What Can Forgotten Nubian Churches Teach Us About Christian Memory?

Walls that carried memory

At Faras, a cathedral carried more than pictures. Painted figures, bishops’ names, visitors’ inscriptions, and the building’s changing surfaces preserved different kinds of remembrance. Grzegorz Ochała shows why these traces need to be read together without making them say the same thing. A royal portrait celebrates authority; a small personal inscription may bring someone much less powerful into view. ¹

Much of this material became known during archaeological rescue before the great reservoir flooded Lower Nubia. UNESCO director Vittorino Veronese’s 1960 appeal presented development and the protection of monuments as a shared international task. It records the campaign’s public ambitions. Those ambitions alone cannot tell us everything the project meant for people whose villages and familiar landscapes would disappear. ²

The National Museum in Warsaw describes its Faras Gallery as arranging rescued paintings with architectural reconstruction and supporting objects. Such work helps a viewer imagine relationships that a detached image can conceal. Yet the museum setting also reminds us of a loss: a painting encountered on a gallery wall has a different physical setting from the church in which it once stood. ³

Homes also carried art. Armgard Goo Grauer’s study draws on records of house decoration in Egyptian Nubia before resettlement. When she later showed photographs, they helped people remember places and work that had vanished beneath the water. Christian history becomes narrower when it notices only the surviving sanctuary and overlooks the households around it, including women’s creative labor. ⁴

We must listen without inventing one community voice. Petra Weschenfelder’s research with women facing another Nubian resettlement found varied hopes and fears, shaped by locality, generation, and personal circumstances. Some anticipated benefits; others feared losses of independence and livelihood. That modern study does not reconstruct medieval life. It teaches a useful discipline for approaching people whose experiences differ within the same place. ⁵

Conversion opened a longer story

The kingdoms commonly called Nobadia, Makuria, and Alwa belonged to a changing African landscape. Artur Obłuski’s study of Nobadia asks about settlement, social relationships, and political formation rather than merely arranging rulers in sequence. Such questions matter for church history. A ruler’s public decision occurred among people with existing livelihoods, loyalties, and ways of organizing their communities. ⁶

John of Ephesus supplies an important sixth century account of missions and royal reception. In his telling, competing church parties sought influence, and initial acceptance was followed by the work of instruction. He wrote as a committed participant in religious controversy. His reported conversations and dramatic scenes therefore need to be read as an author’s presentation, with its own purposes. ⁷

Jitse Dijkstra presses that caution further, questioning whether the famous race between rival missions was constructed for the narrative. He also discusses a different scholarly judgment that leaves such competition possible without treating it as proved. The disagreement limits confidence in particular scenes. It does not erase the wider evidence for Christianity or make a royal mission the only possible beginning of local Christian contact. ⁸

Tsubasa Sakamoto approaches the earlier landscape through graves, pottery, and Christian objects around the Dal Cataract. His proposed chronology suggests that religious change cannot simply be placed after an official missionary arrival. The interpretation remains an archaeological argument. A cross associated with a burial is significant evidence, while leaving unanswered many questions about a person’s knowledge, practices, and convictions. ⁹

Miseeda provides another layered case. A recent research team describes a medieval church built around a much older carved figure. The original figure’s identity and its later Christian use require separate questions. Calling the project the Good Shepherd does not establish that the first carving depicted Christ. Later shrines and local recollections add further chapters to the same landscape. ¹⁰

Names within the church

Church institutions become more concrete in an inscription from Dongola, edited by Tomasz Derda and Adam Łajtar. It commemorates a church event involving an archbishop and visiting bishops, with several names and places recorded. Damaged wording leaves details uncertain, including the event’s precise date. Even so, the text gives a particular glimpse of relationships that a general label such as Christian kingdom cannot supply. ¹¹

Łajtar’s study of Christian Saï likewise pieces together a fragmentary record from inscriptions and manuscripts. The work requires restraint: two bishops with the same name need not be the same person, and a letter’s discovery at one site does not prove that everyone mentioned lived there. Recovering names is valuable precisely when we resist turning a small trace into a complete biography. ¹²

One especially striking Faras inscription survives chiefly through an early tracing because the plaster collapsed soon after discovery. Ochała argues that it identifies Iesousanya as a woman donor bearing the title deacon. The proposed reading deserves attention. It does not reveal her duties, her wealth, or whether she was married. Respect for her presence includes declining to fill those gaps with an attractive invented life. ¹³

Builders also appear in written traces. Piotr Makowski discusses named craftsmen and a drawing that he considers in relation to architectural planning. Later reviewers challenge the identification of that drawing as a church plan. Keeping this disagreement visible prevents an uncertain image from becoming a confident reconstruction of a medieval profession. The people who built churches deserve remembrance alongside the people who commissioned them. ^{14, 15}

A personal Faras prayer offers a different kind of encounter. Łajtar and Ochała explain its biblical language and the limits of its surviving record: an earlier transcript and a blurred photograph now carry much of the evidence. The petitioner becomes faintly visible through words addressed to God. We hear a particular appeal while remaining unable to recover the circumstances that prompted it. ¹⁶

At Banganarti, Łajtar describes visitors leaving names and petitions on church walls, sometimes over renewed surfaces. Some people could write for others, so counting inscriptions cannot produce a literacy rate. The walls nevertheless reveal repeated acts of participation. People came, asked, remembered, and wanted their presence acknowledged, though the written remains preserve only part of what happened there. ¹⁷

Scripture crossed languages

Greek, Coptic, and Old Nubian had overlapping roles rather than occupying three sealed cultural boxes. Ochała’s study of multilingualism distinguishes the language of a surviving text from the language people necessarily spoke in conversation. Repeated Greek formulas can endure without proving universal fluency. Christian teaching moved through a complex linguistic environment, and the surviving documents give an uneven view of it. ¹⁸

The editors of the Old Nubian texts from Attiri show how patient comparison can change an identification. A fragment once associated with literature about Michael belongs instead to a lectionary containing material from Matthew 6. Its gaps still matter: reconstructed words are different from letters remaining on the page. Translation made biblical teaching available, while the damaged manuscript leaves its own limits on what we can recover. ¹⁹

Alexandros Tsakos examines another translated work, the Liber Institutionis Michælis. Comparing Greek and Old Nubian fragments, he notices a title rendered through language familiar from Nubian administration. This is a small example of translators making choices within their own world. Receiving Christian literature involved active interpretation, even where the surviving fragment is too limited to answer every question about its use. ²⁰

Agata Deptuła studies the story of Saint Menas, a woman’s request for a child, and an egg carried on a journey. Its dramatic events belong to a religious narrative; the manuscript does not independently verify each event it tells. The distribution of such surviving stories also reflects where excavation occurred and which texts have been published. Survival and popularity cannot simply be equated. ²¹

A modern edition of that story includes an Andaandi translation intended to connect present Nubian readers with their older written heritage. El Shafie El Guzuuli and Vincent van Gerven Oei describe choices of script, spelling, and presentation. Their work illustrates another stage of remembrance: a text can move from being an object studied by specialists toward being read within communities connected to its language. ²²

Households beyond a royal portrait

Letters bring less ceremonial concerns into view. Giovanni Ruffini shows that repeated expressions can function as greetings or practical idioms. A phrase that seems to describe eating may instead concern handling a transaction, while an apparently empty letter can raise questions about goods expected with it. Reading daily life requires more than substituting dictionary meanings word by word. ²³

A letter edited by van Gerven Oei and Tsakos identifies its sender Mariamē through her relationship to an eparch, a powerful official, and also preserves the scribe Chael’s role. It gives evidence of a particular woman acting through correspondence. Identifying her with another recorded Mariamē remains a hypothesis. Neither her position nor this letter establishes the circumstances of all Nubian women. ²⁴

Geoffrey Khan’s study of Arabic documents places relations with Egypt within a harder social history. Accounts of the baqt, the arrangement associated with exchanges and a truce, differ in emphasis and detail. Enslaved people formed part of those obligations. Calling the parties Christian and Muslim cannot turn that history into either uninterrupted harmony or an explanation of every encounter by hostility. ²⁵

The medieval Churches and Monasteries of Egypt, available in B. T. A. Evetts’s older translation, describes Nubian churches, monasteries, trade, and marvels. Sweeping statements sit beside particular observations. Its enormous church totals cannot serve as a verified congregational census, and its stories need comparison with other evidence. An impressive number in an old account is still a claim requiring interpretation. ²⁶

Nubians also traveled beyond these kingdoms. Adam Simmons examines evidence for a diaspora while explaining why its scale resists calculation. External writers used geographical labels unevenly, and some possible routes remain conjectural. Such notices widen our picture of connections and movement. They should not become precise population figures or a confident itinerary assembled from uncertain identifications. ²⁷

Cultural contact also appears within Christian settings. Małgorzata Martens Czarnecka compares clothing, furniture, and decorative details in a Dongola monastic painting with Arabic artistic forms. These are observations about a particular image and its possible relationships. Borrowing an artistic form does not by itself tell us that the people who used the room had abandoned Christian belief. ²⁸

Shared tables and unequal lives

Excavation at Ghazali reveals rooms, benches, niches, and changing arrangements for common meals. Obłuski and his colleagues distinguish what survives from suggestions about how rooms were used. These practical spaces remind us that a religious community needed water, food, work, and rest. Its physical arrangements cannot disclose every motive, but they prevent devotion from becoming a story without bodies or daily needs. ²⁹

Robert Stark and his colleagues add evidence from a small sample of people buried at the monastery. Their dietary study suggests varied consumption, including animal products. The results do not justify accusing every monk of breaking a rule borrowed from another region. The sample spans a long period, and possible illness, local practices, and other explanations require consideration. ³⁰

At Kulubnarti, Kendra Sirak’s team found no systematic genetic separation between two cemetery groups previously associated with different health and mortality patterns. Relatives crossed the cemetery boundary. This complicates a simple story that assigns inequality to separate biological populations. It does not measure anyone’s faith or settle every social explanation for differences in the lives represented by those burials. ³¹

A study of a small burial sample at Soba likewise finds evidence of varied mobility and subsistence. Joanna Ciesielska and her colleagues explain the limits of identifying origins from the available comparisons. Chemical evidence can reopen questions about who lived in a capital. It cannot tell us which creed an individual confessed or make that capital representative of every village. ³²

Anne Austin and her colleagues use multispectral imaging to reveal tattoos on preserved remains, including marks difficult to recognize by ordinary inspection. They also explain how survival of skin shapes the sample. Possible Christian associations are interpretations rather than access to each wearer’s convictions. A new method can make people’s practices more visible while leaving important questions open. ³³

Ciesielska’s broader discussion of bioarchaeology challenges a history populated only by rulers and institutions. Human remains can expose differences obscured by broad cultural labels, while unequal excavation and preservation create further distortions. Her argument invites a humbler picture of a Christian society. Sharing a public religion never meant that everyone enjoyed the same food, health, security, or social standing. ³⁴

Endings do not have one date

Even a cathedral wall can preserve troubling words. Van Gerven Oei’s study of an Old Nubian curse considers damaged language, biblical allusion, and the difficulty of dating the text. Its survival resists an idealized picture of every church inscription as gentle devotion. One hostile text also cannot explain an entire church’s later fortunes or become proof that everyone’s faith had deteriorated. ³⁵

Pamela Rose’s account of Qasr Ibrim follows several kinds of evidence across a long history. The burial and documents of Bishop Timotheos belong to a later Christian chapter; a subsequent use of the cathedral as a mosque belongs to another. A building’s changing use gives a particular institutional sequence. It does not supply one date on which Christianity disappeared everywhere along the Nile. ³⁶

Simmons examines a later Portuguese notice about Queen Gaua and an embassy in the early sixteenth century. Its significance depends on questions that remain open, including the ruler’s territory and the account’s assumptions about church connections. Such evidence challenges a prematurely closed timeline. It offers a lead for careful reconstruction, rather than a fully recovered final chapter of Nubian Christian government. ³⁷

At Soba, Maciej Kurcz and Mariusz Drzewiecki find varied relationships between residents and the remains of the old capital. Bricks, grinding stones, and ruins can enter present livelihoods and memories in different ways. The people living around a site should therefore be heard as participants in its history. Treating them simply as an obstacle to outside preservation misses those relationships. ³⁸

A later Soba field report describes work with Sudanese researchers, local residents, children, and older women. The resulting conversations and drawings illuminate present remembering. They are shaped by the project’s questions and by other sources of knowledge, so a child’s drawing is not a recovered medieval plan. Listening carefully means valuing these voices while asking what kind of evidence each provides. ³⁹

A multitude beyond our records

Lynn Huber argues that Revelation invites its audience to envision a symbolic world that can shape how they see and act. That helps frame an appropriate Christian response to this history. John’s vision gives us theological hope; it does not identify a particular burial, painting, or fragment as belonging to someone in the heavenly multitude. Historical judgments still require historical evidence. ⁴⁰

In Revelation 7, John sees many peoples and tongues before the throne and the Lamb. Their worship belongs with suffering, cleansing, shelter, and divine care. The Lamb’s saving work enlarges our attention beyond communities whose books survived and languages that later became dominant. ⁴¹

A Pentecostal church can receive this history with gratitude and discernment. We need not adopt every practice to recognize the labor of translation, the desire to pray, or household needs. Love for the worldwide church includes truthful remembrance and care for overlooked neighbors now. ⁴¹

An archive’s limits are not the limits of God’s knowledge. We cannot name every believer, recover every household, or judge each life. Revelation places our hope in the Lamb who feeds his people and wipes away their tears. His promise invites study, generous concern, and worship. ⁴¹