Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures

Evidence from historical linguistics, philology, archaeology, and, more recently, genetics enables us to reconstruct part of the complex history of the area in southern Egypt and northern Sudan that has come to be known as Nubia. Whereas today Nubian languages and Arabic are dominant in these areas, interdisciplinary research points towards the presence of several other languages in the past, spoken by communities who interacted with each other to various extents over the past millennia, depending on such factors as climate change and technological development, but also on ever-changing sociopolitical constellations.