Thursday, June 3, 2021
(PCMA UW/Adrian Chlebowski)
WARSAW, POLAND—Science in Poland reports that researchers led by Artur Obłuski of the University of Warsaw have found the remains of a large medieval church in the center of Old Dongola, Northern State, Sudan. Dongola was the capital of Makura, one of the Christian Nubian kingdoms, Obłuski explained.
He suggests the building could have served as the seat of the archbishop of Dongola, who governed the Nubian churches along a 620-mile stretch of the Nile River. The team members have uncovered the church’s apse, an adjacent wall, and the dome of a large tomb.
The apse, Obłuski added, is the largest yet found in Nubia, and it was decorated with plaster and paintings of monumental figures. Much of its walls remain buried. It had been previously thought that the city’s medieval cathedral was situated outside the city walls, but this structure resembles the cathedral unearthed in the center of Faras, the medieval capital of the Nubian kingdom of Nobadia.
“There may be more paintings and inscriptions under our feet, just like in Faras,” Obłuski said. To read about a fourth-century A.D. Christian basilica unearthed in northern Ethiopia, go to “Early Adopters.”
EARLY ADOPTERS
By Marley Brown
March/April 2020
(Courtesy Michael Harrower)
Basilica, Beta Samati, Ethiopia The remains of a Christian basilica dating to the fourth century A.D. have been discovered at the site of Beta Samati, which may once have been an important religious and commercial center of the Aksum Empire in northern Ethiopia. The Aksumites, who embraced Christianity around A.D. 325, were important Red Sea trading partners with the Byzantine Empire until the Aksum Empire collapsed in the ninth century. Archaeologists discovered a number of artifacts, including stamp seals, coins, possible trading tokens, incense burners, and a stone pendant in the shape of a cross, that suggest the site was used for both administrative and religious purposes. “The basilica seems to have arrived in Ethiopia as a Christian architectural form,” says archaeologist Michael Harrower of Johns Hopkins University, “but it may also have retained some associations with bureaucratic functions that it had in Rome.” Bovine figurines and a gold and carnelian ring engraved with a bull’s head were also uncovered at the site, suggesting that indigenous pagan beliefs survived alongside Christianity. “People are worshipping multiple gods and switching back and forth,” Harrower says. “There appears to have been a lot of flux here in terms of religious tradition.”
(Courtesy Michael Harrower)
Clockwise from left: 7th-century Aksumite coin (obverse and reverse), stone pendant, gold and carnelian ring