CREATING CHRISTIAN NUBIA – PROCESSES AND EVENTS ON THE EGYPTIAN FRONTIER

[From 1st paragraph] This paper will explore the interweaving of socio-political and religious transformations on the southern frontier of Roman Egypt during the third-sixth centuries. In this period northern Nubia represents an interesting space, outside the Roman Empire while also forming the northern frontier of the (fading) Meroitic Empire, centred far to the south in Sudanic Africa. As a meeting place of imperial powers certain parallels may be drawn with the northern Arabian regions, although these ‘barbarian’ encounters were played out in a region with its own distinctive dynamic, not least in the peculiar geographical circumstances of the Egyptian/Nubian riverine oasis, and its desert hinterland. My own particular concerns lie less with the Roman presence, but rather in how the region was transformed from a Meroitic province to an independent (Christian) ‘Nubian’ kingdom