Old Nubian

Old Nubian
Native to	Egypt, Sudan
Region	Along the banks of the Nile in what is now southern Egypt and northern Sudan
Era	8th–15th century
Language family	Nilo-Saharan? Eastern Sudanic Nubian Northern Old Nubian
Writing system	Greek
Language codes
ISO 639-3
Linguist list	onw
Glottolog	oldn1245
A page from an Old Nubian translation of the Instructions of the Archangel Michael, from the 9th-10th century, found at Pakhoras, now at the British Museum. Michael's name appears in red: Nubians during the period frequently used Greek personal names, often with a terminal ‑ι added.

Old Nubian is an ancient variety of Nubian, attested in writing from the 8th to the 15th century (the most recent known text was written in 1485). It is ancestral to modern-day Nobiin and related to other Nubian languages such as Dongolawi. It was used throughout the medieval Christian kingdom of Makuria and its satellite Nobadia. The language is preserved in at least a hundred pages of documents, mostly of a religious nature, written using a modified form of the Greek script; the best known is The Martyrdom of Saint Menas.

Old Nubian had its source in the languages of the Noba nomads who occupied the Nile between the First and Third Cataracts and the Makorae nomads who occupied the land between the Third and Fourth Cataracts following the collapse of Meroë sometime in the 4th century. The Makorae were a separate tribe who eventually conquered or inherited the lands of the Noba: they established a Byzantine-influenced state called Makuria which administered the Noba lands separately as the eparchy of Nobadia. Nobadia was converted to Monophysite Christianity by the priests Julian and Longinus, and thereafter received its bishops from the pope of Alexandria.

Old Nubian is one of the oldest written African languages but was used only sporadically. The civil administration and legal records tended to employ Greek, while the church leadership (originally all Egyptians) were fluent in Coptic. Over time, more and more Old Nubian began to appear in both secular and religious documents, and the language also influenced the use of Greek and Coptic in the region (e.g., some confusion of Greek grammatical genders & use of variant verb tenses). The consecration documents found with the remains of archbishop Timotheos suggest, however, that Greek and Coptic continued to be used into the late 14th century, by which time Arabic was also in widespread use.