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Finding Old Nubian, or, why we should divest from Western tongues

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Even if one could bypass all institutions, all academic apparatuses, all schools […], all disciplines, all (public or private) media structures, recourse to language is indispensable for the minimal practice of philosophy. This massive and trivial evidence must be remembered not for itself but for the conclusions to which it should lead, and which we do not always draw

– Jaques Derrida.

As long as a single person must pay to be able to speak with others and to read and listen to them, language and philology are not free

– Werner Hamacher

Abstract

In this essay, I venture to describe my own trajectory, through linguistics and continental philosophy, to becoming a philologist specialized in the Old Nubian language, in tandem with a broader analysis of the destabilizing powers of philology that resonate in both deconstruction and psychoanalysis: the problem of the material carrier of writing as that which eventually determines the reading, the humbling idea that the most abstract thought of Plato can be traced to a crumbling fourth-century papyrus. In parallel, I also address the current state of Nubiology and how I have inserted myself into the field as an advocate of both accessible scholarship and a re-anchoring of the scientific field within the local political and social context of Egypt and the Sudan.

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Notes

  1. See, for example, Yaguello (2006) and Okrent (2009). Rasula and McCaffery (1998) remains a necessary starting point.

  2. For a lineage of this argument see De Man (1986), Hamacher (2019). See also van Gerven Oei (2014a, b, 2015), where I explore some of these themes.

  3. A notable, early exception to scholars’ trust in the stability of the manuscript is Friedrich Nietzsche, who started his career as philologist intensely engaged with pre-Socratic texts and an obsession for Democritus. See Porter (2000) and Swift (2008).

  4. See, for example, the exchange with John Searle documented in Derrida (1988). More recently, new and speculative materialism(s) have flourished based on a rejection of deconstruction as an avatar of ‘correlationism’ (Meillassoux, 2008). However, the main proof for the existence of an ‘absolute’ independent of thought/language, a sine qua non for this rejection to hold, falls prey to fundamental misunderstanding regarding the nature of the sign and the task of the epigraphist (van Gerven Oei, 2014a).

  5. This falls squarely in what Artur Obłuski (2014, 9) has termed the ‘Two Kingdoms Period’ (c. 700–1450 CE) to avoid the eurocentric terms ‘Middle Ages’ or ‘Medieval period.’ The first written evidence for Old Nubian are a graffito from Es-Sebu' from 795 CE (Jakobielski, 1995) and a gravestone for the priest Stephanos Eiñitta from 797 CE (Łajtar, 1992, 112–29, no. 1). Because of the presence of Meroitic signs in the Old Nubian alphabet, its invention must be dated to the end of the Meroitic period, in the fifth century c. (Rilly, 2008, 191). The latest documents in Old Nubian are from Gebel Adda (e.g., Łajtar, 2014, 951), many of which remain unpublished.

  6. Nobiin was first coined as name for the closely related dialects of Mahas and Fadicca. Andaandi is also known as Dongolawi and Mattokki as Kenzi/Kunuzi. See for other terms and orthographies Jakobi and Kümmerle (1993, 21–4).

  7. See for an account by a Sudanese administrator, Dafalla (1975). The exodus of the Nubian people has had severe effects on their communities; see, for example, Fernea & Kennedy (1966) and Paesler (2018).

  8. See, for example, Hafsaas-Tsakos (2011).

  9. Despite the unfathomable destruction of cultural heritage, UNESCO insists on calling the campaign ‘a complete and spectacular success’ (UNESCO, n.d.)

  10. See for a second-generation testimony El-Melik (2017).

  11. The Darfur Nubian language Birgid has died out in recent decades. All Nubian languages have an EGIDS (Expanded Graded Intergenerational Disruption Scale) level of 6b (threatened) or worse. EGIDS ‘measure[s] the status of a language in terms of endangerment or development.’ See Ethnologue (n.d.).

  12. According to Asante, the ‘Afrocentrist seeks to uncover and use codes, paradigms, symbols, motifs, myths and circles of discussion that reinforce the centrality of African ideas and values as a valid frame of reference for acquiring and examining data,’ (1990, 6; quoted in Winters, 1994, 170), which also provides a recapitalution of the Nubian trope (178–88).

  13. I will not address the politics of citationality in Heng’s book, which, even though professing to understand race ‘differently from its definition by canonical twentieth-century race theories’ (2018, 3), completely ignores a cornerstone of critical race theory such as Kimberlé Crenshaw. See Tomlinson (2018), who speaks in this context of ‘powerblindness.’

  14. Uighur and Mongolian actually belong to two distinct language families.

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Acknowledgements

I would like to thank my editor, Afrodesia McCannon, as well as two anonymous reviewers, for their valuable input to this brief essay.

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    Vincent W. J. van Gerven Oei

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van Gerven Oei, V.W.J. Finding Old Nubian, or, why we should divest from Western tongues. Postmedieval 11, 301–309 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41280-020-00182-9

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