The research on the Christian kingdoms of Nubia (Nobadia, Makuria, and Alwa) existing in the Middle Nile Valley between the 6th and the 15th centuries has recently intensified. New studies applying the newest methodologies bring us closer to understanding the history and society of the Christian Nubians, who once were able to halt the Islamic conquest of central Africa and produced outstanding culture, but now are practically unknown to a wider public.
The IaM NUBIAN project fits into this trend, proposing a new research perspective: identity and memory studies. These two research fields have already been successfully employed for other ancient and medieval cultures. However, in most cases, they were applied to well-researched cultures. Christian Nubia represents an opposite pole, as the repertoire of study material is quite limited and the basic facts about the history of the land are still largely unknown. By applying the methodologies of identity and memory studies, we are thus able to go beyond the most general image of Nubian society: a pious Christian community, focused on the salvation of their souls and aspiring to belong to the Oriental Christian oikoumene. The new research allows us to study, for instance, what the mindset of an average Nubian was, what it meant for them to be part of this society, or what drove them to follow external models in different aspects of their life.
The main objective of the project is to study medieval Nubian written sources (Greek, Coptic, Old Nubian, and Arabic), both their content and context, to see how and to what end their authors encoded information about themselves, their compatriots, and the history of the kingdom. By singling out various identity markers (e.g. names, designations of functions and family relations, or epithets) and proper understanding of their meaning, it is possible to see the focal points of (self-)presentation of different groups of Christian Nubian society, be it religion, ethnicity, or social position. On the other hand, the Nubian memory, meaning both "big" national history and "small" personal histories, can be accessed through the analysis of the contents and context of texts inscribed on the walls of buildings. The fact of being publicly displayed made them truly interactive conveyors of "historical" messages. Finally, the project also aims at studying how medieval Nubians were perceived by the outside world, most notably by the inhabitants of the Islamic empire, Nubia's closest neighbour (and enemy). Here, the research focuses on the narrative techniques used by foreign authors to characterise the Nubians.
