Kalendarz liturgiczny Kościoła nubijskiego w świetle zachowanych fragmentów nubijskich lekcjonarzy
Liturgical calendar of the Nubian Church: the evidence of Nubian lectionary fragments

Summary/Abstract: Christian Nubia is little known to the scholarly milieu, although different aspects of its culture are derived from or modelled on the Mediterranean patterns. Many enigmas of the history of the Middle Nile Valley still remain to be solved, among them the question of litugical practices of the Nubian Church. The present article aims at analysing from two different perspectives (typological and liturgical) scant remnants of Nubian liturgical books, which, although some of them have been known for a long time, have not been treated in a detailed manner so far. The comparative study of the pericopae preserved in the Nubian material and the ones found in lectionaries of other Eastern Churches of that period provides an interesting perspective on links between the Christian kingdoms of the Nile valley and the rest of the Eastern Christendom. It seems that the Nubian system of lections may have preserved some elements of a primitive liturgical calendar used throughout the East, which is most clearly visible in the case of the pericopae for the Nativity. The antiquity of tradition is also very well visible in the arrangement of the Liturgy of the Word, with one Psalm and two New Testament readings (from the Pauline Epistles and the Gospels), which is identical with the early Constantinopolitan and Alexandrian practice. Moreover, analogies to the Nubian sources can be found not only in neighbouring Egypt and infl uential Constantinople, but also in Syro-Palestine and Georgia, which proves that the cultural landscape of the Middle Nile Valley is more complex than it is usually perceived.

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