Reading Old Nubian manuscripts from Attiri island, Sudan
Four open lectures on Old Nubian
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Seven researchers will be meeting at Bergen between 3–6 June and will be working intensively in order to advance our knowledge of Old Nubian, one of the few languages of the past that we still do not fully understand.
Open lectures
After the first two days of work, we invite on Friday the 5th of June all those interested in languages, manuscripts, religion and literature, history and archaeology, to join us for four open lectures:
10:00–10:30: Alexandros Tsakos
The manuscripts from Attiri – texts and contexts
10:30–11:00: Vincent van Gerven Oei
Old Nubian Grammar as seen through the Attiri manuscripts
11:00–11:30: Vincent Laisney
Lists of goods in the Attiri documents and in other Old Nubian texts
11:30–12:00: Giovanni Ruffini
Published and Unpublished Texts in Old Nubian
On Old Nubian
Old Nubian, a language of the Nilo-Saharan phylum, is spoken until today by the inhabitants of the Sudanese Nile Valley around the area of the 3rd Cataract.
Only some couple of hundred of pages of texts have been preserved from this medieval African language, written with Greek and Coptic letters, in an alphabet that also included three characters of Meroitic, the script of the language used in ancient Sudan, another language that challenges our linguistic abilities.
The seminar to be hosted at Bergen is taking place in the frame of the post-doctoral project of Alexandros Tsakos, titled “Religious Literacy of Christian Nubia” and is funded by the research group for Middle Eastern and African Studies at the Department for Archaeology, History, Cultural and Religious Studies.
Most texts to be examined during the seminar belong to religious literature. All have been discovered in Attiri, a very particular site of medieval Nubia: a small and rocky island on the Nile where all the archaeology seems to post-date the Christian period.
Welcome!
