Arabic document from 17th-cent. rubbish heap confirms semi-legendary Nubian king
phys.org
phys.org
Dongola in the Funj period sounds like the place to be!
> In The Art of Travel (Vintage), Alain de Botton talks about the frustration of learning new information that doesn’t connect to anything you already know—like the sorts of facts you might pick up while visiting a historic building in a foreign land. He writes about visiting Madrid’s Iglesia de San Francisco el Grande and learning that “the sixteenth-century stalls in the sacristy and chapter house come from the Cartuja de El Paular, the Carthusian monastery near Segovia.” Without a connection back to something he was already familiar with, the description couldn’t spark his excitement or curiosity. The new facts, he wrote, were “as useless and fugitive as necklace beads without a connecting chain.”
Like, presumably you'd know something of monastaries, materials, manufacturing...
"“the sixteenth-century stalls in the sacristy and chapter house come from the Cartuja de El Paular, the Carthusian monastery near Segovia.” "
tells me that 500 years ago, the church reused either entire stalls or perhaps materials from another presumably older church that's near Segovia. I'd infer that there must have been some importance to both the intitial act and the preservation of the fact. Probably due to religious orders preferring lineage and continuity.
Without knowing anything at all about either facility, the countries involved, or really just anything at all, I can still tell that we're observing the heritage of traditions and know enough to ask after details of how this facility relates to the one near Segovia.
That gap - knowing this is probably fundamentally deeper when perceived by someone else - is what the author is getting at. He can feel that's missing for him. Even if he's not completely left devoid of all comprehension of the passage.
For example here's an excerpt from 1688's "Oroonoko"
I have often seen and convers'd with this great Man, and been a Witness to many of his mighty Actions; and do assure my Reader, the most Illustrious Courts cou'd not have produc'd a braver Man, both for Greatness of Courage and Mind, a Judgment more solid, a Wit more quick, and a Conversation more sweet and diverting. He knew almost as much as if he had read much: He had heard of, and admir'd the Romans; he had heard of the late Civil Wars in England, and the deplorable Death of our great Monarch; and wou'd discourse of it with all the Sense, and Abhorrence of the Injustice imaginable. He had an extream good and graceful Mien, and all the Civility of a well-bred great Man.Go back another four hundred years to Old English and Beowulf and it becomes complete gobbledygook (to me at least).
Also: only reading the "boring" bits. When I was in high school I was excused English classes (took English 101 at the local college instead - told you I was a nerd), but overheard my classmates hating their way through "The Wife of Bath's Tale", or "The Knight's Tale" - one of those - and introduced them (nerd!) to "The Miller's Tale" - broad scatalogical comedy - which they loved. Later I did something similar for them with Gulliver's Travels, by showing them the bit where he has fairly graphic sex with the giantess. (I think that's an actual kink, but I certainly didn't know that at the time!)
What's really fun is that if you keep the dialect in your head, and try reading it out loud with your best "Chaucer accent" it feels like slipping on a pair of glasses: you immediately "get" stuff that you'd have thought was impenetrable just looking at the page.
Source: my medieval lit classes, with a teacher who was really good.
That being said, Darija, or rather North African Arabic is a messy mix of Arabic and Tamazight. Which can be difficult for Middle East Arabic speakers to understand.
For reference, I speak Darija and understand both classical and modern Arabic. It would take me a few days to adapt my speech to other regional variations of arabic.
If you get past the weird spelling it's still fairly understandable.
Exception being maybe stuff like Shakespeare, but a huge part of what makes that inaccessible is that his writing is full of references to current events, double entendres, and various 17th century memes. It's a bit like showing South Park's world of warcraft episode to someone from the 2400s.
It is more akin to watching television from a different culture. I am American, live in Norway, with my Norwegian spouse. We wind up watching British television from time to time. We find the jokes funny, but we both realize that we are missing references to people and places - but understand the gist of the jokes.
The difference between shakespear and modern times is even larger - you don't always know they are jokes because you don't realize they are referencing anything. Still enjoyable, but a different story without as much comedy.
Yes... my own recounting of freshman high school English (it was the late 80s) https://everything2.com/node/1207826
But I think that affirms the GP's point. The jokes needed explanation, which is what you'd expect when the audience is from a different culture and don't understand them natively.
And yep, she was a very good English teacher. It was a more fun class than the other English classes I had through the years. Composition was a pain, but that the teacher was a stickler for everything it helped with my writing and communication skills today. English lit from Beowulf to Pope was a slog. Ancient was ok (mostly Ancient Greek which got into more philosophy rather than word choice because it was a translation). Modern literature was only enjoyable because of Thoreau - I think that was also where I read Waiting for Godot and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead ... the other plays weren't as memorable.
Aside on that - read The Necklace (in English) in one of those classes... I'm fairly sure that was senior year. In college I took French to finish out my foreign language requirement and the final exam was reading comprehension for La Parure in French. I knew the story and so was able to quickly skim for vocabulary rather than needing to read every page.
All in all, looking back it was good, but as with most school classes, they weren't classes that I enjoyed going to at the time.
I think Your TV analogy is probably pretty accurate. Kids also do not get a lot of sexual references in TV comedy too!
As many of us learned recently from this great article: https://www.deadlanguagesociety.com/p/how-far-back-in-time-u...
This writing (and speaking) style permeates this institution.
you are upset by these comments which this article's author chose to quote?:
As lead author Tomasz Barański explains, however, this transformation was far from sudden. "Nubia was not a marginal or isolated region of the Nile Valley, but a pivotal corridor connecting the Mediterranean world to sub-Saharan Africa. Rather than a civilizational dead end, Nubia functioned for millennia as a dynamic zone of movement for people, goods, and ideas. Through Nubia passed commodities such as gold, ivory, and enslaved people, but it also enabled the exchange of less tangible elements: technologies, religious beliefs, and political models.
"Moreover, Nubian communities were not passive recipients of outside influence; they actively shaped and adapted the flows passing through this corridor. This long history of exchange helps us understand later cultural transformations in the region, including Arabization and Islamization. These were not sudden ruptures, but part of a much older pattern of interaction, negotiation, and adaptation that has characterized Sudan throughout history."
Barański notes that further discoveries may yet follow: "Preliminary analysis of the letters from Building A.1 suggests distinct patterns in the circulation of correspondence, hinting at a coherent communication network. This network encompassed not only the city's religious and administrative elites, but possibly also the leaders of nomadic groups herding flocks in the surrounding regions."
Additionally, he adds, "the discovery of this seemingly inconspicuous scrap of paper, when situated within the larger context of gift-giving culture and traditional royal patronage navigating local micropolitics, provides a vivid example of how archaeological fieldwork continues to produce material that bridges the gap between material culture and written history."