About the Nubian Language

According to stone tools evidence found by archaeologists, the Nile Valley between the 1st and the 6th cataracts (between today's town of Aswan in Southern Egypt and Omdurman in Sudan, north of the capital Khartoum) was inhabited since at least half a million years, probably since much longer - up to 2 million years ago. As the region was very fertile during this whole period, and quite protected and isolated through the cataracts in the Nile and surrounding mountain chains, it served as an ideal cradle for the development of civilization, and thus the Nubian language in its millennia-long evolution is one of the oldest - if not THE oldest - permanently spoken languages in the World. Furthermore, the self-reliant, sociable and traditionalist nature of the Nubian population lets imagine that the roots of the Nubian language were developed since prehistoric times, although due to the absence of writing it can't be proven by scientists. The Nubian language, a direct descendent from Proto-Nubian, which is considered by Afro-Asiatic linguists to be the root language, and related to Omotic, is part of the Afro-Asiatic, Nilo-Saharan language group, and linguists date it back to at least the 9th to 6th millennium B.C. Some scientists even believe Old Nubian was the first structured language in the World. While the word "Adam" in most languages stand for a name, in Nubian "adam" means "man" or "human being". And the name "Eva" is presumed to have been derived from "ouwo", which means "two" in Nubian. The very limited influence of languages that passed the region due to conquests, administrative shifts as well as commercial and religious influences also reinforces the assumption that the Nubians preserved and protected their language since very ancient times. While Old Egyptian hieroglyphic inscriptions in Nubia predate the Meroitic writing, starting in the 8th century B.C., during the Kushite Meroitic Kingdom, many inscriptions in Meroitic - first written in hieroglyphics, later in Egyptian demotic script and finally in its own alphabet of 24 letters derived from Demotic appeared. The Meroitic texts refer mainly to funerary, administrative and royal writings; however, up to this day the Meroitic writing hasn't been fully deciphered, therefore we have only a basic knowledge of this language. Due to the close ties with Egypt, the Meroitic ruling elite was writing in Meroitic and Egyptian, while commonly speaking Nubian. While some scholars assume that Meroitic was the precursor of Old Nubian, others - like F.L. Griffiths - think that Meroitic was related to Nubian, and possibly both variations of the language may have been spoken simultaneously, Meroitic being the language of the elite and administration while Nubian was the commonly spoken language.