Last August I participated in the 12th International Conference for Nubian Studies that took place in the British Museum, London. It is one in a series of congresses organized every four years on behalf of the International Society for Nubian Studies. These congresses cover the entire history of the civilizations of Nubia, an area that basically comprises the riverain landscape of the Middle Nile Valley (southern Egypt-northern Sudan), from prehistory till the recent past.

Over 200 participants from all over the world represented a wide variety of disciplines, such as archaeology, Egyptology, linguistics, ethnography, etc. The organizers had conceived the unfortunate idea of arranging the congress chronologically so that the contributions on late-antique and medieval Nubia that interested me most were concentrated in a number of parallel sessions towards the end of the congress, facing the participants with impossible choices. Yet I found the conference very rewarding. The most noteworthy event for me was the establishment of a network for the study of Old-Nubian, the still imperfectly known written vernacular of medieval Nubia, in which among others two of my former students participate.

Website: medievalnubia.info

In my own paper, entitled ‘“What is man?” Patterns of commemoration in Christian Nubian epitaphs’, I primarily wanted to announce two publications. One, the volume of the Greek and Coptic inscriptions from Qasr Ibrim (Northern Nubia), published by Adam Łajtar and me, had appeared a few weeks before the congress, while another one, Nubian voices: studies in Christian Nubian culture, a volume devoted to medieval Nubian literary culture, edited by the same persons, is due to appear in 2011. My congress paper anticipated a long essay in the latter volume, in which I try to develop a conceptual framework for the study of the texts published in the Qasr Ibrim volume. For the greater part these are extremely monotonous epitaphs that are hardly interesting in themselves. Why should one wish to publish such dull texts at all?

In my paper I argued that epitaphs are “voiced texts” (J.M. Foley), written texts that are meant to be read aloud. As such, they are not “data carriers”, but invitations to join in the social and ritual event of the deceased’s periodical commemoration. It is precisely their formulaic character that makes them interesting, as a formula is not an empty element, but “a symbol of shared knowledge and experience” (V. Edwards & Th. Sienkewicz). The various formulae that can be distinguished in the corpus of Nubian funerary inscriptions express shifting societal attitudes towards death and afterlife, and document one of the ways in which Christian Nubian elite culture asserted itself ritually.

Illustrations
1. Coptic funerary stela of Mariakyto, Qasr Ibrim, AD 1059 (Łajtar & Van der Vliet, no. 45).
2. Adam Łajtar, Jacques van der Vliet, Qasr Ibrim: the Greek and Coptic inscriptions. The Journal of Juristic Papyrology Supplements, vol. XIII. Warsaw: Raphael Taubenschlag Foundation, 2010. IX+336 pp. ISBN 978 83 925919 2 4.