Makurian Nubian Christianity

Between Egypt and the deserts of the Sudan, the Christian kingdom of Makuria held together for centuries under an arrangement no one else had: the Baqt, a treaty struck with Muslim Egypt in 652 that set terms of exchange rather than conquest and was more or less honoured for six hundred years. Under that peace, and especially after Merkurios — whom an Egyptian writer called a new Constantine — took the throne in 697, Nubia built. The cathedral at Faras was rebuilt in 707 and covered, over the following centuries, in wall paintings: enormous saints and archangels, nativities, and portraits of the bishops themselves, several shown with dark skin beside lighter-skinned holy figures. Nubian Christians wrote their own language, Old Nubian, in an alphabet adapted from Coptic. What they did not leave, or what has not survived, is much writing about their inner life; this is a Christianity known mainly by what it built and painted.