THE NUBIAN LITURGICAL CALENDAR The Evidence of the Nubian Lectionaries* 1. Introduction There are still many aspects of Christian culture of the Middle Nile Valley that remain largely understudied. One of them is Nubian liturgy, which belongs to the most difficult fields of research for a Nubiologist. This difficulty stems from the paucity and fragmentation of sources and is reflected in a limited number of publications devoted to the subject. One of these few articles and at the same time the most complete one was published by Heinzgerd Brakmann in the ArchivfürLiturgiewissen- schaft in 20061. In the second paragraph of this excellent text, Brakmann states that to present a general analysis of the Nubian liturgy, a series of detailed researches is required, one of them on the order of the pericopae preserved in Nubian sources. As a matter of fact, the subject was not left untouched, but it has never been presented in a detailed manner. To the best of my knowl- edge, only three scholars attempted to interpret the earliest-known and * In my book on the dating systems used in the Middle Nile Valley between the sixth and the fifteenth centuries, I devoted a small chapter to the survey of sources that contain information on different feasts of the Nubian Church (OCHAŁA, ChronologicalSystems, p. 321-324). I, however, did not go into details of the Nubian liturgical calendar, since the subject largely exceeded the scope of the book. In the present article I attempt to present a more adequate analysis of the sources. The present article is a seriously revised version of the text published in Polish in 2013 (OCHAŁA, Kalendarzliturgiczny). A detailed analysis of one text discussed here, “The Qasr Ibrim typikon”, has already been published in HAGEN – OCHAŁA, SaintsandScrip- turesforPhaophi; however, our previous considerations are repeated here to some extent for the sake of completeness of the evidence and discussion. My research on this subject has been generously financed by the Ministry of Science and Higher Education of the Republic of Poland (grant no. 0392/IP3/2011/71, title of the project: “Chronological systems of Christian Nubia: liturgical calendar and king’s list”). I wish to thank in this place Diliana Atanassova, Nathalie Bosson, Joost Hagen, Adam Łajtar, Giovanni Ruffini, Jacques van der Vliet, and Ewa Wipszycka for commenting upon various drafts of the present text. Special thanks go to Diliana Atanassova, who has furnished me with information about unpublished typika from the White Monastery and permitted me to use this extremely important comparative material, and to Giovanni Ruffini, who corrected my English. Finally, I would like to express my utmost gratitude to Ugo Zanetti, whose critical review of the text helped me remove bigger and smaller errors that resulted from my lack of experience in the field of liturgiology. 1 BRAKMANN, Defunctus, p. 283-333. LeMuséon 128 (1-2), 1-48. doi: 10.2143/MUS.128.1.3080615 - Tous droits réservés. © Le Muséon, 2015. 998027.indb8027.indb 1 44/06/15/06/15 111:521:52 2 G. OCHAŁA most extensively preserved fragment of a lectionary from the Middle Nile Valley, the so-called “Griffith’s Old Nubian lectionary”: Hermann Junker in 1906, Francis Griffith in 1913, and Bruce Metzger in 19682. However, all of them limited themselves to more or less laconic but very similar statements that the Nubian order of the readings finds no parallel in lectionaries of other churches3. Both Junker and Griffith took as their point of departure the present-day system of readings of the Coptic Church, which, although it preserves some archaic elements, especially the read- ings for solemnities4, is a result of centuries of development. Hence, it is hardly surprising that only very few similarities can be found in the Nubian lectionaries. Metzger, on the other hand, took as his basis “Greek and Coptic lectionaries” (without any further specification, regrettably), but he was not able to identify any parallels either. All three scholars had at their disposal only one text; at present, after the discovery and publication of documents from Qasr Ibrim, the number has increased five times. However unimpressive this number still is, the documents deserve a closer look, all the more so since no one has ever paid any particular attention to them and their historical and liturgical analysis is still lacking. In my research I have decided to go beyond Coptic and Greek sources and to verify lectionaries of other Eastern churches as well: Syriac, Geor- gian, and Armenian, according to the availability of sources and their publications5. For the Reader’s convenience, in the “Appendix” placed at the end of the present article I give a full list of sources and publications 2 JUNKER, DieneuentdecktenchristlichenHandschriften, p. 440-441; GRIFFITH, The NubianTexts, p. 25; METZGER, TheChristianizationofNubia, p. 120. Gerald M. Browne, who was the last editor of the text (see below), is not included here, since he conducted only a codicological, grammatical, and linguistic analysis of the source. 3 Interestingly, “Griffith’s Old Nubian lectionary” is occasionally mentioned in schol- arly literature on the ancient liturgy. I have managed to locate three such remarks, one in BAUMSTARK, NichtevangelischesyrischePerikopenordnungen, p. 34, and two other in ZANETTI, Les lectionnaires coptes annuels, p. 19-20, and ZANETTI, Les lectionnaires coptes, p. 177. Both scholars, however, mention the Nubian text in connection with Egypt and her liturgical tradition rather than discuss it as a document of the separate Church of Nubia. 4 ZANETTI, Leslectionnairescoptes, p. 150 and 167. 5 Ethiopia is excluded from this list, because in my research I have not come across any published Ethiopic lectionary. FRITSCH – ZANETTI, Gǝṣṣawe, p. 773-775, note that the Ethiopian liturgical calendar is based on the Egyptian (more probably the Upper Egyptian) one, but no comparative studies of the pericopae have been undertaken so far. To date, only the temporal has been made available to scholars not reading in Ethiopic in FRITSCH, TheLiturgicalYearI: TheTemporal (nonvidi); cf. FRITSCH, TheLiturgicalYear:Intro- duction, p. 71-116. The Ethiopian synaxarium, on the other hand, is known to have been translated in the fourteenth century from Coptic-Arabic sources (COLIN – BAUSI, Sǝnkǝssar, p. 621-623; COQUIN, Synaxarion,Ethiopian, p. 2190-2191). 998027.indb8027.indb 2 44/06/15/06/15 111:521:52 THE NUBIAN LITURGICAL CALENDAR 3 used as comparative material for the Nubian pericopae. The “Appendix” includes both abbreviations of the most frequently used bibliographic references, explanations concerning names, sigla, and inventory numbers appearing throughout the article, and brief descriptions of sources. Unfortunately, the comparative material is rather limited, which in some cases results not from the lack of sources but rather their state of publication. This is especially visible in the case of Byzantine liturgical books, which are abundant but virtually unavailable6. Moreover, until quite recently Greek lectionaries were studied solely from the perspective of the textual criticism of the Scriptures7. Thus, the system of readings of the Byzantine Church is not well known and the compilation produced by Caspar René Gregory more than a hundred years ago is, to the best of my knowledge, the only publication making such information available to scholars. On the other hand, one experiences a lack of sources, especially ancient ones, in the case of Egypt. This situation is particularly frustrating, since Egypt as Nubia’s closest neighbour could be the key to understand- ing the Nubian liturgy. These two facts, the lack of sources and the lack of publications, make the present-day liturgical calendars of the Greek and Coptic Churches in many cases the only source of analogies. Of course, both calendars are the effect of hundreds of years of evolution, but since we have no access to particular stages of the process, it seems worthwhile to look at the final result, all the more so since both traditions are highly conservative (which, by the way, also finds confirmation in the present article). Thus, the present paper is the first attempt to comprehensively analyse the fragments of the Nubian lectionaries known to date. The article con- sists of three parts: the presentation of the material, a typological analy- sis of the sources, remarks on the order of the Liturgy of the Word, and a discussion of the Nubian choice of pericopae. All parts have a value in themselves, mainly thanks to their systematising character. However, they also bring a handful of interesting observations, which, when put together, may bring us a bit closer to a better understanding of the Nubian litur- gical calendar in particular and the Nubian liturgy in general. Of course, the sources are too fragmentary to expect from them a full picture, but they are the only witnesses of the Nubian system of pericopae and as such deserve particular attention. 6 A list of manuscripts prepared by Caspar Gregory in 1900 (GREGORY, Textkritik, p. 387-477) includes 1359 New Testament lectionaries, but I have no information how many of them have ever been published. 7 The history of research on this category of sources is presented in JORDAN, TheTex- tualTradition, p. 15-39. 998027.indb8027.indb 3 44/06/15/06/15 111:521:52 4 G. OCHAŁA 2. Thesources As mentioned above, there are five fragments of Nubian lectionaries in total. All of them are in different states of preservation and they cover different parts of the liturgical year. Apart from “Griffith’s Old Nubian lectionary” (no. 1), the provenance of which is unknown, all of the remain- ing pieces (nos. 2-5) were found at the site of Qasr Ibrim, one of the most important cities in Lower Nubia8. Fragment no. 5 is exceptional in this assemblage, because it is written partly in Greek and partly in Coptic, while the remaining four texts are exclusively in the Old Nubian language.