participants and event plurality, the ‑(i)j-extension is also used to signal respect when addressing a person, as Khalil shows.

As for ‑(i)j in Mattokki, Massenbach highlights the fact that it expresses the intensity of an action.142

Mattokki
man
that
ʃibir
basket
urub-buu-n
have.hole-stat-3sg
“that basket has a hole”
(158)
man
that
ʃibir
basket
urub-ij-buu-n
have.hole-plact-stat-3sg
“that basket is thoroughly perforated”
(159)
ter
3sg
gulud=ki
jar=acc
aa-toog-ij-mun-um
prog-break-plact-neg-neut.3sg
“he does not smash the jar”
(160)

Abdel-Hafiz, in turn, chooses the term “distributive” to refer to the Mattokki ‑(i)j-extension because it “has the effect of spreading the action over time and space.” He also points out that the ‑(i)j-suffix “can indicate the intensity with which an action is performed,”143 as illustrated in (162).

duguu=g
money=acc
gull-ij-os-s-u
throw-plact-pfv-pt2-3sg
“s/he threw the money here and there”
(161)
gur
bull
baab=ki
door=acc
toog-is-s-u
break-plact-pt2-3sg
“the bull broke the door”
(162)

In (162) the ‑(i)j-extension is realized as [is], due to regressive assimilation when followed by the preterite suffix ‑s.

As for the Andaandi suffix ‑(i)j, Armbruster notes that it “usually has an intensive or repetitive force.”144

Andaandi
(163) war “jump” war-ij “jump continually”
(164) or “tear” or-ij “tear to pieces”
(165) aaw “do” aw-ij “do repetitively”
tinn-ɛssi=n
her-sister=gen
dilti=g
hair=acc
aw-ij-in
do-plact-3sg
“s/he plaits her sister’s hair”
(166)

The Dilling reflex of *‑(i)j is ‑j. Kauczor’s examples suggest that it can refer to a plural object but it can also express the intensity or frequency of an event.145

Dilling
(167) mon “dislike” mon-j-i “hate (intensely)”
(168) bel-er “throw oj sg to the ground (in wrestling)” bel-j-i “throw to the ground oj pl or frequently”

The Tagle reflex of *‑(i)j is realized as the voiced palatal stop [ɟ] or after /l/ as the voiceless palatal stop [c]. It expresses repetitive or multiple events. The examples are provided in the 2nd singular imperative form.

Tagle
(169) áŋ-ɪ́r-ɪ̀ “catch, seize!” oj sg áŋ-c-ɪ́ [áɲcɪ́] id. rpt
(170) kɪ̀ŋ-ɪ́r-ɪ̀ “repair!” oj sg kɪ́ŋ-c-ɪ́ [kɪ́ɲcɪ́] id. rpt
kòn-ú-nù=gì
bird-sg-dim.sg=acc
kákár=kɔ̀
stone=ins
jɪ̀l-ɪ̀
throw-imp.2sg
“throw a stone at the bird!”
(171)
kòn-ú-nù=gì
bird-sg-dim.sg=acc
kákár-í=kɔ̀
stone-pl=ins
jɪ́l-c-ɪ́
throw-plact-imp.2sg
“continue to throw stones at the bird!”
(172)

In Karko, the *‑(i)j-extension is realized as voiced palatal plosive [ɟ] after a vowel, and as [Vɟ] after a consonant (except for /n/ and /l/). Following these consonants, *‑(i)j is realized as voiceless alveopalatal fricative [ɕ]. In this case, [ɕ] is difficult to identify as a suffix because the preceding /l/ and /n/ are deleted. The following (unmarked) imperative forms refer to a singular or plural object.

Karko
(173) ɕàn “buy/sell!” oj sg ɕàɕ id. oj pl
(174) kìl “jump over!” oj sg kìɕ id. oj pl
(175) t̪ōl-ór “swallow!” oj sg146 t̪òɕ id. oj pl
kwàt̪
pebble.sg
t̪ōl-ór
swallow-plr
“swallow the pebble!”
(176)
kwǎr
pebble.pl.acc
t̪òɕ
swallow.plact
“swallow the pebbles!”
(177)

In the Kordofan Nubian languages like Karko, the pluractional extension is selected by the plural object (patient) in a transitive clause like (177) and by the plural direct object (theme) in a ditransitive clause, as shown in (179). This patterning of the transitive patient with the ditransitive theme – but not with the indirect object, the beneficiary – is known as the indirect-object construction.147

kə̄k-ə̄nd̪=ə́g
stone-sg=acc
ɔ̀g=ɛ̄g-nɛ̀n
1sg.acc=roll-lk.appl>1
“roll the stone for me!”
(178)
kə̄k-ə̄r=ə́g
stone-pl=acc
ɔ̀g=ɛ̄g-ɛ̄j-nɛ̂n
1sg.acc=roll-plact-lk.appl>1
“roll the stones for me!”
(179)

Proto-Nubian *‑(i)j is reflected by Midob ‑c (allomorph ‑j). According to Werner, this extension marks participant and event plurality, the latter expressing “repetitivity, intensity.”148 However, he provides only two pairs of contrastive examples. Examples (180) and (181) show that ‑c is sensitive to the plural number of the intransitive subject.

Midob
ìi-hêm
come-ind.prf.1sg
“I came”
(180)
ìi-c-áhàm
come-plact-ind.prf.3pl
“they came”
(181)

The other pair of examples raises the question whether the ‑j-extension is required by an unexpressed pronominal plural object or even by event plurality.149

éeg-ìr-wà
answer-caus-ind.cont.1sg
“I answer”
(182)
éeg-ìr-j-wà
answer-caus-plact-ind.cont.1pl
“we answer”
(183)

In addition to its event plurality and participant plurality marking function, Midob -c has come to serve as the marker of the 2nd person imperative plural form. The corresponding singular form is morphologically unmarked.150

(184) kóod “see” imp 2sg kóod-íc “see” imp 2pl
(185) “go” imp 2sg sóo-íc [sówíc] “go” imp 2pl

This development of the pluractional extension adopting the additional function of a 2pl imperative marker is an innovation which is unattested in the other Nubian languages.

4.2. The Plural Stem Extension *-(i)k

Probably because the *‑(i)k extension is mainly attested on ideophonic verbs, which often play a marginal role in grammars, the plural stem extension *‑(i)k has been overlooked in most Nubian grammars. Compared to the other extensions *‑(i)k is less productive and more lexicalized. Moreover, as far as I can see, it is unattested in Old Nubian and Midob. Despite these deficiencies *‑(i)k has reflexes in both branches of the Nubian language family. For this reason, it is considered to be a reconstructable Proto-Nubian extension.

PN ON No Ma An Dil Ta Ka Mi
*‑(i)k -k -k -k -k -(i)k -(V)k

Table 12. The plural stem extension *‑(i)k

As Armbruster was the first to provide evidence of the ‑(i)k-extension, this section considers Andaandi data first.151 Listing a few pairs of verbs Armbruster identifies ‑k as a suffix with “perhaps intensive or factitive” meaning. While it is obvious that the geminate velar stop kk results from the regressive assimilation of the root-final consonant to the following ‑k, it is not clear why the long root vowel is shortened in case of (186) jak-k-i and (187) jok-k-i but unchanged in the case of (188) uuk-k-i.

Andaandi
(186) jaag “knead” jak-k-i “compress”
(187) joog “grind” jok-k-i “chew (food)”
(188) uuw “call” uuk-k-i “bark”

Armbruster provides a list of some twenty Andaandi verbs exhibiting ‑k. Most of them do not have an underived counterpart, though. This suggests that ‑k is no longer a productive morpheme and that it has become lexicalized. In addition to Armbruster, El-Guzuuli has compiled many Andaandi ideophonic verbs, several of them exhibiting the ‑k-extension.152

loori
lorry
weer
idf
udud-k-in
rumble-plr-3sg
“a lorry rumbles”
(189)
iiɡ
fire
aaɡ
prog
habab-k-in
blaze-plr-3sg
“the fire is blazing”
(190)

Although Massenbach does not address the ‑k-extension in her Mattokki grammar sketch, her dictionary contains some verbs which exhibit -k, e.g., jok-k(i) “chew”; kil-ik(i) “chirp”; tos-k(i) “cough”; and wak-k(i) “yelp (fox).” The fact that ‑k often occurs on verbs depicting inherently repetitive events like rumble, blaze, chew, chirp, cough, and yelp indicates that it reflects event plurality.

This is also true for Nobiin. Werner’s compilation of Nobiin ideophones contains a list of sixteen “ideophonic verbs imitating animal sounds,” all sharing a low-high tone pattern.153 Among these verbs are nine which exhibit the -k-extension. Here we present just two examples.

Nobiin
áadíi
hyena
ùu-k-ín
howl-plr-3sg
“the hyena howls”
(191)
kùglúul
rooster
kìik-k-ín
crow-plr-3sg
“the rooster crows”
(192)

As for Old Nubian, there is no evidence of the stem extension ‑k, not even in combination with the reduplicated stems of apparently onomatopoeic or ideophonic verbs,154 to which ‑k is often attached in the modern Nile Nubian languages.

The ‑k-extension in the Nile Nubian languages is assumed to be cognate to ‑k in Dilling, ‑(i)k in Tagle and ‑(V)k in Karko. As it is often combined with other plural stem extensions, it is also considered in §⁄6.5. Here a few examples may suffice. They suggest that ‑(V)k is often associated with repetitive events but the examples also show that, due to semantic extension, ‑(V)k can also reflect the number of participants in the action. Both properties are typical of verbal number markers.

Dilling155
(193) ir “bear child” tr, oj sg ir-k id. oj pl, rpt
be “get lost” itr, sj sg be-k id. sj sg, rpt
Tagle
(194) ònd̪ “sip, absorb” tr, oj sg ónd̪-ík id. oj sg, rpt
d̪ád̪d̪ “cross, pass” itr, sj sg d̪ád̪d̪-ík id. sj sg, rpt
Karko
(195) kúʃ-ɛ́ɛ́r “hang up” tr, oj sg kùj-ùk id. oj pl
ʃíl-ɛ̀ɛ́r “kindle” tr, oj sg ʃìl-ìk id. oj pl

As Midob is still comparatively poorly documented, there is presently no clear evidence of the *-(i)k-extension.

5. Traces of the Archaic Causative Prefix

According to Dimmendaal’s typological study, the archaic causative *i-prefix (allomorph *ɪ-) is a historically stable feature, since it is attested in several distinct Nilo-Saharan subgroups, including different branches of the East Sudanic group, i.e., Me’en, Majang, and Southern Nilotic, as well as Central Sudanic, represented by Ma’di.156

(196) Me’en -dibis “be full” -i-dibis “fill”
(197) Majang -paak “be hot” -ɪ-paak “heat”
(198) Kipsigiis -nɛ́r “be fat” -ɪ̀-nɛ́ɛ̂r “fatten”
(199) Ma’di “climb up” ī-tú “make climb up, promote”

5.1. The Causative Prefix in the Nubian Languages

Me’en, Majang, Kipsigiis, and Ma’di have retained reflexes of the causative prefix with the original high front vowel i ~ ɪ. This V-shaped prefix is retained both in Nubian and Ama although it has undergone vowel shifts. In the Nubian languages, this shift has resulted in the emergence of an *u- ~ o-prefix, in Ama the shift has led to the prefix a- (see §⁄5.2). The reconstructed Nubian vowels *u ~ o can be identified as prefixes because they are all associated with transitive verb stems which contrast with the phonologically and semantically similar intransitive verb stems that do not exhibit an initial vowel. The small number of these derived transitive verbs and the lack of productivity of the vowel prefix suggest that they are a remnant of the archaic causative *i-prefix.

Prefixes are rare in the Nubian languages. Another instance of a petrified prefix is the verbal negation marker *m-,157 which is attested in all Nubian languages: e.g., Old Nubian ⲙ-ⲟⲛ, ⲙ-ⲟⲩⲛ “hate, reject, be reluctant” vs. ⲟⲛ, ⲟⲩⲛ “love,” Nobiin m-éskìr “be unable” vs. éské “be able.” In Dilling, *m- has regularly shifted to /b/: b-or-di “barren” vs. ir “give birth.” In Midob, *m- has regularly shifted to /p/: p-óon-hèm “I hated, refused, rejected” vs. óo-hêm (< óonhèm) “I loved.” As the prefixing pattern strongly deviates from the predominantly suffixing pattern, which is now typical of all Nubian languages, it suggests that a restructuring process has taken place.

A closer look at the examples below reveals that when the causative prefix is attached to a verb root, it tends to adopt the quality of the root vowel. The root vowel, in turn, often adopts the quality of the original high front vowel prefix *i-. This process is known as paradigmatic displacement,158 which is probably motivated by the canonical (C)V(V)(C) shape of Nubian roots. When they are followed by another syllable, this second syllable tends to be reanalyzed as a suffix. Such a syllabic suffix is usually realized with an epenthetic high front vowel i.

PN ON No Ma An Dil Ta Ka Mi
*u- ~ o- ⲟⲩ- u- u- u- u-, o- u-, e- ə-, ɔ-, u- u-

Table 13. The archaic causative prefix *u- ~ o-

In Old Nubian,159 for instance, there is evidence of an ⲟⲩ-prefix on transitive verb stems, whereas this prefix is absent on the cognate intransitive stems.

Old Nubian
(200) ⲧⲟⲣ, ⲧⲟⲩⲣ, ⲧⲟ(ⲣ)ⲁⲣ “enter” itr
ⲟⲩ-ⲧⲣ̄, ⲟⲩ-ⲧⲟⲩⲣ, ⲟⲩ-ⲧⲁⲣ “lay, put, hold, deposit” tr

Another intransitive verb root, ⲥⲟⲩⲕⲕ “descend,” attests two derived stems with increased valency: one stem is derived by the ⲟⲩ-prefix plus the causative ‑(ⲁ)ⲣ- ~ -ⲟⲩⲣ-suffix; the other stem is extended by the causative ‑ⲕⲣ̄-suffix but without the ⲟⲩ-prefix. Presumably the absence, i.e., loss of the ⲟⲩ-prefix and the suffixation of the productive ‑ⲕⲣ̄-suffix (see §⁄2.2) was triggered by the semantic fading of the causative function of the ⲟⲩ-prefix.

(201) ⲥⲟⲩⲕⲕ, ⲥⲟⲅⲅ “descend” itr
ⲟⲩ-ⲥⲕ-(ⲁ)ⲣ, ⲟⲩ-ⲥⲕ-ⲟⲩⲣ “place” tr
ⲥⲟⲩⲕ-ⲕⲣ̄ “cause to descend” tr

The u-prefix attested in Old Nubian is also found on cognate verbs in the modern Nile Nubian languages: e.g., u-dir (Nobiin); u-ndur (Mattokki and Andaandi); and u-skir (Nobiin, Mattokki, Andaandi). Lepsius recognizes that Andaandi u-ndire, u-ndure is a cognate of Nobiin u-dire.160 The addition of the nasal attested in u-ndir(e) and u-ndur(e) is due to epenthesis.161 It is conceivable that the derived unattested stem u-toor underwent a number of phonological and morphological changes, including vowel assimilation, the insertion of the epenthetic n, which has triggered the voicing of the following original root-initial t, and the re-analysis of the root-final Vr sequence as the causative ‑ir-suffix (see §⁄2.1). Two distinct developments are assumed: utoor > utor > utur > untur > undur, as attested in Mattokki and Andaandi, and utoor > utur > udur > udir in Nobiin.

(202) An, Ma too(r)162 “enter” itr
No toor-e “enter” itr
No u-dir-e “take to, lay down, put into, insert” tr
Ma u-ndur-e “put in, name, dress” tr
An u-ndur-e “put in, introduce, insert” tr

The extension of the verb stem u-sk with the causative ‑ir results from a secondary process that started when the causative prefix lost its productivity.

(203) No sukk-e “descend” itr
No, Ma, An u-sk-ir-e “put down, lay down” tr
Ma, An u-sk-ir-e “give birth” tr

As for Kordofan Nubian, Kauczor was the first to recognize the extension of verb stems by means of prefixes (“Stammbildung durch Präfixe”).163 As they introduce a causer, the Dilling u- and o-prefixes are assumed to be reflexes of the archaic *i-causative.

Dilling
(204) jir “lie down” itr u-jir “lay down” tr
(205) tor “enter” itr o-tir “insert, put into” tr

These two verb pairs have cognates in Tagle. A native speaker, however, would not perceive the verb root jèr to be the base of ù-jír or ù-jèr, nor t̪ʊ́r to be the base of è-t̪ír, since the initial vowel no longer operates as a productive prefix.164 Tagle examples (206) and (207) are given in the 2sg imperative form, marked by an ‑i-suffix.

Tagle
(206) jèr-í “lie down!” itr
ù-jír-ì “put down, lay down!” tr, oj sg
ù-jèr-í “put down, lay down!” tr, oj pl
(207) t̪ʊ́r-ɪ́ “enter, begin!” itr
è-t̪ír-ì165 “insert, put in, start!” tr

Cognates of the Tagle intransitive/transitive verb pairs “lie down”/“put down” and “enter”/“insert” exist in Karko as well. The archaic Nilo-Saharan *i-prefix is reflected by the initial vowel of the transitive items, which is associated with a particular form of vowel harmony in which the quality of the root vowel is adopted by the short suffix vowel due to lag assimilation: e.g., òk-ót̪ “bean” sg; ūk-ūnd̪ “fire” pl; ɕə̀t-ə̀d “closed” ptc sg. The imperative forms ə̄-t̪ə́r, ɔ̄-t̪ɔ́r, ū-júr suggest that the initial vowels of these verbs are re-analyzed as root vowels and that the verb-final Vr sequence is conceived of as a ‑Vr-suffix (see §⁄2.1). Karko imperatives are marked by a low tone when the verb stems are underived: e.g., t̪òr and jɛ̀r. The imperative forms of verbs derived by ‑Vr, however, can have different tone patterns depending on the tone class to which the verbs belong. The contrast between singular and plural imperative forms is unmarked by dedicated suffixes but often expressed by vowel alternation, as (208) ə̄-t̪ə́r vs. ɔ̄-t̪ɔ́r illustrate.

Karko
(208) t̪òr “enter!” itr, imp 2sg
ə̄-t̪ə́r “enter, insert, start, cause!” tr, imp 2sg
ɔ̄-t̪ɔ́r “enter, insert, start, cause!” tr, imp 2pl
(209) jɛ̀r “lie down, go to sleep!” itr, imp 2sg
ū-júr “put down!” tr, imp 2sg
kám-m-bíl
eat.plr-lk-first
jɛ̀r
lie.down.sng
“eat first then go to sleep!”
(210)
ɕǎnt̪àà=g
bag=acc
kúrɕī=ét̪
chair=loc
ū-júr
caus-put.down
“put the bag on the chair!”
(211)

Because of their phonological and semantic similarities, the Midob verb stems súkk “descend” and ú-kk “give birth” can be identified as cognates of Nile Nubian sukk- “descend” and u-skir- “put down, lay down, give birth”; see examples (201) and (203) above.

Midob
(212) súkk-ihèm “I descended”
ú-kk-áhèm “I gave birth”

The initial vowel of the Midob verb stem ú-kk is assumed to reflect the archaic causative prefix. It is conceivable that due to this prefix and the preferred monosyllabic structure of lexical roots, the unattested bisyllabic verb stem ú-súkk has undergone some changes involving the deletion of the second vowel and the fricative /s/. The deletion of /s/ before /k/ is also observed in other Midob lexical items: e.g., ùkúdí “dust, sand” < PN *Vskidi; and úfúdí ~ úkúdí < PN *VskVdi.166 The fact that the geminated velar of súkk is retained in ú-kk corroborates the assumed derivational relationship between these two stems.

5.2. The Causative Prefix and Causative Suffixes in Ama

Ama and Afitti verbs commonly exhibit two bases which used to be referred to as “definite” and “indefinite” aspect stems.167 In recent studies by Rilly and Norton, the definite and indefinite are recognized as perfective and imperfective aspect stems, respectively.168

As in the Nubian languages, verbal derivational extensions in Ama are usually suffixed to the verb. Therefore, a prefixed extension such as the causative a- is a remarkable deviation from the suffixing pattern.169

Ama
(213) a-t̪os/a-kwos “suckle” t̪os/kwos “suck”
(214) a-mɔ “raise” “rise”

Stevenson points out that the a-marked causative may “also be combined with the ɪg form,”170 which apparently has a causative function as well. Tucker & Bryan, too, note that the causative a-prefix is sometimes combined with the ‑ɪg- and ‑ɛg-extensions and that, in addition to the causative function, these suffixes express the meaning of “action directed towards.”171 For this reason, Norton uses the term “directional” rather than causative.172 For the ‑ɪd-suffix on tam see §⁄6.7.

(215) a-t̪al-ɪg “feed” t̪al “eat”
(216) a-tam-ɪd-ɛg “feed” tam “eat”

Interestingly, Stevenson, Rottland & Jakobi have documented another form of the causative verb “suckle” in Ama.173 Its two causative stems do not exhibit the a-prefix but only the causative ‑ìg-suffix.

(217) t̪ɔʃ-ìg/kwɔʃ-ìg “suckle” t̪os-o/kwoʃ-ì “suck”

Thus, in Ama there are three alternative patterns of causative marking:

  • the causative stems are solely marked by the a-prefix, as attested by (213) a-t̪os/a-kwos and (214) a-mɔ;
  • the causative is simultaneously marked by the a-prefix and the ‑ɪg- or ‑(ɪd-)ɛg-suffix, as in (215) a-t̪al-ɪg and (216) a-tam-ɪd-ɛg; and
  • the causative is only marked by the ‑ìg-suffix, as (217) t̪ɔʃ-ìg/kwɔʃ-ìg show.

It is quite conceivable that the three patterns reflect three stages in the historical development from a prefixing pattern to a suffixing pattern. The coincidence of the causative being marked by both the a-prefix and the ‑ɪg- or ‑ɛg-suffix, as found in a-t̪al-ɪg and a-tam-ɪd-ɛg, represents an intermediate step in that restructuring process.

The velar consonant of the Ama suffix ‑ɪg or ‑ɛg is strongly reminiscent of the velar consonant that is part of the Nubian causative suffixes, Nobiin ‑kìr, Mattokki ‑igir, Andaandi ‑(i)gir, Dilling ‑eg-ir and ‑ig-er, and Midob ‑éek and ‑èek (see §⁄2.2). Since bound morphemes are not easily borrowed, these Nubian causative suffixes are considered to be cognates of the Ama ‑ɪg and ‑ɛg causative suffixes. At present, this assumption cannot be corroborated by data from Afitti, since the Afitti verb stems documented so far do not show any evidence of an ‑ɪg- or ‑ɛg-suffix.

Concluding this section, we recognize that both Nubian and Ama exhibit a petrified causative prefix. Since remnants of this prefix are also found in Central Sudanic and several branches of East Sudanic, they provide comparative evidence of the genetic relationships between these languages. Along with the prefixed Nubian negation marker *m- (see §⁄5.1), the causative prefixes in Nubian and Ama suggest that these languages have undergone a typological change from prefixing to suffixing languages. These prefixes in Nubian and Ama corroborate Dimmendaal’s hypothesis, which assumes “that the common ancestor of Central Sudanic and Northeastern Nilo-Saharan was typologically more similar to the Moru-Madi languages within the Central Sudanic branch than to any other Nilo-Saharan subgroup found today.”174

6. Verb Extensions with a Restricted Distribution

Some verbal extensions have a restricted distribution because they occur only in a single Nubian language or in a subgroup of the Nubian family.

6.1. Nile Nubian Passive Extensions

Unlike the languages of the western branch, the Nile Nubian languages have dedicated passive extensions. They comprise Old Nubian ‑(ⲓ)ⲧⲁⲕ, Nobiin ‑dakk ~ ‑takk ~ ‑daŋ, Mattokki ‑takk, and Andaandi ‑katt. Nobiin and Matokki ‑dakk ~ ‑takk suggest that Old Nubian ‑ⲧⲁⲕ (although spelled with a single ⲕ), used to be realized with a geminate kk, too.

Old Nubian
ⲁ̇ⲉⲧ︥ⲧⲁⲕⲁⲧⲁⲙⲏ
aeit-tak-a-ta-mē
insult-pass-pred-neg-jus.sg
“don’t you be insulted!” (M 6.11)
(218)

Apart from ‑dakk ~ ‑takk, Nobiin has another passive extension, -daŋ, which, according to Reinisch, is restricted to the Fadicca variety.175 As far as we know today, it is unattested in Old Nubian.176 Both Reinisch and Lepsius provide examples of ‑daŋ being attached to original Nobiin items and even to borrowings from Arabic as in (220),177 which attest the productivity of the extension. Due to the phonetic similarities of ‑daŋ and the inchoative ‑aŋ, Reinisch and Lepsius conceive of ‑daŋ as being composed of a d-prefix plus -aŋ. According to Reinisch, d- has a “reflexive-passive” function.178

Nobiin
(219) nuluu-aŋ “become white” nuluu-d-aŋ “be whitened”
(220) nadiif-aŋ “become clean” nadiif-d-aŋ “be cleaned”

However, this hypothesis is not convincing unless we can corroborate the existence of a *d-prefix. Moreover, (221), a translation of Mark 2:27, suggests that -dakk and -daŋ are simply variants of the same extension. A more literal translation of this example should read: “The Sabbath was made because of man, man was not made because of Sabbath.”179

santee-l
sabbat-det
aadem=in=doorro
man=gen=because.of
aaw-dakk-on
do-pass-pt.3sg
aadem
man
santee=n=doorro
sabbat=gen=because.of
aaw-daŋ-kum-mun
do-pass-pt-neg
“the Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath”
(221)

As for Mattokki, Massenbach points out that the passive extension is realized as [takk] or, more rarely, as [katt].180

Mattokki
buuwe-tákk-imn-um
call-pass-neg-prs.3sg
“he is not called”
(222)

Abdel-Hafiz only mentions the -takk variant and its allomorph -cakk which is used after c. It can be used with transitive verbs, but also with intransitive verbs such as neer “sleep.”181

indo
here
neer-takk-is-u
sleep-pass-pt-3sg
“it was slept here”
(223)
Andaandi
goraan
Qur’an
kuur-katt-in
learn-pass-3sg
“the Qur’an is learnt / the Qur’an can be learnt”
(224)

Both Matokki ‑takk and Andaandi ‑katt are productive extensions, as shown by their use with Arabic loanwords.182

Mattokki
(225) gaffir-takk “be forgiven”
Andaandi
(226) hamd=ee-katt183 “be praised”

As for the origin of the passive extensions various suggestions have been advanced. Reinisch proposes two rather vague hypotheses:184

  1. katt has developed from k-att, i.e., from the accusative marker plus the verb att “bring.”
  2. Andaandi katt “wrap, role (cigarette)” corresponds to Nobiin kand “wrap, dress” or takk with the same meaning.

Reinisch’s second hypothesis is supported by Armbruster, who suggests, too, that the Andaandi passive suffix -katt originates from the verb katt “wrap.”185 Smagina, in turn, argues that Old Nubian tak(k) derives from the short form of the 3sg pronoun accusative, the long form being takka.186 Although the incorporation of a pronoun as part of a passivizing strategy is conceivable, as Van Gerven Oei points out,187 the presence of Nobiin ‑daŋ as a variant of ‑dakk ~ ‑takk does not support the assumption of the Old Nubian -tak(k) passive extension originating in the 3sg pronoun.

Given the fact that Nobiin ‑daŋ and Old Nubian -ⲧⲁⲕ have a CVC-shape suggests that they originate from a verb root, similar to the CVC-shaped causative and applicative extensions, *-(i)gir and *-tir, which stem from the verbs gir ~ kir “make” and tir “give to 2nd or 3rd person.” The Nobiin and Mattokki extensions ‑dakk ~ ‑takk may owe their final geminated kk and their CVCC-shape to a lexical CVC-shaped root incremented by a velar stop. Perhaps this stop can be identified as the plural stem extension –k. Its function in this context is, however, unclear (§⁄4.2).

Passive markers often have a verbal origin, as shown by the English be- and get-passives and the German werden-passive. Therefore, we follow Reinisch’s and Armbruster’s suggestions assuming that the passive extensions originate from two semantically related verbs, “wrap, wind” and “be covered.” It is conceivable that Andaandi -katt originates from kant “wrap, wind,” a verb attested both in Nobiin and Andaandi,188 particularly because the gemination of tt resulting from the regressive assimilation of n to t is also attested in the lexical variants sunti and sutti “hoof, fingernail.”189

It is also possible that Nobiin ‑daŋ and ‑dakk ~ ‑takk as well as Matokki ‑takk are based on tag “get covered”190 incremented by the extension ‑k, i.e., -tag-k > -takk. In the course of grammaticalization the initial t may have undergone weakening, i.e., t > d which has led to the realization of ‑takk as ‑dakk. It is also conceivable that during the assumed grammaticalization process, one of the Nobiin varieties retained tag without extending it by –k. Considering that the initial and final consonant of tag may have been weakened, i.e., t > d and g > ŋ, it is possible that this variant of the passive extensions has come to be realized as ‑daŋ.

Of course, we cannot exclude that Andaandi ‑katt does not originate from kant but rather from the metathesis of ‑takk > -katt (even though the motivation for this phonotactic change is as yet unclear). That suggestion has the advantage of conceiving the passive extensions in the Nile Nubian languages to have a common origin in a single verb, tag “get covered.” The semantic notions of this intransitive verb fit well with its grammaticalization as a passive marker.

Unlike the Nile Nubian languages, the Kordofan Nubian languages do not have a dedicated passive extension. Rather, as Comfort and Jakobi have shown,191 the passive and other non-basic intransitive constructions are based on verbal plural stems (see §⁄6.5).

As for Midob, Werner denies that there is “a real passive.”192 He points out that semantically passive notions are either expressed by a stative or a 3pl active verb form. The latter option is cross-linguistically quite common, it also exists in Old Nubian and Nobiin.193 As the 3pl element “is not understood to refer to any specific group of individuals,”194 it is known as “generalized subject” or “impersonal.”195

6.2. The Mattokki and Andaandi Plural Object ‑ir- and ‑(i)r-ir-Extensions

The plural object extensions ‑ir and ‑(i)r-ir are restricted to Mattokki and Andaandi. Unlike the pluractional *-(i)j (§⁄4.1) and the ‑er-extension §⁄6.3, these extensions have a strongly restricted function because they are only selected when the referent of the transitive object is plural. That is, they do not interact with plural subjects of intransitive clauses. Both Massenbach and Armbruster account for this productive suffix, but Abdel-Hafiz does not mention it in his Mattokki grammar.196

Mattokki
ai
1sg
toog-s-im
break-pt2-1sg
“I smashed it”
(227)
ai
1sg
toog-ir-s-im
break-ploj-pt2-1sg
“I smashed them”
(228)
ar
1pl
el-r-un [ellun]
find-neut-1pl
“we find it”
(229)
ar
1pl
el-ir-r-un
find-ploj-neut-1pl
“we find them”
(230)

Armbruster observes that Andaandi ‑ir, which is sometimes reduplicated and realized as [irir], additionally has distributive connotations since it is “used when the verb’s object is a plural that is regarded as a series of singulars.”197 But when discussing (231) and (232), mother tongue speaker El-Shafie El-Guzuuli pointed out that he does not perceive a semantic difference between them.198

Andaandi
in-gu=gi
this-pl=acc
sokke-rir
take-ploj
“take (each of) these away!”
(231)
in-gu=gi
this-pl=acc
sokke
take
“take (each of) these away!”
(232)

Unlike the reduplicated causative ‑ir-ir-extension, which is realized as [iddi], the reduplicated plural object extension ‑(i)r-ir is never pronounced as [iddi]. This finding supports Armbruster’s assumption that the plural object extension is not identical in origin with the causative *-(i)r-extension (see §⁄2.1).199

6.3. The Kordofan Nubian and Midob Plural Stem Extension ‑er

Another verbal number marking device is represented by the highly productive extension -er (glossed as plr). It is confined to the Kordofan Nubian languages and Midob. Kauczor was not only the first to recognize the Dilling prefixes u- and o- (§⁄5.1), he also noticed that the Dilling ‑er-extension is used in four distinct grammatical contexts:200

  • when a transitive verb refers to a plural object;
  • when an intransitive verb refers to a plural subject;
  • when a transitive verb is used without a syntactic object; and
  • when a transitive verb has passive meaning.

The first two contexts indicate that the interaction of ‑er with an intransitive plural subject and a transitive plural object represents an ergative alignment pattern. In this respect, the plural stem extension ‑er is comparable to the pluractional *‑(i)j (§⁄4.1), which is associated with the same pattern of grammatical relations. The last two contexts suggest that ‑er is associated with a low degree of transitivity (in the sense of Hopper & Thompson’s concept of transitivity as a scalar value201).

Kauczor also points out that some verbs are always extended by ‑er. This finding has been confirmed in recent studies of other Kordofan Nubian languages, particularly Uncu, Tagle, and Tabaq where verbs with a lexicalized ‑er-extension often express inherently repetitive events, such as “stutter” and “bark.”202 Some examples from Tagle may suffice to illustrate how the plural stem extension is used. In an intransitive clause, ‑er refers to the plural subject.203

Tagle
ɪ̀yɪ̀
1sg
ékk-é
urinate-pst.1sg
“I urinated”
(233)
àyì
1pl
ékk-ér-ó
urinate-plr-pst.1pl
“we urinated”
(234)

In a transitive clause, ‑er refers to the plural object.

àyì
1pl
kér=gì
fence.sg=acc
kíl-ó
jump-pst.1pl
“we jumped the fence”
(235)
àyì
1pl
kér-nd̪ú=gí
fence-pl=acc
kíl-ér-ó
jump-plr-pst.1pl
“we jumped the fences”
(236)

The ‑er-extension also occurs in transitivity alternations. Compare the transitive clause in (237) to the agent-preserving clause in (238) and to the patient-preserving non-basic intransitive clause in (239).

íyé-t̪ù
shepherd-sg
ēg-ī=gī
goat-pl=acc
túy-é-n
milk-plr-3
“the shepherd milks the goats” / “the shepherd milks goats”
(237)
íyé-t̪ù
shepherd-sg
túy-é-n
milk-plr-3
“the shepherd milks”
(238)
ōd̪-d̪ū
goat-sg
túy-é-n
milk-plr-3
“the goat milks, i.e., produces milk” / “a goat milks, i.e., produces milk”
(239)

Depending on the semantics of the verb and the semantic properties of its arguments, non-basic intransitivity constructions may even have a facilitative or passive reading.204

ɪ̀-t̪ʊ̀
baobab-sg
dʌ̄ɲɲ-ɛ̄-n
climb-plr-3
“the baobab is easy to climb” / “the baobab gets climbed”
(240)

Some transitive and intransitive verbs expressing inherently repetitive events are always marked by the ‑er-extension, as shown by the following 2sg/2pl imperative forms of Tagle. On these verbs the ‑er-extension has become lexicalized.

(241) t̪ʊ́m-ɛ́r-ɪ́ sg/t̪ʊ́m-ɛ́r-ɛ́ pl “stutter!”
(242) bóg-ér-ì sg/bóg-ér-è pl “bark!”
(243) ùr-ér-ì sg/ùr-ér-è pl “light a fire!”

The morphologically unmarked imperative examples from Karko show that the ‑er-extension is realized with an unspecified vowel which adopts the quality of the root vowel. Segmentally, it resembles the causative extension ‑Vr (see §⁄2.1).

Karko
(244) hə̄ɲ-ə́r “greet!”
(245) ūl-úr “breastfeed!”
(246) ɕàb-àr “wipe off!”
(247) ɛ̀b-ɛ̀r “wash (hands, body)!”

The ‑er-extension is often found combined with other verbal number marking devices, most frequently with the alternation of the root vowel. Tabaq examples (248)–(250) also show that ‑er may occur in paradigmatic contrast with the singular stem extension ‑ɪr ~ ‑ʊr. This indicates that extensions which mark verbal number are not exclusively employed to express plurality; they can also refer to single participants and events.205 Extensions marking singular verb stems have exclusively been documented in the Kordofan Nubian branch.206

Tabaq
sng plr Gloss
(248) dʊ́t̪-ʊ̀r dʷát̪-ɛ̀r- “cut across”
(249) ʃɔ́ɲk-ɪ́r ʃʷáɲk-ɛ́r “dry”
(250) kʷɔ́ɔ́k-ɪ́r ~ kʷɔɔk-ʊ́r kʷáák-ɛ́r “hide”

Midob ‑er is obviously a cognate of the Kordofan Nubian ‑er-extension. Werner claims that it is “no longer operative and can neither be clearly identified with plurality of object only.”207 The examples below show that ‑er is, in fact, sensitive to the plural subject of an intransitive verb, as shown by “sit” and “stop,” and to the plural indirect object (i.e., the recipient) of the ditransitive “give” verb.208

Midob
(251) tèl-ér-hàm “they sat down” (several people)
(252) tèkk-ér-íc “stop!” itr imp 2pl
(253) tìr-îc “give to him!” imp 2pl
(254) tìr-èr-îc “give to them!” imp 2pl

Interestingly, the Kordofan Nubian and Midob ‑er-extension is phonetically and semantically comparable to the Ama ‑r-suffix, which, according to Norton, has distributive connotations, i.e., it distributes the event either over several object referents or over a series of sub-events.209 It is always preceded by another distributive suffix, ‑Vd̪, and the theme vowel a. The resulting complex ‑Vd̪-a-r-suffix in Ama corresponds to the Afitti verbal plural suffix (-tə)-r. As distributivity is closely associated with plurality, it is quite conceivable that the Kordofan Nubian and Midob plural stem extension ‑er is a cognate of Ama (-Vd̪-a)-r and Afitti (-tə)-r. Moreover, these extensions may be related to the Mattokki and Andaandi extensions ‑ir and ‑(i)r-ir, which are sensitive to plural objects and distributive events (see §⁄6.2). The different but semantically related functions of these extensions – verbal plural, distributive, plural object – indicate that this extension is of considerable age.

6.4. The Kordofan Nubian Reciprocal ‑in-Extension

Whereas the Nile Nubian languages and Midob express reciprocal notions lexically, the Kordofan Nubian languages exhibit a productive reciprocal extension which is attached to plural verb stems. Reciprocal constructions are intransitive; for this reason, in Tagle the intransitive past marker is required, ‑(ì)bɛ̀l, which contrasts with the transitive past marker ‑(í)nàl.

Tagle
ínì
people
kòn‑nú‑nù=gì
bird-sg-dim.sg=acc
ìcí=kɔ̀
hand=ins
áŋ‑ínàl‑à-m [áŋàlàm]
seize-tr.pst-pl-pst.3
“the people seized the bird by hand”
(255)
ínì
people
àɲ-c-ìn-ìbɛ̀l-ʌ̀-m
seize-plr-rcp-itr.pst-pl-pst.3
“the people seized each other”
(256)

In Karko the reciprocal extension has several allomorphs. Because of its underspecified vowel the extension ‑Vn adopts the quality of the stem vowel. As in Tagle, the reciprocal is attached to the plural verb stem, which signals low transitivity. In the past it requires the intransitive past marker -ɲj.

Karko
ín
people
kwɛ̌ɛ̀=g
spear.pl=acc
fɛ́t̪-ɛ́n-ɲj-ɛ̀ɛ̀
throw.plr-rcp-itr.pst-3pl
“the people threw spears at each other”
(257)

The Kordofan Nubian reciprocal ‑in-suffix looks strikingly similar to the Ama dual suffixes ‑ɪ̄n and ‑ɛ̄n. According to Norton’s internal reconstruction, Ama ‑ɪ̄n is the older form, which originates from an old reciprocal suffix.210 He also points out that similar reciprocal extensions are attested in several East Sudanic languages. For these reasons, Kordofan Nubian ‑in and Ama ‑ɪ̄n can be considered cognates, providing another piece of evidence for the genetic relationship between these languages. So far, we do not know whether Afitti exhibits a comparable extension.211

6.5. Further Plural Stem Extensions in the Kordofan Nubian Languages

The Kordofan Nubian languages are rich in verbal number marking devices. In addition to the reflexes of the productive pluractional *-(i)j and plural stem marker ‑er there are several further less productive extensions as well as alternations of the root vowel, tonal alternations, and reduplication of the root. Some verbs have a single marked plural stem which is sensitive both to repetitive events and plural objects, other verbs have two distinct plural stems, one interacting with event number, the other one interacting with the intransitive plural subject or transitive plural object.

Dilling
(258) bur “get solid” itr, sj sg bur-k-iɲ id. sj pl
(259) ʃoɲ “get dry” itr, sj sg ʃwaɲ-c-iŋ id. sj pl
(260) dil “gather” itr, sj pl dil-t-ig id. sj pl, rpt

The stacking of plural stem extensions (i.e., the use of more than one suffix) is a common phenomenon in the Kordofan Nubian languages, as attested by Dilling (258) bur-k-iɲ, (259) ʃwaɲ-c-iŋ, and (260) dil-t-ig, as well as Tagle (261) èl-t-ìg-ì, (262) ét̪-íŋ-k-í, and (264) dɛ́-k-ɛ́r-ɛ́. While (261) and (262) display 2sg imperative forms marked by a final ‑i, (263) and (264) represent the 2sg/2pl imperative forms, marked by ‑i/ ‑e ~ ‑ɛ.

Tagle
(261) él-ír-ì “reach!” tr, oj sg èl-t-ìg-ì id. oj sg, rpt
(262) èt̪-ír-ì “enter!” tr, oj sg ét̪-íŋ-k-í id. oj pl, rpt
(263) nòm-èr-í “run!” itr, sj sg nòm-k-é id. sj pl, rpt
(264) dí “stand up, get up!” itr, sj sg dɛ́-k-ɛ́r-ɛ́ id. sj pl, rpt

Karko, too, uses various plural stem extensions, including ‑t-Vg, ‑kVn, and ‑(V)k, which are often combined with other formal devices such as tonal alternation and the reduplication of the verb root. The examples also illustrate that some verbs exhibit more than one plural stem, one stem interacting with participant number and the other with event number. The “fact that there is usually more than one formal strategy” for marking verbal number suggests “that this grammatical domain is subject to a high degree of communicative dynamism.”212

Karko
(265) kūg-úr “fix, connect!” tr, oj sg kùg-t-ùg id. oj pl, rpt
(266) dìí-r “sink!” itr, sj sg dìì-kìn id. sj pl dīī-dìì-k id. rpt
(267) nwàá-r “run!” itr, sj sg nwàà-kàn id. sj pl dòɕ id. rpt

Like the ‑er-extension (§⁄6.3), the suffixes introduced in the present section can mark plural verb stems which are required in transitivity alternations. For this reason, they are glossed just like ‑er by plr. Here are two pairs of Karko examples contrasting transitive and non-basic intransitive clauses. The latter are illustrated by the agent-preserving clause (269) and the patient-preserving clause (271).

ín
people
wèè=g
sorghum=acc
díg-t-ìg
gather-plr-plr
“the people gather the sorghum (ears)”
(268)
ín
people
kùld=ūt
mountain=loc
díg-t-ìg
gather-plr-plr
“the people gather on the mountain”
(269)
íīd̪
man
t̪óóɲéè=g
children=acc
fɛ̀j-ɛ́k
wake.up-plr
“the man wakes the children up”
(270)
t̪óóɲē
children
fɛ̀j-ɛ́k
wake.up-plr
“the children wake up”
(271)

6.6. The Kordofan Nubian ‑ad̪- and Midob ‑át-Extensions

These productive extensions, Kordofan Nubian ‑ad̪ and Midob ‑át, are assumed to be cognates, first, because non-initial Kordofan Nubian can correspond to Midob alveolar t,213 and second, because these suffixes have similar functions, since they are both associated with decreased valency. However, ‑át and ‑ad̪ differ in that the first is a verbal extension which does not trigger a change of the word category, while the latter turns the verb into a “verbal adjective,” as Kauczor suggests,214 or rather a resultative participle. When the morpheme ‑ad̪ attaches to verbal stems, the outcome is a resultative participle expressing states that result from previous events which have affected or changed the entity whose properties are designated by the participle.

The ‑ad̪-extension is a portmanteau morpheme since it cumulatively expresses decreased valency and singular number. The corresponding plural morphemes, Dilling ‑e, Tagle ‑an-i ~ -ʌn-ɪ, and Karko ‑Vn are portmanteau morphemes too, as they cover both decreased valency and plural number. However, only Tagle ‑an-i ~ -ʌn-ɪ and Karko ‑Vn are etymologically related to each other, while Dilling ‑e appears to have a different origin.215

Dilling
(272) bar/bar-k-iɲ “be tired” bar-k-ad/bar-k-e “tired”
(273) beʃ-ir/bej “damage” beʃ-ig-ad/bej-ig-e “damaged”
(274) em “wash” em-ad/em-e “washed”

The Tagle participles are regularly associated with a low tone pattern. The singular forms are marked by complex suffixes composed of the participle marker plus a vowel suffix marking number, ‑ad̪-u ~ -ʌd̪-ʊ and the plural forms by ‑an-i ~ -ʌn-ɪ. This means that Tagle participles are double marked for number. The participles can serve as attributive adjectives modifying a noun phrase or as predicative adjectives in copula clauses.

Tagle
kɪ́-t̪ʊ́
door-sg
èt̪-ìŋk-àd̪-ù
enter-plr-ptc.sg-sg
“the closed door”
(275a)
kɪ́-nɪ́
door-pl
èt̪-ìŋk-àn-ì
enter-plr-ptc.pl-pl
“the closed doors”
(275b)
kɪ̀-t̪ʊ̀
cloth-sg
dùy-àd̪-ù-ní [dùyàdùní]
sew-ptc.sg-sg-cop
“the cloth is sewn”
(276a)
kɪ̀-nɪ̀
cloth-pl
dùy-àn-ì-ní
sew-ptc.pl-pl-cop
“the clothes are sewn”
(276b)

Similar to Tagle, Karko participles are characterized by a low tone pattern. They are inflected for singular by ‑Vd̪ and for plural by ‑Vn, the vowel V adopting the quality of the stem vowel.

Karko
(277) kàm-àd̪/kàm-àn “eaten”
(278) t̪ɔ̀f-ɔ̀d̪/t̪ɔ̀f-ɔ̀n “killed”

Interestingly, most of the participles illustrated here exhibit a marked plural stem: e.g., Dilling bar-k-ad/bar-k-e “tired,” beʃ-ig-ad/bej-ig-e “damaged”; Tagle èt̪-ìŋk-àd̪-ù/èt̪‑ìŋk-àn-ì “closed.” The corresponding singular stems are Dilling bar, beʃ-ir and Tagle èt̪-ír, respectively. The Karko examples kàm-àd̪/kàm-àn “eaten” and tɔ̀f-ɔ̀d̪/tɔ̀f-ɔ̀n “killed,” however, exhibit suppletive plural stems, the corresponding singular stems being kə̀l and fúr, respectively. The plural verb stems are selected because they are associated with low transitivity (which is also addressed in §⁄6.3).

As for the Midob ‑át-extension, we suggest an analysis different from Werner’s. On first sight, (279)–(281) support his claim that ‑(r)ati derives reflexive verbs.216

Midob
(279) èeb-àh-êm “I washed” tr èeb-árát-ìh-èm “I washed myself” refl
(280) tə̀g-ə̀n-dóo-h-èm “I covered” tr tə̀g-rát-ìh-èm “I covered myself” refl
(281) pìss-ìr-h-êm “I have sprinkled” tr pìss-ìrát-íh-èm “I sprinkled myself” refl

However, his Midob grammar also contains a few counter examples which do not express reflexive notions.217 They suggest that ‑r-at is a complex morpheme composed of ‑(i)r ~ ‑(a)r plus ‑át. Whereas the first component looks like a reflex of the causative *-(i)r, the second component ‑át can be identified as a valency-decreasing device deriving intransitive from transitive verbs.

(282) òss-ír-hèm “I soaked” tr òss-ìr-át-ùm “it is soaking”
(283) tə̀g-ə̀r-hèm “I closed, covered” tr tə̀g-r-át-òn-ûm “it was covered”218

It is still conceivable that ‑at can also trigger a reflexive interpretation, especially when it is attached to verbs with an animate and agentive subject such as “wash,” “cover,” and “sprinkle.”

If Kordofan Nubian ‑ad̪ and Midob ‑át are cognate valency-decreasing morphemes, are they related to the passive extensions, Old Nubian ‑tak and Nobiin ‑dakk ~ ‑takk ~ ‑daŋ? Although the metathesis of -ad̪ > -d̪a and ‑át > -tá is conceivable, none of these suffixes exhibits a velar which would match the final consonants of ‑tak and ‑dakk ~ ‑takk ~ ‑daŋ. For this reason, there is too little evidence supporting the assumption of a common origin of these extensions.

6.7. The Midob ‑íd-Extension

Tucker & Bryan identify a ‑Vda-suffix which expresses “plural action.”219

(284) ʊkk-a “bear” ʊkk-ʊda “bear often”
(285) ökk-a “bear twins” ökk-ʊda “bear twins often”
(286) acc-a “bite” acc-ida “bite often”

Werner, in turn, recognizes this suffix as ‑íd, ending in an alveolar [d].220 His examples suggest that the final ‑a on ‑Vda is not part of this suffix. Similarly to Tucker & Bryan, he describes this suffix as expressing “plurality of action.”221

(287) úkk-ánònùm “she has given birth” úkk-íd-ánònùm “she has given birth (to many children)”

A phonetically and semantically similar VC-shaped extension is attested in Ama by ‑ɪ́d̪. According to Norton, the Ama extension ‑ɪ́d̪ has a distributive function.222 It is sensitive to a plural object participant, as shown in (289) or to a plural subject participant as in (290). Moreover, it can express an event distributed in time over a series of sub-events, as in (291). Norton considers ‑ɪ́d̪, with these distributional functions, as a type of pluractional.223

Ama
ə̀ŋí
1pl
bā
ver
wùd̪ēŋ
child
dɛ̄ɛ́ɪ́
hit
“we hit the child”
(288)
ə̀ŋí
1pl
bā
ver
dɔ̄rɛŋ
children
dɛ̄-ɪ́d̪-ɪ́
hit-dstr-th
“we hit the children”
(289)
ə̀ŋí
1pl
bā
ver
tūɽ-íd-è
cry-dstr-th
“we (three or more) each cried”
(290)
ə̀ŋí
1pl
bā
ver
dɔ̄rɛŋ
children
mʊ̄l
five
dɛ̄-ɪ́d̪-ɪ́
hit-dstr-th
“we hit until we had hit five children”
(291)

Midob is spoken in Darfur and Ama in the Nuba Mountains. In view of the geographical distance between these languages today, (recent) direct borrowing is unlikely. Considering that the non-initial dental and the non-initial alveolar d may correspond to each other,224 the striking semantic and phonetic resemblances between Ama ‑ɪ́d̪ and Midob ‑íd suggest that these suffixes are cognates. They represent another piece of evidence for the common genetic origins of Ama and the Nubian languages. Unfortunately, as in the case of the causative ‑ɪg- or ‑ɛg-suffix and the reciprocal/dual suffix ‑ɪn, corroborating evidence from Afitti is (still) missing.

7. Conclusions

If we disregard the predicable epenthetic vowel, we recognize that six of the seven reconstructable derivational extensions either consist of a single consonant C or of a CV(V)C pattern. While the C-shaped extensions include *‑(i)r, the pluractional *‑(i)j, and the plural stem extension *‑(i)k, the CV(V)C pattern is represented by the causative morpheme *‑(i)gir and the applicative morphemes *tir and *deen. The latter pattern coincides with the canonical syllable pattern of Nubian lexical roots, thus corroborating the assumed origin of *(i)gir, *tir, and *deen from lexical items, or, more precisely, from lexical verbs.

Whereas *‑(i)r, *‑(i)j, *‑(i)k, *‑(i)gir, *tir, and *deen can be traced back to Proto-Nubian, the causative *u- ~ o-prefix and its cognate, the Ama a-prefix, are assumed to originate from the archaic Nilo-Saharan *i-. As reflexes of this prefix are also attested in several branches of Eastern Sudanic and in Central Sudanic, they prove to be historically stable derivational morphemes which corroborate the assumed genetic coherence of the Nilo-Saharan phylum, as Dimmendaal argues.225 Moreover, the prefixes suggest that these languages have changed from an originally prefixing to a predominantly suffixing type. Another indicator of this conversion process is the archaic Nubian *m-prefix, which used to serve as a negation marker.

The comparative perspective on the Nubian verb extensions reveals language change motivated by various instances of grammaticalization, including semantic bleaching, the weakening and loss of functions, blending, the adoption of new grammatical functions, and even the emergence of new morphemes.

A manifestation of language change is the grammaticalization of the causative extension *-(i)r. The Old Nubian and Nobiin ‑(i)r-suffix tends to become redundant and therefore appears as a lexicalized element on some verbs. In Mattokki and Andaandi the gradual loss of the causative function of the ‑ir-extension has motivated the development of a reduplicated suffix. The resulting new ‑ir-ir-extension, realized as [iddi], is considered to be a compensation for the nearly defunct ‑ir. In the Kordofan Nubian languages the weakening of the causative function has resulted in ‑(i)r serving as a transitivizer on some Dilling verbs and on other verbs as an intransitivizer. On some Tagle verbs, in turn, ‑ir is even used in paradigmatic contrast to ‑er, thus differentiating singular from plural stems. Such morphologically marked singular stems only occur in Kordofan Nubian languages, whereas in the Nile Nubian languages they are unattested.

Another instance of grammaticalization is the assumed morphological blending of the two donative verbs, resulting in the emergence of the innovative verb ti. In the Kordofan Nubian languages ti has begun to replace the original donative verbs, particularly in applicative constructions. These distinct stages of grammaticalization indicate that the western Nubian languages have undergone more morphological and syntactic changes than the Nile Nubian languages which have retained the two original verbs.

Suggesting that the Old Nubian and Nobiin ‑a-suffix is a converb marker and therefore different from the Old Nubian clitic predicate marker -a, we have highlighted some syntactic, morphological, and semantic properties of converbs in the Nile Nubian languages. They can express chains of successive events or even events prior or simultaneous to the event expressed by the main verb. Converbs are also employed as adverbial modifiers of main verbs. In these contexts, converbs are used in symmetric formations, i.e., the converb(s) and the main verb of a clause contribute equally to the expression of two or more events. In an asymmetric converb construction, by contrast, the converb and the adjacent main verb jointly express a single event. Such asymmetric formations are often associated with directed motion or transfer events or with the grammaticalization of the main verb as an aspect-marking or even valency-changing device. The latter is attested by the biverbal applicative construction in the Nile Nubian languages where the second verb is represented by a finite donative verb. This serves as a valence operator commonly licensing an additional argument with the role of a beneficiary.

Unlike the biverbal applicative construction in the Nile Nubian languages, applicatives in the Kordofan Nubian and Midob form monoverbal constructions, since “give” has become a derivational morpheme being suffixed to the stem of the lexical verb by means of the linker ‑(i)n. This means that in Kordofan Nubian applicative constructions the development of “give” as a bound derivational morpheme has reached a further stage on the grammaticalization path than “give” in the Nile Nubian converb constructions. At least in Andaandi, the auxiliary-like “give” verb is a free form which can be separated from the preceding lexical verb by means of the question clitic te.

Verbal number plays an important role, as it can express event number and participant number. The pluractional *‑(i)j, for instance, conveys event plurality associated with various aspectual notions. In Andaandi, Dilling, and Midob it expresses intensive and repetitive actions, in Tagle repetitive and continued actions, and in Mattokki distributive events. It also has morphosyntactic functions, as indicated by the interaction between the -*(i)j-marked verb stems and the plural subject in intransitive clauses or the plural object in transitive clauses. In ditransitive applicative constructions the reflex of *‑(i)j is selected by the plural indirect object (i.e., the beneficiary), as attested in the Old Nubian example (144). In Kordofan Nubian ditransitive applicative constructions, however, it is the plural direct object (i.e., the theme) which selects a reflex of *‑(i)j, as shown in the Karko example (179). In transitive clauses *‑(i)j is sensitive to the plural object (patient), as shown in the Old Nubian example (154) and Karko example (177). Thus, the selection of the *‑(i)j-extension provides evidence of two patterns of alignment. Whereas the patient aligns with the beneficiary in Old Nubian, in Karko the patient aligns with the theme. These two patterns are known as secondary-object construction and indirect-object construction, respectively.226

Verbal number marking in the Kordofan Nubian languages is far more complex than in the Nile Nubian languages. It is carried out by means of several formal strategies, including a variety of suffixes which may be combined with each other and with the alternation of the stem vowel and tone pattern. The morphological complexity of this system suggests that it is rather instable.227 In addition to expressing event number and participant number, Kordofan Nubian plural stems can even serve as valency-decreasing devices in agent-preserving and patient-preserving clauses which may convey facilitative and passive meanings.

In addition to reconstructing several Proto-Nubian verb extensions, the present paper also shows striking phonetic and semantic resemblances between several Nubian and Nyima (mostly Ama) verb extensions. The Nubian causative suffix *‑(i)gir, for instance, exhibits a velar stop. A velar [g] is also found in the Ama directional/causative extensions ‑ɪg and ‑ɛg. The Ama causative verbs “feed” and “suckle” addressed in §⁄5.2 suggest that the ‑ɪg- and ‑ɛg-extensions have come to replace the now defunct causative a-prefix, the latter being a cognate of the Proto-Nubian *u- ~ o-prefix.

The Kordofan Nubian reciprocal extension ‑in is comparable to the Ama dual ‑ɪn, which, according to Norton, originates from a reciprocal extension.228

When we consider that the Proto-Nubian liquid *r is retained in most of its daughter languages, as attested by *ur “head,” *m-iir “barren,” and *tir “give to 2nd or 3rd person,”229 it is quite conceivable that the Kordofan Nubian and Midob verbal plural suffix ‑er and the Mattokki and Andaandi plural object ‑ir- or ‑(i)r-ir-extension are cognates. They also appear to correspond to the Ama distributive extension ‑r and to the ‑r component of the complex Ama and Afitti extensions (‑Vd̪‑a)‑r and (-tə)-r, respectively. In addition to the shared ‑r-suffix, all of these extensions convey the semantic notion of plurality.

The Midob plural stem extension ‑íd- ~ -ʊd and the Ama distributive ‑ɪ́d̪ share several features, such as a VC-shaped structure, a high vowel, and high tone. Moreover, they are both semantically associated with plurality. Therefore, it seems likely that they have a common genetic origin.

As bound morphemes are less often subject to borrowing than free morphemes, these corresponding verb extensions point to a remote genetic relationship between Nubian and Nyima, rather than to contact-induced similarities.

However, in addition to the suggestive evidence of their old genetic links, there are also indicators of recent convergence between Nubian and Nyima, as attested by lexical borrowings (Tables 1 and 2). Since the phonetic similarities of the Ama, Mandal, and Afitti items to the Kordofan Nubian items is stronger than to the corresponding Nile Nubian items, they indicate that Kordofan Nubian is the donor language of these borrowings. It is assumed that Ama and Afitti adopted Kordofan Nubian lexical items due to contact with the ancestors of the present Kordofan Nubian language speakers, after they had migrated to and settled in the Nuba Mountains.

8. Abbreviations

  • 1, 2, 3 – 1st, 2nd, 3rd person;
  • acc – accusative;
  • An – Andaandi;
  • appl – applicative;
  • caus – causative;
  • cnv – converb;
  • com – comitative;
  • comm – command;
  • cont – continuous;
  • det – determiner;
  • Dil – Dilling;
  • dim – diminutive;
  • distr – distributive;
  • ditr – ditransitive;
  • gen – genitive;
  • excl – exclusive;
  • imp – imperative;
  • incl – inclusive;
  • ind – indicative;
  • inten – intentional;
  • ins – instrumental;
  • itr – intransitive;
  • jus – jussive;
  • Ka – Karko;
  • Ma – Mattokki;
  • lk – linker;
  • loc – locative;
  • Mi – Midob;
  • neg – negation;
  • neut – neutral;
  • NN – Nile Nubian;
  • No – Nobiin;
  • oj – object;
  • ON – Old Nubian;
  • pass – passive;
  • pcnv – purposive converb;
  • pl – plural of nominal;
  • plact – pluractional;
  • plr – plural verb stem;
  • PN – Proto-Nubian;
  • PKN – Proto-Kordofan Nubian;
  • ploj – plural object;
  • pred – predicate;
  • prf – perfect;
  • prog – progressive;
  • pfv – perfective;
  • prs – present tense;
  • pst – past;
  • pt – preterite;
  • ptc – participle;
  • prog – progressive;
  • proh – prohibitive;
  • q – question;
  • refl – reflexive;
  • rcp – reciprocal;
  • rpt – repetitive;
  • sj – subject;
  • sg – singular of nominal;
  • sgt – singulative;
  • sng – singular verb stem;
  • stat – stative;
  • sub – subessive;
  • supe – superessive;
  • Ta – Tagle;
  • th – theme;
  • top – topic;
  • tr – transitive;
  • ver – veridical;
  • vet – vetitive.

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Stevenson, Roland C. bib⁄“A Survey of the Phonetics and Grammatical Structures of the Nuba Mountain Languages, with Particular Reference to Otoro, Katcha and Nyimaŋ.” Afrika und Übersee 41 (1957): pp. 27–65, 117–152, 171–196.

Stevenson, Roland, Franz Rottland & Angelika Jakobi. bib⁄“The Verb in Nyimang and Dinik.” Afrikanistische Arbeitspapiere 32 (1992): pp. 5–64.

Thelwall, Robin. bib⁄“Lexicostatistical Relations between Nubian, Daju and Dinka.” In Etudes Nubiennes, Colloque de Chantilly, 2–6 Juillet 1975, edited by Jean Leclant and Jean Vercouttier. Cairo: IFAO, 1978: pp. 265–286.

Thelwall, Robin. bib⁄“Meidob Nubian: Phonology, Grammatical Notes and Basic Vocabulary.” In Nilo-Saharan Language Studies, edited by M. Lionel Bender. East Lansing: African Studies Center, Michigan State University, 1983: pp. 97–113.

Tucker, Archibald N. & Margaret A. Bryan. bib⁄Linguistic Analyses: The Non-Bantu Languages of North-Eastern Africa. London: Oxford University Press, 1966.

Veselinova, Ljuba N. bib⁄“Verbal Number and Suppletion.” In The World Atlas of Language Structures Online, edited by Matthew S. Dryer & Martin Haspelmath. Leipzig: Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, 2013. www⁄http://wals.info/chapter/80.

Voogt, Alex de. bib⁄“Dual Marking and Kinship Terms in Afitti.” Studies in Language 35, no. 4 (2011): pp. 898–911. doi: www⁄10.1075/sl.35.4.04dev.

Werner, Roland. bib⁄Grammatik des Nobiin (Nilnubisch). Pho­no­logie, Tonologie und Morphologie. Hamburg: Helmut Buske, 1987.

Werner, Roland. “Ideophones in Nobiin,” unpublished ms presented as hand-out at the 9th Nilo-Saharan Linguistics Colloquium at Khartoum, 2004.

Werner, Roland. bib⁄Tìdn-áal: A Study of Midob (Darfur-Nubian). Berlin: Dietrich Reimer, 1993.

Zyhlarz, Ernst. bib⁄“Die Lautverschiebungen des Nubischen.” Zeitschrift für Eingeborenen-Sprachen 35 (1949/50): pp. 1–20, 128–146, 280–313.


  1. This paper is partly based on data drawn from published sources, partly collected in collaboration with mother tongue speakers. I am deeply indebted to the unflagging commitment of El-Shafie El-Guzuuli who contributed examples of Andaandi, to Ali Ibrahim of Tagle, Ahmed Hamdan of Karko, and Ishaag Hassan of Midob. Isaameddiin Hasan provided advice on Nobiin. ↩︎

  2. Bender, The Nilo-Saharan Languages: A Comparative Essay; Bender, “Nilo-Saharan”; Dimmendaal, “Eastern Sudanic and the Wadi Howar and Wadi El Milk Diaspora”; article⁄Blench, this issue↩︎

  3. In the present paper I will use the term Nyima to refer to the language group comprising Ama, Mandal, and Afitti. Afitti is also known as Dinik (Stevenson, Rottland & Jakobi, “The Verb in Nyimang and Dinik.”). ↩︎

  4. Rilly, Le méroïtique et sa famille linguistique. ↩︎

  5. For a recent sub-classification of East Sudanic, see Dimmendaal et al., “Linguistic Features and Typologies in Languages Commonly Referred to as ‘Nilo-Saharan’.” ↩︎

  6. Ehret, A Historical-Comparative Reconstruction of Nilo-Saharan, p. 141; Starostin, “Lexicostatistical Studies in East Sudanic I.” Both Ehret and Starostin use Ama (but no Afitti) data. ↩︎

  7. Ehret, A Historical-Comparative Reconstruction of Nilo-Saharan, chap. 5. ↩︎

  8. Rilly, Le méroïtique et sa famille linguistique. ↩︎

  9. Adapted from Rilly, “The Linguistic Position of Meroitic.” ↩︎

  10. I would like to thank the cartographer at the Institute of African Studies and Egyptology, University of Cologne, Monika Feinen, for designing the map. ↩︎

  11. Rottland & Jakobi, “Loan Word Evidence from the Nuba Mountains.” ↩︎

  12. For the purpose of clarity, the different spelling conventions adopted for writing the various modern Nubian languages in the Latin script have been unified in this paper. Thus, the following digraphs are replaced by single IPA symbols: sh → ʃ; ch → c; ny → ɲ; and ng → ŋ. Consonantal characters with diacritics are replaced as follows, š → ʃ; ğ, ǵ → j; ń, ñ → ɲ; ṅ → ŋ. The IPA symbol ɟ, however, is replaced by j. Long vowels are rendered by two identical vowel symbols, e.g., ii, rather than by a vowel plus colon (e.g., i:) or a vowel with a macron (e.g., ). To facilitate the comparison of the language data from different sources, alveolar stops are rendered by t and d; the corresponding dentals being represented by and ↩︎

  13. Tucker & Bryan, Linguistic Analyses, p. 245. ↩︎

  14. Van Gerven Oei, A Reference Grammar of Old Nubian, §14.1.3. ↩︎

  15. Werner, Grammatik des Nobiin, pp. 204–205. ↩︎

  16. Massenbach, “Wörterbuch des nubischen Kunûzi-Dialektes,” pp. 121–122, Armbruster, Dongolese Nubian: A Grammar, §§3888–3889. ↩︎

  17. According to Kauczor (Die bergnubische Sprache, §§445–448), the inchoative is realized by the complex singular suffix -n-er and the plural suffix -ŋ. It is the plural suffix which looks like a cognate of the corresponding Nile Nubian inchoative suffixes. ↩︎

  18. Greenberg, The Languages of Africa, p. 93. ↩︎

  19. Noonan, “Genetic Classification and Language Contact.” ↩︎

  20. Dimmendaal, “Comparative African Linguistics.” ↩︎

  21. Rilly, Le méroïtique et sa famille linguistique, pp. 285–288. ↩︎

  22. Thelwall, “Lexicostatistical Relations Between Nubian, Daju and Dinka.” ↩︎

  23. Zyhlarz, “Die Lautverschiebungen des Nubischen”; Bechhaus-Gerst, “Sprachliche und historische Rekonstruktionen im Bereich des Nubischen”; Bechhaus-Gerst, “‘Nile-Nubian’ Reconsidered”; Jakobi, “The Loss of Syllable-final Proto-Nubian Consonants”; Rilly, Le méroïtique et sa famille linguistique. ↩︎

  24. Dimmendaal, “Nilo-Saharan,” p. 52. ↩︎

  25. Stevenson, “A Survey of the Phonetics and Grammatical Structure of the Nuba Mountain Languages” and article⁄Norton, this issue↩︎

  26. Stevenson, “A Survey of the Phonetics and Grammatical Structure of the Nuba Mountain Languages”; Tucker & Bryan, Linguistic Analyses, pp. 243–252; Rottland & Jakobi, “Loan Word Evidence from the Nuba Mountains”; Stevenson, Rottland & Jakobi, “The Verb in Nyimang and Dinik”; article⁄Norton, this issue↩︎

  27. Browne, The Old Nubian Miracle of Saint Menas; Van Gerven Oei, A Reference Grammar of Old Nubian. ↩︎

  28. The examples are drawn from Browne, Old Nubian Dictionary. ↩︎

  29. Van Gerven Oei, A Reference Grammar of Old Nubian, §13.2.1. ↩︎

  30. Example from Van Gerven Oei, A Reference Grammar of Old Nubian, §10.2.1. ↩︎

  31. Browne, Old Nubian Grammar, p. 47. ↩︎

  32. Lepsius, Nubische Grammatik, p. 152. ↩︎

  33. Werner, Grammatik des Nobiin, pp. 220–273. ↩︎

  34. Hopper, “Where Do Words Come From?” p. 154. ↩︎

  35. Examples drawn from Massenbach, “Wörterbuch des nubischen Kunûzi-Dialektes,” pp. 132–133, 215. ↩︎

  36. Abdel-Hafiz, A Reference Grammar of Kunuz Nubian, pp. 105–106. ↩︎

  37. Massenbach, “Wörterbuch des nubischen Kunûzi-Dialektes,” pp. 157, 214. ↩︎

  38. Examples from Massenbach, “Wörterbuch des nubischen Kunûzi-Dialektes,” p. 132. ↩︎

  39. Examples from Armbruster, Dongolese Nubian: A Grammar, §§3670–76 and §3722; Armbruster, Dongolese Nubian: A Lexicon, p. 44. ↩︎

  40. Armbruster, Dongolese Nubian: A Grammar, §2865 and §3718. ↩︎

  41. “Neutral” is a tentative term for a (non-preterite, non-negative) suffix which in previous studies has been called “present tense.” The term “imperfective” is probably more appropriate. ↩︎

  42. Armbruster, Dongolese Nubian: A Grammar, §3708. ↩︎

  43. Examples drawn from Kauczor, Die bergnubische Sprache, §253. ↩︎

  44. Ibid. ↩︎

  45. All Tagle examples are provided by Ali Ibrahim (p.c.). ↩︎

  46. Werner, Tìdn-áal, p. 53. Werner translates (48) with English infinitives, “to get up” and “to get/wake (somebody) up.” He does not provide morpheme glossing. Due to the inflectional suffix -(i)hem, they can be identified as 1st person perfect indicative forms. ↩︎

  47. Examples provided without tone marks by Ishaag Hassan, p.c., January 2019. ↩︎

  48. Werner, Tìdn-áal, p. 29. ↩︎

  49. Van Gerven Oei, A Reference Grammar of Old Nubian, §13.2.2. ↩︎

  50. Browne, Old Nubian Dictionary, pp. 81, 124, 152. ↩︎

  51. Browne, Old Nubian Grammar, p. 48. ↩︎

  52. Reinisch, Die sprachliche Stellung des Nuba, p. 37. ↩︎

  53. Ibid. ↩︎

  54. Werner, Grammatik des Nobiin, p. 178. ↩︎

  55. “Present tense” is a preliminary term for a category that is probably more adequately described as imperfective aspect. ↩︎

  56. Werner, Grammatik des Nobiin, p. 179. ↩︎

  57. Werner, p.c., October 2020. ↩︎

  58. Isaameddiin Hasan, p.c., 2017. ↩︎

  59. Massenbach, “Wörterbuch des nubischen Kunûzi-Dialektes,” p. 132. ↩︎

  60. Armbruster, Dongolese Nubian: A Grammar, §§3665ff. ↩︎

  61. Borrowed Arabic verbs are integrated into the Andaandi verbal system by means of the clitic verb ɛ which is more frequently realized with a long vowel as ɛɛ “say,” cf. Armbruster, Dongolese Nubian: A Grammar, §2879 and §§3602–3607. ↩︎

  62. ɛɛʃ belongs to the class of onomatopoeia or ideophones. They are not used as free forms but are turned into verbs by means of the clitic verb ɛ “say,” cf. Armbruster, Dongolese Nubian: A Grammar, §§2870–2877. ↩︎

  63. Armbruster, Dongolese Nubian: A Grammar, §3688. ↩︎

  64. Werner, p.c., October 2020. ↩︎

  65. Examples provided by E. El-Guzuuli, p.c. June 2019. ↩︎

  66. Examples from Kauczor, Die bergnubische Sprache, §269 and §270. ↩︎

  67. In (78) ʃɔ̀k-ɪ̀r-ɪ̀ can be replaced by ʃɔ̀k-ɪ̀↩︎

  68. Examples from Werner, Tìdn-áal, pp. 54, 89. ↩︎

  69. Ibid., p. 86. ↩︎

  70. Ibid., p. 27. ↩︎

  71. Example from Grüning, A Sketch of the Midob Verbal Morphology, p. 41. ↩︎

  72. The reconstructed PN lexical items are drawn from Rilly, Le méroïtique et sa famille linguistique, p. 273, the corresponding Midob items from Werner’s Midob–English vocabulary in Tìdn-áal, pp. 75–143. ↩︎

  73. Rilly, Le méroïtique et sa famille linguistique, p. 443. ↩︎

  74. The alveolar t as an initial segment of the two donative verbs is also attested in Uncunwee, as seen in Comfort & Jakobi, “The Verb ‘to give’ as a Verbal Extension in Uncunwee.” ↩︎

  75. See the sets of cognates in the appendix of Rilly’s Le méroïtique et sa famille linguistique, p. 518, no. 182. ↩︎

  76. Cf. Van Gerven Oei, A Reference Grammar of Old Nubian, §2.2. Nobiin examples from Werner, p.c., October 2020. ↩︎

  77. Examples from Massenbach, “Wörterbuch des nubischen Kunûzi-Dialektes,” p. 128. ↩︎

  78. Examples from Armbruster, Dongolese Nubian: A Lexicon, pp. 48, 200. ↩︎

  79. Examples from Kauczor, Die bergnubische Sprache, p. 346. ↩︎

  80. Werner, Tìdn-áal, pp. 56, 130, 132. ↩︎

  81. Van Gerven Oei, A Reference Grammar of Old Nubian. chap. 7. ↩︎

  82. Werner, Grammatik des Nobiin, pp. 167–170. ↩︎

  83. Lepsius, Nubische Grammatik, p. 292; Reinisch, Die sprachliche Stellung des Nuba, p. 25. ↩︎

  84. Browne, Old Nubian Grammar, p. 64; Hintze, “Beobachtungen zur altnubischen Grammatik I und II,” p. 287; Bechhaus-Gerst, The (Hi)story of Nobiin, p. 137ff. ↩︎

  85. Massenbach, “Wörterbuch des nubischen Kunûzi-Dialektes,” p. 126. ↩︎

  86. Werner, Grammatik des Nobiin, pp. 167–170. Werner’s term “a-Form” covers both the converb marker and the copula. ↩︎

  87. Van Gerven Oei, “A Note on the Old Nubian Morpheme -ⲁ in Nominal and Verbal Predicates.” ↩︎

  88. Hintze, “Beobachtungen zur altnubischen Grammatik I und II,” p. 287; Smagina, The Old Nubian Language. ↩︎

  89. Amha & Dimmendaal, “Converbs in an African Perspective.” ↩︎

  90. Ibid., p. 394. ↩︎

  91. Jakobi & Crass, Grammaire du beria, pp. 168f. ↩︎

  92. Comfort, “Converbs in Uncunwee (Kordofan Nubian).” ↩︎

  93. Example from Hashim, Nobiiguun Kummaanchii, p. 54. ↩︎

  94. Example from Lepsius, Nubische Grammatik, p. 345. Lepsius’s German translation reads: “angekommen gingen sie zu ihm.” ↩︎

  95. Example from Lepsius, Nubische Grammatik, p. 364. ↩︎

  96. Unlike the Nile Nubian languages, which solely use same subject converbs, the Kordofan Nubian languages exhibit same subject, different subject, and purposive converbs; see, for example, Comfort, “Converbs in Uncunwee (Kordofan Nubian).” ↩︎

  97. The Nobiin perfective marker is realized with a long [oː], while the corresponding marker in Mattokki and Andaandi has a short [o]. ↩︎

  98. Ameka, “Ewe Serial Verb Constructions in their Grammatical Context,” p. 128. ↩︎

  99. Aikhenvald, “Serial Verb Constructions in Typological Perspective,” p. 6. ↩︎

  100. Massenbach, “Wörterbuch des nubischen Kunûzi-Dialektes,” p. 126 points out that the converb (“Verbum conjunctum”) is realized i) without a suffix; ii) with the suffix ‑ka; and iii) with the suffix ‑rgi ~ -rigi. It is unclear, however, which criteria trigger the selection of one of these converb forms. ↩︎

  101. Jakobi & El-Guzuuli, “Perception Verbs and their Semantics in Dongolawi,” erroneously refer to converbs as serial verbs, thus disregarding the fact that Andaandi (Dongolawi) converbs cannot function as independent verbs in simple clauses, as serial verbs can do. ↩︎

  102. Amha & Dimmendaal, “Verbal Compounding in Wolaitta,” p. 327. ↩︎

  103. Rapold, “Defining Converbs Ten Years On,” p. 13. ↩︎

  104. Mufwene, Stativity and the Progressive. Example from Werner, Grammatik des Nobiin, p. 185. ↩︎

  105. Abdel-Hafiz, A Reference Grammar of Kunuz Nubian, pp. 115–117. ↩︎

  106. Example from Armbruster, Dongolese Nubian: A Lexicon, p. 38. ↩︎

  107. Examples from Lepsius, Nubische Grammatik, p. 292. ↩︎

  108. Examples provided by El-Shafie El-Guzuuli, p.c. ↩︎

  109. Massenbach, “Wörterbuch des nubischen Kunûzi-Dialektes,” p. 214. According to El‑Shafie El‑Guzuuli, p.c., this expression is not used in Andaandi. ↩︎

  110. Abdel-Hafiz, A Reference Grammar of Kunuz Nubian, pp. 123–125. Example from ibid., p. 125. ↩︎

  111. Example provided by El-Shafie El-Guzuuli, p.c. ↩︎

  112. Slobin, “What Makes Manner of Motion Salient,” p. 62. ↩︎

  113. Amha & Dimmendaal, “Verbal Compounding in Wolaitta,” p. 327. ↩︎

  114. Examples provided by El-Shafie El-Guzuuli, p.c. ↩︎

  115. Aikhenvald, “Serial Verb Constructions in Typological Perspective,” p. 30f. ↩︎

  116. Examples from Browne, The Old Nubian Miracle of Saint Menas, pp. 12, 7. Glossing is taken from Van Gerven Oei, A Reference Grammar of Old Nubian, §15.1.3 and §7. Unlike Van Gerven Oei, I consider -ir in ook-ir-s-n-a to be a causative, rather than a transitive extension (see §⁄2.1). ↩︎

  117. Browne, Old Nubian Grammar, p. 65; Bechhaus-Gerst, The (Hi)story of Nobiin, p. 148. ↩︎

  118. Van Gerven Oei, A Reference Grammar of Old Nubian, §11.1.2. Example from ibid., §11.1.1.1. ↩︎

  119. Browne, The Old Nubian Miracle of Saint Menas, p. 35 describes the unmarked converb in these collocations as “desinenceless adjunctive.” ↩︎

  120. Creissels, “Benefactive Applicative Periphrases.” ↩︎

  121. Examples from Lepsius, Nubische Grammatik, pp. 135, 136; Werner, Grammatik des Nobiin, p. 187. ↩︎

  122. Examples from Massenbach, “Wörterbuch des nubischen Kunûzi-Dialektes,” p. 134. ↩︎

  123. Massenbach, “Wörterbuch des nubischen Kunûzi-Dialektes”; Armbruster, Dongolese Nubian: A Grammar, §3998; Werner, Grammatik des Nobiin, p. 272; Abdel-Hafiz, A Reference Grammar of Kunuz Nubian. ↩︎

  124. Example provided by El-Guzuuli, p.c., November 2013. ↩︎

  125. Examples provided by Ishaag Hassan, p.c., January 2019. ↩︎

  126. Kauczor, Die bergnubische Sprache, §§374–377. ↩︎

  127. Examples from ibid., §380f. ↩︎

  128. Tagle examples provided by Ali Ibrahim, p.c. ↩︎

  129. Karko examples provided by Ahmed Hamdan, p.c. For the plural stem extension ‑(V)k on ɕīj‑īk-n-dìì see §⁄4.2 and §⁄6.5↩︎

  130. Example from Van Gerven Oei, A Reference Grammar of Old Nubian, §7.2.3.1. Old Nubian ⲇⲉⲛ is here written with a final ⳡ rather than ⲛ, thus mirroring its realization as palatal [ɲ] when followed by the palatal stop [ɟ] (i.e., Old Nubian ⳝ). ↩︎

  131. Example from Abel, Eine Erzählung im Dialekt von Ermenne, ex. 69. ↩︎

  132. Example from Werner, Grammatik des Nobiin, p. 188. Werner’s glossing of ‑a as “a(-Form)” is here replaced by the glossing cnv. Note that we would expect the vowel of -dèn to be long rather than short. ↩︎

  133. Example from Abdel-Hafiz, A Reference Grammar of Kunuz Nubian, p. 114. ↩︎

  134. Example provided by El-Shafie El-Guzuuli, p.c. The 3sg pronominal direct object is unexpressed. ↩︎

  135. Examples from Kauczor, Die bergnubische Sprache, §375 and §378. ↩︎

  136. Veselinova, “Verbal Number and Suppletion.” ↩︎

  137. Browne, Old Nubian Grammar, p. 49. ↩︎

  138. Lepsius, Nubische Grammatik, p. 127. ↩︎

  139. Werner, Grammatik des Nobiin, p. 173. ↩︎

  140. Examples from Werner, p.c., October 2020. ↩︎

  141. Khalil, “The Verbal Plural Marker in Nobiin.” ↩︎

  142. Examples from Massenbach, “Wörterbuch des nubischen Kunûzi-Dialektes,” p. 132. ↩︎

  143. Abdel-Hafiz, A Reference Grammar of Kunuz Nubian, p. 117f. ↩︎

  144. Armbruster, Dongolese Nubian: A Grammar, §2881. Examples from ibid., §2883f. ↩︎

  145. Kauczor, Die bergnubische Sprache, §262. ↩︎

  146. The singular stem tōl-ór is extended by the plural stem marker -Vr (see §⁄6.3). ↩︎

  147. Haspelmath, “Ditransitive Constructions.” ↩︎

  148. Werner, Tìdn-áal, pp. 50, 52. ↩︎

  149. Examples from ibid., pp. 49 and 86. Werner erroneously translates them as “I answered” and “we answered.” However, as the Midob -wa-suffix marks the 1sg and 1pl of the “continuous indicative,” they should be rendered by “I answer” and “we answer.” ↩︎

  150. Ibid., p. 58f. ↩︎

  151. Armbruster, Dongolese Nubian: A Grammar, §§2852–2855. ↩︎

  152. El-Shafie El-Guzuuli, p.c., October 2020. ↩︎

  153. Werner, “Ideophones in Nobiin.” ↩︎

  154. Van Gerven Oei, A Reference Grammar of Old Nubian, §18.2. ↩︎

  155. Examples from Kauczor, Die bergnubische Sprache, p. 128. ↩︎

  156. Dimmendaal, “Nilo-Saharan,” p. 395f. ↩︎

  157. The “verbal negative in m” is a feature of several Eastern Sudanic languages; see Greenberg, Studies in African Linguistic Classification, p. 76. ↩︎

  158. Dimmendaal, Historical Linguistics and the Comparative Study of African Languages, p. 107. ↩︎

  159. Due to the lack of a standard orthography, the ON lexical items commonly exhibit several spelling variants. ↩︎

  160. Lepsius, Nubische Grammatik, pp. 405, 141f. Lepsius regards the verb-final -e on undire, undure, udire, sukke, uskire as the infinitive suffix. ↩︎

  161. Epenthesis involving a consonant is specifically known as excrescence. The insertion of a nasal before another consonant, as attested by undur, has also occurred in English messenger and passenger, which are loanwords originating from the French nouns messager and passager. ↩︎

  162. In Mattokki and Andaandi, some lexical items with a root-final r delete this r in the citation form. However, when followed by a suffix, the r shows up again, e.g., toor-os-ko-r-an “they have entered”; toor-iid “entrance.” ↩︎

  163. Kauczor, Die bergnubische Sprache, p. 137. ↩︎

  164. Ali Ibrahim, a native speaker of Tagle, rejects the proposed analysis: “this is not the transitive verb opposite to ‘lie down,’ it just means to ‘put down.’ […] Also the two verbs, ‘enter’ and ‘insert,’ are different roots in Tagle.” ↩︎

  165. The initial /e/ vowel in Tagle ètírì regularly corresponds to /o/ in other Kordofan Nubian cognates (Ali Ibrahim, p.c.). ↩︎

  166. Jakobi, “The Loss of Syllable-final Proto-Nubian Consonants,” p. 220. ↩︎

  167. E.g., Stevenson, “A Survey of the Phonetics and Grammatical Structure of the Nuba Mountain Languages,” 41: pp. 177f. and Tucker & Bryan, Linguistic Analyses, p. 249. ↩︎

  168. Rilly, Le méroïtique et sa famille linguistique; Norton, “Number in Ama Verbs.” ↩︎

  169. Apart from Stevenson and Tucker & Bryan, the causative prefix is also identified by Norton (“Number in Ama Verbs,” p. 84), as suggested by his morpheme glossing of the verb form á-cɪ̀-ɛ̄n as caus-happen-du. Examples from Stevenson, “A Survey of the Phonetics and Grammatical Structure of the Nuba Mountain Languages,” 41: p. 179. ↩︎

  170. Stevenson, “A Survey of the Phonetics and Grammatical Structure of the Nuba Mountain Languages,” 41: 179. ↩︎

  171. Tucker & Bryan, Linguistic Analyses, p. 245. ↩︎

  172. article⁄Norton, this issue↩︎

  173. Stevenson, Rottland & Jakobi, “The Verb in Nyimang and Dinik,” p. 16. The corresponding Afitti stems tòsù/kosìl “suck” and “suckle” lack an overtly marked distinction between the transitive and the causative stems. ↩︎

  174. Dimmendaal, “On Stable and Unstable Features in Nilo-Saharan,” p. 19. ↩︎

  175. Reinisch, Die Nuba-Sprache, vol. 1, p. 64; Reinisch, Die sprachliche Stellung des Nuba, p. 41. ↩︎

  176. Van Gerven Oei, p.c., September 2020. ↩︎

  177. Lepsius, Nubische Grammatik, pp. 100f. ↩︎

  178. Reinisch, Die sprachliche Stellung des Nuba, p. 41, fn. 1. ↩︎

  179. Example from Werner, p.c., October 2020. ↩︎

  180. Massenbach, “Wörterbuch des nubischen Kunûzi-Dialektes,” p. 134. ↩︎

  181. Abdel-Hafiz, A Reference Grammar of Kunuz Nubian, p. 111f. ↩︎

  182. Examples from Massenbach, “Wörterbuch des nubischen Kunûzi-Dialektes,” p. 122; Armbruster, Dongolese Nubian: A Grammar, §4099. ↩︎

  183. The clitic -ee can be identified as the verb “say.” Here it is used as a finite “light verb” following a coverb represented by a lexical item borrowed from Arabic. Such coverb plus light verb constructions are widely attested in the languages of northeastern Africa, as Dimmendaal (“Eastern Sudanic and the Wadi Howar and Wadi El Milk Diaspora”) has shown. In Ama they are common, too (article⁄Norton, this issue). ↩︎

  184. Reinisch, Die Nuba-Sprache, vol. 1, p. 62. ↩︎

  185. Armbruster, Dongolese Nubian: A Grammar, §4093. ↩︎

  186. Smagina, The Old Nubian Language, p. 43. ↩︎

  187. Van Gerven Oei, p.c., September 2020. ↩︎

  188. Almkvist, Nubische Studien im Sudān 1877–78, p. 223. ↩︎

  189. Lepsius, Nubische Grammatik, p. 388. ↩︎

  190. This verb is attested in all Nile Nubian languages: Browne, Old Nubian Dictionary, p. 163; Massenbach, “Wörterbuch des nubischen Kunûzi-Dialektes,” p. 215; Armbruster, Dongolese Nubian: A Lexicon, p. 192. Almkvist, Nubische Studien im Sudān 1877–78, p. 249 lists the transitive counterpart tag-ir “cover,” German “bedecken.” ↩︎

  191. Comfort, “Verbal Number in the Uncu Language”; Jakobi, “Verbal Number and Transitivity in Karko (Kordofan Nubian).” ↩︎

  192. Werner, Tìdn-áal, p. 55. ↩︎

  193. Van Gerven Oei, A Reference Grammar of Old Nubian, §13.2.3.2; Lepsius, Nubische Grammatik, p. 102. ↩︎

  194. Keenan & Dryer, “Passive in the World’s Languages,” p. 329. ↩︎

  195. Haspelmath, “The Grammaticization of Passive Morphology,” p. 49. ↩︎

  196. Armbruster, Dongolese Nubian: A Grammar, §3031ff. Examples from Massenbach, “Wörterbuch des nubischen Kunûzi-Dialektes,” pp. 127–128. ↩︎

  197. Armbruster, Dongolese Nubian: A Grammar, §5456. ↩︎

  198. El-Guzuuli, p.c., September 2020. ↩︎

  199. Armbruster, Dongolese Nubian: A Grammar, §3668. ↩︎

  200. Kauczor, Die bergnubische Sprache, §252. ↩︎

  201. Hopper & Thompson, “Transitivity in Grammar and Discourse.” ↩︎

  202. Comfort, “Verbal Number in the Uncu Language”; Jakobi & Ibrahim, “Labile Verbs in Tagle”; Pointner, “Verbal Number in Tabaq.” ↩︎

  203. In Tagle, the extension is realized as [er] or [ɛr], depending on the ATR feature of the stem vowel. ↩︎

  204. Jakobi & Ibrahim, “Labile Verbs in Tagle.” ↩︎

  205. Jakobi, “Verbal Number and Transitivity in Karko.” ↩︎

  206. Examples from Pointner, “Verbal Number in Tabaq,” p. 83. ↩︎

  207. Werner, Tìdn-áal, p. 52. ↩︎

  208. Werner’s grammar lacks explicit information on the marking of imperative forms. However, from the glossing of the examples ending in -ec ~ -ic, such as òtt-éc “enter!” pl (ibid., p. 111) and péesir-íc “leave, go out!” pl (p. 115), one can conclude that -ec ~ -ic is the 2pl imperative marker. It is assumed to be a reflex of the pluractional *‑(i)j-extension (see §⁄4.1). ↩︎

  209. article⁄Norton, this issue↩︎

  210. Norton, “The Ama Dual Suffix.” ↩︎

  211. De Voogt, “Dual Marking and Kinship Terms in Afitti,” p. 903. Being mainly concerned with dual possessive pronouns attested on Afitti kinship terms, De Voogt provides little insight into dual extensions on the verb. He claims that “Afitti has singular and plural subject marking in the verbal system, but an unmarked subject dual,” but he also admits that “the un-marked dual form has an uncertain status and meaning.” ↩︎

  212. Dimmendaal, “Pluractionality and the Distribution of Number Marking across Categories,” p. 73. ↩︎

  213. Rilly, Le méroïtique et sa famille linguistique, p. 480, no. 114. ↩︎

  214. Kauczor, Die bergnubische Sprache, §462. ↩︎

  215. Examples from Kauczor, Die bergnubische Sprache, §§462f. ↩︎

  216. Werner, Tìdn-áal, p. 53. This suffix is ‑r-at, rather than -rati, because the final -i is an epenthetic vowel which is part of the following morpheme. The vowel prevents the unadmitted sequences of ‑h preceded by a consonant. ↩︎

  217. Ibid., pp. 110 and 136. ↩︎

  218. Ibid., p. 136 renders this example by “it is covered.” However, the presence of the past marker ‑òn suggests that the example should be rendered by “it was covered.” ↩︎

  219. Tucker & Bryan, Linguistic Analyses, p. 317. ↩︎

  220. Thelwall, “Meidob Nubian,” p. 100, asserts that “t, d, n are alveolar.” ↩︎

  221. Werner, Tìdn-áal, p. 52. ↩︎

  222. Norton, “Number in Ama Verbs.” ↩︎

  223. article⁄Norton, this issue. Examples from Norton, “Number in Ama Verbs,” pp. 77 and 78. ↩︎

  224. Rilly, Le méroïtique et sa famille linguistique, p. 327. ↩︎

  225. Dimmendaal, “Nilo-Saharan.” ↩︎

  226. Haspelmath, “Ditransitive Constructions,” Jakobi, Ibrahim & Ibrahim Gulfan, “Verbal Number and Grammatical Relations in Tagle.” ↩︎

  227. Dimmendaal, “Pluractionality and the Distribution of Number Marking across Categories,” p. 130. ↩︎

  228. Norton, “The Ama Dual Suffix.” ↩︎

  229. Rilly, Le méroïtique et sa famille linguistique, pp. 230, 231, 244. ↩︎

article⁄Restoring “Nile-Nubian”: How to Balance Lexicostatistics and Etymology in Historical Research on Nubian Languages
abstract⁄The paper offers a critical analysis of the proposal to dismantle the genetic unity of the so-called Nile-Nubian languages by positioning one of its former constituents, the Nobiin language, as the earliest offshoot from the Common Nubian stem. Combining straightforward lexicostatistical methodology with more scrupulous etymological analysis of the material, I argue that the evidence in favor of the hypothesis that Nobiin is the earliest offshoot may and, in fact, should rather be interpreted as evidence for a strong lexical substrate in Nobiin, accounting for its accelerated rate of change in comparison to the closely related Kenuzi–Dongolawi (Mattokki–Andaandi) cluster.
keywords⁄comparative linguistics, Nilo-Saharan, glottochronology, lexicostatistics, Nubian, West Nilotic

1. Introduction

Although there has never been any serious disagreement on which languages constitute the Nubian family, its internal classification has been continuously refined and revised, due to such factors as the overall complexity of the processes of linguistic divergence and convergence in the “Sudanic” area of Africa; constant influx of new data that forces scholars to reevaluate former assumptions; and lack of scholarly agreement on what types of data provide the best arguments for language classification.

Traditionally, four main units have been recognized within Nubian1:

  • Nile-Nubian, consisting of the closely related Kenuzi–Dongolawi (Mattokki–Andaandi) dialect cluster and the somewhat more distant Nobiin (= Fadidja–Mahas) cluster;
  • Kordofan Nubian, or Hill Nubian, consisting of numerous (and generally poorly studied, although the situation has significantly improved in the past decade) languages such as Dilling, Karko, Wali, Kadaru, etc.;
  • Birgid (Birked, Birged), now-extinct , formerly spoken in Darfur;
  • Midob (Meidob), also in Darfur.

This is, for instance, the default classification model adopted in Joseph Greenbergʼs general classification of the languages of Africa,2 and for a long time it was accepted in almost every piece of research on the history of Nubian languages.

More recently, however, an important and challenging hypothesis on a re-classification of Nubian has been advanced by Marianne Bechhaus-Gerst.3 Having conducted a detailed lexicostatistical study of a representative batch of Nubian lects, she made the important observation that, while the percentage of common matches between the two main components of Nile-Nubian is indeed very high (70%), Kenuzi–Dongolawi consistently shows a much higher percentage in common with the other three branches of Nubian than Nobiin (Table 1).

Midob Birgid Kadaru Debri Dilling K/D
K/D 54% 48% 58% 57% 58%
Nobiin 40% 37% 43% 41% 43% 70%

Table 1. Part of the lexicostatistical matrix for Nubian4

In Bechhaus-Gerstʼs view, such a discrepancy could only be interpreted as evidence of Kenuzi–Dongolawi and Nobiin not sharing an intermediate common “Nile-Nubian” ancestor (if they did share one, its modern descendants should be expected to have more or less the same percentages of matches with the other Nubian subgroups). Instead, she proposed independent lines of development for the two dialect clusters, positioning Nobiin as not just a separate branch of Nubian, but actually the earliest segregating branch of Nubian. Consequently, in her standard historical scenario described at length in two monographs, there was not one, but two separate migrations into the Nile Valley from the original Nubian homeland (somewhere in South Kordofan/Darfur) — one approximately around 1,500 BCE (the ancestors of modern Nobiin-speaking people), and one around the beginning of the Common Era (speakers of Kenuzi–Dongolawi). As for the multiple exclusive similarities between Nobiin and Kenuzi–Dongolawi, these were explained away as results of “intensive language contact.”5 The lexicostatistical evidence was further supported by the analysis of certain phonetic and grammatical peculiarities of Nobiin that separate it from Kenuzi–Dongolawi; however, as of today it is the lexical specificity of Nobiin that remains at the core of the argument.

Bechhaus-Gerstʼs classificatory model, with its important implications not only for the history of Nubian peoples, but also for the theoretical and methodological development of historical and areal linguistics in general, remains somewhat controversial. While it has been embraced in the recent editions of such influential online language catalogs as www⁄Ethnologue and www⁄Glottolog and is often quoted as an important example of convergent linguistic processes in Africa,6 specialists in the field often remain undecided,7 and it is concluded in the most recent handbook on African linguistics that “the internal classification of Nubian remains unclear.”8 One of the most vocal opponents of the new model is Claude Rilly, whose research on the reconstruction of Proto-Nubian (in conjunction with his work on the historical relations and genetic affiliation of Meroitic) and investigation into Bechhaus-Gerstʼs evidence has led him to an even stronger endorsement of the Nile-Nubian hypothesis than ever before.9

While in theory there is nothing impossible about the historical scenario suggested by Bechhaus-Gerst, in practice the idea that language A, rather distantly related to language B, could undergo a serious convergent development over an approximately 1,000-year long period (from the supposed migration of Kenuzi–Dongolawi into the Nile Valley and up to the attestation of the first texts in Old Nubian, which already share most of the important features of modern Nobiin), to the point where language A can easily be misclassified even by specialists as belonging to the same group as language B, seems rather far-fetched. At the very least, it would seem to make perfect sense, before adopting it wholeheartedly, to look for alternate solutions that might yield a more satisfactory explanation to the odd deviations found in the data.

Let us look again more closely (Table 2) at the lexicostatistical evidence, reducing it, for the sake of simple clarity, to percentages of matches observed in a “triangle” consisting of Kenuzi–Dongolawi, Nobiin, and one other Nubian language that is universally recognized as belonging to a very distinct and specific subbranch of the family — Midob. Comparative data are given from the older study by Bechhaus-Gerst and my own, more recent examination of the basic lexicon evidence.10

Nobiin Midob
K/D 70% 54%
Nobiin 40%

Table 2a. Lexicostatistical relations between Nile-Nubian and Midob (Bechhaus-Gerst)11

Nobiin Midob
K/D 66% 57%
Nobiin 51%

Table 2b. Lexicostatistical relations between Nile-Nubian and Midob (Starostin)12

The significant differences in figures between two instances of lexicostatistical calculations are explained by a number of factors (slightly divergent Swadesh-type lists; different etymologizations of several items on the list; exclusion of transparent recent loans from Arabic in Starostinʼs model). Nevertheless, the obvious problem does not go away in the second model: Midob clearly shares a significantly larger number of cognates with K/D than with Nobiin — a fact that directly contradicts the K/D–Nobiin proximity on the Nubian phylogenetic tree. The situation remains the same if we substitute Midob with any other non-Nile-Nubian language, such as Birgid or any of the multiple Hill Nubian idioms.

The important thing is that there are actually two possible reasons for this discrepancy in the lexicostatistical matrix. One, endorsed by Bechhaus-Gerst, is that the K/D–Nobiin number is incorrectly increased by the addition of a large number of items that have not been inherited from a common ancestor, but actually borrowed from Nobiin into K/D. An alternate scenario, however, is that the active recipient was Nobiin, except that the donor was not K/D — rather, a certain percentage of Nobiin basic lexicon could have been borrowed from a third, possibly unidentified source, over a relatively short period of time, which resulted in lowering the percentage of Nobiin matches with all other Nubian languages.

Thus, for instance, if we assume (or, better still, somehow manage to prove) that Nobiin borrowed 6% of the Swadesh wordlist (i.e., 6 words on the 100-item list) from this third source, exclusion of these words from lexicostatistical calculation would generally normalize the matrix, increasing the overall percentage for the K/D–Nobiin and Nobiin–Midob pairs, but not for the K/D–Midob pair.

The tricky part in investigating this situation is determining the status of those Nobiin words on the Swadesh list that it does not share with K/D. If the phylogenetic structure of the entire Nubian group is such that Nobiin represents the very first branch to be split off from the main body of the tree, as in Bechhaus-Gerstʼs model (fig. 1), then we would expect a certain portion of the Swadesh wordlist in Nobiin to be represented by the following two groups of words:

  • archaic Nobiin retentions that have been preserved in their original meaning in that subgroup only, replaced by innovations in the intermediate common ancestor of Midob, Birgid, K/D, and Hill Nubian;
  • conversely, more recent Nobiin innovations that took place after the original separation of Nobiin; in this case, the Nobiin equivalent of the Swadesh meaning would also be opposed to the form reconstructible for the common ancestor of the remaining four branches, but would not reflect the original Proto-Nubian situation.

The revised classification of Nubian according to Bechhaus-Gerst

Fig. 1. The revised classification of Nubian according to Bechhaus-Gerst

Indeed, we have a large share of Nobiin basic words that set it apart from every other Nubian languages (see the more than 30 items in §⁄III of the list below), but how can we distinguish retentions from innovations? If the word in question has no etymological cognates in any other Nubian language, then in most cases such a distinction is impossible.13 However, if the retention or innovation in question was not accompanied by the total elimination of the root morpheme, but rather involved a semantic shift, then investigating the situation from an etymo­logical point of view may shed some significant light on the matter. In general, the more lexico­statistical discrepancies we find between Nobiin and the rest of Nubian where the Nobiin item has a Common Nubian etymology, the better the case for the “early separation of Nobiin” hypothesis; the more “strange” words we find in Nobiin whose etymological parallels in the other Nubian languages are highly questionable or non-existent, the stronger the case for the “pre-Nobiin substrate” hypothesis.

In order to resolve this issue, below I offer a concise and slightly condensed etymological analysis of the entire 100-item Swadesh wordlist for modern Nobiin.14 The lexical items are classified into three groups:

  • I. Lexicostatistical matches (i.e., cases where the exact same lexical root is preserved in the exact same Swadesh meaning, without semantic shifts) between Nobiin and K/D. These are further divided into subcategories I.1: common Nubian roots, also found in the same meaning in all or some other branches of Nubian beyond Nile-Nubian; and I.2: exclusive isoglosses between Nobiin and K/D that may be either retentions from Proto-Nubian, lost in all other branches, or Nile-Nubian innovations replacing more archaic words. In either case, these data have no bearing on the issue of Nobiinʼs uniqueness (although isoglosses in I.2 may be used to strengthen the case for Nile-Nubian).
  • II. Lexicostatistical matches between Nobiin and other Nubian branches (Midob, Birgid, Hill Nubian) that exclude K/D. Upon first sight, such isoglosses might seem to weaken the Nile-Nubian connection, but in reality they are not highly significant, as the K/D equivalents of the respective meanings may simply represent recent lexical innovations that took place already after the split of Nile-Nubian.
  • III. Nobiin-exclusive lexicostatistical items that have a common Nubian etymology (III.1) or do not have any parallels in any of the other attested Nubian languages (III.2). This is the most significant group of cases, with items in subgroup III.1 testifying in favor of the early separation hypothesis (particularly if the lexicostatistical meaning in Nobiin can be shown to be archaic), and items in subgroup III.2 favoring the substrate explanation. Needless to say, it is the items in this group that will be receiving the most extensive commentary.15

2. 100-Item Swadesh List for Nubian: The Data

2.1. I. Nobiin/Kenuzi–Dongolawi Isoglosses

2.1.1. I.1. General Nubian Isoglosses

  • “ashes”: N ùbúr-tí, K/D ubur-ti (= M úfù-dì, B ubur-ti, etc.).
  • “belly”: N tùː, K/D tuː (= M tə̀ː, B tuː, etc.).
  • “bird”: N kawar-ti, K kawir-te, D kawɪr-tɛ (= M àːbéd-dí, B kwar-ti, etc.).
  • “bite”: N àc-, K/D acc- (= M àcc-, Dl , etc.).
  • “black”: N úrúm, K/D urumm- (= M údí, B úːdè, Dl uri, etc.). ◊ The Nile-Nubian form is an original nominal derivate (*ur-um “darkness”) from the adjectival stem *ur- “black.”
  • “bone”: N gìsìr, K kiːd, D kɪhɪːd (= M ə̀ːdí, B kìzídì, etc.). ◊ Voiced g- in Nile-Nubian is irregular, possibly as a result of assimilation (< *kizir) or contamination.16
  • “breast”: N óg, K/D og (= M ə́ː, B ogi, Dl ɔki, etc.).
  • “claw/nail”: N sun-ti, K sutti, D sun-tɪ (= M súŋún-dí, B sun-di, etc.).
  • “cold”: N ór-kí, K oroːke-l, D oroːfɛ-l (= Wali ór-kō, Debri worr-uŋ, etc.).
  • “die”: N dí-, K/D diː (= M tíː-, B ti-n-, Dl ti, etc.).
  • “drink”: N ní-, K/D niː (= M tìː-, B ɲiː, Dl di, etc.). ◊ From PN *ni- with regular denasalization in M and Hill Nubian languages.
  • “ear”: N úkkí, K/D ulug (= Dl ulɟe, M úlgí, etc.). ◊ From PN *ulg-i. The Nobiin form goes back to ON ul(u)g- and shows a specific phonetic development (*-lg- > -kk-); the latter, however, can in no way be construed as an archaism.
  • (?) “eye”: N máːɲ (= ON maɲ-), D mɪssɪ, K missi (= M pì-dì). ◊ A complicated case. The K/D forms perfectly correspond to M pì-dì, going back to PN *miC-ti, where -C- is one of several consonants capable of triggering the lenition *-t- > -s- in K/D. If *-C- = *-ɲ-, then the forms are further comparable with N máːɲ, and we are either dealing with a one-time vocalic dissimilation *miɲ > *maɲ in N or two independent assimilations (*maɲ > miɲ-) in M and K/D, respectively. Alternately, the N form may be completely unrelated to the K/D–M isogloss, in which case the word should be moved to group III.2, since a separate form like *maɲ “eye” would have no Common Nubian etymology of its own.
  • “fire”: N íːg, K iːg, D ɪːg (= Dl ike, Debri ika; probably also B uzug, M ússí). ◊ The forms in B and M are comparable if the original stem is to be reconstructed as *usi-gi, with regular elimination of intervocalic *-s- in Hill and Nile Nubian. The vocalism is still problematic, but even without the B and M forms, parallels in Hill Nubian clearly show that the Nile-Nubian items represent an inherited archaism.
  • “foot”: N óːy, K ossi, D oss(ɪ) (= B ose, M òttì). ◊ All forms go back to PN *oy(-ti).
  • “give”: N tèː-r, K ti-r, D tɪ-r (= M tì-, B teː-n, Dl ti, etc.).
  • “green”: N déssí, K desse ~ dosse, D dɛssɛ (= M tèssé, B teːze, Dl teɟe).
  • “hand”: N èd-dì (= ON ey-), K , D ɪː (= M ə̀ssì, B essi, Dl iši, etc.). ◊ All forms go back to PN *əsi ~ *əsi-ti.
  • “head”: N ùr, K/D ur (= M òr, B úr, Dl or, etc.).
  • “heart”: N áy (= ON ai-l-), K/D (= B ai-di, Dl a-l, etc.).
  • “horn”: N nìːšì, K nišši, D nɪšši (= M kə́ːcí, B ŋis-ti, D dɔ-ti). ◊ All forms go back to PN *ŋəɟi.17
  • “I”: N ày, K/D ay (= M ə́y, Dl ɛ, etc.).
  • “kill”: N fáːy-èːr, K beː, D bɛː (= M pé-r-, B fi-laːle).
  • “knee”: N kúr-tí, K kur-ti, D kur-tɪ (= M ùrú-d, B kur-ti, etc.).
  • “know”: N ìrbé-èr (= ON i- ~ ia-r- ~ ie-r-), K iy-ir (= M ìːyá-, D i-er-). ◊ The stem in modern Nobiin seems to be an extended form of the original stem, though the nature of the extension is not quite clear.
  • “long”: N nàssí, K nosso, D noso (= M tàssè, B nizze, Dl dɔɟi, etc.). ◊ Goes back to PN *nossi, although vocalic correspondences are somewhat irregular.
  • “louse”: N issi, K issi, D ɪssɪ (= M ìːdì, Dl iti-d, etc.).
  • “moon”: N ùn-áttí, K un-atti ~ an-atti, D un-attɪ (= Dl nɔn-ti, Wali ūm-tù etc.). ◊ The Nile-Nubian root is *un-; there are some problems with Hill Nubian forms, such as explaining the initial n- in Dl, but overall, there is no reason to doubt the common origin of all these items.
  • “neck”: N íyyí, K eyye, D ɛyyɛ (= Kadaru ). ◊ Not clear if M éːr “neck” also belongs here (with a suffix?), but the Kadaru form is sufficient by itself to trace the word back to PN *eyi.
  • “not”: N -mùːn, K/D -mun- (= Dl -min, B -m-, etc.). ◊ A common Nubian negative verbal stem (interestingly, not attested in M, which instead uses the suffixal morpheme -áː- for negation, something that could be construed as an archaism and used as a serious argument against early separation of Nobiin).
  • “one”: N wèːr ~ wèːl, K weːr, D wɛːr (= M pàr-, B meːl-, Dl be, etc.).
  • “person”: N íd (= M ír, Dl id, etc.). ◊ The old Nubian root is largely replaced by Arabisms in K/D (K zoːl, D adɛm), but the word ɪd is still used in D as an archaism or in various idiomatic formations.
  • “rain”: N áwwí, K a-nn-essi (< *aru-n-essi “rain-waterʼ), D aru (= M áré, B aːle, Dl are, etc.). ◊ The development *-r- > -w- in N is regular before *-i.18
  • “red”: N géːl, K geːle, D gɛːlɛ (= M kéːlé, B keːle, Dl kele, etc.).
  • “sand”: N síw, K siːw, D sɪu (= Dl šu-d, Debri šu-du, etc.).
  • “see”: N nèːl, K/D nal (= M kə̀l-, B ell-, Dl gel, Kadaru ŋeli, etc.). ◊ All forms go back to PN *ŋali-.
  • “sit”: (a) N àːg-, K/D aːg (= M àːg-, Dl ak-i, etc.); (b) N tìːg-, K teːg, D tɛːg (= M tə́g-). ◊ Two roots with very close semantics, both easily reconstructible back to PN.
  • “sleep”: N nèːr-, K neːr, D nɛːr (= M kèrà-, B neːri, Dl ɟer, etc.). ◊ All forms go back to PN *ɲɛːr-.
  • “star”: N wìnɟì, K wissi, D wɪssɪ (= M òɲè-dì, B waːɲ-di, Kadaru wonɔ-ntu, etc.). ◊ There are some problems with the reconstruction, but it is possible that all forms go back to PN *wiɲ- ~ *waɲ-; at the very least, *wiɲ-ti “star” is definitely reconstructible for Proto-Nile-Nubian.
  • “sun”: N màšà (= ON mašal-), K masil, D masɪl (= M pàssàr). ◊ The isogloss with M confirms PN status, although some phonetic peculiarities (such as the irregular -š- in N) as well as the attestation of the term maša ~ masa in Meroitic, where it denotes a supreme deity19 indirectly suggest a possible areal isogloss; if so, an alternate candidate for PN “sun” would be *eːs- > B iːzi, Dl “sun,” further related to M èːsì “heat; midday,” K eːs id., D ɛːs “afternoon.” In either case, N still aligns with K/D rather than anything else.
  • you (sg.): N ì-r, K e-r, D ɛ-r (= M íː-n, B e-di, Dl a, Karko , etc.). ◊ Although all the forms are related (going back to PN *i-), N is noticeably closer to K/D in terms of morphological structure (with the direct stem marker *-r).
  • “tongue”: N nàr, K ned, D nɛd (= M kàda-ŋì, B nat-ti, Dl ɟale, Debri ɲal-do, etc.). ◊ All forms go back to PN *ɲal(T)-.20 Interestingly, the ON equivalent tame- (no parallels in other languages) is completely different — the only case on the list where ON differs not only from N, but from all other Nubian languages as well.
  • “tooth”: N nìːd, K nel, D nɛl (= M kə̀d-dì, B ɲil-di, Dl ɟili, etc.). ◊ All forms reflect PN *ɲəl-.
  • “two”: N úwwó, K owwi, D owwɪ (= M ə́d-dí, B ul-ug, Dl ore, etc.). ◊ All forms go back to PN *awri; the unusual cluster *-wr- is responsible for the unusual development *-r- > -w- already in Proto-Nile-Nubian (rather than just in N), and is actually seen explicitly in the extinct and very poorly attested Haraza Nubian: auri-yah “two.”21
  • “walk (go)”: N ɟúù-, K/D ɟuː (= M sə́-r-, Dl šu, etc.). ◊ All forms go back to PN *cuː-.
  • “warm (hot)”: N ɟùg, K/D ɟug-ri (= M sùːw). ◊ From PN *cug-.
  • “who”: N nàːy, K niː, D nɪː (= M kə̀ː-rén, B neː-ta, Dl de, etc.). ◊ All forms go back to PN *ŋə(y).

2.1.2. I.2. Exclusive Nile-Nubian Isoglosses

  • “all”: N màlléː, K malleː, D mallɛ.
  • “big”: N dàwwí, K/D duː-l.
  • “burn”: N ɟùgé-èr, K/D ɟug.
  • “egg”: N kúmbúː, D kumbu. ◊ Replaced in K by the recent compound innovation gas-katti (where the first root probably = gaːsi “heavy, hard, rough”), but clearly reconstructible for Nile-Nubian on the whole.
  • “feather”: N šipir,22 D sɪbɪr.
  • “leaf”: N úkkí, K/D ulug. ◊ Same word as “ear.”
  • “man”: N ògɟí-l, K ogiɟ, D ogɪɟ.
  • “many”: N díyyí, K dig-riː, D díyyí. ◊ In ON usually attested as diː-, once as dig- (reflecting dialectal differences between N and K/D).
  • “nose”: N sòrìŋ, K sorin, D sorɪɲ.
  • “smoke”: N túllí, D tulla. ◊ This may be a recent innovation in both languages; cf. the morphological discrepancy, the fact that the stem in N is a better match for K tulli “chewing tobacco,” and the lack of attestation in ON. Obvious similarity with Nuer toːl, Dinka tol “smoke” suggests an old areal isogloss.
  • “that”: N mán, K/D man.
  • “this”: N in, K in, D ɪn. ◊ The subsystems of deictic pronouns in M, B, and Hill Nubian are much less cohesive than in Nile-Nubian and do not allow for reliable reconstructions of any PN items that would be different from Nile-Nubian.
  • “what”: N mìn, K min, D mɪn. ◊ It is quite possible that the Nile-Nubian situation here is innovative, since all other branches agree on *na(i)- as a better equivalent for PN “what?”: M nèː-n, B na-ta, Dl na, Karko nái, etc.23
  • “woman”: N ìd-éːn, K eːn, D ɛːn. ◊ Technically, this is not a fully exclusive Nile-Nubian isogloss — cf. B eːn “woman.” However, the main root for “woman” in Nubian is *il- (ON il-, M ìd-dì < il-ti, Dl eli, Karko îl, etc.); *eːn is the common Nubian word for “mother,” which has, most likely, independently shifted to “woman” in general in modern Nile-Nubian languages and in B. N is particularly innovative in that respect, since it uses a compound formation: ìd “person” + éːn “mother.”

2.2. II. Nobiin / Non-K/D Isoglosses

2.2.1. II.1. Potential K/D innovations

  • “bark”: àːcì (= M àccì-dì). ◊ Possibly < PN *aci “bark, chaff.” As opposed to K/D gabad (no parallels in other languages).
  • “fly”: wáːy-ìr (= B maː-r). ◊ May reflect PN *way- “to fly” (*w- > m- is regular in B). However, the corresponding form in D is war “to jump, leap, spring,” and typologically the development “jump” → “fly” is far more common than the reverse. Opposed to K firr, D fɪrr “to fly” with no parallels outside of Nile-Nubian.
  • “liver”: N dìbèː (= M tèmmèɟí). ◊ In D, the old word has been replaced by the Arabic borrowing kɪbdaːd. The isogloss between N and M allows to reconstruct PN *dib- “liver.”
  • (?) “night”: N áwá (= ON oar-). ◊ A rare case where K/D are clearly more innovative than N: K/D uguː “night” occasionally has the additional meaning “24 hours,” and further comparison with ON uk-r- ~ uk-l- “day,” K ug-reːs, D ug-rɛːs, N ùg-réːs, M ùːd (< *ugu-d) id. suggests that “24 hours; day-night cycle” was the original meaning. On the other hand, N áwá is comparable with M òːd (< *awa-d?) and could very well be the original PN equivalent.
  • “skin”: N náwá (< *nawar, cf. pl. nàwàr-íː; = B noːr, Dl dor, etc.). ◊ Opposed to K aɟin, D aɟɪn “skin, leather.”

2.2.2. II.2. Potential Synonymy in the Protolanguage

  • “come”: kí-ìl (= M ìː-, B ki). ◊ The K/D equivalent is taː “to come,” related to Hill Nubian forms (Dl ta, Debri tɔ-rɛ, Kadaru ti-ri, etc.). Old Nubian texts feature numerous instances of both ki- and ta- in the meaning “to come,” with the semantic difference between them poorly under­stood; in any case, it is likely that both *ki- and *ta- have to be reconstructed for PN as synonyms (possibly suppletives), with subsequent simplification in daughter branches, meaning that neither the situation in Nobiin nor in K/D may be regarded as a straightforward innovation.

2.3. III. Nobiin-exclusive Items

2.3.1. III.1. Nobiin-exclusive Items with a Nubian Etymology

  • “blood”: N díːs (= ON dis-). ◊ Related to K des, D dɛs, M tèssì “oil; liquid fat; butter”; the meaning in N is clearly innovative, since the original PN root for “blood” is well distributed across non-Nile-Nubian lineages (M ə̀ggə́r, B igir, Dl ogor, etc.).
  • (?) “earth”: N gùr (= ON gul- ~ gud-). ◊ The same word is also found in D as guː “earth, ground, floor” and in K as guː “field, acre; earth (surface).” According to Werner, in modern Nobiin the meaning “earth = soil” is also expressed by the same root,24 whereas ON iskit- “earth; dust” > Nobiin ìskíːd corresponds to the narrower meaning “dust” in Wernerʼs dictionary.25 It is perfectly possible, however, that this is all simply a byproduct of inaccurate semantic glossing and that the situation in Nobiin is actually exactly the same as in K/D. In this case, the word has to be moved to §⁄I.2 (or §⁄I.1, if B izzi-di “earth” also belongs here).
  • “hear”: N úkké-èr (= ON ulg-ir- ~ ulg-ar- ~ ulk-ir-). ◊ Transparent derivation from ulug “ear.” The old verbal root “hear” is present in K/D (K giɟ-ir, D gɪɟ-ir) and Hill Nubian (Dl ki-er- etc.) < PN *gi(ɟ)-. The situation in Old Nubian/Nobiin is seemingly innovative.
  • “meat”: N áríɟ. ◊ Probably a recent innovation, since the ON equivalent for “flesh, meat” is gad-, with a likely etymological parallel in M kàdì “meat without bones.” As for áríɟ, the shape of this word is reminiscent of an adjectival derivate (cf. fáríɟ “thick, heavyʼ), making it comparable with K aːre, D aːrɛ “inside, interior.” The most common Nubian equivalent for “meat,” however, is *kosi ~ *kosu > K/D kusu, M òsò-ŋí, B kozi, Dl kwaɟe, etc.
  • (?) “root”: N ɟúː. ◊ Perhaps related to D ɟuː “nether stone for grinding,” K ɟuː “hand mill” (if the original meaning was “bottom, foundation”), but the semantic link is weak. Notably, the word is not attested in ON where the equivalent for “root” is dulist- (no etymology). The most common form for “root” in Nubian is *ir- (M ír-dí, Dl ir-tad, etc.).
  • “say”: N íːg-ìr (= ON ig-ir “tell”). ◊ Same as D iːg “tell, narrate”; in N, this seems to have become the main equivalent for “say.” Other ON words with similar meanings include the verbs pes- (direct speech marker), il- (“speak,” “tell”) and we- (very rare, probably a K/D dialectism); the latter is the common Nubian equivalent for “say” (cf. K weː, D wɛː, Dl fe, Kadaru wei, etc.).
  • “swim”: N kúcc-ìr. ◊ Not attested in ON; phonetically corresponds to D kuɟ- “to be above,” kuɟ-ur- “to place above, set above,” kuc-cɛg- “to mount, ride.” If the etymology is correct, the semantic development can only be unidirectional (“to be on top/on the surface” → “to swim”) and the meaning in N is clearly secondary. That said, the word “swim” in general is highly unstable in Nubian languages (almost every idiom has its own equivalent).
  • “tree”: N kóy (= ON koir-). ◊ Comparable with D koɪd “a k. of jujube (Ziziphus spina-christi)”; if the etymology is correct, a secondary generalization of the meaning to “tree (gen.)” in N would perfectly agree with the fact that a much better candidate for PN “tree” is *pər > Dl hor, Dair or, Wali fʊ́r, K ber “wood,” D bɛr “wood” (the meaning “tree” in K/D, as in N, is expressed by an innovation: K ɟowwi, D ɟoːwwɪ, formerly “Acacia nilotica”).
  • “we”: N ù: (= ON u-). ◊ ON has two 1pl pronouns: u- and e-r-, the distinction between which is still a matter of debate; Browne, Werner, and others have suggested an old differentiation along the lines of inclusivity, but there is no general consensus on which of the two pronouns may have been inclusive and which one was exclusive. In any case, the two forms are in complementary distribution in modern Nile-Nubian languages: N only has ùː, K/D only have a-r-. On the external level, K/D forms are better supported (cf. M. àː-dí, B a-di), but forms cognate with N ùː are also occasionally found in Hill Nubian, e.g., Wali ʊ̌ʔ.26 Without sidetracking into in-depth discussion, it should be acknowledged that ùː may well be a PN archaism retained in N.

2.3.2. III.2. Nobiin-exclusive Items without a Nubian Etymology

  • “dog”: N múg (= ON mug-). ◊ Not related to PN *bəl (K wel, D wɛl, M pə̀ːl, B mɛl, DL bol, etc.); no parallels in other Nubian languages.
  • “dry”: N sámá. ◊ Not related to K soww-od, D soww-ɛd “dry” or their cognates in Hill Nubian (Debri šua-du, etc.).
  • (?) “eat”: N kàb- (= ON kap-). ◊ ON shows dialectal variety: besides the more common kap-, there is also at least one hapax case of ON kal- “eat” = K/D kal. It is not entirely clear if the two roots are indeed unrelated: a scenario where ON kap-, N kàb- < Nile-Nubian *kal-b- (cf. such derived stems as D kal-bu- pass. “be eaten,” kal-bɛːr “eat to satisfaction”) cannot be ruled out. However, it would run into additional phonetic and morphological problems. From an external point of view, only K/D kal < PN *kɔl has sufficient etymological backup; cf. Dl kol, M ə̀l- id. Regardless of etymologization, N kàb- is clearly innovative.
  • “fat”: N sìlèː. ◊ Not attested in ON; no parallels in any other languages.
  • “fish”: N ángíssí. ◊ Replaces ON watto-; neither of the two words has any clear parallels in K/D or any other Nubian languages. A possible, though questionable, internal etymology is “living in water” (from aɲ- “to live” + *essi “water,” see notes on “water” below).
  • “full”: N mídd-ìr (= ON medd- ~ midd- “to be full/ready”). ◊ Possibly from an earlier *merid- (this form is actually attested a few times in ON sources). The item is quite unstable in the Nubian group on the whole; the PN equivalent remains obscure.
  • (?) “good”: N màs. ◊ This word does not have a Nubian etymology; however, the older equivalent gèn (= ON gen-), mainly used in the modern language in the comparative sense (“better”), is clearly cognate with D gɛn “good, healthy” and further with such Hill Nubian items as Dl ken, Debri kɛŋ “good,” etc., going back to PN *gen-. Were the semantic criteria to be relaxed, this item should have been moved to §⁄I.1.
  • “hair”: N šìgír-tí. ◊ Not attested in ON. The form is similar to K siːr “hair,” but phonetic correspondences would be irregular (*-g- should not be deleted in K). On the contrary, D dɪl-tɪ “hair” perfectly corresponds to M tèː-dì, B dill-e, Dl tel-ti, etc. and is reconstructible as PN *del- or *dɛl-. Forms in N and K would seem to be innovations — perhaps the result of separate borrowings from a common non-Nubian source.
  • “lie (down)”: N fìyy-ìr (= ON pi-). ◊ No parallels in other languages.
  • “mountain”: N mùléː. ◊ Probably a recent innovation, since the ON equivalent is naɟ-. No parallels in other languages. Opposed to M òːr, B kúːr, Dl kulí, Karko kúrù, etc. < PN *kur- (in K/D this word was replaced by borrowings from Arabic).
  • “name”: N tàŋìs (= ON taŋis-). ◊ No parallels in other languages. The most common Nubian equivalent for “name” is K erri, D ɛrrɪ, M ə́rí, B erei, Dl or, etc. < PN *əri.
  • “new”: N míríː (= ON miri-). ◊ No parallels in other languages. The common Nubian root for “new” is K eːr, D ɛr, B eːr, Dl er < PN *ɛːr.
  • “road”: N dáwwí (= ON dawi- ~ dawu-). ◊ Although it is likely that dáwwí < *dari (see “rain” above), the word is hardly directly related to K darub, D darɪb27 since the latter is transparently borrowed from Arabic darb-. A separate early borrowing into ON from the same source cannot be excluded, but it is also possible that the word has a completely different origin.
  • “seed”: N kóɟìr (= ON koɟir-). ◊ No parallels in other languages. The common Nubian root for “seed” is *ter- (K teːri, D tɛːrɪ, Dl ter-ti).
  • “small”: N kùdúːd. ◊ No parallels in other languages, but the word is generally unstable throughout the entire family.
  • “stand”: N ménɟ-ìr. ◊ Attested only once in ON (as meɟɟ-), where the usual equivalent for “stand” is noɟ(ɟ)-. The corresponding K/D stem is K teːb, D tɛːb, but a better candidate for PN “stand” is the isogloss between M tèkk-ér- and Dl tek-er < PN *tek-.
  • “stone”: N kìd (= ON kit-). ◊ No parallels in other languages. The common Nubian root for “stone” is *kul- (K/D kulu, M ùllì, B kul-di).
  • “tail”: N ɟèlèw. ◊ No parallels in other languages. The common Nubian root for “tail” is *ɛːb (K eːw, D ɛːu, M èːmí, Dl ɛb, etc.). The old vocabulary of Lepsius still gives aw as an alternate equivalent,28 meaning that ɟèlèw is clearly an innovation of unclear origin. (Possibly a concatenation of *ɛːb with some different first root?).
  • “water”: N ámán (= ON aman-). ◊ No parallels in other languages. The common Nubian root for “water” is *əs-ti (K essi, D ɛssɪ, M ə́ːcí, B eɟi, Dl ɔti, etc.). The innovative, rather than archaic, character of N ámán is clearly seen from the attestation of such idiomatic formations as ès-kàlèː ~ às-kàlèː “water wheel” and màːɲ-éssí “tear” (lit. “eye-water”); see also notes on the possible internal etymologization of “fish” above. The word ámán has frequently been compared to the phonetically identical common Berber equivalent for “water,” *ama-n,29 but the inability to find any additional Nobiin–Berber parallels with the same degree of phonetic and semantic similarity make the comparison less reliable than one could hope for.
  • “white”: N nùlù (= ON nulu-). ◊ No parallels in other languages. The common Nubian root for “white” is *ar- (K/D ar-o, M àdd-é, B eːl-e, Dl ɔr-i, etc.).

2.3.3. III.3. Nobiin-exclusive Recent Borrowings

  • “cloud”: N géːm < Arabic ʁayma-. Replaces ON niɟɟ-, a common Nubian root (= D niccɪ, M tèccì-dì, B naːsi-di, etc.).
  • “yellow”: N asfar < Arabic ʼaṣfar. The word in general is highly unstable in Nubian and not reconstructible for PN.

2.4. Analysis of the Data

Based on the presented data and the etymological discussion accompanying (or not accompanying) individual pieces of it, the following observations can be made:

  1. Altogether, §⁄III.2 contains twenty items that are not only lexicostatistically unique for Nobiin, but also do not appear to have any etymological cognates whatsoever in any other Nubian languages. This observation is certainly not conclusive, since it cannot be guaranteed that some of these parallels were missed in the process of analysis of existing dictionaries and wordlists, or that more extensive lexicographical research on such languages as Midob or Hill Nubian in the future will not turn out additional parallels. At present, however, it is an objective fact that the percentage of such words in the Nobiin basic lexicon significantly exceeds the corresponding percentages for any other Nubian language (even Midob, which, according to general consensus, is one of the most highly divergent branches of Nubian). Most of these words are attested already in ON, which is hardly surprising, since the majority of recent borrowings into Nobiin have been from Arabic and are quite transparent as to their origin (see §⁄III.3).
  2. Analysis of §⁄III.1 shows that in the majority of cases where the solitary lexicostatistical item in Nobiin does have a Common Nubian etymology, semantic comparison speaks strongly in favor of innovation, i.e., semantic shift in Nobiin: “blood” ← “fat,” “hear” ← “ear,” “meat” ← “inside,” “say” ← “tell,” “swim” ← “be on the surface,” “tree” ← “jujube”; a few of these cases may be debatable, but the overall tendency is clear. This observation in itself does not contradict the possibility of early separation of Nobiin, but the near-total lack of words that could be identified as reflexes of Proto-Nubian Swadesh equivalents of the respective meanings in this particular group clearly speaks against this historical scenario.
  3. It is worth mentioning that the number of isoglosses that Nobiin shares with other branches of Nubian to the exclusion of K/D (§⁄II.1) is extremely small, especially when compared to the number of exclusive Nile-Nubian isoglosses between Nobiin and K/D. However, this observation neither contradicts nor supports the early separation hypothesis (since we are not assuming that Nobiin should be grouped together with B, M, or Hill Nubian).

3. Conclusions

Based on this brief analysis, I suggest that rejection of the Nile-Nubian hypothesis in favor of an alternative historical scenario as proposed by Bechhaus-Gerst is not recommendable, since it runs into no less than two independent historical oddities/anomalies:

  1. assumption of a huge number of basic lexical borrowings from Kenuzi–Dongolawi into Nobiin (even including such elements as demonstrative and interrogative pronouns, typically resistant to borrowing);
  2. assumption of total loss of numerous Proto-Nubian basic lexical roots in all branches of Nubian except for Nobiin (19–21 possible items in §⁄III.2). Such conservatism would be highly suspicious; it is also directly contradicted by a few examples such as “water” (q.v.) which clearly indicate that Nobiin is innovative rather than conservative.

By contrast, the scenario that retains Nobiin within Nile-Nubian, but postulates the existence of a “pre-Nobiin” substrate or adstrate only assumes one historical oddity, similar to (1) above — the (presumably rapid) replacement of a large chunk of the Nobiin basic lexicon by words borrowed from an unknown substrate. However, it must be noted that the majority of words in §⁄III.2 are nouns, rather than verbs or pronouns, and this makes the idea of massive borrowing more plausible than in the case of presumed borrowings from K/D into Nobiin.30

This conclusion is in complete agreement with the tentative identification of a “pre-Nile- Nubian substrate” in Nobiin by Claude Rilly,31 who, based on a general distributional analysis of Nubian lexicon, claims to identify no fewer than fifty-one Nobiin lexical items derived from that substrate, most of them belonging to the sphere of basic lexicon. It remains to be ascertained if all of Rillyʼs fifty-one items are truly unique in Nobiin (as I have already mentioned above, some of these Nobiin isolates might eventually turn out to be retentions from Proto-Nubian if future data on Hill Nubian and Midob happens to contain etymological parallels), but the fact that Rilly and the author of this paper arrived at the same conclusion independently of each other by means of somewhat different methods looks reassuring.

If the Nile-Nubian branch is to be reinstated, and the specific features of Nobiin are to be explained by the influence of a substrate that did not affect its closest relative (K/D), this leaves us with two issues to be resolved — (a) chronology (and geography) of linguistic events, and (b) the genetic affiliation of the “pre-Nile-Nubian substrate” in question.

The aspect of chronology has previously been discussed in glottochronological terms.32 In both of these sources the application of the glottochronological method as introduced by Morris Swadesh and later recalibrated by Sergei Starostin allowed to generate the following classification and datings (fig. 2):

Phylogenetic tree for the Nubian languages

Fig. 2. Phylogenetic tree for the Nubian languages with glottochronological datings (generated by the StarlingNJ method)33

If we take the glottochronological figures at face value, they imply the original separation of Proto-Nile-Nubian around three to three and a half thousand years ago, and then a further split between the ancestors of modern Nobiin and K/D around two to two and a half thousand years ago. Interestingly enough, these events are chronologically correlatable with the two main events in the history of Nile-Nubian languages according to Bechhaus-Gerst, but not quite in the way that she envisions it: her “early separation of Nobiin” becomes the early separation of Nobiin and K/D, and her “later separation of K/D” becomes “final split between Nobiin and K/D.” The interaction between Nobiin and the mysterious “pre-Nile-Nubian substrate” must have therefore taken place some time in the 1st millennium CE (after the split with K/D but prior to the appearance of the first written texts in Old Nubian). Nevertheless, at this point I would like to refrain from making any definitive conclusions on probable dates and migration routes, given the possibility of alternate glottochronological models.

The other issue — linguistic identification of the “pre-Nile-Nubian substrate” — is even more interesting, since its importance goes far beyond Nubian history, and its successful resolution may have direct implications for the reconstruction of the linguistic history of Africa in general. Unfortunately, at this moment one can only speculate about what that substrate might have been, or even about whether it is reasonable to speak about a single substrate or a variety of idioms that may have influenced the early independent development of Nobiin.

Thus, Rilly, having analyzed lexical (sound + meaning) similarities between his fifty-one “pre-Nile-Nubian substrate” elements and other languages spoken in the region today or in antiquity, reached the conclusion that the substrate in question may have contained two layers: one related to ancient Meroitic, and still another one coming from the same Northern branch of Eastern Sudanic languages to which Nubian itself is claimed to belong.34 An interesting example of the former would be, e.g., the resemblance between ON mašal “sun” and Meroitic ms “sun, sun god,” while the latter may be illustrated with the example of Nobiin šìgír-tí “hair” = Tama sìgít id. However, few of Rillyʼs other parallels are equally convincing — most of them are characterized by either significant phonetic (e.g., Nobiin súː vs. Nara sàː “milk”) or semantic (e.g., Nobiin nóːg “house” vs. Nara lòg “earth”) discrepancies, not something one would really expect from contact relations that only took place no earlier than two thousand years ago. Subsequent research has not managed to alleviate that problem: cf., e.g., the attempt to derive Nobiin nùlù “white” from proto-Northeast Sudanic *ŋesil “tooth,”35 unconvincing due to multiple phonetic and semantic issues at the same time.

In Языки Африки, an alternate hypothesis was put forward, expanding upon an earlier observation by Robin Thelwall,36 who, while conducting his own lexicostatistical comparison of Nubian languages with other potential branches of East Sudanic, had first noticed some specific correlations between Nobiin and Dinka (West Nilotic). Going through Nobiin data in §⁄III.2 yields at least several phonetically and semantically close matches with West Nilotic, such as:

  • túllí “smoke” — cf. Nuer toːl, Dinka tol “smoke”;
  • kìd “stone” — cf. Luo kidi, Shilluk kit, etc. “stone”;
  • ɟèlèw “tail” — cf. Nuer ɟual, Dinka yɔl, Mabaan yilɛ, etc. “tail.”

Additionally, Nobiin múg “dog” is similar to East Nilotic *-ŋɔk-37 and Kalenjin *ŋoːk,38 assuming the possibility of assimilation (*ŋ- > m- before a following labial vowel in Nobiin). These parallels, although still sparse, constitute by far the largest single group of matches between the “pre-Nile Nubian substrate” and a single linguistic family (Nilotic), making this line of future research seem promising for the future — although they neither conclusively prove the Nilotic nature of this substrate, nor eliminate the possibility of several substrate layers with different affiliation.

In any case, the main point of this paper is not so much to shed light on the origin of substrate elements in Nobiin as it is to show that pure lexicostatistics, when applied to complex cases of language relationship, may reveal anomalies that can only be resolved by means of a careful etymological analysis of the accumulated evidence. It is entirely possible that advanced character-based phylogenetic methods might offer additional insight into this problem, but ultimately it all comes down to resolving the problem by means of manual searching for cognates, albeit without forgetting about statistical grounding of the conclusions.

In this particular case, I believe that the evidence speaks strongly in favor of reinstating the Nile-Nubian clade comprising both Nobiin and Kenuzi–Dongolawi, although it must be kept in mind that a common linguistic ancestor and a common ethnic ancestor are not necessarily the same thing (e.g., the linguistic conclusion does not at all exclude the possibility that early speakers of Kenuzi–Dongolawi did shift to Proto-Nile-Nubian from some other language — not necessarily Nubian in origin itself).

4. Abbreviations

  • B — Birgid;
  • D — Dongolawi;
  • Dl — Dilling;
  • K — Kenuzi;
  • K/D — Kenuzi–Dongolawi;
  • M — Midob;
  • N — Nobiin;
  • ON — Old Nubian;
  • PN — Proto-Nubian.

5. Bibliography

Armbruster, Charles H. bib⁄Dongolese Nubian: A Lexicon. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1965.

Bechhaus-Gerst, Marianne. bib⁄“‘Nile-Nubianʼ Recon­sidered.” In Topics in Nilo-Saharan Linguistics, edited by M. Lio­nel Be­n­der. Ham­burg: Helmut Buske, 1989: pp. 85–96.

Bechhaus-Gerst, Marianne. “Sprachliche und his­torische Rekonstruktionen im Bereich des Nubischen unter beson­de­rer Berücksichtigung des Nilnubischen.”⦚bib:49ab42ae-e792-4474-855c-0b2985eca9fnot found Sprache und Geschichte in Afrika 6 (1985): pp. 7–134.

Bechhaus-Gerst, Marianne. Sprachwandel durch Sprachkontakt am Beispiel des Nubischen im Niltal: Möglichkeiten und Grenzen einer diachronen Soziolinguistik. Cologne: Rüdiger Köppe, 1996.

Bechhaus-Gerst, Marianne. bib⁄The (Hi)story of Nobiin: 1000 Years of Language Change. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2011.

Bell, Herman. bib⁄“Documentary Evidence on the Haraza Nubian Language.” Su­dan Notes and Re­cords 56 (1975): pp. 1–35.

Browne, Gerald M. bib⁄Old Nubian Dictionary. Leuven: Pee­ters, 1996.

Greenberg, Joseph H. bib⁄The Languages of Africa. Bloo­mington: Indiana University Press, 1966.

Güldemann, Tom. bib⁄“Historical Linguistics and Genealogical Language Classification in Africa.” In The Languages and Linguistics of Africa, edited by Tom Güldemann. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 2018: pp. 58–444.

Heine, Bernd & Tania Kuteva. bib⁄“Convergence and Divergence in the Development of African Languages.” In Areal Diffusion and Genetic Inheritance: Problems in Comparative Linguistics, edited by Alexandra Y. Aikhenvald and R.M.W. Dixon. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001: pp. 393–411.

Hofmann, Inge. bib⁄Material für eine meroitische Grammatik. Veröffentlichungen der Institute für Afrikanistik und Ägyptologie der Universität Wien 16. Vienna: Afro-Pub, 1981.

Hofmann, Inge. bib⁄Nubisches Wörterverzeichnis: Nu­bisch-­deutsches und deutsch-nubisches Wörterverzeichnis nach dem Kenzi-Ma­te­ri­al des Samuêl Alî Hisên (1863–1927). Berlin: Dietrich Reimer Verlag, 1986.

Jakobi, Angelika. bib⁄“The Loss of Syllable-final Proto-Nu­bian Consonants.” In Insights into Nilo-Saharan Language, History and Cul­ture, edited by Al-Amin Abu-Manga, Leoma Gilley & Anne Storch. Cologne: Rüdi­ger Köppe, 2006: pp. 215–228.

Kassian, Alexei. bib⁄“Towards a Formal Genealogical Classification of the Lezgian Languages (North Caucasus): Testing Various Phylogenetic Methods on Lexical Data.” PLoS ONE 10, no. 2 (2015). doi: www⁄10.1371/journal.pone.0116950.

Kauczor, P. Daniel. bib⁄Die Bergnubische Sprache (Dialekt von Ge­bel Deleṅ). Vienna: Alfred Hölder, 1920.

Khalil, Mokhtar M. bib⁄Wörterbuch der nubischen Spra­che (Fadidja/Maḥas Dialekt). Warsaw: Piotr O. Scholtz, 1996.

Krell, Amy. bib⁄Rapid Appraisal Sociolinguistic Survey among Ama, Karko, and Wali Language Groups (Southern Kordofan, Sudan). SIL International, 2012.

Lepsius, C. Richard. bib⁄Nubische Grammatik. Mit einer Einleitung über die Völker und Sprachen Afrikas. Berlin: Wilhelm Hertz, 1880.

Rilly, Claude. bib⁄“Language and Ethnicity in Ancient Sudan.” In The Fourth Cataract and Beyond: Proceedings of the 12th International Conference for Nubian Studies, edited by Julie Renée Anderson and Derek A. Welsby. British Museum Publications on Egypt and Sudan, 2014: pp. 1169–1188.

Rilly, Claude. bib⁄Le méroïtique et sa famille linguistique. Leuven: Peeters, 2010.

Rottland, Franz. bib⁄Die Südnilotischen Sprachen: Be­sch­rei­­bung, Vergleichung und Rekonstruktion. Berlin: Dietrich Reimer Verlag, 1982.

Souag, Mostafa Lameen. bib⁄Grammatical Contact in the Sahara: Arabic, Berber, and Songhay in Tabelbala and Siwa. PhD Thesis, SOAS, University of London, 2010.

Starostin, George. bib⁄Языки Африки. Опыт построения лексикостатистической классификации. Том II: Восточносуданские языки [Languages of Africa: An Attempt at a Lexicostatistical Classification, Vol. II: East Sudanic Languages]. Moscow: Jazyki slavjanskoj kulʼtury, 2014.

Thelwall, Robin. bib⁄“A Birgid Vocabulary List and Its Links with Daju.” In Gedenkschrift Gustav Nachtigall 1874–1974, edited by Herbert Gansl­mayr and Hermann Jungraithmayr. Bremen: Übersee-Museum, 1977: pp. 197–210.

Thelwall, Robin. bib⁄“Lexicostatistical Relations between Nubian, Daju and Dinka.” In Etudes Nubiennes, Colloque de Chantilly, 2–6 Juillet 1975, edited by Jean Leclant and Jean Vercouttier. Cairo: IFAO, 1978: pp. 265–286.

Vasilyev, Mikhail & George Starostin. bib⁄“Лексикостатистическая классификация нубийских языков: к вопросу о нильско-нубийской языковой общности&rdquo; [“Lexicostatistical Classification of the Nubian languages and the Issue of the Nile-Nubian Genetic Unity”]. Journal of Language Relationship 12 (2014): 51–72.

Voßen, Rainer. bib⁄The Eastern Nilotes: Linguistic and His­to­ri­cal Reconstructions. Berlin: Dietrich Reimer, 1982.

Werner, Roland. bib⁄Grammatik des Nobiin (Nilnubisch). Pho­no­logie, Tonologie und Morphologie. Hamburg: Helmut Buske, 1987.

Werner, Roland. bib⁄Tìdn-áal: A Study of Midob (Darfur Nu­bian). Berlin: Dietrich Reimer, 1993.


  1. Bechhaus-Gerst, “Nile-Nubian Reconsidered,” p. 85. ↩︎

  2. Greenberg, The Languages of Africa, p. 84. ↩︎

  3. Bechhaus-Gerst, “Nile-Nubian Reconsidered”; Bechhaus-Gerst, Sprachwandel durch Sprachkontakt am Beispiel des Nubischen im Niltal; Bechhaus-Gerst, The (Hi)story of Nobiin↩︎

  4. Bechhaus-Gerst, Sprachwandel durch Sprachkontakt am Beispiel des Nubischen im Niltal, p. 88. ↩︎

  5. Bechhaus-Gerst, The (Hi)story of Nobiin, p. 22. ↩︎

  6. E.g., Heine & Kuteva, “Convergence and Divergence in the Development of African Languages.” ↩︎

  7. E.g., Jakobi, “The Loss of Syllable-final Proto-Nu­bian Consonants.” ↩︎

  8. Güldemann, “Historical Linguistics and Genealogical Language Classification in Africa,” p. 283. ↩︎

  9. Rilly, Le méroïtique et sa famille linguistique, pp. 211–288; Rilly, “Language and Ethnicity in Ancient Sudan,” pp. 1180–1183. We will return to Rillyʼs arguments in the final section of this paper. ↩︎

  10. Starostin, Языки Африки, pp. 24–95. ↩︎

  11. Bechhaus-Gerst, “Nile-Nubian Reconsidered” ↩︎

  12. Starostin, Языки Африки↩︎

  13. One possible argument in this case would be to rely on data from external comparison. Thus, if we agree that Nubian belongs to the Northern branch of the Eastern Sudanic family, with the Nara language and the Taman group as its closest relatives (Rilly, Le méroïtique et sa famille linguistique; Starostin, Языки Африки), then, in those cases where Nobiin data is opposed to the data of all other Nubian languages, it is the word that finds better etymological parallels in Nara and Tama that should be logically regarded as the Proto-Nubian equivalent. However, in order to avoid circularity or the additional problems that one runs into while investigating chronologically distant language relationship, I intentionally restrict the subject matter of this paper to internal Nubian data only. ↩︎

  14. Reasons of volume, unfortunately, do not allow to go into sufficient details on many of the more complicated cases. A subset of 50 words, representing the most stable (on average) Swadesh items, has been analyzed in detail and published (in Russian) in Starostin, Языки Африки, pp. 224–295. A complete 100-item wordlist reconstructed for Proto-Nubian, with detailed notes on phonetics, semantics, and distribution, is scheduled to be added to the already available annotated 100-item wordlists for ten Nubian languages, published as part of www⁄The Global Lexicostatistical Database↩︎

  15. Note on the data sources: for reasons of volume, I do not include all available data in the etymologies. Nobiin (N) forms are quoted based on Werner’s Grammatik des Nobiin; if the word is missing from Wernerʼs relatively short glossary, additional forms may be drawn upon from either older sources, such as Lepsius’s Nubische Grammatik, or newer ones, e.g., Khalil’s Wörterbuch der nubischen Sprache (unfortunately, Khalilʼs dictionary is unusable as a lexicostatistical source due to its unwarranted omission of Arabic borrowings and conflation of various early sources). The ancient forms of Old Nubian (ON) are taken from Gerald Browneʼs Old Nubian Dictionary.

    Data on the other languages are taken from the most comprehensive published dictionaries, vocabularies, and/or wordlists and are quoted as follows: Kenuzi (K) — Hofmann, Nubisches Wörterverzeichnis; Dongolawi (D) — Armbruster, Dongolese Nubian; Midob (M) — Werner, Tìdn-áal; Birgid (B) — Thelwall, “A Birgid Vocabulary List”; Dilling (Dl) — Kauczor, Die Bergnubische Sprache. Hill Nubian data other than Dilling are used sparingly, only when it is necessary to specify the distribution of a given item; occasional forms from such languages as Kadaru, Debri, Karko, and Wali are quoted from wordlists published in Thelwall, “Lexicostatistical Relations between Nubian, Daju and Dinka” and Krell, Rapid Appraisal Sociolinguisyic Survey among Ama, Karko, and Wali Language Groups.

    Proto-Nubian forms are largely based on the system of correspondences that was originally laid out in Marianne Bechhaus-Gerstʼs reconstruction of Proto-Nubian phonology in “Sprachliche und his­torische Rekonstruktionen im Bereich des Nubischen unter beson­de­rer Berücksichtigung des Nilnubischen,” but with a number of emendations introduced in Starostin, Языки Африки. Since this study is more concerned with issues of cognate distribution than those of phonological reconstruction and phonetic interpretation, I will refrain from reproducing full tables of phonetic correspondences, but brief notes on peculiarities of reflexes of certain PN phonemes in certain Nubian languages will be given for those cases where etymological cognacy is not obvious or is disputable from the standard viewpoint of the neogrammarian paradigm. ↩︎

  16. Bechhaus-Gerst, “Nile-Nubian Reconsidered,” p. 94 lists this as one of two examples illustrating the alleged archaicity of Old Nubian and Nobiin in retaining original PN *g-, together with ON gouwi “shield.” However, in both of these cases K/D also show k- (cf. K/D karu “shield”), which goes against regular correspondences for PN *g- (which should yield K/D g-, see “red”), meaning that it is Nobiin and not the other languages that actually have an innovation here. ↩︎

  17. Reconstruction somewhat uncertain, but initial *ŋ- is fairly clearly indicated by the correspondences; see detailed discussion in Starostin, Языки Африки, pp. 56–57. ↩︎

  18. Bechhaus-Gerst, “Nile-Nubian Reconsidered,” p. 93 counts this as an additional slice of evidence for early separation of N, but since this is an innovation rather than an archaism, there are no arguments to assert that the innovation did not take place recently (already after the separation of N from K/D). ↩︎

  19. Hofmann, Material für eine Meroitische Gram­ma­tik, 86. ↩︎

  20. See the detailed discussion on this phonetically unusual root in Starostin, Языки Африки, p. 80. ↩︎

  21. Bell, “Documentary Evidence on the Haraza Nubian Language,” p. 10. ↩︎

  22. Khalil, Wörterbuch der nubischen Spra­che, p. 124. ↩︎

  23. In Starostin, Языки Африки, p. 92 I suggest that, since the regular reflex of PN *n- in Hill Nubian is d-, both Nile-Nubian *min and all the na(i)-like forms may go back to a unique PN stem *nwV-; if so, the word should be moved to §⁄I.1, but in any case this is still a common Nile-Nubian isogloss. ↩︎

  24. Werner, Grammatik des Nobiin, p. 357. ↩︎

  25. The meanings “sand; dust” are also indicated as primary for Nobiin iskid ~ iskit in Khalil, Wörterbuch der nubischen Spra­che, p. 48. ↩︎

  26. Krell, Rapid Appraisal Sociolinguistic Survey among Ama, Karko, and Wali Language Groups, p. 40. ↩︎

  27. As per Bechhaus-Gerst, “Nile-Nubian Reconsidered,” p. 93. ↩︎

  28. Lepsius, Nubische Grammatik, p. 274. ↩︎

  29. Where *-n is a productive plural marker, cf. Bechhaus-Gerst, “Sprachliche und his­torische Rekonstruktionen im Bereich des Nubischen unter beson­de­rer Berücksichtigung des Nilnubischen,” p. 109. ↩︎

  30. For a good typological analogy from a relatively nearby region, cf. the contact situation between Northern Songhay languages and Berber languages as described, e.g., in Souag, Grammatical Contact in the Sahara. ↩︎

  31. Rilly, Le méroïtique et sa famille linguistique, pp. 285–289. ↩︎

  32. Starostin, Языки Африки, pp. 34–36; Vasilyey & Starostin, “Лексикостатистическая классификация нубийских языков.” ↩︎

  33. For a detailed description of the StarlingNJ distance-based method of phylogenetic classification and linguistic dating, see Kassian, “Towards a Formal Genealogical Classification of the Lezgian Languages (North Caucasus).” ↩︎

  34. Rilly, Le méroïtique et sa famille linguistique, p. 285. ↩︎

  35. Rilly, “Language and Ethnicity in Ancient Sudan,” pp. 1181–1182. ↩︎

  36. Thelwall, “Lexicostatistical Relations be­twe­en Nu­bian, Daju and Dinka,” pp. 273–274. ↩︎

  37. Voßen, The Eastern Nilotes, p. 354. ↩︎

  38. Rottland, Die Südnilotischen Sprachen, p. 390. ↩︎

author⁄Roger M. Blench
article⁄Morphological Evidence for the Coherence of East Sudanic
abstract⁄East Sudanic is the largest and most complex branch of Nilo-Saharan. First mooted by Greenberg in 1950, who included seven branches, it was expanded in his 1963 publication to include Ama (Nyimang) and Temein and also Kuliak, not now considered part of East Sudanic. However, demonstrating the coherence of East Sudanic and justifying an internal structure for it have remained problematic. The only significant monograph on this topic is Bender’s The East Sudanic Languages, which uses largely lexical evidence. Bender proposed a subdivision into Ek and En languages, based on pronouns. Most subsequent scholars have accepted his Ek cluster, consisting of Nubian, Nara, Ama, and Taman, but the En cluster (Surmic, E. Jebel, Temein, Daju, Nilotic) is harder to substantiate. Rilly has put forward strong arguments for the inclusion of the extinct Meroitic language as coordinate with Nubian. In the light of these difficulties, the paper explores the potential for morphology to provide evidence for the coherence of East Sudanic. The paper reviews its characteristic tripartite number-marking system, consisting of singulative, plurative, and an unmarked middle term. These are associated with specific segments, the singulative in t- and plurative in k- as well as a small set of other segments, characterized by complex allomorphy. These are well preserved in some branches, fragmentary in others, and seem to have vanished completely in the Ama group, leaving only traces now fossilized in Dinik stems. The paper concludes that East Sudanic does have a common morphological system, despite its internal lexical diversity. However, this data does not provide any evidence for the unity of the En languages, and it is therefore suggested that East Sudanic be analyzed as consisting of a core of four demonstrably related languages, and five parallel branches which have no internal hierarchy.
keywords⁄East Sudanic, Nilo-Saharan, comparative linguistics

1. Introduction

The East (formerly “Eastern”) Sudanic languages, spread between Chad and Northern Tanzania, constitute a branch of Nilo-Saharan with a proposed membership of nine families, including Nilotic, the largest and most complex group. We owe the original concept of East Sudanic to Greenberg who attributed seven branches to it,1 shown in Table 1, together with their modern names. Families unknown to Greenberg are added in the “Current” column.

Greenberg (1950) Current
Nubian Nubian + Meroitic
Beir-Didinga Surmic
Barea Nara
Tabi Eastern Jebel
Merarit Taman
Dagu Daju
Southern Nilotic
Nyima
Temein

Table 1. Greenberg’s original concept of East Sudanic

Greenberg was not aware of Nyimang and Temein, and these were added later in Greenberg together with Kuliak,2 now considered by Bender to be a separate branch of Nilo-Saharan.3 Greenberg claimed East Sudanic was part of “Chari-Nile,” a group which included Central Sudanic, Kunama, and Bertha.4 Chari-Nile is also now not thought to be valid.5 Somewhat confusingly, Tucker had earlier published a book entitled The Eastern Sudanic Languages but it is largely about Central Sudanic, Ubangian, and Nilotic languages.6 Prior to Greenberg, many individual languages or small groups had been described in Tucker & Bryan, but they were not combined into a larger unit.7 Greenberg makes a large number of proposals for grammatical and lexical isomorphs, which more recent scholars have not followed up in detail.8

East Sudanic languages are by far the most well-known branch of Nilo-Saharan, with Nilotic and Nubian the main focal points. This is undoubtedly a reflection of the cultural prominence of the speakers and their relative accessibility. However, rather like Bantu, Nilotic represents a recent expansion and is only a fragment of the internal diversity of Eastern Sudanic. Nubian has attracted researchers because of its old manuscript attestations and epigraphic tradition. It has long been suspected that the extinct Meroitic language is part of East Sudanic,9 but the small number of unambiguously identified lexemes made this argument difficult to sustain. However, with the work of Rilly and Rilly & De Voogt this argument can be considered secure.10 Rilly places Meroitic as coordinate with proto-Nubian as part of his “Northern East Sudanic” family. Map 1 shows their approximate distribution in recent times.

The East Sudanic languages

Map 1. The East Sudanic languages

The nine branches remain the accepted listing with some relatively minor reassignments. There have been few attempts to synthesise data on East Sudanic, the unpublished MSc thesis of Ross,11 who was a student of Bender, and Bender’s own studies and monograph.12 The study by Starostin of Nubian–Nara–Tama is part of a project to re-evaluate East Sudanic as a whole from the point of view of lexicostatistics.13 Bender gives basic phonologies representative of each branch, as well as an argument for the coherence of East Sudanic based principally on lexical evidence. This latter was locally printed in Carbondale and is best described as problematic to read for those who are not strongly motivated to penetrate its forest of acronyms and compressed citations. It has therefore had a very limited impact on Nilo-Saharan studies. However, it is full of interesting suggestions for isoglosses and presents an elaborate table of sound correspondences, so it undoubtedly merits close study. Unlike Bender’s Omotic compendium,14 it does not include original lexical forms systematically, and hence each entry needs to be rechecked against original and more current source data. It is safe to say Bender’s publications did not have a resounding impact on the scholarly community.

Despite its previous acceptance, the published arguments for the coherence of East Sudanic remain weak. No unambiguous innovations, lexical or phonological, mark all branches as members. Some researchers have expressed scepticism about its unity. However, studies of East Sudanic by Dimmendaal broadly accept the classification of Bender,15 although using very different criteria for accepting its coherence. However, Güldemann remains sceptical, arguing that internal typological differences may be evidence for convergence rather than genetic affiliation.16 The www⁄Glottolog takes a far more extreme position, treating all branches as distinct families.

2. Lexical evidence

2.1. East Sudanic as a Unity

Claims for the reality of East Sudanic are largely based on lexical evidence. Bender proposes the most significant set of proposals in this area,17 but Greenberg’s original argument also includes some suggestions. Assuming the coherence of East Sudanic, the proposals for an internal structure are tenuous. Bender has argued in various places that East Sudanic has two main subdivisions, which he notates Ek and En, on the basis of the first person independent pronoun (Table 2).18

Ek Branch En Branch
E1 Nubian E2 Surmic
E3 Nara E4 Eastern Jebel
E5 Nyima E6 Temein(?)
E7 Taman E8 Daju
E9 Nilotic

Table 2. Bender’s subclassification of East Sudanic

The first person singular subject pronoun in East Sudanic, first set out by Greenberg and later supplemented by Bender, forms a distinctive set (Table 3):

Branch Language(s) Form
Nubian Nobiin ay
Nara Nara ag
Nyima Ama a(i)
Taman All wa, wo
Surmic Didinga a
Surmic Kwegu aan
Eastern Jebel Gaahmg aan
Temein Ronge nan
Daju Nyala aaga
West Nilotic Dinka an
East Nilotic Masai, Turkana, Nandi, Teso nanu
South Nilotic Pokot anii

Table 3. First person singular subject pronoun in East Sudani19

Even this dataset does not entirely support Bender’s division, since Daju appears to fall in the Ek group. The forms with a nasal largely correspond to Bender’s En, while those without nasals correspond to Ek. However, on this evidence, the presence of a velar cannot be said to characterise all Ek languages.

2.2. The Ek Languages

Bender, Ehret, Rilly, and Starostin agree that at least Nubian, Nara, Tama, and perhaps Nyimang form a subgroup (Ehret’s “Astaboran”).20 The lexical tables below provide a summary version of the compilations of Rilly sometimes with updated citations. Table 4 shows the Ek forms for “drink” which seem to refer to a protoform *dii.

Subgroup Language Attestation
Nara líí
Nubian Dilling di
Nubian Midob tìì
Nyima Ama
Taman Proto-Taman *li(y)-

Table 4. Ek lexical isogloss, “drink,” *dii21

Table 5 shows a common form for “house,” assuming Nubian preserves a velar lost in the other languages. The vowel is not entirely clear, but I provisionally reconstruct a mid central vowel.

Subgroup Language Attestation
Nubian Midob kàr
Nubian Nyala aare
Nara wǒl
Nyima Ama wel
Taman Tama wal

Table 5. Ek lexical isogloss, “house,” *kəl22

Table 6 shows a lexical isogloss for “mouth,” *aŋəl. However, the Eastern Jebel language Gaamhg also appears to be either cognate or else a loan, so this constitutes slightly imperfect evidence.

Subgroup Language Attestation
Nubian Andaandi agil
Nara aùlò
Nyima Ama ŋàl
Taman Abu Sharib awl
E Jebel Gaahmg ag

Table 6. Ek lexical isogloss, “mouth,” *aŋəl23

Table 7 presents the evidence for the lexical isogloss, “two,” perhaps *wari(m) if the -m in Nyima is to be included.

Subgroup Language Attestation
Nubian Haraza auri-yah
Nubian Old Nubian uwo
Nubian Karko ārè
Nara ari-ga
Nyima Proto-Nyima *arm-
Taman Proto-Taman *wari

Table 7. Ek lexical isogloss, “two,” *wari(m)24

2.3. The En Languages

Though the En languages share overlapping isoglosses, they do not share enough common material to be conclusively considered a genetic unity. Bender recognizes that the arguments for membership of Temein in his En group are sketchy. Table 8 presents one of Bender’s better common glosses.

Subgroup Language Attestation
Surmic Murle ***ɓɔ****lɔ́ɔ́k*
E Jebel Aka ***bəəb****a*
Temein Temein ***pɔ̀p****áʈɪ̀ʈ*
Daju Liguri ku****ɓu****du
E Nilotic Lopit a.bob.io
E Nilotic Maa a.bob.oki

Table 8. En lexical isogloss, “bark n.,” *-bob-

3. Morphological Evidence

In the light of these problems with the lexicon, it may be that a better case for East Sudanic can be made on the basis of morphology. Bryan had already noted the existence of a “t-k substratum” in a variety of languages across East-Central Africa.25 These elements are affixes on nominals associated with number marking. Her argument is somewhat confused, as this feature is unlikely to be a substrate feature of some lost phylum. Most plausibly, it is a feature of Nilo-Saharan which has been borrowed into Afroasiatic (since it is definitely not a widespread feature of Afroasiatic). Bryan identifies the following morphological elements:

  • Singulative -t
  • Plural -k
  • Plural -N

The majority of languages she uses to exemplify this principle would now be classified as East Sudanic. Greenberg calls moveable k- a “stage III article”26 while Ehret calls it both an “adjective suffix” and a “noun particularizing prefix.”27 Bender, who considers it a “noun-class formative remnant,”28 notes that it is widespread but not universal in Nilo-Saharan. Also included are some Cushitic languages, but the extension of the “substratum” is somewhat strained. The T-affix in Afroasiatic is a widespread marker of feminine gender and a deep level connection with Nilo-Saharan through semantic shift is not impossible. Bender also discusses N-affixes in Nilo-Saharan,29 reprising observations by Tucker & Bryan.30 Storch also takes up the issue of N/K and T/K alternations in relation to Nilotic noun morphology.31

These affixes are certainly present in East Sudanic languages along with others. Many languages also permit gemination or consonant doubling. The origins of gemination in suffixes remains in doubt, but may arise from resuffixing, just as long consonants in Niger-Congo can arise from reprefixing in noun class languages. Moreover, nominals in East Sudanic can allow “affix-stacking,” the addition in sequence of one or more affixes as part of historical stratification.

The paper considers each branch of East Sudanic in turn, and briefly lays out the evidence for the affix system, as well as the presence of gemination and stacking. Discussion of the membership of individual branches, and their structure is not given here, but can be consulted in standard references.32

4. Individual Branches

4.1. Nubian and Meroitic

Nubian demonstrates strong evidence for tripartite number marking in nouns. Jakobi & Hamdan describe Karko, which has a restricted system of suffixed singulatives, where -Vt and are allomorphs (Table 9).

Gloss sg pl
sorghum wèê-t wèè
hair ʈēɽ-ét tèèl
bulrush millet ɛ̀nɖ-ɛ́t ɛ̀nɖ
tooth jíl-ɖ jīīl
breast ə̄l-ɖ ɔ̄ɔ̄l

Table 9. Karko singulatives33

However, the majority of suffixes denote plurals (Table 10). The majority seem to be allomorphs of the singulative suffix, thus ɖ ~ Vl ~ Vr, with a distinct second set, Vɲ ~ Vŋ. The suffix -Vnd may be a composite of the nasal and alveo-dental suffixes.

Gloss sg pl
body íìl īl-ɖ
heart áàl āl-ɖ
star ōnɖ ōnɖ-ôl
milk éèj ēj-ēl
chicken kòk kōk-ôr
cat bùt bùt-ùr
blood ōg ōg-ōnd
fire úk ūk-ūnd
river ìr īr-īɲ
rope ə̀r ə̄r-ə̄ɲ
shield kə̀r kə̀r-ə̀ŋ
ostrich ʈùlɖ ʈùlɖ-ùŋ

Table 10. Karko plural marking34

Proto-Nubian may have had a fully functional tripartite system, which has now eroded leaving both singulatives and plurals, but not simultaneously. Once allomorphy is taken into account, the available affixes are very restricted. A language such as Midob has a still more reduced system, with only the alveo-dental t ~ di (Table 11).

Gloss sg pl
thing sáar sàartì
house ə̀d ə̀ttì
child úccí ùccédí
woman íddí ìddédí
cow tə̀ə tə̀yítì

Table 11. Midob nominal plurals35

The restricted corpus for Meroitic and the absence of reliable grammatical information makes it problematic to know the nature of its affix system. However, a couple of glosses which are considered reliable almost certainly show singulatives comparable to other Nubian languages:

Gloss Transliteration Approx. pronunciation
sister kdise, kdite /kaɖiɕ, kaɖit/
life pwrite /bawarit/

Table 12. Meroitic glosses showing singulative marking36

4.2. Nara

Nominal plurals in Nara are created through suffixing and sporadic gemination of the final consonant. The six plural classes are shown in Table 13. There are weak correlations with semantics and these are given only as indicative:

Suffix Gloss sg pl Semantics
-ka -K fox kerfe kerefka animals
animal oof oofka
-ta -T heart asma asimta body parts
meat nooti noota
-a -V ear tus tusa animals and plants
thorn keer keera
-tta -T blood kito kitotta collectives(?)
grass sum sumitta
-CCa -I bride solobi solobba people, animals
goat bele bella
-ʤʤa -S gland foʤi foʤʤaa internal secretions
milk course ngiʤi ngiʤʤaa

Table 13. Nara number marking in nouns37

The plurals in last three classes which involve consonant doubling and change the final vowel to -a may simply be allomorphs of an underlying -a suffix. These may derive from a single rule and thus not exemplify the characteristic East Sudanic suffixes.

4.3. Nyima

Nyima covers two related languages, Nyimang and Afitti, now usually known as Ama and Dinik respectively. Both languages have retained only traces of the complex noun morphology characteristic of other East Sudanic branches. Ama nouns have a single plural-marking suffix, -ŋi (or -gi after a liquid). Even this is dropped when number can be inferred from either a numeral or a quantifier. There are a small number of suppletives for persons:

Gloss sg pl
person, pl people wodáŋ wàá
child wodéŋ ɖúriŋ

Table 14. Suppletive plural forms in Ama

Reduplication can be used to express collectives, e.g., ɖàmì “egg”; ɖàɖàmì “all the eggs.”

Otherwise the loss of most plural marking is very marked in comparison with related branches. For Dinik, De Voogt notes number marking briefly, which he states is only applied consistently to animates. Dinik has three plural markers, -gòr, -ná, and -é.38 A comparison of the lexicon of Dinik yields some possible evidence for fossil affixes. Dinik in particular has a wide range of nominals with -Vk suffixes (Table 14).

Gloss Attestation
river kwɔlək
dura sorghum mənək
scorpion ŋwunək
grave tirik
lightning arsək
salt ɔrdik
spear mətsək

Table 15. The fossil affix -Vk in Dinik39

Despite their lexical affinity to the Ek branch, Nyima languages have all but lost their indicative noun morphology. However, as Norton observes,40 the characteristic t/k alternations are well preserved in the verbal system in the distinction between factative and progressive. Table 16 exemplifies this alternation.

Gloss Factative Progressive
build t̪-ùɡ-è k-ūɡ
dig t̪-īw-ò k-íw
light (fire) t̪-ūɕ-ē k-úɕ-ín
build tuɡɛ̀ kwò
chop tàiɔ̀ kaì
dig tìwò kìù

Table 16. T/K marking on Ama verb stems41

Norton has a lengthy argument about how the nominal alternation became attached to verbs, which he summarises as follows:

I therefore propose that this class of verbs attests the Nyima cognate of the wider Nilo-Saharan T/K alternation. This entails a chain of events in which the T/K alternation first moved from the noun (singular/plural) to the verb (singulactional/pluractional), and then shifted in meaning from verbal number to verbal aspect (factative/progressive) […]. Seen in this light, the significance of moving T/K morphology onto verbs in the Nyima branch is that it renewed an existing system of irregular singulactional/pluractional alternations.42

This shift from the nominal to the verbal system suggests that Nyima need no longer be treated as the missing piece in the puzzle of East Sudanic morphology.

4.4. Taman

Descriptions of the morphology of Taman languages are very limited. Kellermann provides a summary of number marking in nouns, based on the manuscript material of Stevenson (Table 17):

Affix sg Affix pl Gloss
-t mèya-t -k mèya-k blacksmith
-t wɪ̀gɪ-t wɪ̀gɪ-ɛ bird
-V áunyò -(V)k áunyò-k elbow
-∅ gaan -(V)k gaan-ɪk tree
-∅ wal -V wal-u house
-k taɽ-ak -V taɽ-o chief
-X iɲ-o -(V)ɲ iɲ-iɲ pot
-∅ áwór -(V)ŋ áwór-oŋ knee

Table 17. Tama nominal number-marking43

As with other East Sudanic languages, once allomorphy is taken into account, number-marking affixes are quite reduced. Tama has -t, -k, -(V)N, and an underspecified vowel. No examples of synchronic tripartite number marking are given, but the use of -t in the singulative and the “moveable” -k all point to this as formerly operative. The underspecified V in -VC suffixes suggests compounding, as in other East Sudanic languages.

4.5. Surmic

Surmic displays abundant evidence for three-term number marking. Table 18 shows its operation in Laarim:

Gloss sg Generic pl
gazelle boronit boron- boronua
nail gurmaloʧ gurmal- gurmaleeta

Table 18. Tripartite number marking in Laarim44

Yigezu & Dimmendaal focus on Baale and Table 19 shows its number marking system and identifiable affixes. The variability in Baale is extremely high with many minor differences, so the analysis is not always certain. For example, “stomach” might represent an original -NV affix, eroded by the subsequent addition of the -TV.

Gloss Affix sg Affix pl
arm, hand -∅ ayí -NV ayinná
moon -∅ ɲʊlʊ́ -KV ɲɔlɔgɛ́
man, person -∅ éé -TV eet̤á
goat -∅ ɛ́ɛ́s -TV ɛ́ɛ́ta
head -A ɔwá -TV ooti
face, forehead -A ŋʊmmá -TV ŋuundí
stomach -A kɛŋŋá -TV keendi
ear -NV ɪtááni -NV ɪnná
rope -S mɔssájí -N mɔɔssɛ́n

Table 19. Baale number marking and affixes45

From this evidence, Baale has singulars in -(N)A, -S, and -NV and plurals with -KV, -TV, and -N.

4.6. Eastern Jebel

To judge by the data in Bender,46 Aka has a richer system of number marking than Gaahmg. Extracting the affixes from the system of number-marking, the following (at least) occur (Table 20):

Gloss Affix sg Affix pl
tongue -∅ kala -A, -T kala.ati
knee -∅ kʊsu -N kʊsuu.ŋi
belly -∅ ɛllɛ -T ɛllɛ.ti
ear -∅ sigii -T sigii.de
fish -∅ ʔʊʊgu -T ʔʊʊgu.ði
dog -∅ kɛle -V kɛle.i
bone -K gamoo.ka -N gamoo.ɲi
egg -K ʔʊmuu.ke -T ʊʊmʊ.ti
horn -K kɔsʊl.ge -V kɔsʊʊl.i
cloud -V aabuga -T aabug.adi

Table 20. Examples of Aka number marking on nouns47

As with Gaamhg, nouns can have zero marking, singulatives a velar or underspecified vowel, with plural affixes -Ti, -Ni, or a single vowel. Some plural suffixes, such as -aTi, probably combine two affixes, a pattern found elsewhere in East Sudanic.

4.7. Temein

Temein consists of three languages, Temein, Keiga Jirru, and These.48 Surface forms for number marking in Temein are highly diverse and not easy to predict, even though the basic elements are relatively few. Temein languages operate a three-way system of number-marking with an unmarked form plus singulatives and pluratives, also known as “replacive.”49 However, the erosion of this system has meant that nouns where three terms occur synchronically are relatively rare. Table 21 shows some examples of these:

Language Gloss sg Unmarked pl
Temein dura mórɪŋɪnʈɛʈ (one grain) mórɪŋɪs (head of grain) mórɪŋ (dura plant)
Keiga Jirru meat bɪlanḑàk (one piece) ɪnɖàk kɪnɖaɖɪ̀k
Keiga Jirru medicine móreḑàk komórò (roots)
These fat (n.) nányɛ́ɖə̀k nányàʔ kɪnányàʔ

Table 21. Tripartite number marking in the Temein cluster

Number marking in Temein displays typical Nilo-Saharan characteristics, although these are combined in ways that are difficult to predict for individual nouns. The most common elements are:

  • “Moveable k-” (with an underspecified vowel), prefixed, suffixed or both, where prefixed kV- is a typical strategy for Arabic loanwords
  • Addition of final –NI
  • Addition of final –a[ʔ]
  • Singulative marking with –Iʈ, -Is
  • Vowel lengthening and unpredictable changes in vowel quality
  • Changes in ATR quality of the vowel
  • Suppletion is present although not always easy to identify due to vowel changes and shortening

4.7.1. Prefix k-

In the Temein cluster k- is strongly associated with plurals and can occur before, after, and at both ends of a word. The underspecified vowel often results in a copy of the stem vowel, though not in every case. The vowel can disappear when the stem begins with an approximant. Table 22 shows surface forms in Temein:

Gloss Unmarked pl
belly óòm kómɪk
big ḿbù kɪmbɪk
hill, stone kúrɛʈ kukúrɛʈ
shield wór kwòráʔ

Table 22. Temein -Vk, kV- nominal affixes

This affix has an allomorph –Vk that can mark singulative as in These (Table 23):

Gloss sg Unmarked
firewood márɛnyɪk márɛŋ
ear ŋwánɪk kwɛɛŋ
eye náánɪk kɛnyɪŋ
fish kɛlɛɖak káála

Table 23. These -Vk singulative affix

In the case of the singulative for “fish,” it appears that it has already been marked once as a singulative with –ʈ and the –Vk has been subsequently affixed.

4.7.2. Final –NI

Less common is –NI or -IN in final position. Temein examples are shown in Table 24:

Gloss Unmarked pl
friend wórɪnyà kórɪnyànɪ̀
hanging frame sɛsɪlàŋ sɛsɪlàŋì
moon kóù kikówɪn

Table 24. Temein -IN, -NI plural affix

The following affixes can thus be attributed to Temein, -T, -K, -N, -S, -V. Temein shows no evidence for consonant gemination.

4.8. Daju

Daju languages also show evidence for the characteristic three-way number-marking contrast of Nilo-Saharan, albeit realised in a fragmentary way in many languages. Stevenson describes the three-way contrast in Shatt Tebeldia:

Many nouns have three forms, representing mass or collective / unit / units. […] The suffix is then replaced by another, or a further suffix is added, to denote the plural of the unit. […]50

This is shown for two glosses in Table 25:

Gloss sg Unmarked pl (countable)
egg gilis-ic gilis gilis-u
worm ox-uic ox ox-uij-iny

Shatt and Laggori at least have considerable diversity of surface affixes marking number, either singulative or plural with suffixes as well as *replacing word endings.51 Boyeldieu describes the number marking in Shatt Damman in some detail (Table 26).

Category sg pl
sg/pl. alternation -V -u
-x
-c -ɲ, -ic/-iɲ, -d(d)ic/-d(d)iɲ
-ic -u
-(ɨ)c -ta/-d(d)a
pl only -iɲ
-u
-ta/-d(d)a
-ti/-d(d)i
-tiɲ
-dɨk
sg only -ic
-tic/-d(d)ic
-c
-sɨnic/-zɨnɨc

Table 26. Number-marking suffixes in Shatt Damman52

Boyeldieu also lists a significant number of irregular forms. There are three classes of noun, those with alternation, and those with singulatives and those with plurals. It appears there are now no examples of three-way contrast. Despite the surface variety, allomorphy suggests there are five underlying affixes, -N, -T, -K, -y, and -V where V is a high back vowel. In addition, the -x suffix may an allophone of an underlying fricative, i.e., -S (s ~ z), which would give Daju a complete set of East Sudanic affixes. Some singulative suffixes, such as -zɨnɨc, illustrate multiple compounding. There are, however, no examples of gemination.

The alternating nominal suffixes of Dar Daju described by Aviles present a far simpler set.53 Every noun has one of four singular suffixes. Aviles calls these “classificatory” although they have no obvious semantic association. These alternate with four plural suffixes, although these all appear to be allomorphs of -ge (Table 27).

Class Gloss sg
1 elder ɉam-ne
2 liver cacaw-ce
3 mouth uk-e
4 car watiɾ-i

Table 27. Singulative suffixes in Dar Daju54

The singulative suffixes -NV, -ʧV, and -V (where V is a front vowel) can be attributed to Dar Daju.

4.9. Nilotic

4.9.1. West Nilotic

The principal overview of noun morphology in West Nilotic is presented by Storch. Western Nilotic also has an emergent classifier system, described in some detail in Storch but omitted here. Table 28 summarizes the affixes of West Nilotic:

Semantics Mayak Mabaan Jumjum Dinka Nuer
general -(V)k -k(ʌ̃) -kV -k, -V
general -(V)n -Cin̪ -ni -N, -V -ní, -V̪
round, mass, small -ǎn̪
body -kù -c
space (*-N?)
unspecified -y
unspecified -it̪ -t̪ǎn -t̪ -t̪
abstract -ḓín
Semantics Anywa Päri Shilluk Lüwo Thuri
general -k, -Ci, Cè -ki, -ke *-k -kʌ̀ -k
general -Ci?, -Cè? -Neʔ -V(N) -V, -ɛ, -NVɛ́ -Ni, -in, -Nɛ́, -ɛ́n
round, mass, small -i -e (.ˋ), (ʾ) -ɛ́ -ɛ́
body -Ci
space
unspecified [.ˋ]
unspecified -t, -Cè -rí, -te -Vdi -t̪ -d̪i
abstract
Semantics Belanda Bor S. Lwoo Labwor
general -k(V), -ke -gV
general -ni, -n(í)n, -ne -ni, -né
round, mass, small -e -é, -i
body -i -i
space
unspecified
unspecified *-ti, -(t)àʔ -(C)áʔ
abstract

Table 28. Number marking affixes in West Nilotic55

If we presume the same processes of allomorphy as elsewhere in East Sudanic, the number marking affixes of Proto-West Nilotic can be summarized more briefly:

  • Underlying affixes: -KV, -TV, -NV, -V
  • Compound affixes: -TVN, -VTV, -VNV

4.9.2. East Nilotic

The only survey of East Nilotic lexicon remains Voßen’s,56 and this can provide an impression of number marking morphology, although descriptions of individual languages provide more detail. For example, Kuku has unmarked nominals, with singulatives in some cases, and plurals, both suffixed. Table 29 shows examples of the main number-marking strategies in Kuku.

Gloss Affix sg Affix pl
cattle tick -T(T) mɨ́sɨ́r.ɨtɨ́t -∅ másɛ̂r
black ant -T múkúɲ.êt -∅ múkûn
Bari -N + -T bari.nɪ́t -∅ barɪ
hippo -∅ yárɔ́ -S + -N yárɔ́.Ɉɪn
school -∅ sukúlu -K sukúlu.kíʔ
nose -∅ kʊmɛ́ -S kʊmɛ́.sɪʔ
cheek -∅ ŋɛ́bɪ́ -T ŋɛ́bɪ́.at
speck -∅ bɛ́rɛt -N bɛ́rɛt.án
hedgehog -∅ leɲɨpúɗut -T + -M leɲɨpúɗu(t)lɨ́n
knife -∅ wálɪ́ -V wálɪ́.a

Table 29. Kuku singulatives and plural markers57

The underlying logic of the singulatives is evident; nouns that are considered inherently plural are unmarked, with individuals marked by suffix. Thus “Bari” is a nation and the singulative applies to a Bari person. The suffixes are all allomorphs of a basic -VT form, except for the additional nasal, which is either a person marker or the nasal also occurring in the plural. Plural suffixes can be reduced to a dental, a velar, a nasal and an underspecified vowel. The only unusual feature is the -sɪʔ suffix, which may be innovative.

4.9.3. South Nilotic

There are two published reconstructions of South Nilotic.58 Rottland includes a substantial comparative wordlist as well as discussions of number marking. Tucker & Bryan discuss number marking with respect to Pokot and Nandi-Kipsigis. Based on their illustration of Pokot, Table 30 extracts a sample of singular/plural pairings in Pokot, which illustrate singulatives in -V(V)N and -tV and plural in -kV. -V(V) suffixes are also common, but it is unclear how many are allomorphs and how many are distinct roots.

Gloss Affix sg Affix pl
the calf -Tv mɔ̀ɔ̀ɣ.tâ -V mòóɣ.eeʔ
the duiker -Tv cèptǐrkìc.tä́ -kV cèptǐrkìc.kä̂
the flea -VN + -Tv kə̀mə̀tyàán.tɛ́ɛ́ -kV kəmə́t.kä̂
the spear -Tv ŋɔ̀t.ə́t -V, -V(V) ŋät.w.éè
the lover -VN + -Tv cä̀míín.téè -V *cä̀m.í
the barred door -V mä̀rä̀n.èéʔ -kV mä̀rä̂n.kä̂

Table 30. Examples of Pokot number marking59

Pokot shows evidence for an original singulative -V(V)N, which has been resuffixed with -tV(V).

The number system of Endo, another language of the Markweeta (Marakwet) group, is described by Zwarts. Endo has a wide range of singulative suffixes shown in Table 31, although once allomorphy is considered, they can probably be reduced to a rather simpler set. Zwarts argues that plurals constitute the unmarked set.

Gloss Affix sg pl
cloud -tV pool.ta pool
woman -ka kāār.kā kāār
grasshopper -wa taalim.wa taalim
cedar -wa tārāāk.wā taraak
patch of grass -wa + -Vn sīūs.wāān sūūs
medicine -wa + -Vn saakit.yaan saakit
European -Vn chūmp.īīn chumpa
shoe -V kwēēr.ā kwēēr

Table 31. Endo singulative suffixes60

Underlyingly, therefore. Endo has the singulatives -V(V)N, -tV, -V, -kV, and an unmarked plural. Despite the surface differences, the West Nilotic system in these two examples is broadly similar.

4.10. Synthesis

A feature of East Sudanic, and indeed Nilo-Saharan more generally, is extensive allomorphy. Each affix appears under several guises, often reflecting the stem to which is suffixed. Table 32 shows the typical allomorphs of East Sudanic nominal affixes:

Affix Interpretation Typical allomorphs
-T dentals /t/, /ʈ/, /d/, /ɖ/
-K velars /k/, /g/
-N nasals /n/, /ŋ/, /ɲ/
-S fricatives /s/, /ʃ/, /ʤ/
-V non-central vowels /i/, /u/
-A central vowels /a/

Table 32: Allomorphs of East Sudanic nominal affixes

Table 33 shows the presence or absence of individual affixes in each branch, together with affix-stacking and gemination, as well as the table which supports this analysis.

Branch -T -K -N -V -S Aff. st. Gem. Ref.
Nubian + + + T. 9, 10
Nara + + + + + T. 13
Nyima ? T. 15, 16
Taman + + + + T. 17
Surmic + + + + + T. 19
E Jebel + + + + + T. 20
Temein + + + + + + T. 22, 23, 24
Daju + + + + + + T. 26, 27
W Nilotic + + + + + T. 28
E Nilotic + + + + + + + T. 29
S Nilotic + + + + + T. 30, 31

Table 33. East Sudanic nominal affixes and associated

The resultant pattern is not perfect but still indicative for the structure of East Sudanic. The number-marking suffixes form complete sets in En languages, with -S attested only in Nara. This implies that all five affixes were present in proto-East Sudanic but were preferentially lost in the Ek languages. Affix-stacking, though present in Nubian, is otherwise absent in Ek languages but is likely to be a retention from proto-East Sudanic. Gemination is too sparsely distributed to draw any conclusions, but is plausibly an independent development of no classificatory significance.

5. Internal Structure of East Sudanic

The evidence presented points to a common inheritance in East Sudanic number marking strategies. The distribution of affix-stacking and complete affix sets suggest that apart from common lexemes, Ek languages are characterized by a common loss of these characters. In the light of this, Figure 1 presents a revised internal classification of East Sudanic, grouping together the Ek languages as Northern East Sudanic, but leaving the others as independent branches.

Proposed internal structure of East Sudanic

Figure 1. Proposed internal structure of East Sudanic61

It seems plausible that further results should be attainable from a deeper examination of the lexicon, since the effect of affix accretion and reanalysis obscures cognacy of roots.

6. East Sudanic within Nilo-Saharan

The attentive reader will have observed that many of the affixes identified in this paper have been attested outside the proposed East Sudanic. Indeed, the “t-k substratum” proposed by Tucker & Bryan is far more widespread. Particular candidates are Kuliak and Kadu, a subgroup sometimes excluded from Nilo-Saharan altogether. This section considers briefly the morphology of these two groups in relation to our understanding of East Sudanic.

I have explored this morphology in the Kadu languages while Gilley has looked into number-marking in Katcha in some detail.62 Typically, Kadu languages have a three-term system with a singulative in -t and plural in -k and -N. They also have case-marking, which is only sporadically attested in East Sudanic languages and cannot be reconstructed, as well as sex-gender, which is entirely absent. This suggests that the -T, -K, and -N affixes can be reconstructed further back in Nilo-Saharan, but the -V and -S are distinctive to East Sudanic. The gemination found in Nara and East Nilotic is not recorded in Kadu, but may not be reconstructible to proto-East Sudanic.

The Kuliak languages, a small group in northeast Uganda which includes Ik, So, and Nyangi, were originally included by Greenberg within East Sudanic, but have long been treated as an independent branch of Nilo-Saharan. However, their lexicon has been heavily impacted both by their immediate neighbors, the Karimojong, but also by Southern Nilotic in some past era. Moreover, Lamberti has noted striking resemblances to the East Cushitic languages.63 Heine presents an overview and reconstruction of Kuliak as it was known at the period.64 More recently, Carlin and Schrock have provided extensive documentation of Soo and Ik (Icétôd).65 Kuliak languages have three-term number marking, with singulative in -T and plurative in -K, -N, as well as allowing affix-stacking, but also have a striking nominal case-marking system not present in East Sudanic. There is no evidence for gemination.

In conclusion, East Sudanic is characterized by a series of affixes, which have developed out of a smaller set which are also present in related branches of Nilo-Saharan. Unlike Kadu, there is no trace of gender and the case marking. Case marking is also characteristic of Kuliak languages, which only have a reduced affix set. These suggest that there is a higher node within Nilo-Saharan which included these three branches, but that the East Sudanic language developed specific morphological features (or perhaps lost them at the level of the proto-language). It is striking that the lexical unity of East Sudanic is not more apparent, given the conservatism of the number-marking system.

7. Abbreviations

  • A: any central vowel ±ATR;
  • C: any consonant;
  • I: any high front vowel ±ATR;
  • K: velar consonant;
  • N: any nasal consonant;
  • pl: plural;
  • S: any fricative consonant;
  • sg: singular;
  • T: any dental consonant;
  • V: any vowel;
  • X: any phoneme.

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Carlin, Eithne. bib⁄The So language. Cologne: Universität zu Köln, 1993.

Cohen, Kevin B. bib⁄Aspects of the Grammar of Kukú. Munich: Lincom Europa, 2000.

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Güldemann, Tom. “The Historical-Comparative Status of East Sudanic.” In Proceedings of the 14th Nilo-Saharan Linguistics Colloquium, edited by Roger M. Blench, Petra Weschenfelder, and Georg Ziegelmeyer. Cologne: Rüdiger Köppe, forthcoming.

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Zwarts, Joost. bib⁄“Number in Endo-Marakwet.” In Advances in Nilo-Saharan Linguistics: Proceedings of the 8th Nilo-Saharan Linguistics Colloquium, University of Hamburg, August 22–25, 2001, edited by Mechthild Reh and Doris L. Payne. Cologne: Rüdiger Köppe, 2007: pp. 281–294.


  1. Greenberg, “Studies in African Linguistic Classification: V. The Eastern Sudanic Family.” ↩︎

  2. Greenberg, The Languages of Africa. ↩︎

  3. Bender, The Nilo-Saharan Languages. ↩︎

  4. Greenberg, The Languages of Africa. ↩︎

  5. Bender, The Nilo-Saharan Languages. ↩︎

  6. Tucker, The Eastern Sudanic Languages, vol. 1. ↩︎

  7. Tucker & Bryan, The Non-Bantu Languages of North-Eastern Africa. ↩︎

  8. Greenberg, “Studies in African Linguistic Classification: V. The Eastern Sudanic Family.” ↩︎

  9. E.g., “Meroitic and Eastern Sudanic: A Linguistic Relationship.” ↩︎

  10. Rilly, Le méroïtique et sa famille linguistique; Rilly & De Voogt, The Meroitic Language and Writing System. ↩︎

  11. Ross, A Preliminary Attempt at the Reconstruction of Proto-East Sudanic Phonology and Lexicon. ↩︎

  12. Bender, “Genetic subgrouping of East Sudanic”; Bender, The East Sudanic Languages. ↩︎

  13. Starostin, “Lexicostatistical Studies in East Sudanic I”; article⁄Starostin, this issue↩︎

  14. Bender, Comparative Omotic Lexicon. ↩︎

  15. Dimmendaal, “Differential Object Marking in Nilo-Saharan"; Dimmendaal, Historical Linguistics and the Comparative Study of African Languages; Dimmendaal, “Marked Nominative Systems in Eastern Sudanic and Their Historical Origin.” ↩︎

  16. Güldemann, “The Historical-Comparative Status of East Sudanic.” ↩︎

  17. Bender, The East Sudanic Languages. ↩︎

  18. Ibid.; Bender, The Nilo-Saharan Languages. ↩︎

  19. Data from Bender, “The Genetic Position of Nilotic i” and Bender, The East Sudanic Languages, supplemented with more recent sources. ↩︎

  20. Bender, The Nilo-Saharan Languages; Bender, The East Sudanic Languages; Ehret, A Historical-Comparative Reconstruction of Nilo-Saharan; Rilly, Le méroïtique et sa famille linguistique, and Starostin, “Lexicostatistical Studies in East Sudanic I.” ↩︎

  21. Nara and Ama data from Rilly, Le méroïtique et sa famille linguistique; Dilling, Midob, and proto-Taman data from Starostin, “Lexicostatistical Studies in East Sudanic I.” ↩︎

  22. Midob data from Werner, Tìdn-áal; Nyala data from Thelwall, “A Birgid Vocabulary List and Its Links with Daju”; Nara data from Hayward, “Observations on Tone in the Higir Dialect of Nara”; Ama data from Bender, “Roland Stevenson’s Nyimang and Dinik Lexicon”; Tama data from Edgar, “First Steps toward Proto-Tama.” ↩︎

  23. Andaandi, Nara, and Abu Sharib data from Rilly, Le méroïtique et sa famille linguistique; Ama data from Bender, “Roland Stevenson’s Nyimang and Dinik Lexicon”; Gaahmg data from Stirtz, A Grammar of Gaahmg↩︎

  24. Haraza data from Bell, “Documentary Evidence on the Ḥarāza Nubian,” 84; Old Nubian data from Browne, Old Nubian Dictionary, 138; Karko data from Jakobi & Hamdan, “Number Marking on Karko Nouns”; Nara data from Hayward, “Observations on Tone in the Higir Dialect of Nara”; Proto-Nyima data from Bender, “Roland Stevenson’s Nyimang and Dinik Lexicon”; Proto-Taman data from Edgar, “First Steps toward Proto-Tama.” ↩︎

  25. Bryan, “The T–K Languages.” ↩︎

  26. Greenberg, “Nilo-Saharan Moveable-k as a Stage III Article.” ↩︎

  27. Ehret, A Historical-Comparative Reconstruction of Nilo-Saharan, pp. 176, 181. ↩︎

  28. Bender, The Nilo-Saharan Languages, p. 75. ↩︎

  29. Ibid. ↩︎

  30. Tucker & Bryan, Linguistic Analyses, pp. 22–24. ↩︎

  31. Storch, The Noun Morphology of Western Nilotic, p. 46. ↩︎

  32. See Bender, The Nilo-Saharan Languages and the 2020 edition of www⁄Ethnologue↩︎

  33. Data from Jakobi & Hamdan, “Number Marking on Karko Nouns.” ↩︎

  34. Data from Jakobi & Hamdan, “Number Marking on Karko Nouns.” ↩︎

  35. Data from Werner, Tìdn-áal↩︎

  36. Data from Rilly, Le méroïtique et sa famille linguistique ↩︎

  37. Data from Dawd & Hayward, “Nara.” ↩︎

  38. De Voogt, “Dual Marking and Kinship Terms in Afitti.” ↩︎

  39. Data from Bender, “Roland Stevenson’s Nyimang and Dinik Lexicon.” ↩︎

  40. Norton, “Number in Ama Verbs”; article⁄Norton, this issue↩︎

  41. Data from article⁄Norton, this issue ↩︎

  42. article⁄Norton, this issue ↩︎

  43. Data from Kellermann, Eine grammatische Skizze des Tama auf der Basis der Daten von R.C. Stevenson. ↩︎

  44. Data from Joseph et al., Laarim Grammar Book. ↩︎

  45. Data from Yigezu & Dimmendaal, “Notes on Baale.” ↩︎

  46. Bender, “The Eastern Jebel Languages of Sudan I”; Bender, “The Eastern Jebel Languages of Sudan II.” ↩︎

  47. Data from Bender, “Proto-Koman Phonology and Lexicon.” ↩︎

  48. Blench, “Introduction to the Temein Languages.” ↩︎

  49. See, e.g., Dimmendaal, “Number Marking and Noun Categorization in Nilo-Saharan Languages,” or Blench, “Introduction to the Temein Languages.” ↩︎

  50. Stevenson, “A Survey of the Phonetics and Grammatical Structures of the Nuba Mountain Languages,” 96. ↩︎

  51. Boyeldieu, La qualification dans les langues africaines; Alamin Mubarak, “An Initial Description of Laggori Noun Morphology and Noun Phrase.” ↩︎

  52. Data from Boyeldieu, La qualification dans les langues africaines. ↩︎

  53. Aviles, The Phonology and Morphology of the Dar Daju Daju Language. ↩︎

  54. Data from Aviles, The Phonology and Morphology of the Dar Daju Daju Language. ↩︎

  55. Data from Storch, The Noun Morphology of Western Nilotic, 385. ↩︎

  56. Voßen, The Eastern Nilotes. ↩︎

  57. Data from Cohen, Aspects of the Grammar of Kukú. ↩︎

  58. Ehret, Southern Nilotic History; Rottland, Die südnilotischen Sprachen. ↩︎

  59. Data from Tucker & Bryan, Noun Classification in Kalenjin: Päkot; Tucker & Bryan, Noun Classification in Kalenjin: Nandi-Kipsigis. ↩︎

  60. Data adapted from Zwarts, “Number in Endo-Marakwet.” ↩︎

  61. Cf. Rilly, Le méroïtique et sa famille linguistique, 208. ↩︎

  62. Blench, “The Kadu Languages and Their Affiliation”; Gilley, “Katcha Noun Morphology.” ↩︎

  63. Lamberti, Kuliak and Cushitic. ↩︎

  64. Heine, The Kuliak Languages of Eastern Uganda. ↩︎

  65. Carlin, The So language; Schrock, The Ik Language. ↩︎

editor⁄Henriette Hafsaas

1. Biography

Henriette Hafsaas is an archaeologist researching the relationship between peoples in ancient Nubia and Egypt from a southern perspective. She completed her PhD thesis titled “War on the Southern Frontier of the Emerging State of Ancient Egypt” at the University of Bergen in 2015. In the dissertation, she argues that warfare was a significant form of contact between Nubia and Egypt during the 4th millennium BCE, leading to the emergence of a distinct Nubian culture called the A-group people in the mid-4th millennium BCE and to the collapse of the A-group society towards the end of the 4th millennium BCE.

Hafsaas has worked on various archaeological projects in Sudan, Palestine, and Norway. In Sudan, she has been part of the Medieval Sai Project, which focused on the medieval cathedral of Sai. Hafsaas has published several articles in peer-reviewed academic journals. She is also engaged in ethical dilemmas for archaeologists.

Currently, Hafsaas is the Head of Research at Volda University College in Norway, and she continues to pursue her research interests in the past of ancient Nubia and Egypt.

mentioned in⁄
editor⁄Alexandros Tsakos

1. Biography

Alexandros Tsakos is working at the Special Collections of the University of Bergen library. He specializes in Christian Nubia, especially religious literacy, and the cult of the Archangel Michael. He has worked in the field and in museums in Sudan and is managing editor of the Nubiological Journal Dotawo.

mentioned in⁄
editor⁄Vincent W.J. van Gerven Oei

1. Biography

Vincent W.J. van Gerven Oei is a publisher and philologist, specialized in Old Nubian. He is co-managing editor of Dotawo: A Journal of Nubian Studies.