This reference grammar provides a novel and detailed overview of Old Nubian, an extinct Nilo-Saharan language written in the Nubian kingdom of Makuria between the 8th and 15th centuries CE. Including more than 700 glossed examples sourced from manuscripts and inscriptions covering the entire written record, this standard work treats Old Nubian syntax, topic/focus constructions, subordination and coordination, verbal morphology including person, aspect, tense, pluractionality, affirmation, and negation, nominal morphology, derivation, and phonology. The grammar is aimed both at scholars working in the fields of Nubiology, Egyptology, and Near Eastern Studies curious to gain a better understanding of one of the lesser studied languages from the medieval period, and linguists interested in one of the few historical languages of which written records have survived on the African continent.

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.

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 It presents heretofore unpublished material: an edition of a series of manuscripts discovered during the Aswan High Dam campaign at the site of Attiri, a rocky island in the Batn el-Hajjar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.

This volume comprises three appendices to the same author's Old Nubian Dictionary (CSCO 556, Subs. 90; 1996). The first deals with the emphatic particles -lo/-lo, -sin and -so/-so and provides for each a catalogue of examples followed by a commentary describing the usage. The second appendix, intended to facilitate the editing of damaged texts, is a reverse index of all the words entered in the Dictionary. The third furnishes addenda et corrigenda to M.M. Khalil's published Worterbuch der nubischen Sprache (Fadidja/Mahas-Dialekt) and supplements the cognates cited in the Dictionary. Like the Dictionary, this volume of appendices should be of interest to all who work in the area of Christian Africa. The author is Professor of the Classics and Linguistics in the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (USA) and is recognized as the world's leading authority on Old Nubian.