Toponymic strata in Ancient Nubian placenames in the Third and Second Millenium BCE: a view from Egyptian records

The civilizations of the Middle Nile are considered as largely illiterate until the Napatan period and the emergence of the Meroitic alphasyllabary later in the end of the first millennium BCE. Elsewhere, isolated epigraphic material exists in Ethiopia as early as 800 CE, but longer texts in the Horn of Africa are generally a much later phenomenon of the first millennium CE. For reconstructing the linguistic history of the Middle Nile then we are largely reliant on two chief data points: 1) contemporary Egyptian records pertaining to Nubia and 2) the epistemologically more difficult method of retrojecting later historical traditions or even modern linguistic material onto a map of ancient Nubia.

This article attempts to make a contribution not so much to the location of toponyms in ancient Nubia, as is the preoccupation of most philologists and historians, but rather outline the various linguistic strata of toponyms present in ancient Nubia and what they tell us about the linguistic history of the Middle Nile. Toponyms not only provide key insights into the historical geography of ancient cultures, but are also linguistic artifacts in themselves. They can spatially demonstrate linguistic boundaries, and in some cases can also illustrate linguistic migrations. While most of Northeast Africa outside Egypt is terra incognita from the point of indigenous toponymic textual data until the emergence of Meroitic, Old Nubian, and Geʿez, toponyms enumerated in hieroglyphic Egyptian sources provide some of the earliest insights into the history of Sudan and its “linguistic map.”