The only documents from inside Nubia: land sales, letters and legal texts from Qasr Ibrim in Old Nubian, dated by the reigning king, his eparch and the local officials, which give the names and titles of the court of Dotawo (the Nubians' own name for the kingdom) in the generation around 1200. A letter of 1186 gives the full titles of King Moses George as ruler of the Alodians, Makurians and Nobadians, documents of the 1190s are dated under him, and the kingdom then passes to a King Basil, so these texts fix who ruled at Dongola on 1 January 1200. They also show the eparch of Nobadia at Qasr Ibrim, the church hierarchy, land prices and the survival of Greek alongside Nubian. Fragmentary and technical; read with Ruffini's Medieval Nubia (2012).
About this source
- Title
- Old Nubian and Greek documents from Qasr Ibrim and the Nubian royal documents
- Author
- Various
- Author's dates
- Nubian scribes, kings, eparchs and private persons, eighth to fifteenth centuries
- Written
- the dated Qasr Ibrim land sales and letters run from the 1150s to the 1460s; the royal documents of the 1180s and 1190s are the nearest to 1200
- Language
- Old Nubian, Greek, Coptic, Arabic
- Covers
- about 750 to 1464
- Kind
- Charters and cartularies
Browne's and Ruffini's editions are under copyright. The 1186 titulature of Moses George is DBMNT 610. The sequence and dates of the kings around 1200 (Moses George, then Basil) rest on a few dated documents and are not settled; the Wikipedia article on Makuria names Georgios VI as Moses George's successor instead.
Where to read it
Editions
- G. M. Browne (vol. 1 with J. M. Plumley), Old Nubian Texts from Qasr Ibrim, 3 vols (London, 1988 to 1991) (not freely online)
- G. R. Ruffini, The Bishop, the Eparch and the King: Old Nubian texts from Qasr Ibrim IV (Warsaw, 2014) (not freely online)
- F. Ll. Griffith, The Nubian Texts of the Christian Period (Berlin, 1913), the earlier texts
Translations
- English translations accompany Browne's and Ruffini's editions, see editions (not freely online)
Read it online
- Database of Medieval Nubian Texts (DBMNT), University of Warsaw: catalogue of every text with dates, persons and bibliography
- Griffith's Nubian Texts of the Christian Period (1913) at the Internet Archive