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When Greek Was an African Language: The Role of Greek Culture in Ancient and Medieval Nubia*
STANLEY M. BURSTEIN
California State University, Los Angeles
| THE SPREAD of Greek and Greek culture throughout the territories of the former Persian empire was one of the defining characteristics of the Hellenistic period. For almost a millennium, until the Arab conquests of the seventh century C.E., the acquisition of a Greek education and the ability to speak Greek were the keys to privilege throughout much of western Asia and Egypt. Not surprisingly, the study of this phenomenon has generated an enormous scholarly literature.1 Much less studied, however, has been the significance of Greek for the cultures of peoples living on the periphery of the Hellenistic kingdoms and their Roman and Islamic successor states. The purpose of this paper is to examine the role of Greek and Greek culture in one of those peripheral areas: ancient and medieval Nubia.2 |
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It is a huge story. Spatially it covers southern Egypt and the northern and central Sudan from the first cataract at modern Aswan to south of Khartoum. Chronologically it spans almost a millennium and a half from the Hellenistic period to the end of the middle ages. It is also a story that could not even begin to be told until recently. In part, this was because of the lack of sources that is the bane of all ancient historians. Until recently, native Nubian sources were almost entirely lacking, and only fragments remain of the once extensive classical and Arabic accounts of the region and its peoples. Lack of sources was not, however, the only problem. The historiography of Nubia is the oldest body of Western historical scholarship dealing with the African interior.3 Like any historiography, however, it reflects the biases of both the times in which historians of Nubia lived and the periods in which their sources were written. |
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The central fact facing all historians of Nubia is that the surviving ancient and medieval accounts of Nubia are not only limited but profoundly Egyptocentric.4 Nubia and its peoples and cultures are rarely mentioned except when they are relevant to Egypt, and when they are mentioned, they are discussed from the perspective of Egypt. Not surprisingly, when modern histories of Nubia first began to be written in the nineteenth century C.E., they were largely based on classical and Arabic sources, supplemented by Egyptian texts and therefore they reflected the Egyptocentric views of their sources.5 Nubia was treated as little more than an extension of Egypt without a significant cultural tradition of its own. The problem was compounded, moreover, by the fact that their authors wrote during the heyday of European imperialism in Africa, and, not surprisingly, they shared the then-current popular view of Africans as inferior peoples, capable, at best, only of receiving and imitating influences from superior foreign cultures. |
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These two factors mean that when the presence of the Greek language and Greek influence in Nubia was recognized, no effort was made to understand how they functioned within ancient and medieval Nubian culture. Greek objects found in Nubia were treated instead as indices of Hellenization, which was conceived as a one-sided process of acculturation involving the deliberate decision by non-Greek individuals—usually elites—to transform themselves and their society by abandoning their own culture in favor of Greek culture.6 The equation was simple. The greater the number of Greek objects and other examples of Greek influence, the greater the degree of Hellenization. One example will have to stand for many. After reviewing the evidence for Greek imports into Nubia, the great Hellenistic and Roman historian M.I. Rostovtzeff concluded that Hellenistic Meroe "with its Hellenistic palaces, its Hellenistic bath, its Ethiopian-Hellenistic statues and decorative frescoes, became a little Nubian Alexandria."7 |
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