436 ray a. kea
al-Idrisi (writing c. 1154) refers to “flourishing towns and famous strongholds” and
describes the inhabitants as rich because “they possess gold in abundance” and
imported “many good things ... from the outermost parts of the earth” (Levtzion
and Hopkins, 2000: 111). Another facet of the Almoravid route is evident in the
international commercial activities of fourteenth-century merchants from the Mali
Empire: they maintained houses of business (wakalat) in Mediterranean- and Red-
Sea-centers like Fustat-Cairo and Jeddah. In practical terms the activities of these
merchants gave Malian royals and upper-class families access to international slave
markets; thus, fourteenth-century Mali imported “Turks,” who served as personal
and royal guards, and Arab, Ethiopian, and Nubian women who became concubines
and wives. The trans-Saharan slave trade moved in two directions.
Mediterranean in Africa?In the middle Nile valley, Makuria (c. 450–1500 ce) represented a Christian kingdom
of power, authority, and wealth. Its heartland, between the third and fifth Nile cata-
racts, was stamped by influences coming from the east and the west and served as a
connection between the Red Sea and the Wadi Howar, the main thoroughfare in the
Libyan desert linking the Nile valley with inner Africa. From the mid-fifth to the late-
sixth century the process of Christian conversion in the Nubian kingdoms, Nobadia,
Makuria, and Alodia (Alwa), assimilated various traditions: classical Kushite customs,
Meroitic imperial culture, Christian practices of Coptic Egypt, and Romano–Nubian
military piety. From this matrix, Nubian Christianity developed as a “sovereign reli-
gion;” that is, the religion originated with the office of the divine or sacralized king-
ship of Nubia and, in contrast to Egypt and other parts of the ancient world, was a
religion of the state and ruling dynasty and not of the socially oppressed. With a tradi-
tion of military saints, priest-warriors, Byzantine-style cathedrals, monumental fres-
coes, and the office of Queen Mother, church and state represented interdependent
levels of authority. Together with Coptic Egypt and Aksum, Christian Nubia formed
a north-east African–Christian complex that was an integral component of Eastern
Christendom—a phenomenon not well acknowledged by Mediterranean studies as
presently constituted.
Makuria, in contrast to the Garamantian Kingdom and the polities of the middle
Niger basin, has been characterized as a Mediterranean society in Africa, with a legal
tradition that represented a fusion of Greco–Roman and indigenous practices. Greek
language and script remained important through the thirteenth century—“a way
of referring to the shared values of Mediterranean Christian culture, which implied
cultural Hellenism and religious orthodoxy, however defined”. A review of the
literary and religious role of Greek in ecclesiastical life signals the language’s impor-
tance: “Cathedral libraries at major centers such as Faras, Qasr Ibrim, and Old
Dongola, the Makurian capital, possessed a wide variety of religious texts including
bibles, church canons, saints’ lives and homilies, hymnals, other liturgical texts, and
even magical texts” (Burstein, 2008: 57). In addition to Greek, from the eighth to
the fifteenth centuries, Sahidic Coptic, Old or Classical Nubian, and Arabic were part
of cultural, ecclesiastical, and social life. At the fortress-city of Qasr Ibrim (752
bce–1811 ce), an administrative and pilgrimage center in northern Makuria, archae-
ologists discovered five multilingual archival caches containing administrative and