This essay investigates a certain disturbance that appears at the moment that philosophy is confronted with philological practices, as foreshadowed in Paul de Man’s seminal work on the ‘return to philology.’ This disturbance appears vividly in Heidegger’s Introduction to Metaphysics with the sudden appearance of the ‘nonsense word’ kzomil. Hei…[Read more]

Discussion of the work of Albanian artist Armando Lulaj in relation to the heritage of Albanian socialist realist art.

Based on an allegorical interpretation of Robert Rauschenberg’s “Erased de Kooning,” this article argues for “reading” as what Foucault referred to as a possible “socialist governmentality.”

A glance at a makeshift drawing from the cathedral in Faras suggests that it may depict the ground plan of a church. Nevertheless, the naive appearance of the sketch and an almost complete lack of sufficient parallels from either Nubia or the Eastern Mediterranean make a proper examination of this assumption unfeasible. A reassessment of the…[Read more]

Old Nubian is a Nubian (North-Eastern Sudanic) language spoken in the Medieval Christian kingdoms of Nubia. Being a dead language, very little is known about its phonology, and previous studies by Hintze and Browne have remained unsatisfactory in this regard.

Based on a detailed investigation of the behavior of loanwords from Byzantine Greek,…[Read more]

This paper sketches out several characteristics of Old Nubian translation of Greek biblical texts, and the specific grammatical manipulations necessary to arrive at a “faithful” translation.

This book chapter investigates the precise distribution of the Old Nubian morpheme -a in the nominal and verbal domain.

A series of brief proposals relating to possible future avenues for Old Nubian studies.

The Miracle of Saint Mina is one of the core texts in the small corpus of texts written in Old Nubian, a Nilo-Saharan language spoken between the third and fourth cataract of the Nile river until about the fifteenth century, and written in an adaptation of the Coptic script. It is one of the oldest written indigenous African languages. The Miracle…[Read more]

Analysis of the different types of relative clauses in Old Nubian.