Dotawo: A Journal of Nubian Studies offers a platform in which the old meets the new, in which archaeological, papyrological, and philological research into Meroitic, Old Nubian, Coptic, Greek, and Arabic sources confront current investigations in modern anthropology and ethnography, Nilo-Saharan linguistics, and the critical and theoretical approaches of postcolonial and African studies. Dotawo gives a common home to the past, present, and future of one of the richest areas of research in African studies. It offers a crossroads where papyrus can meet the internet, scribes meet critical thinkers, and the promises of growing nations meet the accomplishments of older kingdoms.Bringing together a collection of articles that were first presented as papers at the International Medieval Congress at the University of Leeds in 2016 and additional articles, the sixth volume of Dotawo showcases a diverse richness of topics concerning Nubia. The articles within this volume attest to the cultural, linguistic, geographic, and demographic diversity witnessed throughout Nubian history nationally and internationally amongst its neighbours, both near and far.

The volume is the first study of the archaeology of religion of Christian Nubia. It presents the material record of Nubian monasticism and offers a comparative analysis of this phenomenon. On the basis of archaeological and epigraphic data, the author reconstructs the life in Nubian monasteries. The work features a catalogue of archaeological sites tentatively identified as locations of monastic communities, as well as an overview of pertinent textual sources. Among the focal points are spatial aspects of the Nubian monastic movement, particularly the location of Nubian monasteries and their spatial organisation. Spatial analysis of monastic sites serves as a point of departure for insights into the social and economic matters of monastic communities in Nubia, which are central to the third part of the book. From the scarce sources the author recreates the complex spiritual and social dynamics present in monasteries, their management systems and competing hierarchies.

This volume gathers studies on translations into Latin, Syriac, Armenian, Georgian, Coptic, Old Nubian, Old Slavonic, Sogdian, Arabic and Ethiopic, sampling the range of approaches to the reception of Christian literature across the various languages in which it was transmitted.

The Old Nubian Texts from Attiri is the first publication in the Dotawo: Monographs series. It presents heretofore unpublished material: an edition of a series of manuscripts discovered during the Aswan High Dam campaign at the site of Attiri, a rocky island in the Batn el-Hajjar region in Sudan, and does so in an innovative way, through an intensive collaboration of the editors under the name of the Attiri Collaborative. By bringing together their diverse backgrounds in linguistics, archeology, Bible studies, history, anthropology, and philology, the editors hope to have provided an example of a new model of collective manuscript editing and the results such collaboration can attain. The collection consists of 15 manuscript fragments that were all written in Old Nubian. Among these manuscripts special mention should be made of two parchment leaves from a codex dedicated to works on the Archangel Michael, a lectionary containing fragments from the Gospel of Matthew and the Second Letter to the Corinthians, as well as a rare letter written on a leather sheet.

The first full-length study of the social and economic history of medieval Nubia, this book uses unpublished indigenous Old Nubian documentary sources to reveal a complex society that blended Greco-Roman legal traditions with African festive practices.