(Egypt Exploration Society, Texts from Excavations 10, 1989)

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 It presents heretofore unpublished material, an edition of a series of manuscripts discovered in the frame of the Aswan High Dam campaign at the site of Attiri, a rocky island in the Batn el-Hajjar region in the Sudan, and does so in an innovative way, through an intense 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.TABLE OF CONTENTS Preface - ixList of Tables - xiList of Figures - xGeneral Introduction - 13P. Attiri 1-2: The Attiri Book of Michael - 31P. Attiri 3-4: Lectionary - 59P. Attiri 5: Unidentified fragment - 75P. Attiri 6: Fragment - 79P. Attiri 7: Fragments - 81P. Attiri 6: The Head - 83P. Attiri 6: Sale - 85P. Attiri 6: Unidentified document - 89P. Attiri 6: Letter - 93Bibliography - 97

Eugenia Smagina first published her grammar of the Old Nubian language in 1986 in Russian. For more than thirty years the work has remained untranslated, even though the late Gerald M. Browne affirmed that "this lucid, well-argued presentation should be available to all Nubiologists and ought therefore be translated into a western language." Slavicist José Andrés Alonso de la Fuente has prepared a first English translation of this concise but indispensable work, which forms a necessary counterpart to Browne's classical Old Nubian Grammar. The grammar is divided into sections on script, lexicon, morphology, and syntax, and is followed by the analysis of a sample text, known as The Miracle of St. Menas.Smagina's The Old Nubian Language provides an excellent first introduction into the grammar of this medieval Nilo-Saharan language.