Nubian Greek
Greco-Nubian
Greek epitaph of Stephanos, bishop of Faras, 926 AD.
Region	Nubia
Era	c. 300–1500 AD
Language family	Indo-European Hellenic Greek Attic–Ionic Attic Koine Nubian Greek
Writing system	Greek Alphabet Nubian Script (after c. 1000)
Official status
Official language in	Makuria
Language codes
ISO 639-3	grc
The three kingdoms of Nubia and the six cataracts of the Nile

Nubian Greek (also known as Greco-Nubian) is the conventional term for the forms of the Greek language used in the Christian kingdoms of Nubia in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages.^[1]

The presence of the Greek language in Nubia dates back to the 6th century BC as attested by an Ionic Greek graffito left at Abu Simbel by Greek mercenaries taking part in pharaoh Psamtik II's invasion of Nubian in 592 BC.

• 
  Greek graffito on the outside of the left shin

After the Macedonian conquest of Egypt in 332 BC, the first Nile cataract known as the Dodekaschoinos (Δωδεκάσχοινος, "Land of the Twelve Schoinoi") came under Ptolemaic control. Koine Greek, the Ptolemaic language of administration was introduced to the Kushite ruling classes, which may have triggered the creation of an alphabetic Meroitic writing. However, Nubian contact with the Greek world remained sporadic until Ptolemy II's Nubian campaign for Meroë in the 270s BC. At the same time, Ergamenes (Arkamani II), a king of one of the nine Nubian kingdoms, studied Greek language and customs at the Alexandrian court in the Ptolemaic Empire.

Greek influence in Nubia declined in the second century BC. The lack of Ptolemaic inscriptions or other evidence of Ptolemaic control has led modern scholars to conclude that by the reign of Ptolemy IX Lathyros (r. 116–109 and 88–81 BC), if not already around the middle of the 2nd century BC, most of the Triakontaschoinos, south of Debod, had been lost to the Ptolemies. After the Roman annexation of Egypt, Latin began to be used in Egypt alongside Greek and Coptic, with a third-century Latin inscription found as far south as Musawwarat es-Sufra commemorating a local Nubian queen.^[2] In 298 AD, the emperor Diocletian abandoned the Dodekaschoinos, leading to a further decline of the Greek language in Nubia.

After multiple wars with Aksum, the Kingdom of Kush collapsed in the fourth century AD, leading to the extinction of the Meroitic language. Two Greek inscriptions from the old Kushite capital of Meroë commemorate the Aksumite kings' victories.^[3] As the Nubians now had no written language of their own, Greek, already used by the Romans in the north and the Aksumites in the south, became the new lingua franca of the region alongside Coptic.

A Greek letter written before 500 AD from Phonen, king of the Blemmyes, to Aburni, king of Nobatia, attests to Greek as a language of diplomacy and communication in Nubia and is an early example of the formation a Nubian Greek "pidgin."

Following the adoption of Christianity by emperor Constantine the Great in 312, the Christianisation of Aksum and Nubia began, with Greek becoming the language of religion. Around 540 AD, the Empress Theodora sent Greek-speaking missionaries to these lands, which had already been in the process of evangelisation earlier and went on to adopt Christianity as their official religion. It was the Byzantine missionaries that helped established the authority of Christianity In the area, and as a result founded the new Nubian Christian kingdoms, such as Nobatia, Alodia, and Makuria.

Whilst Greek managed to retain its prestigious status in Nubia following the Arab conquest of Egypt in 646 the creation of Old Nubian as a written language in the eighth century relegated Greek primarily to the religious sphere. In the tenth century, Old Nubian seems to have become the official language of the Dongolan court, supplanting whatever status Greek may have previously held.^[4] However, Greek still flourished in the religious sphere but now sharing the space with Old Nubian rather than Coptic. The reading of the liturgy in particular appears to have been performed almost exclusively in Greek.^[5]

The last securely dated Nubian Greek text is a wall inscription left by a Makurian bishop in a monastery near Aswan dated to April 7, 1322.^[6] The final decline of the Greek language in Nubia likely began with the fall of "Great Makuria" c. 1365, after which "Little Makuria" ruled over a vastly reduced territory. Arabic had been used in Nubia on a small scale since the eighth century (constituting only 1.47% of the DBMNT catalogue), but centuries of pressure from Arabic-speaking Muslims lead to the Islamicisation and Arabisation of the Nubians. Certain undated Greek graffiti should be dated to the Little Makurian period, demonstrating that there was still some knowledge of Greek until the final conquest of Nubia by the Ottoman Empire and Funj Sultanate in the sixteenth century.^[5]

From the fifth-seventh centuries Greek served as the lingua franca of the Nubian kingdoms. However, after the Arab conquest of Egypt in 642, Nubia became isolated from the rest of the Greek-speaking world and over time knowledge of the language declined. In the multilingual Nubian society, Greek served primarily as a sacral language used for epitaphs and pilgrimage inscriptions.^[7] The exact status of Greek in Nubia is a matter of debate, with some scholars arguing that Greek was the official language of the Nubian church and others that it was the official langauge of the Dongolan court.^[8] Bilingual versions of the Psalms found throughout Nubia that alternate between Greek and Old Nubian verses point to the existence of a "private scholarly milieu" fluent in both languages who would have read these bilingual texts as a form of enjoyment and education.^[9]

The term "Greco-Nubian" is sometimes used by scholars to describe both Hellenised Old Nubian and Nubianised Greek.^[10][11] In many cases, distinguishing between the two is near impossible, leading to Nubian Greek being characterized as a "pidgin" language.^[12] Greco-Nubian, together with the less common Greco-Coptic and Copto-Nubian constitute 31.7% of the texts in the Database of Medieval Nubian Texts (DMNT), compared to 30.5% Greek, 22.6% Coptic and 7.93% Old Nubian.^[13]

The following are examples of Greco-Nubian sentences:

Analysis of Greek inscriptions on terracotta and stone shows regional differences though: in the kingdom of Makuria, the Greek language was the main linguistic vehicle for the "Byzantine-like royal court at Old Dongola", whereas in the Kingdom of Nobatia the Coptic language played a similarly important role. Hence, for example, the foundation stele of the Faras Cathedral was carved in both languages.

Owing to Old Nubian's lack of gender and declension system, two key features of ancient Greek, lower register Nubian Greek morphology was much more relaxed.

The Ancient Greek case system was often used interchangable, in particular the use of the nominative or accusative instead of the genitive.^[14]

Gendered pronouns were often used interchangably, for instance the masculine αὐτοῦ ('his') instead of the feminine αὐτῆς ('her').^[14]

Nubian Greek often lost the inflected endings of Ancient Greek verbs, leading to "apparently meaningless" verbs. The common verb γράφω (' I write ') could be rendered in inscriptions as γράφα, γράφου and γράψον rather then the standard aorist form ἔγραψα ('Ι wrote').^[15]

Nubian Greek's syntax evolved to establish a fixed word order, influenced by Old Nubian's fixed subject–object–verb word order and to compensate for Nubian Greek's weak case system. Adjectives follow the noun and the sequence of elements in attributive expressions is always rectus–regens, typically genitive–nominative. This feature is particularly prevalent in appelatives.^[16]

Nubian Greek had similar phonology as Koine Greek, including Iotacism and the loss of vowel length distinction.^[14]

The doubling intervocalic -λ- was also a common occurence in Nubia for words like σελήνῃ (σελλένῃ) θέλοντος (θέλλοντος) and δούλου (δοῦλλούν).^[17]

Nubian Greek incorporated loanwords from Old Nubian. A portrait of the 13th century king Moses Georgios is

accompanied by an inscription that states:

Οὗτός ἐστιν ἀδαύελ Βασιλεύ Μώσες Γεωργίου Βασιλεύ Νουβδῆς καί Ἀρουά καί Μακρό

'This is the great King Moses Georgios, the King of Nobatia, Alodia, Makuria'

Here, the Old Nubian adjective "

Another example is θεος “god”, used also in the meaning “saint” in the Banganarti inscriptions (with relation to Archangel Raphael), no doubt under the influence of the Nubian tL=l-, which means both “God” and “Saint”.^[18]

Old Nubian used a variation fo the Coptic script, which itself was derived from the Greek alphabet. The letters ⲍ, ⲝ/ϩ ⲭ, and ⲯ only appear in Greek loanwords. These loanwords make up about 6 percent of recorded Old Nubian vocabulary and mostly deal with religion.^[19]

Many Nubians also took Greek names, for instance the regnal name 'Georgios' (ⲅⲉⲱⲣⲅⲓⲟⲥ/ ⲅⲉⲱⲣⲅⲓⲟⲩ) from the Greek Γεώργιος was borne by at least four Makurian kings. The DMNT records 179 Greek-derived names in Christian Nubia.

• Hendrickx, B. "Was 'Nubian Greek' that bad?," in W. Burger and M. Pienaar (eds.) Die tand van die tyd opstelle opgedra aan Jac Conradie, pp. 35–44. Sun Press 2009.
• Hatke, George. (2013) Aksum and Nubia: Warfare, Commerce, and Political Fictions in Ancient Northeast Africa. New York University Press and Institute for the Study of the Ancient Word, New York.
• Łajtar, Adam. (2003). Catalogue of the Greek Inscriptions in the Sudan National Museum at Khartoum. Peeters, Leuven (Orientalia Lovaniensia Analecta 122).
• Łajtar, Adam. "The Greek of Late Christian Inscriptions from Nubia — the Evidence from Banganarti and Other Sites," in Between the Cataracts 1: Proceedings of the 11th International Conference for Nubian Studies, Warsaw University 27 August - 2 September 2006: Part One, Main Papers, pp. 759–764. Warsaw university press, Warsaw, 2010.
• Łajtar, Adam and Vliet, Jacques van der. "Rich Ladies of Meinarti and Their Churches: With an Appendix of sources from Christian Nubia containing the expression 'having the Church of so-and-so," in J. v. d. Vliet (ed.) The Christian Epigraphy of Egypt and Nubia, pp. 347–364. Routledge, Oxford and New York 2018. (Variorum Collected Studies Series)
• Łajtar, Adam and Ochała, Grzegorz "Language Use and Literacy in Late Antique and Medieval Nubia," in G. Emberling and B. B. Williams (eds) The Oxford Handbook of Ancient Nubia, pp. 787–805. Oxford University Press, 2021.
• Łajtar, Adam (2024). Nubica: Studies in the History and Epigraphy of the Middle Nile Region in Christian Times. Peeters
• Ochała, Grzegorz "Multilingualism in Christian Nubia: Qualitative and Quantitative Approaches," Dotawo: A Journal of Nubian Studies 1 (1) 2014, pp. 1–50.
• Ruffini, Giovanni R. (2012) Medieval Nubia: A Social and Economic History. Oxford University Press.
• Smagina, Eugenia B. (2017). The Old Nubian Language. Punctum Books, Dotawo.
• Tsakos, A. "Religious Literacy in Greek from the Christian Nubian Monastery at Qasr El-Wizz, Lower Nubia," Proceedings Ekklesiastikos Pharos 1, 2014, pp. 220–230.
• Vliet, Jacques van der. (2018). The Christian Epigraphy of Egypt and Nubia. Routledge, Oxford and New York (Variorum Collected Studies Series)